Episode 17 - Ben Shapiro

Join our Dynamic Duo, Yugopnik and Mike, as they put Ben Shapiro's career on the operating table and examine just how bad the damage is!

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Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

So in the 2024 election, Donald Trump had continued that kind of electoral denial, questioning of Joe Biden's um win, uh, arguing that he had been, you know, had the election stolen from him. And that actually persuaded a large portion of the Republican base. And so when Donald Trump launched his reelection campaign in 2024, it was the redemption arc of a stolen election. And Ben Shapiro had been saying the entire time that the election hadn't been stolen. And so he went for a conservative movement, neoconservative uh stalwart in Ron DeSantis in Florida. And that's who he supported throughout the 2024 primary until Donald Trump secured the nomination, and then he immediately flipped in a similar way to how he did in 2016. Once Trump secured the nomination, Shapiro was quickly united behind him with the rest of the Republican Party. He co-hosted a fundraiser for Trump's campaign. He donated to the campaign himself. Trump went on his show for a friendly interview, got millions of views. So at this point, you know, Ben kind of accepted Trump's primacy over the Republican Party. He was no longer in any way a critic of Trumpism or Trump. He became an active participant in Trump's political coalition. And his platform, the Daily Wire, functioned as one of the Republican Party's most influential media institutions. And he just went back to giving his audience all the arguments as to why Donald Trump's personal corruption or anything was not that bad when compared to, say, Joe Biden. He totally sold out to defending Donald Trump's power. And I think like this is something that we have noted a number of times throughout the stream. I hope I'm not sounding duplicative, because Ben Shapiro, like many other reactionary figures throughout American politics, have learned to accept the political gravity of Trumpism. Even though many of them, including people like the current vice president J.D. Vance, Ben Shapiro's previously endorsed candidates of Ron DeSantis and Ted Cruz, they all warned of Trump's authoritarian instincts. J.D. Vance in a tweet called him America's Hitler. But it didn't matter how much Donald Trump weakened Democratic norms. He's fundamentally reshaped the Republican Party and it's become about personal loyalty to him. Ed Shapiro used to be the biggest free marketeer. Now he's defending Donald Trump's tariffs. All the Republican and conservative media apparatus have ultimately capitulated and become willing pods of Donald Trump's increasingly authoritarian drives. The other thing to keep in mind is that there is an audience capture element. You know, as a content creator ourselves, we understand that when you make content and the audience doesn't vibe with it, you don't get views, there's a natural tendency to kind of shift and experiment in order to get, you know, the rewards of a successful video. And Ben Shapiro has done that time and time again. His conservative media has rewarded the personalities who remain connected to Donald Trump, his administration. And honestly, conservative fans were looking for hagiographers. They were looking for people that were shining up and glazing Trump, not people that were, you know, criticizing him in a principled manner. And every single election has strengthened Donald Trump's hold over the Republican base. Every victory has raised the political cost of sustained opposition. Just this year, another two Republican senators were swept out of office by Donald Trump endorsed challengers because they dared to oppose him on an issue. Remaining outside the coalition meant surrendering influence over millions of conservative voters and viewers.

SPEAKER_02 4:20

There's a thin line in almost every political movement, especially reactionary political movements, where it's uh times for potential readjustment of how the message is delivered, and a time when the way the message is delivered is set in absolute stone. You know, this the the the graph starting at the zero, going at 100, and eventually plummeting down. And most of these, especially grifty uh media personalities, really, really hope that they can guess when the line is moving downwards, when the general populace, especially the reactionary general populace, is looking for a new spin on things which are going to uh rile them up again and refresh the general direction of their of their movement. Ben Shapiro, time and time again, and this is to an extent as we'll talk later, repeating today, he keeps misinterpreting moments of change for moments when the direction, the momentum has already been set. He wanted to readjust the way uh Republicans run and which candidates are supposed to be the future of the party at a time when Trump was a new face of the movement. He wanted to abandon it, as you beautifully put. He wanted to abandon uh Trump and MAGA when he thought it was done, and then again and again, and I guess he learned his his lesson after his uh second L, but now he's returning to the to the same thing. With these guys, I just want the audience to understand that it's literally almost all aesthetics. They sit down and they think about what way to deliver basically the same message to you. And the same message is always don't pay attention to the system, pay attention to these particular social ills that we are presenting to you as social ills. But the way they can inform you about these social ills that you really, really should care about can be incredibly diverse. And the internal competition that exists between these right-wing talking heads is who's gonna get in early on the new spin on events. And Ben, while having been incredibly successful in the beginning of his career with this whole like wounded kin kind of pitch, ended up taking L after L afterwards, where a very, very, very, let's say, unpalatable to him approach to pitching a right wing America uh came to dominate the the news cycle. So I believe it's a combination of ego and just not reading the room, like really, really, really not reading the room multiple times.

SPEAKER_01 7:12

Yeah, I mean, I think Shapiro, although he's had a lot of false starts with Trump, has always managed to keep himself on the side of the winner, right? And it's only recently that that has begun to change. So Donald Trump's unwavering support for Israel's government has further deepened Shapiro's alignment with his presidency. As I've said earlier, like I think for Ben Shapiro, the Greater Israel project is his number one priority. He has long argued that support for Israel occupies a central place within American conservatism and United States foreign policy. He was incredibly supportive of Donald Trump's decision to recognize Jerusalem as Israel's capital, move the American embassy there, recognize Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights occupied from Syria, broker the Abraham Accords between the Gulf states, Saudi Arabia, and Israel, ending their diplomatic isolation, and provide consistent diplomatic backing to the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu all over the world. And that closely matches Ben Shapiro's own foreign policy positions. And that is increasingly outside the mainstream. The catalyst for that change, for what was a central pillar and a subset of conservatism in America, but has opened up the front for dissent, has been the October 7th attacks. Shapiro, in response to Hamas's attacks on Israel, became one of the most outspoken defenders of Israel's military campaign and genocide in Gaza and frequently praised Trump's promise to restore what he described as stronger American support for Israel. And major Israeli American figures pledged openly hundreds of millions of dollars to support Trump, who claimed he would be supportive of annexation of what they call Judea and Samaria, which is known to the rest of the world as the West Bank, and other extreme pro-Israel positions that were previously outside the mainstream of American politics and only the purview of the Israeli far right. And Ben Shapiro has been there, at the elitist that he is to defend it. So overall, Ben Shapiro's journey from never Trump conservative to Trump ally reflects one of the defining political realignments of the 21st century. The conservative movement that once emphasized constitutional restraint, institutional stability, free markets, family values, and moral leadership has all coalesced around the singular figure of Donald Trump. And Ben Shapiro's career illustrates how that transformation has unfolded in real time and it has exposed, quite frankly, the moral decrepitude of Ben Shapiro as he only cares about one thing, which is the power of the Republican Party and Israel.

SPEAKER_02 10:59

And as we just heard from Mike before October 7th, the Daily Wire is riding high. Internally they call the vision for their project conservative Disney. The idea that you can build a right-wing alternative universe with its own movies, children's content, razors, chocolate bars, the whole thing. And for a while, it works. But underneath the surface, the numbers are already wobbling. By 2025, YouTube views are down by about 90% from their peak. The company is laying off staff and CEO Jeremy Boring, Shapiro's key partner in building the brand, exits amid strategy missteps, especially that expensive fantasy series flop. Paid subscriptions drop by roughly a third to about 850,000, which is, I believe, 150 times more than ours. Ad revenue declines year on year from 2022. And while the empire is still big, it is on the decline. And then Gaza happens. Shapiro is and always has been a complete absolutist on Israel. He has defended settlement expansion, dismissed Palestinian claims of statehood, and framed the conflict in simple civilizational terms. Israelis build, Arabs bomb. So when Hamas killed around 1,200 Israelis on October 7th and took hostages, he reacted in full character. Full-throated defense of Israel's right to quote unquote eradicate Hamas' deep hostility to any talk about ceasefires and contempt for the word genocide being applied to Gaza. But outside this bubble, images from Gaza are forcing people to confront what support for Israel really means. Tens of thousands of Palestinian kids killed, entire neighborhoods flattened, hospitals hit and starvation used as a weapon. Even on the right, especially among younger, more online conservatives, that level of violence starts to look less like self-defense and more like a literal atrocity. Isolationist and America first currents have been growing for years, and suddenly they have a visceral example to rally around. The old formula, Shapiro, as the rational adult defending Israel against irrational critics, starts to fail. The pictures are too stark, the body count too high, and one of the first cracks appears not in the audience, but on his own payroll. Candace Owens is, at this point, one of the biggest stars at the Daily Wire after joining back in 2020. Post October 7th, Owens starts to say out loud what many people are already thinking. On November 3rd, 2023, she tweets No government anywhere has a right to commit a genocide ever. There is no justification for a genocide. I cannot believe this even needs to be said or is even considered the least bit controversial to state. That tweet came from under the literal Daily Wire roof. Ben Shapiro, the King Zionists' own establishment. A twist of the ages. Inside the Daily Wire, Shapiro's anger was not subtle. At a private event caught on video and circulated online, he calls Owen's behavior absolutely disgraceful and mocks her false sophistication on the Israel Hamas war. He tells the audience her conduct has been ridiculous and disrespute and disreputable, making it very clear this isn't just an internal disagreement. It's a public declaration of hostilities, or should we say, a special military operation against his own colleague. Owens then responds with a Bible quote, ensuring the rest of us that her rejection of the Ben Shapiro Zionist genocidal arguments are not based on some sort of love and respect for human rights, not based on a grander anti-imperialist realization. Nah, when it comes to her, it's just anti-Semitism. Quote, no one can serve two masters. Either you will hate the one and love the other, or you will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve both God and money. Jew and money. Not only problematic because the feelings of Jews are more important than the suffering of Palestinians, but because it makes the rest of the righteous, anti-colonial, anti-imperialist, and anti-Zionist movement look like a bunch of weird Jew hating freaks. It harms the very cause to the core because she now associates herself to it with points like these. Places like CNN and other outlets, of course, immediately point out that framing a jab at a Jewish media boss about loving God versus loving money is drenched in very old school anti-Semitism. Shapiro, of course, uses that moment to read it the same way and offend himself the same way he called out so many Hispanics and blacks as being hypocritical in the previous decade. He even fires back from Twitter. That single line, by all means quit, becomes the catchphrase for the whole feud. It's not a boss calling an employee, is the Jewish Zionist co-founder telling his Christian nationalist rising star to pick a side. The company and its pro-Israel line or her conscience and her followers. What an insane bag fumble. Owen's probably rubbing her hands replies saying you have been acting unprofessional and emotionally unhinged for weeks now, and we have all had to sit back and allow it. While this war of words rages, the rest of the conservative ecosystem is watching and choosing sides. Newsweek describes the conflict bluntly. Israel is tearing MAGA apart, with Owens and Shapiro's feud emblematic of a broader split between global police conservatives and more isolationist no foreign entanglement right wingers. Owens frames her position as opposing genocide and questioning why US taxpayers should fund Israel's war, connecting Gaza to a wider critique of endless foreign wars. On the other side, Shapiro and his allies treat criticism of Israel as either naive or actively dangerous. He insists that what's happening is a just war or some other shit and calls Owens cynically chasing a cloud. Inside the Daily Wire itself, their CEO initially tries to contain the blast radius. And while being on a leave of absence, he publicly states that neither he nor Shapiro has unilateral authority to fire Owens and that they don't regulate the speech of our hosts even when we disagree with them. Obviously, here talking about the Daily Wire and promising her job is secure unless she breaks the law or some other shit. At the same time, boring and other Daily Wire figures wade into some sort of bizarre theological firefights between them because they don't know what's happening over shit like Christ is king and whether it is anti-Semitic or not, after Owens adopts it as a slogan and far right figures like Nick Fuentes cheer her on. Boring argues that saying Christ is king becomes anti-Semitic when wielded as a weapon against Jews and calls using that a grave sin. Andrew Klava, another Daily Wire host, adds that using the phrase to declare that God has abandoned the Jews is quoting scripture like Satan does in the Bible. Their image, the image of the Daily Wire in front of the American right, keeps painting itself further and further in the colors of woke. Because to an extent they built that chair for themselves and now they have to sit in it. It's a total and utter relevancy suicide. Being led by what can only be defined as men savagely out of touch with the very audience that they are speaking to. When leading Daily Wire voices are warning their own audience that an explicitly Christian nationalist anti-Semitic current is rising as most of their own audience hold those very beliefs, they end up selling the very noose they will later hang them with in honor of the new right. As a direct example, Nick Fuentes, by the way, check out our earlier episodes on him, starts positioning Shapiro as the archetypal Xiocon, a Zionist propagandist whose real loyalty is Israel, not America. Fuentes praises Owens for waging what he calls a full-fledged war against the Jews, telling his audience, go off, girly, eat them up their filth, in response to her rhetoric.

SPEAKER_01 21:16

I think it's also important to note that this is something that we talked about in the episode, the Groyper War, which was against Charlie Kirk, which was uh of the same vein, which was the attempt to throw out Jews from that Judeo Christian post-World War II coalition. And this is hardening. Like this, there is tremendous success in the Nick Fuentes hard right model, especially along among conservative commentators. And so this behavior that we're talking about here has seen tremendous, tremendous success, which is reflected in the numbers. This is not just an opinion. It's called hard fact.

SPEAKER_02 22:01

Absolutely. And Shapiro makes it even worse when he starts then replying to Fuentes by calling him a Nazi in that space, dude. Are you fucking serious? You have spent 10 years saying that the left and the liberals throw the word Nazi around all the time, call people fascist all the time, and now you are calling your political opponent anti-Semitic and fascistic. Uh but but it's it's crazy that not only like these, you know, call them whatever you want, let's say like far-right figures are coming after him, you also have like old school talking heads like fucking Megan Kelly, like a long, friendly voice to Shapiro, took a stage at Turning Point USA and accused him of making anti-Semites. I mean, she argued that policing criticism of Israel and demanding loyalty tests around Zionism is backfiring and driving younger conservatives toward resentment. She asked, why would you divide the American conservative movement over Israel? It says attempts to silence debate are tearing the movement apart. So even these individuals that are just you know trying to do their own more digital version of prime time TV still stuck in fucking 1969, even they are throwing the are throwing Ben Shapiro's rhetoric straight back at him and uh introducing the conversation about Israel as one that is to an extent lived up. In other words, from both the so-called moderate and the openly fascist wings of the right, you start hearing the same complaint. Ben cares more about Israel than about the cohesion of the American right. He becomes, in their narrative, the guy who would rather blow up friendships and alliances than tolerate anti-Zionist sentiment. Even when that sentiment is mixed with genuinely anti-Semitic conspiracy theories. The world has outgrown him.

SPEAKER_01 24:13

The thing about Ben Shapiro is he's seemingly behaving in a way where he is inducing anti-Semitism. He openly trumpets his own loyalty to Israel, and then he says, It's anti-Semitic to notice that I'm loyal to Israel. And that has created an entire movement of the far right that are now called noticers. Which, if you've ever seen social media now, anytime there is some sort of conservative uh alt-right or far right post that involves Israel, the comments are full of people noticing the cause of whatever ale uh of society that they are covering. And so Ben Shapiro, you know, is oftentimes daring people to notice what is an ancient anti-Semitic trope, which is dual loyalty, while demonstrating dual loyalty. And so you put everybody in the difficult situation of like, hey, Ben Shapiro seems to care more about Israel than he does about the the interests of America or the well-being of Americans. And then the moment you say that, you feel yourself being pulled into an anti-Semitic trope, and therefore you're now vulnerable to being being called anti-Semitic, while the actual anti-Semites are right there posting about how they're noticing all this, and we are powerless rhetorically to stand against it.

SPEAKER_02 25:41

It's the ultimate machine.

SPEAKER_00 25:42

One that I, if you asked me like maybe five years ago, I couldn't believe uh could exist because usually this podcast is 100% financed by you guys, the listeners, and we have to pay our editor. As such, you can find the rest of this episode over at patreon.com slash the reaction podcast, or just use the link in the podcast description. We are incredibly grateful to all of our supporters. If you're already a patron and you're hearing this, you are on the wrong podcast feed. Thank you all so much for listening.