The Matt Walsh Show - January 30, 2025


Jeremy Boreing Hosts a Special Daily Wire Townhall


Episode Stats

Length

29 minutes

Words per Minute

176.02779

Word Count

5,238

Sentence Count

302

Hate Speech Sentences

9


Summary

Learn English with The Daily Wire's Managing Director, Ben Shapiro. President Trump signs an executive order banning chemical and surgical mutilation of our children, and it's an exciting moment to reflect on what we ve accomplished as a company.


Transcript

00:00:00.180 It's 2025. The Daily Wire is about to turn 10 years old.
00:00:04.800 And yesterday, the President of the United States signed an executive order titled
00:00:07.980 Protecting Our Children from Chemical and Surgical Mutilation,
00:00:11.300 which prohibits surgical and chemical mutilation of our children.
00:00:15.400 It is a great day for The Daily Wire.
00:00:17.560 Thank you.
00:00:47.560 For me personally, though, this is also an exciting moment to reflect on what we've accomplished
00:00:59.660 as a company. There are a lot of people in the conservative movement who deserve a lot of credit
00:01:04.060 for this victory, but a lot of the people who deserve the most credit are sitting right here
00:01:08.860 in this room today. We don't often get to tout all of our own accomplishments, modesty being a virtue.
00:01:14.580 But false modesty is a sin. And to put it bluntly, The Daily Wire has been leading on this issue
00:01:20.840 from the very day that we were founded. I couldn't be more proud of all of our enormous contributions
00:01:26.580 to this issue. We've made enormous contributions to a range of issues, and I'm often proud of the team,
00:01:32.560 but never more so than today. It is rare in life. I've been in this business for a minute.
00:01:39.840 I've seen a lot of things. It is rare in this life that you get to be a part of a moment like this.
00:01:45.400 And it would be inappropriate for us not to take a moment to reflect on it together as a team and to
00:01:51.220 reflect on it with our audience, with the people who have supported us, with the people who've
00:01:54.700 empowered us by listening to our shows, by sharing our content, by engaging with our advertisers,
00:02:01.000 our advertisers who actually did the advertising, our subscribers who made it possible for us to take
00:02:06.160 some of the stands that we've taken against incredible odds. I don't think people,
00:02:11.820 sometimes even inside the company and certainly outside, actually realize just how difficult it
00:02:19.300 has been to wage this particular fight and what it means that we've been able to participate in
00:02:24.240 this victory. It's a very special thing. We should hold on to it. Like with all of your successes in
00:02:30.320 life, you should hang on to it loosely, but you should hang on to it nonetheless. Nobody has fought
00:02:36.020 harder than we have on this issue. And for that reason, I've never been more proud.
00:02:41.820 And I want to tell you a little bit just in reflection on how we came to be in this moment.
00:02:47.940 Two weeks after the founding of the company, Ben Shapiro went on CNN and did a show with Dr. Drew
00:02:56.720 and Zoe Tur. If those of you don't remember, Zoe Tur is a biological man who, it's hard to remember him
00:03:03.200 because he's basically disappeared from public life. But he's a biological man who at that time was
00:03:08.280 defending so-called trans rights, which were fairly novel at the time. Most of us had not really
00:03:12.720 engaged with this issue in a major way. And yet there was Ben, 2015, I can't stress enough, two
00:03:19.200 weeks after we started the Daily Wire. And he was debating these issues and he referred to
00:03:24.980 Tur as Sir, which in retrospect was perhaps a little bit more polite than Ben should have been.
00:03:31.360 Tur, though, responded to this by grabbing Ben by the neck and saying,
00:03:35.980 if you say that again, you're going home in an ambulance.
00:03:41.060 It was an amazing moment of television. I mean, here you had a rather large biological man in a
00:03:47.700 dress threatening physical violence if Ben didn't bend the knee to this obvious delusion.
00:03:53.580 And what was the reaction from CNN? Nothing. What was the reaction from Dr. Drew while one of his
00:03:59.980 guests was being threatened on national television for saying a political opinion? Nothing. And that
00:04:07.220 was the first clue that we had as a company as to what this fight was going to be like. It was going
00:04:11.920 to be threats, threats of physical violence, threats of economic hardship, threats of demonetization,
00:04:20.140 of blocking, of harassment, of threats against essentially the livelihood of everyone who worked for this
00:04:26.820 company and our opportunities at success at every turn if we did not accept this obvious lie.
00:04:34.020 So from day one, it was the Daily Wire's policy not to give into this. From day one, it was our policy
00:04:39.100 not to use the ridiculous novel concept of preferred pronouns in any of our reporting. And we decided
00:04:45.920 instead we would just use pronouns in our reporting like reporters had been doing since the dawn of time.
00:04:50.600 But at the time, well, in retrospect, like, well, that's not a very big deal, except that at the time,
00:04:55.580 everybody was moving as quickly as they could to rewrite the rules of language to accommodate for this
00:05:02.320 gender madness. Back then in 2015, we only had two hosts, Ben and Drew. At that time, I'm not even sure that
00:05:10.640 we had hired Michael Knowles to be our social media manager, which was the worst decision we ever made in the
00:05:15.960 history of the company. We eventually had to give him a show just because he was so bad at his job.
00:05:21.180 But even with only two hosts, this issue was never far away from our coverage. I remember Ben talking
00:05:28.040 about it on his 20th episode. I remember Drew talking about it in the first month of the company
00:05:32.140 and giving one of his first comedic monologues about men going into women's restrooms. And you
00:05:38.760 should go back and watch it. It's absolutely vintage, classic Andrew Klavan. And again, at the time,
00:05:45.960 no one was having these conversations. No one was engaging in this fight. Now, of course, it's
00:05:51.300 universal. And in retrospect, it feels like these were just very small moves that were happening,
00:05:56.540 but they were pronounced moves at the time. In fact, many right of center commentators and journalists
00:06:03.180 at that time, even many who now are on the correct side of the issue, who now have done heroic work since
00:06:08.940 having the scales lifted from their eyes. Nevertheless, in those days, they were not on our side.
00:06:14.400 They were supportive of, again, I call them so-called trans rights, because I'm not sure
00:06:19.920 that there is a right to mutilate your body in service of a delusion. And there's certainly not
00:06:25.660 a right to mutilate children in service of a delusion. We weren't the only people in the fight,
00:06:31.740 and I don't mean to imply that we were, but it was lonely. There were not many, and we were leading.
00:06:37.500 And our outspokenness on the issue came with a very real price. The truth is, we couldn't have
00:06:44.500 imagined how great a price it would ultimately be. And I'm going to tell you a little bit about that
00:06:47.940 as we go through today. But we were warned. In 2019, as the company was really starting to get
00:06:54.020 its sea legs, we were really starting to break through. We were really starting to have success.
00:06:58.960 We were being courted by one of the big three Hollywood talent agencies. And an agent at one
00:07:07.700 of these, a top agent at one of these top agencies with whom I've cultivated a friendship. I think he's
00:07:12.660 a good guy. I'm not going to say his name because I don't want him to take a lot of flack for this.
00:07:16.000 Nevertheless, he called me and he said, listen, we love you guys. We think that there's huge
00:07:20.780 opportunity. There are a lot of great deals to be done. But, you know, you're conservatives,
00:07:28.140 and we're, as an organization, pretty well populated by left-leaning Hollywood folk. I said,
00:07:35.860 yeah, but you knew that when you were taking the meetings with us. Are we going to be able to do
00:07:38.560 deals or not? And he said, you are 100% going to be able to do deals. We're going to do huge deals.
00:07:42.720 We're going to make a lot of money together. We're going to help you guys increase your reach,
00:07:45.960 increase your effectiveness. And the truth is, we don't really care what you guys talk about. You want
00:07:50.820 to talk about abortion, that's fine. You want to talk about small government, that's fine.
00:07:54.400 fine. Robust foreign policy, that's fine. We understand. But there is one thing. You have
00:08:00.660 got to stop talking about this trans issue. You have to understand, he told me, a lot of the people
00:08:05.820 you'll be working with at the agency, I mean, this is LA, this is New York. A lot of the people you're
00:08:09.900 working with at the agency have transgendered children. It's personal to them. You have to let
00:08:15.940 it go. The or else was kind of implied. He didn't actually say it. And again, the guy who said this,
00:08:24.080 a good guy, he wasn't actually trying to threaten me. He was trying to tell me the actual reality of
00:08:28.960 the situation. But it really was a devil at the crossroads moment for Ben and I. I mean,
00:08:33.980 essentially, we were being told, you can have the world and it will only cost you your soul.
00:08:39.240 And we wanted the world. You know, if you work here, you know, if you've been following the
00:08:45.220 company, if you're a supporter of the company, we are remarkably ambitious. We're the most ambitious
00:08:49.740 people in conservative media. We don't just want to be the preeminent conservative media company.
00:08:55.240 We want to be the preeminent digital media company in the world. That's what we have our sights on,
00:08:59.740 the most influence, the largest and most engaged audience, the most opportunity to make a difference,
00:09:05.100 the most opportunity to do well and to do good. And here we were being told, well, the cost of that
00:09:10.480 is you cannot talk about this issue. And we chose our souls. Again, you look back and you say the
00:09:17.720 Daily Wire did over $200 million of revenue last year. We have millions of people in our audience.
00:09:23.080 We have enormous reach. We have successful hosts and successful shows and successful movies,
00:09:27.820 successful documentaries. And it seems like that was an easy decision to make. It was not an easy
00:09:33.540 decision to make. In fact, if we had known just how hard it's going to be, I don't know if we could
00:09:39.980 have had the fortitude to have stood by the decision. Fortunately, God has special providence
00:09:45.180 for fools and we were very naive. So in the years that followed, we doubled down and we tripled down
00:09:51.360 on this particular fight. We led on this particular fight and we scored real victories, both political
00:09:58.060 and cultural. In 2021, our own Luke Rosiak blew open one of the most consequential news stories
00:10:03.520 of the decade. And I say consequential because it literally elected a governor in the state of
00:10:07.860 Virginia. In Loudoun County, Virginia, a school board had covered up a sexual assault in order
00:10:12.880 to protect the insane bathroom policy that they had put in place, which had allowed a teenage boy
00:10:18.120 to go into the restroom with teenage girls. After the story blew up, Matt Walsh rented a room in
00:10:25.040 Loudoun County in order to qualify as a citizen for a citizens-only school board meeting and helped
00:10:29.540 bring the issue to national attention. It went viral and led in significant part to the election
00:10:35.040 of Governor Youngkin in Virginia, which is a huge turning point for the state of Virginia
00:10:39.940 and the beginning of what became a cascading turning point around this issue and around our
00:10:45.360 politics nationwide. And of course, the school officials responsible for the travesty were later
00:10:50.680 indicted for their roles in the cover-up. That is because of the work of Luke Rosiak, is because of the
00:10:55.860 work of Matt Walsh. It is because of the work of The Daily Wire from our journalists all the way
00:11:00.200 through our social media team for making that happen. And in many ways, it was the springboard
00:11:04.560 for Matt's journey becoming himself a leader on this issue, the leading voice at the leading
00:11:09.580 publication on the defining social issue of the last decade. Again, a thing for which we should be
00:11:16.260 enormously proud and thankful to have been a part of. After that, Matt released his children's book,
00:11:21.320 Johnny the Walrus, and cleverly became the number one author in the LGBT category on Amazon.
00:11:27.380 It was a hilarious stunt, and the book was very, very funny and very good. I'll brag a little bit
00:11:33.260 that my niece illustrated the book. So I have, obviously, this was a great moment for me in the
00:11:37.180 history of the company. But it was also effective because it changed policy at Amazon. Outraged
00:11:43.580 Amazon employees staged a die-in. They were so scandalized by the fact that we were able to sell
00:11:50.480 some books about ideas with which they disagreed that they pretended to be dead at the doorway of
00:11:55.280 Amazon to imply that reading our words in a children's book was the threat of actual violence.
00:12:02.180 It threatened their actual lives. And Amazon, one of the largest and most valuable companies in the
00:12:07.120 world, had to make a choice. Would they stand with their employees? And probably, if we're being honest,
00:12:12.680 based on the geography of where they were founded, probably their own sort of political beliefs,
00:12:16.980 whether they deeply held a belief in transgenderism at the top of the company or not, who knows?
00:12:22.040 But certainly, they were friendly to the idea of progressive values. And yet, because the Daily
00:12:28.460 Wire was gaining traction, because we were starting to have purchase with the audience, they chose
00:12:34.560 sanity, which was surprising to all of us. They left the book up in their store, and today,
00:12:41.120 it sold over 150,000 copies on Amazon. And that wouldn't be the last time we took a top tech
00:12:47.720 company to task over the issue of transgenderism. Then, of course, in March of 2021, Harry's Razors
00:12:55.280 canceled a big advertising campaign with the Daily Wire because Michael Knowles and Candace Owens had
00:13:00.080 discussed the reality of biological sex on a show that, at the time, wasn't even on the Daily Wire.
00:13:06.260 And once again, we decided to fight rather than simply let the left have the ability to dictate
00:13:12.020 this dilution onto the rest of us by fiat. We launched Jeremy's Razors. And just so you understand,
00:13:19.460 today, Jeremy's Razors is a growing and thriving business. It did something like $20 million of
00:13:26.580 revenue last year, which is a pretty funny end of the joke, if you think about it. But it wasn't obvious
00:13:32.540 that that was going to redound to our benefit. We were essentially saying to all of our advertisers
00:13:37.440 on whom we are dependent, and at that time, we're dependent for almost all of our revenue.
00:13:42.260 This was before the real ascendancy of our subscription program. And we were telling them,
00:13:46.120 we will not bend the knee to these sorts of threats. We will not bend the knee. We could have
00:13:51.920 lost an overwhelming number of our advertisers, and we could have lost the entire company.
00:13:57.280 We didn't, thank God. But that doesn't mean that we weren't taking that risk. We did take the risk.
00:14:03.600 And we won. A year later, we launched another market opportunity with Jeremy's Chocolate.
00:14:11.080 Hershey's Chocolate thought it would be funny to cater to all this nonsense with a Hershey bar.
00:14:15.700 And we said, no, you can't. We're not going to give in to this sort of diversity cult that you're
00:14:20.120 a part of. We launched our own chocolate. And today, we've sold over a million bars of our
00:14:24.400 she, her, and he, him chocolate. As I like to say, one of them has nuts. I'll leave it to you
00:14:29.240 to decide which is which. And again, we were telling the marketplace of our advertisers
00:14:34.600 that we weren't going to put up with this. There was enormous risk. Just because the moves worked
00:14:41.800 does not mean there wasn't enormous risk. Success always seems inevitable in retrospect. But success
00:14:47.840 is never guaranteed. Each one of these moves required of us huge risk, both of capital and of
00:14:55.660 toil and of reputation. And every single time, we felt like we were putting the entire company at risk
00:15:02.500 to stand for these particular values. And we felt that way because we were. And the consequences that
00:15:10.300 we had been warned about were very nearly upon us. And of course, the most important and most public
00:15:16.300 move we made came in the form of a question. In 2022, Daily Wire released Matt Walsh's culture
00:15:21.520 shaping documentary, What is a Woman? The left, it turns out, did not know the answer. And they were
00:15:26.600 pissed. Matt's film became a national sensation with tens of millions of viewers. By the time the
00:15:33.340 dust had settled, we, working together with Matt, had exposed the sinister motives behind body-destroying
00:15:39.140 medical procedures at Vanderbilt Hospital and beyond, hosted a giant rally outside of the Tennessee
00:15:44.320 state house demanding action to protect children. And it started a movement that inspired over 36
00:15:49.280 states nationwide to change their laws to ban the barbaric practice of mutilating children in the
00:15:54.920 name of radical political theory. Those actions, more than anything else, led to the case that's
00:16:00.880 currently before the Supreme Court to determine whether or not states have an inherent right to
00:16:04.660 protect children from having their bodies sacrificed on the altar of this fashionable social contagion,
00:16:10.200 or whether our government is just a pagan death cult. We will know that this year,
00:16:14.080 and we will know it because of What is a Woman? And What is a Woman wasn't our only film dealing with
00:16:22.380 these issues. In 2023, we put out Lady Ballers starring virtually all of us and tackling the issue
00:16:29.740 of men dominating women's sports. The day after we released the trailer, Facebook permanently collapsed
00:16:37.380 our traffic on the platform. You have to understand that there was a time when the Daily Wire was the
00:16:44.480 number one publisher in the world on Facebook, which was the number one publisher in the world.
00:16:52.340 The day after we released the Lady Ballers trailer, they crushed us.
00:16:58.900 Mark Zuckerberg has publicly acknowledged now that they were taking actions to suppress effective
00:17:04.620 political and social content. And we were the most engaged provider of that kind of content in the
00:17:09.620 world at the time. We saw an 80% reduction in our traffic and revenue on the platform. There was a
00:17:16.100 time when it was the number one source of our revenue and the number one source of our traffic,
00:17:21.780 and it was cut by over 80% as a result of the actions that we've taken around this issue. The single
00:17:29.040 set of changes from this single company has cost the Daily Wire tens. And I'm not exaggerating when I
00:17:34.560 say very probably hundreds of millions of dollars. And it wasn't the only loss because of the trans
00:17:41.480 issue. After Michael Knowles told the crowd at CPAC that transgenderism must be eradicated from public
00:17:46.180 life entirely, no less an adversary than the Biden White House itself came out to announce him.
00:17:53.600 YouTube demonetized Matt Walsh's entire channel for discussing the biological sex of Dylan Mulvaney.
00:17:58.840 He's a dude, by the way. In sum, YouTube has demonetized 2,000 videos from Daily Wire since
00:18:08.280 2020 and declared 194 videos hateful and derogatory just since 2022. The total cost of these enforcements
00:18:16.560 just from YouTube against the Daily Wire are likely between 10 and 20 million dollars. The total cost of
00:18:23.360 the additional shadow banning and removing from recommendation engines and inability to retarget the
00:18:28.200 audiences that we weren't able to engage with in the first place. And all the other consequences of
00:18:32.240 our stand on the trans issue are well in excess of 100 million dollars. Just so you know, because big
00:18:38.740 numbers start to sound small when we use them all the time. When you're talking about 100 or 200 million
00:18:44.160 dollars in just four years for a company that only did 200 million dollars of revenue this year and the
00:18:50.700 year before, you are talking about the difference between abject success and close the doors and sell off
00:18:57.860 the printer failure. That we have been able to persevere and survive and even thrive against
00:19:04.000 these kinds of attacks, almost all of which were directly because of the trans issue, is nothing
00:19:11.200 short of miraculous. God himself has, for some reason that is beyond my understanding, chosen to allow us to
00:19:20.220 continue to survive when by all right we should not have been able to because of the attacks we have
00:19:27.340 taken, because of the stand that we've made on the issue of transgenderism. As I said, if that agent back
00:19:34.260 in 2019 had told me what the price was actually going to be, I don't know what I would have said. I probably
00:19:40.260 would have said the same thing because I'm an ornery cuss, and also because I had a lot less to lose back
00:19:44.640 then, which, you know, if he comes along and says the same thing to me now, as I like to say, I'm not
00:19:49.900 very good, but I'm real expensive, you know. It's not that I'm not for sale, it's that no one ever makes
00:19:53.760 an offer. But damn, we had our teeth kicked in over this issue again and again and again and again.
00:20:03.120 I couldn't begin to outline all of the consequences, but here are a few. 206 enforcements from TikTok,
00:20:09.980 who has actually shut down our channels on numerous occasions. We've been dropped by back-end service
00:20:16.240 providers from JW Player to HubSpot to OpenWeb to Aspire. We lost a multi-million dollar a year
00:20:21.860 email business for almost two years because of these and other cancellations. We were blocked by Eventbrite
00:20:27.260 for events related to What is a Woman, by Target for sales of Johnny the Walrus, by Bing who canceled
00:20:32.960 our ability to even give them our money. They wouldn't let us spend advertising dollars with them
00:20:37.640 because of the trans issue. We were restricted and banned by Twitter, including their blocking
00:20:41.940 of Dr. Jordan Peterson before he ever even joined the Daily Wire. And I think it's worth noting that
00:20:46.960 Dr. Peterson's rise to international prominence largely began with a refusal to buckle on the issue
00:20:51.940 of preferred pronouns. One might say that while the Daily Wire has been a leader on this issue, we have
00:20:57.640 also attracted other people who are willing to fight the fight on this issue to join us. And Dr.
00:21:02.980 Peterson is an obvious example, another leader on the issue who chose to join the Daily Wire.
00:21:07.640 Even conservative media organizations refused to have our talent on their shows at various times
00:21:13.860 because of our rigidity on this issue. Everyone wanted us to just get over it.
00:21:21.440 But we kept fighting. We launched our children's streamer, BentKey, specifically because of Disney's
00:21:26.760 quote, not-so-secret gay agenda of adding queerness into content for little kids. We fought against
00:21:33.040 GARM for trying to enforce their ideology on us at the cost of our ad revenue. And Ben was called to
00:21:37.620 testify on Capitol Hill. We even dropped our HR, they call it HRM, like our HR back-end provider,
00:21:45.540 where you used to all log in and see why your paycheck bounced. One time, one time. But we dropped
00:21:54.880 that entire service because they were requiring us to put pronouns in everyone's profiles. At every
00:22:02.260 single turn, we dropped law firms who required us to identify our pronouns. Every single turn,
00:22:08.600 we made the decision that was worse for business because it was right for our mission. Because
00:22:14.620 this company exists for two reasons. A business reason, yes, and a missional reason also. And there's
00:22:21.200 tension between those two missions. And when in doubt, we choose our values.
00:22:26.420 The fundamental thing that we will be accused of by people who watch this video is, sure,
00:22:35.680 you did all of that. But you did it to make money. You did it to sell books. You did it to sell tickets
00:22:42.920 to your movies. You did it to get traffic on the platforms. What I'm telling you, first of all,
00:22:48.260 is that it's not by accident that The Daily Wire has aligned the profit motive with our missional
00:22:53.960 interests. We did that deliberately because we know how human incentives work. We know that we
00:22:58.560 will be more likely to accomplish our values-based mission if we are also accomplishing a business
00:23:06.380 mission. But I assure you that at every single point at which we made one of these decisions,
00:23:14.800 we thought that it wasn't going to be financially successful. We thought there was a chance. We were
00:23:21.800 taking a bet on the audience. We were putting our faith in the audience. We were assuming that if
00:23:26.360 we felt the way that we felt, surely somebody else felt the way that we felt also. And that maybe if we
00:23:31.820 had the courage of our convictions to stand up when others were not standing up, that maybe that
00:23:36.700 audience would have our back. And yes, that did redound to our benefit, not to the price of the
00:23:43.300 hundreds of millions of dollars, that we've been denied by company after company, by tech giant
00:23:49.780 after tech giant. And again, sometimes even by other people in the conservative movement.
00:23:55.740 Now, that is, as I've said all along, that is not to say that we were alone in this fight. There
00:24:01.620 were a lot of important voices in the fight. Abigail Schreier and Riley Gaines and Seth Dillon and
00:24:06.380 Haya Rychik and Megyn Kelly. Elon Musk spent $44 billion to restore, in part, to restore the Babylon
00:24:12.780 Bee after they made a very brave stand and refused to take down a post about a man dressed as a woman
00:24:17.340 in the federal government. And of course, there are many, many, many more. But they weren't all there
00:24:25.080 from the beginning. Many of the people who did some of the best work on this topic, in part, felt the
00:24:32.020 freedom to do so because we had taken big risks ahead of them. Still others of them only even agreed
00:24:40.020 with the concept of doing it. Because they read a book by Abigail Schreier, because they watched a movie
00:24:45.720 by Matt Walsh, because they read an article by Luke Rosiak, because they saw a video of Ben Shapiro asking a
00:24:51.980 college student why she wasn't 60, which is one of the biggest viral moments in the history of the company
00:24:58.060 from the very earliest days of the Daily Wire. And the presence of those other great warriors in the
00:25:05.080 fight doesn't change the fact that for a decade now, the Daily Wire has been leading on this issue
00:25:09.720 more and more and more effectively than any other organization in American public life. And for that
00:25:15.780 reason, every single one of you, and everyone who has ever worked here in the past, and every subscriber,
00:25:22.560 and every former subscriber who subscribed to the Daily Wire sometime in the past,
00:25:26.460 and everyone who listens and shares, and everyone who engages with our advertisers,
00:25:30.460 and every advertiser who's ever advertised on our shows and stood beside us should feel some pride of
00:25:36.500 ownership in this remarkable moment. We all deserve to recognize the role that we've played
00:25:41.960 and to savor this enormous victory. It's easy to say of conservatives that for all our talk,
00:26:00.240 we don't actually conserve anything. It's easy to say, but it's a lie. Our work matters. Our dedication to
00:26:09.900 our principles matters. These battles aren't short, and victory is never guaranteed. But when we take
00:26:15.660 great risks on behalf of what's right, sometimes God allows us to participate in some small way
00:26:21.760 in world-changing events. The Daily Wire fights. This team fights. Our audience fights. And sometimes
00:26:30.920 we win. There are a lot of people who don't like the Daily Wire. That comes with the territory. And
00:26:38.100 it's fine. But we take great risks, and we have been a part of great victories. If you're employed in
00:26:44.140 this country today and you're unvaccinated, you should know that the Daily Wire, alongside a small
00:26:49.740 handful of other companies, made that possible by daring to take on the federal government.
00:26:54.620 If you think, sure, that's just what you do for a living, I would encourage you to pick a fight with
00:27:01.220 people who can audit you and regulate you, and who can and do regulate and threaten the people on
00:27:07.660 whose platforms we conduct almost 100% of our business. And if your child or grandchild should
00:27:14.840 struggle, as millions of children do, with questions about their identity and how to feel comfortable in
00:27:20.020 their own skin, you should know that the Daily Wire, along with a handful of other allies, played a
00:27:25.340 pivotal role in helping to make sure that your government can't prey on them in their weakest
00:27:29.760 moments and then castrate them while they're still too young to drive. This year marks the 10-year
00:27:36.540 anniversary of the Daily Wire, as I said. And that means 10 years of fighting this particular fight.
00:27:42.560 Through every one of those battles, God has blessed us. Even with all the risks and all of the
00:27:47.840 challenges, and even after all of the defeats, we've managed to grow in size. We've managed to
00:27:52.640 grow in strength. We've managed to grow in revenue and in reach. We're bigger today than we've ever
00:27:57.860 been, and we're fighting harder for our values than we have ever fought. Over the coming months,
00:28:04.060 we'll do a lot to mark this enormous milestone, 10 years of the Daily Wire. And I look forward to
00:28:10.720 getting back together and raising a glass to that unbelievable moment and sharing also with you in the
00:28:16.540 audience some of the fun ways that we're going to celebrate between now and September 21st, which,
00:28:21.300 according to some arguments, is actually the first day because it's the first day of the Ben Shapiro
00:28:25.480 show. There's an argument for July, which is the first day we started paying Ben Shapiro.
00:28:31.480 And there's an argument for October, which is when we launched the website. But I think September 21st
00:28:35.740 is the appropriate day because it's the first day that we appeared on the public scene.
00:28:40.080 But reading the news yesterday couldn't help but think that today and this enormous victory
00:28:48.180 is just an excellent way to kick off the festivities. So to everyone in this room and to those who've
00:28:53.640 been with us on this journey through this last decade fighting these battles and other battles
00:28:57.800 that are yet to be won, you have my deepest thanks. We did it together. Savor it. Thank God for it.
00:29:05.720 Thank one another for it. Thank all the warriors who've taken the field to defend our children.
00:29:12.160 Thank Donald Trump for winning his re-election, which is the number one job of a politician is to
00:29:17.880 win and for having the courage in his victory to do things that other Republican presidents have lacked
00:29:23.360 the courage of their convictions to actually take on. And then let it go. Because the only way to
00:29:31.280 thrive in this world is to hold lightly to those victories and to move on to the next challenge
00:29:36.400 and win yet again. Thank you.
00:29:43.400 Thank you.