I think that those pushing these conspiracy theories haven't watched Shapiro and his business model enough.Originally Posted by sonatine
Shapiro was a child genius who was both small and socially awkward, and was relentlessly bullied. It didn't help that he skipped two grades. He has talked about it here and there, even sharing one story where some fellow Jewish kids hit him at a camp sleepover, and his dad tracked down the kids and threatened to hit their heads with a hammer if it happened again.
His original path in life was to be an attorney. And he was a practicing one for a few years. However, at the same time he was writing conservative editorials, and had written two books by age 21. He slowly seeped into conservative consciousness, and was eventually elevated by Andrew Breitbart.
Unfortunately for Ben, or maybe fortunately, Brietbart croaked a short time after Ben got there, and he fell out with new leadership within a few years.
This caused him to start Daily Wire in 2015, along with the mostly-unknown Jeremy Boering, who was more of a business guy than Shapiro. From there, everything took off, and now both Shapiro and Boering are very rich. They also control most of conservative online media, having swallowed up most of the prominent conservative social media influencers. That's how Candace Owens ended up with them, which has been a predictable headache. As I'm sure you remember, they almost had Steven Crowder as well, but that fell apart, and then they completely cucked Crowder, who then further cucked himself when it came out that he was a shitty boss, an emotional abuser of his wife, and possibly a closet homosexual.
My point here is that Daily Wire is basically unchallenged in the conservative social media space, which then leads to them occasionally saying and doing dumb shit.
Shapiro thought he was sharing an unspoken truth about social security and what the people really want, but it turns it out he had no understanding of the needs and desires of the working man. So he made himself look like a fool, arguing that retirement shouldn't happen, and that people are happy working until they're in the ground. His statistic about people dying within 5 years of retirement? That's more correlation than causation. People are more likely to completely retire when they're having physical health problems which make working difficult or impossible. There is actually a real factor where people sometimes die earlier when either depressed or lacking a purpose in life. This is why married couples often die within a year of one another. However, this isn't a reason for people to keep working until they keel over. You can find purpose and meaning in lots of things which don't involve working for someone else.
Shapiro whiffed that one hard. He attempted to semi walk it back when he realized how stupid it sounded. The last thing you want is to be seen as the elitist who doesn't understand the common man. Trump proved that you can be rich and still related to blue collar folks, if you address them like friends, and understand their gripes with government and life. Shapiro has to be careful to be the opposite of that.
With all of that said, I actually think Shapiro is a good and mostly honest guy. Note that he was one of the few major right wing media figures who refused to go along with the stolen election crap, and also refused to go along with anti-vaxx crap in 2020-21. Unfortunately, his partner Jeremy Boering doesn't seem to have many scruples, and Shapiro seems to be falling more and more under his influence. But you can't blame Boering for the social security shit. That one was all Ben's gaffe.
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