Head to the coast in Abercrombie's latest summer drop.

It's short season, and their new C-Fade shorts add the perfect wash look to your fit.

They're so easy to throw on and pair with everything in your closet.

Complete the look with a new shirt and your set.

Prep for summer with Abercrombie in the app, online, and in stores.

Ben Shapiro spent a decade building the Daily Wire into one of the largest conservative media empires in America.

But now this past week, between mass layoffs, a public fight with Candace Owens, and a YouTube audience that has gone down anywhere from 70 to 85% in 18 months, you've got a question being asked on both sides of the Maga Civil War. Is this empire actually collapsing in real time? Depending on who you ask, the answer is either yes, we're watching Enron or no, calm down, they're fine. It was an absolute bloodbath, not allow them to spin it. Okay, I'm talking entire departments, big people at the firm, lawyers at the firm, the chief

operating officer, the executive vice president, virtually the entire marketing department,

the production team has now been reduced to a mere skeleton crew.

No one was safe.

Not even Ben's team was safe. Because make no mistake, this is like the equivalent of Enron, right? It's a virtual overnight collapse. Okay, so on May 1st, with the Daily Wire confirming mass layoffs, with the company telling the rap that the cuts were largely concentrated at its national headquarters, and they said that the restructuring is tied to investment in new production formats and geographic expansion. Right, and they didn't in that initial announcement give a headcount. And so then you have Candice Owens walking in, who you might remember was fired from the Daily Wire in 2024 over her comments about Israel and a series of statements widely criticized as anti-Semitic. And you had Owens posting on Twitter claiming that 50% of the company's staff had been let go. Though she then bumped that number to 60%, and she went on her show and called it an absolute bloodbath, like the equivalent of Enron saying it's a virtual overnight collapse. But then, he had the Daily Wire firing back with editor-in-chief Brent Share posting on Twitter, quote, yes, the company had layoffs today, it's always really tough. No, it was nowhere near 50% of the company. That's insane and also insane to post without verifying. And while the spokesperson for the outlet said that the layoffs today, it's always really tough. No, it was nowhere near 50% of the company. That's insane

and also insane to post without verifying. And while a spokesperson for the outlet said that the layoffs amounted to 13% of the staff this year, that figure didn't include layoffs from the prior year. And so the company appears to still have more than 200 employees and you had Puck News putting the number closer to 20% or around 42 employees. There was also an independent industry tracker called layoffhedge.com, pegged at around 100 rules.

And so the situation is, you know, no one outside of the company really knows the number. Owens probably inflating it, the Daily Wire, I could see them underplaying it, and the truth is maybe probably somewhere in between. But whatever those numbers are, where the story gets harder for the Daily Wire to spin is with the audience data. Because that's third party, that's not internal. that's not internal. And according to data from Bit IQ, Ben Shapiro's YouTube views, they're down roughly 70% since December of 2024. Though you also had Ivy Time citing different analytics tools, putting the drop at closer to 85% from his late 2023 peak. But either way, you have people saying, you know, those are not normal declines for a flagship channel, saying, you know, those are collapse-shaped declines. Also, data from Social Blade shows that the DailyWire's YouTube subscriber base has plateaued or shrunk and 15 of the last 16 months since the start of 2025. By March of this year, the company's website traffic was about half of what it had been a year earlier. On the Spotify chart, Shapiro's show is currently ranked 48th, Owens is 16th, Tucker Carlson in his eighth, Vaughan's fifth, Joe Rogans, of course, number one. And for comparison sake, by 2020, the Daily Wire had been Facebook's top English language publisher for three straight months. But 2023, it was being valued in the hundreds of millions of dollars. But now, five years later, you've got the company fighting publicly about whether it's still actually healthy or not. And as far as why is this happening? You have the Daily Wire's official explanation from Shapiro being essentially two things at once.

First, they acknowledge that revenues down from 2024, though Shapiro says that cash flow

still dwarfs what their critics have. And second, Shapiro argues that the audience losses

of the result of staying principled while other right-wing outlets in his telling chase clicks by

quote, embracing radical Islam,

theorizing about the evils of Winston Churchill, extolling the wonders of Russian supermarkets, and mocking the widow of Charlie Kirk. And so that is a very specific, very pointed list. And if you've been following any right-wing media for the past year, I know that we've been trying to talk about it more and more because what's happening there is very important to talk about. Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens, and a handful of figures, they've been peeling more and more of that Daily Wire audience off.

And then also, they've been peeling more and more of that daily wire audience off. And then also you have people like Makin Kelly saying, well, it's not really about algorithms at all. We're saying that it's actually about Shapiro's unwavering position on Israel and the Iran war at a moment when a substantial chunk of the younger conservative base has been moving in the opposite direction. So folks like Tucker Carlson, they've managed to benefit from that shift.

He's gotten very, very popular lately I read with Muslim viewers because he's been standing up for Islam.

I know for a fact he has a lot of young men flocking to him.

And so while he may have lost some contingent of the Fox News audience, that's

...