Ben Shapiro, Charlie Kirk, and the Collapse of Conservative Media Accountability

I saw this article and I thought this might be an odd story to start the show with, but one of the great things about our program is we're not bound by any sort of norms here. We're not held to, hey, you got to do things in the traditional way that everybody's done them, because it's a three hour conversation that we have every day. Sometimes the most important conversation is a little unorthodox. And that's sort of how our lives are, right? Sometimes the most important conversation that you have every day is one you don't expect, one you're not thinking about like when the day began, like when you start your day, you think about like, okay, I got to do this and I got to do this. And this is the big thing I'm going to do today. And inevitably in our own lives, there's often things that pop up that end up being the most important thing each day. And you're like, ah, I didn't see that one coming. I think that's one of the great things about our show. Is there's no, there's no rule to it. There's no you have to's here. And I think that's why you guys kind of like the show. It is in a sense, sort of like talk radio, but it's a very, very, very free form version of it.

Vox Article on Ben Shapiro Sparks Larger Debate About Conservative Media

This article stems out of Vox did an interesting piece on the decline of Ben Shapiro and the decline of the Daily Wire. We've touched on this a little bit before, but the Daily Wire for the last half decade was a real juggernaut in the conservative media movement. And it, along with Turning Point USA, when Charlie Kirk was alive, really became in the wake of the passing of Rush Limbaugh, sort of the place that conservatives, especially younger conservatives, were sort of gravitating to like the conservative media movement is a fascinating study in history. If you think about it, it's sort of emanated out of Rush Limbaugh launching this talk radio program in the late 1980s. And by the mid 90s, it had this great national footprint. And it was one of those weird things where the guy who was first was the best to ever do it. A lot of times people like I think about this like Stern where Stern wasn't the best. Stern's not a great broadcaster. Stern was just first and then a bunch of people copied Stern afterwards. But Stern was the first guy to do it, or at least the first guy to get noticed doing it. Rush was unique because he was first and he was also the best. And so for basically this 25 year window, everybody kind of gravitated to one guy as the voice. Hey, something happens in politics. Something happens in government, something big occurs and everybody goes to Rush. And it was interesting because the Liberals, not only were they never able to duplicate a central figure, a central voice, they were never able to get any sort of footing in the talk radio world. And that was it. Radio America, Air America. But they just, they were never able to have what the conservatives had. Then out of Rush, there were all of these people who emanated, right? Like they were never able to get the success that Rush had. But they were very successful careers, and they were all kind of talking about the same stuff. Hannity, Glenn Beck, Levin. You want to get a little more extreme people like Michael Savage. O'Reilly's in there. All of these guys sort of became, if Rush is the core of it, these guys became the exterior. They all made a lot of money. They all had big success. They all had national programs. But there was one guy that everybody went to. And in the wake of the passing of Rush, there was this gigantic void that was talked about for years in our industry, like what would happen long before Rush got sick? What's going to happen when Rush isn't here anymore? Who's going to fill the Rush void? And there were a lot of people, including some people that I worked with who fancied themselves having some sort of ability to have some hold of that footprint or something, I don't know. We used to laugh about it all the time because it's like, ain't nobody, anybody who remotely knew radio knew there was never going to be anybody to fill Rush's void. Not as a collective, not as an individual. And any person who thought they were going to in some way do that was laughably kidding themselves. If you look at in the wake of Rush's passing, talk radio has not recovered. I mean, there have been local stations like the one I worked at that have had local success, but there's no national figure that stepped in and filled the void of Rush. I mean, there was a show or shows that were put in his place, but they've never scratched the surface on what Rush did. And that's not their fault. It's like some person happened to the guy who had to replace Babe Ruth at the Yankees. Right. How are you going to do that? How are you going to do that now? Joe DiMaggio came along a few years later, but there was no, there was never going to be another Babe Ruth.

Rush Limbaugh’s Death Changed How Conservatives Consume Political Information

So when Rush passed away, when Rush's show went away, the idea of a central location by which everybody got the talking points of the day, it disappeared. And in that wake, the podcasting world, which it had been popular. I'm not acting like there was not podcasting before Rush Limbaugh passed away. But in the conservative movement, the podcast world exploded because everybody who used to go to one place now was open for business. They all could go anywhere. And two entities really did a phenomenal job, especially with the younger people, of taking a lot of that. And that was Turning Point USA. And that was the Daily Wire. And while Shapiro and Kirk were sort of seen as one or seen together, seen as a team, even though they were kind of competition, they really weren't. They were very different in their approach and their style, but they were ultimately trying to do. But they sucked up a lot of, especially again, with the, and by younger people, I'm talking 50 and under. I'm not talking about just college kids or young professionals. They were able to grab a lot of those people who now didn't have one central place to go to. And they brought a lot of new people into the process. For several years with Kirk and with Ben Shapiro. They almost were able to play off of each other and grow the industry. They grew the platform. Other podcasters, people like Matt Walsh, were able to explode in popularity because of the success of Daily Wire, of Turning Point USA. And they created industries. Kirk and Shapiro created industries around their platforms. And that was interesting for me to watch from afar because I was still in the talk radio industry. Now again, just like we're doing here, my radio show, or at least I wanted it to be as much as I could, as much as I was allowed to, was hyper local. That's always been where my heart is. It's always what I've wanted to do and look. We had immense success with that hyper local focus on the radio show. And by podcasting standards, we're having immense success here, staying hyper local. So I was always able to watch sort of almost like a neutral observer what these guys were doing. But in the wake of the death of Charlie Kirk, and this article in Vox gets into this, Ben Shapiro and The Daily Wire have really suffered like bad. Like there's people who I don't know if go out of business is the right word, but there has been in less than a year, a dramatic reduction in people who are consuming Daily Wire content. One of the things that this Vox article goes into, and it's a, there's a variety of reasons. There's a variety of theories, but one of the things that the Vox article gets into a little bit is that the death of Kirk Shapiro is almost a victim of the death of Kirk because Kirk and Shapiro, while they weren't on the same team in the sense of like they were competing entities, they were sort of seen as one and moving forward in the same direction, moving forward in the same way by a lot of people. And they sort of became one A and one B in terms of how younger people were consuming conservative content. They were all kind of gravitating to one of two places. And look, if you look at talk radio, it still exists. It will continue to exist, but it has become an entity. And this is not in any way to demean what talk radio is or what it will be in the future. But if you just look at the, it's a numbers game. It's a much older audience. It's an aging audience. There are fewer people listening to radio as a collective, not just talk radio, but radio as a collective every single day. And in this thriving new medium, Kirk and Shapiro were seen as the guys, the central hub, sort of by which everything sort of disseminated out of. Much in the way Rush for years was the central focus of the entire conservative movement. And so when Kirk died, and we've talked about this a lot. It created a vacuum much the way when Rush died, some people were like, hey, who's going to be the person to fill it? The answer is nobody's going to fill it. The same way with Rush. No one was going to fill it. And it's not in any way to say Clay and Buck or any of these people are not good broadcasters, or they don't have a fine show. It just means nobody was ever going to fill that. And everybody then started trying. Everybody said, I can get my little piece of the pie. And instead of one central location, there are now 50 people that have taken a little portion of that pie. The same thing has happened in the wake of the death of Charlie Kirk. And there are some reasons that conservative, the younger conservatives, are not happy with Ben Shapiro. Israel is a big part of it. His unwavering support of Israel is a big part of it. And we'll get into that a little bit later with Trump. But it's also that in the wake of the death, the assassination of Charlie Kirk, a whole bunch of people said, my turn to get the pie. My turn to get my little piece that I was always dependent upon having some sort of a relationship with Charlie Kirk or relationship with Ben Shapiro. What this split really tells us, and with all of these people out there. It's not about the cause anymore. It's not about better government anymore. It's not about ideology anymore. To these people who are trying to fill the void, who are taking down Ben Shapiro, who are trying to grab hold of their portion, their piece of the influence that Charlie Kirk had. It's about them. It's about clicks. It's about likes. It's about shares. It's not about the policy anymore. Because one of the things about the whole MAGA movement or whatever you want to call it now, it's way different than it was when Trump started 11 years ago. As someone who was a Trump supporter in the beginning. From the beginning. I don't even recognize it anymore. It's like some Frankenstein monster version of the initial core ideas of what Trump was and what he represented. And I think that should be cause for concern for every single one of us, because the conservative media movement used to be about a core set of ideas, like whether you listen to Rush or you listen to Hannity, or you listen to Beck, or you listen to Levin, or again, Savage was kind of a fringe version of that. But they all kind of had the same core set of beliefs or espoused the same core set of beliefs. Now it's all over the map. There is no. And I think that kind of represents where we are as a country now. Like, what is the MAGA movement? You can't say it's anti-war anymore. Look at where we're at. We appear to be in this another forever conflict in the Middle East with Iran. And we'll talk about that here in just a little bit. You can't say that Republicans are about limited government anymore. I mean, if you say that Trump is the leader of the Republican Party, certainly you can't say that anymore. Government has grown massively under Donald Trump. The spending has grown exponentially under Donald Trump. So you can't say that anymore. The idea of, I mean, I don't even know what we are in terms of immigration because it's gotten so screwy. I know what Trump has espoused. But if you look at, say, the Indiana government, right. Take away the words because words are meaningless. Look at actions. What do we do in this state? Every year through the Indiana Economic Development Corporation, we take money from you and we give it to companies who bring in foreign workers. It's indisputable. That's what we do. Now the politicians will go, will go and bitch about it. They'll like, oh, it's great that Trump is trying to cut off the influx of foreign workers into our country. A foreign worker should never take the jobs of Americans, and then they vote for fully funding the Indiana Economic Development Corporation, which pays out millions of dollars to mega companies to bring in foreign workers. I don't know if there even exists a core set of principles anymore in the Republican Party and our media, which once was sort of the bastion of what do we believe? What do we think, what are we about? And we hold the politicians accountable who don't do that, doesn't really exist anymore. The media in the era of Trump. The conservative media has become cheerleaders for politicians rather than a place to hold them to account.

Rush Limbaugh’s Death Changed How Conservatives Consume Political Information

One of the great things about Rush was he used to go at Republican politicians all the time. Think about our state and our politicians and all the crap they've pulled. Who holds them accountable? Let's just use talk radio as the medium. Who's holding them accountable now? Who on a daily basis is calling them out and holding them to account? I'll wait. If you know, if you have an example in the YouTube chat of someone with a daily show who is holding people like Todd Young and Jim Banks and Mike Braun and Micah Beckwith accountable, let me know. Now, there are some people who will go after Diego because of the scandals, but not because of the bad government. Diego is the only one where there is remotely any sense of being held to account. But that's because of the scandals, not of the acts of government. The people in conservative media are now more teammates of the politicians or better said teammates of the approved politicians or the politicians who want to be approved. Rather than an accountability mechanism that it used to be. And these politicians now get judged by the media or treated by the media based on whatever they espouse about Trump or whatever they do to make Trump happy. Rather than holding them accountable, calling them out on obvious stuff, on obvious stuff. Let me give you an example. Todd Young was on WOWO the other day. That's the talk radio station in Fort Wayne. All the crap Todd Young has pulled in terms of spending, in terms of adding close to voting to add close to $20 trillion to our nation's debt. And every problem that we see in this country right now essentially emanates out of that magical money printing press that Todd Young and both parties have repeatedly turned on. The inflation, the cost of living, the decline of American exceptionalism, the decline of the American dollar, the decline of American buying power, the growth of government, the growth of government in our lives. It has all emanated out of people like Todd Young, spending and spending and spending.

Political Accountability Has Been Replaced by Media Loyalty and Team Sports

And as he famously told me in front of a room full of people, he's never stopping. He's never stopping. And yet this interview was softballs r us. Because too many people in the quote unquote conservative media see themselves and their own elevation as being a teammate to these people rather than a mechanism of accountability. You, me, we have always been about accountability. But we're a dying breed, guys, and we got to figure out a way to get that back. Because what drew me to talk radio, to make this a career, was the idea of being able to create better government. The idea that you could use a platform to motivate people, to motivate politicians to have better public policy. That is not what our industry has turned into now. And it's horrifying. It's horrific. It scares the hell out of me. These politicians don't need teammates out of us. They need somebody that's going to look them in the face and say, you are wrong. You are doing wrong by the people, and I'm going to hold you to account. And that is not happening anymore.