The Daily Wire Presents Backstage Live at Ryman Auditorium in Nashville, August 2024
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 hasattacked Shapirooutright, while The Daily Wire has tested conservative infighting content with videos mocking Carlson.
The film — shooting at Municipal Auditorium this week — will reportedly depict men posing as girls while competing in a basketball tournament
In August, thecompany settleda $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 likeThe Washington PostandNew York Magazinehave gleefully penned their own postmortems this month.
Local layoffsreportedMay 1are 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 satireLady 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 andSecretary 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.
The Nashville Downtown Church Collective and the Southern Christian Coalition make the most …
We recap what the state legislature did — and didn’t do — this year at the Capitol
Source: Drudge Report
