Ben Shapiro

Ben Shapiro (born January 15, 1984, Burbank, California, U.S. ) is a blunt-spoken conservative American commentator who hosts The Ben Shapiro Show, one of the country’s most popular political podcasts.

Early years

Shapiro grew up in Burbank, a city in Los Angeles county. His mother was a TV company executive, and his father was a composer and piano player; both his parents were Reagan Republicans. He grew up in a two-bedroom house and shared a bedroom with his three older sisters. Politically aware from a young age, Shapiro dressed up as John Adams, the country’s second president, for Halloween every year, starting at the age of five. When he was 11, the family moved to a larger house in an Orthodox Jewish community, and Shapiro became Orthodox.

A self-described virtuosic violinist as a child, Shapiro performed the theme from the movie Schindler’s List at a dinner hosted by talk-show host Larry King in 1996, with his father accompanying him on piano. King, reading from a card, introduced 12-year-old Benjamin Shapiro, telling the audience, “In addition to the violin, he plays chess, loves baseball, competes in track-and-field. His goal is to become the first Orthodox rabbi to sit on the Supreme Court.”

Shapiro skipped both the third and ninth grades, and he enrolled at University of California, Los Angeles when he was 16. He began writing pieces for the college newspaper, the Daily Bruin, Shapiro has said, to counter an article he read in the paper that compared then Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon to Adolf Eichmann, the Nazi leader who sent millions of Jews to death camps during the Holocaust. When he was 17, Shapiro became the youngest political columnist for Creators Syndicate, which distributes content to major news organizations. By the time he was 20, he had written his first book, Brainwashed: How Universities Indoctrinate America’s Youth. Shapiro went on to Harvard Law School, where he wrote his second book, Porn Generation: How Social Liberalism Is Corrupting Our Future.

Breitbart News and The Daily Wire

One of Shapiro’s columns drew the attention of Andrew Breitbart, the late founder of the conservative news site Breitbart News, where Shapiro became an editor at large in 2012. His friendship with Breitbart also led to spots on conservative radio. In 2015 Shapiro teamed up with Hollywood producer Jeremy Boreing to start The Daily Wire, a conservative media company that would go on to host podcasts, streamed shows, scripted movies, and documentaries including Am I Racist?, which pokes fun at diversity, equity, and inclusion programs. As of 2025 Shapiro put the value of The Daily Wire at more than $220 million. His eponymous podcast is listened to 25 million times a month.

In 2016 Shapiro left Breitbart News in protest after the company did not back reporter Michelle Fields, who had alleged that then presidential candidate Donald Trump’s campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski, grabbed her arm, bruising it, while she tried to ask Trump a question. Shapiro, at the time a critic of Trump, said in a statement that “both Lewandowski and Trump maligned Michelle in the most repulsive fashion. Meanwhile, Breitbart News not only stood by and did nothing outside of tepidly asking for an apology, they then attempted to abandon Michelle by silencing staff from tweeting or talking about the issue.”

In a 2017 profile in The New York Times Shapiro was described as “the cool kid’s philosopher, dissecting arguments with a lawyer’s skill and references to Aristotle.”

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Hot-button political views

In 2015, when Vanity Fair did a cover story about Caitlyn Jenner’s transition to a woman, Shapiro appeared on a panel on the CNN show Dr. Drew on Call. After transgender video journalist Zoey Tur praised Jenner for her courage, Shapiro asked, “Why are we mainstreaming delusion?” and referred to Jenner as “Bruce” (her birth name) and “him.” When other panelists admonished Shapiro for being rude, he uttered what is now one of his trademark lines, “Facts don’t care about your feelings.” Tur, sitting right next to Shapiro, told him he did not know what he was talking about, and Shapiro proceeded to ask her, “What are your genetics?” Then she leaned in, put her hand around the back of his neck, and calmly said, “You cut that out now, or you’ll go home in an ambulance.” After the incident, which quickly went viral, Shapiro filed a police report against Tur, but she was not charged with a crime.

The incident reflects the depth of Shapiro’s social conservatism. His opposition to transgender rights is unequivocal, telling one questioner at a rally that she could no more change her gender than she could change her age. His position on gay rights is somewhat less strident. He believes Obergefell v. Hodges, the Supreme Court decision that legalized gay marriage, was a bad ruling but is quick to add, “Does that mean that there should be prosecution of people who are living in gay relationships? Of course not.”

Shapiro’s Jewish faith has informed much of his political commentary and, at times, made him the subject of antisemitic online attacks. He hired conservative firebrand commentator Candace Owens to The Daily Wire with great fanfare, but, after she made repeated inflammatory comments about Jews, they parted ways in 2024. He took Elon Musk to the Auschwitz concentration camp in 2024 after the Anti-Defamation League criticized Musk for responding “actual truth” to an antisemitic tweet.

Shifting views on Trump

Shapiro has said that in the 2016 presidential election, he voted for neither Trump nor Hillary Clinton. However, he supported Trump in 2020 (although he did not back Trump’s subsequent baseless claim that the election had been rigged). And by 2024 Shapiro raised money for Trump and campaigned for him.

Shapiro still criticizes Trump on occasion, expressing opposition to the president’s tariffs, for example. And after Trump’s Federal Communications Commission chair, Brendan Carr, made comments that some took to be a threat against ABC, Shapiro pushed back strongly. Carr had been responding to a comment made by ABC late-night host Jimmy Kimmel in the wake of the September 2025 murder of conservative activist Charlie Kirk. Shapiro warned that “one day the shoe will be on the other foot.” If a Democratic administration were to take action against a conservative commentator such as Tucker Carlson or Sean Hannity, Shapiro asked, “Would the right be OK with that or would they be claiming, quite properly, that is massive regulatory overreach, unprecedented in scope?”

Lions and Scavengers

In 2025 Shapiro published his book Lions and Scavengers: The True Story of America (and Her Critics). In it, he puts Americans into two camps: Lions, who want to build up Western civilization, and Scavengers, who aim to tear it down. He calls Lions builders and says that New York mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani personifies the Scavenger ethos. In the book he writes:

Lions almost always win, because Lions are warriors, while Scavengers are cowards.

Personal life

Shapiro and his wife, Mor Shapiro, a physician, have four children.