The Daily Wire’s decade-long battle against radical gender ideology—facing media showdowns, billion-dollar tech suppression, and relentless censorship—has led to a major victory: President Trump’s executive order banning the surgical and chemical castration of children. This townhall is a no-holds-barred look at the fight to defend truth and the unwavering stand that made this moment possible.
Chapter 1: What significant event did President Trump announce?
It's 2025. The Daily Wire is about to turn 10 years old. And yesterday, the President of the United States signed an executive order titled, Protecting Our Children from Chemical and Surgical Mutilation, which prohibits surgical and chemical mutilation of our children. It is a great day for The Daily Wire.
This order comes on the heels of other critical actions taken by President Trump in just his first week in office, which affirm that the federal government will reform its practices to recognize the scientific and moral reality that there are only two genders, male and female.
These actions should bring an immediate and dramatic end to what's been a true period of national disgrace, which I think will be remembered as no less evil than slavery or abortion. And Donald Trump deserves enormous credit for righting this terrible national wrong. For me personally, though, this is also an exciting moment to reflect on what we've accomplished as a company.
There are a lot of people in the conservative movement who deserve a lot of credit for this victory, but a lot of the people who deserve the most credit are sitting right here in this room today. We don't often get to tout all of our own accomplishments, modesty being a virtue, but false modesty is a sin.
And to put it bluntly, The Daily Wire has been leading on this issue from the very day that we were founded. I couldn't be more proud of all of our enormous contributions to this issue. We've made enormous contributions to a range of issues, and I'm often proud of the team, but never more so than today. It is rare... in life. I've been in this business for a minute. I've seen a lot of things.
It is rare in this life that you get to be a part of a moment like this. And it would be inappropriate for us not to take a moment to reflect on it together as a team and to reflect on it with our audience, with the people who have supported us, with the people who have empowered us by
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Chapter 2: How has The Daily Wire contributed to the fight against gender ideology?
listening to our shows, by sharing our content, by engaging with our advertisers, our advertisers who actually did the advertising, our subscribers who made it possible for us to take some of the stands that we've taken against incredible odds.
I don't think people, sometimes even inside the company and certainly outside, actually realize just how difficult it has been to wage this particular fight and what it means that we've been able to participate in this victory It's a very special thing. We should hold on to it. Like with all of your successes in life, you should hang on to it loosely, but you should hang on to it nonetheless.
Nobody has fought harder than we have on this issue. And for that reason, I've never been more proud. And I want to tell you a little bit just in reflection on how it came to be in this moment. Two weeks after the founding of the company, Ben Shapiro went on CNN and did a show with Dr. Drew and Zoe Turr. If those of you don't remember, Zoe Turr is a biological man. Yes.
who it's hard to remember him because he's basically disappeared from public life. But he's a biological man who at that time was defending so-called trans rights, which were fairly novel at the time. Most of us had not really engaged with this issue in a major way.
And yet there was Ben, 2015, I can't stress enough, two weeks after we started The Daily Wire, and he was debating these issues and he referred to Tur as Sir, which in retrospect was perhaps a little bit more polite than Ben should have been. Tur, though, responded to this by grabbing Ben by the neck and saying, if you say that again, you're going home in an ambulance.
It was an amazing moment of television. I mean, here you had a rather large biological man in a dress threatening physical violence if Ben didn't bend the knee to this obvious delusion. And what was the reaction from CNN? Nothing. What was the reaction from Dr. Drew while one of his guests was being threatened on national television for saying a political opinion? Nothing.
And that was the first clue that we had as a company as to what this fight was going to be like.
It was going to be threats, threats of physical violence, threats of economic hardship, threats of demonetization, of blocking, of harassment, of threats against essentially the livelihood of everyone who worked for this company and our opportunities at success at every turn if we did not accept this obvious lie. So from day one, it was the Daily Wire's policy not to give into this.
From day one, it was our policy not to use the ridiculous novel concept of preferred pronouns in any of our reporting. And we decided instead we would just use pronouns in our reporting like reporters had been doing since the dawn of time.
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Chapter 3: What challenges did The Daily Wire face in its early days?
At that time, I'm not even sure that we had hired Michael Knowles to be our social media manager, which was the worst decision we ever made in the history of the company. We eventually had to give him a show just because he was so bad at his job. But even with only two hosts, this issue was never far away from our coverage. I remember Ben talking about it on his 20th episode.
I remember Drew talking about it in the first month of the company and giving one of his first comedic monologues about men going into women's restrooms. And you should go back and watch it. It's absolutely vintage, classic Andrew Klavan. And again, at the time... No one was having these conversations. No one was engaging in this fight. Now, of course, it's universal.
And in retrospect, it feels like these were just very small moves that were happening, but they were pronounced moves at the time. In fact, many right-of-center commentators and journalists at that time, even many who now are on the correct side of the issue, who now have done heroic work since having the scales lifted from their eyes, nevertheless, in those days, they were not on our side.
They were... supportive of, again, I call them so-called trans rights because I'm not sure that there is a right to mutilate your body in service of a delusion. And there's certainly not a right to mutilate children in service of a delusion. We weren't the only people in the fight, and I don't mean to imply that we were, but it was lonely. There were not many, and we were leading.
And our outspokenness on the issue came with a very real price. The truth is we couldn't have imagined how great a price it would ultimately be. And I'm going to tell you a little bit about that as we go through today. But we were warned. In 2019, as the company was really starting to get its sea legs, we were really starting to break through. We were really starting to have success.
We were being courted by one of the big three Hollywood talent agencies. And an agent at one of these, a top agent at one of these top agencies with whom I've cultivated a friendship. I think he's a good guy. I'm not going to say his name because I don't want him to take a lot of flack for this. Nevertheless, he called me and he said, listen, we love you guys.
We think that there's huge opportunity. There are a lot of great deals to be done, but, you know, you're conservatives and we're, as an organization, pretty well populated by left-leaning Hollywood folk. I said, yeah, but you knew that when you were taking the meetings with us. Are we going to be able to do deals or not? And he said, you are 100% going to be able to do deals.
We're going to do huge deals. We're going to make a lot of money together. We're going to help you guys increase your reach, increase your effectiveness. And the truth is, we don't really care what you guys talk about. You want to talk about abortion, that's fine. You want to talk about small government, that's fine. Robust foreign policy, that's fine. We understand. But there is one thing.
You have got to stop talking about this trans issue. You have to understand, he told me, a lot of the people you'll be working with at the agency, I mean, this is LA, this is New York, a lot of the people you're working with at the agency have transgendered children. It's personal to them. You have to let it go. The or else was kind of implied. He didn't actually say it.
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Chapter 4: What was the impact of the Loudoun County story?
That we have been able to persevere and survive and even thrive against these kinds of attacks, almost all of which were directly because of the trans issue. is nothing short of miraculous.
God himself has, for some reason that is beyond my understanding, chosen to allow us to continue to survive when by all right, we should not have been able to because of the attacks we have taken, because of the stand that we've made on the issue of transgenderism. As I said, if that agent back in 2019 had told me what the price was actually going to be, I don't know what I would have said.
I probably would have said the same thing because I'm an ornery cuss, and also because I had a lot less to lose back then, which, you know, if he comes along and says the same thing to me now, as I like to say, I'm not very good, but I'm real expensive. It's not that I'm not for sale, it's that no one ever makes an offer.
But damn, we had our teeth kicked in over this issue again and again and again and again. I couldn't begin to outline all of the consequences. But here are a few. 206 enforcements from TikTok, who has actually shut down our channels on numerous occasions. We've been dropped by backend service providers from JW Player to HubSpot to OpenWeb to Aspire.
We lost a multi-million dollar a year email business for almost two years because of these and other cancellations. We were blocked by Eventbrite for events related to what is a woman, by Target for sales of Johnny the Walrus, by Bing who canceled our ability to even give them our money. They wouldn't let us spend advertising dollars with them because of the trans issue.
We were restricted and banned by Twitter, including their blocking of Dr. Jordan Peterson, before he ever even joined the Daily Wire. And I think it's worth noting that Dr. Peterson's rise to international prominence largely began with a refusal to buckle on the issue of preferred pronouns.
One might say that while the Daily Wire has been a leader on this issue, we have also attracted other people who are willing to fight the fight on this issue to join us. And Dr. Peterson is an obvious example, another leader on the issue who chose to join the Daily Wire.
Even conservative media organizations refused to have our talent on their shows at various times because of our rigidity on this issue. Everyone wanted us to just get over it. But we kept fighting. We launched our children's streamer, Bentkey, specifically because of Disney's, quote, not-so-secret gay agenda of adding queerness into content for little kids.
We fought against GARM for trying to enforce their ideology on us at the cost of our ad revenue. And Ben was called to testify on Capitol Hill. We even dropped our HR, they call it HRM, like our HR backend provider, where you used to all log in and see why your paycheck bounced. One time, one time.
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Chapter 5: How did The Daily Wire respond to advertising cancellations?
Now, that is, as I've said all along, that is not to say that we were alone in this fight. There were a lot of important voices in the fight. Abigail Schreier and Riley Gaines and Seth Dillon and Haya Raichik and Megyn Kelly.
Elon Musk spent $44 billion to restore, in part, to restore the Babylon Bee after they made a very brave stand and refused to take down a post about a man dressed as a woman in the federal government. And, of course, there are many, many, many more stories. But they weren't all there from the beginning.
Many of the people who did some of the best work on this topic in part felt the freedom to do so because we had taken big risks ahead of them. Still others of them only even agreed with the concept of doing it.
because they read a book by Abigail Schreier, because they watched a movie by Matt Walsh, because they read an article by Luke Rosiak, because they saw a video of Ben Shapiro asking a college student why she wasn't 60, which is one of the biggest viral moments in the history of the company from the very earliest days of The Daily Wire.
And the presence of those other great warriors in the fight doesn't change the fact that for a decade now, the Daily Wire has been leading on this issue more and more effectively than any other organization in American public life.
And for that reason, every single one of you and everyone who has ever worked here in the past and every subscriber and every former subscriber who subscribed to The Daily Wire sometime in the past and everyone who listens and shares and everyone who engages with our advertisers and every advertiser who's ever advertised on our shows and stood beside us should feel some pride of ownership in this remarkable moment.
We all deserve to recognize the role that we've played and to savor this enormous victory. It's easy to say of conservatives that for all our talk, we don't actually conserve anything. It's easy to say, but it's a lie. Our work matters. Our dedication to our principles matters.
These battles aren't short and victory is never guaranteed, but when we take great risks on behalf of what's right, sometimes God allows us to participate in some small way in world-changing events. The Daily Wire fights. This team fights. Our audience fights. And sometimes we win. There are a lot of people who don't like the Daily Wire. That comes with the territory. And it's fine.
But we take great risks and we have been a part of great victories. If you're employed in this country today and you're unvaccinated, you should know that the Daily Wire, alongside a small handful of other companies, made that possible by daring to take on the federal government. If you think... Sure, that's just what you do for a living.
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Chapter 6: What new ventures did The Daily Wire launch in response to controversy?
We're bigger today than we've ever been. And we're fighting harder for our values than we have ever fought. Over the coming months, will do a lot to mark this enormous milestone, 10 years of the Daily Wire.
And I look forward to getting back together and raising a glass to that unbelievable moment and sharing also with you in the audience some of the fun ways that we're going to celebrate between now and September 21st, which, according to some arguments, is actually the first day because it's the first day of the Ben Shapiro show.
There's an argument for July, which is the first day we started paying Ben Shapiro. And there's an argument for October, which is when we launched the website. But I think September 21st is the appropriate day because it's the first day that we appeared on the public scene.
But reading the news yesterday couldn't help but think that today and this enormous victory is just an excellent way to kick off the festivities. So to everyone in this room and to those who've been with us on this journey through this last decade, fighting these battles and other battles that are yet to be won, you have my deepest thanks. We did it together. Savor it. Thank God for it.
Thank one another for it. Thank all the warriors who've taken the field to defend our children. Thank Donald Trump for winning his reelection, which is the number one job of a politician, is to win, and for having the courage in his victory to do things that other Republican presidents have lacked the courage of their convictions to actually take on, and then let it go.
because the only way to thrive in this world is to hold lightly to those victories and to move on to the next challenge and win yet again.
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