Behind The Daily Wire, Part 1

And we're going to talk about that here, but now no more specifically about how the Daily Wire has been able to profit off of this shift. So as third spaces, including churches die off, online spaces have been gun to fill the gaps, from Facebook groups to content creators to conservative streaming services. The organizational hub of the far right has been picked up by opportunistic bloggers and aspiring movie moguls. Which brings us to twenty thirteen, a perfect year. Nothing

went wrong, just a normal, normal time. So In twenty thirteen, we had failed screenwriter Ben Shapiro and failed movie producer Jeremy Boring. They started working together on a project called Truth Revolt. Now, I assume most of us are somewhat familiar with Ben Shapiro. He was an editor at Breitbart This He started as a young conservative blogger who gained

prominence in the twentyds and the twenty teens. So I'm not gonna waste too much time going into the background of Ben because I'm I'm guessing we all basically know who Benhapiro is. But I'm also guessing that almost no one listening to this probably knows who Jeremy Boring is, hence the name, So I'm gonna be focusing a lot on Jeremy. I find Jeremy to be a kind of fascinating person. I almost weirdly enjoy watching his stuff just

because I find it to be extremely fascinating. His demeanor, his way of going about creating a conservative media empire, I find to be really intriguing. I've watched Jeremy Boring stuff just as like a voyeurist observer for years now, and he's actually starting to become more of a prominent face among the right wing media ecosystem, or at least he's been putting his face out there for a while. Most of the time he's just been behind the scenes.

So Jeremy Boring is just A is A is A is a good Christian boy from a small town in Texas. He got involved in kind of local town. Yeah. I I forget the exact town because I didn't I didn't write it down in the script, but I believe it's somewhere in West Texas if I remember correctly. It's it's it's It's been a while since I watched the two hour interview with Jeremy Boring where he discussed his upbringing.

failed actor. Yes, yes, yes, exactly. In the early two thousands, he got invited to a Hollywood Bible study group with a whole bunch of like young C list celebrities, and over time he evolved into a sort of pastoral role within the group. And then in two thousand and seven he was able to write and produce his first movie, Spiral, starring Zachary Levi, who now played Shazam in DC's movies and really nothing else because he seems to be a deeply unlikable person who has not really been hired in

many other things. But Zachary Levi was also in this like a Christian Bible study group. They were both friends, him and Jeremy Boring. So they made this movie Spiral. It grossed just over three thousand dollars, So not the smash hit that you know you would you you would hopeful for your first movie.

So he became a very central role and he made a lot of connections, connections that will soon become important when we discuss The Daily Wire's own adventures in movie producing in the in the next episode or so. So he took over this group. Eventually he had this other smaller Bible study group, so he's kind of moving up

in the world of conservative secret meetings in Hollywood. So because he met Andrew bite Bart at the Friends of Abe, Andrew bype Bart obviously knows Ben Shapiro because Shapiro used to be the editor at Breitbart News.

a lot, is like influencing culture now. Boring was very impressed by Shapiro and sought to propel Shapiro's fame and wanted to create a platform and wanted to create a platform to increase Ben's ability to impact politics on a larger scale. He really thought he saw something in Ben that, if utilized, could make Ben into a pretty major celebrity. Boring was friendly with board members of the David Horowitz Freedom Center, an extremely racist, anti Muslim right wing think

tank I believe based in law. Boring thought that Ben and David had a lot in common. They were both very like politically feisty Jewish conservatives in the LA scene, and Boring wanted to prepare Ben to sort of carry the torch of the Freedom Center using all of the resources that David Horowitz have built up over a long

period of time. So for a year and a half, Boring met with board members behind the scenes to create some sort of buy in and cast Ben Shapiro as the future for the Freedom Center, planning seeds of what it will be to come. Eventually, David Horwitz chose Ben as the heir to the Freedom Center first by giving Shapiro and Boring an opportunity to test things out by starting a company under the Freedom Center called Truth Revolt.

Truth Revolt is something that I didn't I think I saw it a little bit when I was like a younger teen, but it wasn't It wasn't super popular. Truth Revolt saw some initial success as like a conservative quote unquote news site aimed at exposing leftist media. Shapiro billed Truth Revolt as the quote unquote anti media matters Now.

Shapiro admits that Truth of Volt ultimately wasn't very sustainable because the whole website was designed around trying to generate traffic by being linked by Drudge Report, and at the time.

I have a wonderful screenshot here of some old truth Revolt videos from like nine ten years ago. We have brass tax on immigration. Andrew Cleavan I think his name is Clevan. He's he's one of the main Daily Wire guys now, but he was involved way way back then. He has a video on Obama conspiracy theories, which I'm sure that's great.

this entire media operation. Now, the old guard of this conservative think tank did not really like this plan. The Freedom Center actually fired Jeremy Boring when he produced this plan to revamp Truth Revolt, and soon after Ben Shapiro stepped down. This was in April of twenty fifteen. Jeremy and board Jeremy and Ben attempted to buy out the site, but that didn't pan out, and eventually Truth Revolt just withered away. Do you know what else slowly withers away over time?

Texas billionaires known as the Wilks Brothers. We're looking to use their fracking fortune to quote unquote influence culture. There's that term again. Through a mutual friend, Boring was able to secure millions of dollars in seed money from the Wilkes, who also later went on to fund prager You. With an influx of cash on hand, Ben and Jeremy started The Daily Wire initially just as a conservative news site, but with ambitions to become an entire conservative entertainment production

and distribution house. Instead of relying on donors or links from news aggregators, their new approach was focused on creating and cultivating a long term audience. They first prioritized quote unquote investing in making Ben and other up and coming conservative figureheads more famous, in particular, using an intentional social media strategy to propel people from out of the conservative

bubble into the popular zeitgeist. Specifically, Jerry Bor worked to increase the personal brand awareness on sites other than Twitter, where generally most of these writers spend most of their

social media hours. The point was to not just do it on Twitter, instead do it on the other social media sites where actual, like regular people spend more of their time because it's mostly just other writers on Twitter versus the actual audience that the Daily Wire wanted to attract, or mostly spending their time on places like Facebook or Instagram. So fourteen months in the Daily Wire was already cash flow positive, and we see this approach of specifically trying

to like create celebrity. It really paid off. If you look at how how like the cultural figure of Ben Shapiro specifically kind of emerged in the mid two thousands, Like he became such like a meme, such like a recognizable character through very simple marketing on like YouTube, on Facebook. It was. It was wildly successful. You cannot open up YouTube with out seeing a Ben Shapiro destroys college student

on campus video, like every single every single time. Now, on top of making a news site, they also decided to move into podcasting, a very controversial medium. I'm gonna I'm gonna read one quote from Ben here. Quote. One area that we had no idea was going to be the center of revenue was the actual podcast. When I look back at that business plan, what we had allocated for the amount of revenue from the podcast was minimal compared to how successful the podcast became. And that cannot

be understated. The Daily Wire makes a shitload of money on their podcast.

wide margin. Shapiro has more followers in The Washington Post, their engagement outpaces the New York Times, The Washington Post, NBC, CNN, and Fox News on average by over ten times, and they often get more clicks on their articles than all of those outlets combined. They have like they figured out a really successful method to promoting their news content in a way that really no one else has been able

to replicate. Utilizing provocative rage bait propagandized by a select few of online personalities, the Daily Wire has been able to expand the brand recognition of not just their own site but also the person brand of its own hosts. Ben and Jeremy brought over some of the people from Truth Revolt, but they were also scouting for new talent among the twenty sixteen Conservative spear to invest their newly

acquired fracking resources into. Another quote from Ben is like surround yourself with people who are going to be successful unquote, particularly not like going after people who are currently popular, but trying to find up and coming content creators who they think they can turn into being much more successful

than what they currently started as. Among the people they recruited was the relatively unknown extremist Christian writer and radio talk show host Matt Walsh, who we will get to in a sec the slightly more famous blogger Candice Owens, who was picked up a few years prior by the conservative student group Turning Point USA to be their quote director of Urban Engagement, which is an awful title what they mean by I wonder what they mean by urban engagement.

And then in twenty twenty, after being a Daily Wire correspondent for a few years and helping to launch Ted Cruz's own podcast, the Daily Wire hired failed actor Michael Knowles, who's basically a discount Matt Walsh to host his own podcast, And finally, in twenty twenty two, the Daily Wire recruited Jordan Peterson, probably their biggest get to date after he

quote unquote retired from the University of Toronto. The original funding pitch to the Wilkes Brothers, who are looking to influence culture, explicitly positioned the Daily Wire not just as a news site, but as a prospective alternative to the liberal Hollywood monopoly. There's a really interesting quote here from Jeremy Boring quote, I think there is a path for conservatives to create entertainment, but I think you have to

go about it in a roundabout way. We need a marketing and distribution mechanism that allows us to actually put an audience on the target, because Hollywood will never cooperate. Even if you manage to make a great film, they'll never cooperate. They'll make it very difficult for you. With Ben and with what we've been doing at Truth Revolt, we can make something that's capable of marketing whatever we

produced thereafter for this particular audience unquote. So there he's emphasizing that no matter the quality of the actual content you create. For this sort of conservative media ecosystem, you first need to actually build an audience that will be able to find it. That's like their first step is building up this audience, and then they can focus on actually making the content just because of how this distribution system works. That at least that was Jeremy's take on that.

Do you know what else is really important for building up a sustainable audience? Products, that's right, trustworthy products and services that our audience knows are of of fantastic, fantastic quality. It's the it's the only way.

entertainment empire in the music city. After over half a decade of building up an audience, the Daily Wire started to shift towards creating in house entertainment media like movies and TV, as well as producing their own neatly packaged documentaries to serve as a cultural catalyst in a way that a daily podcast show like The Shapiro Show just can't write like we put out a daily podcast, and because it's a daily show, it can only have a certain level of impact for all the things we cover

in a way that you know, a highly produced documentary can have like a little bit more like easily observable impact just because of how it's being packaged. So they saw this and decided they wanted to start putting a lot of resources into their own documentaries as well as their podcasts. But it wasn't just documentaries. In twenty twenty one, they also distributed their first movie, Run Hide Fight thirty eight percent on Rotten Tomatoes. It is a school shooter

thriller movie that I have not watched. I've watched a lot of the Daily Wires a bitual content. I am not watching Run Hide Fight. I'm sorry, I'm just not doing it.

to some of those in the next episode. Now, before twenty twenty, the Daily Wire was making some exclusive content behind like a membership paywall for something that they called Daily Wire All Access, But across twenty twenty one and into twenty twenty two, they rebranded and pivoted hard into promoting their own subscription based streaming service, The Daily Wire Plus. Again, they are nothing if not original. This was during a wave of plus branded streaming services. We have Disney Plus,

we have Paramount Plus. I'm sure there's probably many others that I'm just not gonna bother even looking up. But the Daily Wire Plus the hit new streaming service that I'm sure your great uncle has.

sometimes sometimes beaten by Robert's Podcast. Anyway, so, a little over a year ago, the Daily Wire Plus passed one million subscribers. We don't have any updated numbers on that, so it's probably quite higher now, but at least as of around a year ago they had a million subscribers, and again as of back then, it was bringing in the company two thirds of its annual revenue. I think it was like three or so years ago they were making one hundred million dollars a year, so they were

making bank across their podcasts and exclusive content. They have over three hundred employees and are still growing and are investing hundreds of millions of dollars into producing original entertainment content. In their efforts to influence politics through entertainment media, they strive to create cultural events around the release of their original documentaries. The biggest success they've had with this is what was in twenty twenty two with What Is a Woman?

Which rocketed the Daily Wire Plus into the online spotlight and proved there was great success to be had with this star of aggressive anti trans advocacy. The film also put the previously niche figure of Matt Walsh on the map and established Walsh as an authority in queer exterminationist campaigning. I've known of Walsh for like the past decade. After he had a short lived radio career, he made a name in Christian circles as a provocative blogger, sort of

like a young firebrand of the Christian right. In the early twenty teens, he had a brief stint at Glenn Beck's The Blaze before being recruited to The Daily Wire in twenty seventeen to do a daily podcast. The goal of documentaries such as What Is a Woman? Beyond growing the Daily Wire's subscriber count is also to encourage real world action while converting attention from the documentary into actual real world harassment campaigns and live events, which fuel even

more content. It's like this, It's like this weird content circle that the Daily Wire does. They create content to make these real world events, which then can fuel more content. It's this perfect loop that generates them a lot of money. On October twenty first, twenty twenty two, the Daily Wire put on a quote rally to end child mutilation at the Tennessee State Capitol, which was streamable on Daily Wire

Plus exactly. This is a perfect example of creating this event that then allows them to also create exclusive content for their own streaming service. The Daily Wire has been incahoots with the state government of Tennessee ever since they first moved their headquarters there. Back in twenty twenty one, the General Assembly and Governor drafted a resolution welcoming the Daily Wire to the state. Jeremy Boring regularly gets invited

to dinners at the Governor's mansion. After the release of What Is a Woman, the governor of Tennessee announced an investigation into a transgender health clinic in Nashville, and Walsh has made appearances at official state press conferences, and Tennessee's legislator has led the charge on following the Daily Wire and Walsh's political program to target trans people, ban drag shows, and lobbying school boards to ban LGBTQ materials in schools.

The Daily Wire was they were kind of wise to not get too caught up in the Trumpian mud from twenty sixteen to twenty twenty, instead instead focusing on broader culture war issues ranging from anti liberalism, antidiversity, parental rights, religious rights, and attacks on LGBTQ people. But that also means that they didn't peak during the Trump era in the way that a lot of other conservative content people

kind of did. They chose not to capitalize on the Trumpian alt right moment, and they were way too smart

to go full QAnon. Instead, they were kind of waiting on the sidelines, slowly growing an audience to eventually find the right moment to catalyze more widespread support and thrust themselves into the spotlight, which they have now done by crafting anti queer propaganda to pick up the baton from the dying to a non movement, while moving the needle away from from like explicitly ce brain shit to simple stuff like parental rights and the more socially acceptable groomer

and save the children talking points. The once more exotic target of pedophilic elites has been shifted to simply any random queer person, which is a much more tangible point of iyre. And that's where're gonna leave us here today, kind of on the point that the Daily Wire waited and found the moment in like the first year or two of the Biden presidency to really push themselves to be the own spotlight instead of just relying in the shadow of Donald Trump in the way that someone like

Tucker kind of has now done. He's not nearly as popular as he was in twenty seventeen, twenty eighteen, twenty nineteen, and the Daily Wire is now massively influential in a way that they were only kind of rising to prominence back during the Altright era. So in the next episode, we'll talk a little bit more about The Daily Wire's own anti queer advocacy and their push for original content, including a brand new child focused to streaming service, which

I will talk about in the next episode. Anyway, Robert, do you have any do you have any thoughts on the Daily Wire?

from something that's legitimately really fucking good, as opposed to just put it like they're the they're kind of most commercially viable movies like the School Shooting movie are, from what I've read in reviews, like just kind of normal mid movies, Like they don't necessarily feel like a Daily

Wire movie. There'll be a couple of points in there maybe, but they could more or less pass for something you'd see on Netflix or Amazon Prime or whatever, which is you know, if you're competing with mid grade action movies and the like that are a dime a dozen, you can actually do that fairly well. And it's even possible

to like well. The economics of streaming are actually deeply obscure, but theoretically it's possible to do as well with that as Netflix does with it, right because people, But if you're trying to replace a children's show that, like kids consume voraciously and are deeply in love with and is really well made, I think that's actually a lot harder

than they're guessing it's going to be. Like yeah, word, adults who want something to watch when they're drunk at night are a harder audience than little kids who are obsessed with a TV show that is the best in its market.