Daily Wire Makes Its Own Nuclear Deal

When Mat Nuclear was 15 years old, he realized he really liked debating vegans. 

He found them on the internet. First, it was on Discord. Then he took to TikTok and became one of the most feared debaters on social media. 

Next came Jubilee. Nuclear walked into “Surrounded,” Jubilee’s viral video series that throws one combatant to the wolves in a roundtable debate, and faced off against Amanda Seales, a self-proclaimed black radical who came armed with the usual talking points on systemic racism and reparations. 

“I debated Amanda Seales,” Nuclear told The Daily Wire, “and I destroyed her.” 

He pressed her on whether doling out $50,000 reparations checks would actually move the needle on median black household income. He brought up the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 to puncture her tidy narrative that U.S. history runs in only one racist direction.

“That’s when my career kicked off,” Nuclear explained. Clips of the 18-year-old debater soon went viral on social media. Then Charlie Kirk called. So did Ben Shapiro.

“I’m really impressed,” Shapiro said at the time. “It’s really rare that I bring somebody from your age-range on the show, so again, well done.”

Now, Nuclear starts a new chapter at The Daily Wire.

The teenage debate phenom will be streaming live every night of the week, debating leftists on TikTok about the biggest arguments in politics and culture. He promises call-ins and “a lot of chaos” while debating “the most important and controversial issues in America.”

“I love having controversial conversations and debates. You can expect that from my show 100,000 percent,” Nuclear said. “It’s going to be really fun, really epic.”

The Nuclear Reaction starts tonight ☢️????

Meet The Daily Wire’s newest talent, @MatNuclear!

Part reaction, part debate, part broadcast from the ruins of rationality — Mat’s getting into it all.

Watch tonight on YouTube at 6PM, plus his guest appearance on Friendly Fire???? pic.twitter.com/AkGPcbHbWh

— Daily Wire (@realDailyWire) June 17, 2026

Nuclear says his role models are great thinkers like Thomas Sowell, Ben Carson, Clarence Thomas, and Shapiro.

He fondly recalls the first Shapiro clip he ever watched — the one where Shapiro took apart transgender-identifying man Caitlyn Jenner and kept his cool even when Jenner threatened to beat him up. 

“That guy is great,” Nuclear remembers thinking. “He’s really smart, and he’s destroying these people.” 

Nuclear was not driven to the Right by any lofty manifesto, he says. It was from seeing clips like these while watching leftists flounder on easy questions.

“What really convinced me,” he says, “was when I saw that leftists didn’t know what a woman was.”

Nuclear’s whole game is refusing to let them squirm away from the truth. His strategy is to draw back the conversation to what actually happened, take down the straw man by articulating his side of the story, and ask tough questions that expose the double standard. 

And he’s convinced it works, especially on people his own age — who are not, he insists, the lazy cynics as older generations imagine, but a generation that will move the moment someone hands them a clean argument instead of a condescending lecture.

“I think the way to convince young people is to convince them that this is the rational position. This is the normal position,” Nuclear said.

When he’s off camera, Nuclear can be found reading and researching — the key to being a good debater is to do the homework. He’s also, by his own account, a fairly normal 19-year-old: he swims, hikes, and logs quite a few hours on video games.

Nuclear is excited to start his new chapter at The Daily Wire, and you can find him on Instagram, X, YouTube, and TikTok, where his episodes will stream daily, with the live shows landing on The Daily Wire immediately after.