The Daily Wire’s everything-man Ben Shapiro broke into media relevance with a simple appeal to reason: "Facts don’t care about your feelings." Often aimed at liberals — with relish — Shapiro’s catchphrase shaped the post-Obama online right and became a conservative rallying cry.
Now a very inconvenient truth faces Shapiro’s shaky empire. Once seen as a Digital Age successor to Fox News, The Daily Wire — which relocated from Los Angeles to Nashville in 2020 as it neared a market peak — has suffered layoffs and a failed attempt to build a right-wing Hollywood over the past 12 months. Its audience has been in free fall across platforms while competing against independent personalities like Tucker Carlson, Nick Fuentes and former DW principal Candace Owens. Conflicting political analyses on the right have specifically challenged unconditional American support for Israel, Shapiro’s longtime position, upsetting The Daily Wire’s hegemony in conservative online media. Owens has attacked Shapiro outright, while The Daily Wire has tested conservative infighting content with videos mocking Carlson.
The facts are not good. During the Biden presidency, The Daily Wire dominated social media by pioneering ragebait and demonstrating a mastery of the burgeoning shareable video form. In 2022 and 2023, the company churned out videos that could command millions of views within 24 hours. Now it’s hemorrhaging about 10,000 YouTube subscribers a week, according to online trackers, and posting traffic around 10 percent of its 2023 high.
The film — shooting at Municipal Auditorium this week — will reportedly depict men posing as girls while competing in a basketball tournament
In August, the company settled a $2 million class action suit for allegedly illegally sharing user data with Facebook, where The Daily Wire used to rank among the juggernaut’s top-viewed pages. After spending years dwarfed by The Daily Wire’s online engagement, legacy national outlets like The Washington Post and New York Magazine have gleefully penned their own postmortems this month.
Local layoffs reported May 1 are the surest sign that The Daily Wire’s dollars are no longer making sense. A recent move toward feature film production that suffused plots with conservative values (and anti-transgender narratives, as seen in 2023's failed satire Lady Ballers) slowly turned into an expensive mistake. The digital company’s Nashville footprint is still somewhat blurry, with corporate addresses leading to downtown’s UBS Tower and a UPS store on 12th Avenue South, but it has coincided with the city’s rise among conservative celebrities.
Since The Daily Wire’s relocation, Nashville has become a choice spot for figures like Knowles, Owens, conservative pundit Tomi Lahren and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth. They praise the city’s combination of entertainment and dining options while crediting Tennessee’s conservative lawmakers and the state’s cultural associations with “traditional” lifestyles and Christianity.
