The fall of Ben Shapiro

0:01Noel King: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, 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.

0:38Noel King:Web traffic is plummeting. And recently, Shapiro laid off 13 percent 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 kids still got it. On Today Explained, The Fall of Ben Shapiro. Girl, winter is so last season. And now spring's got you looking at pictures of tank tops with hungry eyes. Your algorithm is feeding you cutoffs. You're thirsty for the sun on your shoulders. That perfect hang-on-the-patio sundress.

1:14Noel King:Those sandals you can wear all day and all night. and you've had enough of shopping from your couch. Done hoping it looks anything like the picture when you tear open that envelope? It's time for a little in-person spring treat. It's time for a trip to Ross. Work your magic. When you finally find your thing, you want the whole world to know about that thing. So you use a thing called Canva to make it an even bigger and better thing. Whether you want to create flyers for that thing, make presentations for that thing, or design merch for that thing, you can do anything. so people can see your thing, feel your thing, love your thing.

1:52Noel King:The next thing you know, it's a thing. Canva, the thing that makes anything a thing. 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 anything. 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.

2:36Noel King: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 are some whores in this house. There's some whores in this house. There's some whores in this house. It continues along these lines. And yet he has fallen and so has the media movement around him. 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.

3:12but also this kind of classic mega media energy has changed too.

3:16Noel King: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 wonder kid. 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?

3:58Ben Shapiro just destroyed this woke student with simple logic.

4:01Noel King:The answer is that in 99.8%, 99.9 % of cases, you absolutely can gender somebody based on looking at them. Like, really. 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 ex-scrabble 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, was making a ton of money for not just him, but for The Daily Wire, which he co-founded.

4:49That was this like blog media property. 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.

5:05Noel King: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.

5:48And so they started kind of thrashing in a lot of different directions and exploring a lot of different ways to spend. 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,

6:06Noel King:and most importantly, the god king of the Daily Wire, Jeremy Boring, moved to LA 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 alternate Hollywood and make all of these different media properties that were anti-woke and satirical and anti-left. And so, you know, they started making movies. They started like going into Hollywood and making these big feature films that they would put into theaters, movies like Lady Ballers.

6:48A guy can become a girl with no physical changes at all.

6:52Noel King:Oh, that's called jitter-filling. So I can be a woman on the court and a man in the bedroom, I can't believe it. Nice! And am I racist that were like feature film length documentary satires. Am I racist? I would really appreciate it if you left. I'm trying to learn. I'm on this journey. Can you please leave? Tell me about the Game of Thrones knockoff. Oh, yeah. So this is my favorite of their ventures because it was so... It was insane even to the people inside the company. It was a fantasy series, seven-episode series, kind of loosely based off of Game of Thrones. It was called The Pendragon Cycle, Rise of the Merlin.

7:30They say Merlin slew 70 men with his own hands. This is where it begins. And they flew out all of these actors. Some of them were conservative bloggers at Daily Wire. They flew them out to places like Italy and Hungary. They filmed on location for this knockoff fantasy in the time of Merlin and swords and ladies in furs. and they spent roughly$3 million an episode to make this show. They had huge special effects budgets. They had swords clanging and they had production diaries. All of this stuff that you would never imagine from a blog that was making fun of Nancy Pelosi and blue hair liberals and all this stuff.

8:16But they just felt like, hey, we have the money. Let's build something where we can actually make even more money on the other side of it. But this show was completely a failure. on basically every metric. Nobody watched it, right? You had to subscribe to the Daily Wire Plus. There was no discussion about it. It was just a complete money pit. What was it like, Mylund, to be alone? And even on their YouTube, if you go onto the Pindragon Cycle YouTube, it's gotten the low hundreds of subscribers. So it was just a real, real loss.

8:47Noel King:All right, so Ben Shapiro builds a media empire, makes some foolish decisions, makes some very smart ones, though. and then what happened? Yeah, so I think the biggest change point was the October 7th attacks in Israel. For a time before that, the conservative movement was heavily pro-Israel by default and Ben Shapiro was a proud cheerleader of that because he's a practicing Jew, he wears a yarmulke, he's very proud of his Jewish heritage, he is very openly pro-Israel. And yet that moment became a huge fracture point for MAGA, definitely MAGA media online because you had the traditional conservatives who were staunchly pro-Israel.

9:29Noel King:Israel has been actually extraordinarily meticulous in the pursuit of an incredibly difficult urban war. But then you had this rising faction that was defined by some people who were just sort of critical of Israel and then a side of it that was openly anti-Semitic. And you had these people like Candace Owens who shares a lot of anti-Semitic conspiracy theories and who for a time was a rising star at the Daily Wire. She got her fame in Ben Shapiro's organization, but then left it after October 7th because her and Ben Shapiro were constantly fighting over these issues. I truly believe that the Zionist ideology is an evil.

10:09Noel King:It's an evil because it's a supremacist ideology that says you can trample over anybody's rights as long as it is like, you know, you serve Israel. So there was just this bigger debate happening that was roiling MAGA, and the Daily Wire became a microcosm of it because you had these two different conservative factions fighting over where MAGA should go to next. We're talking because Ben Shapiro's company is failing. And so the question is, is the company failing because the company, as a company, made bad business decisions? Or is the company failing because conservatives do not like the way that Ben Shapiro talks about Israel and they've said, eh, we're going to go elsewhere?

10:49I think it's a little bit of both, honestly. You know, they were pouring a lot of money into bad business decisions. They were gaining less money because their business model was changing. They couldn't just make$100 million on Facebook anymore. Facebook was changing their algorithm, shunting traffic in other ways. And a lot of the political energy they had was also fading. You know, this pro-Trump reflexive support was changing. And meanwhile, you know, 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.

11:25And it was just kind of a perfect storm for them.

11:27Noel King: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. His short videos really give this whiff of desperation. He's doing all of the stuff that a TikToker would do, but 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 s*** 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.

12:15And so I just don't think there's enough propulsion there to keep him at the center of these MAGA conversations anymore.

12:29Noel King: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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16:35This suggests that there's an awful lot of fun today explained. My name is Ryan Broderick, and I write the Garbage Day newsletter, and I host the Panic World podcast.

16:47Noel King:You wrote an essay about Ben Shapiro and his recent troubles. It included these wonderful lines. The age-old problem with working at the racism factory, they eventually make a new racism that includes you. What are you talking about? Well, it was sort of a pithy way to describe what I think is happening to Ben Shapiro right now, which is that he's found himself on the wrong side of a far right vibe shift that's happening. So the question of, you know, should American conservatives support Israel, I think, has quickly become the deciding factor in, you know, canonizing the new wave of MAGA or even post MAGA conservatism in America.

17:30There's a lot of creators on one side who say we should not be involved with Israel. They say that largely for anti-Semitic purposes, but also because they're xenophobic and isolationists. But they sort of know that this is a red line that they can go across. And Ben Shapiro cannot follow them there because he is an Orthodox Jew who supports Israel and is a fairly standard conservative, all things considered. And so this is among the many other problems that Shapiro is having right now in trying to kind of hold his digital media empire together. All right.

18:00Noel King:So Ben Shapiro is on one side. As you said, he is unlikely to ever turn his back on Israel. On the other side are people who are going hard at Israel and have been since approximately, I don't know, October 8th, maybe 2023. Who are they? Who are the players here? So the biggest one is Nick Fuentes. Israel does whatever it wants and nobody seems to be able to stop them. He is the de facto leader of this far-right splinter cell movement, the Groypers. And he's got a live stream that he's on every single day. And he is just the most, you know, lowest of the low, vile kind of far-right personality you could imagine.

18:39Noel King:I don't mean to perpetuate any anti-Semitic tropes, but doesn't that seem to imply, wouldn't that tend to imply that Israel controls the whole world? But you also have more and more creators, I think, sensing this vibe shift and moving towards him. So Candace Owens was going so far as to even claim that Charlie Kirk was killed by Mossad. Truth is that Charlie was under immense pressure and he was facing financial threats over his shifting stance on Israel. You also have Tucker Carlson, Megyn Kelly. A lot of these people I was sort of put in the camp of, you know, pretty run-of-the-mill conservative commentators who understand that Trump is not popular.

19:27And so they're trying to like kind of feel out new territory there. I don't owe anybody my never-ending support.

19:35Noel King:I will be open-minded to the facts as they develop. A lot has happened with Israel. And then you also have manosphere guys like Tim Dillon, who have even started to kind of go against Israel. So 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. okay so in that camp of people you have critics of israel that run the gamut from candace owens who seems kind of nutty to megan 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 i my read on this is that it all stems from Charlie Kirk, actually.

20:27So, 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, 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.