Ben Shapiro

At 40 years old, Ben Shapiro has this physical status:

Benjamin Aaron Shapiro (born January 15, 1984) is an American conservative political commentator, public speaker, and advocate.

He was the first nationally syndicated columnist in the United States at age 17.

He writes columns for Creators Syndicate and Newsweek and is the editor-in-chief of The Daily Wire, which he created, and hosts The Ben Shapiro Show, a daily political podcast and live radio show.

Between 2012 and 2016, an editor-at-large for Breitbart News, the first being Brainwashed: How Universities Indoctrinate America's Youth (2004) and the new being The Right Side of History: Why Reason and Moral Purpose (2019).

Early life

Shapiro was born in Los Angeles, California, to a Conservative Jewish family of Russian-Jewish and Lithuanian-Jewish origins. His family converted to Orthodox Judaism when he was nine years old. He began playing violin at a young age and appeared at the Israel Bonds Banquet in 1996 at the age of twelve. Both his parents worked in Hollywood. His mother was an executive of a television company, and his father, David Shapiro, served as a composer.

Shapiro went from Walter Reed Middle School in The Valley to Yeshiva University High School of Los Angeles, where he graduated in 2000 at the age 16 in Westside, Los Angeles, where he went to kindergarten for the third and ninth grades. He graduated from the University of California, Los Angeles, in 2004 with a Bachelor of Arts degree in political science and then from Harvard Law School in 2007. He spent time at Goodwin Procter's law firm. Benjamin Shapiro Legal Consulting, a Los Angeles-based independent legal consultancy firm, operated as of March 2012.

Personal life

On her website Classically Abby, Shapiro's sister is an opera singer who also posts right-wing videos on YouTube. Due to her brother's public visibility, she has been exposed to online antisemitic trolling. Shapiro is a cousin of writer and actress Mara Wilson, but the two are unlikely to speak out due to their differing political views.

Shapiro married Mor Toledano, an Israeli medical doctor of Moroccan descent, in 2008, and they lived in Los Angeles. The couple has two daughters and a son. They follow Orthodox Judaism. In 2019, the FBI arrested a man from Washington for making death threats against Shapiro and his family members.

Shapiro and his family were moving out of California in September 2020. Shapiro moved his Daily Wire company's headquarters to Nashville, Tennessee, but he retrained in South Florida.

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Career

Shapiro became involved in politics at an early age. He started a nationally syndicated column at the age of 17 and had published two books by the age of 21.

Shapiro's first book, Brainwashed: How Universities Indoctrinate America's Youth (2004), argues that the American Left has ideological hegemony over universities, and that professors do not accept non-left views.

In 2011, HarperCollins published Primetime Propaganda: How the Left Took Over Your Television, Shapiro's Fourth Book, in which Shapiro argues that Hollywood has a left-wing project that it actively promotes through prime-time entertainment programs. The authors of Happy Days and M*A*S*H claim to have followed a pro-pacifist, anti-Vietnam-War project in those books. Shapiro has also served as a fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center.

Bullies: How the Left's Culture of Fear and Intimidation Silences Americans. Threshold Editions, 2013.

True Allegiance, his first and to date only fiction book, was published in 2017.

Shapiro's book The Right Side of History: How Reason and Moral Purpose Made the West Great, which explores the benefits of Judeo-Christian values and laments the loss of those values in modern America. In a May 2019 interview with BBC where Shapiro was promoting his book, interviewer Andrew Neil suggested that Shapiro's remarks were inconsistent with the book's message. Before Shapiro ended the discussion, Shapiro accused Neil (a well-known British conservative journalist) of having a left-leaning bias. Shapiro later admitted that he had been "destroyed" by Neil, posting on Twitter that he had "broke his] own law and wasn't properly prepared."

Shapiro wrote The Authoritarian Moment in 2021, which claims that there is no such threat to right-wing politics in the United States. Rather, he argues that the authoritarian threat to academia, Hollywood, journalism, and corporate America comes from the left's absolute clout.

Shapiro became editor-at-large of Breitbart News, a website founded by Andrew Breitbart in 2012. Despite videos and eyewitness evidence of the assault, Shapiro resigned from his position as editor-at-large of Breitbart News in March 2016 after what he described as the website's lack of funding for reporter Michelle Fields in reaction to her suspected assault by Donald Trump's former campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski. Shapiro said in his resigning address that "Steve Bannon is a bully" and that Bannon had "shaped the company into Trump's personal Pravda." Breitbart published a piece after Shapiro's departure, attributed incorrectly to Shapiro's pseudonym, "Ben Shapiro betrays faithful Breitbart followers in the quest for Fox News contributorship," Breitbart later reported.

Shapiro, who left Breitbart News, had been a frequent victim of antisemitic sarcastic rhetoric from the alt-right. Shapiro was the most popular target of antisemitic tweets against journalists, according to an anti-Defamation League report in 2016.

Shapiro published an article on February 7, 2013 citing unidentified Senate sources who said that a group named "Friends of Hamas" was one of the foreign contributors to Chuck Hagel's political campaign, a former U.S. senator. Senator Paul Ryan's appointment as the Secretary of Defense as a candidate for President Barack Obama, but Slate reporter David Weigel found there was no proof that such a group existed. Shapiro told Weigel that the story was "the entirety of the information [he] had" from his archives.

In collaboration with the David Horowitz Freedom Center, Shapiro and business partner Jeremy Boreing co-founded TruthRevolt, a U.S. media watchdog and advocacy website. TruthRevolt, a division of TruthRevolt, ceased operations in March 2018.

Shapiro was featured in Politico's Playbook newsletter on January 14, 2021, where he defended House Republicans who oppose Donald Trump's second impeachment. Many Politico employees retaliated against the newsletter, some of whom argued that Shapiro should not have been allowed to write the article. "We're not going to go back to back from releasing something because some people believe it was wrong to do so," Matthew Kaminski, editor in chief of Politico, refused to apologize and defended the decision to encourage Shapiro to write the book. According to the Daily Beast, more than 100 Politico workers signed a letter from publisher Robert Allbritton condemning both Politico's and Kaminski's response.

Shapiro, a host on KRLA-AM 870 in 2012, was a host on the morning radio program alongside Heidi Harris and Brian Whitman. He was one of the hosts of KRLA's The Morning Answer, a conservative radio show, by 2016. Shapiro was under pressure from Salem Media executives, the show's owner, to be more sympathetic of Donald Trump in the 2016 presidential election, according to internal emails. Shapiro, on the other hand, remained skeptic of Trump throughout the campaign.

On September 21, 2015, Shapiro and Boreing founded The Daily Wire. He also acts as editor emeritus and host of his online political podcast The Ben Shapiro Show, which airs every week. The podcast was ranked by Podtrac as the second most popular podcast in the United States as of March 2019. In April 2018, Westwood One began syndicating The Ben Shapiro Show podcast to radio. Politico called the podcast "highly regarded" in 2018. Westwood One's one-hour podcast-to-radio service grew Shapiro's one-hour podcast-to-radio radio show, as well as a nationally syndicated two-hour live radio show on Wednesday for three hours of Ben Shapiro's daily broadcast show. According to Westwood One, more than 200 stations are being carried out by more than 200 stations, including in nine of the top ten markets, as of March 2019. Shapiro resigned as editor-in-chief in June 2020, taking over editor emeritus.

On Fox News in September 2018, Shapiro hosted The Ben Shapiro Election Special. The limited-run series covered news and events surrounding the 2018 midterm elections.

Shapiro has appeared on PragerU regularly, with lectures on intersectionality and Hollywood as of December 2018.

In 2021, Ben Shapiro's podcast was ranked as the ninth most listened to Apple podcasts in the world.

Shapiro appears on college campuses around the United States. He often adopts a liberal stance in his addresses on controversial topics. He appeared on 37 campuses from early 2016 to late 2017.

Some students and faculty members at California State University, Los Angeles, protested a speech that Shapiro, then an editor at Breitbart News, had planned to hold at the university on February 25, 2016. The university's 'When Diversity Becomes a Problem' William Covino, the president of the University, postponed the address three days before it was scheduled in the hopes of rescheduling it so that the celebration would feature various viewpoints on campus diversity. Covino finally reversed his decision, allowing the speech to proceed as expected. Student protesters formed human chains on the day of the speech, blocking the doors to the venue and staging sit-in demonstrations. A protester alerted Shapiro as he began his address. Shapiro was led out by campus police after the lecture ended. The Foundation for Young People announced that it was launching a lawsuit against the university (with Shapiro as one of the defendants), arguing that Covino's attempted cancellation of the First and Fourteenth Amendments of the students' human rights were abused, as well as physical barriers excluding students from entering or leaving the festival.

Shapiro's invitation to speak with students at the school was withdrawn in August 2016 and he was refused admission to the campus due to "security concerns."

Shapiro delivered a speech on September 14, 2017 at the invitation of the University of California, Berkeley's student group, in which he condemned identity politics. There was a large police presence at the vigil in Berkeley, Calif., who had vowed to advocate for free expression in her August letter. The university and the city of Berkeley spent $600,000 on police and security for the case, which resulted in nine arrests but no major incidents.

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