← Bulwark Takes
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- [00:00]
A
Hey guys, it's me, Sam Stein, managing enter at the Bulwark. I'm joined by Will Sommer, author of False Flag, one of our new newsletters. Will, thanks for joining us. You wrote about the Daily Wire today. People probably know what that is, but just as a reminder, it's Ben Shapiro's media empire. It is, I think, objectively a behemoth. Big force on the right. I don't have the stats in front of me, but does great numbers.
- [00:25]
B
Um, well, it did great numbers.
- [00:29]
A
Did great numbers, right.
- [00:30]
B
The numbers may be going down.
- [00:31]
A
Well, let's talk about that because what, what, what sparked our interest was sort of a rather abrupt. What do you want to call it? Resignation. Yeah. Stepping down of its co CEO Jeremy Boring. Tell the viewers what exactly is happening at Daily Wire and why this is a big deal.
- [00:48]
B
Yeah, so Jeremy Boring is one of the guys who co founded the Daily Wire with Ben Shapiro. So he's one of the OGs there. He's the boss, you know, and he was very much like a public facing guy, like as much of a personality as Ben Shapiro was in terms of the Daily Wire. Ben Shapiro doesn't live in Nashville where the Daily Wire is headquartered. So Boring was really like, really the guy in charge and in many ways sort of like the future of the brand, if you will.
- [01:12]
A
So why did he step down?
- [01:14]
B
Well, you know, stay tuned. We don't really. Well, you know, what did you found.
- [01:18]
A
Out from your recording?
- [01:19]
B
Well, officially they said, you know, this was very abrupt. I mean, just a few months ago he was like, you know, we're making 200 million revenue. Like, we're going to cash out this company, basically. Like, I'm going to sell it to Fox News or someone like that and whatever. And so. Or maybe we'll be the New York Times, he said, right. But instead they say, oh, Jeremy's stepping down and he's just going to be doing a monthly podcast now and, you know, handling a couple entertainment things. And Ben Shapiro gave him a very like, wow, what a great run. Best of luck to Jeremy, you know, like, like the door.
- [01:51]
A
Yeah. In the press release, the Wire said Boring was trading his co CEO position for what they called an advisory role handling the company's creative projects that he'd appear on the monthly podcast. And then Shapiro's quote is, we can't wait to see what he does next. I'm not gonna like try to read too far between lines, but it doesn't take much. That's not usually how you celebrate someone on a successful tenure. It's sort of giving them an off ramp so they could save face.
- [02:17]
B
Exactly. And so, you know, it seems like something's going on here. I have heard stories about Daily Wire troubles for years. Um, and meanwhile, you know, public facing. The company seemed to be doing great. They were getting all these profiles like Jeremy Boring's the new Rupert Murdoch, all this kind of stuff. And, and yet. And so now really the, the question in right wing media where this guy was very well known, you know, is what happened, you know, all these figures.
- [02:44]
A
Let's back up a little bit because talk a little bit about the Daily Wire, like its history, what it does, who it's influential with and why had such promise and such reach.
- [02:54]
B
Sure. So the Daily Wire has really been sort of the breakout digital media success story of the conservative movement. You know, it started initially with Ben Shapiro, but it has other people too. It has Michael Knowles, who is a big kind of podcast YouTube guy. It has Matt Walsh, who people may know from his documentaries such as they Are what Is a Woman and Am I Racist? Which was, if you can believe it, the highest grossing documentary in the country last year. And so it's had. It's successful.
- [03:20]
A
How much did it make?
- [03:22]
B
I'm not sure about that. I mean, maybe it was a lean year for documentaries, but it was everywhere.
- [03:27]
A
It really was everywhere.
- [03:28]
B
Yeah, yeah. And so, so there's that. And, you know, but it has ambitions beyond just kind of like various political things. I mean, they really believe in Andrew Breitbart's, you know, you know, often quoted max, and that politics is downstream of culture. And so they want to kind of become not just, you know, right wing, like the biggest talk radio or podcast company, but they want to be like right wing Netflix. And so they have like a sort of kids channel which is like, they have kind of like if you take Bluey, but you put in chinchillas instead. And they have, you know, they have kind of like a whole streaming thing they're trying to do.
- [04:03]
A
Should we do a kids channel at the Bulwark? Would that be something that you'd be interested in taking on?
- [04:09]
B
Never Trump cartoon characters like elephants or something?
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A
Little cartoon elephants that kind of dance around the Capitol?
- [04:18]
B
Yeah, I think we could do it.
- [04:20]
A
Each week they have a new task for stopping Trump. Talk a little about how Candace Owens plays into this because she was such a dynamic personality and big draw. And then of course, huge flame out over very anti Semitic rants. And she and Ben Shapiro were at loggerheads for a while.
- [04:37]
B
This is why I love covering this stuff because the drama never stops. And so a lot of that in the past few years has come from Candace Owens, who was a, you know, was sort of like a right wing personality who was on the rise, but not, I would say, like a top 10 luminary until she, you know, first hung out with Kanye and then the Daily Wire picked her up and really made her. I mean, obviously she put a lot into it as well and they kind of positioned her into this like very, very prominent podcaster and YouTuber. And then in the past year, especially after October 7, there became this split because, you know, Ben Shapiro is Jewish and very like into that and into supporting Israel. Jeremy Boring, they kind of ideologically, they're very supportive of Israel. Meanwhile, Candace Owens became increasingly not just critical of Israel, but like just into anti Semitic conspiracy theories, all this kind of crazy stuff. Right. I mean, now she's maybe best known on YouTube for believing that the French president's wife is trans. And there's kind of like this twisted decades long masquerade going on.
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A
Oh my goodness.
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B
I mean, people love the content. I guess so. So she basically had this, the Daily Wire in her when she was still employed there, had all this back and forth where they were kind of openly feuding even when she was still employed there. Then they split a year ago to Tuesday when Jeremy Boring stepped down. So I don't know if there's.
- [05:59]
A
Whoa. Maybe there's something about this day. Yeah, but I mean that for being serious, like there's some, some of this personality driven, but I think some of it's got to be attributed to kind of broader trends in the conservative media eco chamber. And basically I would say probably media writ large. Right. Like everything is sort of driven now more by individual personalities. The sub stackification of the media, the Daily Wire kind of had personalities under an umbrella. But you write in the piece that conservative media specifically is going way more towards the Nick Fuentes direct to camera personality driven style. Did that play a role here? Is that sort of the subtext? And I guess maybe my bigger question is like, if there was a nut graph to this story about Boring stepping down, what would it be like? Why, why does this matter in the, in the broad sense?
- [06:49]
B
Yeah, right. I mean, I think the reason people should be interested in this stuff is because it suggests that there's some problem at the Daily Wire that led up to this and that perhaps.
- [07:00]
A
But is it a personality problem or is it an industry problem?
- [07:02]
B
Well, I think it may be an industry problem and it may be suggested, you know, I think the Daily Wire has been cited as this example of like, you know, left wing or mainstream media is doomed. It's going to be the chinchilla show from here on out. You know, it's. Ben Shapiro is taking over. And, you know, perhaps at least in this version, as presented by the Daily Wire, that's not the case. Because I think if Jeremy Boring, even, I think like the speculation about, like, what may have kind of been the proximate cause of his downfall, I think if you're saying this is a guy who built a company with $200 million in revenue, all this stuff, if that's real, then it's, it's strange to me that, that he got this kind of unceremonious exit. So I think it suggests that there may be other issues going on.
- [07:44]
A
Well, what is the, what are the other issues that could be going. I'm just trying to think about sort of the scope of the media universe where it's like, on the one hand, things seem fairly good, honestly for places like diy, but clearly they're not. And I, it's sort of interesting because I remember being at HuffPost, for instance, when Obama came in, you know, it's, they were ideologically more close to Obama than obviously John McCain. Right. But it was, it created different challenges for that. It wasn't like people were showing up and listening to our stuff the same way when Bush was in office because oppositional media tends to be more fruitful. It's probably too early to know if, like, there's a negative Trump effect here happening. And yet I hear it constant, not constantly. I hear regularly from media reporters and people in the know that like right wing media is finding this moment a little bit challenging.
- [08:35]
B
Yeah, I mean, this is a classic issue faced by partisan media. You know, when your party's in power, people are tuning in less. I think also, you know, in as you said, you had this issue where these, the cost to entry is so low to launch a new operation like this, you build up these characters like Candace Owens, they just have to hire a video editor, go off and do their own YouTube thing.
- [08:54]
A
I mean, look at what we're doing right here. Well, absolute bare bones video. Just kidding behind me. But seriously, I, it's funny because we have another piece coming up on Candace Owens written by, it's not live yet, but at least not as we're recording this by Lee's Hogue. And it looks at Candace Owens, who, you know, rightfully a pariah in certain corners because she was so anti Semitic. But she's kind of recast herself as a commentator on the Blake Lively trial and she has a huge audience. And really the, the point of entry is just, do you have a production crew, like to do a meet, to do a video? And that's it. And it makes it harder for larger outlets to compete in a way. But Daily Wire had been competitive, if not, you know, incredibly influential. So I find this very interesting.
- [09:43]
B
Yeah, you know, the other trend I didn't point to in this, in the piece, but I've since thought of is that a lot of these things have migrated into sort of more palatable venues anyway, like Joe Rogan, the kind of like the bro type.
- [09:54]
A
What do you mean by that?
- [09:55]
B
Well, well, I think if you're looking for someone who's kind of going to like get into some culture war stuff from a right wing point of view, you know, have this kind of chat format, I think you probably, I mean, just based on like the size of their audiences, I think Joe Rogan or, or someone like Andrew Schultz or Theo Vaughn is a more palatable ve. More competitive than like Andrew Clavin, who's one of the Daily Wire people, or Ben Shapiro. I mean, these guys are kind of kind of older school even, even Shapiro, who's relatively young, but I mean, he's kind of like a Ted Cruz type of guy. And you know, you know, I think these other guys have a kind of a fresher format that they've sort of assimilated a lot of the daily wires politics and talking talking points.
- [10:36]
A
All right, we got a lot we got to end this with. I kind of did a double take around this whole idea of King Arthur series that boring wanted to do. What the hell is that about? Like, I couldn't really make sense of it.
- [10:51]
B
This is a funny one because, you know, you kind of run through all these like, well, maybe it's the challenges of modern media company or maybe it's the incredibly hubristic Game of Thrones style production in Italy and Hungary that brought him down.
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A
So.
- [11:05]
B
Yeah, so Jeremy Boreing has been, I think it's fair to say, obsessed with a fantasy series called the Pen Dragons, the Pendragon Cycle. For 25 years as a sort of wannabe Hollywood mover and shaker. Long ago in North Hollywood, he. He read this book and he said, he basically said that he learned about movie rights because he was like, I need to make a movie of this. How do I get the rights?
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A
What is the book? Exactly.
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B
So it's about King Arthur, but it's set in Like Roman era Britain, rather than sort of a more kind of medieval chivalric Britain. And he says he likes that specifically. And so it's a lot more kind of like Viking.
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A
It's like the Gladiator when he's out there conquering.
- [11:48]
B
Exactly. And so because of the Daily Wire's enormous revenues, they were in their streaming ambitions. Jeremy Borg was able to become, not just like to finance this, but he is the director and the creator of it. This, like, incredibly ambitious operation. And so, like, they made these production diaries and so I watched these videos on YouTube of them filming it and you look at it and it's like, are they capable of doing this? I mean, we're talking of like a hundred extras, like fist fighting in a marsh in Hungary. Like, the mist is coming in. All, like enormous crews. Then they're like, well, we're flying off.
- [12:23]
A
To Italy and this was on the Daily Wire's dime. They were doing this.
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B
Yes.
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A
Oh, my God.
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B
And it's. Oh, yeah, we're flying to Italy to film with bulls, but they were imported from Spain, so it's all good. Like, it's, it's authentic and you're just like, like kaching, kitchen, kitchen. And it still hasn't come out.
- [12:39]
A
Well, that might explain some of this Departure agreement where you're spending millions on a bizarre project set in Roman era Britain, but filmed in Hungary, involving Italian bulls meant to be from Spain. Wouldn't advise doing that from budgetary perspective. Okay, well, on that note, I think we have some more clarity. Definitely entertaining and I'm glad that you wrote this one. Stay on the case, Will Sommer. Everyone should be signed up for False Flag. It's fantastic already.