A visit to AmericaFest with the Harvard-educated, show tunes-loving Orthodox Jew from deep blue L.A. who harnessed anti-woke fervor to become a right-wing rock star and build conservative media’s fastest-growing empire
As a boy, Ben Shapiro spent week nights at Miceli’s, an Italian joint near Universal Studios famous for its greasy pizzas and singing waiters. His father, David, had moved the family to Los Angeles from Boston in the early 1980s in search of a career in film scoring. “But a lot of people come to Hollywood wanting to do that,” Shapiro observes, adding that his father never achieved his John Williams dreams.
Those were lean years for the family of six. They occupied a tiny house in Burbank, with Ben sharing a bedroom with his three older sisters. To make ends meet, Dad found work at Miceli’s as a pianist. Ben’s father was a natural entertainer and delighted the crowd with physical gags, like putting his jacket on as he was playing. He kept the gig for 20 years. “I was always there,” Ben recalls. “People were singing Broadway. I’d sit there doing my homework or hanging out with the bartender.”
From those convivial beginnings, the 40-year-old Shapiro has carved out an unlikely path as one of America’s most fixated-upon right wing influencers — a cartoonish, perplexing figure, seemingly admired and reviled in equal measure but growing increasingly impossible to ignore. A conservative critic who isn’t afraid to wade into the pop culture fray, Shapiro frequently finds himself the butt of online jokes — there was the “WAP” imbroglio, the Barbie review backlash and, most recently, his rapturous Wicked queen-out.
He takes the jokes in stride, usually. But Shapiro himself is proving less and less of a joke these days. More than just another talking head in the conservative media landscape — he dismissively refers to competitor Tucker Carlson’s operation as a “one-car-crash company,” meaning if Carlson were to die, that’s the end of Tucker Inc. — he has fashioned himself into a self-made media titan as co-founder of the Daily Wire, the Nashville-based conservative company he started with business partner Jeremy Boreing in 2015.
An initial $4.7 million investment from Texas oil tycoon Farris Wilks has blossomed into what Shapiro says is a $220 million empire, encompassing a slate of podcasts — Jordan Peterson and Matt Walsh are on the roster — scripted movies (like Terror on the Prairie, starring fired Mandalorian star Gina Carano), documentaries (like Walsh’s What Is a Woman? and Am I Racist?) and streaming shows (the most ambitious of which, fantasy series The Pendragon Cycle, is now in postproduction). Shapiro anticipates revenue will be much higher in 2025, when the effects of the roller coaster ride to Donald Trump’s reelection are fully felt .
