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The fall of Ben Shapiro

Antisemitism ate the MAGA media star.

Just a few years ago, Ben Shapiro was the defining voice of right-wing media. His podcast sat near the top of the charts. Posts from the Daily Wire, his media company, routinely dominated the competition on Facebook. His team was even coming for Hollywood, putting out “anti-woke” comedies and an epic fantasy series that cost millions per episode.

All that feels like a distant memory now. Shapiro’s social media traffic has collapsed, as the Washington Post’s Drew Harwell recently reported; the Daily Wire has gone through multiple rounds of layoffs since 2025. The epic fantasy series flopped. Shapiro’s struggle to stay relevant is clear on his YouTube page, where you can find painfully forced videos of the pundit reacting to trending culture.

So what happened? Ryan Broderick, a longtime internet culture reporter who publishes the Garbage Day newsletter, has a succinct explanation: “The age-old problem with working at the racism factory! They eventually make a new racism that includes you,” he wrote in May.

To learn more about the Daily Wire’s decline, Today, Explained co-host Noel King spoke with Broderick about how Charlie Kirk’s murder precipitated a MAGA vibe shift that has left Shapiro out in the cold, the new media figures rising to replace him, and whether we will miss Shapiro once he’s gone. (We very likely will.)

Below is an excerpt of their conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.

Explain your “racism factory” line, please.

It was a pithy way to describe what I think is happening to Ben Shapiro right now, which is that he’s found himself on the wrong side of a far-right vibe shift that’s happening.

The question of “Should American conservatives support Israel?” I think, has quickly become the deciding factor in canonizing the new wave of MAGA, or even post-MAGA conservatism in America. There’s a lot of creators on one side who say we should not be involved with Israel. They say that largely for antisemitic purposes, but also because they’re xenophobic and........

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