"Let Me Make You Famous" - How Hollywood Invented Ben Shapiro - Vanity Fair

11/16/2019 “Let Me Make You Famous”: How Hollywood Invented Ben Shapiro | Vanity Fair
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C O N S E R VAT I V E M E D I A
“LET ME MAKE YOU FAMOUS”: HOW HOLLYWOOD INVENTED

BEN SHAPIRO
With the shaping of producer Jeremy Boreing, Brand Shapiro has made owning the libs a
lucrative business, and the Daily Wire a rising power in conservative media. But can they
survive Trump?
BY T I NA N G U YE N
D E C E M B E R 9, 2 0 1 8
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P H OT O G RA P H BY M A R T I N S C H O E L L E R .
The night of January 10, 2013, was a triumph for Ben Shapiro, his first big score—but Jeremy
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Boreing, the Hollywood producer who’s the architect of Shapiro’s vertiginous rise, couldn’t get
past the wardrobe.
Dressed in a dark junior-banker suit, with his College Republican flop dangling over his
forehead, Shapiro, then the editor at large at Breitbart News, had been booked on Piers Morgan
Tonight to discuss his new book, Bullies: How the Left’s Culture of Fear and Intimidation
Silences America, and to debate gun control. But Shapiro’s tactics revealed themselves shortly
after the break, when he called out Morgan for “standing on the graves of the children of Sandy
Hook” in order to criticize gun owners. “Honestly, Piers,” Shapiro said, “you’ve kind of been a
bully on this issue.” He continued, “You tend to demonize people who differ from you
politically.” At one point, he handed Morgan a pocket Constitution to educate him on the Second
Amendment. Shapiro was both smart (he has a degree from Harvard Law) and obnoxious (he
once described Palestinians as living in “open sewage”), snotty and fearless, and he displayed a
preternatural talent for getting under the skin of gibbering libs. Fourteen minutes, and millions
of views later, Shapiro had accomplished his goal: he’d gone viral.
As he watched the Morgan hit, Boreing realized that Shapiro’s look, while perfectly adequate for
a right-wing think-tank talking head, wasn’t going to cut it in many of the demographics they
wanted to conquer. Shapiro quickly agreed to revise the right-wing-dork look, and the makeover
began: Boreing and a wardrobe stylist emptied Shapiro’s closet almost completely, took him to
Macy’s to re-stock, gave him an objectively better haircut, replaced his personal trainer, and
presto, the Ben Shapiro look emerged—a decently-fitted button-up shirt in neutral blues and
grays, tucked into better-fitting jeans, and a jacket that didn’t look too expensive. He wasn't
exactly a GQ cover subject, but he was, quite crucially, no longer an Alex P. Keaton stereotype.
“You can only be good at so many things. Ben is good at a great many things. This is not one of
them,” said Boreing. “So, we structure it for him and simplify it for him. That’s why he always
looks like Ben.”
Before Shapiro, Boreing was a fairly obscure Hollywood figure, perhaps best known for helping
to produce Etienne!, a buddy movie about a dying dwarf hamster. His primary political
affiliation was as the managing director of Friends of Abe, a quasi-secretive salon of conservative
entertainment-industry professionals, which he had taken over from Forrest Gump actor Gary
Sinise. Years earlier, Andrew Breitbart, a celebrity in his own right within Friends of Abe, had
introduced him to Shapiro, and they became fast friends, both serving time at Truth Revolt, a
now-defunct Web site, started as the right’s answer to David Brock’s Media Matters, which
churned out reliable content attacking the mainstream media and their secret funders. Truth
Revolt placated its ancient donors at the David Horowitz Freedom Center, a nonprofit
condemned by the Southern Poverty Law Center, but it was far too earnest, and barely made a
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Months before the Piers Morgan interview, Boreing and Shapiro had devised a site that would
eventually become the Daily Wire, which they viewed as a next-gen media company representing
the 21st-century right—an heir to Drudge and Breitbart, supercharged with modern-media hood
ornaments, like podcasts and video, which happened to be Boreing’s specialty. To get attention,
they needed personality: someone to put forward their attacks, and someone who could
withstand being attacked, too. After the Morgan hit, it dawned on both that Shapiro had to
become the brand. “‘You being a brand brings a lot of security. . . . You being a front man gives
us a ton of security,” Boreing recalled telling him. “I can better accomplish that with video. I can
expose a lot more people to you with video, I can expose them to you in a way that they’ll
remember, because people are visual. . . . Let me make you famous and we’ll have a much louder
voice and a much bigger platform to advance our interests.”
Shapiro, who began his career in radio production working around Michael Savage and Laura
Ingraham, recognized this reality, too. “People love Michael, and they love Laura, because they
love Michael and they love Laura, not because they love what Michael and Laura are talking
about,” he said, calling Boreing a “genius” for realizing this, long before the influencer genre had
taken over pop culture. “For me, the ideas had always been paramount, and so it’s still
bewildering to me that people want to engage with people rather than ideas, but that’s why I try
and kind of use my platform to push ideas as much as I possibly can, or debate ideas.” Of course,
the emphasis on debate and ideas eventually became a crucial part of the Ben Shapiro brand,
itself.
Five years later, Shapiro and Boreing, now the Daily Wire’s chief content officer and the “god-
king” of the site (as the staffers call him), have become dominant players in right-wing digital
media, and the Daily Wire has become an industry leader. Initially funded by fracking magnate
Farris Wilks, the company has not had to seek any outside backers, according to Boreing, and
became cash-flow positive within 14 months—10 months ahead of schedule. Boreing says the
company now boasts 140 million page views a month; more than a million downloads per
episode of The Ben Shapiro Show (the ninth-most downloaded podcast on iTunes in 2018,
worldwide); sixty full-time employees, with plans to bring on more; 1.1 million subscribers on
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YouTube and over 400,000 on Shapiro’s personal page. And all in the span of three years,
frequently beating several of the longer-established news sites on the right in terms of traffic
(The Daily Caller, and video and podcast engagement (Breitbart, which has virtually no YouTube
or podcasting presence). “The quality of the content is, obviously, the passion of the artist. The
success of the content is marketing and distribution,” Boreing told me when I visited the Daily
Wire’s studios in Sherman Oaks. “You can raise money and make a film that no one ever sees, or
you can raise money and market a film that everyone sees.”
Shapiro and Boreing aren’t the first to turn the culture war into an entertainment product, but
they have been among the most successful, in part by avoiding the errors of Milo
Yiannopoulos, who burned through millions of dollars trying to turn offensiveness into a
salable commodity, and Steve Bannon, who turned Breitbart into a warship but left it
rudderless when he was booted. Instead, Shapiro and Boreing have emphasized Hollywood-style
marketing and distribution, prioritizing entertainment value over ideological purity. Shapiro’s
heterodoxy hasn’t satisfied the culture warriors at Breitbart and the devoted MAGA crowd, who
see him as ideologically impure, nor has it endeared him to the anti-Trump left, given his blunt,
provocative commentary on race, gender, and academic freedom. (He continues to argue that
transgenderism is a “mental illness.”) He criticizes Trump for his insufficient conservatism
nearly as often as he berates mainstream media for overhyping Trump’s failures.
And yet, the formula works. Shapiro’s fans are legion—enough to constitute a political faction of
their own. Every time he debates a pundit, student, or high-profile liberal, his fans immediately
compile his remarks into YouTube clips. (“Ben Shapiro DESTROYS race baiting Congresswoman
during Congressional Hearing on Campus Free Speech,” for instance, has over 3.2 million
views.) “The business model is not activism, or even news,” Boreing told Shapiro at the
beginning of their venture. “The business model is personality.”
T
he Daily Wire headquarters in Los Angeles, located on the second floor of a vaguely
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art deco building Fair Oaks,
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tote. reminiscent
is more
studio than a dingy online start-up. The lobby is lined with monitors advertising Daily
Wire shows, millennials chug La Croix in a well-appointed kitchen, and a full-time makeup artist
is always on call. Each of the meticulously designed and personalized sets are stuffed with
enough high-end cameras, soundproofing, and lighting equipment to rival the best cable-news
studios—a significant investment for online shows. Currently, the site has four personalities that
are promoted regularly: Andrew Klavan, an old crank they brought over from Truth Revolt;
Michael Knowles, a dapper, lib-triggering troll; Matt Walsh, a dour, self-described
“extremist” Christian raging against the crassness of pop-culture; and Shapiro himself. Once a
month, Boreing hosts a live show in his office—an elegant man cave featuring studio lighting, a
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massive cigar humidor, and several overstuffed leather armchairs—where he, the crew, and a
special guest smoke cigars and shoot the shit. Though the studios are Hollywood, the content is
decidedly not: in one recent Daily Wire Backstage show, for instance, the hosts discussed
Judeo-Christian theology, religious history, and the pathology of the sort of perpetually
aggrieved liberal who thinks Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer is politically incorrect. (The War
on Christmas is apparently alive and well in the San Fernando Valley.)
The location is fitting. Los Angeles is a mostly liberal city, but it’s also become a crucial engine of
modern conservatism. Andrew Breitbart got his start there, as did Steve Bannon and Stephen
Miller. Perhaps it’s something in the water, or a response to the progressive monoculture, or the
proximity to Hollywood, but the West Coast conservatives have always had a more tactile
understanding of the optics of the culture war—an instinct for how to weaponize the clash of
civilizations, against celebrities, against migrants, against the academics of U.C. Berkeley and the
socialists in San Francisco. Instead of burying his ideas in white papers or books or think tanks,
Andrew Breitbart made his first Internet project a site called Big Hollywood, devoted to bashing
the Beverly Hills elite. Bannon, who eventually took control of Breitbart.com after its founder’s
death, cast himself as a filmmaker and yellow-journalism media baron. Neither were
intellectuals in the Wall Street Journal mold. Miller, who now serves as senior White House
policy adviser, developed his reactionary political consciousness at deep-blue Santa Monica High
School, where he became closely affiliated with the David Horowitz Freedom Center, an
organization initially founded to combat creeping Hollywood liberalism.
It was in this hostile environment, at the apex of the heady Obama years, that Shapiro and
Boreing, both budding culture warriors, were introduced by Breitbart. The two made an unlikely
pair: Boreing is evangelical, methodical, contemplative; Shapiro is Orthodox Jewish, bullish,
constantly on the attack. And yet, they clicked immediately. Allen Estrin, who worked with
Boreing at the conservative video-streaming site PragerU, compared them to Roger Ailes and
Bill O’Reilly at the dawn of Fox News: “If you go to these events . . . any large event with young
people,
Get[Ben] is justaccess
unlimited mobbed. The more
to Vanity Fair common term: Join
+ a free tote. he’s anow
rock star. [And] that’s Jeremy.
That’s Jeremy elevating Ben’s profile, making sure that Ben makes the right decisions. That’s
Jeremy guiding him along the best possible path. I don’t know where Ben is without Jeremy, but
it’s not . . . he’s definitely in a whole different place because of Jeremy.”
Boreing, a soft-spoken man with mousy hair and modest glasses, is nothing whatsoever like Ben
Shapiro. He came to Hollywood from small-town Texas in the early 2000s, worked for a bit as a
talent manager, and somehow ended up becoming housemates with Chuck star Zachary Levi.
”Life was basically getting free food and playing video games in Zach’s dressing room for several
years,” he recalled. It was a good life, for sure, but the Texan soon noticed that whenever he
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parked his car at the Chuck set, his Bush-Cheney bumper sticker was getting some side-eye.
“One day I’m walking through the stairwell and a very well-known actress, who was one of the
stars of that show, stopped me and said, ‘Hey, is that your Bush-Cheney bumper sticker on that
pickup in the parking lot?’ I said, ‘Yeah. Yes, ma’am.’ She said, ‘Kid, you’ve got balls of steel.’
Honest truth, even until that moment it was completely lost on me.”
At his first Friends of Abe meeting, Boreing’s eyes were opened to the existence of an
underground political community for people like himself. It was also there that Boreing met
Breitbart—and where he was exposed to new and intriguing business possibilities. “[Breitbart]
got the idea that he should start Big Hollywood and give a voice to whoever in this organization
[and] outside of it might want to speak their minds politically,” he said, estimating that when the
site was launched in 2008, about 80 percent of its content came from people he met through
Friends of Abe. From there came Big Journalism, and from there, Breitbart.com itself, a full-on
culture-war engine dedicated to fighting the decline of Western civilization by whatever means
necessary. “Arguably Breitbart.com wouldn’t exist without F.O.A.,” Boreing asserted.
Back then, within the Hollywood conservative community, there was an ongoing debate over
how to win that war—with art or activism? “My view is you cannot make a conservative film. You
make a good film that obeys craft. And if it reflects good values, then that’s it,” explained Lionel
Chetwynd, an Academy Award-nominated screenwriter, director, and founding member of
Friends of Abe. (See: Roseanne, Murphy Brown, and Boreing’s film The Arroyo, which focuses
on a rancher defending his property against violent illegal migrants in a border town.) On the
other side of the argument were those, like Bannon, who primarily saw themselves as
propagandists. (See: Bannon’s “documentaries,” such as Fire from the Heartland: The
Awakening of the Conservative Woman.)
Breitbart went to the ramparts, having learned from his former colleague Arianna Huffington
that one could create an influential media empire on the Internet for spare change. Shapiro soon
joined him and eventually became editor at large at Breitbart News Network. For a while,
Boreing chose the path of the artist, working on films with Levi and focusing on writing,
directing, and producing The Arroyo. (“It’s a beautifully constructed movie, and he is a very
talented artist,” said Estrin, who taught screenwriting at the American Film Institute.)
But whenever Shapiro was stuck on something, he would call Boreing, and vice versa, and they
eventually started collaborating on video projects. Boreing’s first video in the activist world,
which Shapiro hooked him up with, was an animated explainer for Encounter Books debunking
global warming. He soon began consulting for PragerU, which packages right-wing social
concepts into slick videos. According to Estrin, Boreing came up with the site’s signature visual
style after a photographer came after them with a fair-use claim; their solution was to use
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illustrations instead. The simple blue and orange stick figures now mark videos with more than
one billion views, making PragerU one of the most effective conversion tools for young
conservatives. At the center of it all was Boreing, who by then had become a leader of the West
Coast conservative movement. “We would always run every major decision past him just to get
his insight,” said Estrin.
Shapiro during a break filming The Ben Shapiro Show in Los Angeles, 2018. BY J E S S I C A P O N S / F O R T H E WA S H I N G T O N
P O S T / G E T T Y I M AG E S .
Making Ben Shapiro famous would become the duo’s most important project, and their most
lucrative. After the post-Piers makeover, they pitched the genesis of the idea for the Daily Wire to
David Horowitz and the Freedom Center’s board. They got shot down. But fate provided
another pathway. In April 2015, the Freedom Center de-funded Truth Revolt, effectively
terminating Boreing’s job, and Shapiro followed him out the door, refusing to work at a hobbled
organization. Instead, they kept honing their pitch. Three months later, they secured several
million dollars in seed funding from Wilks, the billionaire fracking super-donor who supported
Ted Cruz in the Republican primaries. The concept for the Daily Wire was not to push a specific
agenda—the traditional nonprofit model, with a board of directors overseeing a political project
—but to build a profit-generating business, combining conservative opinion with news
aggregation. They launched the following September with a handful of other Truth Revolt
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employees, shooting their first few episodes in Boreing’s pool house, before moving to an ad hoc
studio on the same floor as PragerU, with sets Boreing and his brother built by hand.
Shapiro was also working at Breitbart, but by March 2016, he had become fed up with the site’s
slavish devotion to Donald Trump—in particular an ugly episode in which Breitbart mistreated
one of its own reporters, Michelle Fields, after she was manhandled by Trump campaign
manager Corey Lewandowski—and quit his part-time gig to join the Daily Wire full-time, a
decision his former colleagues derided as opportunistic. Breitbart published and then deleted an
article torching Shapiro as an “ambitious conservative gadfly, who is known to live on the edge,
courting and then leaving a series of companies over the past several years.” Among some
portion of MAGA world—potentially a core audience for a young, conservative media startup—
Shapiro was suspect at best, a traitor at worst.
The Daily Wire’s Trump-skeptical perspective, under those circumstances, was indeed risky. It
was “a very volatile moment in our politics,” Boreing explained, but Shapiro felt strongly about
his stance. “I mean, we took the least popular position in the election. We thought the whole
thing might be over after Election Night.” Within 14 months, however, Trump had won the
presidency and the Daily Wire was cash-flow positive, having won over an unlikely coalition of
shell-shocked Republicans and blindsided centrists entranced by the prospect of Shapiro as
Trump-era Virgil: a Breitbart exile-turned-Trump critic, who wasn’t a foaming-at-the-mouth
MAGA nationalist but still delighted in trolling Hillary and Bernie for their alleged
transgressions.
Shapiro had achieved megastardom, even as he oscillated in his opinion of Trump. To his former
culture-warrior brethren, Shapiro was trying to have it both ways: pretending to be a populist
one day, then trying to stake out a position as a Respectable Conservative the next, and then
pissing off everyone by, say, tweeting inappropriate comments during George H.W. Bush’s
funeral. “He was hardcore ‘Never Trump’ and pretends to be pro-Trump now that it’s clear that
going full Never Trump makes you a [Bill] Kristol or [Evan] McMullin,” an aggrieved
conservative writer told me. But of course, neither Kristol nor McMullin are reliably delivering
fresh content via multiple platforms to an audience of millions, or frequently cross-promoting
with fellow podcast stars Joe Rogan and Dave Rubin (whose studios are nearby). ”It’s never
been our philosophy that you succeed in this business by locking up your content. You've got to
push your content out as widely as possible,” said Boreing.
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or the amount of care and resources poured into video production, the bulk of the site’s
revenue—and Shapiro’s fame—derives from his self-titled podcast, which began as an
afterthought. The audio was ripped directly from the video show itself, and packaged as
an ancillary product when they realized they could start selling ads on it if it hit 30,000
downloads a day. It now gets 1 million downloads per show, and over 1.2 million engagements
across platforms, per Shapiro. “If you look at our original financial specs for what we expected
the podcast to do, it’s not even remotely close to what it ended up doing,” Shapiro recalled. The
investment in video was worthwhile, though, particularly as they ended up using Facebook Live
videos to stream their shows. (Shapiro has 4.5 million followers on Facebook, which he leverages
to direct a massive firehose of traffic back to the Daily Wire. Earlier this month, for example, two
of the top 10 most-read Facebook stories came from Ben Shapiro.)
The Daily Wire’s success on Facebook is notable, given the frequent criticism on the right that
Big Tech firms are stifling their voices. A recent NewsWhip analysis found that Daily Wire
content was in the top 10 of Facebook engagements in political content, frequently cracked the
1,000 most-shared news stories, and was the most actively visited site on the right. Daily Wire
authors dominate the top 10 political-authors list, on both the left and right, a statistic which still
held when Nate Silver discovered this fact in November. “Kinda feels like Facebook has
stopped even trying” to filter hate speech, he wrote, giving Shapiro an opening to attack him on
Twitter, while publishing an op-ed entitled “Nate Silver Indignant That Shapiro’s Stories
Dominate Facebook. Shapiro Fires Back.” (Author: Daily Wire.)
But the Daily Wire’s chief growth strategy has always been, and continues to be, Shapiro himself.
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It helps that he is amenable to becoming a mass-marketed product—constantly on the road
giving talks at universities, making guest appearances on popular podcasts, gabbing his way onto
Fox News, scoring speeches at events like CPAC and Politicon, and still, somehow, writing
columns for Newsweek, National Review, USA Today, and his own site. There is also his own
podcast to attend to, a Sunday interview special, the cigar show, a conventional radio show, and
whatever other media platform will have him. After his appearances, the Daily Wire site and
podcast tend to see a huge spike in traffic, and more important, audience retention: Shapiro’s
first appearance on The Joe Rogan Experience, for instance, provided a massive traffic increase.
As a result, the site spends more money promoting Shapiro than the Daily Wire itself—a decision
that ultimately insulates the site from the political whims of Big Tech’s dreaded social-media
algorithms.
Whatever the model is, the rest of conservative media is playing catch-up. Fox Nation, Fox
News’s own attempt at creating a subscription-only video-content farm for rising personalities,
launched earlier this month. Laura Ingraham, from whom Shapiro took career cues, is now
moving her radio show online. And in early December, CRTV and the Blaze—which the Daily
Wire had considered buying at one point—announced a merger, dumping all of their beleaguered
writers and resources together for the sake of survival. (Better than being The Weekly Standard,
Kristol’s august conservative publication, which is rumored to shutter by the beginning of 2019,
having succumbed to changing political tides and plunging print advertising revenues.)
If Hollywood taught Boreing one thing, however, it’s that fame doesn’t last forever. And that goes
for politics, too. “Sarah Palin was a big voice during the Obama era,” he said as an example.
“She is a much less significant voice during the Trump era. Whatever she represented was
connected to that Tea Party moment, and the Tea Party moment didn’t survive Trump.” For the
Daily Wire and Shapiro, the trick is to keep both brands politically relevant—a major pressure
that Boreing, who said that Shapiro could be the “Rush Limbaugh of his generation,” feels
acutely.
“What is a one-hit wonder in this space?” Boreing asked, rhetorically. “I think it’s someone who
can only survive one presidency. If you find yourself two years into the next presidency, and Ben
is still a dominant voice, he’s probably got runway for the rest of his career. . . . So I want to make
sure that Ben—that his fortunes don’t rise and fall on this weird moment of the Donald Trump
presidency.”

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