Episode 1512: Ben Shapiro

TL;DR: Conservative commentator Ben Shapiro uses cherry-picked statistics and rhetorical sleight-of-hand to dismiss systemic racism and downplay racial disparities in policing, while Rogan offers little substantive pushback.

Aired July 22, 2020, in the wake of the George Floyd protests, this episode covers Black Lives Matter, police reform, COVID-19, and Shapiro’s book How to Destroy America in Three Easy Steps. The problem isn’t political disagreement — it’s that Shapiro’s most-cited statistics misrepresent the underlying data.

The Police Shooting Statistics Sleight-of-Hand

Claim: “The Washington Post database last year showed a grand total of 15 black Americans shot unarmed” out of “330 million police interactions” — therefore “black people are not in more danger of being shot by cops than white people.”

This is the rhetorical core of Shapiro’s argument, and it collapses under scrutiny.

What the evidence actually says:

Washington Post (2024 database analysis): Since 2015, Black Americans have been fatally shot by police at a rate nearly three times higher than white Americans on a per-capita basis. Washington Post Police Shootings Database
Among unarmed victims specifically: Black people are killed at approximately three to four times the rate of white people per capita. Yale News (2020)
Yale/University of Pennsylvania study: Found 218 unarmed Black people killed during the study period, at three times the rate of whites. Yale News (2020)
FBI data undercount: A Post investigation found FBI fatal-shooting data was undercounted by more than half — which is why the WaPo database exists in the first place. Washington Post (2022)

The trick: Quoting raw counts (“15 unarmed Black Americans”) instead of per-capita rates erases the disparity. Black Americans are roughly 13% of the population but a disproportionately larger share of unarmed police-shooting victims.

Shapiro acknowledges that “low-level uses of force between cops and black people are worse” — then proceeds to argue policing isn’t racially biased.

”Single Motherhood Is the #1 Predictor of Poverty”

Claim: “The number one predictor of intergenerational poverty in the United States remains single motherhood,” paired with claims that Black single-motherhood rates rose from 20% (1960) to 70% (today).

Why this is misleading:

Correlation is not causation. Single motherhood correlates with poverty, but the causal arrow runs in both directions — poverty, mass incarceration, job loss, and housing instability all increase rates of single parenthood.
Shapiro frames this as a cultural failing while ignoring the War on Drugs, mass incarceration of Black men, redlining, and discriminatory lending — all documented structural factors that disrupted family formation.
Economists like Raj Chetty have shown that neighborhood effects, school quality, and incarceration rates are powerful predictors of intergenerational mobility independent of family structure. Opportunity Insights

The “$22 trillion on the war on poverty with no progress” claim is also misleading: poverty rates among the elderly fell dramatically thanks to Social Security and Medicare, and the official poverty measure excludes most safety-net transfers. Center on Budget and Policy Priorities

Denying Systemic Racism by Redefining It

Shapiro repeatedly characterizes systemic racism as “any disparate outcome must be racism” — a straw man.

What scholars actually argue:

Systemic racism refers to policies, institutions, and practices that produce racially disparate outcomes regardless of individual intent. Examples: redlining (FHA policy 1934-1968), the racial wealth gap (median white family wealth is roughly 6x median Black family wealth per Federal Reserve), sentencing disparities, school funding tied to property tax.
The 1619 Project that Shapiro dismisses does not claim “everything is attributable to slavery” — it traces specific institutions (e.g., capitalism’s relationship to slave labor, the geography of segregation) to historical roots.

Sources: Federal Reserve Survey of Consumer Finances, The Sentencing Project.

Joe Rogan’s Role

Rogan largely defers to Shapiro throughout the episode. He doesn’t push back on:

The misleading “15 unarmed Black Americans” framing
The unverified “330 million police interactions” figure
Shapiro’s selective use of single-motherhood statistics
The dismissal of systemic racism via straw man

A skeptical interviewer would have asked: what’s the per-capita rate? What does that 15 figure look like as a share of unarmed shooting victims? Where does the 330 million number come from? None of those questions are asked.

This is the recurring pattern on JRE: a guest with confident delivery and selective statistics gets a friendly platform, and the audience leaves with the impression that the data has been “debunked.”

Why It Matters

This episode aired weeks after the George Floyd protests, when accurate information about policing and race was a matter of urgent public interest. Reaching millions of listeners with misleadingly framed statistics — and no real pushback — contributed to public confusion at a moment when data literacy was critical.

Shapiro is entitled to his political opinions. The problem is the factual framing: presenting absolute counts as evidence of no disparity, and presenting correlation as causation, while a host who calls himself a skeptic nods along.