How Ben Shapiro Lost My Generation

His Own Movement Backfired

one of Shapiro’s many adoring fans (Printerval)

Chronically scrolling through Instagram—a weakness of mine—my right-coded algorithm brought me this Kung Fu Panda universe reel: The headline is “Facts don’t care about your feelings,” showing Ben Shapiro as Master Shifu, “me” as a young Tai Lung being trained by him. Then we fast forward to “me,” grown up, strong, muscular Tai Lung confronting my old master—tiny, elderly “Ben Shapiro.” “Me” is now berating him as a “Globalist neo-con.”

What makes this meme particularly resonant is that it reflects the arch of the conservative movement over the past decade. In 2019, 2020, and 2021, my friends and I (and not all of them Americans, I was at boarding school in Switzerland) would watch Shapiro rant in his screechy, high-pitched, pre-pubescent voice on YouTube. Thanks to the World Wide Web (!!!), we had the tremendous opportunity to listen to why the Democrats were basically Communists, and how only the Party of Reagan could save America. So began our process of redpilling.

We would mention Shapiro positively to one another and attempt to understand the world through his vantage point. For us, he was stoic, principled, and unapologetically right-wing—“owning the libs” from his studio in Los Angeles. In hindsight, it was pathetic that in our limited understanding of the world, Shapiro epitomized the Alpha Male.

Nonetheless, we saw the pundit as an exemplar of male rationality (i.e., his catchphrase, “facts don’t care about your feelings,” and his Daily Wire tumbler “Leftist Tears”), juxtaposed against the female irrationality we perceived in the girls our age, whom we didn’t yet know how to talk to. The girls were the “libs,” especially as the Gen Z gender-political divide was beginning to form, and we didn’t want to catch their BLM-protesting, rainbow flag-loving, Joe Biden-supporting cooties.

Then, we simply grew up. Yes, facts were still great, but so was hearing people out. As was caring for others, and actually conversing with the other sex. All of a sudden, things like, “there’s an extremely strong case for reasonable doubt” that Derek Chauvin didn’t really murder George Floyd sounded not “cool,” but rather, cruel. Even if we stayed on the right, Shapiro was no longer our “master.” Some of us, seeing Shapiro for the GOP apparatchik he was, instead went over to the left, or started holding a diverse range of perspectives not easily placed on the binary political spectrum.

Whatever. The “spectrum” is, maybe aside from cultural stances, kinda all bullshit anyway. I’m exhausted from having to explain to people how I’m “adjacent” to certain ideologies and what "horseshoe theory” entails. It might just be easier to, as Laith Nakly’s character in Hulu’s Ramy once proclaimed, identify as politically non-binary.

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Shapiro’s fall from grace

Yet with Shapiro’s slow demise into the abyss of online content creators, the appetite for right-wing voices certainly did not go away, even if some of us graduated from incelhood.¹ Shapiro’s moment, coincidentally, started fading after the BLM riots, around midway through Biden’s term. By that point, with the emergence of a powerful, ballsy, ever-present alt-right, he seemed no longer edgy and provocative, but an establishment conservative in his own right.

In fact, Shapiro sort of always was. While he was able to articulate his points in the language of the populist right, as Rod Dreher pointed out in The American Conservative in 2019, “Shapiro is, in fact, a conventional conservative of the Anglo-American strain.” It was not so much that Shapiro was changing the right as he was marrying Donald Trump’s appeal with the party’s old neoliberal-neoconservative politics. A far cry from Steve Bannon.

After Shapiro, who desperately tried to stay relevant to his fan base by growing a beard and moving to Nashville and then Ron DeSantis’ “free state” of Florida, incels looked to a new slate of figures. First came Jordan Peterson, whom Shapiro gave a platform on the Daily Wire for his evocatively intellectual, Judeo-Christian clichés. Peterson told men that they should be proud of their masculinity, and encouraged specific “good” habits of bourgeois morality—his 12 Rules for Life, and the like: Thou shalt clean your room! But it soon became apparent that Peterson, like Shapiro, was of this conservative “Anglo-American strain.”

Après, Andrew Tate. According to him, you didn’t really need to focus on making yourself attractive to women (and perhaps also to men). You just needed to pursue so much wealth and power that you could “escape the Matrix,” and have your own harem just like his in Romania, filled with Bugattis and girls from the Carpathian Basin. Tate, for his part, has pulled no punches with Shapiro and Peterson, establishing himself as a radically different voice for young men. He has berated Shapiro, in his irritably half-British, half-American IB school-kid accent, as “a midget warmonger, who if he got sent to war himself, would piss his little pants.” Tate has also said that Peterson “was the man at one point,” but that, hypocritically, “he became a drug addict.”²

Just as Shapiro gave way for Peterson in 2021/2022, and Peterson gave way for Tate in 2023/2024, after the November 2024 election came Nick Fuentes’s moment. In an attempt to appease the cultural shift, Fuentes had his shadow ban lifted on platforms like Instagram, allowing him to ascertain newfound influence. Last year, for example, I only had marginal information about his existence, mostly from Trump’s infamous dinner with the Groyper-King and his friend Kanye West. Fuentes says don’t even pursue women—or friendships—altogether. Be unapologetically racist and sexist, and wear “incel” as a proud label. Not redpilled, but blackpilled. Fuentes, as it happens, is too radical for even Candace Owens. ³

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The boys speak out

Years removed from Shapiro’s heyday, it is worth asking what my generation remembers of the man who redpilled so many to the right, making the way for a slate of other, more radical, voices to hold the mantle of conservative provocateur-in-chief.

Lucas Kreuger of New York, 22, a self-identifying conservative who works in banking, told me that Shapiro “was just so fucking smart, dude. And I liked how fast he talked, because I like listening to things fast. I feel like it was like scratching an itch on my brain, if that makes any sense.” Krueger, who is Jewish, said that “around the Israel thing,” however, he however realized that “he’s more pro-Israel than pro America. It’s like, pretty blatantly obvious. He’s a shill for that country, and that's just kind of lame.”

Indeed, Shapiro moved a segment of Gen Z against the Democrats. But then, the cracks in his own worldview became apparent. How are we to reconcile America First with his staunch support of, it seems, every single action taken by the current Israeli government? As younger conservatives have also increasingly grown aware of the excesses of not only Big Government but also Big Business, what are they to think of Shapiro’s both free-market and neoconservative absolutism?

James Thibault of New Hampshire, 19, the youngest state legislator in the country and a Republican, wrote to me that he “started listening to Ben in middle school, probably around 2019,” since he was essentially “the most prominent figure in the conservative media space.” He believes that right now, there are other pundits who offer better analysis, though he still occasionally listens to Shapiro. “I don’t think Ben’s necessarily a neocon, but some of his policy positions have simply put him out of touch with some other parts of the conservative movement,” opined Thibault, and that “It’s not necessarily a bad thing to support Israel’s right to defend itself, but to do so while disregarding any harm that they may cause, including to Middle Eastern Christians, is concerning to many.”

Matthew Allaire of Boston, 20, a stated liberal, had Shapiro recommended to him on YouTube when he was 13, whose voice provided a “compelling, counter-cultural alternative to MSNBC, CNN, and other mainstream media outlets.” At the time, Shapiro seemed to Allaire like he “was a (semi)-independent creator speaking truth to power, but he also wasn’t some random person shouting into the abyss.”

However, “hearing the same old spiel about the woke left became tiresome,” noted Allaire, and by 2021, he came to “very different conclusions about how reliable a source the Daily Wire was.” After Hamas’s attack on Israel on October 7, 2023, Allaire found that Shapiro “had a reasonable reaction for many American Jews at that time, which was to turn his ire against universities.” But according to Allaire, “you can only take these things so far before your audience becomes tired of them.” ⁴

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It’s over

Shapiro pioneered new media specifically curated for right-wing viewpoints. He brought over an entire generation of young people to conservatism, whatever that means in 2025. Though not all of these kids are still fully or at all conservative, listening to Shapiro likely made them, even today, somewhat more sympathetic to right-wing viewpoints. But as they grew up, their views became more nuanced. It seemed like Shapiro was no longer, for his position on foreign policy, or economics, or other things, genuine.

As Gen Z has soured over neoconservatism and neoliberal economics that do not prioritize the working and middle class but global capital, yes, many of us now eagerly and almost instinctively will berate once “master” Shapiro as a “globalist neocon.”

As for now, Shapiro has even lost Rabbi Schmuley. Godspeed!

1. Here, I am using “incel” not necessarily to denote someone who has not had, or does not regularly have, sex. But, rather, someone who participates in bigoted and reactionary incel rhetoric, language, and culture – and well, let’s just say someone who doesn’t leave his mom’s basement too often. And who probably absolutely adores Japan for its hentai and clean streets, despite never having been there.

2. There is something to this. Young, impressionable young men would not easily find their role model in someone like Shapiro, reading the lyrics of Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion's “Wet Ass Pussy” (“p-word is female genitalia…beat it up n-word…this p-word is wet come take a dive”), but in a pro-materialistic guy who has the girls, the cars, the private jet, like Tate. In the same clip from 2020, Shapiro opined, “these women are suffering from some sort of serious [gynecological condition]…I mean, a bucket and a mop? This sounds like there is something that is going on here that is not biologically normal.” His wife, a doctor, was apparently able to diagnose these women’s “vaginal condition.” OK bro.

3. Of course, I’m going through the personalities who would have most appealed to the men initially radicalized by Shapiro. This is not to mention other, more lasting figures who are either explicitly or implicitly associated with today’s right: Joe Rogan, Theo Von, Tucker Carlson, among others. Frankly, I think these people are more well-rounded, more open-minded, and better voices precisely because they don’t have a masturbating fan base. And because they have enough brain capacity to agree with ideas from across the political spectrum. Take recent episodes like Rogan and Bernie Sanders, Von and Ro Khana, or Carlson and Ana Kasparian.

4. Shapiro might just be aware of how America First and isolationist, and yes in some cases downright antisemitic, the right has gotten (though we also shouldn’t equate America First itself to extremism, as the ADL does). The Daily Wire, where Shapiro serves as editor emeritus and is essentially the boss, recently released a documentary series on how Pope Pius XII in fact was not Hitler’s pope, and saw the Third Reich as his “greatest enemy.” Rabbi Schmuley, the pro-Israel activist you likely know from videos of him screaming “antisemite” at random people, is now maligning Shapiro as a bad Jew. “BenShapiro tramples on the sacred memory of then six million and the Survivors," writes Schmuley, either too filled with rage or too drunk to check for grammar.