Today, Explained - The fall of Ben Shapiro

Episode Date: May 28, 2026

Ben Shapiro used to be the leading voice in MAGA media. His downfall tells a bigger story of chaos and shifting allegiances in the conservative media world. This episode was produced by Miles Bryan, edited by Jolie Myers, fact-checked by Gabriel Dunatov, engineered by David Tatasciore and Bridger Dunnagan, and hosted by Noel King. Commentator Ben Shapiro at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Argentina. Photo by Tomas Cuesta/Getty Images. Listen to Today, Explained ad-free by becoming a Vox Member: vox.com/members. New Vox members get $20 off their membership right now. Transcript at ⁠vox.com/today-explained-podcast.⁠ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

In the span of a decade, Ben Shapiro built the Daily Wire into a conservative media empire. He produced hit podcasts that bit at liberal excesses and documentaries and lectures about the founders, the genders, the Gospels. He peddled polos, hats, candles, provided a home for de-platformed conservative stars like Matt Walsh, and minted stars like Candice Owens. Let's put a pin in that. The Daily Wire even has kids programming, a judgmental puppet named Zoodles. Zoodles. Zoodoo! Who shares Shapiro's load-bearing eyebrows.

This year, though, the empire showed signs of collapse. The Daily Wire's YouTube videos are down from millions of views to the low-five figures. Web traffic is plummeting. And recently, Shapiro laid off 13% of his employees. Asked by the Washington Post, what had happened? Shapiro accused other conservatives of click-horring by embracing radical Islam, theorizing about the evils of Winston Churchill and mocking the widow of Charlie Kirk. The kids still got it.

On today, explained, the fall of Ben Shapiro. If you or any of your friends get pregnant, that is generally not having anything to do with... Today explained, per se. So I'm confused as to why I would want you to force anything. Drew Harwell tech reporter Washington Post writes about MAGA media and influencers, including recently, one Ben Shapiro. Ben Shapiro matters because he is a symbol of the changing conservative media landscape. Like, he was the king of MAGA Media online for a number of years. You're not being polite to the pronouns. Disrespect.

Okay, forget about the disrespect. Facts don't care about your feelings. Do you really think Donald Trump respects the rule of law? I mean, if somebody... No, but I think the Constitution itself is a pretty damn durable document, thank God. There's some whores in this house. There's some whores in this house. There's some whores in this house.

It continues along these lines. And yet, he has fallen. so has the media movement around him. Ben Shapiro was effectively the final boss of the pro-Risrael lobby, and we're now watching him come undone in real time. It really has shown how much the MAGA movement has been undermined in recent years and how much, you know, the Trump star has fallen, but also this kind of classic MAGA media energy has changed too.

All right, for people who are not familiar, who is this guy? Who is Ben Shapiro? Ten years ago, Ben Shapiro came on the scene, and he was this conservative digital media, like, wonderkind. Hi, I'm Ben Shapiro, and this is Reality Check. Ben Shapiro is editor-at-large at brightbark.com. So why am I off the rails, Mr. Shapiro? He was, you know, this right-wing pundit.

He was coming up at a time where he wasn't really traditional conservatism, like, you know, small business, chamber of commerce. He represented this new wave of MAGA conservatism that was more, more about, you know, winning the, quote-unquote, the culture wars, right? Ben Shapiro just destroyed this woke student with simple logic. The answer is that in 99.8%, 99.9% of cases, you absolutely congender somebody based on looking at them. Like, really? He wasn't competing in the same debates that the conservative journals of the time were talking about.

He wasn't talking about tax codes. You know, he was talking about, like, the stupid things that the libs were doing, you know, the dark times that wokeness was bringing for the country. Coca-Cola has now decided that they are going to force their employees to take anti-racism training

with the excreble Robin DeAngelo. And he was making a lot of money from it, right? He was putting out this viral chum that was constantly doing big numbers on Facebook, making a ton of money for not just him, but for The Daily Wire, which he co-founded.

That was this like blog, media property. and the Daily Wire, you know, with his help, became like the biggest publisher on Facebook for many months, beating out, you know, CNN, Fox, New York Times. It just became this unstoppable property at the time. So when does Daily Wire hit its peak? I would say probably about 2020. That was the year when the Daily Wire was consistently month after month becoming the top publisher on Facebook. That was their peak Facebook posting time. their peak ad revenue time.

They were making $100 million or more a year, which is completely insane. Even now, for what was essentially a blog, even in conservative media, they were a huge outlier. And they were riding so high and they were making so much money that for a time it was like

they didn't really even know what to do with the money. They were this blog that had become this giant media empire. And so they started kind of thrashing in a lot of different directions and exploring a lot of different ways to spend. They had Ben Shapiro. There was one other important guy in the operation named Jeremy Boring, who was this, basically

this theater kid. My friend, co-founder, co-CEOO, and most importantly, the God King of the Daily Wire, Jeremy Boring, moved to L.A. as a young man with stars in his eyes 20 years ago and now. And we want our movies to be defined less by what they're about and more what they aren't about, which is left-wing sucker punches and left-wing propaganda. You know, his big push was to take the anti-woke model they had been successful at in their blogging on Facebook and really make this alternate Hollywood and make all of these different media properties that were anti-woke and satirical and anti-left.

And so, you know, they started making movies. They started like going into Hollywood and making these big feature films that they would put into theaters, movies like, lady ballers. A guy can become a girl with no physical changes at all. Oh, that's called Jinder's living. So I can be a woman on the court and a man in the bedroom, I can't believe it. Nice. And am I racist that were like feature film length, you know, documentary satires. Am I racist? I would really appreciate it if you left. I'm trying to learn. I'm on this journey. Can you please leave? Tell me about the Game of Thrones knockoff? Oh yeah. So this is my favorite

of their ventures because it was so it was insane even to the people inside the company. It was a fantasy series, seven episodes series kind of loosely based off of Game of Thrones. It was called the Penn Dragon Cycle, Rise of the Merlin.

They say Merlin slewes 70 men with his own hands. This is where it begins. And they flew out all of these actors. Some of them were conservative bloggers at Daily Wire. They flew them out to places like Italy and Hungary. They filmed on location for this, you know, knockoff

fantasy in the time of, you know, Merlin and swords and ladies and furs. And they spent, you know, roughly $3 million an episode to make this show. They had, they had huge special effects budgets. They had swords clanging and they had production diaries. All of this stuff that you would never imagine from, like, a blog that was making fun of, you know, Nancy, Pelosi and blue hair liberals and all this stuff. But they just felt like, hey, we have the money. Let's build something where we can actually make even more money on the other side of it. But this show was completely a failure on basically every metric.

Nobody watched it, right? You had to subscribe to the Daily Wire Plus. There was no discussion about it. It was just a complete money pit. What was it like, Marlon, to be alone? And even on their YouTube, if you go onto the Pinn-Dragon cycle YouTube, it's gotten the low hundreds. of subscribers. So it was just a real, real loss. All right. So Ben Shapiro builds a media empire, makes some foolish decisions, make some very

smart ones, though. And then what happened? Yeah, so I think the biggest change point was the October 7th attacks in Israel. You know, for a time before that, the conservative movement was heavily pro-Israel, you know, by default. And Ben Shapiro was a proud cheerleader of that because he's a practicing Jew. He wears a yarmulka. He's very proud. out of his Jewish heritage. He's very openly pro-Israel. And yet that moment became a huge fracture point for MAGA, definitely MAGA media online, because you had the traditional, you know, conservatives who were staunchly pro-Israel. Israel has been actually extraordinarily meticulous in the pursuit of an incredibly difficult urban war. But then you had this rising faction that

was defined by some people who were just sort of critical of Israel. And then, you know, a side of it that was openly anti-Semitic. And you had these people like Candace Owens who shares a lot of anti-Semitic conspiracy theories and who, for a time, was a rising star at The Daily Wire. She got her fame in Ben Shapiro's organization, but then left it after October 7th because her and Ben Shapiro were constantly fighting over these issues. I truly believe that the Zionist ideology is an evil. It's an evil because it's a supremacist ideology that says you can trample. over anybody's rights as long as it is like, you know, you serve Israel. So there was just this bigger debate happening that was roiling MAGA, and the Daily Wire

became a microcosm of it because you had these two different conservative factions fighting over where MAGA should go to next. We're talking because Ben Shapiro's company is failing. And so the question is, is the company failing because the company, as a company, made bad business decisions? Or is the company failing because conservatives do not like the way that Ben Shapiro talks about Israel? And they've said, eh, we're going to go elsewhere. I think it's a little bit of both, honestly, you know, they were pouring a lot of money into bad business decisions. They were gaining less money because their business model was changing. They couldn't just make $100 million on Facebook anymore. Facebook was changing their algorithm, shunting traffic in other ways. And a lot of the

political energy they had was also fading. You know, this pro-true. Trump reflexive support was changing. And meanwhile, you know, they didn't have the political high ground for a lot of their fans anymore. A lot of their fans were moving to these independent creators who were more likely to say what they wanted to hear. And it was just kind of a perfect storm for them. So what's Ben Shapiro's future, which was once never in doubt. What does it look like now? When you go into Ben Shapiro's social media, you don't see a lot of that confidence.

energy that you saw five years ago. I look on his TikTok and his Instagram. His short videos really give this whiff of desperation. He's doing all of the stuff that like a TikToker would do, but he doesn't really, he doesn't seem to really enjoy it as much. All righty, folks, today we're going to go through some more woke TikToks at the behest of my producers. Oh no, why is Lizzo being by a Lubu?

You know, it's like the culture war is still happening. but he's kind of flailing to regain that relevance that he had. And so I just don't think there's enough propulsion there to keep him at the center of these maggot conversations anymore. Drew Harwell of the Washington Post. Maybe it was October 7th that alienated Shapiro from his audience and vice versa. But our next guest says there was another turning point. The assassination.

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MyPay, SpotMe, and Travel Perks, go to chime.com slash disclosures. This suggests that there's an awful lot of, um, today explained. My name is Ryan Broderick, and I write the Garbage Day newsletter, and I host the Panic World podcast. You wrote an essay about Ben Shapiro and his recent troubles. It included these wonderful lines. The age-old problem with working at the racism factory.

They eventually make a new racism. that includes you. What are you talking about? Well, it was sort of a pithy way to describe what I think is happening to Ben Shapiro right now, which is that he's found himself on the wrong side of a far right vibe shift that's happening. So the question of, you know, should American conservative support Israel, I think has quickly become the deciding factor in, you know, canonizing the new wave of MAGA or even post-Maga conservatism in America. There's a lot of creators on one side who say we should not be involved with Israel. They say that largely for anti-Semitic purposes, but also because they're xenophobic and isolationists. But they sort of know that this is a red line that they can go across.

And Ben Shapiro cannot follow them there because he is an Orthodox Jew who supports Israel and is a fairly standard conservative, all things considered. And so this is among the many other problems that Shapiro is having right now in trying to kind of hold his digital media empire together. All right. So Ben Shapiro's on one side. As you said, he is unlikely to ever turn his back on Israel. On the other side are people who are going hard at Israel and have been since approximately, I don't know, October 8th, maybe 2023. Who are they? Who are the players here? So the biggest one is Nick Fuentes. Israel does whatever it wants and nobody seems to be able to stop them. He is the de facto leader of this far-right splinter cell movement, the Groyper's.

And he's got a live stream that he's on every single day. And he is just the most, you know, lowest of the low, vile kind of far-right personality you could imagine. I don't mean to perpetuate any anti-Semitic tropes. But doesn't that seem to imply? Wouldn't that tend to imply that Israel controls the whole world? But you also have more and more creators, I think, sensing this vibe shift and moving towards him. So Candice Owens was going so far as to even claim that Charlie Kirk was killed by Mossad. Truth is that Charlie was under immense pressure and he was facing financial threats over his shifting stance on Israel.

You also have Tucker Carlson, Megan Kelly. A lot of these people, I was sort of put in the camp of, you know, pretty run-of-the-mill conservative commentators who understand that Trump is not popular, and so they're trying to, like, kind of feel out new territory there. I don't owe anybody my never-ending support. I will be open-minded to the facts as they develop. A lot has happened with Israel. And then you also have Manosphere guys like Tim Dillon, who have even started to kind of go against Israel.

So it is this thing that is happening, and, you know, social media, I think, always, prioritizes the newest most taboo idea. And so this would be a new taboo that has been discovered by far-right commentators. Okay. So in that camp of people, you have critics of Israel that run the gamut from Candace Owens, who seems kind of nutty to Megan Kelly, who often, I don't know, seems pretty straight. What do they all have in common? Is it just their criticism of Israel? No, my read on this is that it all stems from Charlie Kirk, actually. Oh. Yeah, the MAGA movement is not one movement. It is not one ideology. The 2024 winning coalition was this weird mismatch of far-right live streamers,

Manosphere podcasters, neoconservatives, and the, you know, the TPUSA, Charlie Kirk, kind of middle-of-the-road MAGA people. What is so important to our country is to find our disagreements respectfully, because when people stop talking, that's when violence happens. And I think Charlie Kirk was very instrumental in holding a lot of this together, if only because it seemed like, you know, to them at least, that he was possibly a replacement for Trump. You know, I've read into it as like the MAGA movement was trying to homegrow their own

version of Trump. Charlie Kirk may have been that figure. He dies and the whole thing starts to fall apart. And I have to give, unfortunately, some credit to Nick Fuentes here who has always hated Charlie Kirk. So Charlie Kirk is killed. And then these alliances form and they fracture and they reform and they refracture. What events of the last, say, eight months do we place in the, okay, this is a post-Charlie Kirk's assassination moment? Well, it's a lot of reading the tea leaves of online discourse, I would say. But you know when the movement is working, when they're all falling in lockstep with one another.

Huh. And so, you know, Sydney's Sweeney's jeans would be a good example of the, or Cracker Barrel, right? Cracker Barrel says it is ditching its new logo after a wave of harsh back. backlash from customers. Okay, we have brand new reaction now from President Trump, who has had enough of the woke mob going after Sidney-Sweeney. They've been able to get this talking point to surface out of their DMs and into the general consciousness. And if you look back, you know, at the months immediately after Charlie Kirk's murder, that hasn't really been happening the same way. They're not really working together. They're fighting with each other a lot. And they're also

telling on each other. I mean, these people are very messy. So like even as we speak, Ashley St. Clair is on TikTok sharing secrets from inside the MAGA movement and going on Hassan Piker's stream. It seems strange when I, when I start the conversation by saying like, oh, this is Elon Musk baby mama. Yeah. Yeah. I know. You're more than that. You are also a right wing reactionary conservative influencer. No, not anymore.

You used to be. And so all these guys are sort of unfollowing each other and fighting with each other. And it's a lot of right-wingers who are super dependent on internet attention and monetizing internet attention. And they're really, really nervous about the internet landscape the same way all digital media publishers are. I think it's having a negative impact on the stuffiest of the digital media era people. And Ben Shapiro is the stuffiest. Okay, you're going to call him stuffy, but there is something else that I've been thinking about a lot, which is Ben Shapiro. when he started out, he was so young, he has such a baby face. And it was like this young man that appealed to people who were much older because he was super well-spoken and he was pugnacious. And now, and we talked about this in the first half of the show, he just sort of seems old. He seems like he doesn't really know what he should be doing on TikTok. He seems like he doesn't really know who in the culture is relevant anymore. You could make the same argument about Tucker Carlson, even though he's surviving. But he

openly seems scared of Nick Fuentes. Do you think that this is that the guys that we were used to are now the old guys and they know it and the young guys that are coming after them are, I don't know, maybe worse, maybe more willing to say what 20-somethings these days want to hear? Like, where does age play into this? So I would say that Ben Shapiro from the very beginning was much better at talking to old people than talking to young people. And, you know, it seems like what he was doing was, you know, creating a digital media company that looked hip and cool to old people who would then give him money and he would spend that money on advertising and sort of dominate Facebook and sort of created this flywheel that allowed him to grow pretty quickly. A lot of the weird preoccupations the Daily Wire has had with, like, dominating Hollywood, for instance, feel very old to me. Like it just feels like like a like an 80 year old conservative's fever dream of what the internet could be, right? Like just very strange stuff. And I think it's only gotten stranger in the last year or two because it also feels like the Trump movement has kind of moved beyond the need for someone like Ben Shapiro. Like in the era of Doge and Prada 20205 and, you know, ICE occupations and the J.D. Vance AI stuff.

Like none of it feels like Ben Shapiro is really in the mix anymore. Do you think we're going to look back in a few years and miss Ben Shapiro for his sort of sobriety? Yeah, okay. Okay, tell me where we're headed. No, I think that's exactly right. I think when digital publishers on the right in the early 2010s began to really lean into the Internet, they inadvertently connected American conservatism, and by extension, like global conservatism, with the sea changes and tides of internet discourse.

And that's always going to go towards the thing that feels the most dangerous and the most taboo, because that's what's most exciting on social media. And so there is really no incentive. If you have, if you have like every major conservative figure in America making money directly from the internet, there's no real incentive for them to become more moderate, right? Like they're just going to, like, they're going to be hitting themselves in the face with hammers and smoking meth and, you know, attacking people on the street and going completely full white nationalists, no regard to anything race science, substack, nonsense. Like, it's just, and we're already seeing this. The days of Prager University or the Daily Wire are trying to do like a sensible conservatives reaction to Cardi B is,

whoop or whatever is just like not going to come back. Bring a bucket and a mop. So this suggests that there's an awful lot of, not to be too graphic, but some sort of medical discharge that's happening here. Right, a lot too much because that's a symptom of something that is not going great. Bless.

Ryan Broderick, Garbage Day, Panic World, Miles Bryan, producer, Jolie Myers, editor, Gabriel Dunnettov, check the facts, David Tadishore and Bridger Dunnigan on the mix. I'm Noil King. It's today Explained.