Ben Shapiro changes his tune on rap — by rapping
Ben Shapiro Photo by Joshua Blanchard/Getty Images for Politicon
By PJ Grisar January 29, 2024
On Saturday, Ben Shapiro took his anti-woke politics to an art form that has consistently triggered him: rap music.
That’s right. Despite years of insistence that “rap isn’t music” and an infamous conniption over Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion’s “WAP,” the conservative pundit and Daily Wire founder is featured in a track called “FACTS” by Canadian artist Tom MacDonald, a heavily tattooed individual who one suspects would, in typical circumstances, cause Shapiro to lock his car door.
Tom MacDonald and Ben Shapiro collab for “FACTS” rap song pic.twitter.com/exj0HU7ULe
— The Post Millennial (@TPostMillennial) January 26, 2024
The song glorifies Shapiro’s “facts don’t care about your feelings” ethos, with a chorus that goes, “I hope I offend you/I ask myself ‘What would Ben do?’”
MacDonald’s rap insists that there are two genders, that there’s nothing wrong with being proud to be white and laments that American flags have been replaced by “BLM flags or a rainbow.” (The song doesn’t register the irony that it is conveying what it believes is a subversive, devil may care attitude toward scandalizing leftist pieties via a medium — rap — that has historically offended almost everyone at some time or another.)
Shapiro appears in the music video in a gray hoodie and later on a wall of televisions like that scene in The Matrix. Putting his drumfire monotone to the test, he raps by citing data (“look at the graphs, look at my charts”) and about his hopes to chart himself as a Billboard #1.
Reader: he did it. The song, in which Shapiro suggests that the typical listener of rap wastes their money on strippers and will be going to prison, and in which he utters the instantly iconic correction “Dawg, it’s a yarmulke, homie, no cap,” was # 1 on iTunes this weekend, prompting Shapiro to change his X bio to “America’s #1 Rapper.”
Nicki Minaj, name-checked in the song, praised Shapiro on social media for the streaming success. The natural order of things, where Shapiro had nothing but disdain for hip-hop and whose musical bona fides extended to classical violin and the odd rendition of a Les Miserables song about unyielding law and order, has been irrevocably changed.
Will Shapiro make a cameo on Minaj’s new album? Will he give up his media empire to go platinum with songs excoriating Critical Race Theory and trans athletes and listing soporific crime statistics? Or, will one more song about female pleasure push him back to merely quoting the lyrics like an appalled school marm in between ads for Raycon earbuds?
MacDonald may ask himself what Ben would do, but if “FACTS” is any indication, it’s really anybody’s guess.
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s award-winning journalism this Passover.
In this age of misinformation, our work is needed like never before. We report on the news that matters most to American Jews, driven by truth, not ideology.
At a time when newsrooms are closing or cutting back, the Forward has removed its paywall. That means for the first time in our 126-year history, Forward journalism is free to everyone, everywhere. With an ongoing war, rising antisemitism, and a flood of disinformation that may affect the upcoming election, we believe that free and open access to Jewish journalism is imperative.
Readers like you make it all possible. Right now, we’re in the middle of our Passover Pledge Drive and we still need 300 people to step up and make a gift to sustain our trustworthy, independent journalism.
Make a gift of any size and become a Forward member today. You’ll support our mission to tell the American Jewish story fully and fairly.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
Join our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.
Only 300 more gifts needed by April 30
