Benjamin Aaron Shapiro (born January 15, 1984) is an American conservative political commentator, media host, and attorney. He writes columns for Creators Syndicate, Newsweek, and Ami Magazine, and is editor emeritus for The Daily Wire, which he co-founded in 2015. Shapiro is the host of The Ben Shapiro Show, a daily political podcast and live radio show. He was editor-at-large of Breitbart News from 2012 until his resignation in 2016. Shapiro has also authored sixteen non-fiction books.

Benjamin Aaron Shapiro was born on January 15, 1984, in Los Angeles, California, to a Conservative Jewish family. He is Ashkenazi Jewish. When he was 9 years old, his family began to observe Orthodox Judaism. He started playing violin at a young age and performed at the Israel Bonds Banquet in 1996 at age 12. His parents both worked in Hollywood. His mother was a TV company executive, and his father, David Shapiro, worked as a composer.

Skipping two grades (third and ninth), Shapiro went from Walter Reed Middle School in The Valley to Yeshiva University High School of Los Angeles in Westside, Los Angeles, where he graduated in 2000 at age 16. He studied political science at the University of California, Los Angeles, graduating in 2004 at age 20 with a Bachelor of Arts, summa cum laude, and membership in Phi Beta Kappa. He then attended Harvard Law School, where he studied under liberal law professors Lani Guinier and Randall Kennedy. Shapiro graduated from Harvard Law in 2007 with a Juris Doctor, cum laude.

After graduating from law school, Shapiro entered private practice at the law firm Goodwin Procter but left after 10 months. As of March 2012^[update], he ran an independent legal consultancy firm, Benjamin Shapiro Legal Consulting, in Los Angeles.

Shapiro became interested in politics at a young age. He started a nationally syndicated column when he was 17, becoming the youngest nationally syndicated columnist in the United States, and had written two books by age 21.

In his first book Brainwashed: How Universities Indoctrinate America's Youth (2004), Shapiro argues that the American Left has ideological dominance over universities and that professors do not tolerate non-left opinions.

In 2011, HarperCollins published Shapiro's fourth book, Primetime Propaganda: The True Hollywood Story of How the Left Took Over Your TV, in which Shapiro argues that Hollywood has a left-wing agenda that it actively promotes through prime-time entertainment programming. In the book, the producers of Happy Days and M*A*S*H say they pursued a pro-pacifist, anti-Vietnam-War agenda in those series. Shapiro also became a fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center.

In 2013, Threshold Editions published Shapiro's fifth book, Bullies: How the Left's Culture of Fear and Intimidation Silences Americans. In 2017, he released his only novel, True Allegiance, a book about "An illegal immigrant crisis breaking out along America's Southern border". In 2019, Shapiro published the book The Right Side of History: How Reason and Moral Purpose Made the West Great, which focuses on the importance of Judeo-Christian values and laments their decline in modern America.