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A visit to AmericaFest with the Harvard-educated, show tunes-loving Orthodox Jew from deep blue L.A. who harnessed anti-woke fervor to become a right-wing rock star and build conservative media’s fastest-growing empire.
By Seth Abramovitch
Senior Writer
As a boy, Ben Shapiro spent week nights at Miceli’s, an Italian joint near Universal Studios famous for its greasy pizzas and singing waiters. His father, David, had moved the family to Los Angeles from Boston in the early 1980s in search of a career in film scoring. “But a lot of people come to Hollywood wanting to do that,” Shapiro observes, adding that his father never achieved his John Williams dreams.
Those were lean years for the family of six. They occupied a tiny house in Burbank, with Ben sharing a bedroom with his three older sisters. To make ends meet, Dad found work at Miceli’s as a pianist. Ben’s father was a natural entertainer and delighted the crowd with physical gags, like putting his jacket on as he was playing. He kept the gig for 20 years. “I was always there,” Ben recalls. “People were singing Broadway. I’d sit there doing my homework or hanging out with the bartender.”
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From those convivial beginnings, the 40-year-old Shapiro has carved out an unlikely path as one of America’s most fixated-upon right wing influencers — a cartoonish, perplexing figure, seemingly admired and reviled in equal measure but growing increasingly impossible to ignore. A conservative critic who isn’t afraid to wade into the pop culture fray, Shapiro frequently finds himself the butt of online jokes — there was the “WAP” imbroglio, the Barbie review backlash and, most recently, his rapturous Wicked queen-out.
He takes the jokes in stride, usually. But Shapiro himself is proving less and less of a joke these days. More than just another talking head in the conservative media landscape — he dismissively refers to competitor Tucker Carlson’s operation as a “one-car-crash company,” meaning if Carlson were to die, that’s the end of Tucker Inc. — he has fashioned himself into a self-made media titan as co-founder of the Daily Wire, the Nashville-based conservative company he started with business partner Jeremy Boreing in 2015.
An initial $4.7 million investment from Texas oil tycoon Farris Wilks has blossomed into what Shapiro says is a $220 million empire, encompassing a slate of podcasts — Jordan Peterson and Matt Walsh are on the roster — scripted movies (like Terror on the Prairie, starring fired Mandalorian star Gina Carano), documentaries (like Walsh’s What Is a Woman? and Am I Racist?) and streaming shows (the most ambitious of which, fantasy series The Pendragon Cycle, is now in postproduction). Shapiro anticipates revenue will be much higher in 2025, when the effects of the roller coaster ride to Donald Trump’s reelection are fully felt.
“This last quarter we picked up more subscribers than we have for several years [combined],” he says, noting the company boasts more than 1 million paid subs, a good number of whom signed up to hear Shapiro’s rapid-fire and insightful takes on jaw-dropping developments like the Trump assassination attempt in July.
Shapiro learned of the shooting during the Sabbath break, when a staffer made a rare interruption at his home to alert him to the news. An Orthodox Jew, Shapiro’s religious beliefs typically render him unreachable from sundown Friday to sundown Saturday, and he packs kosher meals for his frequent travels — inconveniences for a media mogul. His religiosity makes him a constant target for anti-Jewish racists — but it also doesn’t prevent him from engaging in sometimes cruel and crude attacks on political opponents.
Shapiro won’t reveal his own net worth on the record, but off the record he’s happy to — this is the guy who once bragged on HBO’s Real Time of “sleeping on my bed made of money,” after all — and he claims it’s a figure much higher than $220 million. This, presumably, is because he retains full ownership of the crown jewel of the Daily Wire empire: The Ben Shapiro Show, the highest-rated conservative podcast, averaging 25 million total plays per month, according to Shapiro. Pod Save America, its liberal counterpart, averages about 21 million.
As his profile and audience have grown, so has his influence. A pro-settlements Zionist long before that term became a loaded epithet, Shapiro has in the wake of the Israel-Hamas war become one of the most visible and vociferous voices for Israel on the right. He has the ear of Benjamin Netanyahu and Trump; the latter appeared on his podcast in October. When Elon Musk got himself in hot water with the Anti-Defamation League for replying positively to an antisemitic tweet, Shapiro accompanied Musk on a field trip to Auschwitz — a first visit for both.
“Elon approaches the world as an alien visiting and trying to analyze how the humans work,” Shapiro says. “There’s a sadness in his demeanor.” At Auschwitz, the two discussed the notion of the “inherent goodness” of the human race. “I, obviously, seeing Auschwitz, think no,” Shapiro says. “But Elon was of the opinion that human beings are naturally good but are capable of great evil as part of that equation.”
Shapiro tells me all this 45,000 feet up in the sky, in a Gulfstream jet on the way to Phoenix, where he will be the opening speaker at AmericaFest 2024, an annual conservative gathering. Before the flight, we spent most of the day inside Shapiro’s South Florida studio, where a production team of six oversees the taping of The Ben Shapiro Show (today’s unsexy topic was a GOP-backed omnibus bill) and Ben After Dark, a sort of conservative attempt at Last Week Tonight. (Shapiro moved his family out of L.A. in 2020, saying his hometown had become a “dung heap”; he frequently retells the story of watching his friends get robbed at gunpoint “in a very nice area” the last time he visited.)
The whole Shapiro Show operation is a well-oiled machine, with cable news clips dropping in like clockwork as the host, a dizzyingly fast talker, rarely stumbles. He can rattle off ad copy for a steak-by-mail service, react to TikTok videos and offer play-by-play on the new Superman trailer, all without visibly taking a breath.
By late afternoon, we’re airbound for AmericaFest, organized by Charlie Kirk’s Turning Point USA, which heavily canvassed college campuses in the run-up to the election and has been credited with helping Trump overperform with Gen Z. To show his thanks, the president-elect will attend two days after Shapiro.
“Everybody’s in a good mood, obviously,” Shapiro tells me, still enjoying the afterglow of Trump’s victory. “I think it could be an emerging new golden age for the country.” That ebullience is palpable on the ground as Shapiro makes his way on the convention floor, flanked by two bodyguards. With his highly divisive opinions on everything from Gaza to musicals, Shapiro, who typically sports a black yarmulke, is aware of what a tempting target he makes.
“The ADL said I was the most targeted person online for hate speech in 2015 and 2016,” he says, almost as a point of pride. “I’m pretty used to a very high threshold of people yelling at me.” His security detail works around the clock. A separate team is at the entrance to his production studio, where visitors (including this one) are subjected to a bag search and a lengthy iPad questionnaire. Another group monitors the nearby home Shapiro shares with his Israel-born doctor wife, Mor, and their four young children.
There was some concern among his team that Shapiro might be received hostilely at the event, particularly after Candace Owens — another conservative firebrand who worked for Daily Wire until what the ADL characterizes as her “explicitly antisemitic, anti-Zionist and anti-Israel views” led to increasing public friction with Shapiro and, eventually, her termination — tweeted, “I hope the crowd boos every person on that stage who has betrayed America.” (Reached later by The Hollywood Reporter, Owens said “the tweet was about all neocons who betrayed the American people by insisting on never-ending wars” and not specifically about Shapiro.) There was also a risk that the followers of Holocaust-denying alt-right figure Nick Fuentes — who famously dined with Trump in 2022 alongside Kanye West — would infiltrate the event and heckle Shapiro.
Neither disruption comes to pass. On the contrary: AmericaFest is a lovefest for Shapiro, who is swarmed by starstruck admirers. A young dad thrusts a newborn baby in a tiny MAGA hat at him, rendering Shapiro momentarily flustered. (Is he supposed to kiss the baby or sign the hat? He opts for a pat on the head.) A man dressed in Founding Father drag leans in for a selfie. Shapiro goes on at 6:30 p.m., accompanied by a pyrotechnics display worthy of the WWE — an elfin figure in an off-the-rack sports coat occupying center stage, cheered on like a pop siren by a mosh pit filled with blond 20-somethings in Stetsons and MAGA hats. Shapiro wastes no time in plugging his latest venture — a documentary co-produced with Turning Point called Identity Crisis, which “scrutinizes the radical gender ideology movement” and “the societal failures enabling the continued mutilation of children.” Opposition to transgenderism is a key platform at AmericaFest, with lines like “Keep men out of women’s sports!” getting rousing standing ovations.
Shapiro hopes Crisis will sustain the momentum of Am I Racist?, a DEI-skewering prankumentary that opened in September to the best box office numbers for a political documentary since Fahrenheit 9/11 in 2004. Racist has grossed $12.3 million on a budget of $3 million — and is available to stream on Daily Wire+ for $13 a month.
From there, Shapiro goes into the central thesis of an upcoming book, what he terms “lions vs. scavengers” — in short, innovators like Musk are lions, and anyone who stands in their way are scavengers — before declaring that Trump “is going to make free markets great again.” Along the way, he can’t resist taking a few potshots at the exiting administration. “Are we really good at this — or are the other guys just really crappy at this?” he asks. He calls Joe Biden “a corpse who died onstage” at the infamous June debate, who was then “swapped out for a potato of a human who is physically incapable of uttering coherent sentences,” presumably referring to Kamala Harris and not Donald Trump.
Here, Shapiro admits that, yes, he was once a Never Trumper. “In 2016, I didn’t vote for either candidate because I didn’t know if President Trump was going to be conservative,” he says in a bit of self-serving revisionism. Like many other right wing media figures at the time, he eloquently spoke about Trump’s many moral failures and called him a joke — but lost a lot of audience as a result and then caved. He maintains, however, that his take on Trump as a person is basically the same. As he puts it to me on the plane, “My opinion of Trump characterologically has not changed.”
But once Trump was in office, “right away he nominated Justice [Neil] Gorsuch, and I put on a MAGA hat,” says Shapiro. “In 2020, obviously, I backed him. And in 2024, I gave money to his campaign, I fundraised for him. I campaigned in six states. If we back him and if he does the right things, which I think he will, then America will be great.”
With that, he throws the last 15 minutes to the crowd for questions. A young woman approaches the mic. “After your review of Wicked and hearing you were a musical theater enthusiast, what’s your favorite musical theater performance?” she asks.
The question is in reference to Shapiro’s viral YouTube review of Wicked — 19 solid minutes of him gushing about the film interspersed with minor gripes about orchestration and Ariana Grande’s performance as Glinda the Good Witch. The sheer breadth of Shapiro’s musical theater knowledge — one comes away from the video assuming he could write a dissertation on composer Stephen Schwartz — raised many an eyebrow.
“Guys, I’m straight,” Shapiro responds, addressing the pink elephant in the room. It draws a big laugh. He then offers two musical theater favorites. The first is Sweeney Todd — an interesting choice, seeing as Stephen Sondheim’s cannibalistic tale explores themes of political corruption and the destructive forces of free markets. Thinking better of it, Shapiro cuts himself off and opts for a safer choice.
“My personal favorite musical is 1776,” he says. “Every year I dressed up as John Adams from 1776 for Halloween. If you want to show your kids something super patriotic for July Fourth, show them 1776. It’s terrific.”
***
When he was 11, Shapiro’s parents announced they were adopting an Orthodox Jewish lifestyle and relocating the family to an Orthodox community. Ben was fully on board with the decision. “I remember eating KFC and then not eating it,” he says. “It wasn’t much to give up.”
He had already skipped third and sixth grades and would later leapfrog ninth. By 16, he was attending UCLA, where his conservative op-eds in the Daily Bruin drew enough attention that, by 17, he was the youngest political columnist in the history of Creators Syndicate, a national newspaper syndicator. At 20, he published his first book, Brainwashed: How Universities Indoctrinate America’s Youth. He’s since written dozens more that regularly appear on the New York Times best-seller list.
At the urging of his mother, a TV business affairs executive, Shapiro applied to law school and got into Harvard. He met future U.S. senator Elizabeth Warren, then a Harvard professor, at a recruitment dinner.
“She comes up to me and she’s like, ‘Oh yeah, you’re the kid with the book on your résumé,’ ” Shapiro recalls. “I can’t remember how Rush Limbaugh came up. And she’s like, ‘Well, Rush Limbaugh is just terrible.’ And I was like, ‘Have you ever listened to Rush Limbaugh?’ And she’s like, ‘No.’ I said, ‘How do you know he’s terrible?’ ”
Shapiro “wasn’t too popular” at Harvard Law, he says. “There’s a lot of drinking in law school, and I’m a nondrinker. So when you’re not drinking or whoring, they’re going to chase you out of the best parties.” But he wasn’t targeted for his political beliefs, either: “I think people at Harvard Law were pretty secure in the fact that they were going to do well in life. There wasn’t much rage at each other.”
Shapiro says those days are long over in the Ivy League, however, where progressive identity politics run amok have “devalued those degrees to the point where they’re not worth the cost anymore. If I send my kids to university at this point, maybe I’m sending them to the University of Florida. Maybe I’m deciding that they don’t go to college at all, and depending on what they’re doing, I get them an apprenticeship in a really good company.” (His children, ages 1 to 10, currently attend a Jewish day school.)
He claims some of his biggest boosters on campus were actually liberals — he cites one of his professors, Lani Guinier, the African American legal scholar nominated by Bill Clinton in 1993 to be assistant attorney general for civil rights. “I got along with her famously,” he says. (Guinier died in 2022.)
Shapiro maintains that trend persists in Hollywood today, where people would be shocked to learn whom he counts among his friends and confidants. (Not his first cousin, mind you — Mara Wilson, star of Mrs. Doubtfire and Matilda. “I haven’t spoken to her in years,” he says. “We fell out of touch. I’m sure she would disagree with many of my politics.”) Probed for names, Shapiro comes up with one — a queer journalist who is “wildly to the left” and spent most of their “early career ripping the shit out of me,” he says. These days, he’s “very friendly” with the journalist, even though the person “would never acknowledge that publicly.” (The journalist did not respond to a request for comment.)
Perhaps they fear that any public expression of kinship to Shapiro will result in the shitshow that befell filmmaker Mark Duplass in 2018 after he tweeted, “Fellow liberals: If you are interested at all in ‘crossing the aisle’ you should consider following @benshapiro. I don’t agree with him on much but he’s a genuine person who once helped me for no other reason than to be nice. He doesn’t bend the truth. His intentions are good.”
Duplass posted the tweet after consulting with Shapiro for a documentary on gun rights. “I said, ‘Absolutely, I’ll talk to you. But you shouldn’t tell anyone you’re here,’ ” Shapiro recalls. Duplass didn’t listen. After fierce backlash — which cited past inflammatory Shapiro tweets about Palestinians (“Israelis like to build. Arabs like to bomb crap and live in open sewage. This is not a difficult issue. #settlementsrock”) and Trayvon Martin (“Trayvon Martin would have turned 21 today if he hadn’t taken a man’s head and beaten it on the pavement before being shot”) — Duplass deleted the tweet and posted a much longer disavowal of Shapiro.
It’s obvious Shapiro is still stung by the tar-and-feathering from his Hollywood almost-friend. It’s a phenomenon he’s even given a name to: “The Happy Birthday Problem,” he says. “Which is that most people would text me ‘Happy Birthday,’ but nobody will say publicly ‘Happy Birthday’ on Twitter for fear of being burned at the stake. Which I do think is an actual political problem in the United States.
“I think he was trying to be a nice person,” he continues of Duplass. “And I think he wasn’t a nice enough person to recognize that being a coward is being a bad person. A cowardly nice person is sometimes worse than a non-cowardly not-so-nice person.”
***
Entering real estate law in 2007 at the start of the subprime mortgage crisis effectively ended Shapiro’s legal career before it began. It was for the best, as he was already well on his way as a rising conservative star, having been taken under the wing of Andrew Breitbart, the charismatic, provocative, Angeleno founder of Breitbart News.
The two had known each other since 2001. “Andrew emailed me one day while I was at UCLA after reading one of my columns. ‘Who the hell is this kid?’ ” Shapiro recalls. “And he took me out to this crazy taco joint that I couldn’t eat at, and I watched him eat tacos, and we hung out and became friends at that point.”
Through Breitbart, Shapiro met all the key figures in the conservative media sector — giants like Matt Drudge (Shapiro calls the Drudge Report founder “one of the geniuses of modern media” and refuses to speculate about why Drudge turned against Trump this election cycle — “but it’s pretty obvious he did”) and Steve Bannon, about whom Shapiro has nothing positive to say (all he’ll note on the record is that the former White House strategist is a “very hard-charging guy and not easy to get along with”).
Breitbart helped Shapiro land gigs in conservative talk radio. In February 2012, he offered Shapiro a full-time job at Breitbart. “And Andrew drops dead March 1, 2012,” Shapiro recalls, referring to Breitbart’s fatal heart attack at 43. Despite the loss of his mentor, Shapiro remained with the company as an editor-at-large.
It was while at Breitbart in 2015 that Shapiro created one of his first viral media appearances. Vanity Fair had just run the “Call me Caitlyn” cover that launched Caitlyn Jenner’s transition journey — and the transgender movement writ large — into the public sphere.
On an episode of Dr. Drew on Call that went disastrously off the rails — but in many ways anticipated the chaos to come — Drew Pinsky hosted a panel discussion about Jenner. On the panel was Zoey Tur, the transgender video journalist responsible for capturing some of the most indelible media images in recent U.S. history, including the O.J. Simpson Bronco chase and the attack on truck driver Reginald Denny during the L.A. riots.
When she was recruited for the panel, Tur recalls, she was told it would be a sensitive environment in which to address emerging transgender issues. “I show up to the CNN studios in Hollywood, and I go to the green room and I’m waiting, and there’s this little guy, young guy sitting all by himself, not talking to anybody, on his computer,” Tur says. “I said, ‘Who’s that?’ And they said, ‘Oh, nobody, don’t worry about it.’ ”
It was Shapiro, who came to the discussion with a cudgel. Shapiro repeatedly referred to Jenner as “Bruce” and “him” and demanded to know why Pinsky was “mainstreaming delusion.”
“How he feels on the inside is irrelevant to the question of his biological self,” Shapiro said of Jenner. With the temperature between the two guests rising, Shapiro demanded to be told the makeup of Tur’s genetics. That led Tur to place a hand on Shapiro’s neck and admonish him: “You cut that out now, or you’ll go home in an ambulance.” Recalls Tur, “He started shaking, really shaking.”
Tur later learned that Pinsky’s producers were former producers of The Jerry Springer Show. “So it was a setup,” she says with resignation. “I was just not prepared for it. I don’t even know why he was there, except to basically create controversy and to humiliate me. It’s funny, a bunch of cisgender people are on this panel and everyone’s sitting there discussing my right to exist, and I’m sitting right there and it’s like, this affects me.”
Shapiro filed a police report against Tur, which did not lead to an arrest. “There were people that supported me in the L.A. city attorney’s office and the D.A.’s office,” Tur says. “And Harvey Levin called me and said, ‘Don’t worry, you have very powerful friends in the city of L.A. and you have nothing to worry about.’ ”
But the damage was done, Tur says. Her employer, Inside Edition, was inundated with anti-trans hate mail, which Tur says led them to fire her. She received hundreds of hate messages directly, too, which she keeps in a folder. “I’ve had to call the FBI several times for people wanting to kill me, throw acid in my face, stuff like that,” Tur says.
“Shapiro helped destroy me with his sick, twisted worldview and the people that follow him,” she says. “I was horrified that my medical care and my life and my well-being was the subject of a political argument by people that were using me, demonizing me, to make political points.”
While on the plane, I bring up the accusations of transphobia frequently leveled at Shapiro. “First of all,” he reflexively responds, “I don’t even know what that word means. That I’m afraid of trans people?”
“No,” I reply. “It means that you hate them.”
“Why would I hate a person who has gender dysphoria?” he says. Then he relays a story about a conversation, or maybe more of an argument, he had with a transgender University of Michigan student. During the exchange, the student maintained, “My parents say that I’m a girl. They treat me like a girl.”
Shapiro told the student, “Your parents love you, and they don’t want to do anything that will hurt your feelings. But your parents know that you’re a boy. You were born a boy. Your parents know you’re a boy.” The student broke down in tears and fled the auditorium.
Concerned he may have pushed too hard, Shapiro asked the school to put him in touch with the student. “I found out if that student was OK that night,” he says. “I had breakfast with that person to make sure they were all right. I can disagree with what you think or what you do without hating you as a person. I think on all sides of the aisle we’ve fallen beyond that. It’s a real problem.”
***
The latest controversy to ensnare the Shapiroverse involves Brett Cooper, a charismatic, 23-year-old rising conservative media star who until very recently hosted the hit Daily Wire podcast The Comments Section With Brett Cooper.
Cooper, who grew up in Chattanooga, Tennessee, and moved to L.A. at age 10 to pursue acting, evokes Shapiro in many ways — particularly her volubility but also in her physical appearance — and she was clearly being teed up by the company as a Gen Z protégé. There was also the added perk that she aspires to act. So she appeared in The Pendragon Cycle — no premiere date has yet been announced for the Arthurian legend series — and was cast as Snow White in the feature Snow White and the Evil Queen, Daily Wire’s anti-woke response to Disney’s upcoming Snow White (a favorite punching bag of the right — and of Shapiro’s — since Trump critic Rachel Zegler was announced as the lead in 2021).
“Disney is one of the greatest companies in the history of the country, and these people have fucked it up beyond all recognition,” he tells me, referring to inclusivity measures like race-blind casting, the introduction of LGBTQ+ characters, and cultural sensitivity warnings posted before older films like Lady and the Tramp and Aladdin. “There are a lot of people like me who were born as Disney fans and have found ourselves now unable to subscribe to Disney+.
“And Kathleen Kennedy should be put on top of a SpaceX rocket and fired into the sun for what she’s done to the Star Wars intellectual property,” he adds for good measure. “She somehow turned it into lesbian witches.” (He’s referring to the Disney+ series The Acolyte, which features a coven of lesbian witches.)
While Shapiro is very vocal about his anti-trans stance, he tends to keep his thoughts on gay rights closer to the vest. When pressed, however, he confirms he would support a reversal of the Supreme Court decision making same-sex marriage legal in every state. “Obergefell [v. Hodges] is a bad Supreme Court decision,” he says. “Does that mean that there should be prosecution of people who are living in gay relationships? Of course not.”
As for the Daily Wire’s own Snow White, something clearly managed to go sideways on the way to the Enchanted Forest.
“The rumors are mostly true,” Cooper announced Dec. 10. “Today will be my last day hosting The Comments Section and working for the Daily Wire. It is not true that I am being forced out; it was my own choice to leave.”
Conservative social media users theorized that Cooper’s Israel-Hamas opinions got her fired, but Cooper’s camp dismisses this. “Brett was never fired. It’s absurd that the people who have spent the last decade criticizing ‘cancel culture’ are meticulously combing through Instagram likes between friends,” a spokesperson for Cooper tells THR. “Brett’s current focus is building an entirely new channel from the ground up.” Shapiro is similarly vague.
“Brett is an enormous talent,” he says. “We’re all sorry to see her go but wish her all the best.”
***
A few weeks after my day with Shapiro, I get a call from Van Jones, the progressive Democratic analyst from CNN. At that point, I’d just about given up on finding anyone from the pugilistic world of political punditry to weigh in on Shapiro — no one wanted to touch him. But Jones, 56, was game — and refreshingly magnanimous about Shapiro’s success.
He characterizes Shapiro as “one of the best debaters in American life,” one who “actually believes in stuff he’s saying and who has put in the intellectual labor required to back it up.”
He praises him for “experimenting with the form,” citing Shapiro’s rap song “Facts,” which reached No. 1 on the iTunes sales charts in January 2024, earning a congratulatory “not bad” tweet from Nicki Minaj.
“I think what’s most impressive about him is that he’s not sitting up on Fox News letting somebody else build all the institutional capacity. He’s building his own machine. That’s the new way to do it,” Jones says. “And so he’s worthy of study. The progressives keep saying, ‘What are we going to do to match Joe Rogan?’ But they better figure out how to match Ben Shapiro. Ben Shapiro is the problem because he dropped a very, very deep anchor in a set of ideas, and he’s only going to become more powerful over time.
“Quit talking about Joe Rogan and start worrying about Ben Shapiro.”
This story appeared in the Jan. 9 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.
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