It has nothing to do with intelligence or stupidity. You can't fail the way Shapiro fails at thinking being stupid. It's malice, the cruelty is the point. When you uphold hatred and cruelty above all, logic goes out of the window and then this advanced stupid becomes possible. He is not arriving to a POV from an understanding of a subject. He decides what he wanted his POV to be first, then he uses whatever he has at hand to justify it.

Being a Rightwing Grifter is hella profitable. Chuds love throwing money at people that validate their shitty opinions with fancy talk.

In fairness, the misunderstanding of the first law of thermodynamics isn't a new thing. You hear it come up from every bad theist apologist so it's not like he came up with this argument on his own based on researching science and misunderstanding his own research. He just heard someone else say it and is parroting it like all of the other people who make similar bad arguments related to the laws of thermodynamics.