Ben Shapiro's New Rap Song Is Super Woke

The conservative commentator teamed up with rapper Tom MacDonald to bitch about stuff in an overtly political, deeply generic hip-hop diatribe.

“Facts don’t care about your feelings,” is probably the most famous thing conservative commentator Ben Shapiro has ever said or ever will say and he wears his own pithy quotation on what is likely the first hoodie he’s ever had the misfortune to wear. He’s wearing it in a chart-topping music video with Canadian rapper and YouTuber, Tom MacDonald. They want you to know—seriously guys—that they do not care, not one little bit, if they offend you. They care so little about what you think of them that they wrote this whole song about it.

Much has been made of Shapiro’s hypocrisy here—he has claimed that hip-hop isn’t real music, but rather “spoken rhythm” (lol)—but I’d prefer to talk about why this song is actually super woke. Or, rather, why the problems with this song are similar to those with art that is criticized for being “woke.”

If you can muster up the courage, here’s Ben “rapping”:

To be fair, MacDonald is fine here, at least in comparison to Shapiro. Nothing special. He’s no Kendrick Lamar or Eminem. His lyrics, which we’ll dive into momentarily, are not clever. His style is relentlessly generic.

Shapiro, meanwhile, is doing this “just for fun” and, of course, for attention. He somehow manages to rap more slowly than he actually talks, which is certainly remarkable.

The song—solely as a piece of music—is forgettable and bland and only making any waves at all because A) it has the novelty of featuring Shapiro and B) because it takes the very stunning and brave stance of rapping about right-wing stuff instead of, um, I guess all those BLM rap songs out there. But seriously, it’s making waves because it repeats a whole bunch of right-wing talking points but in a rap. Take that, libtards.

These rappers want you to know exciting new ideas such as:

• “There’s only two genders, boys and girls” and

• “They can’t cancel my message ‘cause I’m the biggest rapper in the whole freaking world” (um, the term is “fracking” dude) and

• “I’m not ashamed because I’m white” and

• “We go woke, we go broke” (how clever, never heard that one before) and

• “Pro-choice, pronouns, pro-love, you’re progressives but you ain’t pro-gun, no one to protect it”

The Canadian rapper then asks “Where the American flags at?” despite there being American flags all over the place along with all kinds of other flags—including, yes “BLM flags” (quite rare these days, this is already super dated like most overtly political art that focuses on immediate political issues rather than larger thematic questions, but we’ll get to that in a minute) and “rainbow” flags which, again, I live in a super liberal college town and just don’t see that many flags of any kind. Mostly I see the American and Arizona flags around city hall and various bumper stickers with everything from Don’t Tread On Me snakes to Baby Yoda. Maybe a Ukrainian flag from time to time, but that’s just trendy faux geopolitical affectation.

This same song, bashing anti-gun politics, contains the lyric “We ain’t pushing guns” and then, later on, in a marvelous twist to “What would Jesus do?” asks “What would Ben do?” Not rap again, I hope.

I suppose if you’re a rapper asking that question you might pen a song like “Facts.”

The lyrics continue down this hilarious path which, to be fair, does fit within a certain hip-hop tradition of braggadociousness that has always been one of my least favorite things about the genre.

Nothing says manly like reassuring everyone that “If you want my pronouns, I’m the man, I’m the man who don’t respect you.”

Then there are fat jokes, a litany of racist stereotypes and other unintentionally hilarious bits. Ben sneers that “you’re going to prison, I’m on television” and then, because he doesn’t care, addresses his commenters:

Keep hating on me on the internet
My comment section, all woke Karens
And I make racks off compound interest
Y'all live with your parents

It’s too much. It’s like some gift from God in heaven. Nobody spoofs Ben Shapiro harder than Ben Shapiro.

It was bound to be a Billboard hit, of course, because it’s exactly the type of thing that goes viral briefly on the internet before fizzling out into memeland. There is also a trend on the right (I suppose it’s always been this way) to get really excited whenever something anti-woke or right-leaning pops up and becomes very popular or newsworthy. I meant to write about Oliver Anthony’s Rich Men North Of Richmond when that blew onto the scene. This one:

Now, I don’t know if this song qualifies as “conservative”—in many ways, Anthony is taking on the long tradition of more socialist-leaning artists, railing against the economic depravities of the rich and powerful. He’d fit right in with hobo folk artists like the Almanac Singers—Millard Lampell, Lee Hayes, Woody Guthrie, and Pete Seeger—who were all pro-union, anti-war, lefties. A lyric like “These rich men north of Richmond, Lord knows they all just wanna have total control” would be right at home in a Guthrie ballad. And within that tradition, it makes perfect sense as art-as-protest. Art can and often should be political, and for much of Anthony’s song it is political in a way that is honest and sincere and touches on universal themes that are bigger than just the talking points of the day. And then he drops a line about welfare queens and the whole thing implodes. You were so close, Anthony.

Of course, MacDonald and Shapiro’s song is effectively just digs at welfare queens (or other versions of right-wing bogeymen) over and over again. There’s nothing sincere here, regardless of how sincerely they may hold these beliefs. Nothing universal. Nothing timeless. The struggle in Anthony’s voice and words is authentic. Living in the new world, with an old soul, has made him terribly sad. He’s struggling with depression, just like much of rural America is struggling with economic depression. Just like many hip-hop artists rap about the economic and social depression of the inner cities. Rap, like folk music, often contains political themes and messages, often about injustice. Often about pain and loss and suffering. Both traditions also often look inward at the problems created by their own communities, not just by the Enemy.

I have never had much patience for the argument that art cannot be political. But where it runs afoul is when it stops being clever or sincere and just becomes preachy and propagandistic. When I have complained about overly aggressive progressive politics worming their way into modern television and film, my beef is not that “you go woke, you go broke” it’s that when you begin to preach and talk down to people, or use corporate tokenism instead of authentic representation, and when that messaging becomes more important than crafting quality art or telling quality stories, it becomes propaganda. Or profiteering. Or both. The problem with “woke” has never been the desire for more equality, only the tactics used by its most vociferous proponents and the way this style of message-over-content has trickled into so many works of art and been adopted by so many corporations as a marketing tactic.

By that definition, Shapiro’s rap is wildly woke. It is all messaging, all politics, all little pithy attempts to say “Haha look at us, you can’t cancel us, we’re too rich and famous!” Which is true! You can’t really cancel someone outside of your political camp to begin with. Remember Milo Yiannopoulos? He loved to troll the left and was quite good at it, but was it the left that cancelled him in the end? He wasn’t afraid of the left because they had no power over him. That’s not how cancelling works. The right cancelled Milo, and they would cancel Shapiro, too, if he started saying things that didn’t toe the line. You have to be a powerhouse like Trump to change an entire movement to fit your own beliefs (in Trump’s case, whatever Trump wants, that dark black vortex of ego and charismatic narcissism). But if Shapiro started saying “Hey, you know maybe we need more gun laws and maybe women should have the right to an abortion up to conception and we should probably tax the rich more” he’d be cancelled in a heartbeat. A Shapiro rap that was all about how actually trans people deserve respect and we should have non-gendered bathrooms would have been ballsy. There’s nothing brave at all about Shapiro taking digs at Lizzo. The left can’t cancel anyone outside of the left. Shapiro knows this. All these guys just want you to be afraid. If you’re afraid enough you’ll be angry enough that even the lamest mockery of the Other will get you off and you’ll lap up the schadenfreude like junkies. They’re not pushing drugs, no, just the next best thing.

If you’re a moderate, of course, you risk cancellation on all sides. If you’re just a normal person working at a job, you could be cancelled for speaking out of line depending on the current political zeitgeist. And I do think that’s concerning. I have an entire theory about the rise of authoritarianism on the left that I’m working on because I do find it troubling. (And please, as always, a reminder to watch John Cleese’s bit on extremism. None of this is new).

I don’t find Shapiro’s rap troubling. I just think it’s bad. And I think it’s hypocritical in the extreme because he does the exact thing he bitches about his political opponents doing. It’s just right-wing woke. But hey, they don’t care what I think. Or what you think. They made a whole big-dick-waving song to remind us of that, so it must be true.

Not terribly long ago, I made a video about Jason Aldean’s Try That In A Small Town that kind of covers similar ground about the ways that overtly conservative art—art that places that right-wing message above any kind of authentic attempt to explore the human condition—is just as bad as any overly-woke goofiness. Art can be political, but if you preach at me, I’d better be in church.

Oh, and MacDonald, just one final piece of advice: Never saying sorry, not caring if you offend people¹—that doesn’t make you tough. It makes you small. It just means you have no sense of honor or dignity or courage. It’s easy to live without those qualities. It takes guts to admit when you’re wrong. Sometimes the hardest thing in the world is to apologize to someone who you’ve hurt or offended. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t also stick to your beliefs and values, it just means you should never lose sight of empathy. Some of the best hip-hop is about empathy. Tupac’s Keep Ya Head Up or even Eminem’s Stan.

You might ask what Ben would do. I’ll ask the other guy.

“But to you who are listening I say: Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who mistreat you.”

Thanks for reading and subscribing. I know I’m terrible at keeping up with all of it and I appreciate you all.

1. I’m all for offensive political commentary, by the way. I’m a huge South Park fan. But they don’t have to go around strutting like idiotic peacocks saying “we don’t care that we offended you” and they’re funny. They’re also effective because they’re very good at taking on every sacred cow. Their show works because it’s nuanced and calls out the ridiculousness of people in general. That’s just good satire. Ben and Tom’s little hip-hop experiment is not.