CONSERVATIVE MEGA-COMMENTATOR Ben Shapiro’s Daily Wire media empire announced a big shakeup on Tuesday: co-CEO Jeremy Boreing was abruptly stepping down.

A contentious and outspoken executive, Boreing had become almost as much a face of the company as Shapiro himself. He positioned the Daily Wire into the success story of right-wing digital media, an ambitious attempt to swing the culture rightward. Rumors have been swirling of a massive acquisition in the offing.

While Shapiro lives in Florida, Boreing has been building the Daily Wire’s main Nashville wing into a right-leaning content juggernaut. Along with the expected podcasts and YouTube operation, the Daily Wire has a streaming operation, offering documentaries and conservative educational miniseries. For conservative preschoolers, their Bentkey streaming app hosts a combination of original programming—a puppet show, for example, and a chinchilla-themed cartoon kind of like Bluey—and “handpicked episodes from well-loved shows” that have been checked and rechecked to make sure they are “respectful of your family’s values.”

In profiles and media-biz interviews, the 46-year-old Boreing was positioned as a twenty-first century Rupert Murdoch, claiming the Daily Wire raked in $200 million in revenue last year. Boreing superfans could even buy his eponymous, anti-woke razor and chocolate brands.

But as of Tuesday, all that is on ice. In its press release, the Daily Wire said that Boreing was trading his co-CEO position for an “advisory role” handling the company’s creative projects, and that he’ll appear on a monthly podcast.

“We can’t wait to see what he does next,” Shapiro said, in a not particularly warm statement.

That’s an abrupt drop in ambition for a man who once promoted his business plans by posing on a throne wearing a crown. Boreing even described himself as the Daily Wire’s “god king”—the kind of nickname you don’t give yourself if you think there’s any chance you’ll be mysteriously demoted.

In a November interview on Puck’s Grill Room podcast, Boreing said that he wanted to turn the Daily Wire into the next New York Times, and that he fell asleep every night dreaming of selling the company for a big payoff. So much for that!

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SO WHAT’S GOING ON HERE? If there’s one thing people in the fractious world of right-wing digital media can agree on, it’s that there’s a backstory here we aren’t getting.

“I don’t really buy this or believe this,” podcast host Elijah Schaffer, one of Boreing’s many nemeses, said on his YouTube show on Tuesday. “I think it’s way nastier behind the scenes.”

Not to be outdone, former Daily Wire host Candace Owens, whose firing from the company Boreing announced almost exactly one year ago, hosted a kind of victory livestream of her own on Tuesday night speculating about what led to Boreing’s decision to step down.

Despite what count as “successes”—Daily Wire host Matt Walsh’s Am I Racist? was the top-grossing documentary of 2024—the company has been bleeding talent. Owens has, despite her extreme views, built a larger platform for herself since leaving the company.

Back at Daily Wire HQ, campaigns like a new effort to convince Trump to pardon Derek Chauvin, the Minneapolis cop convicted of murdering George Floyd, have landed with comparative thuds. Right-wing commentator Jason Whitlock, for example, pointed out that pardoning Chauvin would be a deranged move for the first days of Trump’s administration.

One particularly frothy, drama-filled debacle in the last months of Boreing’s CEOship centered on Brett Cooper, a Daily Wire YouTuber/podcaster who comes off like a younger, female version of Shapiro.

Last fall, as rumors circulated online that Boreing and Cooper were at odds, Cooper’s on-camera role was increasingly filled by her friend and producer, a woman named Reagan Conrad, prompting speculation that Boreing was using her to replace Cooper.

When Cooper finally quit the Daily Wire in December, Conrad was indeed slotted into the now-vacant host role. Under Conrad, the show’s views are down. Meanwhile Cooper, like Owens before her, is building her own channel on YouTube. In one particularly rough moment, Boreing insisted in an online video that Conrad had not taken “acting classes” to seem more like Cooper.

“It’s hurt my feelings a little bit that Brett hasn’t done more to defend her friend,” Boreing said.

Cooper celebrated Boreing’s exit herself on Tuesday, posting a smiling Jimmy Fallon gif on X.

TO BE FAIR TO BOREING, the Daily Wire may be facing some broader media trends that were out of his control. The energy on the young right-wing internet is headed in an increasingly radical, Nick Fuentes-style direction, and Boreing and his crew look dull by comparison.

And as the digital-media economy favors individual personalities, there’s not much incentive for someone who has built a following working at the Daily Wire to stick with the company rather than strike out on their own.

But by far the thing I’m most interested in here is The Pendragon Cycle, Boreing’s 25-year passion project to film a book series about King Arthur set in Roman-era Britain.

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Boreing, who wears a key around his neck that reminds him of the Texas theater where he put on plays as a young man, is—like so many in right-wing media (ahem, James O’Keefe)—a wannabe entertainer at heart. In 2023, he announced that the Daily Wire was undertaking the massive project of turning the fantasy series into a streaming show, which was initially set to premiere in 2024. Boreing is credited as the series’ creator and director, and looks thrilled in the on-set videos the Daily Wire has posted.

But 2024 has come and gone, and so far, the first season of The Pendragon Cycle still hasn’t been released. Awkwardly, it’s taken so long that Cooper—who plays a supporting role as a sort of woodlands pagan character—has already left the company on what appear to be bad terms.

It’s impossible to watch the show’s production diaries on YouTube—which feature months of filming in Hungary and Italy, actors performing elaborate, real stunts over rampaging bulls, and dozens of extras fighting in the marshes of the Danube River—and not think “This has to have been comically expensive.” Certainly more than just filming another YouTube show with Ben Shapiro would have been!

I’m trying to find out what happened here, so if you have any ideas, hit me up at sommer@thebulwark.com. In the meantime, maybe The Pendragon Cycle will come out and silence its doubters.