Ben Shapiro

Shapiro is an Orthodox Jew who observes the Sabbath with his wife, children, parents, and community.[4] As of the publication of his 2019 book, his wife was a doctor and he was the father of a daughter and a son.[4] He earned a law degree from Harvard Law School and has been described as a New York Times bestselling author.[4]

His personal connection to Jewish history and culture runs deep. He began playing violin at age five and recalled performing the theme from Schindler's List alongside his father at an event when he was twelve.[6] Their shared musical background later led to a major creative collaboration.

Shapiro served as editor-at-large at Breitbart News. He co-founded The Daily Wire in 2015 and later publicly broke with Breitbart, saying it had become a propaganda tool for Donald Trump's presidential campaign.[4][3] The Daily Wire expanded from a conservative news site into films, children's content, and a streaming service.[1] At a July 2024 House Judiciary Committee hearing, Shapiro was introduced as co-founder and editor emeritus of The Daily Wire.[3]

The Ben Shapiro Show has been described as one of the most-listened-to conservative podcasts in the United States.[1] In 2024, Shapiro testified that more than one million people paid for subscriptions associated with his business and that his YouTube channel drew approximately 50 million unique viewers in a 90-day period, with roughly 65 percent of his listeners between the ages of 18 and 44.[3]

Beyond media, Shapiro has been a prominent speaker at colleges and universities across the country. He began a campus tour in late 2015 with appearances or attempted appearances at institutions including California State University at Los Angeles, the University of Wisconsin, Penn State, DePaul University, and Berkeley.[4]

His 2019 book The Right Side of History: How Reason and Moral Purpose Made the West Great, published by Broadside Books, an imprint of HarperCollins, examined the relationship between reason, moral purpose, and the foundations of Western civilization.[4] His 2013 book Bullies: How the Left's Culture of Fear and Intimidation Silences America, published by Threshold Editions, argued that liberal political actors use fear and rhetorical intimidation against opponents.[7]

His 2021 book The Authoritarian Moment argued that the United States was experiencing institutional pressure, censorship, and social conformity that subordinated individual rights to political power.[8] In Lions and Scavengers, Shapiro presented a framework dividing political actors into those who build and defend civilization and those who seek to tear down existing institutions. He defined American conservatism through free enterprise, limited government, individual freedom, traditional values, and a strong national defense.[9]

Shapiro has also engaged directly with U.S. foreign-policy discussions. He interviewed Secretary of State Mike Pompeo for The Ben Shapiro Show about Venezuela, U.S. sanctions, Yemen, and rising antisemitism, expressing skepticism toward isolationism.[10] In a separate interview with Pompeo, Shapiro argued that Jerusalem could not realistically be divided, described Israeli claims outside the 1967 lines as legitimate but disputed, and criticized Palestinian leaders' repeated rejection of peace proposals.[11]

Shapiro's influence in conservative media is reflected in The Daily Wire's expansion beyond news into films, children's content, and streaming, as well as the national reach of The Ben Shapiro Show.[1] His books and repeated campus appearances further expanded his profile among politically engaged audiences.[4]

That prominence has also made him a major target of antisemitic abuse. The Anti-Defamation League included him among the ten journalists most targeted by overtly antisemitic tweets in its 2015–2016 study, while Representative Dan Crenshaw later called him “the No. 1 target of the alt-right.”[12][13]

Shapiro has been an outspoken supporter of Israel throughout his public career.[5] In July 2022, he headlined a sold-out International Conservative Conference in Tel Aviv attended by 2,500 people and co-hosted by CPAC, the Tel Aviv International Salon, Shibolet Press, and Sella Meir Publishing.[2] There he argued that the United States and Israel could learn from one another—that the United States should absorb Israel's strong sense of nationhood, while Israel should free up its economy along American lines.[2]

Asked why he had not made aliyah, Shapiro framed his decision in moral and religious terms, saying that remaining in the United States was a “point of morality” because the country's fundamental principles were worth upholding and because his large American audience enabled him to promote values he considered eternally good.[2] He added that Jews should live where they can be “a light to the nations” and that his Jewish mission did not conflict with his American citizenship or loyalty.[14] He also argued that Israel's existence was the greatest guarantor of his loyalty to the United States because it provided a backstop should conditions in America deteriorate.[15]

Israel selected Shapiro as one of the torchbearers for its 2025 state Independence Day ceremony at Mount Herzl in Jerusalem, a recognition of his years of advocacy on behalf of the Jewish state.[5]

Shapiro's platform has also served as a venue for Holocaust education. Yad Vashem senior historian Dr. Robert Rozett appeared on The Ben Shapiro Show on Yom Hashoah, addressing Holocaust remembrance, the murder of six million Jews by Nazi Germany and its collaborators, the contemporary rise of antisemitism in Europe and the United States, and the relationship between antisemitism and anti-Israel sentiment across the far right, Islamist movements, and the political left.[16]

Shapiro and his father David co-created We Will Rise, a musical drawing on the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising and connecting it with contemporary Israel. Ben Shapiro wrote the libretto, plot, and dialogue, while David Shapiro composed the score and lyrics.[6] The idea took shape in 2019 after Shapiro heard music his father had written for an unrealized project; Shapiro said he had been fascinated by the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising for years, viewing it as a story of Jewish resistance, courage, and sacrifice.[6]

After October 7, the production was revised to reflect the attacks and to emphasize that the struggle for Jewish survival was ongoing. “This is about the survival of the Jewish people—that's it,” Shapiro said of the work.[6] The musical was planned as an eight-show tour in Beersheba, Jerusalem, and Tel Aviv, featuring the Israel Sinfonietta Beersheba, a 30-piece orchestra, and conductor Rani Calderon.[6]

Shapiro has faced significant antisemitic harassment, particularly on social media. An Anti-Defamation League study of 19,253 overtly antisemitic tweets sent to at least 800 U.S. journalists during August 2015 through July 2016 found that the ten most targeted journalists—all identified by the ADL as Jewish—received 83 percent of those tweets, and Shapiro was among that group.[12] A separate ADL finding identified him as the single most targeted journalist for antisemitic and white-supremacist harassment on Twitter during the preceding year.[17]

His own book cited the ADL statistic and recorded that he received approximately 7,400 of those antisemitic tweets personally.[4] The FBI arrested a man suspected of threatening Shapiro.[18] Representative Dan Crenshaw, at a 2019 House hearing on social media, described Shapiro as “the No. 1 target of the alt-right” and criticized leaked Google communications that, in his characterization, treated Shapiro alongside Jordan Peterson and Dennis Prager as Nazis. A Google representative responded that the company evaluated individual pieces of content rather than speakers as a whole.[13]

In July 2024, Shapiro testified before the House Judiciary Committee at a hearing titled “Collusion in the Global Alliance for Responsible Media,” addressing alleged antitrust, advertising-boycott, content-moderation, and First Amendment issues involving the Global Alliance for Responsible Media, advertisers, and media platforms.[3] He described GARM as “a cartel” whose standards on hate speech, harassment, misinformation, and sensitive social issues were, in his characterization, subjective in theory and partisan in practice. He alleged that GARM members accounted for approximately 90 percent of U.S. advertising spending.[19]

Shapiro testified that The Daily Wire's YouTube channels experienced a 1,000-percent increase in content enforcements over a two-year period beginning in 2017, and that his personal Facebook page had seen impressions decline by more than 80 percent since 2021.[19] He also stated that The Daily Wire had filed a federal lawsuit against the State Department over alleged coordination between executive-branch agencies and organizations involved in advertising standards, and urged Congress to investigate what he called informal or possibly formal arrangements between government agencies and groups such as GARM.[19] Shapiro noted that while advertising had once represented nearly all of The Daily Wire's early revenue, the company had since built a large subscriber base that reduced its dependence on advertising income.[3]

Shapiro's selection as a 2025 Israeli Independence Day torchbearer drew backlash from the Israel Gay Youth Organization, which objected that a person who had described homosexuality and transgender identity as mental illness should receive a national honor.[5] Shapiro's stated positions include opposition to same-sex marriage and same-sex couples raising children, and support for a near-total abortion ban except where a competent medical authority determines that a mother's life is at risk.[5]

In 2015, during an on-air dispute over transgender rights, Shapiro asked why society was “mainstreaming delusion” and characterized the discussion as one about embracing “mental illness and delusion.”[20] In 2003, he publicly advocated expelling Palestinians from the West Bank—known by its original, indigenous Jewish name of Judea and Samaria. He later rejected that position.[20] In 2013, he claimed that former Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel had received donations from “Friends of Hamas,” a group that turned out not to exist.[20]

Shapiro's allegations concerning GARM, government coordination, and platform suppression of conservative media were claims advanced during congressional testimony and have not been adjudicated as formal findings in the cited records.[19] Similarly, the audience, subscription, and enforcement figures he cited at the hearing were self-reported and were not independently audited by the cited sources.[3]