![]() ![]() If podcasts are the new talk radio, there’s a case to be made that Shapiro is the new Rush Limbaugh. A video version of the show-just a couple of cameras pointed at Shapiro’s face as he monologues-attracts an additional 250,000–350,000 views per day on YouTube. The Ben Shapiro Show, which launched in September 2015, now generally gets between 250,000–350,000 downloads per day on SoundCloud. (He declared Poppy’s behavior indefensible unless the 93-year-old was “deep in the throes of dementia.”) At one point, he took a detour to recommend War and Peace, a book he said he’d devoured on his most recent vacation, and remarked that Tolstoy “is a conservative guy in many ways.” His myriad rants on a wide-ranging number of topics were issued off the cuff-he happily showed me his laptop screen to prove he uses no notes.Īt a certain point in each of his shows, Shapiro crows, in his pinched, adenoidal tenor, that his is the “largest and fastest-growing conservative podcast in the country.” He’s almost certainly correct. On this particular morning, Shapiro was weighing in on George H.W. The treatment of Fields was his breaking point. Under a new boss, Steve Bannon, Breitbart News cozied up to the Trump campaign and to the burgeoning alt-right movement. Breitbart eventually hired Shapiro, years later, but died a month after Shapiro came aboard. Shapiro had known Breitbart’s founder, Andrew Breitbart, ever since he emailed to compliment a column Shapiro wrote for the Daily Bruin as a 16-year-old undergrad at UCLA. Despite a Washington Post writer’s eyewitness account corroborating Fields (and, later, video evidence), the editors at Breitbart opted to accept the Trump team’s brazenly false version of events over the word of their own reporter. Trump spokeswoman Hope Hicks suggested Fields was just angling to get attention. When Fields complained, Lewandowski said Fields was “delusional” and denied the incident had occurred. A Breitbart reporter named Michelle Fields had been physically assaulted after a Donald Trump press conference by Corey Lewandowski, who was then Trump’s campaign manager. Shapiro first hit my and many other left-wing radar screens in March 2016, when he called out the bullies at Breitbart News. ![]()
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