[2][3][4][1][5] 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.

[1][11][7] 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.

[7] "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".

[12] 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".

[15] 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".

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".

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".

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.

[10] 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.