Popular conservative pundit and creator of Change My Mind, Steven Crowder, has recently levied an attack against The Daily Wire. Crowder accused them of being in bed with big-tech companies in a recent video he posted on his YouTube channel.
Steven claimed that the Daily Wire had offered him a contract that explicitly required him to avoid being demonetized or else his pay would be cut heavily. What this essentially means is that Crowder would be entering into a contract not just with The Daily Wire, but also with YouTube’s ever-hanging terms of service.
Co-founder of The Daily Wire, Jeremy Boering, refused to respond to any of Crowder’s legitimate criticisms. Boering later addressed the situation, stating:
“Steven’s philosophy seems to be: ‘I deserve to be paid millions and millions and millions of dollars whether my show drives the revenue or not.’ That’s not a business relationship … He’s looking for a benefactor,”.
Does Mr. Boering know that he’s not simply running a business, like a construction or retail company? The Daily Wire is in the political sphere, so it is ostensibly assumed that they are making real change in the United States. Saying that your contract revenue is contingent on your channel keeping its monetization is an admission that money is more important than publishing the truth. When you dock the pay of someone who faces YouTube’s anti-conservative policies, that creator is incentivized to back off, and say things which are less controversial.
It is also worth asking, why has The Daily Wire never been censored on any platform? They are one of the most recommended channels on Youtube, and make heavy use of Facebook’s targeted advertising. We all know that censorship has ramped up across all big tech platforms in the last few years, from the banning of calls to violence, to harassment, to now outright opinions regarded as “hate-speech.” Despite all of this, the Daily Wire remains untouched, uncensored, and monetized.
Would The Daily Wire ever commit to saying something so conservative that it meant getting demonetized or censored, thus losing revenue? I doubt it, they’ve never done so in the past. Ben Shapiro came out in support of the vaccine when other conservatives were getting banned for opposing it, and only retracted his opinion many months later when it was safe to. That should tell you everything you need to know about the DW crew.
This comes just a few months after it was revealed that the Desantis campaign paid The Daily Wire over a hundred thousand dollars for favorable coverage, and Boering’s response was nothing more than “but everyone pays us to give them air time!”. Yeah, not exactly the best rebuttal. Why can a platform that is supposed to be giving you honest conservative opinions be bought out so easily, and why is that admitted so nonchalantly?
The reality is that The Daily Wire and other conservative inc. organizations don’t actually care about you or the political landscape of the country, they view it as a vacuum to be filled and a cow to be milked. They’ll say some “edgy” things from time to time, but on the big issues – immigration, homosexuality, media representation, foreign influence – their opinions line up starkly with the orthodoxy. If The Daily Wire has any use to real dissidents at all, it is to funnel conservatives to those who are authentically right wing. The debates Ben Shapiro and others used to do to change young people’s minds were historic, but that time has passed. He and his coworkers only serve as gatekeepers to the conservative movement now.
