Photo: Mark Peterson/Redux
There was a time, not very long ago, when Ben Shapiro could reasonably call himself the king of all conservative media.
In 2020, as Drew Harwell at the Washington Post notes, Shapiro’s media company, the Daily Wire, “ranked as Facebook’s top English-language publisher for three straight months. Its sarcastic news items on then–House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s salon visits gained millions more views than the websites of Fox News, CNN and the New York Times.” Shapiro himself was ubiquitous, a right-wing star who had risen to fame before Donald Trump and seamlessly adapted to the MAGA takeover of the Republican Party. He was a digital battering ram against the Democrats and the progressive left. He seemed guaranteed, like Fox itself, for an indefinite run at the top of the media heap.
That’s all over now. The Daily Wire is instituting significant layoffs. Its website has emerged as one of the great traffic losers in conservative media. Meanwhile, the company has seen its subscriber base on YouTube starting to shrink. There are Daily Wire YouTube videos that now, after a few days online, have less than 10,000 views, a catastrophically small number for a channel with more than 3 million subscribers. The top comments all mock the low view counts.
If a variety of poor business decisions can be blamed, in part, for the Daily Wire’s downfall — ill-fated investments in feature films, an epic fantasy series, and peculiar merchandise — the greater story is the collapse of Shapiro’s constituency, especially among the young media consumers who once fueled the Daily Wire’s runaway growth. 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.
Shapiro, who is an Orthodox Jew, is fiercely pro-Israel. His support for Israel and hatred of the Palestinian cause are issues that define him as a public political figure. He is an unequivocal backer of Netanyahu’s Israel and a committed, conventional neoconservative; he has been predictably thrilled by Trump’s war against Iran. Also a fiscal libertarian and social conservative, Shapiro once sat at the happy median of the Republican voter and could claim, at least in the 2010s, that he understood the beating heart of campus conservatism.
No longer. The anti-Israel, antisemitic Groypers, led by Nick Fuentes, are in ascendance. Candace Owens, who once worked with Shapiro at the Daily Wire, now boasts a YouTube channel that’s larger than his, where she’s indulged in anti-Israel conspiracy theories, warred with Charlie Kirk’s widow, and even broken with Trump without suffering any financial consequences. Beyond Owens and Fuentes, Tucker Carlson and Megyn Kelly have found massive audiences with their own brand of conspiratorial commentary that marries Israel skepticism and isolationist advocacy. Carlson and Kelly have both loudly opposed the war in Iran; Trump now reviles them, but neither ex–Fox talking head has backed down. Carlson seems to be moving on from Trump completely.
As the recent state elections in Indiana show, Republicans who break with Trump can still suffer. He remains godly among the MAGA faithful. It remains to be seen if the Carlson or Owens projects have an electoral future. What is clear, however, is that there’s an online constituency for what they do, whereas Shapiro’s will have an expiration date. Gen-Z conservatives have no great affection for Israel. In the Groyper tent, this can be chalked up to Jew hatred. But the story is far more complicated among the millions of young right-leaning voters who simply don’t understand how Trump could campaign on America First while standing up a foreign policy that is clearly subservient to the whims of the Netanyahu government. In 2025, a pundit who claimed Netanyahu would be dictating the terms of an Iran bombing campaign to Trump might have been accused of trafficking in antisemitic tropes. Instead, we’ve learned that’s essentially what happened.
The reality of two wars — Israel’s bombing of Gaza following the October 7 attacks and the ongoing bombardment of Iran — cannot be waved away by the likes of Shapiro, whose propagandist talking points have grown stale. There are young conservatives willing to call Israel’s actions in Gaza genocidal or question how establishing a violent apartheid state in the West Bank is furthering American interests. This doesn’t mean there’s any groundswell of sympathy for the Palestinians among right-wing Gen Z, but it does preclude the ironclad support for Israel that Shapiro has always insisted is essential for any conservative. The chaos in Iran, meanwhile, has only damaged Shapiro’s standing further. Republican voters overall still back Trump and the war, but support for MAGA is collapsing among the youth — which is to say, Shapiro’s audience. What is America First about incinerating an Iranian school for no real reason?
In the second Trump term, conventional conservatives are undoubtedly the power brokers, and they’ll have another two and a half years to impose their will on the country and the rest of the world. Attempted regime change in Iran and Venezuela were great neoconservative projects. Marco Rubio might be the most important official in the Trump Cabinet, and there are signs he’s displacing J.D. Vance as the front-runner for the 2028 nomination. Who, though, will actually own the future? What will the GOP look like in 10 or 20 years? Will your prototypical Republican be a Shapiro Republican — libertarian on economics, interventionist on foreign policy, and extremely pro-Israel? Or will they look very different, closer to a Carlson or an Owens or even a Fuentes?
The collapse of the Daily Wire can be seen as a dire warning for traditional Republicans. Young conservatives are now looking on as the Iran war rapidly devolves into a quagmire and seeing all the damage it has wrought. They view this as an outgrowth of Israeli foreign policy, and they don’t like it. In a post-Trump future, they’ll have little desire to repeat these interventions. Like the Rockefeller Republican of yore, the Shapiro Republican could go extinct entirely.
This story has been updated to credit reporting from the Washington Post.
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