Is The Daily Wire Dying?

The Daily Wire was a driving force in the MAGA movement, but does the movement still need them?

Imagine you’re The Daily Wire. You’ve spent years furthering the interests of the Republican party by means of propaganda campaigns, speeches and debate forums at colleges, building personality cults around your main speakers, and making movies and shows to affirm the currently held beliefs of your audience. 

Now the very party that you’ve fought for are in power, and your audience is still dissatisfied. They want more.

Social programs have been cut, causing some of your audience to have to make the choice between your subscription service or food, a war was started to draw press away from your messiah’s multitude of scandals and now oil, the black gold that has funded the ecosystem you exist in, may gradually become more trouble than it’s worth.

You’ve done all you can to keep your viewer base’s anger pointed in your desired direction, but now that anger is getting harder to direct. 

You’ve recently laid off a chunk of your staff. Most of your movies have been disastrous flops that cost you millions of dollars. You’ve lost a good portion of your talent due to infighting. Jordan Peterson might even be on his death bed.

You feel the walls closing in. Your heyday was during the last administration. Sure, you can shit on them all day for valid reasons, but it was better than whatever the fuck the current kleptocrats are up to and you know it. You’re reaping what you’ve sown, and you’ve never been more miserable.

Who do you blame? What sand can you throw in the eyes of your viewers to distract from the fact that the worldview you peddle has always had disastrous consequences for them? 

You need a scapegoat. Some nebulous “other” foreign enough to be thrown at the gullible lemmings as you scramble. Their social media algorithms have kept them firmly in your clutches thus far, and you hope against hope that your grip on them stays firm.

That could be hard if their material conditions worsen. Like if they lose SNAP benefits, or if a datacenter pops up near them that poisons their water supply. You resort to what you’ve always done best: divide.

You fear it may be the last card you have, so you best make it count. 

You tell them how the dangerous immigrant is coming to replace them, or how trans people are coming for their kids. Keep them terrified and constantly scanning for threats like a caged hamster.

You watch as the ecosystem you’ve fostered blames trans people for every other mass shooting regardless of the evidence, how it goes haywire every time someone with dark skin commits a crime, and how it covers for a fascist regime as their foot-soldiers kill civilians in the streets. The machine works as intended, but you start to question whether you still have a role in it.

Imagine you’re The Daily Wire. The world has changed, but you have not.

Ben Shapiro’s The Daily Wire has been going through some tough times. They’ve recently laid off a chunk of their staff, they’ve lost some of their talent, and the performance of most of their movies has been lacklustre to say the least. But why are they struggling if they got their guy in power? Wasn’t that what they always wanted?

One aspect of grievance politics is that you always need to have a visible enemy who is all-powerful, but simultaneously incompetent. It’s a purposeful contradiction. They need to cast their enemy as someone to rally against, a real force to be reckoned with. At the same time he is to be seen as incompetent or weak, hence the urgency and feasibility of his defeat. This means they will lack all objectivity when it comes to assessing their threat, which is often their undoing.

Ben started the website with money from the Wilks brothers. Fracking magnates. The oil and gas industry loves throwing money at unscrupulous cretins who will further their interests, hence climate change deniers and cortisol-spiking dinner conversations with your Facebook-addicted relatives. Ben Shapiro is probably the reason why your uncle is now a really weird hang.

You just know that he’s seen Matt Walsh’s “documentaries” where he speaks to experts and then ignores everything they say in favour of his own predispositions.

Their bread and butter has never been their main site though, that’s downline. Their main content was always clips and compilations. Content like “Liberal snowflake OWNED with facts and logic!” videos on YouTube where a moment from a debate is taken out of context to make their guy (often Ben) look smart. The primary purpose of these types of videos is not actually information aggregation or even entertainment, but catharsis. Viewers are there to see their perceived enemies humiliated.

These videos spread far and wide, and have done so for about a decade now. But The Daily Wire of today is largely a streaming service called Daily Wire+, where rich dudes sit around in leather lounge chairs wearing suits and smoking cigars and talk about how angry they are about the performance of gender. Their brand of pseudo-intellectual drivel has become a staple in right-wing media, but no one does it better than one of their main intellectuals, the leatheriest of lounge chairs: Dr. Jordan Bernt Peterson.

Jordan is a fascinating character. He talks ardently about how you can only fix society once you, yourself, have sorted out all of your own issues, and then goes to Russia to be medically induced into a coma for a cold-turkey detox of his addiction to benzodiazepines.

He has mastered the art of the philoso-babble. The art of talking for hours, constantly using big, intelligent-sounding words, yet saying absolutely nothing, just a word salad of platitudes. I don’t think he’s dumb, he has a Phd in psychology. I just think he’s full of shit and knows how to pander to an audience of young misogynists who always want to be the smartest person at the table but don’t actually want to put in any effort to learn anything. Learning requires friction, and Jordan provides none. He’s Cocomelon for chuds.

Much like what happened with Ben, Jordan’s videos and lectures were circulated widely, mostly by people other than himself. He appealed to alienated young men who, on one hand, needed some simple life advice during tough times, exemplified in Jordan’s famous “clean your room” sentiment, but on the other hand, they needed someone to blame for their problems. And Jordan sure delivered on that.

He first rose to fame for railing against bill C16 in Canada, a bill that would extend current human rights law regarding discrimination to trans people. He claimed that the bill would force him to use someone’s preferred pronouns or risk jail time. That was never the case. He either misunderstood the bill or (more likely) just lied about it to appeal to a specific base.

His misogyny had shone through at times, but he gradually started wearing it more on his sleeve. Equating men to order and women to chaos or proposing enforced monogamy to reduce violent tendencies. He is not a person to be admired or even taken seriously. He’s just an odd dude.

The Daily Wire has a handful of other characters, some with their own gimmick or specialty, but others are just kinda… there. Does Michael Knowles do anything? Is he just a low-rent Matt Walsh? Does he exist for the sole purpose of filling in for their more famous speakers?

So Matt Walsh is the anti-trans guy, Ben is the anti-trans guy… wait. Jordan is also the anti-trans guy… 

Am I wrong? Do none of them have a gimmick or a specialty? Are they all just different versions of the same guy who rose to fame by being an asshole? Maybe. Their entire social identity seems to stem from what they are not. They are not woke. They are not tolerant. They are not empathetic. 

Are they conservative? They might say so. But what does that even mean today?

Conservatism has historically been seen (in theory) as the proverbial brake to the progressives’ acceleration pedal. A “rational” voice to make the other team stop to think before acting. That’s not what they are today, and it’s not what they have been for a long time. Conservatism collapsed in on itself and created a black hole, determined to suck in anything it comes across, leaving behind nothing but ruins. This black hole currently takes the form of MAGA and the current Republican party in the US (arguably the same thing), and Ben and his cronies absolutely had a hand in creating it.

Ultimately, they are all rich as shit, and I think that’s all that matters to them. They don’t care about the societal harm that their rhetoric causes or the actual human beings who are impacted by those who have drunk their Kool-Aid and become unbearable or even dangerous.

I have some level of admiration for what they’ve done. In a vacuum, the impact they’ve had is impressive, but I award them no points because of the immense harm they have caused. Hundreds of thousands are dead because of the current administration, most of them kids. 

History will not be kind to The Daily Wire, especially Ben himself. He will go down as a feckless coward. Someone who tried to save only himself as the world burned around him. Even if he fails.