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Ben Shapiro’s unbelievably cringe anti-woke rap song made it to No. 1 on the iTunes charts

Ben Shapiro and Tom MacDonald in the video for "Facts."
Ben Shapiro and Tom MacDonald in the video for "Facts." Photo: Screenshot

Here’s something you probably didn’t have on your 2024 bingo card: Ben Shapiro rapping on a song that made it to No. 1 on the iTunes charts.

The far-right commentator and co-founder of The Daily Wire is featured on “Facts,” an anti-woke track released last week by Canadian rapper Tom MacDonald. A former professional wrestler, MacDonald was described by Vice in 2021 as “an unstoppable force of reactionary dumbness” who rose to prominence “by taking the undercooked platitudes of the Intellectual Dark Web and filtering them into songs with titles like ‘Fake Woke,’ ‘Cancelled,’ and ‘Snowflakes.’”

“As a longtime devotee of rap, becoming a rapper was the natural next step in my career trajectory,” Shapiro, who has previously claimed that “rap isn’t music,” said in a press release Friday. “So, when Tom asked if I wanted to collaborate on a song, I leapt at the chance. This was the moment I spent 20 years of classical violin training preparing for. For those who don’t appreciate my artistic stylings, all I can say is that they didn’t appreciate Bach properly in his own time, either.”

MacDonald opens “Facts” with boilerplate transphobia (“They call me offensive, controversial / There’s only two genders, boys and girls”) before deploying racist dog whistles in the song’s chorus: “We won’t turn your sons into thugs or your daughters into hoes,” he raps. “You can cry and you can scream. You can riot in the streets. You defunded the police now there’s no one to protect you.”

Shapiro’s contribution to the song, meanwhile, consists mainly of taking shots at artists like Nicki Minaj, Lizzo, and Megan thee Stallion—all of them Black women.

Somehow, the cringeworthy track reached the No. 1 spot on iTunes’s charts the same day it was released, and it remains there as of Monday.

“@IAMTOMMACDONALD and I have officially made hip-hop great again, as was always my lifelong dream,” Shapiro wrote in a Friday X post.

Over the weekend, Minaj even weighed in on the track. “what is rlly happening & whos is that other man rapping???? Is this real life??!! [sic],” she wrote on X.

“I just listened to it @benshapiro,” she wrote in another post. “Not bad. Congrats on #1.”

Fans were quick to criticize Minaj, who has feuded with Shapiro on social media in the past, for congratulating the far-right media troll.

Meanwhile, in another post, MacDonald admitted that the whole thing is a stunt. “We are trying to pull off the biggest troll on the music industry ever,” he said, while urging fans to stream and download the song.

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