Ben Shapiro, the conservative political commentator, media host, and attorney, on Tuesday, announced that he is moving the headquarters of his media company, The Daily Wire, from Sherman Oaks in Los Angeles to Nashville, Tennessee, Deadline reported.
Jeremy Boreing, who co-founded TDW with Shapiro and Caleb Robinson, told Deadline they were moving because of declining quality of life in Los Angeles, the high cost of housing, and homelessness.
The company employs 75 people, who must decide by Erev Sukkot (that’s October 1 to you and me) if they’d like to make the move to Music City or stay in LA and work on their screenplays.
Ben Shapiro who is 36 but looks not a day over 20, became the youngest nationally syndicated columnist in the United States at age 17. He writes columns for Creators Syndicate and Newsweek, serves as editor-in-chief for The Daily Wire, and hosts The Ben Shapiro Show, a daily political podcast and live radio show. Shapiro has written eleven books, the first of which, in 2004, was titled Brainwashed: How Universities Indoctrinate America’s Youth. His most recent book, published this year, is called How to Destroy America in Three Easy Steps.
“The dream of California and the weather were enough to draw us all here and keep us here, even when it was hard,” Boreing told Deadline. “But it’s hubris to think you can keep making it worse and worse for people and that somehow the idea of temperate winters will be enough to make them stay forever.”
In 2003, Shapiro demanded that Israel “transfer the Palestinians and the Israeli-Arabs from Judea, Samaria, Gaza, and Israel proper,” following the precedent of the Polish expulsion of Germans after World War II. After many attacks on him over this issue, including from Jeffrey Goldberg who called him a fascist, Shapiro took it back, saying it was “both inhumane and impractical.”
Nevertheless, Shapiro supports Israel’s settlement enterprise and firmly opposes the two-state solution.
In 2007, Shapiro described the “Palestinian Arab population” as “rotten to the core” and warned that Israel and the US would “continue to pay the price in blood and treasure” unless they accept the “simple truth” that the “Palestinian Arab population breeds terrorism, anti-Semitism and anti-Americanism.”
Shapiro is definitely not a follower of Reb Shlomo Carlebach or even the Lubavitcher Rebbe, seeing as in a 2011 tweet, he suggested the Jewish nation is plagued by “Bad Jews” who “largely vote Democrat.” In a 2011 article titled “Jews in Name Only,” he announced that “Jews who vote for Obama are, by and large, Jews In Name Only (JINOs)” who “do not care about Israel” or “care about it less than abortion, gay marriage, and global warming.”
This probably makes roughly 70% of US Jews JINOs, which could make it awfully difficult to get together a minyan for the high holidays.
Shapiro and his wife, an Israeli physician whose parents made aliyah from Morocco, are Orthodox Jews. Alas, Shapiro is a White Sox fan, a fact that just lost him half of Skokie.