#770: January 20, 2023 dissects Alex Jones’ baseless defense of Steven Crowder’s rejected $50M Daily Wire deal, exposing his impractical "direct sales" advice and ties to far-right conspiracy groups like the John Birch Society. Jones’ coded anti-Semitic tropes—praising farmers while demonizing scholars—clash with his own supplement-driven empire. The episode reveals conservative media’s billionaire-backed contradictions, where figures like Crowder rely on elite funding yet attack peers for perceived "sellouts." Ultimately, it underscores how populist rhetoric thrives on manufactured grievances and selective editing to obscure reality. [Automatically generated summary]
When all those reviews where people are like, oh, they cut down on all the talking and all that stuff.
As I've been going through it, and they absolutely have, but I realized about the last games, most of the time, I read those conversations, but I couldn't...
It was like conversations with co-workers from five years ago, where it'd be like...
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, totally.
And then five seconds later, if you asked me to report what that person had said to me, I would be like, I have no clue.
The being able to move the character within the...
Instead of having to go by each square, you know, being able to direct the character, that is such a huge thing that, like, playing it, I was like, I can't believe that.
We'll get into exactly what's happened, but there is an aspect of this that touches on and implicates Alex's world in a way that I think is really interesting.
And then he also has an interview with that guy who worked at EcoHealth Alliance, who's a whistleblower on COVID, but also didn't work at EcoHealth Alliance at the appropriate times, and also didn't work in the fields that are relevant to this.
There is an issue with that.
So anyway, I don't care about that stuff.
But we start here on the 20th, and Alex has some big news.
Legislation has been introduced by the Democrats in the new Congress.
We covered this two years ago, two days ago.
We told you it was coming two years ago, 20 years ago.
And they say in the legislation, if you talk mad about anyone of color, five years in prison, federal crime.
It actually says that in the bill.
If you deny climate change, prison time.
And we play the clips here where the deputy head of the EU on elected bureaucracy says, looking towards the Republican congressman sitting next to her, that we know soon you will be passing the law to outlaw any hate speech in America.
I'm having trouble doing the show right now, okay?
I'm like a dog in a butcher shop, and there's all these cuts of meat hanging down, and I'm just like salivating and confused and not even knowing what to do next, because the cuts of meat to me are exposing evil and stopping them, and I don't know how I do this justice.
I mean, this is just unbelievable.
What's coming out?
The Democratic Party is now officially endorsing pedophilia.
So he brings up the fight between Crowder and the Daily Wire, and I thought, thank God, because I was worried he wasn't going to talk about it, and therefore I would have no way to really transition into talking about it.
So this was all I could think about this weekend in terms of preparing a show for us to do.
I wanted to do an episode about Crowder and this fight because I really do think that it's relevant to the conversation that this podcast is engaged in.
But I didn't know how to do it unless Alex got involved.
When I first heard about what Crowder was up to, the thought I had immediately was that Alex needed to side with Crowder.
This is a perfect opportunity for Alex, and there are a number of reasons why, which I'll get to as we go along.
I realize that many people probably have no idea what Steven Crowder has been doing, so here's a little recap.
For a while now, Steven has worked for Glenn Beck's network, The Blaze.
Crowder has a large audience on YouTube, but he's also demonetized on there, and his exclusive membership group, The Mug Club, was run through The Blaze.
Steven is no longer with The Blaze, but toward the end of his time there, he was apparently entertaining offers for who wanted to buy his whole thing.
The Daily Wire put in an introductory offer that was very generous, to the tune of $50 million over four years.
The offer was a starting point in potential negotiations and overall is a pretty standard sounding contract for a lot of the things that even Crowder was complaining about.
Anyway, essentially, Stephen misunderstood or intentionally misrepresented various aspects of the offer to make it appear as if the Daily Wire was in bed with big tech and they were doing their bidding.
For instance, the offer specified that if Stephen got kicked off social media platforms for something he said, his pay would be decreased.
Obviously, this makes sense, because the company would be making less money as a result of the ban, and they're a business.
We'd like to have a conversation with Stephen, kind of get into the details of what's he looking for?
What's he looking for financially?
What's he looking for in terms of structure?
What would make his life better?
What would make him happy?
He's got this opportunity now to have a next chapter.
What's he want that next chapter to be?
And Stephen's agent...
We're not going to have a conversation.
We're not going to have some abstract talk.
Send us an offer.
Tell us how much money you're willing to pay.
And he gave us an indication of what the minimum number would have to be in order to even have a discussion with Stephen.
And it's a big number.
So we talked about it internally, and we decided, yeah, we should do that.
We should send over an opening offer, a non-binding term sheet that takes a stab at what we think that...
That minimum number is going to be to get the conversation started so that we can sit down with Stephen so that we can see if there's a deal that would be good for him and good for us.
And that's what we did.
We put together the term sheet.
We sent it over.
And we asked if we could get on the phone and have a conversation with Stephen.
Not only didn't like this $12.5 million a year number that I offered him, but that he thought it should be closer to $30 million a year.
That's $120 million over four years just for Stephen's show.
I would still have to spend those tens of millions of dollars every year that I told you about on things like marketing and infrastructure and technology to support the show, the part that Stephen's never done.
As soon as he said that, I knew we'll never get to a deal.
So real quick, what he's saying there, if he loses all the revenue, another part of the deal that Stephen took issue with was that if all of your sponsors, or a certain amount, enough of your sponsors leave, and we can't replace them within 90 days, then you lose a certain amount of the money that you're going to get from this contract, which again, makes sense.
And that Stephen said was a, him just saying, Daily Wire saying to the left, hey, boycotts work!
I said, hey, we're not going to send a follow-up offer.
Wanted you to hear it directly from me, not from lawyers and agents.
I said, but the kind of deal you're looking for is not the kind of deal that we can make.
He was super gracious, appreciative, kind.
We agreed to continue forward as we always had as friends.
We do favors for each other.
I told him, if you stay at the blaze or if you go off on your own, go to Rumble, go wherever, we're going to continue to write stories about you and promote you and have you on.
We want you to be as successful as humanly possible, and we want to contribute to that.
And we went our separate ways.
And months went by.
October goes by.
November goes by.
December goes by.
And then a week ago, in January, Stephen called me.
And he said, hey man, I can't unsee this contract that you sent me.
Well, it's not a contract.
It's a non-binding term sheet.
It's a conversation starter, but okay.
And he told me his perspective on it, that we were not paying him what he's worth.
That we don't understand his great business mind and that it's going to go exactly the way that he thinks and we're all going to be proven wrong.
I said, again, I hope that's true, Stephen, but that's not a risk I can take.
And then he said, and you're just an enforcer for big tech.
You're hurting young talent.
I said, well, Stephen, first of all, no two talent in our company have the same deal.
Every deal is different because there's different circumstances.
This is the kind of deal you make to protect a nine-figure...
Investment.
You can't pay nine figures in expenses, even if the revenue dries up.
That isn't possible.
It's not prudent, but it also isn't possible.
And he wouldn't let it go.
He was very angry.
And I got very flustered.
I didn't expect him to be calling and laying into me the way he was.
I'd never experienced it before.
I didn't make the best defense of the deal that I probably could have because I was...
So caught off guard.
I mean, I made a decent defense of the structure of it, but I was really taken aback.
Steven called back and was recording the call, pretending to be mad about the offer on behalf of other creators so he could play cherry-picked parts of it on his show.
He played a clip of Boring saying that young talent at the Daily Wire needed to be wage slaves for a while, which is kind of tasteless, but it isn't really offensive if you're conservative and you're super into the free market and all that stuff.
Stephen's deal was ending at the Blaze, and it seems like they weren't interested in paying him what he was asking to renew the deal.
If I had to guess, it might have been because his actual numbers weren't as good as Steven thinks they are.
The investment wasn't worth it, so they passed.
Needing a new home, Steven tried to play hardball with the Daily Wire months back and it didn't work.
Without proof of his draw, they couldn't justify paying him what he demanded and Steven probably wasn't able to provide them with any numbers since he admitted that all that stuff was handled by the Blaze and it's unclear if they even knew about the negotiations since he was a Oh, boy.
months back, Stephen thought he could find a new place to make a huge guaranteed chunk of money free from any market pressures, but it didn't work out.
And now guess what?
There are no other options.
He isn't going to make that kind of money anywhere else, other than maybe Fox News, and I don't think he's quite their brand.
So, Stephen decided to call Boring, pretended to be upset, so he could record the call and start a big public feud.
It was clearly a calculated move, and the idea, obviously, was to try to poach some of the Daily Wire's audience, presumably drawing them to Stephen's independent operation that he's going to now have to figure out how to get off the ground.
This past week has been when the big reveal has happened, and Stephen has done some pieces on his show about this whole mess.
Jeremy Boring put out his response video explaining the offer in minute detail for an hour.
However, underneath this drama, there are a couple of points that make it critically important for Alex if he wants to profit from this.
The first thing I saw that he needed to do was side with Crowder, and it's a good thing he jumped on that.
The Daily Wire doesn't want shit to do with Alex, and all the hosts on there probably or definitely hate him.
Alex isn't going to be talking with Jordan Peterson, Ben Shapiro, or Matt Walsh anytime soon, and Candace Owens may have been on InfoWars in the past, but her brand is way bigger now.
Siding with these people is a waste, whereas Crowder still has Alex on his show.
That's where Alex's bread is buttered, but...
It introduces other problems that we'll get to as we go along.
Yeah, it introduces these questions of this gigantic amount of money and are you making a return on your investment or are you all subsidized by billionaires and taking a loss on this because they want to push a certain social messaging?
And so Crowder, I don't know if he understood that that was what he was stepping into, but because of that, this is not a normal generating attention feud for both sides.
So I guess with a few minutes left in this segment, I'll just go ahead and hit the Ben Shapiro thing, because I've been ignoring it the last four or five days.
I knew exactly what was going on, but I've had a chance to talk to the Crowder folks, and so I can give you the analysis, because I confirmed what I already knew was going on was going on, but I didn't want to go there until I checked if my analysis was correct.
Crowder is as good as it gets, a real patriot American, and he loves the country, and he's a really smart, reasonable guy.
He left the blaze because he was like 80% of their money.
He was almost being paid nothing.
Then when he went and interviewed with the people over at Ben Shapiro's operation, the Daily Wire, they sent him the contracts that said, we're going to control everything you say, control whatever you do, and we'll withdraw your funds and you're tied in for five years no matter what if you get censored by big tech, essentially making big tech his boss.
Then he just criticized them on air without saying their names, so some of them attacked him, so he released recordings of them basically admitting that, and his issue was he didn't take the deal.
Because he's not going to be shackled, but he's really concerned about them controlling the conservative movement with all the other people they've got locked in these contracts.
He's just taking shit that Crowder told him and repeating it as fact, more or less being a mouthpiece for Crowder as opposed to being an Alex who's siding with Crowder and exploiting him, which is what Alex should be doing.
But they're subscribing at a monthly rate and whatever.
But that's only one part of it.
They'd also be able to monetize other content that they create.
So, yeah, I don't exactly understand exactly how the money works out, but that's day one.
Presumably there'd be even more.
But also, that's just a made-up number that Steven's throwing around because he has no idea how many subscribers he has because the Blaze doesn't tell him.
He has a really large YouTube channel and Jeremy Boring even really lays out exactly what the business model is, which is you do your show on YouTube where you...
And you try and funnel people from this YouTube to the pay section.
Right.
And...
So if you're trying to assess that maybe there's 300,000 people who subscribe to his thing, I would have to assume he's taking it as some kind of an equation from, well, maybe a third or a quarter of the people.
I mean, I'm sure he has millions of subscribers on YouTube.
So anyway, to be clear, I hate the Daily Wire and Jeremy Boring sucks.
But I definitely believe his side of the story way more for a number of reasons.
The first and most important reason is that his story makes sense, whereas Stevens does not.
Stevens' actions and motivations don't make sense if you take them at his word, whereas Boring's explanation of the contract and the timeline are sane, rational sequences of events.
And here, I feel like Stephen definitely doesn't know how many subscribers he has.
If he did, and the number was as high as he's claiming, he would use that to his advantage in the context of negotiation.
It could only help make the case for his demand for higher pay, so the fact that he doesn't cite it can only really mean that he doesn't know, or he does know, and it's way lower than you'd think.
Beyond that, Alex is wrong about what the offer the Daily Wire sent included.
He's just parroting Crowder.
It is true that Stephen...
Stephen didn't name Daily Wire in the first video he did, but I don't think that's to his credit.
After Stephen did his first piece, Boring came out and did his response, and the reason for that makes total sense.
Everyone knew Crowder was talking about them, and they have a business to protect.
Daily Wire subscribers were worried that what Crowder was saying was correct, and if left unanswered...
people might assume it was correct and that could cut into their profits.
Sure.
Essentially, they would have to accept Crowder's framing of things when it's obvious he's talking about them.
What other business is there that might have been able to afford this kind of a deal to hire?
After that...
All of the Daily Wire hosts began to shit on Crowder.
All of his presumed allies like Candace Owens and Matt Walsh hit back pretty hard, and there's a good reason for it.
For one thing, Crowder's behavior is much like a sneaky snake.
Perhaps more importantly, though, by saying that the Daily Wire's contract is tantamount to him becoming a slave to big tech...
He's implicitly calling out everyone who's under contract at the Daily Wire.
He's boasting of his principles and not signing this deal, which by extension is a condemnation of the people who did.
Alex only has that expense because he started running Band.Video, and he made the critical error of hosting hours upon hours of videos made by lunatics who get, like, 60 views.
Previously, Steven's content would have been hosted by The Blaze, and now, if this went through, it would be by The Daily Wire.
I'm sure Steven would want to maintain personal representation for some matters, but Daily Wire isn't going to spend millions of dollars a year on a marquee talent and then be like, you're on your own with legal stuff.
They have an investment to protect in him, and also, Alex might have a skewed version of how much legal bills cost.
In fact, the money offers went up when he started to balk.
He said, no, no, no.
This is not about the money.
It's about I'll be totally controlled by you arbitrarily if I go take this deal with you and bring all these people to you when we know Crowder was making Glenn Beck conservatively $50 million a year.
So, of course, the folks at Daily Wire say, oh, you're leaving Glenn Beck because you're only getting a few million dollars a year and can't even pay your bills.
That's the truth about Crowder.
Giant audience should be making 50 million a year gross.
To be able to pay all the bills and all the rest of it.
And Crowder's like, well, I don't like to market stuff.
I don't like to go push stuff.
I just want to do my show.
He does a lot of preparation.
That guy works hard.
I'm like, okay, well if you want your freedom, that's what you gotta do.
And you could be bigger than Infowars ever was if you just go with the model of running your own operation, and then you could hire people and do what Daily Wire did, what I tried to do, but they came after us and attacked us and shut us down before we went to launch.
I built all this to be 24 hours a day, have a bunch of hosts in here, and not control what they say as long as they're patriots.
He needs to black pill Crowder on working with anyone, so he starts to run out of money, and he gets...
Yep.
Probably doesn't seem like an attractive option yet.
But if he goes long enough without a deal and no one paying him with no YouTube monetization, it could look better and better over time to go to Infowars and go to a direct sales model.
If he could manage to do that and break Crowder somehow subtly, whether by negligence or by bad influence, get him to the point where he's desperate enough to come to InfoWars.
You got yourself exactly what you need there, Alex.
You got a guy who's young enough that he's got years ahead of him.
But I'm seen by the globalists as the Mad Prophet of the worldwide populist movement.
They've called me that on CNN, Time Magazine, the Atlantic Monthly.
They've said he's the Wild Prophet.
That brought in Trump and brought in all this stuff.
And everybody gets the credit.
A whole bunch of people, hundreds of millions of folks put up this resistance this way.
Long before I was born, people were fighting it.
My dad was 14, 15 years old every Saturday driving two hours to Dallas from his farm to give anti-communist speeches on the radio because he gave such good ones locally.
just off what he read in the John Birch Society stuff.
Also, if you have someone pinned down and their face pinned down, you don't have them pinned.
In a wrestling match, you need to have a person's shoulders pinned down, and that's going to be really difficult to achieve while you also have their head facing down.
And so now we're in a real fight with the global controllers, all right?
I mean, we got their attention.
We are beating the hell out of them.
We're politically, nonviolently, breaking their ribs, gouging out their eyeballs, pulling out their teeth, slamming their head to concrete, okay?
Now, the problem is they got bioweapons, labs everywhere.
They got nuclear weapons.
They got armies of scum that work for them, pedophiles, devil-worshippers, degenerates, and they're really thinking about turning it all loose and causing a giant global civil war and a collapse.
The good news is they were going to do that regardless.
If you are this weak compared to your enemy, you gotta take them by surprise.
The patriot movement at this point should all pretend that they've given everything up, sneak their way into the halls of power, and then metaphorically do whatever that stuff whenever the globalists don't have their finger on the button of murdering everybody.
It's an interesting development that apparently manual laborers can't be evil because evil people wouldn't be able to cut it in that hard of a job.
I've not heard Alex express this before, and it's also really dumb.
You can find plenty of farmers, plumbers, and other manual laborers who have committed horrible crimes, just as you can find people in any field who do awful shit.
It's kind of hard not to hear this as a dog whistle, though.
Traditionally, anti-Semitic demagogues have painted Jewish people as being unable or unwilling to do hard work, preferring to live off the sweat of others.
In a vacuum, the stuff Alex is saying could possibly be taken as a sentiment of admiration for manual laborers, but given all the other context of his show and where he gets his ideas from, I can't hear this as anything other than coded anti-Semitism.
There are evil people in the banks and the schools and the government, but there aren't any in man.
Manual labor, because Jews don't do manual labor, is essentially how this comes off in the context of his crypto ideas.
Right, and the person who shouldn't like is the dumb fuck who gets on the air, sells dumb supplements by making shit up about headlines for three hours a day.
While we're on the subject, from a doctrine perspective, Alex should have severe problems with the Amish because they come from a branch of Christianity called Anabaptism.
Groups derived from Anabaptists like the Amish, Mennonites, and Quakers do not believe in child baptism.
A faith can only be sincere if it's entered into by a conscious, informed decision, which is absolutely counter to Alex's belief surrounding baptism.
Alex has a caricature of Amish people in his head that he's decided to accept and admire, but it's not real.
Plus, there are plenty of crimes in Amish communities.
You don't hear about a lot of it because the communities are very insulated, and many of their doctrines make it difficult to get people to cooperate with the process of prosecuting a crime, but there are criminals among the very hard-working Amish.
If you want to, you can find plenty of stories that Alex would call demonic if a liberal were involved, but it's Amish people, so he's never heard about it and pretends it doesn't exist.
That obviously doesn't characterize the entire Amish community, and a bit of time I spent growing up, I attended Mennonite churches, and my parents are still members of a Mennonite church, so I've had plenty of experiences with great Anabaptist folks in my life.
But to pretend that somehow there aren't horrible people within that subset of the world is just idiotic.
And I know that people like General Flynn is like kind of what I call a military Amish person.
Not only because he's against technology.
He thinks it's...
He thinks it's...
At a subconscious level, a little too worldly to want to be the leader.
A little too pushy to come out and, you know, it's just not, well, it's a little arrogant.
It's a little egotistical.
No, it's not.
No, it's not.
We're going to lead or we're going to die.
Because we're going to let the Ben Shapiros of the world sit over there and lead our movements when he knows damn well what he's doing and he's not on our side.
He wants all the conservatives under his control so he can lead them into slavery and lead the rest of us into slavery as Judas goats.
It's weird, because the Daily Wire didn't have any, like, stipulations about controlling what Crowder said in their contract.
And, like, Matt Walsh is under their contract, and he's one of the biggest transphobic bigots in the public space.
Candace Owens is under their contract, and she played a huge role in the anti-Semitic rise of yay.
It seems like if you work for them, you can pretty much do whatever you want, but if your actions reduce the amount of money coming in, you get paid less.
Ben Shapiro, Daily Wire story, because as itself, it's not important enough to cover it.
I mean, Steven's a great guy, very important, but just to talk about the fight, like, oh, look, there's a fight.
Oh, here, let's all gather around and see who wins.
I had to weigh in on that because I saw the disinfo live that Steven Crowder recorded the Daily Wire and all the rest of this because he wanted more money if he went to work for him.
No, he's on the tapes saying, I don't even want the money, I want freedom.
And you guys sent me a contract saying Big Tech will be my boss, and if they censor me...
I'll have my pay cut and be locked in a contract to not be able to work anywhere for five years.
I'm not going to take your deal, but respond to me about what you're doing to people.
So, look, here, there's an issue with this telling of the story.
Neither party is contesting that they discussed this opening offer months ago, as far back as September or October, and they left that discussion with an amicable understanding that they weren't going to be able to reach a deal.
Because that's the case, it does not make sense for Crowder to then call Jeremy Boring months later to confront him about the deal while recording the conversation, unless the conversation itself was performance and designed to be used for content later.
It's James O 'Keefe's way of thinking, of like, aha, see, this thing that I think that is 100% insane, I will definitely be able to prove by lying to these people, and then I'll trick them into telling me the things that I know are true.
And here's Crowder getting better and better and understanding this, and he's always been a good guy, and then he tries to expose it in a very friendly way.
And they attack him and say, oh, Stephen Crowder's a monster.
Stephen Crowder, we offered him $50 million over five years, and he called it slave wages.
No, they said in the recording about all the other little people that together have a giant audience, by little, 100,000 followers, a million followers.
They have big followings, but compared to Alex Jones or Joe Rogan or Stephen Crowder or Ben Shapiro, it's small, but together it's bigger.
And then they use their algorithms to feed you all into the Jordan Petersons and the Ben Shapiros.
And by the way, I think Ben Shapiro is all hat and no cattle and a bunch of repeated stuff he does to act smart and talk fast.
Alex could not have a billion or hundreds of millions of dollars to sell out now.
No one wants him, and he's way more trouble than whatever he could possibly bring in.
He's toxic to advertisers, and he couldn't possibly organically create more business for you than he already does on his own, and he's both personally and professionally in bankruptcy.
It's fair that in Crowder's recording, Jeremy Boring said that the younger creators needed to work for slave wages for a while, but there's a couple important things to consider.
I'll play you the clip that Stephen plays, and then we'll go over some of the issues.
They can be wage slaves for a little bit, come over and make a salary and grow their brand.
that you then own well I own parts of it I don't own it they can when their contracts up they can still go out and they'll still be famous they can keep doing their show so go do a show somewhere else they'll be in a far far far better place you help them make them No, not this contract.
This contract owns it in perpetuity even after the contract.
You're paying a lease but getting ownership.
That's what this contract means.
So the first glaring problem is that Stephen didn't release the full call.
It's possible that wage slave, as a comment, was Boring using an expression that Stephen had used earlier in that conversation, and there's no way to know for sure.
Even assuming that was how Boring decided to construct his thought, there are still problems.
One is that he's trying to explain to Stephen how good the deal he's being offered is, and that's because it's an insanely good deal.
Boring is trying to help Stephen understand that they would be making a gigantic investment in him, and because it would be a huge deal, it requires a contract that spells stuff out and makes sure that the Daily Wire doesn't end up losing $50 million, which is not something that you need to be concerned about with younger talents.
The other more important problem that comes up here is that these people don't have a problem with wage slavery.
Go over to Daily Wire's website and see what they have to say about suggestions that the minimum wage should be raised.
Poke around for a minute and see how many videos you can find where Stephen Crowder screams about his opposition to people being paid a living wage.
They don't have a problem.
If you bring in $2 worth of value to an employer per hour, you should be paid $2 an hour.
Crowder should recognize that the younger creators that Boring is talking about don't bring in $50 million in value.
They bring in what he would call slave wages in value to The Daily Wire so they get paid accordingly.
The arrangement is beneficial for them because they get paid something and their association with The Daily Wire raises their profile and allows them to create their own personal brand.
Without his association with The Daily Wire...
I guarantee no one would give a single shit about what Matt Walsh has to say.
I also would never sign this deal, but I don't think it's inherently unfair as a deal.
Typically, a network will require ownership of the material you make while you're under their contract, which is a fairly normal thing, and you hear Boring express that in the call.
The content that Crowder makes under the auspices of the contract are owned by the Daily Wire, but they don't own his brand or the mug club or things that he does post-contract period or before.
I've spoken to people who are with podcast networks, and this is how a lot of podcast networks operate.
And it's definitely one of the sticking points that I've had with the idea of ever joining one, but I don't think it's inherently unethical.
Crowder is pretending to have a problem here because he needs a way to make this whole presentation look like it's something more than picking a petty fight because he doesn't have a giant contract anymore and he's got to figure out how to survive on his own.
The best way to do this is to pretend he's concerned about the other creators who are being exploited by these contracts, which is a great way to fake selflessness, honestly.
Interestingly, though, none of the other creators sided with Steven.
In fact...
Steven may have alienated most of the conservative media with this shit, and it's because of two reasons.
The first is that he's shown himself to be a duplicitous backstabbing sneaky snake who might be recording you at any moment so he can use cherry-picked things you say against you.
He's willing to exploit people who thought they were his friends in order to garner attention.
But that's not really a deal breaker for these people.
But what's not so easy to get over is the crowd who brought up the money.
Steven is treading on thin ice because what he's done is create a situation where it's becoming all too clear that the right-wing media ecosystem is propped up by billionaires who are likely not seeing a return on their investment.
Stephen, again, I think the most entertaining, talented person in the conservative movement, I think one of the most entertaining and talented people in entertainment generally in the country today has created a very successful content generation company, a very successful production company.
But Stephen's never had to create the company that actually...
He distributes, markets, and monetizes all of that content.
You know, he talks in his video about being one of the only true independent conservative voices.
And I find that incredibly offensive.
You know, Stephen, the whole time I've known him, has worked for someone else, has been paid by someone else.
That doesn't mean other people tell him what to say.
He's a very independent voice, and that's good.
So is Matt Walsh.
So is Candace Owens.
So is Ben Shapiro.
So is Michael Knowles.
So is Brett Cooper.
But Stephen...
You know, as much or more than any of them, a very independent voice.
But he's not exactly a self-made man.
That's not true.
He was paid by PJTV when I met him, which was owned by a billionaire at the time.
Then he was paid by CRTV for a number of years, which was owned by a billionaire at the time.
Then he was paid by The Blaze, which was subsidized by a billionaire.
Until Tyler Carden, one of the real genius businessmen in our movement.
I wonder why that billionaire was subsidizing the blaze while it lost money.
Pretty wild how every place Crowder has worked for his entire career has been funded by right-wing billionaires, and no one really has any idea if his show is even profitable.
Probably just a coincidence, too, that The Daily Wire was launched with seed money from fracking billionaire brothers Dan and Ferris Wilkes.
Because of his greed and desperation, Crowder is exposing the business.
He's breaking kayfabe and forcing others to break kayfabe to defend themselves.
The head of Daily Wire is suggesting that one of the largest and most revenue-driving programs in the entire right-wing ecosystem that does not appear to have all that much overhead, it's not like he has an elaborate set like Alex does, might not be profitable.
Well, the gall to ask for $50 million and then make it public like this in a way that the head of the Daily Wire is going to come out and say shit like this.
What's so crazy to me, and we just talked about it, you know, like in this world, oh yeah, of course you recorded one side of my conversation without my knowledge in order to exploit what I have to say secretly as an indictment of my entire life's work.
Yeah, no big deal.
Now, personally, that would be...
We can't be friends anymore.
I mean, it's not even like I'll hate you forever publicly.
Just like, I will never speak to you because I don't know if you're recording this conversation.
And it's just occurred to me, you know, there is a morality tax on these contracts because you know these people have no morality.
So you have to pay them more than you would somebody who, you know, has thoughts and emotions and feelings like a person because they're going to lie to you or perhaps fucking record one half of your conversation.
You've got to pay them more, otherwise they'll do evil shit like that to you.
But if we want to play this game, I would suggest he go check out the comments on Crowder's video where he plays that call with Boring that's titled, "I didn't want to do this." They are almost wall to wall bad.
Stuff like, why did you have those negotiations then wait months to call him back and record that conversation?
It looks like a massive publicity stunt.
Huh.
Or maybe this one.
Been watching Steven since I was 13, but his recent actions are seriously disappointing.
It's not a YouTube comment, but even Mike Cernovich And that's Mike Cernovich.
He repeated in his videos, Big Con is in bed with big tech, trying to label Big Con as big conservative media.
So that's his site that he set up to farm email addresses to create a new database, since the Blaze probably owns his old one.
He says on his site, quote, please go to stopbigcon.com and enter your email.
This isn't just for Louder with Crowder.
This is a petition to show Big Con how many of you out there want to be a new one.
Yeah.
Some people have deduced that Crowder registered this domain, StopBigCon.com, prior to making that phone call to Boring, which he recorded and is currently using as the entire inciting incident for his campaign to stop big conservative media who are just in bed with big tech, which kind of doesn't make sense.
On the surface, it's a pretty standard and blah kind of conservative media grift, but...
The idea that Crowder didn't think people would put some of these pieces together is pretty laughable.
And here's the big problem for Crowder.
He's a tool.
He's not important, ultimately.
He's just somebody that the billionaires have paid to push right-wing ideas to teens.
The Daily Wire is important.
That's a burgeoning institution with its own media wing and projects in the works for educational programming and conservative alternatives to mainstream culture.
This is a giant project that is much stronger and much more supported than Crowder.
Well, I mean, that's the thing with these right-wing talking heads is that as much as they want to talk about gatekeepers, the reality is there's no place for them to...
Get better.
There's no organic movement of that kind of gradual growth where you work and toil in obscurity, and then you have skills.
He's up against something that is much more important than him.
and he does not really have a life raft.
And that's why he needs to team up with Alex.
This is a perfect unholy Avengers assembling kind of moment that they could have where they team up and attack the mainstream conservatives media.
Presumably Alex is actually independent and doesn't take money from billionaires, leaving aside his early career being subsidized by a shady gold dealer and that suspicious $8 million in Bitcoin he got last year.
But leave that aside.
Crowder can own his past and wear it on his sleeve.
How he was fully inside the belly of the beast and he knows how billionaires control all of this right-wing media for their own interests.
He's sorry he was a part of it and now he's teaming up with Alex to be the real media for the Patriots!
This won't happen though because Alex can't come anywhere near affording Steven and Crowder is clearly all about the money.
But...
Crowder has entered a tragic phase of his career.
Essentially, in order to make himself and keep himself relevant at all, he needs to try to tear down the people that he's considered allies and friends.
Honestly, it's a pretty predictable place for a complete asshole like him to have ended up, but the only real, like...
Further down the road kind of possibility?
Because he's not going to get re-monetized on YouTube.
These other platforms like Rumble and all this shit, they're not going to be able to pay him, and whatever money he's going to be able to make off them is not going to be anywhere near what he's accustomed to.
Right.
The kind of deal that The Daily Wire was offering him is perfect, and he shit on that.
Yeah, that makes it feel like, okay, this only really makes sense if this was a plan.
And then the call was farming the content in order to justify the call to action of raising a bunch of emails, like farming a bunch of people's email addresses for this.
And yeah, that is a terrible plan.
I don't think it's going to work.
And I really wonder if he's going to end up at InfoWars.
Sam Seder on the majority report had a good breakdown of...
How damning it is that Steven Crowder is introducing the idea that contracts can be exploitative, and how, for conservative ideology, this is a real big problem.
And I would encourage people who are interested to go ahead and watch that as well, because that is another good point inside this.
I don't feel that way, because I don't think the actual fight is interesting, per se.
I think that...
Some of these, you might call it unforced errors of saying things and making this about the contract and the money as opposed to some sort of a subsidiary issue that you all could fight about and have a good time.
That's kind of interesting to me.
And the fact that Steven Crowder is essentially in a position where he is exactly what Alex needs and he has nowhere else to go.
If he doesn't end up there, I don't understand what's going on.
I don't know what they possibly could think if they're not like, let's team up.
Yeah, you can only really pull that off if someone else is doing all that other stuff for you.
And Alex has had those people, too, and he's done a lot of it.
Ted Anderson did a lot of it for him, too.
Yeah, but Alex's model is better in as much as, like, if you want to just say whatever the fuck you want and be a real dickhead, nobody's gonna stop you.