‘A conspiratorial Right is rising’ in America, Ben Shapiro tells ‘Post’

US political commentator Ben Shapiro in candid conversation with The Jerusalem Post: ‘You get a lot more likes and clicks if you are promoting an anti-Israel, anti-Jewish agenda.’

By ZVIKA KLEIN
The Jerusalem Post

“There is a part of the Right that is extraordinarily conspiratorial and sees Jews as a conspiratorial force… It is rising because social media rewards it,” Ben Shapiro said in an interview with The Jerusalem Post last week. “On X and TikTok, you often get more clicks if you push anti-Israel and antisemitic rhetoric.”

The Post met Shapiro during his recent visit to Israel, days after the announcement at the White House of a potential hostage release and ceasefire between Israel and Hamas. Shapiro said during the interview that while hostility toward Israel on the Left is well documented, Israel should not ignore a parallel danger growing on parts of the Right, where conspiratorial thinking finds a ready audience, and algorithms incentivize it.

“The important thing is the conspiracy itself,” he said. “Conspiratorialism is an incredibly seductive storyline, particularly for young people who are being told that the problems in their own lives are not their fault, and they can be solved by externalizing those problems onto a different group.”

He argued that the dynamic is structural rather than episodic. “You get a lot more likes and clicks if you are promoting an anti-Israel, anti-Jewish agenda than if you are doing the opposite,” he said. “Virtually every conspiracy theory ends up pointing at the Jews because the narrative needs a villain, and it is easier to recycle an old one than to make an honest argument.”

Shapiro linked the problem to the narrowing of mainstream debate online. “The Overton window was narrowed so tightly that ‘normie’ opinions could get you banned from social media or fired from your job,” he said. “That is different from there being truly awful opinions. There should be social consequences for rooting for the Nazis.”

What has changed, he suggested, is that the reward system of social media platforms “elevates the most inflammatory, fact-free content, then presents it as brave truth-telling.”

He wouldn’t get into the specifics of exactly who these extreme-Right figures are, though it is clear he was hinting at people such as political commentator Tucker Carlson.

From that warning, the conversation turned to the region and Shapiro’s new book, Lions and Scavengers: The True Story of America, which he is promoting on a whirlwind, jet-lagged tour.

Shapiro laughed that what his team calls “after dark” interviews tend to produce the most candid answers. The premise of the book, and much of his diagnosis of the current media climate, rests on a simple contrast.

“Everyone has two competing forces,” he said. “The part that builds, and the part that says it is all somebody else’s fault and tries to tear down institutions. Scavengers want to rip things down. Lions want to maintain institutions worth preserving and change the ones that actually need change.”

‘A diplomatic triumph’ that puts the onus on Hamas

On the emerging road map being championed from Washington, Shapiro called the moment “a diplomatic triumph” that could reshape incentives across the Middle East. “To get Israel, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and key European partners oriented against Hamas is amazing,” he said. “For President [Donald ] Trump and Prime Minister [Benjamin] Netanyahu to do so while maintaining Israel’s core interests is the remarkable part.”

Pressed to define those core interests, Shapiro listed two. “No security threat from Gaza, and no future Palestinian state unless the Palestinian Authority or whoever follows it jumps through hoops that everyone knows are nearly impossible,” he said. The deal’s structure, in his view, puts accountability where it belongs.

“If Hamas says no to the deal, Israel essentially has carte blanche to finish the job,” he said. “Obviously, it would be better if the deal goes through and the hostages come home; but if they [Hamas] refuse, the rest can proceed whether Hamas acquiesces or not.”

What if rockets fly in the middle of a phased release, the Post asked. “I think the prime minister has already implied that any violation would reset the terms,” Shapiro said.

“I do not think President Trump would be tolerant of Hamas breaking the deal. If they launch rockets, Israel will go finish off the remnants, and the president is not going to be upset about that.” The broader point, he added, is that successful diplomacy “orients the civilized world against a terror organization and makes their refusal the final indictment.”

Whom he will and will not platform

Shapiro was explicit about his own red lines regarding with whom he would create dialogue and with whom he wouldn’t. “Life is only so many breaths. Some conversations are not productive,” he said. “I do not feel an obligation to sit with people who advocate violence.”

That is not the same as avoiding adversaries. “If I could interview the president of Iran, I would ask why he denies women basic rights, why he builds a nuclear program in a country rich in oil and gas, why they refuse real elections, why they export terrorism, and why they are developing missiles that can hit Europe,” he said. “If you have the opportunity to sit with a hostile leader and you only toss softballs, that is not an interview.”

He applies a similar standard at home. “I am aligned with Prime Minister Netanyahu on many core points, and I am much more aligned with him than with Vladimir Putin,” he said. “It is natural that I would ask more difficult questions of an adversary. But being aligned does not mean you never ask the hard question.”

He said that sympathetic figures still get pushed. “I am very sympathetic to Ukrainians, but when I interviewed President [Volodymyr] Zelensky, I asked what the Right was asking about corruption and conscription,” he said. “Access is not an excuse to stop asking real questions.”

Shapiro’s new book translates his media critique into a civic creed. “A healthy society has a few core principles,” he said. “Private property, equal rights before the law, freedom of mind, and traditional virtue. If you are not doing those things as a society, you are failing.”

He elaborated on three kinds of “scavengers.” There are “looters,” who look at others’ resources and conclude that the system should give those resources to them. There are “lecturers,” who “declare traditional family values patriarchal or oppressive and demand that those institutions be razed.” And there are “barbarians,” often “coming from outside the civilization, who blame the West for their own societies’ failures, then import that critique into Western institutions.”

The Post asked whether that taxonomy is simply a dressed-up partisan map. “It does not have to be conservative,” he said. “There are people who disagree with me on marginal tax rates who are lions, who want to build things that are good and approach the world responsibly. And there are people who consider themselves on my side politically who are focused on tearing pretty much everything down and see the world as filled with conspiratorial forces.”

The “pride in the game” he champions, he said, is less ideology than ethos. “Defend what is worth preserving. Change what truly needs change. That is the lion’s path.”

Marriage, policy, and personal life

Critics in Israel seized on Shapiro’s stance on same-sex marriage when he was honored with lighting a torch at Mount Herzl last year, representing Diaspora Jewry. He called some of the commentary a distortion of a policy argument. 

“I am not in favor of same-sex marriage as governmental policy,” he said. “That does not mean the state should police bedrooms. A society has a specific interest in a man and a woman marrying and having children. Other arrangements are your personal life.”

He noted that Israel recognizes marriages performed abroad but does not provide civil marriage at home. “People looking for controversy will always find it,” he said. “But a disagreement about what the state incentivizes is not hatred of people.”

Shapiro’s connection to the late conservative activist Charlie Kirk was both professional and personal. He first met Kirk as a teenage organizer pitching the fledgling idea for Turning Point USA and would go on to share stages with him at TPUSA’s marquee student conferences while frequently praising Kirk’s talent for mobilizing young conservatives.

After Kirk’s assassination in Utah on September 10, Shapiro published a tribute recalling that first meeting and framing Kirk’s campus project as a generational force, then publicly highlighted his wife, Erika Kirk’s, memorial remarks and said the loss would change how he appears in public, vowing to avoid outdoor events, even as he pledged to keep engaging students.

In Shapiro’s telling, their alliance paired his media platform and debate style with Kirk’s grassroots machine, a complementary partnership that helped turn youth activism into national influence.

In a recent interview, Shapiro made waves by saying, even as an Orthodox Jew, that one lesson from Kirk was to “go to church.” He did not back away from that line in his interview with the Post. “America is a Christian country,” he said. “The founders were either deists or Christians, drawing on a 2,000-year Christian tradition with Judaic roots. Saying otherwise is dishonest and counterproductive. People who go to church tend to engage with a biblical morality that is valuable.”

He said that Kirk’s movement had a Christian bent because of Kirk’s own faith but that the work was “fundamentally political outreach, not a religious crusade.” As for their personal relationship, Shapiro described it as long and close. “I knew Charlie since he was 18,” he said. “He was ubiquitous, texting with everyone, always in motion. We spoke relatively frequently.”

Oct. 7 and a reassessment among liberal American Jews

I’ve interviewed Shapiro in the past, both for this publication and for Makor Rishon, almost a decade ago, where we discussed American Jewry. 

“You have to understand, Reform Jews want something from Israel that will make them feel warm and fuzzy, without having to support Israel in a time of danger,” he told me in 2018.

“They want to be what I call ‘a Peter Beinart Jew’ – Jews who proclaim moral superiority regarding Israel and detach themselves from it whenever they feel uncomfortable supporting it. To me, it is puzzling for Israel to invest so many resources in those who oppose it. I doubt Peter Beinart is a Zionist,” he said of the progressive journalist.

In our recent interview, the Post asked whether Oct. 7 changed anything in American Jewish life outside the Orthodox community. “Some,” Shapiro answered. “I get calls from people who are less religiously observant than my family but who now recognize that the fellow-traveling with hard-left circles demands they dissociate from their Jewishness. Some discovered that the people they marched with really do not like them very much.”

He believes that shift surfaced in voting behavior. “Many who would normally vote straight-line Democrat could not bring themselves to vote for President Trump, but they also stayed home rather than vote for Kamala Harris while she was taking certain positions on Israel,” he said. “You will not see it if you just look at top-line national numbers, but it mattered in places like Pennsylvania and parts of Florida.”

The larger lesson, he suggested, is that there is “less room than people thought to treat Jewish identity as a fashionable accessory while adopting the politics of those who regard Israel as uniquely illegitimate.”

Returning to his opening warning, Shapiro said the supply of conspiracism responds to the demand created by algorithms. “Algorithms reward outrage,” he said. “If the incentive is to enrage, you will get more enraged content, and antisemitic tropes are a ready supply.” He is skeptical that platform policy alone can fix the problem. “The answer is courage and clarity,” he said. “Tell the truth. Defend the good. Refuse to indulge the lie, even when it is popular.”

At the same time, he drew a line between judging ideas and canceling people. “You can read cancel culture too broadly, to mean no one should ever say anything bad about you because it is mean,” he said. “That becomes a weird countervailing cancel culture where someone says something terrible, they get feedback, and they cry cancellation. That is not cancellation. And also, there are truly awful opinions that do not deserve the time of day.” What worries him is when “mainstream, fact-based views are treated as forbidden speech, while fever-swamp narratives are treated as courageous.”

The Trump plan and the path to a post-Hamas Gaza

Shapiro’s analysis of the Trump-led framework speaks of failure modes. “If they refuse, you finish the job,” he said of Hamas. “If they violate, you reset the terms and finish the job.” Success is equally blunt. “The best outcome is that the hostages come home, and the civilized world stays aligned against Hamas,” he said. “The ground has been laid for better relations with key nations in the region. That is why orienting everyone against a terror organization matters.”

He does not think Israel should treat Arab and European buy-in as a sentimental achievement. “It is about shared interests,” he said. “You get alignment when the civilized world decides that a genocidal terror organization cannot dictate the region’s future. That is the realignment this deal aims at.”

We ended where we began, with the question behind Shapiro’s lion metaphor. If social media rewards outrage and conspiracy, how do you convince young people to prefer the slow work of building? “By telling them the truth about meaning,” he said. “If your life is rooted in duty and virtue, you will be happier and more free. If you spend your time tearing down what is good because it is easier than fixing what is broken, you will be emptier.”

He does not pretend the pitch will go viral. “The scavenger’s promise is intoxicating because it absolves you of responsibility,” he said. “The lion’s promise is quieter. It asks something of you. But it is the only way a free society survives.”

Shapiro’s prescription is old-fashioned. “Teach private property and equal rights under the law,” he said. “Teach freedom of mind. Teach traditional virtue. Reward work, marriage, and family. And stop treating people who tell obvious lies as brave for telling them.”

In an ecosystem designed to amplify the loudest voice, he is asking readers to listen for something else. “Defend what is worth preserving. Change what needs to change. Refuse the lie. That is the work of a free people.” 

The writer is editor-in-chief of The Jerusalem Post.

____
https://www.jpost.com/diaspora/article-869858