Exporting Outrage: How Ben Shapiro Became the World’s Most Portable Culture War

If you happen to be sipping an overpriced flat white in Melbourne, queueing for a soggy crêpe in Paris, or silently judging the karaoke choices in a Seoul basement bar, chances are the name “Ben Shapiro” has ricocheted through your phone speaker at least once. The 5-foot-9 human reductio-ad-absurdum machine has become a rare American export that competes, tonally, with both Marvel films and fentanyl: loud, addictive, and—depending on your customs inspector—dangerous or merely tacky. From São Paulo libertarian study groups to Manila call-center break rooms, Shapiro’s nasal syllogisms have carved out a niche as the McNugget of political commentary: engineered, portable, and mysteriously the same temperature in every country.

Shapiro’s global reach is less a testament to universal truth than to universal Wi-Fi. His Daily Wire franchise, valued last year at a reported US $100 million, now peddles dubbed clips in Spanish, Portuguese, and—because irony is legally required in 2024—German. The translations mercifully shave three decibels off his delivery, making him sound almost contemplative, like a philosophy grad student who’s just discovered caffeine. In Warsaw, young conservatives treat these videos as resistance art against “EU neo-Marxism,” while in Jakarta they’re background noise for Grab drivers stuck in monsoon traffic. One man’s ideological firebrand is another man’s traffic report.

The trick, of course, is that Shapiro exports an America-centric culture war with the same carefree attitude Boeing exports aircraft safety records. When he lectures on “Western Civilization,” the phrase lands differently in Lagos—where “the West” still runs the ports—than in Calgary, where it mostly runs the Netflix algorithm. Yet the Shapiro brand sells a one-size-fits-all grievance sweater, knitted from the same yarn of campus outrage and Twitter ratio. The result is a planetary seminar where everyone gets to feel besieged by the same imaginary freshmen.

International advertisers have noticed. A Singaporean fintech app recently sponsored Shapiro’s podcast, presumably hoping to reach young men who mistrust both central banks and shampoo. Meanwhile, the Daily Wire’s nascent children’s entertainment division—think VeggieTales but with more guns—has been translated into Arabic, ensuring that the next generation in Dubai can also learn about the free market via anthropomorphic eagles. The United Nations, still busy failing at climate accords, has no regulatory framework for weaponized bedtime stories.

Critics abroad argue that Shapiro’s greatest export is intellectual shortcut buttons: pre-installed opinions you can deploy at dinner parties without reading the footnotes. In Delhi, right-wing influencers quote his “facts don’t care about your feelings” mantra while ignoring the fact that Delhi’s air quality demonstrably does not care about anyone’s lungs. In Nairobi, university debate clubs screen his campus takedowns like horror films—jump scares included when he says “socialism.” The irony is that the more global his audience becomes, the more parochial the content feels; it’s hard to discuss the finer points of U.S. Supreme Court precedent while rolling blackouts erase your Wi-Fi every six minutes.

Still, credit where it’s due: Shapiro has perfected the 21st-century alchemy of turning panic into profit on every continent that has venture capital and daddy issues. In a world where liberal democracies outsource their manufacturing to autocracies and their moral authority to influencers, the Shapiro phenomenon is simply supply meeting demand at the speed of a TikTok scroll. He offers the comforting illusion that complex geopolitical problems can be solved by owning the libs—who, conveniently, are always somewhere else. British libs, Brazilian libs, even libs floating on melting Arctic ice shelves: all equally ownable from the safety of a podcast studio in Nashville.

So the next time you hear that familiar high-velocity whine in an Uber in Bogotá, remember: this is globalization at work. We used to send jazz and blue jeans across borders; now we ship pre-owned grievances in high-definition. And somewhere in the meta-cargo hold, Ben Shapiro is carefully labeling each carton “Fragile: Handle with Facts.” Bon voyage, planet Earth—it turns out the culture wars have frequent-flyer miles, and we’re all in economy.