Ben Shapiro

Ben Shapiro

Benjamin Aaron Shapiro is an American conservative political commentator, media host, and attorney. Shapiro was editor-at-large of far-right news site Breitbart News between 2012 and 2016. He is a critic of the alt-right movement and has been targeted by antisemitic rhetoric from the Alt-right.

About Ben Shapiro in brief

Summary Ben ShapiroBenjamin Aaron Shapiro is an American conservative political commentator, media host, and attorney. At age 17, he became the youngest nationally syndicated columnist in the United States. He has written eleven books, the first being Brainwashed: How Universities Indoctrinate America’s Youth. Shapiro was editor-at-large of far-right news site Breitbart News between 2012 and 2016. He is a critic of the alt-right movement and has been targeted by antisemitic rhetoric from the Alt-right. In a May 2019 interview on BBC where Shapiro was promoting his book, the interviewer Andrew Neil suggested that Shapiro’s history of remarks were inconsistent with the message of the book. Shapiro stormed out of the interview and later admitted that he had been “destroyed” by Neil. In 2019, Shapiro published the book The Right Side of History: How Reason and Moral Purpose Made the West Great which focuses on the importance of Judeo-Christian values and laments the decline of those values in modern America. He currently hosts The Ben Shapiro Show, a daily political podcast and live radio show. He also serves as editor emeritus for The Daily Wire, which he founded, and hosts a weekly radio show on Fox News. He was born in Los Angeles, California, to an Orthodox Jewish family of Russian-Jewish and Lithuanian-Jewish ancestry. He developed a talent for violin at a young age, having performed at the Israel Bonds Banquet in 1996 at twelve years of age. His mother was an executive of a TV company and his father worked as a composer. He graduated summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa from the University of California, Los Angeles in 2004, at age 20, with a Bachelor of Arts degree in political science and then Cum laude from Harvard Law School in 2007.

As of March 2012, he ran an independent legal consultancy firm, Benjamin Shapiro Legal Consulting, in LA. In March 2016, Shapiro resigned from his position as editor-in-chief of Breitbart News following what he characterized as the website’s lack of support for reporter Michelle Fields in response to her alleged assault by Corey Lewandowski. On February 7, 2013, Shapiro wrote an article citing sources who said that a group named Hamas was among foreign contributors to the U.S. Senate campaign of Chuck Hagel, a former political campaign of former Senate candidate. In 2013, Threshold Editions published Shapiro’s fifth book, Bullies: how the Left’s Culture of Fear and Intimidation Silences Americans. In 2011, HarperCollins published his fourth book, Primetime Propaganda: The True Hollywood Story of How the Left Took Over Your TV, in which Shapiro argues that Hollywood has a left-wing agenda that it actively promotes through prime-time entertainment programming. In his first book Brainwashed, Shapiro argued that students are not exposed to a variety of viewpoints at universities and that those who do not have strong opinions will be overwhelmed by an atmosphere dominated by liberal instructors even if discussion is encouraged in classrooms. In the book Happy Days and M*A*S*H say they pursued a pro-pacifist, anti-Vietnam-War agenda in those series.