Facts (Tom MacDonald and Ben Shapiro song)

"Facts" is a song by Canadian rapper Tom MacDonald and American political commentator Ben Shapiro. It was independently released on January 26, 2024, and marked Shapiro's debut musical appearance. It is a trap song with lyrics decrying various culture war-related topics, including gender pronouns, gun control, and the Black Lives Matter movement. The song's music video, which was released alongside the song, features MacDonald and Shapiro in hoodies.

The song reached number one on the U.S. iTunes sales chart. The song then debuted at number 16 on the Billboard Hot 100, making it Shapiro's first and only appearance on the chart and MacDonald's highest chart entry. It was panned by critics, particularly for Shapiro's verse on the song and also for what they considered to be rage-baiting and Shapiro's hypocrisy for appearing on a rap song after having previously stated that rap music was not real music. Critics from Exclaim! and The Mary Sue described it as the worst song of all time. The song was endorsed by fellow rapper Nicki Minaj, who is mentioned in Shapiro's verse, on Twitter; she received criticism from both fans and critics for her association with Shapiro.

Background


Prior to releasing "Facts", Tom MacDonald broke out with his song "Dear Rappers" in 2017 and became known for his songs that contain conservative views. Ben Shapiro founded the conservative news website, The Daily Wire, in 2015, and he became known for sharing his political opinions. Prior to appearing on "Facts", he had frequently publicly criticized rap music as not being art, including in a viral tweet posted in 2012, and once stated in a 2019 interview with rapper Zuby that it was "not actually a form of music". Following the interview, Shapiro retracted this statement in a speech at Boston University, claiming Zuby had convinced him "rap is a form of music", but that he remained uninterested in the genre.

A video of him reading a bowdlerized version of the lyrics to Cardi B's song "WAP" in a deadpan tone in 2020 on his Daily Wire podcast, The Ben Shapiro Show, went viral online soon after its release. "Facts" was released on January 26, 2024.

Composition and lyrics
"Facts" is a trap song, described by critics as "MAGA rap". Its title is a reference to Shapiro's catchphrase, "Facts don't care about your feelings". On it, MacDonald raps from a conservative, "anti-woke" perspective, criticizing gender pronouns, the LGBT community, gun control, abortion rights, gender, opponents of white pride, the slogan "defund the police", and the Black Lives Matter movement.

In his verse, Shapiro raps about "woke Karens" in his comment sections, the rapper Lizzo, his yarmulke, and his viral "WAP" video, and claims that rap listeners waste money on strippers and will end up in jail. He ends his verse by stating he "just did this for fun", telling actual rapper Nicki Minaj to "take notes", and gives a call to action for listeners to download the song and get MacDonald and Shapiro a number one placement on a Billboard chart. In the song's chorus, MacDonald raps, "I don't care if I offend you/I ask myself 'What would Ben do?'". MacDonald stated that the song "encourage[d] high moral standard" and was intended as "a legendary troll on the music industry".

Music video
In the song's music video, MacDonald wears grills, box braids, and a hoodie that reads "I Don't Care If I Offend You". Shapiro also appears in a gray hoodie, which reads "facts don't care about your feelings" in red lettering, and on several TV screens, which P.J. Grisar of The Forward compared to a scene in the 1999 film The Matrix. Within five days of the music video's release, it received over nine million views on YouTube. Both MacDonald and Shapiro alleged in its first week of release that YouTube was suppressing the video due to it not being listed as the number one trending song on the platform. Despite receiving more views and comments, it sat behind the videos for "Hiss" by Megan Thee Stallion and "Big Foot" by Minaj on the chart.

Commercial performance
Following its release, "Facts" reached number one on the U.S. iTunes sales chart. "Facts" debuted on the Billboard Hot 100 at number 16, giving Shapiro his first and only appearance on the chart and MacDonald his fourth and highest-charting entry, following his 2021 songs "Brainwashed", "Fake Woke", and "Snowflakes". The song received 5.6 million streams and sold 96,000 downloads in its first week on the chart, giving it second-largest sales sum of 2024 by the time of its release following Megan Thee Stallion's "Hiss". "Facts" also debuted at number eight on Billboard's Hot R&B/Hip-Hop Songs chart and at number six on its Hot Rap Songs chart.

Reception


Minaj tweeted her congratulations to Shapiro upon the song reaching number one on the U.S. iTunes sales chart, calling it "not bad" while opining it had instrumental similarities to her 2010 single "Roman's Revenge". Following her endorsement of the song, her fans, known collectively as the Barbz, criticized her for her association with Shapiro. While involved in a feud with Megan Thee Stallion over her song "Hiss", Minaj released her song "Big Foot" in late January 2024 and soon tweeted, "Wait til they 'wake up' & listen to what Ben Shapiro is saying in #Facts." Grant St. Clair surmised that Minaj's association with Shapiro was a "critically-panned kinship" due to the negative critical reception toward both "Big Foot" and "Facts".

For The Daily Beast, Justin Baragona criticized the song as "merely another lazy exercise in titillating easily entertained conservatives while supposedly enraging 'snowflake' liberals" on which "Shapiro awkwardly rattles off a bunch of trolly lyrics with the sole purpose of creating a viral clip" and MacDonald makes "well-worn right-wing culture war talking points". Alex Hudson of Exclaim! called it the "worst song ever" and "a three-minute self-parody that speed-runs through every talking point that anti-woke dogmatists are weirdly obsessed with", also calling it "dreadful", "terrible", and "depressingly predictable" and stating that Shapiro had "sunk to dismal new depths of nerdiness" by appearing on the song. Rachel Ulatowski of The Mary Sue, a feminist entertainment blog, similarly called it "the worst song in history" and "a horrific song that spews tons of racist and transphobic rhetoric and claims they're 'facts'" that also had "hateful, self-glorifying, deluded, and narcissistic lyrics". She further described Shapiro as "a talentless, overconfident man pretending he can rap" and "a hypocritical fool" and compared his appearance in the song's music video to "an 11-year-old boy who thinks putting his hoodie up makes him tough and cool".

Boing Boing's Grant St. Clair opined that "Facts" being "a bad song... goes without saying" and that it was "seemingly designed to cause outrage" due to "right-wing 'art'" having "nothing but outrage to rely on". St. Clair also wrote, "Shapiro has famously said that rap music isn't music, and I would have to agree with him where this song is concerned." Candace McDuffie of The Root wrote that "Facts" is "way, way worse than you think it is", adding that MacDonald and Shapiro were "co-opting a Black art form to disparage Black folks" and that MacDonald's and Shapiro's verses included "white supremacist rhetoric". She also called him "beyond hypocritical" for "employ[ing] the same artistry [he] claim[ed] to hate for profit" and criticized Minaj for her association with Shapiro as "disgusting" and "way to [sic] far—even by Barbz's standards".

For HotNewHipHop, Alexander Cole wrote that Shapiro's verse "has to be one of the worst verses ever recorded" in which he "sounds like an AI version of himself", also describing his flow as "Epic Rap Battles of History-core". For Mediaite, Jennifer Bowers Bahney called the music video for the song "the cringiest thing you will ever watch" and wrote that the song's lyrics "rattl[e] off a series of culture war hot topics". P.J. Grisar of The Forward wrote, "The song doesn't register the irony that it is conveying what it believes is a subversive, devil may care attitude toward scandalizing leftist pieties via a medium — rap — that has historically offended almost everyone at some time or another." Kelly McClure of Salon wrote that Shapiro rapped "in what he likely believes to be the best of his ability". Herb Scribner and Anne Branigin of The Washington Post wrote that the lyrics "seem to call back to talking points floated frequently from far-right wing influencers and media outlets" and compared the song's success to that of "Try That in a Small Town" by Jason Aldean and "Rich Men North of Richmond" by Oliver Anthony, both of which found commercial success due to their popularity among conservative music fans.