Weekly Scroll: Doom and Gloom

Ben Shapiro's downfall, Salary Fights, and a fascinating movie trend

What the hell happened to Ben Shapiro?

Earlier this week, Ben Shapiro’s conservative media company The Daily Wire announced a series of extensive layoffs. While no official numbers have been released, I’ve heard through the grapevine that roughly half the company’s employees were let go. Why? The baseline facts are that Shapiro’s popularity has been plummeting for several years now - take a look at his monthly YouTube views:

Shapiro, despite having more than seven million subscribers on YouTube, has a number of recent videos with less than twenty thousand views. That’s a brutal stat for a company that just a few years ago was in a rapid growth phase with wildly high ambitions to reshape the media ecosystem. And the few views they are getting might be inauthentic - they’re running dozens of Ben Shapiro videos as paid ads right now.

How did this happen? There are a lot of angles here. It’s very funny that major parts of the conservative media ecosystem seem to be in free fall after Viktor Orban’s money hose stopped showering them with money, but I don’t think that was a major factor for The Daily Wire. It’s also pretty clear that Shapiro got way, way ahead of himself and flew too close to the sun chasing dreams of a media empire. The Daily Wire founded a movie studio/streaming service to create a bunch of half-baked right wing productions that nobody really paid attention to, some of which were incredibly cringe (an anti-woke knockoff version of the children’s show Bluey) and some of which were amazing and which I fully supported (throwing Jonathan Majors out of a window). But even beyond the failure of their wildly over-ambitious plans to challenge Hollywood, the core business of Shapiro’s podcast and YouTube channel is floundering. What gives?

In early 2024 I wrote a piece about Shapiro titled Leopards Eating Conservative Faces that neatly explains, two years ahead of time, how the Daily Wire got here. If you’ve been here long enough you know what I’m about to say.¹ Shapiro had a falling out with then-Daily Wire employee Candace Owens that I summarized at that time as “Shapiro, who is Jewish, loves dropping bombs on Palestinians whereas Owens loves thinly-disguised antisemitism”. The two personalities were part of a larger fight over the soul of the conservative movement - Shapiro representing the ‘cowards’, the traditional neoconservatives who desperately want to pretend everything is normal and focus on important things like making fun of purple-haired sociology majors at Sarah Lawrence, while Owens represents the grifter/freak wing of the party that proudly embraces antisemitism, conspiracism, and enough lunacy that they make Shapiro look serious and thoughtful by comparison. And what’s really happened to The Daily Wire is that the Candace Owens/Nick Fuentes wing of MAGA has thoroughly defeated the more ‘respectable’ Shapiro wing.

Quoting that 2024 piece again:

My first instinct is to sympathize with Ben Shapiro here, but I find that I can’t. Ben Shapiro made this bed, and now he’s going to have to sleep in it.

Candace Owens has been a known grifter as long as she’s been a public figure. Ben Shapiro knew she was a grifter when he hired her. He’s quietly tolerated or even promoted anti-semitic people and trends in his conservative movement for years. After Elon praised a Twitter post that said “Jews hate all white people”, who was there to rehabilitate his image? Ben Shapiro. Who hired Gina Carano after the actress was fired for comparing conservatives to Jews in the Holocaust? Shapiro again. He’s defended these people directly, and he’s also largely been silent as a massive amount of anti-semitic freaks became dominant in conservative circles…

Shapiro is a classic coward. He’s smart enough to know exactly what is happening in the conservative movement. But he stays loyal, he promotes the party, and he begrudgingly cooperates with the freaks and the grifters. He made his bed and now that the freaks have come after him he’s got nowhere else to sleep. That goes for him and the entire institutional conservative movement that hasn’t stood up to these people in any meaningful way.

Boreing, Shapiro, and the whole lot are gutless, spineless cowards. They’re still unwilling to directly call out racism. They’re afraid of confrontation. It would cost them too much. They’d lose viewers, their audience would shrink, they’d lose influence within the movement. They’re still trying to make peace with - and I cannot emphasize enough how literal and open they are about this - white supremacists, anti-semites and fascists.

Ben Shapiro is a coward who harbored antisemitic and conspiratorial leopards, and was shocked to find that those leopards wanted to eat his face as well. But he was too afraid of losing his audience to really fight the freaks, so he tried to make nice. But guess what? He lost his audience anyways! Trying to have principles inside the MAGA movement is flipping a trick coin - heads they win, tails you lose. Shapiro somehow managed to lose both his dignity and his audience and he has nobody but himself to blame.

Important Pandemic Update

Is New York Unaffordable? Or Are You Internet-Poisoned?

I’m going to do an incredibly self-indulgent thing here that Substack writers love to do, where I talk about a piece of minor internet drama I was involved in. But rather than re-litigating the specifics of the fight, I want to talk about how it reflects on our modern social media systems.