The Adam Mockler Show - MAGA Host Brutally Realizes Trump BURNED HIM

Episode Date: May 19, 2026

Mike Nellis filling in for Adam Mockler breaks down the growing collapse of Ben Shapiro’s Daily Wire empire after layoffs, falling YouTube numbers, and a public meltdown targeting fellow conservative influencers like Candace Owens, Tucker Carlson, and Meghan Kelly. As younger right-wing audiences increasingly abandon establishment MAGA figures over the Iran war, the economy, and the Epstein files controversy, critics say Shapiro now looks trapped defending a failing political movement that’s rapidly turning on itself. Click below for premium Adam Mockler content 👉 https://www.youtube.com/@adammockler/join 👉 https://adammockler.com/subscribe JOIN THE COMMUNITY: Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/AdamMockler/ Discord: https://discord.gg/y9yzMU3Gff Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/adammockler/ Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/adammockler.com/ Twitter: https://x.com/adammocklerr/ TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@adammockler Contact: [e-mail] Business inquiries: [e-mail] Adam Mockler - Mockler Media LLC Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Behind every F-35 jet is a Canadian company, horizontal tails built in Winnipeg, engine sensors from Ottawa, and stealth composite panels crafted in Loonenberg to name just a few. Thanks to thousands of skilled Canadian workers, the F-35 aircraft is delivering unmatched capabilities for 20 allied nations around the world, and will generate more than $15.5 billion in industrial value for Canada. This ad is sponsored by the F-35 partner team, Lockheed Martin, BAE Systems, Northrop Grumman, and RTX. Learn more at www.f35.com slash Canada. So Ben Shapiro is crashing out online right now and spending a ton of time attacking his fellow mega influencers as new details emerge about why his media business, the Daily Wire, is crumbling.

Shapiro is laying off his staff in droves. He's spending a ton of time online attacking Nick Fuentes and Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens and a bunch of other people who are seeing their numbers grow. And he is begging Donald Trump to step in and save his failing business. Let's dive into this story because it exposes everything that is broken about Donald Trump. MAGA movement. Hey guys, I'm Mike Nellis. I'm filling in for my buddy Adam Mockler. Please be sure to subscribe to both our channels below. Adam and I are working hard to build independent media companies that can take on and expose MAGA hacks like Ben Shapiro. Help us do that by engaging with this video and subscribing to our channels. Thanks guys.

The ranting bag lady of the internet to explain that the daily wires numbers are down. Again, that alliance between the left and the woke right is totally real and it's active. This is why they are getting together to formulate stories. It is why they are repeating the same talking points. Now, Candice says that the Daily Wire's numbers are down because people don't want to be lectured. This is the teenage point of view from Candice and Megan and Tucker. They're all saying the same thing. They don't want to be lectured. Don't lecture me. Megan tweeted in March 2026, you're the coward Ben and your moral printing priggish lectures and holier than thou judgments are the reason you are losing fans and more than that friends at a record rate. All these people

are on the same script. They're all on the same script. And also, because as people who traffic and crap for sweet, sweet lucre, they would love to be spared the lecture. They don't want to be lectured as they grift. So they're going to do the same thing that, you know, a 13-year-old boy would do if quad doing naughty things on his iPad. They don't want to be lectured. Don't you lecture me? Well, it turns out sometimes in life, people need lectures in decency, in reason, and in truth.

So we can go ahead and stop right there so that I can add a little bit of context here. but this is not a video that you post if you are in a position of strength, if your company is doing well. Shapiro is, in my opinion, one of the least likable people in the Magnavoo. I don't understand how at any point millions of people were listening to this guy. I don't understand why the D.C. Republican establishment loves him so much. I don't understand why Donald Trump worships him in his stupid media company. But they are flailing right now, guys. By every available metric, Shapiro is bleeding YouTube subscribers.

They are bleeding engagement. and audience growth. They are spending so much money now to boost their numbers in order to save their advertisers from fleeing the platform that they have to be running negative. That's why they've laid off something like 40, 50, 60 percent in some estimates of their staff in Nashville. And I've met some of their staff because I've done some Daily Wire shows in the past. The staff are good, regular, decent human beings, even if I don't like where they work. I feel bad for them that they've lost their jobs. I don't want them to starve. But Shapiro is making a calculated error here. It's a a huge miscalculation. Because the reason he's attacking Tucker Carlson and Nick Fulence and the rest of

them is because their audiences are growing. Their influence is growing because they've turned on Trump over the war in Iran, over the state of the economy, over the Epstein files cover up, and Shapiro can't do that. Shapiro loves this war in Iran and he believes that it is just and he thinks it's in America's best interest with no actual justification for that. He has nothing to say about the cover up of billionaire petos and the Epstein files. He thinks the economy is doing well for the average American. And that delusion of him as a maga bootlicker has destroyed his reputation. And to a certain degree, Shapiro was a lot like Charlie Kirk in the sense that he was more popular with the DC establishment than he was with actual regular human beings.

The Daily Wire is supposed to be the next Fox News. It's supposed to overtake them. There's been speculation for years that Ben Shapiro wanted to buy Fox News and put a little quiver in his cap. And now it looks like the Murdoz are going to beat him instead with their digital platforms, because they're doing better at towing the line between being pro-Trump and anti-democrat and spreading conservative propaganda than this little weasel is. Now his company is falling apart.

And instead of spending time trying to fix that or coming up with a solution or coming up with a new idea to create some content that people might like, and he's whining on the internet. And he's complaining about Candace Owens. Oh, he doesn't like Candace because she left him. She left the Daily Wire to go off and do her own thing. He hates her for it. And I don't like Candace Owens and Nick Flentes or Tucker Carlson or the rest of them. But they're growing because they're critical of Donald Trump because his presidency is

failure. Because 65, 70% of Americans are united in the fact that they hate what this president is doing. And that's why Democrats are going to crush them in the midterms, provided that they don't find a way to cheat. But I think the election might be, the wave that's coming for them might be too big for them to be able to rig. So Shapiro is flailing here. And it's embarrassing. And I want to show you just how embarrassing it is. Because I want to play for you another clip of Shapiro using these canned bullshit insults against Megan Kelly and others. It's just really sad stuff. And then I'm going to read you out a new article that details why the Daily Wire is falling apart and just how desperate Shapiro is. That's done. The future, according to New York Magazine,

is Nick Fuentes confirmed Nazi stand and woman hater and man who will never be able to get a human woman pregnant through natural means. Or Tucker Carlson, confirmed anti-capitalist and Muslim apologists and victim of demon scratching. Or maybe Candice Owens. He confirmed slanderer of widows and connoisseur of French testicles. Or maybe Megan Kelly, click horrid and grandma Gryper over there. And see, right there, that's what passes for comedy on the right. He thinks calling Megan Kelly a whore is somehow like a big win for him. Okay. Like again, I don't like any of these people. The reason that on my channel, and by the way, make sure that you subscribe to Adam's channel below and my channel below if you're new to this content, because we need people to help

us build these independent media companies. But I spend a lot of time covering this Maga Civil War because these people are all hacks. And it is just indicative of how broken Donald Trump's mega movement is that they're all fighting with one another. Shapiro can't get away from Trump. Shapiro can't actually criticize the president for his corruption or the Epstein Files cover-up or the economy or the war in Iran because he's his business, the rest of his business would fall apart. And because to a certain degree he believes in this shit, which is embarrassing in its own right, given how bad it is for the American people. But all these insults, it's designed to make us think that Shapiro is clever and witty and smart and coming at it from a position of power. But it's kind of like when a schoolyard bully takes their first punch and they start to like whimper and scamper away. They want to act tough, but they're not tough.

All these insights probably came from chat GPT because Ben Shapiro doesn't have an original idea in his head at all. He is out of ideas. They've got nothing. They have no solutions to improve this country. They have no real ideology. Donald Trump has destroyed and exposed every single one of these people who have genuflected at the altar for him to call them their daddy, to call them their king. And now Shapiro is the latest one to do so.

And now their business is falling apart. Again, 40, 50% layoffs is significant. I'm a small business owner in my own right. I have a couple of businesses that I run. I've had to do layouts before. It sucks. It's a hard thing to do. But what I didn't do was go spend all my time on the internet whining about my competition.

No, I figured out a way to try to bring some of those people back to grow the business, to come up with new ideas. That's sometimes something you have to do when you're a small business owner. Shapiro should be doing that instead of coming up with these lame insults. And now let's take a minute and talk about why Shapiro's company is falling apart and get into the details of the incredibly stupid decisions that this company has made that's led to them having to let so many people go. This is from New York Magazine, breaking down why Ben Shapiro's media empire is collapsing. And I'm going to read through and react to this alongside with you guys. There was a time, quote, not very long ago when Ben Shapiro could reasonably call himself

the king of all conservative media. In 2020, as Drew Harwell at the Washington Post, note Shapiro's media company, The Daily Wire, quote, ranked as Facebook's top English publisher for three straight months. It's sarcastic news items on the then-house speaker Nancy Pelosi's salon visits, gain millions more views in the websites of Fox News, CNN, and the news. New York Times. Shapiro himself was ubiquitous, a right-wing star who had risen to fame before Donald Trump and seamlessly adapted the MAGA takeover of the Republican Party. He was a digital battering ram against the Democrats and the progressive left. He seemed guaranteed like Fox

itself for an indefinite run at the top of the media heap. That's all over now. The Daily Wire is instituting significant layoffs. Its website has emerged as one of the great traffic losers in conservative media. Meanwhile, the company has seen its subscriber base on YouTube start to shrink. There are Daily Wire YouTube videos that now, after a few days online, have less than 10,000 views, a catastrophically small number for a channel with more than 3 million subscribers. The top comments all mock the low view counts. And just for context for people, I don't have as big of an account as Ben Shapiro. I don't have as big of an account as my buddy Adam Mockler, which channel you're watching

this on right now, by the way, make sure you subscribe to both of us below. But I have about, I don't know, 160,000 and my videos are right now performing better than the Daily Wire videos. That's how big their drop-off has been. Like, I get over 10,000 on mine and I am far smaller and far newer to this than they are. And so they're in a huge, huge drop-off. And again, the reason is very simple. It's because people aren't buying what the Daily Wire is selling.

They're not buying this conservative propaganda on behalf of the Trump White House. They're sick of it. And Shapiro himself is such a grating asshole. And so are the other guys in their network, too, all right? I've debated Michael Knowles. People are sick and tired of his shtick. He's kind of like a poor man's version of a smart guy. And then Matt Walsh is one of the biggest racists on the planet.

He's an absolute, you know, miserable human being, in my opinion, just spreading propaganda on behalf of the right and this like vision of America they have that's all white. It's ridiculous. And I would just know for Walsh in particular, they love to talk about Walsh's numbers because they talk about how he's broken records for the documentaries that he's put out. But the reason he's broken those records is because they spend so much money. So when you see a video from the Daily Wire, it's because they're pumping money into it. What they're doing is they're basically robbing Peter to pay Paul. They're getting money from their advertisers for boner pills or God knows what else, and then they're spending all of that money, so they end up not having any revenue here.

That's the problem with the business. They haven't figured out a way to stay small and scrappy and independent, so they're relying on the Trump White House for their talking points, and they're relying on their conservative advertisers to prop up their whole business. Otherwise, they can't reach people. Let's go back to the article. If a variety of poor business decisions can be blamed in part for the Daily Wire's downfall, ill-fated investments in feature films, an epic fantasy series, and,

peculiar merchandise, the greater story is the collapse of Shapiro's constituency, especially among the young media consumers who once fueled the Daily Wire's runaway growth. And I do want to note, they've spent a ton of money on trying to build feature films. They've hired like actors that have been canceled from DC, or excuse me, from Hollywood. And it's been an absolute disaster for them. They spent so much money paying for off these people. They tried to create like a fantasy series where they pumped so much money into it. It's really, really strange stuff. And it's just, they got too big for their britches. At one point earlier last year, Ben Shapiro was talking about how the Daily Wire was going to take over DC comics, that they were going to start building out the new DC movie universe.

That's how insane this was. They wanted to be making Batman movies and Green Lantern. Now they're laying off 40, 50% of their staff. There are two realities to Shapiro conservatism in 2026. It retains a significant foothold among Republican elites, and it is fast being rejected by the future grassroots of the party. Again, Shapiro has always been somebody who is beloved by the DC establishment because he will prop up. whatever they want. He is their version of what a, you know, online conservative should look like. And unfortunately, he's getting eaten alive by Nick Fuentes and Tucker Carlson and others who have

separated themselves from that establishment. Whether I like them or not, which is really irrelevant here. That's what's happening. Shapiro, who is an Orthodox Jew is fiercely pro-Israel. His support for Israel and hatred of the Palestinian cause are issues that define him as a public political figure. He is an unequivocal backer of Netanyahu's Israel and a committed conventional neoconservative. He has been predictably thrilled by Trump's war against Iran, also a fiscal libertarian and a social conservative. Shapiro once sat at the happy medium of the Republican voter and could claim at least in the 2010s, then he understood beating heart of campus conservatism. I'm not sure that was ever really true, to be honest with you. I feel like it's just part of the legend they spread. No longer, the anti-Israel anti-Semitic groepers led by Nick Flentes are in ascendance.

Candace Owens, who once worked with Shapiro with the Daily Wire, now boasts a YouTube channel that's larger than his, where she's indulged in anti-Israel conspiracy theories ward with Charlie Kirk's Widow and even broken with Trump without suffering any financial consequences. Beyond Owens and Fuentes, Tucker Carlson and Megan Kelly have found massive audiences with their own brand of conspiratorial commentary that marries Israel skepticism and isolationist advocacy. Carlson and Kelly have both loudly opposed the war in Iran. Trump now reviles them, and neither Xbox talking head is back down. Carlson seems to be moving on from Trump completely. And that's basically it. Nick Fuentes has lost the argument, guys. He's lost the debate. He aligned himself with Trump in an effort to get access

to the White House and be more influential and get access to all kinds of with money and favors and things that he wants. He wanted to get invited to the White House, like every little hack inside the MAGA movement. And now he's lost the debate because Trump is such a miserable failed president. Maybe people would still be buying Ben Shapiro in the Daily Wires bullshit if the economy was good,

if they could get a good paying job, if they could afford to put food on the table. But they can't do that right now. Gas is $6 and so they see right through Shapiro's bullshit. And Shapiro is frankly a lot like Donald Trump in the sense that he's much better as an opposition voice. It's easy for him and guys like Donald Trump and all the others throughout the cabinet to sit on the outside and bitch and moan about what Joe Biden is doing or what the Democratic Party is or isn't doing. But they don't have any real ideas for the future.

It's just a party purely of racism, hate, and grievance. They have nothing deeper than that. And it's so obvious when they're in power because all that they know how to do is what, hawk this stupid ballroom, spend a billion and a half dollars to make the January 6th insurrectionist millionaires which Donald Trump is doing today while they wage a war in Iran. they have no moral clarity, no backbone, no ideas, nothing. And that's why we can never allow them to get into power again because they're just such hacks. Back to the article, as the recent state elections in Indiana show, Republicans who break with Trump can still suffer. He remains godly among the maga faithful. It appears to be seen if Carlson or Owens project have an electoral future. What is clear, however, is that there's an online

constituency for what they do, whereas Shapiro will have an expiration date. Gen Z conservatives have no great affection for Israel. In the great pretend, this can be chalked up to Jew hatred. But the story is far more complicated among the millions of young right-leaning voters who simply don't understand how Trump could campaign on America first while standing up for a foreign policy that is clearly subservient to the whims of the Netanyahu government. In 2025, a pundit named Netanyahu would be dictating the terms of an Iran bombing campaign to Trump might have been accused of trafficking in anti-Semitic tropes. Instead, we're learning that's essentially what happened. And that is, by the way, the reality of this. The American government has been dog-walked by BB Netanyahu into this war. Lindsay Graham literally flew to Tel Aviv to get talking points to sell Trump on it, which is absolutely crazy.

And the fact that Ben Shapiro and the Daily Wire can admit that is hurting their credibility with their base, hurting their credibility with all Americans because about 70, 80 percent of us are opposed to this war. I think it's really aggressively stupid. And I want to add one more thing, too, because they mentioned the state elections in Indiana. Trump is purging the party right now of anybody who has stood up to him on anything. Today is Tuesday, the day that I'm shooting this, it is the primary election in Kentucky. And if you're watching this after, I don't know if Thomas Massey's going to win or not.

But the fact that they've spent $35 million, the most. in history in a House primary to try to defeat Thomas Massey because he stood up to Trump on the Epstein files to expose petos is disgusting. But that's what happens when you oppose Trump. He will do anything he can't afford you. And Shapiro is so afraid of Donald Trump. He doesn't want to get outside of that glow. And now he's trapped there because he's ruined his credibility elsewhere.

So he has nowhere else to go but continue to suckle at Donald Trump's teeth. I don't know how else to describe that as disgusting as that image is. Somebody go use an AI generator to make that image if you want. You'd be a maskist if you did. I'm going to scroll down just a little bit more because I want to get to the end here. In the second Trump term, conventional conservatives are undoubtedly the power brokers, and they'll have another two and a half years to impose their will on the country and the rest of the world. That is, until Democrats win the midterms in November and get one hand back on the wheel.

It'll be harder for them to enact their agenda when Democrats control Congress. Attempted regime change in Iran and Venezuela were great neo-conservative projects. Marco Rubio might be the most important official in the Trump cabinet, and there are signs he's displacing JD Vance as the frontrunner for the 2028 nomination. Who, though, will actually own the future? What will the GOP look like in 10 or 20 years? Will your prototypical Republican be a Shapiro Republican, libertarian and economics, interventionist on foreign policy,

and extremely pro-Israel? Or will they look different? Will they be closer to a Tucker Carlson, or an Owens or a Fuentes? The collapse of the Daily Wire can be seen as a dire warning for traditional Republicans. Young conservatives are now looking on as the Iran war rapidly devolves into a quagmire

and seeing all the damage it is rot. They view this as an outgrowth of Israeli foreign policy and they don't like it. In a post-Trump future, They'll have little desire to repeat these interventions like the Rockefeller Republicans of Yore, the Shapiro Republican could go extinct entirely. And here's the thing, guys. I don't think that a Shapiro Republican actually exists.

I think that there are people who have changing ideologies every single day. And the reason these stories are worth covering and are difficult to track is because we are entering a period of massive change in American politics. The Trump era, either because he's going to die in office from old age or dementia or whatever the hell's going on with his hands and his ankles, or he's going to leave office in 2028 at the end of his term. I don't believe he'll get a third term, guys. I'm not worried about it, but I don't think he'll get a third term. We're going to get a jump ball for the future of this country. All right, we're going to have a Democratic Party primary that will establish the future of the Democratic primary,

which is an institution that needs to be changed and needs to get stronger and needs to get more aggressive in how it uses power to help the American people. And then we are going to watch the Republican Party change. And hey, maybe establishment Republicans like Ben Shapiro will get one hand back on the wheel and they'll be able to do whatever kind of Rockefeller-ish Republican light they want to do, or somebody like Nick Flentes or somebody like Tucker Carlson, they're going to be the ones who drive the vote forward in the Republican Party and change it. If I had to guess, the Republican Party is going to veer wildly to the right and become far more extreme.

If you think Donald Trump is the bottom, it's not. There are worse people out there that could be president of the United States. And so we have to acknowledge that in this moment, there's tremendous change happening in the country. And it's why, and I'm going to end it here, we need more independent voices. Because what's happening in both political parties right now is that the Republicans have their hacks that sell for them that are being paid by MAGA Inc, being paid by these billionaires. You talk about Shapiro, Benny Johnson, Tim Pool, all these others. And then on the Democratic Party side, they have their folks too. And I'm not going to sit here and call people out.

But we need more creators that are independent that are not being paid by the Democratic Party or the Republican Party. You can be aligned with one or the other. I'm a proud card-carrying Democrat. I voted Democrat my entire life. I've been a Democratic strategist my entire career. I'm going to keep fighting and being a member of this party because I believe it is the last best hope for democracy and decency in this country. But it is not a perfect institution, not at all. And I'm going to keep calling it out. And so what I love about Adam, since we're on his channel here, I'm going to talk about him for a second, is he's not taking funding from the billionaire class.

He's not taking money from the Democratic Party. Nobody's paying that 23-year-old guy to build up this. You guys are the ones to support him, just like my subscribers help and support me on Substack and YouTube and elsewhere. And the more that we have independent voices that are removed from the DC establishment, that are willing to tell you the truth about what they're seeing and be honest with you, the better this country will get. That's true on the Republican Party side, too. I would much rather debate somebody with some fresh ideas, with some actual integrity, even if I disagree with them, then just another maga hat.

We all saw Adam destroy Scott Jennings a few weeks ago on CNN. The reason that he can do that with such ease is that Jennings doesn't believe in anything. He's being paid to say the White House's talking points on TV than a guy like Adam who has some real conviction can destroy him. This country will be better. If we have more independent media companies and voices out there, they're doing it. And that's why I hope that the lesson you take from the fall of the Daily Wire and this crash out by Ben Shapiro is to support more independent content creators, whoever they are. And so I'll end the video by saying, please make sure that you subscribe to my channel,

to Adam's channel, support the work that he's doing. We both accept memberships on YouTube if you want to support the work that we're doing financially to help fund this so that we're funded by you guys and not by other people. Make sure that you engage with this video to help it go viral and make sure that other people get a chance to see it. And then please do us both a favor. There's that little bell icon down there. Make sure you smash that bell icon so you get an update the next time, Adam posts a video.

I post a video. Thank you guys so much for watching the video.