Benjamin Aaron "Ben" Shapiro (15 January 1984-) was an American conservative political commentator and activist who served as editor-in-chief of The Daily Wire and as a contributor to Breitbart News.
Biography
Benjamin Aaron Shapiro was born in Los Angeles, California in 1984, the son of Soviet Jewish parents who worked in Hollywood; he was the brother of opera singer and "conservative influencer" Abby Shapiro. He graduated from high school at 16 and graduated summa cum laude from UCLA in 2004 at the age of 20 and cum laude from Harvard Law School in 2007. At the age of 17, he became the youngest nationally syndicated columnist in the United States, and he wrote columns for Creators Syndicate and Newsweek, served as editor-in-chief of The Daily Wire, hosted The Ben Shapiro Show podcast and radio show, and was an editor-at-large of Breitbart News from 2012 to 2016. Shapiro was a well-known conservative activist who was infamous for being outspoken about his views: he claimed that universities brainwashed American students; he claimed that liberals controlled popular entertainment, the media, and the academia, leading to a sense of conservative disenfranchisement which led to Donald Trump's victory in the 2016 presidential election (despite Shapiro supporting Ted Cruz); he called for sedition laws to be reinstated; he called Barack Obama a "fascist"; he called for lowering taxes on the very wealthy, the privatization of social security, the criminalization of abortion (in all cases), and the abolition of Obamacare; he claimed that 800,000,000 Muslims (half of them) were radicalized; he claimed that Islam in Europe was a disease and that Muslim men were uncivilized; he supported gun rights; he argued that African-Americans were no longer being persecuted during the 20th century; he supported the expulsion of Palestinian Arabs from Israeli-occupied lands; he opposed government intervention in marriage rights; and he believed that transgendered people were mentally-ill. Shapiro criticized the alt-right movement calling it "a garbage movement composed of garbage ideas." and saying that it has nothing to do with constitutional conservatism.