Chapter 1: How did Ben Shapiro build his conservative media empire?
In the span of a decade, Ben Shapiro built The Daily Wire into a conservative media empire. He produced hit podcasts that bit at liberal excesses and documentaries and lectures about the founders, the genders, the gospels. He peddled polos, hats, candles, provided a home for deplatformed conservative stars like Matt Walsh and minted stars like Candace Owens. Let's put a pin in that.
The Daily Wire even has kids programming a judgmental puppet named Zoodles. Zoodles. Zoodles! who shares Shapiro's load-bearing eyebrows. This year, though, the empire showed signs of collapse. The Daily Wire's YouTube videos are down from millions of views to the lo-fi figures. Web traffic is plummeting. And recently, Shapiro laid off 13% of his employees.
Asked by The Washington Post what had happened, Shapiro accused other conservatives of click-whoring by embracing radical Islam, theorizing about the evils of Winston Churchill, and mocking the widow of Charlie Kirk. The kid still got it. On Today Explained, the fall of Ben Shapiro.
If you or any of your friends get pregnant, that is generally not having anything to do with- Today Explained. Per se, so I'm confused as to why I would want you to force it.
Drew Harwell, tech reporter, Washington Post, writes about MAGA media and influencers, including recently one Ben Shapiro.
Ben Shapiro matters because he is a symbol of the changing conservative media landscape. Like he was the king of MAGA media online for a number of years.
You're not being polite to the pronouns.
Disrespectful.
Okay, forget about the disrespect. Facts don't care about your feelings. Do you really think Donald Trump respects the rule of law? I mean, if somebody... No, but I think the Constitution itself is a pretty damn durable document, thank God. There's some whores in this house. There's some whores in this house. There's some whores in this house. It continues along these lines.
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Chapter 2: What signs indicated the collapse of The Daily Wire?
Ben Shapiro was effectively the final boss of the pro-Israel lobby. And we're now watching him come undone in real time.
It really has shown how much the MAGA movement has been undermined in recent years and how much, you know, the Trump star has fallen, but also this kind of classic MAGA media energy has changed too.
All right, for people who are not familiar, who is this guy? Who is Ben Shapiro?
Ten years ago, Ben Shapiro came on the scene, and he was this conservative digital media, like, wunderkind.
Hi, I'm Ben Shapiro, and this is Reality Check.
Ben Shapiro is editor-at-large at Breitbart.com. So why am I off the rails, Mr. Shapiro? He was, you know, this right-wing pundit. He was coming up at a time where he wasn't really traditional conservatism, like... you know, small business, chamber of commerce. He represented this new wave of MAGA conservatism that was more about, you know, winning the, quote unquote, the culture wars, right?
Ben Shapiro just destroyed this woke student with simple logic.
The answer is that in 99.8%, 99.9% of cases, you absolutely can gender somebody based on looking at them.
Like, really.
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Chapter 3: What role did the October 7th attacks play in Shapiro's downfall?
He wasn't competing in the same debates that the conservative journals of the time were talking about. He wasn't talking about tax codes. You know, he was talking about, like, the stupid things that the libs were doing. You know, the dark times that wokeness was bringing for the country.
Coca-Cola. has now decided that they are going to force their employees to take anti-racism training with the excrucible Robin DiAngelo.
And he was making a lot of money from it, right? He was putting out this viral chum that was constantly doing big numbers on Facebook, making a ton of money for not just him, but for The Daily Wire, which he co-founded. That was this blog, media property company.
And The Daily Wire, you know, with his help became like the biggest publisher on Facebook for many months, beating out, you know, CNN, Fox, New York Times. It just became this unstoppable property at the time.
So when does Daily Wire hit its peak?
I would say probably about 2020. That was the year when the Daily Wire was consistently month after month becoming the top publisher on Facebook. That was their peak Facebook posting time. That was their peak ad revenue time. They were making $100 million or more a year, which is completely insane even now for what was essentially a blog. Even in conservative media, they were a huge outlier.
And they were riding so high and they were making so much money that for a time it was like they didn't really even know what to do with the money. They were this blog that had become this giant media empire. And so they started kind of
thrashing in a lot of different directions and exploring a lot of different ways to spend um they had ben shapiro there was one other important guy in the operation named jeremy boring who was this basically this theater kid my friend co-founder co-ceo and most importantly the god king of the daily wire jeremy boring moved to l.a as a young man with stars in his eyes 20 years ago and now
And we want our movies to be defined less by what they're about and more what they aren't about, which is left-wing sucker punches and left-wing propaganda. You know, his big push was to take the anti-woke model they had been successful at in their blog and on Facebook and really make this...
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Chapter 4: Who is Ben Shapiro and what made him influential?
And meanwhile, they didn't... They didn't have the political high ground for a lot of their fans anymore. A lot of their fans were moving to these independent creators who were more likely to say what they wanted to hear. And it was just kind of a perfect storm for them.
So what's Ben Shapiro's future, which was once never in doubt? What does it look like now?
When you go into Ben Shapiro's social media, you don't see a lot of that confident energy that you saw five years ago. I look on his TikTok and his Instagram, they really, his short videos really give this whiff of desperation. He's doing all of the stuff that like a TikToker would do, but he doesn't really, he doesn't seem to really enjoy it as much.
All righty, folks. Today, we're going to go through some more woke TikToks at the behest of my producers. Oh no, why is Lizzo being by a labubu?
You know, it's like the culture war is still happening, but he's kind of flailing to regain that relevance that he had. And so I just don't think there's enough propulsion there to keep him at the center of these maggot conversations anymore.
Drew Harwell of The Washington Post. Maybe it was October 7th that alienated Shapiro from his audience and vice versa. But our next guest says there was another turning point, the assassination of Charlie Kirk. That's coming up.
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Chapter 5: When did The Daily Wire reach its peak and what contributed to it?
And then you also have manosphere guys like Tim Dillon who have even started to kind of go against Israel. It is this thing that is happening. And, you know, social media, I think, always prioritizes the newest, most taboo idea. And so this would be a new taboo that has been discovered by far right commentators.
OK, so in that camp of people, you have critics of Israel that run the gamut from Candace Owens, who seems kind of nutty to Megyn Kelly, who often, I don't know, seems pretty straight. What do they all have in common? Is it just their criticism of Israel?
No, my read on this is that it all stems from Charlie Kirk, actually. So, yeah, the MAGA movement is not one movement. It is not one ideology. The 2024 winning coalition was this weird mismatch of far-right live streamers, manosphere podcasters, neoconservatives, and the TPUSA, Charlie Kirk, kind of middle-of-the-road MAGA people.
What is so important to our country is to find our disagreements respectfully, because when people stop talking, that's when violence happens.
And I think Charlie Kirk was very instrumental in holding a lot of this together, if only because it seemed like, you know, to them at least, that he was possibly a replacement for Trump. You know, I've read into it as like, The MAGA movement was trying to home grow their own version of Trump. Charlie Kirk may have been that figure. He dies and the whole thing starts to fall apart.
And I have to give, unfortunately, some credit to Nick Fuentes here, who has always hated Charlie Kirk.
So Charlie Kirk is killed, and then these alliances form and they fracture and they reform and they refracture. What events of the last, say, eight months do we place in the, okay, this is a post-Charlie Kirk's assassination moment?
Well, it's a lot of reading the tea leaves of online discourse, I would say. But... You know when the movement is working when they're all falling in lockstep with one another. Huh. And so, you know, Sidney Sweeney's jeans would be a good example of or Cracker Barrel, right?
Cracker Barrel says it is ditching its new logo after a wave of harsh backlash from customers. OK, we have brand new reaction now from President Trump, who has had enough. of the woke mob going after Sydney Sweeney.
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