It Could Happen Here - Behind The Daily Wire, Part 1

Episode Date: January 18, 2024

Garrison and Robert talk about the rise of the Daily Wire from conservative news site to aspiring entertainment empire.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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I'm bringing you all the latest happening in our entertainment world and some fun and impactful interviews with your combos on the issues that matter to us, and it's all packed with gems, fun, straight up comedia, and that's a song that only nuestra gente can sprinkle. Listen to Gracias Come Again on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Calls on Media. Ah, welcome back to It could happen here a podcast about things falling apart and whenever you have things falling apart you have the daily wire i don't know garrison what are we what are we talking about today yeah the the daily wire has been our trusted companions among the rise of the alt-right and this kind of just impending sense of bad that has been, you know, increasing the past five, ten years, twenty years, thirty years, you know. So Mia in the last episode talked about some of the neoliberal conditions that kind of led to this dip in church attendance. And it's resulted in the Christian right kind of changing formations in a few interesting ways.

And we're going to talk about that here, but now more specifically about how the Daily Wire has been able to profit off of this shift. So as third spaces, including churches, die off, online spaces have begun to fill the gaps. From Facebook groups to content creators to conservative streaming services, the organizational hub of the far right has been picked up by opportunistic bloggers and aspiring movie moguls which brings us to 2013 a perfect year nothing nothing went wrong just a normal a normal time so in 2013 we had failed screenwriter ben shapiro and a failed movie producer Jeremy Boring. They started working together on a project called Truth Revolt. Now, I assume most of us are somewhat familiar with Ben Shapiro. He was an editor at Breitbart. He started as a young conservative blogger who gained prominence in the 2000s and the 2018s. So I'm not going to waste too much time going into the background of

Ben because I'm guessing we all basically know who Ben Shapiro is. But I'm also guessing that almost no one listening to this probably knows who Jeremy Boring is, hence the name. So I'm going to be focusing a lot on Jeremy. I find Jeremy to be a kind of fascinating person. I almost weirdly enjoy watching his stuff just because I find it to be extremely fascinating. His demeanor, his way of going about creating a conservative media empire, I find to be really intriguing. I've watched Jeremy boring stuff just as like a voyeuristic observer for years now and he's actually starting to become more of a more of

a prominent face among the right-wing media ecosystem or at least he's he's been putting his face out there for a while most of the time he's just been behind the scenes so jeremy boring uh is just a is a is a good christian boy from a small town in texas he got involved in kind of local town yeah i i i forget the exact town because i didn't i didn't write it down in the script but i believe it's somewhere in west texas if i remember correctly it's it's it's it's been a while since I watched the two hour interview with Jeremy Boring where he discussed his upbringing. God, I wonder if it's Lufkin. I'm pulling it up. I'm pulling it up.

Slayton. OK, OK. Well, still a dog shit, Texas. Yeah. See, that's why I didn't mention it. It's like, OK, it's in Lubbock County. My God. Yeah.

He was kind of involved in some local community theater productions as a kid and like a lot of kids he aspired to be an actor so as a young adult he moved to la he very soon uh gave up acting i think he had one small bit role as like a crying soldier but besides that he just couldn't get any work. So instead, he decided to become a struggling screenwriter. Classic, classic move. Yeah. Moving from a failed actor. Really failing downwards.

Yes. Yes, exactly. In the early 2000s, he got invited to a Hollywood Bible study group with a whole bunch of like young C-list celebrities. And over time, he evolved into a sort of pastoral role within the group. And then in 2007, he was able to write and produce his first movie, Spiral,

starring Zachary Levi, who now played Shazam in DC's movies. And really nothing else, because he seems to be a deeply unlikable person who's not really been hired in many other things. But Zachary Levi was also in this like christian bible study group they were both friends him and jeremy boring so they made this movie spiral it grossed just over three thousand dollars so not the smash hit that you know you would you you you would hope for for your first movie that is uh yeah

that's not great it's not it's it's not it's not perfect um now jeremy boring claims that his religious and political beliefs made it so that he wasn't able to progress very far in the hollywood system but he was invited to a secret meeting of conservatives in hollywood called the friends of abe that robert you should you should look up the friends of abe logo because it's really good oh my god i think people like like uh like john voight and just you know those sort of like yeah it sounds like i think john voight would be a member of yes i'm pretty sure john voight was a member of this group god they're and they're treating it they're treating it there was like a friends of something or other group that was like a an underground group providing reproductive health care service back before abortion back

before roe v wade which is clearly what they're oh god is that who made this logo this is like bad clip art oh my god it's it's quite good so he was he was invited to this secret meeting the friends of abe and this is where he met another friend of the pod andrew breitbart so this is this is actually really a really important grammar was a member too so yes a very important weird subcultural community within hollywood so as jeremy was trying to move into just movie producing he was actually asked to take over this friends of abe group so he became a very central role and he made a lot of connections connections that will soon become important when we discuss the daily wires own adventures and movie producing

in the in the next uh episode or so so he took over this group eventually uh he had this other smaller bible study group so he's kind of moving up in the world of conservative secret meetings in hollywood um so because he met andrew beitbart at the friends of abe andrew beitbart obviously knows ben shapiro because Shapiro used to be the editor at Breitbart News also I feel the need to note the Friends of Abe was founded by Gary Sinise who was in such beloved movies

as well I think the only beloved movie he was in was Forrest Gump where he played Lieutenant Dan oh he did yeah this is Lieutenant Dan founded the group which is actually like lieutenant dan would be in the friends of abe uh so that that that kind of fits um he also had apparently a bit role or some role in apollo 13 i forget who so there you go

gary sinise great so around this time is when ben shapiro and jeremy boring first met uh just just before like 2010 i think the two met via andrew breitbart whom ben was working for at the time at breitbart news now jeremy and ben hit it off and they decided that they would want to work together to create media to quote unquote influence culture that's that's a term that boring uses quite a lot is like influencing culture now boring was very impressed by shapiro and sought to propel shapiro's fame and wanted to create a platform to to and wanted to create a platform to increase ben's ability to impact politics on a larger scale he He really thought he saw something in Ben that, if utilized, could make Ben into a pretty major celebrity. Boring was friendly with board members of the David Horowitz Freedom Center,

an extremely racist, anti-Muslim, right-wing think tank, I believe based in LA. Boring thought that Ben and David had a lot in common. They were both very politically feisty Jewish conservatives in the LA scene, and Boring wanted to prepare Ben to sort of carry the torch of the Freedom Center, using all of the resources that David Horowitz had built up over a long period of time. Boring met with board members behind the scenes to create some sort of buy-in and cast Ben Shapiro as the future for the Freedom Center, planting seeds of what it will be to come. Eventually, David Horowitz chose Ben as the heir to the Freedom Center, first by giving Shapiro and Boring an opportunity to test things out by starting a company under the Freedom Center called Truth Revolt. Truth Revolt is something that I didn't, I think I saw it a little bit when I was like a younger teen, but it wasn't,

it wasn't super popular. Truth Revolt saw some initial success as like a conservative quote-unquote news site aimed at exposing leftist media. Shapiro billed Truth Revolt as the quote-unquote anti-media matters. Now Shapiro admits that Truth Revolt ultimately wasn't very sustainable, because the whole website was designed around trying to generate traffic by being linked by Drudge Report. And at the time... That's like literally like a third of right-wing media in the early 2000s to mid-aughts. Like that was Alex Jones's whole strategy for a while too. Yeah, the whole point was creating headlines that would be linked by this conservative news aggregator.

And this isn't a very sustainable business model, at least that's what Ben now claims. And because Truth or Fault was operating under the Freedom Center, it was run as a non-profit and received very limited funding and little to no advertising budget. But even back then, there was a big focus on creating video content to fill out the site and grow its own YouTube page. I have a wonderful screenshot here of some old truth revolt videos from like nine, 10 years ago. We have brass tacks on immigration. Andrew Clavan, I think his name is Clavan. He's one of the main Daily Wire guys now, but he was involved way, way back then. He has a video on Obama conspiracy theories, which I'm sure that's great. great yeah i can't wait to dig into that one

uh ben shapiro has a lot of videos about why jews vote leftist we have uh videos about hillary clinton we have the the left's magical thinking there's another andrew clavan video called 50 shades of barack obama so again all very, very like 2012 type stuff here. Like all very like early, early 20-teens. They were iterating. They were cooking. They were cooking. And like cooking, sometimes your first attempt doesn't really work out.

Truth or Fault started declining in around early 2015. But Jeremy Boring was working on a business plan with a more marketing-driven approach. Instead of relying on non-profit annual donors, Boring wanted to use more of a for-profit model, where they use ad revenue and the larger web traffic generated through marketing on social media, especially on Facebook, to pay for this entire media operation. Now, the old guard of this conservative think tank did not really like this plan. The Freedom

Center actually fired Jeremy Boring when he produced this plan to revamp Truth Revolt, and soon after, Ben Shapiro stepped down. This was in April of 2015 jeremy and ben attempted to buy out the site but that didn't pan out and eventually truth revolt just withered away do you know what else slowly withers away over time uh you without the products and services that support this podcast that's right. to join me and a vibrant community of literary enthusiasts dedicated to protecting and celebrating our stories. Black Lit is for the page turners, for those who listen to audiobooks while commuting or running errands, for those who find themselves seeking solace, wisdom, and refuge between the chapters. From thought-provoking novels to powerful poetry,

we'll explore the stories that shape our culture together we'll dissect classics and contemporary works while uncovering the stories of the brilliant writers behind them black lit is here to amplify the voices of black writers and to bring their words to life listen to black lit on the iheart Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast, and we're kicking off our second season digging into how tech's elite has turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires. From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search, Better Offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech from an industry veteran with nothing to lose. This season, I'm going to be joined by everyone from Nobel-winning

economists to leading journalists in the field, and I'll be digging into why the products you love keep getting worse and naming and shaming those responsible. Don't get me wrong, though. I love technology. I just hate the people in charge and want them to get back to building things that actually do things to help real people. I swear to God things can change if we're loud enough. So join me every week to understand what's happening in the tech industry and what could be done to make things better. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts. Check out betteroffline.com.

The 2025 iHeart Podcast Awards are coming. We'll see you next time. Hey, you've been doing all that talking. It's time to get rewarded for it. Submit your podcast today at iHeart.com slash podcast awards. That's iHeart.com slash podcast awards. All right, we are back. Thank the maker for all of those wonderful products and services that let me spend about 10 hours a day watching Daily Wire videos. So I can write like 4,000 words. Truly, this was Sophie's grand dream when she began this. Just have a wall of computers constantly playing Daily Wire Plus exclusive content. That was the pitch we came to corporate with.

What if we exposed a man to all of the Daily Wire one could possibly consume? Oh, boy. All right. So Jeremy Boring, failed movie producer, failed screenwriter, has been fired from Truth Revolt. Ben Shapiro, his colleague in arms, steps down in solidarity.

We love to see workers unite. So Shapiro and Boring still liked their plan to use ad revenue and social media advertising to make a for-profit media company. So in 2015, they looked for other investors to fund a new website. And it just so happened that around this time, two Texas billionaires known as the Wilkes brothers were looking to use their fracking fortune to quote unquote, influence culture. There's that, there's that term again. Through a mutual friend, Boring was able to secure millions of dollars in seed money from the Wilkes, who also later went on to fund PragerU. With an influx of cash on hand, Ben and Jeremy started The Daily Wire,

initially just as a conservative news site, but with ambitions to become an entire conservative entertainment production and distribution house. Instead of relying on donors or links from news aggregators, their new approach was focused on creating and cultivating a long-term audience. They first prioritized quote-unquote investing in making Ben and other up-and-coming conservative figureheads more famous, in particular using an intentional social media strategy to propel people from out of the conservative bubble into the popular zeitgeist. Specifically, Jeremy Boring worked to increase the personal brand awareness on sites other than Twitter, where generally most of these writers spend most of their social media hours.

The point was to not just do it on Twitter, instead do it on the other social media sites where actual regular people spend more of their time because it's mostly just other writers on twitter versus the the actual audience that the daily wire wanted to attract were mostly spending their time on places like facebook or instagram so 14 months in the daily wire was already cash flow positive and we see this approach of specifically trying to like create celebrity it it really paid off if you look at how the how like how like the cultural figure of ben shapiro specifically kind of emerged in the mid-2000s like he he became such a such like a meme with such like a recognizable character through very simple marketing on like youtube on facebook it, it was wildly successful. You cannot open up YouTube without seeing a Ben Shapiro destroys college student on campus video every single time. Now, on top of

making a news site, they also decided to move into podcasting, a very controversial medium. I'm going to read one quote from Ben here. Quote, One area that we had no idea was going to be the center of revenue was the actual podcast when i look back at the business plan what we had allocated for the amount of revenue from the podcast was minimal compared to how successful the podcast became and that cannot be understated the daily wire makes a shitload of money on their podcast yeah we all we all were surprised by how lucrative podcasting wound up being like because it was it was around for like a decade or so before it was

it before people were really making any money off of it it's it kind of snowballed very quickly once advertisers realized it was something they could get in on but like it was there was a long time where it was just sort of like a thing, weird little guys like Joe Rogan did. And most people didn't really think about them much. Yeah. And their social media advertising plan also worked outrageously well,

especially on Facebook. Routinely over the past few years, stories published by the Daily Wire received more likes, shares and comments on Facebook than any other news publisher by a wide margin. Shapiro has more followers in the Washington Post. Their engagement outpaces the New York Times, the Washington Post, NBC, CNN, and Fox News on average by over 10 times. And they often get more clicks on their articles than all of those outlets combined.

They have, like, they figured out a really successful method to promoting their news content in a way that really no one else has been able to replicate. Utilizing provocative rage bait propagandized by a select few of online personalities, The Daily Wire has been able to expand the brand recognition of not just their own site but also the personal brand of its own hosts. Ben and Jeremy brought over some of the people from Truth Revolt but they were also scouting for new talent among the 2016 conservative sphere to invest their newly acquired fracking resources into. Another quote from Ben is like surround yourself with people who are going to be successful, unquote. Particularly not like going after people who are currently popular, but trying

to find up and coming content creators who they think they can turn into being much more successful than what they currently started as. Among the people they recruited was the relatively unknown extremist Christian writer and radio talk show host matt walsh who we will get to in a sec the slightly more famous blogger candace owens who was picked up a few years prior by the conservative student group turning point usa to be their quote director of urban engagement which is an awful title i wonder what they mean by i wonder what they mean by urban engagement and then in uh in 2020 after being a daily wire correspondent for a few years and helping to launch ted cruz's own podcast the daily wire hired failed actor michael knolls who's

basically a discount matt walsh, to host his own podcast. And finally, in 2022, The Daily Wire recruited Jordan Peterson, probably their biggest get to date, after he quote-unquote retired from the University of Toronto. The original funding pitch to the Wilkes brothers, who were looking to influence culture, explicitly positioned the Daily Wire not just as a news site, but as a prospective alternative to the liberal Hollywood monopoly. There's a really interesting quote here from Jeremy Boring, quote, I think there is a path for conservatives to create entertainment, but I think you have to go about it in a roundabout way. We need a marketing and distribution mechanism that Unquote. and with what we've been doing at Truth Revolt, we can make something that's capable of marketing

whatever we produced thereafter for this particular audience, unquote. So there he's emphasizing that no matter the quality of the actual content you create for this sort of conservative media ecosystem, you first need to actually build an audience that will be able to find it. That's like their first step is building up this audience and then they can focus on actually making the content just because of how this distribution system works. At least that was Jeremy's take on that. Do you know what else is really important for building up a sustainable audience? Products?

That's right. Trustworthy products and services that our audience knows are of of fantastic fantastic quality it's the it's the only way we are also supported by the wilks brothers but but directly through selling hydraulic fracturing technology so frack your backyard and uh join the frack pollution Frackvolution. Hey, I'm Jack Peace Thomas, the host of a brand new Black Effect original series, Black Lit,

the podcast for diving deep into the rich world of Black literature. I'm Jack Peace Thomas, and I'm inviting you to join me in a vibrant community of literary enthusiasts

dedicated to protecting and celebrating our stories. Black Lit is for the page turners, for those who listen to audiobooks while commuting or running errands, for those who find themselves seeking solace, wisdom, and refuge between the chapters. From thought-provoking novels to powerful poetry, we'll explore the stories that shape our culture. Together, we'll dissect classics and contemporary works while uncovering the stories of the brilliant writers behind them. Black Lit is here to amplify the voices of Black writers

and to bring their words to life. Listen to Black Lit on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast, and we're kicking off our second season digging into how tech's elite has turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires. From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search, Better Offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech from an industry veteran with nothing to lose. This season I'm going to be joined by everyone from Nobel winning economists to leading journalists in the field and I'll be

digging into why the products you love keep getting worse and naming and shaming those responsible. Don't get me wrong though, I love technology. I just hate the people in charge and want them to get back to building things that actually do things to help real people. I swear to God things can change if we're loud enough. So join me every week to understand what's happening in the tech industry and what could be done to make things better. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts. Check out betteroffline.com. else you get your podcasts. Check out betteroffline.com. But hurry, submissions close on December 8th. Hey, you've been doing all that talking. It's time to get rewarded for it. Submit your podcast today at iHeart.com slash podcast awards.

That's iHeart.com slash podcast awards. We're fracking back here. All right. That was just a wonderful, a wonderful frack break i my my back feels so much so much so much more loose after i just got fracked for like the house across from me exploded when uh fracturing fluid released natural gas that was then ignited by an oven speaking of speaking of fracking i i think we're both actually even though we're on different sides of the country we're both in like a ridiculous cold freeze right now it's it's cheap it's it's it's pretty cold yes it is it is 22 degrees right now yeah it's like 16 or

something here yeah yeah and you're in atlanta so you are the last person alive in the entire city yeah yes but no i'm sure fracking has done nothing to contribute to this um anyway so let's let's let's turn our dials now to 2021 once again normal year nothing bad happened just a fun time overall in 2021 The Daily Wire relocated from liberal Hollywood, California to Nashville, Tennessee, with hopes of creating their own conservative entertainment empire in the music city. After over half a decade of building up an audience, The Daily Wire started to shift towards creating in-house entertainment media like movies and TV, as well as producing their own neatly packaged documentaries to serve as a cultural catalyst in a way that a daily podcast show like The Ben Shapiro Show just can't, right?

Like, we put out a daily podcast, and because it's a daily show, it can only have a certain level of impact for all the things we cover in a way that, you know, a highly produced documentary can have like a little bit more like easily observable impact just because of how it's being packaged. So they saw this and decided they wanted to start putting a lot of resources into their own documentaries as well as their podcasts. But it wasn't just documentaries. In 2021, they also distributed their first movie, Run, Hide, Fight. 38% on Rotten Tomatoes. It is a school shooter thriller movie

that I have not watched. I've watched a lot of the Daily Wire's original content. I am not watching Run, Hide, Fight. I'm sorry. I'm just not doing it. Yeah, I don't really want to watch Die Hard with school shooters and a teenage girl. That seems a bit on the nose. No, I just, I simply refuse. Four other original Daily Wire movies have come out since then, which we'll get to some of those in the next episode. Now, before 2020, The Daily Wire was making some exclusive content behind like a membership paywall for something that they called Daily Wire All Access.

But across 2021 and into 2022, they rebranded and pivoted hard into promoting their own subscription-based streaming service, The Daily Wire Plus. Again, they are nothing if not original. This was during a wave of plus-branded streaming services. We have Disney Plus, we have Paramount Plus, I'm sure there's probably many others that I'm just not gonna bother even looking up. But The Daily Wire Plus,

the hit new streaming service that I'm sure your great uncle has. Quote, The Daily Wire Plus is the streaming home of The Daily Wire, Jordan Peterson, Movies, PragerU, and Daily Wire Kids. We're one of America's fastest growing media companies and counter cultural outlets for news, opinion, and entertainment. We're building the future you want to see. Unquote. That's their little tagline.

Thrilling. Yeah. Truly the new line cinema of racism. Such groundbreaking original content includes My Dinner with Trump. Oh my god, I hadn't even heard of that one are you fucking kidding me no i'm not kidding what is is it is it actually a my dinner with andre parody or is it just something completely disconnected they stole a famous title for it

they just stole the famous title for god damn it it would be really funny if it was just a shot for shot remake of my dinner with Andre, but with Andre as Trump. Like, I would, that's respectable. That's actually respectable. I would watch that movie tonight, actually. No, it's just a filmed dinner with Trump and, like, various political advisors. Oh, my God. Yeah.

Oh, that's so lame. We have. How'd it do? Oh, that's so lame. How did it do? I don't believe that Daily Wire is releasing their streaming metrics, just like Netflix. They're keeping them secret.

Similar companies. Yeah, very similar. We have other hit documentaries, like Kanye West's favorite, The Greatest Lie Ever Sold by Candace Owens. Oh, God. favorite uh the greatest lie ever sold by candace owens oh god an extremely racist misinformation or sorry disinformation documentary about uh about george floyd we have uh uh that mandalorian actress's movie terror on the prairie uh we have a whole bunch of a whole bunch of stuff from jordan peterson after he uh left uh the university of toronto and got

and got kicked off twitter that's the exact time that he was hired at daily wire he's a whole bunch of stuff of just like roundtable discussions on like the bible and i believe he has that uh dragon mythology oh it's great now that that's that's a good show i've watched all of that one with cody and we we enjoyed ourselves quite a lot. We have a Making a Murderer ripoff documentary by Candace Owens called Convicting a Murderer. Again, truly original stuff. Great. But it's not just movies, TV shows, and documentaries. It's also, like we mentioned, they're hit podcasts. Quote, the Daily Wire Plus podcast network

is America's sixth largest podcast publisher and produces several of the top ranked podcasts in America, including the Ben Shapiro Show, the Jordan B. Peterson Podcast, Candace with Candace Owens, the Matt Wall Show, the Michael Knowles Show, and the Morning Wire,

some of which do quite well on the charts and are often sometimes often sometimes sometimes uh beaten by robert's podcast um anyway so a little over a year ago the daily wire plus passed 1 million subscribers i we don't have any updated numbers on that so it's probably quite higher now but at least as of as of uh around a year ago they had a million subscribers and again as of back then it was bringing in the company two-thirds of its annual revenue uh i think it was like three or so years ago they were making a hundred million dollars a year so they were making bank across their podcasts and exclusive content they have over 300 employees and are still growing

and are investing hundreds of millions of dollars into producing original entertainment content. In their efforts to influence politics through entertainment media, they strive to create cultural events around the release of their original documentaries. The biggest success they've had with this was in 2022 with What Is A Woman, which rocketed the Daily Wire Plus into the online spotlight and proved there was great

success to be had with this style of aggressive anti-trans advocacy. The film also put the previously niche figure of Matt Walsh on the map and established Walsh as an authority in queer exterminationist campaigning. I've known of Walsh for like the past decade. After he had a short-lived radio career, he made a name in Christian circles as a provocative blogger, sort of like a young firebrand of the Christian right in the early 20-teens. He had a brief stint at Glenn Beck's The Blaze before being recruited to The Daily Wire in 2017 to do a daily podcast. The goal of documentaries such as What Is A Woman, beyond growing The Daily Wire's subscriber count, is also to encourage real-world action, while converting attention from the documentary into actual real-world harassment campaigns and

live events which fuel even more content. It's like this weird content circle that The Daily Wire does. They create content to make these real-world events which then can fuel more content. It's this perfect loop that generates them a lot of money. On October 21st, 2022, The Daily Wire put on a, quote, rally to end child mutilation at the Tennessee state capital, which was streamable on Daily Wire Plus. Exactly. This is a perfect example of creating this event that then allows them to also create exclusive content for their own streaming service. The Daily Wire has been in cahoots with the state government of Tennessee ever since they first

moved their headquarters there back in 2021. The General Assembly and governor drafted a resolution welcoming the Daily Wire to the state. Jeremy Boring regularly gets invited to dinners at the governor's mansion. After the release of What is a Woman?, the governor of Tennessee announced an investigation into a transgender health clinic in Nashville, and Walsh has made appearances at official state press conferences, and Tennessee's legislator has led the charge on following the Daily Wire and Walsh's political program to target trans people, ban drag shows, and lobbying school boards to ban LGBTQ materials in schools. The Daily Wire was, they were kind of wise to not get too caught up in the Trumpian mud from 2016 to 2020. Instead, focusing on broader culture war issues ranging from anti-liberalism,

anti-diversity, parental rights, religious rights, and attacks on LGBTQ people. But that also means that they didn't peak during the Trump era in the way that a lot of other conservative content people kind of did. They chose not to capitalize on the Trumpian alt right moment, and they were way too smart to go full QAnon. Instead, they were kind of waiting on the sidelines, slowly growing an audience to eventually find the right moment to catalyze more widespread support and thrust themselves into the spotlight. Which they have now done by crafting anti-queer propaganda to pick up the baton from the dying QAnon movement, while moving the needle away from explicitly Q-brained shit to simple stuff like parental rights and the more socially acceptable

to simple stuff like parental rights and the more socially acceptable groomer and save the children talking points. The once more exotic target of pedophilic elites has been shifted to simply any random queer person, which is a much more tangible point of ire. And that's where I'm going to leave us here today,

kind of on the point that The Daily Wire waited and found the moment in like the first year or two of the Biden presidency to really push themselves to be the own spotlight instead of just relying in the shadow of Donald Trump in the way that someone like Tucker kind of has now done. He's not nearly as popular as he was in 2017, 2018, 2019. And the Daily Wire is now massively influential in a way that they were only kind of rising

to prominence back during the alt-right era. So, in the next episode we'll talk a little bit more about The Daily Wire's own anti-queer advocacy and their push for original content, including a brand new child-focused streaming service,

which I will talk about in the next episode. Anyway, Robert, do you have any thoughts on The Daily Wire? Well, I know that the child grooming service they're building, a big part of what they're looking to do is try to copy the show Bluey, which is the biggest thing in children's entertainment right now. And just casual knowledge of where that is talking to parents and stuff about bluey like i feel like it might be a bridge too far for them um because they're they're they're trying to go after they're trying to capture like market from something that's legitimately really

fucking good as opposed to just put it like they're they're kind of most commercially viable movies like the school shooting movie are from what i've read in reviews like just kind of normal mid movies like they don't necessarily feel like a daily wire movie there'll be a couple of points in there maybe but they're they could more or less pass for something you'd see on netflix or amazon prime or whatever which is is, you know, if you're competing with mid-grade action movies and the like that are a dime a dozen, you can actually do that fairly well. And it's even possible to like, well, the economics of streaming are actually deeply

obscure, but theoretically it's possible to do as well with that as Netflix does with it, right? Because people, but if you're trying to replace a children's show that like kids consume voraciously and are deeply in love with and is really well made, I think that's actually a lot harder than they're guessing it's going to be. Like bored adults who want something to watch when they're drunk at night are a harder audience than little kids who are obsessed with a TV show that is the best in its market it's it's certainly a gamble and i we will talk more about the details of this gamble in the next episode as we will also eventually eventually

talk about their brand new movie that came out last month lady ballers all right we're done um i feel like i should call hr just because you mentioned the name of that movie see you in the next episode it could happen here as a production of cool zone media for more podcasts from cool zone media visit our website coolzonemedia.com or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can find sources for It Could Happen Here updated monthly at coolzonemedia.com slash sources.

Thanks for listening. Welcome to Gracias Come Again, a podcast by Honey German, where we get real and dive straight into todo lo actual y viral. We're talking musica, los premios, el chisme, and all things trending in my cultura. I'm bringing you all the latest happening in our entertainment world and some fun and impactful interviews with your favorite Latin artists, comedians, actors, and influencers.

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