The Michael Knowles Show - January 29, 2025


Jeremy Boreing Hosts a Special Daily Wire Townhall


Episode Stats


Length

29 minutes

Words per minute

174.77055

Word count

5,243

Sentence count

299

Harmful content

Toxicity

6

sentences flagged

Hate speech

10

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

Learn English with The Daily Wire's own Managing Editor, Ben Shapiro. In this episode, Ben reflects on the importance of the company's work on the trans+ movement, and why it's important to remember that the Daily Wire has been leading on this issue from the very start.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
00:00:00.160 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
00:02:56.700 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
00:04:55.340 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 1.00
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
00:05:28.060 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
00:05:51.280 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
00:06:02.860 journalists at that time, even many who now are on the correct side of the issue, who now have done
00:06:07.960 heroic work since having the scales lifted from their eyes. Nevertheless, in those days, they were not on
00:06:13.720 our side. They were supportive of, again, I call them so-called trans rights because I'm not sure 0.95
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
00:06:54.000 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 a top agent at one
00:07:08.960 of these top agencies with whom I've cultivated a friendship. I think he's a good guy. I'm not
00:07:13.480 going to say his name because I don't want him to take a lot of flack for this. Nevertheless, he called
00:07:16.920 me and he said, listen, we love you guys. We think that there's huge opportunity. There are a lot of
00:07:21.980 great deals to be done, but you're conservatives. And we're, as an organization, pretty well populated
00:07:31.920 by left-leaning Hollywood folk. I said, yeah, but you knew that when you were taking the meetings
00:07:37.360 with us. Are we going to be able to do deals or not? And he said, you are 100% going to be able
00:07:40.840 to do deals. We're going to do huge deals. We're going to make a lot of money together. We're going
00:07:44.140 to help you guys increase your reach, increase your effectiveness. And the truth is, we don't really
00:07:49.200 care what you guys talk about. You want to talk about abortion, that's fine. You want to talk 0.54
00:07:52.880 about small government, that's fine. Robust foreign policy, that's fine. We understand.
00:07:58.520 But there is one thing. You have got to stop talking about this trans issue. You have to 1.00
00:08:03.860 understand, he told me, a lot of the people you'll be working with at the agency, I mean,
00:08:07.360 this is LA, this is New York. A lot of the people you're working with at the agency have
00:08:11.680 transgendered children. It's personal to them. You have to let it go. 1.00
00:08:16.360 So the or else was kind of implied. He didn't actually say it.
00:08:22.600 And again, the guy who said this, a good guy, he wasn't actually trying to threaten me.
00:08:26.500 He was trying to tell me the actual reality of the situation. But it really was a devil
00:08:31.060 at the crossroads moment for Ben and I. I mean, essentially, we were being told, you can
00:08:36.300 have the world and it will only cost you your soul. And we wanted the world. You know, if
00:08:42.980 you work here, you know, if you've been following the company, if you're a supporter
00:08:46.060 of the company, we are remarkably ambitious. We're the most ambitious people in conservative
00:08:51.440 media. We don't just want to be the preeminent conservative media company. We want to be the
00:08:55.780 preeminent digital media company in the world. That's what we have our sights on. The most
00:09:00.380 influence, the largest and most engaged audience, the most opportunity to make a difference, the
00:09:05.320 most opportunity to do well and to do good. And here we were being told, well, the cost of
00:09:10.320 that is you cannot talk about this issue. And we chose our souls. Again, you look back
00:09:17.220 and you say the Daily Wire did over $200 million of revenue last year. We have millions of people
00:09:22.320 in our audience. We have enormous reach. We have successful hosts and successful shows
00:09:26.480 and successful movies, successful documentaries. And it seems like that was an easy decision to
00:09:31.680 make. It was not an easy decision to make. In fact, if we had known just how hard it's going
00:09:38.600 to be, I don't know if we could have had the fortitude to have stood by the decision. 0.98
00:09:42.920 Fortunately, God has special providence for fools, and we were very naive. 0.91
00:09:48.520 So in the years that followed, we doubled down and we tripled down on this particular fight. 0.96
00:09:53.420 We led on this particular fight, and we scored real victories, both political and cultural.
00:09:59.700 In 2021, our own Luke Rosiak blew open one of the most consequential news stories of the
00:10:03.780 decade. And I say consequential because it literally elected a governor in the state of Virginia.
00:10:08.880 In Loudoun County, Virginia, a school board had covered up a sexual assault in order to protect
00:10:13.320 the insane bathroom policy that they had put in place, which had allowed a teenage boy to go into
00:10:18.980 the restroom with teenage girls. After the story blew up, Matt Walsh rented a room in Loudoun County
00:10:25.540 in order to qualify as a citizen for a citizens-only school board meeting and helped bring the issue
00:10:30.280 to national attention. It went viral and led in significant part to the election of Governor
00:10:36.500 Youngkin in Virginia, which is a huge turning point for the state of Virginia and the beginning
00:10:40.960 of what became a cascading turning point around this issue and around our politics nationwide.
00:10:47.700 And of course, the school officials responsible for the travesty were later indicted for their
00:10:51.520 roles in the cover-up. That is because of the work of Luke Rosiak. It is because of the work of
00:10:56.140 Matt Walsh. It is because of the work of the Daily Wire from our journalists all the way through
00:11:00.300 our social media team for making that happen. And in many ways, it was the springboard for Matt's
00:11:05.280 journey becoming himself a leader on this issue, the leading voice at the leading publication
00:11:10.180 on the defining social issue of the last decade. Again, a thing for which we should be enormously proud
00:11:17.500 and thankful to have been a part of. After that, Matt released his children's book, Johnny the Walrus,
00:11:22.520 and cleverly became the number one author in the LGBT category on Amazon.
00:11:26.580 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 history
00:11:37.380 of the company. But it was also effective because it changed policy at Amazon. Outraged Amazon employees
00:11:44.380 staged a die-in. They were so scandalized by the fact that we were able to sell some books about ideas
00:11:51.640 with which they disagreed that they pretended to be dead at the doorway of Amazon to imply that
00:11:57.280 reading our words in a children's book was the threat of actual violence. It threatened their
00:12:02.620 actual lives. And Amazon, one of the largest and most valuable companies in the world, had to make
00:12:07.740 a choice. Would they stand with their employees? And probably, if we're being honest, based on the
00:12:13.140 geography of where they were founded, probably their own sort of political beliefs, whether they
00:12:17.400 deeply held a belief in transgenderism at the top of the company or not. Who knows? But certainly,
00:12:22.540 they were friendly to the idea of progressive values. And yet, because The Daily Wire was gaining
00:12:29.000 traction, because we were starting to have purchase with the audience, they chose sanity,
00:12:36.220 which was surprising to all of us. They left the book up in their store, and today it sold over
00:12:41.800 150,000 copies on Amazon. And that wouldn't be the last time we took a top tech company to task over
00:12:49.280 the issue of transgenderism. Then, of course, in March of 2021, Harry's Razors canceled a big 0.74
00:12:56.320 advertising campaign with The Daily Wire because Michael Knowles and Candace Owens had discussed the
00:13:00.560 reality of biological sex on a show that, at the time, wasn't even on The Daily Wire. And once again,
00:13:07.980 we decided to fight rather than simply let the left have the ability to dictate this dilution
00:13:12.800 onto the rest of us by fiat. We launched Jeremy's Razors. And just so you understand, today, Jeremy's
00:13:20.260 Razors is a growing and thriving business. It did something like $20 million of revenue last year,
00:13:27.360 which is a pretty funny end of the joke, if you think about it. But it wasn't obvious that that was
00:13:33.060 going to redound to our benefit. We were essentially saying to all of our advertisers,
00:13:37.460 on whom we are dependent, and at that time, we're dependent for almost all of our revenue.
00:13:42.280 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.
00:13:57.960 We didn't, thank God. But that doesn't mean that we weren't taking that risk. We did take the risk.
00:14:03.560 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.
00:14:15.680 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
00:14:29.260 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
00:14:41.420 worked does not mean there wasn't enormous risk. Success always seems inevitable in retrospect,
00:14:47.340 but success is never guaranteed. Each one of these moves required of us huge risk, both of capital
00:14:54.960 and of toil and of reputation. And every single time, we felt like we were putting the entire
00:15:01.120 company at risk to stand for these particular values. And we felt that way because we were.
00:15:09.060 And the consequences that we had been warned about were very nearly upon us.
00:15:14.520 And of course, the most important and most public move we made came in the form of a question.
00:15:19.000 In 2022, Daily Wire released Matt Walsh's culture-shaping documentary,
00:15:22.380 What is a Woman? The left, it turns out, did not know the answer, and they were pissed.
00:15:28.300 Matt's film became a national sensation with tens of millions of viewers. By the time the dust had
00:15:33.760 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 Statehouse demanding action to protect children, and had started a movement that inspired over 36
00:15:49.300 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 sociable, fashionable
00:16:09.260 social contagion, or whether our government is just a pagan death cult. We will know that this year,
00:16:13.980 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.
00:16:52.360 The day after we released the Lady Ballers trailer, they crushed us. Mark Zuckerberg has publicly
00:17:00.560 acknowledged now that they were taking actions to suppress effective political and social content,
00:17:05.900 and we were the most engaged provider of that kind of content in the world at the time.
00:17:11.160 We saw an 80% reduction in our traffic and revenue on the platform. There was a time when it was the
00:17:17.460 number one source of our revenue and the number one source of our traffic, and it was cut by over
00:17:23.180 80% as a result of the actions that we've taken around this issue. The single set of changes from
00:17:30.080 this single company has cost the Daily Wire tens, and I'm not exaggerating when I say very probably
00:17:35.860 hundreds of millions of dollars. And it wasn't the only loss because of the trans issue. After 0.50
00:17:42.380 Michael Knowles told the crowd at CPAC that transgenderism must be eradicated from public 1.00
00:17:46.180 life entirely, no less an adversary than the Biden White House itself came out to denounce 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.
00:18:01.820 In sum, YouTube has demonetized 2,000 videos from Daily Wire since 2020 and declared 194 videos
00:18:11.320 hateful and derogatory just since 2022. The total cost of these enforcements just from YouTube
00:18:17.440 against the Daily Wire are likely between 10 and 20 million dollars. The total cost of the additional
00:18:23.880 shadow banning and removing from recommendation engines and inability to retarget the audiences
00:18:28.580 that we weren't able to engage with in the first place and all the other consequences of our stand
00:18:32.660 on the trans issue are well in excess of 100 million dollars. Just so you know, because big numbers start
00:18:39.200 to sound small when we use them all the time, when you're talking about 100 or 200 million dollars in
00:18:44.940 just four years for a company that only did 200 million dollars of revenue this year and the year
00:18:50.820 before, you were talking about the difference between abject success and close the doors and
00:18:57.200 sell off the printer failure. That we have been able to persevere and survive and even thrive
00:19:03.280 against these kinds of attacks, almost all of which were directly because of the trans issue,
00:19:09.440 is nothing short of miraculous. God himself has, for some reason that is beyond my understanding,
00:19:18.460 chosen to allow us to continue to survive when by all right we should not have been able to because
00:19:26.360 of the attacks we have taken, because of the stand that we've made on the issue of transgenderism.
00:19:33.060 As I said, if that agent back in 2019 had told me what the price was actually going to be,
00:19:37.700 I don't know what I would have said. I probably would have said the same thing because I'm an
00:19:41.720 ornery cuss and also because I had a lot less to lose back then, which, you know, if he comes along
00:19:46.900 that says the same thing to me now, as I like to say, I'm not very good, but I'm real expensive.
00:19:51.200 You know, I, it's not that I'm not for sale, it's that no one ever makes an offer. 0.93
00:19:56.740 But damn, we had our teeth kicked in over this issue again and again and again and again. 0.85
00:20:03.140 I couldn't begin to outline all of the consequences, but here are a few. 206 enforcements from TikTok 0.98
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 Open Web 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
00:20:46.340 that Dr. Peterson's rise to international prominence largely began with a refusal to buckle
00:20:51.140 on the issue of preferred pronouns. One might say that while the Daily Wire has been a leader on this
00:20:57.160 issue, we have also attracted other people who are willing to fight the fight on this issue
00:21:01.080 to join us. And Dr. Peterson is an obvious example, another leader on the issue who chose
00:21:06.060 to join the Daily Wire. Even conservative media organizations refused to have our talent on their
00:21:12.600 shows at various times 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, Bent Key, 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 0.86
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
00:21:37.640 testify on Capitol Hill. We even dropped our HR, they call it HRM, like our HR back-end provider where
00:21:45.640 you used to all log in and see why your paycheck bounced. One time, one time. But we dropped that
00:21:55.140 entire service because they were requiring us to put pronouns in everyone's profiles at every single
00:22:02.680 turn. We dropped law firms who required us to identify our pronouns. Every single turn, we made
00:22:09.000 the decision that was worse for business because it was right for our mission. Because this company
00:22:15.260 exists for two reasons. A business reason, yes, and a missional reason also. And there's tension between
00:22:21.860 those two missions. And when in doubt, we choose our values. The fundamental thing that we will be
00:22:30.340 accused of by people who watch this video is, sure, you did all of that. But you did it to make money.
00:22:39.220 You did it to sell books. You did it to sell tickets to your movies. You did it to get traffic on the
00:22:46.120 platforms. What I'm telling you, first of all, is that it's not by accident that The Daily Wire has
00:22:50.560 aligned the profit motive with our missional interests. We did that deliberately because we know
00:22:56.360 how human incentives work. We know that we will be more likely to accomplish our values-based mission
00:23:03.260 if we are also accomplishing a business mission. But I assure you that at every single point at which
00:23:12.800 we made one of these decisions, we thought that it wasn't going to be financially successful.
00:23:19.640 We thought there was a chance. We were taking a bet on the audience. We were putting our faith in
00:23:24.640 the audience. We were assuming that if we felt the way that we felt, surely somebody else felt the way
00:23:29.560 that we felt also. And that maybe if we had the courage of our convictions to stand up when others
00:23:34.880 were not standing up, that maybe that audience would have our back. And yes, that did redound to our
00:23:40.040 benefit. Not to the price of the hundreds of millions of dollars that we've been denied by company
00:23:47.960 after company, by tech giant after tech giant, and again, sometimes even by other people in the
00:23:53.940 conservative movement. Now, that is, as I've said all along, that is not to say that we were alone
00:23:59.780 in this fight. There were a lot of important voices in the fight. Abigail Schreier and Riley Gaines and
00:24:05.600 Seth Dillon and Haya Rychik and Megyn Kelly. Elon Musk spent $44 billion to restore, in part, to restore the
00:24:12.520 Babylon Bee after they made a very brave stand and refused to take down a post about a man dressed as
00:24:17.080 a woman in the federal government. And of course, there are many, many, many more. But they weren't
00:24:24.680 all there from the beginning. Many of the people who did some of the best work on this topic
00:24:29.240 in part felt the freedom to do so because we had taken big risks ahead of them. Still others of them
00:24:37.440 only even agreed with the concept of doing it because they read a book by Abigail Schreier, because they
00:24:45.060 watched a movie by Matt Walsh, because they read an article by Luke Rosiak, because they saw a video of
00:24:50.400 Ben Shapiro asking a college student why she wasn't 60, which is one of the biggest viral moments in the
00:24:57.280 history of the company from the very earliest days of the Daily Wire. And the presence of those other great
00:25:04.420 warriors in the fight doesn't change the fact that for a decade now, the Daily Wire has been leading
00:25:08.900 on this issue more and more and more effectively than any other organization in American public life.
00:25:15.300 And for that reason, every single one of you and everyone who has ever worked here in the past
00:25:20.140 and every subscriber 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 and every advertiser
00:25:31.580 who's ever advertised on our shows and stood beside us should feel some pride of ownership in this
00:25:37.740 remarkable moment. We all deserve to recognize the role that we've played and to savor this enormous victory.
00:25:44.700 It's easy to say of conservatives that for all our talk, we don't actually conserve anything.
00:26:02.860 It's easy to say, but it's a lie. Our work matters. Our dedication to our principles matters.
00:26:11.260 These battles aren't short and victory is never guaranteed. But when we take great risks on behalf
00:26:17.180 of what's right, sometimes God allows us to participate in some small way in world-changing events.
00:26:23.980 The Daily Wire fights. This team fights. Our audience fights. And sometimes we win.
00:26:33.500 There are a lot of people who don't like the Daily Wire. That comes with the territory. And it's fine.
00:26:38.460 But we take great risks and we have been a part of great victories.
00:26:43.020 If you're employed in this country today and you're unvaccinated, 0.56
00:26:46.460 you should know that the Daily Wire, alongside a small handful of other companies,
00:26:51.140 made that possible by daring to take on the federal government.
00:26:55.340 If you think, sure, that's just what you do for a living,
00:26:59.600 I would encourage you to pick a fight with people who can audit you and regulate you
00:27:03.880 and who can and do regulate and threaten the people on whose platforms we conduct almost 100% of our business.
00:27:13.080 And if your child or grandchild should struggle, as millions of children do,
00:27:17.240 with questions about their identity and how to feel comfortable in their own skin,
00:27:21.080 you should know that the Daily Wire, along with a handful of other allies,
00:27:24.600 played a pivotal role in helping to make sure that your government can't prey on them in their weakest moments
00:27:30.240 and then castrate them while they're still too young to drive.
00:27:35.280 This year marks the 10-year anniversary of the Daily Wire, as I said.
00:27:38.980 And that means 10 years of fighting this particular fight.
00:27:42.560 Through every one of those battles, God has blessed us.
00:27:45.660 Even with all the risks and all of the challenges, and even after all of the defeats,
00:27:50.260 we've managed to grow in size.
00:27:51.960 We've managed to grow in strength.
00:27:54.260 We've managed to grow in revenue and in reach.
00:27:56.060 We're bigger today than we've ever been, and we're fighting harder for our values than we have ever fought.
00:28:02.620 Over the coming months, we'll do a lot to mark this enormous milestone, 10 years of the Daily Wire.
00:28:09.960 And I look forward to getting back together and raising a glass to that unbelievable moment
00:28:14.780 and sharing also with you in the audience some of the fun ways that we're going to celebrate
00:28:18.540 between now and September 21st, which, according to some arguments, is actually the first day
00:28:23.320 because it's the first day of the Ben Shapiro show.
00:28:26.300 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.
00:28:34.440 But I think September 21st is the appropriate day
00:28:37.080 because it's the first day that we appeared on the public scene.
00:28:43.380 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.
00:28:51.000 So, to everyone in this room and to those who've been with us on this journey through this last decade
00:28:55.640 fighting these battles and other battles that are yet to be won, you have my deepest thanks.
00:29:01.900 We did it together.
00:29:03.940 Savor it.
00:29:04.880 Thank God for it.
00:29:06.340 Thank one another for it.
00:29:08.600 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 win.
00:29:18.160 And for having the courage in his victory to do things that other Republican presidents have lacked
00:29:23.380 the courage of their convictions to actually take on.
00:29:27.520 And then let it go.
00:29:29.760 Because the only way to thrive in this world is to hold lightly to those victories
00:29:34.320 and to move on to the next challenge and win yet again.
00:29:38.800 Thank you.
00:29:39.160 Thank you.
00:29:40.400 Thank you.
00:29:40.920 Thank you.
00:29:45.080 Thank you.
00:29:48.120 .
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00:29:53.020 .
00:29:58.900 .