Continetti: Generation Shapiro

I spend a few weeks every year teaching high school and college students, and in my interactions with young people in and around universities I have noticed a trend. After class, at meals, and in walks around campus, the politically engaged students invariably ask me the same question: What do I think of Ben Shapiro?

Nor am I alone. Recently Eliza Gray had a similar experience while reporting on young conservatives in the age of President Trump. "Oddly enough," she wrote in the Washington Post, "the person who appeared to be doing the most to shape the thinking of the new generation of Republican leaders was not the president of the United States—but Ben Shapiro, a 34-year-old anti-Trump conservative pundit who came up unprompted in more than a third of my conversations." Again and again, students turn exchanges involving politics and ideology into discussions of Shapiro, his media presence, his ideas, and his mode of discourse.

As it turns out, I happen to think well of Shapiro and admire not only his intelligence but also the way he is modeling political debate for an audience of millions. (We've corresponded once or twice but have never met.) More important, though, is what Shapiro's celebrity tells us about the changing nature of media, the emerging sensibility of conservative youth, and indeed the future of American conservatism itself.

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