Performing in Stanford’s Memorial Auditorium on Thursday night, amateur magician Ben Shapiro wowed his audience with an array of tricks and illusions, from escaping waterboarding torture while handcuffed to pulling a trans person out of his top-hat and misgendering them. The biggest feat of the night came at the end of his show, however, when Shapiro — with a flourish of his kerchief and a flip of his sparkly purple coattails — destroyed the federal minimum wage with nothing but Facts and Logic.
“Alongside my two pet assistants, Facts the Crow and Logic the Bunny, anything is possible — even magic,” Shapiro announced with a sly grin as the audience gasped and cheered.
The effects of the trick quickly spread from Stanford’s campus to the rest of the nation. Overnight, all homeless, unemployed and poor people instantly found high-paying jobs to remedy their self-imposed, laziness-born poverty and began rejoicing at hourly wages which in some cases reached an astounding three dollars. As unemployment dropped to zero, the American economy boomed: domestic manufacturing went through the roof, coal-mining and candle-making became thriving industries once more, and children returned to the productive factory work they were forced out of long ago.
Later that night, reflecting on his performance, Shapiro expressed satisfaction with how things played out but added that “there’s a lot of magic still to be done.” In future shows, Shapiro said he’s looking forward to sawing abortion access in half, transforming LGBTQ rights into a toad, and pulling from his sleeve a seemingly endless string of handkerchiefs inscribed with the names of every Palestinian civilian shot by the Israeli military.
