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Hello, and welcome back to Tomorrow Will Be Worse!
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As always on Wednesdays, I bring you the work of the incredible Tina Nguyen, Puck’s very own MAGA whisperer. Tina has been telling me about this story for a couple weeks now, so I’m especially excited to bring it to you, because it’s a wild one. I know I’ve been watching Ben Shapiro—he of WAP fame—build out the Daily Wire, thinking, Oh, it’s just a fringe, conservative publication that mostly circulates on Facebook.
Wow, was I wrong. Turns out that Shapiro and his hilariously-named business partner Jeremy Boreing have built a media empire that has nearly double the revenue of Axios. You read that right: double. In part, that’s because The Daily Wire is not just angry, news-adjacent content anymore. It has taken conservatives’ anger about wokeness and monetized every aspect of it—from men’s razor blades to children’s entertainment. (They’ve even poached talent from Disney.)
Anyway, I don’t want to give too much away and will let you read this excellent piece of reporting yourself. Suffice it to say that if Michael Jordan’s adage that “Republicans buy sneakers, too” was true in the ‘90s, that market logic is equally, if not more, powerful today.
Enjoy? In the meantime, stay tuned for more Ukraine content from me, coming soon. Good night. Tomorrow will be worse.
Julia
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The Chip & Joanna of MAGA America? |
Ben Shapiro and Jeremy Boreing have gone from millennial alt-right content jockeys to full-blown influencers to, truly, mini-kingpins of a billion-dollar MAGA D.T.C. media business. Is the only thing that can stop them their own ambition? |
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At its core, the right-wing political-media industrial complex has often been a money pit, largely fueled by billionaire Koch-types, nonprofits, wealthy donors, vitamin supplements and pillow sales. Which is to say The Daily Wire, the right-wing media entity founded by Ben Shapiro and Jeremy Boreing in 2015, is that rare thing—an actual growth company that, unlike The Lincoln Project or Independent Journal Review or Breitbart, has the discipline to not light its success on fire.
Ever since its launch, The Daily Wire has sought to combine the culture war ethos of Fox News with the millennial sensibility of the online creator economy. Its content spans politics, sports, and culture, but at its core, it thrives on the notion that everyone else is promoting, secretly or openly, a woke liberal agenda—and that only they are the alternative. I first spoke to Boreing, a former Hollywood director, in 2018 for Vanity Fair, around the time that “The Ben Shapiro Show”became one of the most downloaded podcasts in the country. Back then, I was struck by how professionalized The Daily Wire was in comparison to its online competitors; crisp audio, high-end production design; a soundstage that looked more like a cable news set than a typical podcasting studio... |
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FOUR STORIES WE'RE TALKING ABOUT |
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Zaslav’s Disappearing Act |
WBD C.E.O.’s culling of HBO Max properties makes sense to Wall Street, but to not creators. |
JULIA ALEXANDER |
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