MAGA goes to the movies: Inside the Daily Wire’s blockbuster culture-war battle

For more than three decades, the historic Ryman Auditorium in downtown Nashville was home to the Grand Ole Opry, where country music was born and raised. But one sweltering evening this past August, the red-brick Carnegie Hall of the South hosted a different kind of cultural revival session.

Its wooden pews filled with women in tasteful sundresses and men wearing ball caps plastered with the American flag, the Ryman hit capacity. Tonight’s hot-ticket event, Backstage Live, was organized by the Daily Wire, a conservative media empire whose many platforms include a news website and podcast network. On the bill this evening: four of their marquee personalities, gathered to “fight the left, and build the future.”

Flanked by two giant gold-painted “truth bomb” missile props, Daily Wire hosts Andrew Klavan (743,000 YouTube subscribers), Michael Knowles (2.1 million), Matt Walsh (3.2 million) and Ben Shapiro (7.1 million) spent a few hours onstage trading quips about Kamala Harris (“Basically the Hawk Tuah Girl of politics”) and extolling the virtues of Donald Trump (“the best foreign-policy president in my lifetime”) to a whooping, hollering, “amen!”-shouting crowd.

Part Make America Great Again rally, part sermon-cum-podcast and part righteous rock show staged in the heart of Music City, the evening marked both a victory lap for the company since its move to Nashville from Los Angeles three years ago, and a battle cry to reignite America’s right.

Less than a month before, when Joe Biden was sleepwalking through his campaign, the U.S. election felt like it was Trump’s to lose. Yet tonight inside the Ryman, with Harris riding a Democratic ticket built on joy and conservatives reckoning with the anti-charisma of JD Vance, the mood was all anxious hopes and prayers.

After running through various nightmare scenarios in which a Trump loss would lead to abortion on demand, totally open borders and the mass “transsexualization” of American youth – “I’m going to go into the restroom and pull them off the wall,” Walsh said of any tampon dispensers that he might find in a boys washroom – the Daily Wire brain trust arrived at what felt like the main event of the evening, the debut of a fiery new flank in the culture war.

On a giant screen, a trailer was queued up for Am I Racist?, a new film in which Walsh employs a Borat-like shtick to uncover the “race hustlers and grifters” working inside the diversity, equity and inclusion industry. Urging the audience to preorder tickets for the movie, Daily Wire’s co-CEO Jeremy Boreing noted that the venture was a “true risk” for Daily Wire – its first-ever theatrical release, set to open on 1,500-plus screens across the United States and Canada.

If all goes according to plan, the film will not only deliver huge box-office receipts but also act as a pivotal piece of gateway content to lure subscribers to DailyWire+, the company’s upstart streaming service. It’s being pitched as Netflix for the MAGA crowd, a way to beat the liberals at their own cultural game.

“Let’s show Hollywood,” Boreing told the Ryman audience, “that Nashville is now Movie City!”

‘Politics is downstream from culture’

For an enterprise built on catering to red-state tastes, the Daily Wire’s origin story has a distinctly blue-state flavour: Shapiro and Boreing dreamed up the business in the latter’s L.A. pool house.

It was 2015, and Shapiro, a sharp-tongued Harvard Law graduate, had spent the past decade making a name for himself in the wilderness of right-wing commentary. His books included Primetime Propaganda: The True Hollywood Story of How the Left Took Over Your TV, and he enjoyed a regular byline at Breitbart News Network, a site conceived by late founder Andrew Breitbart as the conservative answer to HuffPost. Boreing, meanwhile, had operated in the background of Hollywood for years as a talent manager, screenwriter and producer (especially diehard fans of Shazam! star Zachary Levi might have seen Boreing’s 2007 thriller Spiral).

Boreing’s biggest asset, though, was his Rolodex of contacts via his work as the managing director of Friends of Abe, an informal network of about 2,000 entertainment-industry conservatives whose membership was a semi-open secret. At private salons across town, the likes of Kelsey Grammer, Clint Eastwood and Jon Voight mixed with fellow Republicans and listened to speeches from Ted Cruz, Karl Rove and Marco Rubio.

After being connected via Breitbart , Boreing and Shapiro started to brainstorm ways of toppling, or at least matching wits with, the overwhelmingly liberal Hollywood system. While on paper the pair make for an odd couple – the Texas-born Boreing is an evangelical Christian who chooses his words carefully, while the California-raised Shapiro is an Orthodox Jewish smart-aleck – the two bonded over their perceived status as cultural underdogs. Not to mention a mutual love of the Lord of the Rings movies.

“Ben and I both came up under Andrew Breitbart , who always said that politics is downstream from culture. So entertainment was always on our mind,” Boreing recalls. “We’ve always been ambitious sons of bitches, but obviously we couldn’t have imagined all of this at that moment.”

It is the morning after the Ryman show, and the Daily Wire chief, who runs the company alongside co-CEO Caleb Robinson and is known around as its “god king,” is sitting next to Shapiro inside one of their well-appointed conference rooms.

The open-space, high-ceilinged offices could easily be mistaken for the headquarters of any tech startup enjoying a moment of growth. There is a fully stocked kitchen with snacks and catered lunches, a sunny courtyard for impromptu meetings, and sharply dressed employees dashing between editing suites and meeting rooms.

There are, though, small differences. The office’s address is kept confidential for security reasons (armed guards are quick to approach any unannounced visitor who steps out of an Uber). The washrooms are explicitly not gender-neutral (“He/Him” and “She/Her”). A nearby building houses a warren of soundstages, including a TV set of Judged By Matt Walsh that was recently visited by a Make-A-Wish kid (who staff assure was not terminal). And the water bottles are politicized (one boasts of containing “liberal tears”).

“We’re in this not just for business reasons but ideological ones,” Shapiro says. “There are a lot of easier, more predictable ways to make a living. I could have stayed in law.”

After securing initial funding from petroleum billionaire Farris Wilks, Boreing and Shapiro launched Daily Wire almost a decade ago in L.A., with an eye toward click-driven commentary and news aggregation. The podcasting boom soon shifted the business plan, and the site found success with not only Shapiro’s flagship show (2,000-plus episodes and counting, with recent instalments titled, “The Most RIGGED Debate in HISTORY” and, “The DNC Begins: Free Abortions and Vasectomies, Plus Hamas!”) but increasingly popular programs from Walsh (“Disney’s Not-So-Secret Anti-White Agenda” and, “Our Towns and Our Pets Aren’t Safe Thanks to Third-World Migrants”) and Canadian lightning-rod Jordan B. Peterson (“Alberta: The Promised Land for Canada’s Future”).

Its programming is explicitly, almost comically provocative, with Walsh in particular earning scorn for his vitriolic takes delivered with deadpan rigour. In 2022, The New Republic named him “Transphobe of the Year,” citing his consistent attacks on the queer community, including calls for protests against hospitals that “butcher children” by playing host to transgender health programs.

Yet the Daily Wire’s content is packaged in a savvy, consciously slick manner that feels light years removed from the lumbering eras of Rush Limbaugh or Matt Drudge. And there is a growing audience for it.

In 2021, the privately held company earned US$100-million in annual revenue. In 2023, that figure more than doubled to about US$220-million, 10 per cent alone of which hails from its burgeoning e-commerce business. Perhaps you would like to “shave woke-free” with Jeremy’s Razors, which launched in 2022 after Harry’s Razors pulled ads from Daily Wire citing “misaligned values”? Or possibly you’d like a bite of Jeremy’s Chocolate, a fair-trade line of sweets unveiled shortly after Hershey’s Canada debuted an International Women’s Day campaign featuring a transgender activist? The “He/Him” bar comes with nuts.

Boreing and Shapiro’s content is as aggressive as their ambitions for growth. But it was only after the crises of the pandemic and the murder of George Floyd – and their attendant protest movements – that the pair realized that there might be an opportunity to drive a larger, more lucrative wedge into the culture war. But it involved venturing into the one area that conservatives have never been able to consistently crack: movies.

“One thing we talked about early on was that there was no clear, good distribution method for any movie not made in the Hollywood system. If we wanted to do this, we would have to build the distribution mechanism first,” says Shapiro. “Our lightbulb moment was in 2020, where projects that were imminently popular were getting cancelled left and right, and Disney started slapping warnings on its classic movies. As if you watched Peter Pan you would come away as a genocidal anti-native white supremacist.”

“There was a moment in that storm, an article in Rolling Stone, that essentially said it’s time to stop watching Law & Order: SVU because even though Mariska Hargitay is a bad-ass no-nonsense woman who stands up for victims, she perpetuates the lie that there are good cops. I thought, oh man,” Boering adds.

“We thought it might be a good time to counterprogram,” says Shapiro. “If they’re going to abandon an entire swath of classic narrative structure in favour of stupidity, then why not take advantage of that vacuum in the market?”

Yet the team would dive into entertainment not by remaining in L.A. – which Boreing says had turned into a “complete postnuclear apocalyptic wasteland” during the heights of COVID-19 – but by relocating their operation to the safer space of Nashville. The pair’s wives got eight weeks’ notice of the move; their 100 or so employees at the time got six. (Shapiro ended up in South Florida, where there is a larger Jewish infrastructure for his Orthodox family. He visits the Nashville offices every month.)

Once in Tennessee, where Governor Bill Lee signed a resolution welcoming the company that “recognizes that truth matters more than emotion,” Boreing and Shapiro came to another key realization.

If they wanted to make movies that could compete with Hollywood – and avoid the kind of cheap and easily mocked faith-based films such as Left Behind and God’s Not Dead – then they needed to enlist someone who knew how to make Hollywood movies.

‘Fighting for our causes, our values’

Despite his long history in Hollywood, producer Dallas Sonnier defines his career as one built in opposition, if not outright defiance, to the mainstream industry.

Like his fellow Texan Boreing, Sonnier worked in the trenches of L.A., from intern to assistant to manager, at one time representing Greta Gerwig. Yet he never felt aligned with the political mood in town, which Sonnier calls today “so far left that it’s left of AOC.”

After heading back to the Texas city that earned him his nickname (he was born Joseph Sonnier IV), Sonnier established the production company Cinestate, which quickly helped him become the king of a new subgenre that might be dubbed populist pulp: low-budget, ultramacho action fare such as Bone Tomahawk and Dragged Across Concrete that leveraged name recognition (Kurt Russell, Vince Vaughn, Mel Gibson) with the faintly discernible whistle of reactionary politics. It was red meat for red states.

“I look at the period between 2008 and 2014 as the introduction of what we would call ‘woke’ – this massive shift in the entertainment business,” Sonnier says. “My model then was to find someone who was famous before 2008 and build this hyper-masculine action movie around them, and it worked really well.”

But in 2020, Sonnier faced two very different challenges. First, he couldn’t find a distributor to buy his new thriller Run Hide Fight, a kind of NRA fantasy come to cinematic life in which a teen girl pulls a Die Hard against the school shooters who have taken her classmates hostage.

More seriously, a producer named Adam Donaghey, who worked with Cinestate, was arrested on a charge of sexual assault of a child, with The Daily Beast publishing an investigation in the summer of 2021 accusing Sonnier of ignoring or playing down other incidents involving Donaghey. (In 2022, Donaghey pled “nolo contendere” – a type of plea in which the defendant neither admits nor disputes a charge – to a refiled charge of injury to a child, receiving five years of deferred probation.)

“We let him go the day the allegations came out,” Sonnier says now. “He was introduced to me by [fellow Texan filmmaker] David Lowery’s team, by all the hyper-lefties in the Texas Theatre. I think they pawned him off on me, saw me as a mark. Like, ‘That’s our way out.’ I didn’t know about any of it, not a single thing. I said everything that I wanted to say about it in the Daily Beast piece, which was a partisan attack.” (Representatives for Lowery did not respond to requests for comment.)

If the allegations caught the attention of Daily Wire, then they didn’t preclude the company from buying Run Hide Fight, the first feature-film acquisition to be added to the DailyWire+ catalogue. Nor did the controversy stop Boreing from partnering further with Sonnier, who dissolved Cinestate to form his new production outfit Bonfire Legend. Today, Sonnier is essentially the Daily Wire’s in-house film and television producer, having decamped to Nashville and declared himself a true believer in the company’s mission.

“Jeremy and Caleb put their entire livelihoods on the line every single day by fighting for our causes, our values, putting up with the barrage of attacks on social media. They are heroes to be supported,” Sonnier says. “If I can give my entire treasure chest of movie-producing experience and understanding of storytelling, they deserve it. Because if the movies are not great, they are dead in the water.”

Critics and audiences might be hard-pressed to agree that the DailyWire+ output has so far been above water. While Run Hide Fight has its hard-edged charms – notably Isabel May’s intense lead performance – it is also sluggish and frequently tasteless, exploiting a highly sensitive subject for cheap thrills.

Similarly unsteady is the 2022 thriller Shut In, the first film made in-house for DailyWire+. The film is directed with polish and professionalism by Hollywood veteran D.J. Caruso (Disturbia, Eagle Eye), but it’s also stuck with eye-rolling evangelical themes and weighed down by a sloppy performance from filmmaker-turned-Trump-acolyte Vincent Gallo. And then there is Terror on the Prairie, a dry and dusty Western that can only squeeze so much curiosity from its stunt casting of Gina Carano.

Sonnier convinced the actress to sign on after her firing from the Star Wars spinoff The Mandalorian in 2021, after Carano posted a meme online comparing the treatment of American conservatives during the pandemic to European Jews during the Holocaust. (The actress is currently suing Disney for wrongful termination.)

Aside from underscoring Shapiro’s interest in the contemporary plight of Star Wars – which he says Disney has destroyed in part by making The Acolyte, “a series about lesbian space witches” – Carano’s casting reflects Daily Wire’s biggest challenge in the entertainment space. Or maybe its stealth advantage.

“I keep in touch with all the folks I’ve worked with in the past, most of whom are very supportive of what I do here – just not to a point where they can come and be a part of this and still be in polite society in Los Angeles,” says Sonnier. “So we are forced to look outside the box for talent. Or inside the box, which is what happened with Lady Ballers.”

A sports comedy in the vein of a Zucker, Abrahams and Zucker production like Airplane! (or more accurately, Trey Parker and Matt Stone’s 1998 messy farce BASEketball), the 2023 DailyWire+ film Lady Ballers follows a down-on-his-luck basketball coach who schemes to win a women’s championship by having his male players claim they are transgender. Complete with swing-and-miss gags about TERFs (trans-exclusionary radical feminists), a villainous journalist who has abortions for kicks, and a cameo from Ted Cruz, Lady Ballers would have a hard time attracting even the most cancelled Hollywood player.

Which is why the film is essentially Daily Wire: The Movie, with the company leveraging the brand power of its own in-house personalities in lieu of outside celebrity. Boering pulls triple duty as director, co-writer and star, Walsh pops up in a supporting role as a far-left doofus, and the sports podcasters Jake Crain, Blain Crain and David Cone play members of the basketball team.

Currently, Lady Ballers, Run Hide Fight and the rest of Sonnier’s output sit in the DailyWire+ catalogue alongside a curious collection of documentaries (My Dinner with Trump, Choosing Life: Beyond the Legacy of Roe) and the company’s experiment in serialized comedy, a Family Guy-esque cartoon called Mr. Birchum.

There is also a tab in DailyWire+ leading to Bentkey, the children’s-entertainment streamer launched in 2023 to challenge Disney’s supposed efforts to “indoctrinate children into the LGBTQIA cult.” Bentkey’s marquee program is Chip Chilla, a cartoon about home-schooled chinchillas featuring the voice of former Saturday Night Live vet and Robert F. Kennedy fan Rob Schneider. (Unlike DailyWire+, Bentkey is not yet available in Canada.)

Taken together, the programming resembles a cracked-mirror version of Netflix, which can be difficult to square with Boreing’s initial DailyWire+ mission statement in which he pledged that the company will “make great entertainment that all Americans can enjoy, regardless of their political views.”

“We aspire to have an entertainment audience that is far broader than our political audience, but right now, if a person is making a decision to buy DailyWire+, it’s unlikely that they object to our politics,” the co-CEO says. “But Mr. Birchum is no more conservative than The Simpsons is liberal. It’s fairly mainstream. But because everything Hollywood makes tilts one way, it feels political.”

Although the company would not reveal its current DailyWire+ subscriber count, nor how popular the service is in Canada, Axios obtained information in 2022 showing that the streamer hit one million paid subscribers at the time. It is a figure that should only grow in the wake of the company’s biggest entertainment bet yet.

‘Theatre-owners are not agenda-driven like studios’

Early in the new quasi-documentary Am I Racist?, co-writer and star Matt Walsh uses a fake name to infiltrate a “Grieving White Privilege” meeting, in which participants pay an “anti-racist instructor” to confront their prejudices. After being recognized for his Daily Wire association, Walsh is asked to leave the group, and is gently escorted out while uttering, “Well, I didn’t consent to be touched.”

The scene, which was greeted with gut-busting belly laughs by the overwhelmingly white Ryman audience, feels like vintage Sacha Baron Cohen filtered through the prism of Elon Musk’s X feed.

Unlike Walsh’s first DailyWire+ film, 2022’s What Is a Woman? – a talking-head-heavy doc that includes a scene in which Walsh accuses members of a Virginia school board of being “predators” and “pathetic little gutless cowards” for allowing students to use their preferred pronouns – Am I Racist? wraps its agenda in the cinematic language of progressive filmmakers. Not only Cohen, but also Michael Moore, Nathan Fielder and the contrarian cynicism of Larry David.

“We talked about Borat as a reference point, even some older Daily Show stuff – really, it’s satirical comedy,” says Walsh. “You are taking on the thing you are trying to make fun of, providing a forum for people to feel comfortable to embarrass themselves. This is a type of comedy and entertainment that conservatives have not typically done. We wanted to break the mould on that.”

The film’s bid to subvert form culminates in a scene in which Walsh sits down with Robin DiAngelo, author of the bestselling book White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism, convincing her to pay his Black producer $30 in “reparations.” DiAngelo issued a statement last month saying she was misled into appearing in the film, which she described as “designed to humiliate and discredit anti-racist educators and activists” – a criticism that echoes the sentiments of some participants in What Is a Woman?.

“Every single person who appears in the film signed a legal waiver that we gave them ahead of time,” Walsh says. “If some of them feel after the fact that they didn’t do their due diligence or think it through, that’s more on them than it is on us.”

Outrageous and unapologetic by design, Walsh’s films fulfill twin roles for Daily Wire – they can be comforting appeals to the company’s base, and serve as a kind of trigger warning to the left that the company is intent on penetrating, or at least fractioning, mainstream audiences.

Since being released in theatres last month, Am I Racist? has earned more than US$12-million in North America (including $500,000 and counting in Canada), delivering the highest opening weekend for a political documentary since Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11 two decades ago.

While the movie will be made available to DailyWire+ subscribers eventually, it was important for Boreing to release the title into theatres first.

“We want impact, audience and credibility in the filmmaking community, and at some point we’re limited if the content is only on the streamer. We have to play in the places where scores are kept,” Boreing says, noting the headlines that drive box-office reporting. “If you’re putting a movie in a theatre, you’re taking a bigger risk, but that’s important if you’re going to be competitive in the industry.”

While a few years ago there might have been a reluctance on part of theatre-owners to play conservative-leaning titles – Canadian theatre giant Cineplex was blasted in 2019 for screening the anti-abortion drama Unplanned – the landscape has shifted as mainstream studios punt titles to streaming services.

“Theatre-owners are not agenda-driven like studios – they just want happy customers who will buy a ticket and a bucket of popcorn,” says Chuck Konzelman, co-founder of SDG Releasing, which partnered with Daily Wire to handle the theatrical distribution of Am I Racist?. “Theatres have a new term for movies like this: ‘alternative content blockbusters.’”

And competition in this alternative space is heating up.

Since its release in August, the fawning biopic Reagan, starring Dennis Quaid as the Gipper, has pulled in more than US$28-million at the box office. Last year, the fledgling Utah-based Angel Studios – which specializes in “wholesome” content – brought in a whopping US$250-million worldwide for Sound of Freedom, a thriller that traffics in right-wing conspiracy theories about pedophile rings.

Those titles would fit right in on DailyWire+ – which is why the company recently partnered with Angel Studios for the theatrical release of the inspirational drama Sound of Hope: The Story of Possum Trot. And why the company is intent on diversifying its slate.

Up next for the streamer is The Pendragon Cycle, a series based on the Arthurian fantasy books by Stephen R. Lawhead, which might be the DailyWire+ answer to Game of Thrones. There is also progress on a series based on Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, and a live-action version of Snow White starring Daily Wire podcaster Brett Cooper (which was developed in response to what Shapiro calls Disney’s “woke beyond belief” remake starring Rachel Zegler, set for release in 2025). Sonnier also has a dream of building the company’s own action franchise in the spirit of John Wick.

“We have to grow capability, and the only way to do that is through the act of doing. If we want to be good filmmakers, we have to be filmmakers,” says Boreing. “I love when a man leaves the hospital with his first kid and he has a ‘World’s Greatest Dad’ hat on. You’ve never even been a dad yet. But it’s aspirational.”

“We don’t let fear keep us from stepping out and making content. Which we’re getting better and better at,” he continues, “even if we don’t have access to every talented person working in Hollywood.”