Sometimes it’s helpful to separate the art from the artist—like when you’re watching Seinfeld reruns and can’t stop thinking about that time the real-life Jerry dated a teenager, or when you’re staring at the 808s & Heartbreak tattoo on your leg, placed there long before Kanye started selling swastika merch. Sometimes, though, a work of art arrives so thoroughly infused with the essence of its maker that you couldn’t separate the chicken from the egg if you tried. The latest film from Ben Shapiro’s production company, titled Run, Hide, Fight: Infidels, is one such masterpiece.

Shapiro is mostly known for being one-third of the Holy Trinity of right-wing, debate-me podcasters. (He’s the father, his progeny-turned-enemy Candace Owens the son, and Charlie Kirk, well…) But five years ago, Shapiro realized that his primal urge to Own the Libs could propel him far beyond the confines of a lonely recording booth, all the way to Hollywood.

Since the 2021 launch of its film studio, the Daily Wire has treated audiences to a vast catalog of conservative movies-with-a-message. There are thrillers like Run, Hide, Fight, in which a plucky teenage girl stops a mass shooting by ignoring her school’s protocols and killing the would-be killer herself, using a gun she keeps in her backpack (of course! why didn’t all those murdered children think of that?!), and comedies like Lady Ballers, in which a down-on-his-luck basketball coach convinces his male team to compete in women’s sports so they have a chance at winning. (Get it? “Balls” means two things here.) Next year the studio is also releasing a scripted TV series adaptation of Atlas Shrugged.

I can’t speak to the quality or entertainment value of any of those films, because I refuse to pay for a DailyWire+ subscription. Instead, I opted to watch Shapiro’s latest release on a random torrent site, which quickly inundated my computer with pop-ups for Serbian gambling apps and porn. Take that, Ben!

Run Hide Fight: Infidels is apparently a sequel to the original Run Hide Fight, although the only parallel seems to be that they’re both set in schools. The movie opens with a flashback of two U.S. soldiers busting down the door of a Somalian ISIS compound; one of them, the heroic Captain Saunders, is played by Jonathan Majors, while the other guy is played by a generically handsome blond man.

The pair unleash a spray of bullets on everyone inside, but when Blond Man comes across a small child cowering in bed, he hesitates and lowers his weapon. Wrong choice, softie! Never show weakness! A previously unseen terrorist pops up from behind and shoots the empathetic soldier in the head.

Saunders manages to subdue the man—who keeps chanting “Allahu Akbar!”—by pistol whipping him a couple times. It’s too late: Blond Guy is dead, all because he had a fleeting moment of empathy for the enemy (a toddler). Here, the film’s entire premise is laid bare.

Fast forward seven years and we’re transported to the lush, green campus of Laughton University. It’s not clear exactly where this place is, and that’s the whole point: it could be any one of the hundreds of colleges across America turning our sons pansexual and our daughters into jihadists.

In one of the buildings, a Middle Eastern man named Ibrahim Asad is applying for a job as a custodian. We can tell by the ominous music, and his beard, that he’s connected to the same ISIS cell from the first scene. Despite the fact that he’s internationally wanted, Massid doesn’t bother giving a fake name, and the woman interviewing him is clearly too woke and too stupid to realize she’s sitting across from a bona fide terrorist. (“You’re from Syria? I’d love to go somewhere like that some day. So exotic!”) She hires him on the spot.

On his way out, Ibrahim walks by a pole holding up an American flag and slashes the rope with a flick of his pocket blade. (Now this just seems like a silly move on Massid’s part: he was literally just hired as the custodian! They’re going to make him fix that rope tomorrow!) Then he smirks and plants a bomb in a trash can, which seems like a more effective strategy.

But if there’s a sketchy new janitor planting IEDs all over campus, nobody seems to notice. Everyone is far too distracted by the bigger issue: a group of whiny, blue-haired pro-Palestine activists camping out on the lawn. They’ve taken the communal green space hostage, chanting demands like “ICE out! Gaza in!” Worst of all, they don’t even care that they’re hogging the space meant for the annual Fall Festival; when asked by a student reporter if they’d be willing to move to another location, the ringleader with the bluest hair spits back: “We’re fully aware that this quad is the usual home of that capitalist, imperialist celebration.” They despise logic, and also apple cider.

It’s in the scenes featuring these braindead lefties that we really see Ben Shapiro’s spirit shine. The podcaster supposedly loves to debate, but where he really excels is alone in a studio, refuting claims that nobody is making. In Run, Fight, Hide: Infidels, much of the dialogue sounds like an imaginary argument you’d practice in the shower, set in a fantasy world where your opponent is always awed by your wit and left stuttering in response.

While the protesters continue to shriek, a facts-over-feelings conservative student named P.J. walks by and makes this insane point: “How many Jews are in Palestine, and how many Arabs are in Israel? The answer is zero Jews in Palestine, and millions of Arabs are in Israel.” He holds out what appears to be his vape to a protester as a mock-microphone: “So which is the apartheid state?”

Incredible point, P.J. Hey, Nelson Mandela: did you ever notice the shanty-towns in South Africa are all Black people? Guess you don’t hate segregation that much!

As Run, Hide, Fight: Infidels goes on, it becomes clear that the jihadists aren’t actually the movie’s real villains. That distinction belongs to the protesters. The terrorists are violent, but the script treats them almost like rabid animals: snarling, bloodthirsty creatures whose desire to murder infidels is simply an immutable fact of their nature. Of course they’re going to bite you, what did you expect? The people who the movie truly despises are those obnoxious, hypocritical, silver-spooned activists who see the snarling Rottweiler, insist everyone else is prejudiced for being afraid of it, bring it home to demonstrate their own superior compassion, and then act shocked when they return from Whole Foods to discover that it has eaten the baby. In the film’s moral universe, the idiot who opened the door is the one who should have known better.

And who warned these idiots about the dog all along? Why, Captain Saunders, of course, who witnessed the full brunt of their evil back in Somalia. The army vet happens to be stopping by Laughton University to promote his new book, America Unafraid, and unsurprisingly, the activists are whining about that too. But pretty soon, they’ll be begging for his help. That evil jihadist janitor has been taking advantage of all the protest hullaboo, planting bombs all over campus in broad daylight and mapping out the buildings so dozens of fellow terrorists can launch a coordinated attack.

Saunders is in the middle of his book event when the carnage starts: “There are three ways Islam will conquer the West,” he tells the students, delivering the movie’s thesis straight into the camera. “Through immigration, through the wombs of our women, and by using our nation’s freedoms against us.” A group of armed bearded men burst into the room to prove his point.

There’s something almost endearing about the nakedness of the fantasy. Every racist who’s ever been called a bigot at Thanksgiving dreams of this kind of ultimate vindication: You just wait. One day when the Civil War erupts, you’ll come crawling back, begging me to teach you how to load a rifle!

And I’ll give credit where it’s due: Jonathan Majors does a pretty good job delivering the lines from this soap-opera script. He is, after all, an Emmy-nominated, Yale-trained actor who was once being positioned as the next major villain of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. His arrival at the Daily Wire is therefore a particularly grim example of the emerging right-wing entertainment industry's secondary function: becoming Hollywood's Island of Canceled Misfit Toys. Of course, Majors was actually “cancelled” because he was found guilty of assault and harassment against his former girlfriend in 2023, at which point Marvel dropped him. He was later sentenced to probation and a yearlong domestic-violence intervention program.

And Majors isn't the only disgraced star to discover a second career waiting in the burgeoning anti-woke film industry. There’s also Armie Hammer, whose career collapsed in 2021 amid allegations of being sexually and emotionally abusive, along with having a cannibalism fetish. (He denied the former accusation, but stopped short of denying the latter, though he’s emphatic that he has never actually consumed human flesh.) After laying low for a while, and even doing a stint selling time shares at a resort in the Cayman Islands, Hammer made his silver screen return this summer in Uwe Boll's right-wing thriller Citizen Vigilante. He probably should have stayed in the Caribbean.

In that film, Hammer’s character becomes incensed with the perceived influx of migrants into Europe and goes on a killing spree targeting foreigners, in one scene executing an entire Muslim family one by one. Hammer apparently didn’t realize exactly what kind of film he'd made until seeing the final product: according to a source in his camp, he “freaked the fuck out” at the first viewing and left “in tears,” complaining that the film was “hateful” and “disgusting.” And yet, reportedly Hammer has not ruled out appearing in a sequel, though a source close to him says “it would have to be life-changing money.”

Perhaps it’s a sign that the only actors willing to take roles in the burgeoning right-wing film industry are those who’ve been pushed out of the traditional sector, often because of actual crimes. Hammer doesn’t seem to really hate immigrants, but so long as the check clears, he also doesn’t care that much. Jonathan Majors once starred in The Last Black Man in San Francisco; now, he's starring in a DailyWire+ movie whose producer, Dallas Sonnier, has proudly dubbed himself the “patron saint of cancelled actors.” The whole thing highlights an absurd evolution in the definition of cancellation. Marvel didn’t drop Majors because he made an uncouth comment about gender-neutral bathrooms, it was because a jury convicted him of strangling his ex-girlfriend and breaking her finger. I’m pretty sure I’d get fired too if I did that.

We used to use the term “blacklisted” for actors pushed out of the industry; but even then, it basically only ever happened to suspected commies, or women who reported their assaults. (Men, too). But liberal media still embraces abusers—MMA fighter Conor McGregor was found civilly liable of rape in 2025, and he just went on The Jimmy Fallon Show. Mike Tyson has a long history of sadistic abuse against women, and he’s now producing a scripted series about his life starring Jamie Foxx and directed by Martin Scorsese. (When Tyson’s ex-wife Robin Givens, who described their marriage as “torture… pure hell,” found out about the project, she said her stomach dropped. Givens filed a cease and desist to ensure she wouldn’t be portrayed falsely, to which Tyson’s team responded they had never planned to mention the relationship at all. Shocker.) Hell, Roman Polanski just had a film premiere at the Venice Film Festival in 2023 and it received a standing ovation. He couldn’t attend, of course, on account of his outstanding arrest warrant for raping a child, which has caused him to live as a fugitive in France for decades. I guess you could say he’s been cancelled by the Department of Justice?

The point is, right-wing filmmakers like the ones at DailyWire+ have completely invented an issue in which they are the victims—leading to dozens of movies whose plot revolves entirely around their victimhood. Infidels follows the same script, with a little added “torturing the liberals” sprinkled in as a treat.

Once the jihadists seize control of Laughton, all the pride flags are replaced with black ISIS banners, and the campus becomes a miniature caliphate. The protesters who spent the first half of the movie sneering at conservatives discover that their new friends aren’t particularly interested in intersectional solidarity. In the film’s most gleefully unsubtle scene, our Jihadi janitor Ibrahim drags two of the activists up to a rooftop: a gay guy named Bruce, and that insufferable blue-haired protester, Farrah. When Ibrahim starts talking about the children they’ll produce under his new regime, Farrah explains that they aren’t a couple: she’s pansexual, actually, and Bruce is gay! Ibrahim responds by immediately shoving Bruce off the roof.

Farrah blubbers and tries to convince him they’re on the same side—“Please! God!”—but he promptly slits her throat: “There is no God but Allah.” (Yes, “Allah” is just the Arabic word for God, so this makes no sense.)

It’s hilariously blatant, because while the film is ostensibly about showing the horrific evils of Islam, we’ve spent most of the last hour thinking about how goddamn annoying these college kids are; now, they’re finally getting their comeuppance. It’s kind of like the scene in Jurassic Park where the cowardly, greedy lawyer is eaten by a T-Rex while sitting on the toilet. Sure, we still have to deal with the T-Rex—but isn’t it satisfying that it killed that guy first? Especially since he let the monsters run loose in the first place?

The terrorists function as the Daily Wire’s proxies: stabbing, slashing, and pushing gays off roofs in ways they’ve only fantasized of. It’s a strange jihadi cuckold situation, in which Ben Shapiro is the one sitting in the corner chair furiously masturbating. Clearly, they want to brutalize the libs and minorities themselves—recall Michael Knowles, another Daily Wire alumnus, saying at CPAC that “transgenderism must be eradicated from public life.” But they can’t make that movie, so they invent some evil foreigners to do the slaughtering for them, then insert themselves as the brave heroes who save whoever is left.

Eventually, the surviving students grow less passive and actually organize to fight back, rather than simply fleeing or cower in fear. (One accurate aspect of the film is that the police are completely useless.) Naturally, it’s Captain Saunders who eventually comes face to face with one final cartoonishly evil jihadist, and teaches him one last lesson before taking him out. The man hisses: “The American way is your task forces and your trials, your climate change and your abortions—” before Saunders silences him with a bullet to the head. “Actually,” Saunders announces, “that’s the American way.”

It’s a fitting conclusion to a movie, and an entire conservative entertainment industry, built around a peculiar victimhood/hero complex. The world is simultaneously controlled by terrifying leftists who persecute conservatives for their beliefs, and populated by helpless leftists who will inevitably need those same conservatives to rescue them. Everyone laughs at you until the barbarians arrive; everyone calls you a bigot until they need you to pick up a gun.

As ludicrous as the movie is, it’s far less funny when you remember that people will actually watch this shockingly hateful film and absorb it as a manifesto. There is a long and ugly history of movies teaching audiences which groups of people they ought to fear. In 1915, The Birth of a Nation depicted Black men as violent predators, not unlike the Muslims in Infidels, and painted the Klu Klux Klan as the heroic force necessary to save white civilization. A title card refers to the KKK as "the organization that saved the South from the anarchy of black rule," and the film was used as a recruiting tools for years afterward. Nazi propagandists understood the power of cinema, too: The Eternal Jew portrayed Jewish people as an alien population infiltrating German society, even splicing footage of Jews with rats spreading across Europe. It isn’t that Run, Hide, Fight: Infidels is going to single-handedly launch a genocide against Muslim people—but it makes a pretty good case for denying and justifying the violence that is currently happening, from the genocide in Gaza to the trend of Islamophobic assaults right here in the United States. When you repeatedly tell an audience that an entire class of people are an existential threat, any brutality against them is not only justified, but heroic.

Just take a look at Israel, a society that has been spoon fed anti-Arab propaganda since its inception: polling shows that 62 percent of Israelis believe there is “no such thing as an innocent person in Gaza.” That’s where the logic of Infidels leads, too. Effective propaganda doesn’t have to directly teach you to enjoy killing “the enemy,” only that whatever happens, they had it coming.