The public beef between Steven Crowder and Conservative Inc. got even hotter when the Daily Wire’s Jeremy Boreing made a response video to Crowder’s initial plea. In his response, Boreing explained the fiduciary concerns of the Daily Wire before stating that Steven Crowder was not a self-made man, despite having a near 6 million sub YouTube channel in a medium that he pioneered. Yet Steven Crowder would post a rebuttal video airing the final phone conversation that he had with Boreing in which Crowder insisted that the Daily Wire’s business model was terrible for the movement.
Steven Crowder made his initial video to expose a problem in Conservative Inc, not singling out the Daily Wire. Yet, like Colonel Jessup, the Daily Wire admits they ordered the code red. In this debate in the conservative movement, what is the balance between pursuit of profit and mission?
Self Made?
Steven Crowder is a legacy YouTuber whose first mover advantage helped pave the way for other conservative YouTubers whilst he rose to the top. As a free agent he will have to start again, albeit with a large email list but more expenses. While at BlazeTV, Crowder was not censored or punished financially for Big Tech censorship. Most of Conservative Inc. is different.
The Daily Wire, on the other hand, grew to its prominence by dominating Facebook, especially as Facebook cracked down on its direct competition. Additionally, they invested heavily in Facebook ads.
The Hand That Feeds You
While the Blaze had a model that encouraged the building of an independent infrastructure, the Daily Wire has a model reliant on Big Tech, even though it has a high price subscription service on top of it.
Crowder contends that the Daily Wire is solely focused on money, whereas he’s focused on a country. The Daily Wire’s contractual terms would essentially rent a contributor yet own the content in perpetuity. In another industry, this seems routine, yet in an industry that monetizes social media accounts and podcast RSS feeds, perpetual ownership rights of content is far less reasonable.
Creators like Brett Cooper, a young “Ben Shapiro lookalike” and former actress, rose to prominence with the Daily Wire, accumulating over 1.7 million subs on YouTube in a very short period of time. While simp culture is an unfortunate truth on the right, one can only suspect that the algorithms were greased for the Daily Wire’s mid contributor to thrive whereas conservative content is routinely suppressed on YouTube.
Therein lies the suspicion with the Daily Wire. They peddled Russian collusion, lockdowns, mask mandates, and poisonous jabs. Additionally, their hosts curiously seem to avoid social media censorship outside of brief Twitter suspensions. This brings to mind the term controlled opposition.
Are Big Tech and the Daily Wire colluding to control market share and the Overton Window, or is the Daily Wire self-censoring to not risk it? Given how capricious Big Tech has been, the latter seems unlikely to succeed, as even Crowder self-censored to no avail.
Unethical Business Models
Many prominent figures in the culture got where they were through sordid gain. Andrew and Tristian Tate made their money off of cam girls before being manosphere influencers. Jordan Peterson sold self-help books to men and monetizes false Bible teaching. The Daily Wire placates Big Tech while claiming to represent a political movement.
This is eerily similar to the pitfalls in Big Eva, an industry that has given ground to Satan yet claims to represents the plebs in the pews.
Conclusion
Crowder might be doing this for the grift, as well. We have certainly noted that he has gone soft the last year or two. But one thing is clear, relying on Big Tech is a business model built on sand. Andrew Torba talks often about the parallel economy because this is what we need.
When building the site for Evangelical Dark Web, we attempted to insolate ourselves from Big Tech as much as possible. Obviously, there are limitations as we still use adsense, YouTube (the largest social media platform), and rely on Google search traffic, but the site itself is safeguarded from their wickedness. It may slow our growth, but we grow without surrendering control. Like Torba, Crowder is right to call for the right to not rely on the liberals for income.
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