Ben Shapiro built the Daily Wire on one proposition: facts do not care about your feelings. The company is now laying off a quarter of its staff, canceling its children’s programming, and has retained a bankruptcy lawyer. It turns out the facts are not caring about the Daily Wire’s feelings either.
The collapse has been building since co-founder Jeremy Boreing resigned earlier this year after steering the company into a series of expensive creative bets that did not pay off. The company spent at least $10 million on a single fantasy series. It launched anti-woke razor and chocolate brands. It built a conservative children’s streaming platform called Bentkey. None of it worked. The audience the Daily Wire spent a decade cultivating moved on to a new generation of podcasters and streamers who were willing to say things Shapiro was not, and the company that once dominated Facebook engagement found itself stranded between the mainstream media it mocked and the radicalized base it had helped create.
Shapiro’s brand of debater’s conservatism, built on owning liberals with logic and Israel hawkishness, ran directly into the new populist right’s preferences, which turned out to be less interested in debate and more interested in grievance. Megyn Kelly mocked his YouTube views as “like 500 views” apiece. Candace Owens, whom he fired, became more popular after leaving than before. His former audience did not want facts. It wanted a fight, and it found better fighters.
The irony is near total. A media company that positioned itself as the antidote to institutional decline and liberal soft-headedness is now exhibit A for institutional decline and soft-headed business decisions. The compliance plan, per reporting, is a thesaurus and a bankruptcy attorney. The anti-woke razor company is apparently still operational.
When the media brand that told everyone else to toughen up needs a bankruptcy lawyer, what exactly was the lesson?
