If you want to understand the mess that America finds itself in, you could do worse than study the life and times of Ben Shapiro. Writer, broadcaster and podcast supremo, Shapiro has become a lightning rod for his nation’s culture wars, at once despised by the left and the far right.
He brought that fight to Britain last week in a combative, fractious BBC interview with Andrew Neil. Shapiro accused Neil of being biased and eventually terminated the conversation, saying: “I’m not inclined to continue an interview with a person as badly motivated as you.”
Shapiro mistakenly accused Neil, a former editor of The Sunday Times, of being a leftwinger, which enabled the interviewer to respond: “Mr Shapiro, if you only knew how ridiculous that statement is, you wouldn’t have said it.”
It was the latest controversy for Shapiro, a fast-talking conservative flamethrower and an unapologetic advocate of western values, whose speeches on college campuses have led to scenes of violence.
He has received death threats and is reportedly the single biggest media target for anti-semitic abuse online.
He is also astoundingly popular. His podcast, The Ben Shapiro Show, is downloaded more than 10m times a month. It has made him one of the most influential voices in America and he’s found plenty of fans in Britain, too, particularly among young rightwingers.
Now 35, Shapiro has had a meteoric rise. His opinions are relentless and his mind electric. He was a columnist at 17, an author by 21, a driving force behind the ascent of Breitbart News, and then its mortal enemy when he resigned in 2016.
He is an Orthodox Jew who has strongly criticised Donald Trump, which is why the alt-right hate him, but has also been described as alt-right by The Economist (which later apologised).
Read the article by Josh Glancy in The Australian (from the Times).