 Those in charge, the big conservative, the big con, and it really is the biggest con going right now, they're making it known in their contracts that they will enforce the guidelines of Big Tech and punish conservatives. He's accusing us of being in league with Big Tech because of a term sheet, a negotiable term sheet that we submitted to him that offered to pay him 50 million dollars over four years. 50 million dollars? So you think you got Chelsea Clinton? Yesterday, Stephen Crowder released a sanctimonious video where he anxiously exposed the conservative media that supposedly in bed with Big Tech. Now, even though he went out of his way to avoid naming names, the audience pretty much figured out immediately that he was referring to Ben Shapiro. And now today, Ben Shapiro has responded to the accusations lobbed against him by Stephen Crowder. Now this entire debacle is incredibly entertaining, but it really exposes a lot about conservative media, specifically how much money is behind them. But before we get to my commentary, let's listen to Stephen Crowder's initial accusations. But for the first time, I have to say that I believe many of those in charge in the right-leaning media are actually at odds with what's best for you, the viewer, the customer, and more importantly, the country. We here at Monclem, we thought that we were all in this together, that we were fighting the media entertainment industrial complex. We thought that we were all genuinely taking it to Big Tech, but too many of those in charge of the big conservative platforms are verifiably in bed with them. Big Tech is in bed with Big Khan. The people you thought, the people I thought were fighting for you, a lot of it has been a big con. If Blank is boycotted or dropped by more than 50% of the advertising partners, the company is not able to replace them within 90 days, the fee will be reduced by 25%. That's a sponsorship boycott. So that's saying, hey, liberals, boycotts work. They work on our guys. We'll punish them for you. Let me go on, specifically YouTube demonetization. If any of the major platforms issues a content strike such that Crowder cannot be monetized on such platform and the company is not able to resolve the issue within 90 days, the fee will be reduced by 25% moving forward. Now, I thought this was a mistake because, you know, these people maybe didn't know who I am that we've been demonetized for three years. No, it's made very clear to me in no uncertain terms. This is what's sent out to everybody. Think about this for a second. Those in charge at Big Conservative, the Big Khan, and it really is the biggest con going right now, they're making it known in their contracts that they will enforce the guidelines of Big Tech and punish conservatives. The most insufferable part about that to me is how he tried to make this about the viewers and how Big Khan is betraying the viewers when in actuality this is about him not being satisfied with a very lucrative contract. And it's evident based on this portion of the video that we're about to watch that he's positioning himself for the next phase of his grift, which is why he decided to make a giant spectacle out of this announcement. Let's watch. If there are enough of you out there, I will transition Mug Club into a full-scale network with independent content creators who don't want to be locked into slave contracts. Look, I understand that business relationships sometimes fall through, people don't see eye to eye. I get that, but there is a way to structure these contracts and a network. There's a world in which contracts and a network exists where everyone benefits with some semblance of fairness, transparency. There's no need to be enslaved like this. Give me your money and I'll make a more virtuous, conservative platform where we're not going to be beholden to big tech. Now, that to me is just hilarious, but there's a portion of that clip and I'm sure you picked up on it that is just so ridiculous. He called that contract a slave contract and said, there's no reason to be enslaved like this. Now, as you're going to find out, that claim is absolutely ridiculous, so ridiculous that Ben Shapiro was forced to respond and point out that this slave contract that Ben, that Stephen Crowder is referring to here, that is a $50 million contract. Let's listen. I would just like to take a moment speaking of big tech and suppression of free speech. Take one moment to comment on a controversy that has broken out because my friend Stephen Crowder been friends with Stephen for a long time, like well over a decade. I was his lawyer when he first signed a contract with Fox and I've been friendly for a very long time. He put out a video essentially accusing Daily Wire of being in league with big tech. He's accusing us of being in league with big tech because of a term sheet, a negotiable term sheet that we submitted to him that offered to pay him $50 million over four years and included provisions that said that if he got booted from arenas that would lose him ad dollars, since we would also lose the ad dollars, then he would lose money as well. This is typically how contracts work. If his show were to start losing money, this is true of my show. If my show loses money, and it loses the Daily Wire money, I lose money. So if Stephen had come to work at Daily Wire Plus, it would have been precisely the same thing. If he had lost money in the ad space and his show had lost money, then he also would have lost money because that's how a joint venture works. Stephen interpreted that as somehow misinterpreted. I'll give it the best possible gloss. He somehow misinterpreted that as us attempting to quote-unquote do the work of YouTube. No, no. If you want more on that, then you should check out my friend and co-founder, Jeremy Boring's 55-minute video going through every single word of the term sheet that Stephen selectively read on his own YouTube channel. He read certain parts, he didn't read other parts. Jeremy reads literally word for word the entire term sheet and explains every single term they're in. I think it is well worth the watch. We should all be on the same side of this thing. I'm encouraging you. They should go subscribe to Stephen's Mug Club. I hope that he's very successful in whatever endeavor he chooses to pursue. That does not mean that he happens to be correct about the term sheet we submitted to him, and there is something rather nasty about attacking people who have been friends for over a decade, colleagues, defenders, for over a decade, on the basis of your own misinterpretation of a document that offers you $50 million over the course of four years. In other words, Stephen Crowder was insulted that the $50 million contract wasn't sufficient, and he was mad that there were caveats in said contract, which said he would lose money in the event he were to be deplatformed. Now, his claim is that deplatforming or demonetization for conservatives is inevitable, so $50 million wouldn't be the actual value that he's paid. But believe it or not, you don't have to say things that get you demonetized and deplatformed. For example, Ben Shapiro, he's one example. He still says all of the overtly bigoted things that he wants to say. He just doesn't take it to the next step and use slurs and go out of his way to violate the terms of service on YouTube. But a lot of these conservatives, they do this on purpose. They go out of their way to get banned or temporary suspensions, so that way they can then do a crowdfunding campaign and claim that they're being censored and say, oh my god, join my mug club or join my Patreon to push back against the censorship from Big Tech, so they like this victim narrative because that narrative is lucrative. So by joining this contract, Stephen Crowder wouldn't be able to rely on that portion of the grift. But understand that this exposes how greedy this man is. $50 million over four years. That is an amount of money that is comparable to mainstream media pundits. And yet he's still not satisfied. It is absolutely incredible. Now, Ben Shapiro referenced the co-CEO of the Daily Wire, Jeremy Boring, and he responded in a very lengthy video. I'll link to that down below if you want to watch the whole thing. But the clip that we're going to see shows Boring exposing Stephen Crowder as a fraud because he claims that he's independent and he's virtuous when in actuality, no, billionaires rolled out the red carpet in front of him and helped him get to the level that he's at currently. He talks in this video about being one of the only true independent conservative voices. And I find that incredibly offensive. 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 telling him what to say. He's a very independent voice and that's good. So is Matt Walsh. So is Candace Owen. So has Ben Shapiro. So is Michael Knowles. So is Brett Cooper. But Stephen, 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 Carton, one of the real genius businessmen in our movement, turned the company around and made it profitable. During all of that time, Stephen drove a ton of revenue. He's incredibly valuable. I'm not suggesting that he wasn't driving value. He was. I'm only saying he didn't have to build all of that. He didn't have to think about it and he didn't necessarily have to be profitable. And he doesn't know for a fact that he was profitable because, as he has said very publicly, all those companies, none of them really shared all the information about what was happening with him. So Stephen feels very certain that his show was always profitable, but he doesn't know that his show was profitable. This is all hilarious to me. He claims that he's independent, but yet you can't actually say that with a straight face if you've been bankrolled by billionaires because think about it. You really can't say whatever you want if you have billionaire money. You can advocate on increasing their taxes or policies that go against their particular industries. Now a conservative would never do that because they are bootlickers and they support these industries. They support the status quo, hence why these billionaires fund them. But you're still not independent because in the event Stephen Crowder decided to go rogue and say, well, maybe we should increase taxes on some wealthy individuals, well then they would pull funding. So he's still restrained. He's not fully independent as we are on the left where we don't even take advertising dollars most of the time. Now there's some additional details that I find pretty hilarious. Journalist Wool Summer explains the reaction among the right wing fan base was initially with Crowder, but now seems to be shifting against him with the revelation that he treated a $50 million contract like indentured servitude. Exactly. He has no self-awareness. One final detail, Jordan Peterson, whose podcast is hosted by the Daily Wire, was apparently unaware of who Crowder's video was actually about and initially tweeted his support for him. Someone appears to have gone to him though and Peterson later deleted the tweet. Now he adds possibly relevant in November, roughly two months after the Daily Wire negotiation broke down, Stephen Crowder was defending Kanye by complaining about people with Jewish last names in conservative media duping talent with confusing contracts. People with Jewish last names, I wonder who he could have been talking about. That was a great find by Wool Summer by the way. So he was covertly taking shots at Ben Shapiro presumably back then, but now he's decided, actually there's a way to cash in on this. Position myself to rather than joining the Daily Wire, just be the next Daily Wire and have my viewers fund my venture even though I'm already incredibly wealthy. And he has a lot of money because if you're going to turn down a $50 million contract for pretty reasonable clauses, then you're doing pretty well. Now let's talk about what this all exposes. I think it's pretty obvious, but these right-wingers, right-wing media, this whole ecosystem, it is far more well-funded than any of us imagined. As this Twitter user points out, the amount of secret billionaire money floating around these hard-right media personalities has got to be way more than even the most cynical person might imagine. Yeah, exactly. Because we all knew that these right-wing figures and organizations were propped up by billionaire money, but none of us knew just the sheer amount of money that was behind these individuals. A 2018 TYT report by Alex Koch detailed some of the billionaires in the web of funding for the Daily Wire and right-wing media more generally speaking, and it's a bit complicated, but they're heavily propped up by billionaires overall like the Mercers, the Wilkes Brothers and Koch Industries just to name a few. But in part, due to this funding, Ben Shapiro was able to transform the Daily Wire into an organization that found commercial success, claiming that they raked in $100 million in 2021 up from $65 million in 2020. And considering that they just recently offered Stephen Crowder a $50 million contract for four years, I'm assuming, just gonna go out on a limb here, that 2022 was really good to them as well. So this right here specifically is why these right-wingers have so much influence. It's not because they make better arguments and they're just more persuasive. That's not the case. It's because they're bankrolled by the rich and when you have this money, you can more easily get your name out there. You can flood the airwaves with your advertisements. You can sponsor organizations that will promote you. That's why the left is having such a difficult time competing with them and it seems as if they're winning the culture war. But in actuality, they're just reaching more people and the left can't do this because, again, the left, we actually are independent. We don't take money from billionaires. Most of us, again, don't even run advertisements. So this is why it seems like they're winning and why I think it's so important for the likes of us on the left to push back against their talking points and reveal how clownish and cartoonishly stupid their arguments are because it's just a numbers game. The more people you reach, the more people you're going to convince and if you get your message out to more people, you're going to have more people jump on the bandwagon. So it's a difficult job to try to compete with the right, but this is why they are dominant. It's because there's so much money behind them and even a $50 million contract isn't sufficient for some of these individuals. So that goes to show you how much money they have. It's just so ridiculous. This is why so many folks on the left end up grifting to the right because there's no money on the left. So, of course, you little by little start to ship to the right and you realize, wow, it actually pays to be a hateful piece of shit. Hate pays because not only do you get a lot of eyeballs from the individuals who are radicalized by the likes of Steven Crowder and Ben Shapiro, but that opens the door to right-wing funding. Look at the way that Glenn Greenwald and other individuals got contracts with Rumble. They're not offering that to left-wingers. Do you understand? So this is why it seems like they're winning. It's because money is everything. Money is power in a capitalist system. And that's why we have to work that much harder to try to compete with them and dismantle their misinformation.