All That's Solid Melts Into Ads

Ben Shapiro and the metaphysics of right wing grift

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There’s a recent clip from The Ben Shapiro Show that’s been making the rounds, mostly because it’s incredibly funny. Shapiro, who a justly-mocked profile once dubbed “The Cool Kid’s Philosopher” is such an irritating little dork you sometimes have to remind yourself that an entire media empire has somehow been built around him. That’s generally easier to do on the right because a near bottomless well of billionaire money exists to pump up figures like this.

But I’ve always thought the conservative media ecosystem has another built-in advantage related to its complete and utter shamelessness — especially in the realm of advertising. These guys, truly, seem willing to sell or promote anything so long as it makes them buck, and half the products you see touted on these shows are just garden variety consumer items with anti-woke branding. (Have YOU been looking for a protein powder that refuses to use they/them pronouns and supports the troops? Well, for the low, low price…)

Anyway, Shapiro’s recent viral moment¹ came courtesy of his rather jarring transition from what initially sounded like a eulogy for Lindsay Graham into an ad read for ZipRecruiter:

All the worst people are very, very excited about Lindsay Graham’s death. All the worst people. But, listen, whenever you talk about mortality or the passage of time it’s a big reminder that you don’t have time to waste. It’s just a reality. We just had a baby, that means we are super, duper busy. There is no time to waste. And that’s also true when it comes to your business. We all have our own time-saving hacks for everyday life. If you’re a business owner, how can you save time hiring? ZipRecruiter. ZipRecruiter has a new feature that lets…[etc etc]

The transition here is pretty funny, and I think it especially tickled me as a podcaster who has always steered clear of ad reads. I also, however, find its totally seamless nature weirdly fascinating. As best I can tell, as much as one-fifth of revenue at The Daily Wire (Shapiro’s media company) comes from advertising, so its figurehead is at this point very practised at hawking things in the midst of his shows without skipping a beat. But when it comes to the seamlessness of Shapiro’s transition in the clip above, I found myself landing on a somewhat different interpretation.

Ben Shapiro, like much of the modern conservative movement, has always been a total market zealot. To an even greater extent than certain others in the Republican tent, he really is someone who thinks market relations should determine basically everything (this old exchange between him and Tucker Carlson is a good example). This obviously translates into all of the usual policy preferences — destroy the social safety net, unions bad, more tax cuts for billionaires, etc. — but I think it ultimately constitutes a much deeper ontology for social and individual life.

Once you’ve decided that markets and private property are the One True God it follows that everything else becomes subordinate or secondary to them. All life, in effect, is just some variant of commerce and the entire spectrum of human experience is bent around the logic of buying, selling, and making a profit: your political preferences; the imperatives of your media empire; the programming on your YouTube show; your relationship to the natural world; the passage of time; the realities of life and death.

1. I’m incidentally grateful to a Twitter account that appropriately goes by the handle “Future Adam Curtis B-Roll” for exposing me to the clip.