In this Based Camp episode, Malcolm and Simone Collins break down the dramatic decline of The Daily Wire — from massive layoffs (25-50% staff cuts), an 85% drop in Ben Shapiro’s YouTube views, and high-profile splits with Candace Owens, Brett Cooper, and others — to financial flops like the $10M Pendragon fantasy series nobody asked for.

They explore Shapiro’s mean-girl gatekeeping, failed attempts to control the conservative movement, allegations of heavy viewbotting, outdated content strategies, and why the old-guard “Boomer conservative” model is collapsing while newer, more vital, fun, and adaptive voices (including Based Camp) are rising.

Show Notes

* Around May 1st, the Daily Wire laid off around 13% of their staff

* At least according to a company spokesperson

* Candace Owens claims that 50% were laid off

* And LayoffHedge (a third-party tracker) estimates approximately 100 jobs cut in 2026 (that is 50% of the approximately 200 remaining staff)

* This is their second round of layoffs, following a 25% staff cut in April 2025

* A year in which they also shut down their Bentkey children’s entertainment division

* So their team is down over 60%

* These changes coincide with a 85% drop in Ben Shapiro’s YouTube viewership

* 2023: He had over 170 million monthly views

* Now: 18-28 million monthly views

* Plus Ben Shapiro and Team Daily Wire is very publicly splitting from major right-wing influencers—after a long history of sanctimonious gatekeeping

* And this is in addition to insanely stupid financial indulgences made by the Daily Wire, like dumping $10M on a fantasy series nobody asked for

Let’s look at their rise and fall and what it indicates about the right.

The Rise of Ben Shapiro and the Daily Wire

Ben Shapiro’s rise began in the early 2000s as a teenage author and columnist, accelerating in the 2010s through campus debates, books, and podcasts.

Shapiro published his first book, Brainwashed, at age 17 in 2004 while at UCLA, followed by columns and radio appearances.

His national breakout came around 2012-2016 via viral campus speeches (”facts don’t care about your feelings”), resigning from Breitbart in 2016 amid Trump tensions, and The Ben Shapiro Show podcast launch. By 2018, it was syndicated on over 200 stations, peaking his influence during 2016-2020 political polarization.

The Daily Wire launched on June 29, 2015, co-founded by Shapiro and Jeremy Boreing with seed funding from the Wilks brothers, building on Shapiro’s momentum post-Breitbart. The Ben Shapiro Show debuted as its flagship in September 2015.

* The Daily Wire perfected Facebook‑era virality with clicky headlines and “SJW owned” debate clips, becoming one of the most‑linked news domains on the platform and a powerhouse during the Trump and early COVID years.

The company hit its peak in late 2023, driven by Shapiro’s YouTube reaching ~170 million monthly views amid Israel-Hamas coverage, with revenue claims over $100 million annually by 2022. Expansion included Nashville HQ (2020), DailyWire+ (2022), and Bentkey (2023).

The Layoffs

* Most of the layoffs were around the Daily Wire’s Nashville, TN headquarters (and particularly within the production office)

The YouTube and Facebook Drops

Facebook

* Facebook’s 2024 feed changes de‑ranked news and gutted The Daily Wire’s traffic, collapsing the distribution engine that had made them look unbeatable in the mid‑2010s.

YouTube

* Independent YouTube analytics (VidIQ and others) show Ben Shapiro’s channel views are down roughly 70–85% from their late‑2023 peak

* Flagship channels sometimes have normal slumps, but online commentators like Philip DeFranco have noted this change in traffic is closer to a collapse

* Social Blade data shows The Daily Wire’s YouTube subscriber base has plateaued or shrunk in 15 of the last 16 months since early 2025.

* Website traffic by March 2026 was about half of what it had been a year earlier, and Shapiro has admitted that revenue is down from 2024 even while insisting cash flow remains strong relative to critics’ expectations.

The Splits

Direct

Brett Cooper

* Voluntarily left The Daily Wire on December 10, 2024

Candace Owens

* Left in March 2024

* CEO Jeremy Boreing announced the end of their partnership, stating it was mutual but amid public feuds like Owens’ “Christ is King” posts and defense of Kanye West’s antisemitic remarks. Shapiro challenged her to quit if unhappy, while Owens called herself “finally free” and accused Shapiro of ad hominem attacks. She continued criticizing Israel and the ADL post-exit.

* Owens weaponized receipts, text messages, and live‑stream theatrics to frame Shapiro as hypocritical and captured by Israeli donors, and then rode the Charlie Kirk assassination discourse into a giant audience surge while undermining Shapiro’s legitimacy.

More Ideological

The Daily Wire fell out of step with the dissident right and younger MAGA, especially re: stanning Israel

Nick Fuentes

* In his interview with Tucker Carlson, Nick Fuentes talks about how Ben Shapiro gatekept and belittled him early in his career, even when he was essentially a nobody

* Fuentes describes first publicly criticizing Shapiro and The Daily Wire over Israel, then getting labeled an antisemite:

* “I tweeted to Ben Shapiro. I said, ‘You know, I’ve never seen anything on the Daily Wire that’s actually critical of Israel.’ And he quote tweets me… And he says to accuse a Jew of dual loyalty is the shest sign of anti-semitism.”

* “He immediately called you an anti-semite.” (Tucker) – “Mhm. So I’m driving to Christmas Eve mass with my family and I see on Twitter the notification comes up. Ben Shapiro quote tweets me calling me an anti-semite.”

* “And then… I said something like, ‘If you’re China first, you should live in China. If you’re Mexico first, you should live in Mexico. If you’re Israel first, maybe you should go live in Israel.’ And again, he quote tweets me and says, ‘You’re an anti-semite’ that same night.”

* Fuentes frames this as Shapiro deciding early on to shut him down inside the conservative movement:

* “It turned out that Cassie Dylan, she had texted him earlier and she wanted him to take me under his wing… And he goes, ‘I’ll take a look.’ And so, I guess the two of them were kind of like grooming me in a sense. They wanted me to go maybe and be a Daily Wire [guy] or maybe looking me as a potential conservative activist or influencer. And so they started paying attention to me.”

* “And the more critical of Israel I was, I started to get this really intense push back from the both of them and from a lot of the people at Daily Wire.”

* “For them, it was very easy that if they detected that a promising young guy was going to become anti-Israel in the conservative movement, they could crush that person easily and grind them under the heel. So, they sort of were alerted, oh, there’s a precocious young guy that isn’t on board with Israel. We’ll keep an eye on him and if he gets too vocal or popular, we’ll cut him down. We’ll crush him.”

* “Basically from then on, it was just this escalating series of blacklisting, censorship, hit pieces, rumors to try to ostracize me from the movement.”

* Fuentes links Shapiro/Daily Wire and their circle to efforts to isolate him and get him fired:

* “First they would try to dissuade me from asking questions… they would say, ‘Well, you know, there’s a really good answer for that, but you’re asking it in the wrong way… you’re asking it in an anti-semitic way.’”

* “And eventually they said, ‘You know what? we’re not going to talk to you anymore.’ And these were my friends… All of them one day said, ‘You’re done. We’re blocking you. We’re never going to speak to you again. We’re never going to have you on our show.’”

* “At this time I was on RSBN… And they escalated their attacks. Cassie Dylan would call my boss… every day for weeks, saying, ‘You’ll never believe what Nick said on his show tonight. It’s so racist. It’s so bad. You got to take him off the air. It’s going to make you look bad.’”

* “And I would then get word from my boss… ‘I don’t know what has gotten into Cassie. I thought you guys were friends, but she is calling me every day hysterically demanding that I fire you.’”

* On a clip that ended up at Media Matters: “And so that clip appears on Media Matters… and ultimately then they fired me… But the pressure in this scenario came exclusively from the Daily Wire.”

* “My show got maybe a hundred live viewers every night… So the Media Matters was not on to me. They were put onto me by people in the right that wanted me cancelled.

* Later, Fuentes explicitly ties Shapiro’s attacks to his own radicalization and turn against the conservative establishment:

* “Looking back with that 2020 hindsight, I mean, Ben Shapiro seems like a big part of your political evolution. You went from a fan acolyte to an opponent and then just pivoted against everything that he believes.” (Tucker) – “Yeah. It was because it was this new dialectic that Trump forced… So once you accept that, a lot of the way we’re doing things becomes impossible to support or justify. The contradiction becomes apparent.”

* “I realized that the conservative movement was completely bankrupt in that way. Became very radical.”

Tucker Carlson

Shapiro blasted Carlson as an “intellectual coward” and “moral imbecile” in late 2025 for interviewing Nick Fuentes and echoing antisemitic tropes on Israel/Jewish influence. Carlson retaliated by slamming Shapiro’s “many attacks on Jesus,” immigrat...