The Daily Wire Responds To The Haters Rooting For Its Death

Sometimes we are the news here at the Daily Wire.

Over the past few weeks, the Daily Wire has been the subject of a veritable cornucopia of hit pieces. There was one from the Washington Post, one from Puck, and finally an especially ridiculous one from the stellar journalists at New York Magazine, who plagiarized their hit piece from the Washington Post.

So much high-level journalism.

New York Magazine claims “there was a time when Ben Shapiro could reasonably call himself the king of all conservative media.”

I don’t remember that time, but it sounds cool.

“That’s all over now. The Daily Wire is instituting significant layoffs,” they continued.

According to New York Magazine, the future of conservatism isn’t traditional conservatism; free markets, equal rights before the law, checks and balances, and traditional virtue. That’s done.

The future, according to New York Magazine, is Nick Fuentes, confirmed Nazistan and woman-hater, and a man who will never be able to get a human woman pregnant through natural means.

Or Tucker Carlson, confirmed anti-capitalist and Muslim apologist and victim of demon-scratching. Or maybe Candace Owens, the confirmed slanderer of widows and connoisseur of French testicles. Or maybe Megyn Kelly, clickwhore and Grandma Groyper.

New York Magazine writes, “The collapse of the Daily Wire can be seen as a dire warning for traditional Republicans. … 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.”

The polling data shows that is wrong. The positions we take here on the show reflect the broad majority of Republicans. That’s just the reality.

But I figured that we should address all of this head-on. It’s true; the Daily Wire has laid off roughly 13% of our workforce since the beginning of the year.

It really sucked. It was truly sad because all those people are great, and any time you lay people off, it really sucks. It’s tough. It’s bad for them; it’s bad for us. And I’m personally working to find other places of employment for as many of these people as I possibly can, because everybody we let go deserves a job somewhere else; they’re great folks.

But for our critics, this was all cause for massive celebration, the joyful popping of the corks. (Or maybe, in the case of Nick Fuentes, a victory celebration with catboys and lubricant.)

We’re honored by the attention. Here’s the thing: People only tend to write stories like this about major American institutions, such as “Amazon dumps people” or “The Washington Post dumps people.” That’s a big story.

Thank God we are a major American institution. According to Podtrac, our podcast reaches 41 million people per month. We’re ranked sixth globally. We have a total of 11 shows. Paramount, for example, is ranked fourth globally, according to that same chart. They have 145 shows.

So on a per-capita basis, we’re killing it. We are responsible for the two most successful conservative documentaries in history, “Am I Racist?” and “What Is a Woman?” Just this week, Vice President JD Vance was quoting our reporting in his fraud investigations, and our White House correspondent, Mary Margaret Olohan, was in the press room asking questions.

There’s no national media coverage if a Candace Owens producer and her manager quit, or if Megyn Kelly’s YouTube account starts shedding tens of thousands of subscribers a month, or if Tucker Carlson’s traffic is disproportionately drawn from Pakistan.

Those are all things that have actually happened, but nobody really cared very much because while those people have significant audience numbers, they don’t have any real institutional influence. They are not institutions.

That’s not true of the Daily Wire. We’re big enough that people care when we trip up. And of course, like any business, we have our ups and we have our downs.

As Mark Twain put it, the reports of our death are greatly exaggerated.

But there’s something else going on here. Something very clear is going on here.

The media Left, and the Woke Right — Candace and Fuentes and Tucker and Megyn — all of them together form the New Left. They are attempting to destroy traditional conservatism.

That’s the reason for these attacks. The Daily Wire is the largest traditional conservative media company in the digital space by leaps and bounds. We are multiple times the size of any of these others.

We have many conversations on our platform among our hosts about topics ranging from AI to the Middle East to Catholicism and Judaism. There’s a lot of rich disagreement here at the Daily Wire, but in the end, what we stand for is pretty simple: truth, virtue, and freedom.

And that is what the New Left would love to destroy. It’s why the attacks have been coming fast and furious for weeks now. They want to destroy traditional conservatism. It is their goal in life.

There are a couple of different reasons they do this.

The media Left is always happy to run this grift because they love a Right that is crazy. They don’t want a political Right characterized by normie beliefs. They want a Right that’s nuts, because the easiest way to make AOC president in the 2028 election is to have that nutty lady run against a conservative movement that is focused on Brigitte Macron’s testicles, or demon attacks in the wilds of Maine, or why the Jews are responsible for your incurable gingivitis and horrific body odor and inability to get a date.

As for the Woke Right, Fuentes and Tucker and Candace and Kelly, they’re ecstatic about all of this for both business and political reasons. First, they compete with us, and second, they want to tear down traditional conservatism. Their whole goal is to cannibalize the traditional conservative audience.

There are, by all available metrics, a hell of a lot more traditional conservatives and rational people in this country than people who are nuts. But the goal of the New Left is to gut the conservative movement and then turn it into a skin-suit for their own perverse politics.

That is why many of them are now coming out as Democrats. That’s why Russia Today, the official outlet for the Kremlin, is retweeting Nick Fuentes acting triumphant.

I don’t know; if living in your basement and streaming for eight hours a day while jacking off to catboys is a form of winning, then whatever floats your boat.

It’s also why the Washington Post is happy to quote Candace Owens, the ranting bag lady of the internet, to explain that The Daily Wire’s numbers are down.

The alliance between the Left and the Woke Right is genuine, and it’s active.

Candace 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 Candace and Megyn and Tucker. They’re all saying the same thing. They don’t want to be lectured.

Megyn tweeted in March 2026, “You are the coward, Ben. And your moral preening, priggish lectures and holier-than-thou judgments are the reason you are losing fans.”

All of these people are on the same script. And because they are people who traffic in crap for sweet, sweet lucre, they would love to be spared the lecture. They don’t want to be lectured as they grift.

Thus, they’re going to do the same thing that a 13-year-old boy would do if caught doing naughty things on his iPad: “Don’t you lecture me!”

It turns out sometimes in life, people need lectures in decency and reason and in truth.

You know, like people who smear the wives of murdered men or cover for people who smear the wives of murdered men.

Maybe the people who revive Nazi propaganda, the people who have a weird interest in the non-existent testicles of the spouses of French politicians, or the people who make cause with actual Nazistan deserve lectures. 

Maybe the people who are repeating talking points from Hasan Piker and mimicking the propaganda of Vladimir Putin, or people who just randomly start cursing a ton and are hanging out with groyper-adjacent people and embracing Islam, deserve lectures.

There’s always a big YouTube audience for their crap. But let’s be real: There’s a massive online audience for pornography as well. People addicted to either deserve a bit of a lecture.

But getting back to the central issue: The point of the attacks on the Daily Wire is not just to attack the Daily Wire. It’s to destroy traditional conservatism.

That’s the whole thing. The entire thing. All of it. Every bit of it.

The reason they’re coming after the Daily Wire is that they want to come after you. They want to come after traditional conservatives who believe traditional conservative things.

It is no coincidence that at the same time the Washington Post and New York Magazine and all the rest of these legacy Left publications are attacking the Daily Wire, they’re also writing Strange New Respect features on Nick Fuentes and Marjorie Taylor Greene and Tucker Carlson.

The Left wants those people to win — and they’re not hiding it very well. New York Magazine’s piece says,”Like the Rockefeller Republican of yore, the Shapiro Republican could go extinct entirely.”

That’s what they want. They want traditional normie Republicans to go away. It’s what they want, and it’s what they hope for.

Perhaps it will turn out that all these people who hate conservatism and what I consider to be traditional American principles are correct; maybe it’ll turn out that the future of the Right — perverted by the algorithmic insanity of the internet — is slopulism, the Tucker-style grievance conspiracism, complete with the night-scratching demons, or Candace Owens’s usual brand of kookery, or Nick Fuentes’ transgressive Nazi cosplay or Theo Von’s man-child podcast illiteracy.

Maybe that’s where the Right goes. Maybe that’s what comes next. Maybe that’s all facilitated by the click-whoring of the Megyn Kellys of the world and justified by an appeal to audience numbers, because none of these people ever appeal to morality; they just point to their clicks.

Maybe “Idiocracy” wasn’t a satire. Maybe it was a prophetic documentary.

But here’s the thing: From where I sit, that does not change one single thing for me.

Not a single thing.

I’ve been doing this since I was 17. I started writing a syndicated political column when I was 17. I didn’t do that because I wanted to get rich that way; that’s not how you get rich.

I got into politics because I cared about the truth, about saying things that I believed to be eternal and true, because I care about the ideas of conservatism.

It’s why I’ve done that for all these years.

I care about free markets, and I care about private property, and I care about equal rights before the law and checks and balances and the Constitution.

I care about all of those things.

I care about the America the Founders promised us, and the America our parents and grandparents fought for, worked for, and died for.

And I’m not going to lie for cash. I’m not going to do it.

I’m not going to tell you about the wonders of Moscow supermarkets or the glories of Sharia Law in Qatar. I’m not going to pander for clicks by pretending that Erika Kirk might have been complicit in Charlie Kirk’s murder, or that perverse and malicious questions about TPUSA’s “cover-up” are somehow a bizarre form of investigative journalism.

I’m not going to wink and nod at the transgressiveness of the Nazi incels, or chuckle along with people who pretend that “a conspiratorial elite” is the reason your life isn’t everything that you want it to be in the freest and most prosperous country in world history. I’m going to be grateful for America. I’m going to point out what’s great about America and what our principles are.

I’m not going to do any of that other stuff because I got into this business to do precisely the opposite. I haven’t changed my principles. I’ve been doing this for 25 years. I have not changed my principles.

There’s a question I get a lot these days from friends and family. People will come up and say, “What happened to all these people?”

They understand New York Magazine and Washington Post and what they are. But what happened to Candace Owens or Tucker Carlson or Megyn Kelly, and all the rest?

I don’t know the answer because I’m not a psychiatrist.

But here’s what I do know. Nobody has ever asked that question about me. No one. Because my worldview has not changed, it has not changed. 

My principles haven’t changed because I think they’re true and good, and they won’t change.

So in the end, take it or leave it. If people decide they don’t want to hear it, it’s a free country; that’s their choice.

But I am willing to bet my future and the future of America that more Americans agree with me than agree with the people who want to destroy the Daily Wire. I’m betting there are far more rational people in this country than conspiracy-mongering nutjobs. I’m betting that there are far more people in America who believe in truth and virtue and freedom than people who revel in grievance and demoralization and stupidity.

Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe we lose.

But that doesn’t change a thing. It doesn’t matter.

Because the only thing that matters is the only thing that has ever mattered to me: speaking the truth, whether people like it or not.

That’s because facts still don’t care about your feelings.