#72: Can't we all just get along?

What's up everyone? David Bozell at the For America headquarters. Welcome to "Voices for America." I absolutely loathe doing this. I hate wading into these waters of conservative versus conservative crime. I'm watching this Steven Crowder versus Jeremy Boreing/Daily Wire feud, and I'm just thinking to myself, is any of this gonna help us win the White House in 2024?

No.

But as someone who has come up in the cause, in the conservative movement, I know a ton about its history and I've watched the conservative media ecosystem grow from nothing in a very short period of time to have an incredible array of talent competing.

Look, we're not communists, right? We ought to be competing politely and helping each other broaden the cause of conservatism. And I'm watching this feud go back and forth, and if you're not familiar with it, I'll backtrack it. Somewhere along the way, late last year, it appears Steven Crowder, who's got a very successful YouTube channel, was either set to become a free agent or was a free agent, and he starts entertaining negotiations with other publishers. And Daily Wire reached out and offered him essentially what amounts to a memorandum of understanding. They send this out, it's not a contract, but they send out the bullet points of the beginnings of negotiation. And it's very generous. $50 million over four years is nothing to sneeze at. And that's an eye-popping number. It's a ton of scratch to do this. But, great. That's great. That to me is another example of how influential the conservative media ecosystem is and can be and should be.

That's a positive development. So they send over these terms to Steven. Steven rejects them, and the only reason we even know that is that Steven went on his show, redacted who had sent him this agreement, and complained about it. The agreement stated that if he was not able to meet a certain number of hours, in terms of the shows that he was gonna publish, and if he was suspended or demonetized from certain platforms, then the fee would go down.

Then, people figured out that it was the Daily Wire that had offered him this. Jeremy Boreing, who is the financial mind behind Daily Wire, did his own retort and went on for about an hour and it was brilliant to watch because he goes line by line about what the contract meant, and his essential point was, we can negotiate all of these things.

Again, it was just a memorandum of understanding of where they should start. We can negotiate all these things. However, if my company, my for-profit company, can't make money, can't make a return on investment from you, then yeah I'm gonna pay you for the effort, but we're gonna have to reduce some things because I'm not gonna be able to hit the bottom line I need.

That was essentially Jeremy's point. It reminds me of what's going on in the NFL. The Cleveland Browns guaranteed a contract to Deshaun Watson, their quarterback, for $250 million. It was the first contract of its kind, fully guaranteed. Now, Deshaun Watson has all sorts of demons coming from the Houston Texans.

He's been sued, almost two dozen times for sexual this, that, and the other. And I think he's reached some settlements or what have you, but he becomes available and the Cleveland Browns owner decides to make this unprecedented contract offer. Deshaun Watson signs it and Cleveland trades for Watson, gets him off the Texans roster, and guarantees him $250 million.

Now, fast forward to Lamar Jackson, who's the quarterback of the Ravens, his contract is up and he thinks I'm better than Deshaun Watson. And oh, by the way, I don't have all this drama and all this baggage, so my contract should be guaranteed, but the Ravens don't wanna participate in guaranteeing money.

Because Lamar Jackson has a propensity for injury and their attitude is we can't make good on this investment if you're not on the field to play. Perhaps we cannot guarantee your salary, so it's not too different from that. Putting aside some of the ancillary number of shows that Steven was contractually going to be obligated to perform, etc. etc.

Putting all that stuff aside, I think Crowder essentially wanted a guaranteed bottom line for his services. And Daily Wire said, look we'll do some of that, but in order to reach all of what we're gonna offer you, you can't be demonetized. The negotiations die and go quiet between the two parties. And then last night, Crowder revealed that he called Jeremy Boreing a few months later.

And then essentially what nobody knew was that he was taping the conversation and he releases the audio. Jeremy Boreing didn't say anything bad in these tapes, but the very idea that you would audio tape a contract negotiation, or at least, I guess they really weren't negotiating, but just releasing conversation is just an unforgivable sin. To release it to the public, it's just an unforgivable sin. Now, a lot of folks have made that commentary, that's not breaking news here.

My concern is, forget these two, forget the $50 million, forget the fact that what Crowder essentially wanted Boreing to do was: A), pay him a huge amount of money; B) figure out a way to pay him without having to rely on Big Tech to distribute him...i.e. YouTube, Facebook, and Spotify. Crowder was upset that Boreing wasn't going to figure this out.

It is a massive problem for the conservative movement, which is: how do you get your message out when the distribution channels are lined up against you? My beef with the whole thing is Jeremy Boreing has created a juggernaut with Daily Wire and Ben Shapiro, he has a business mind that every single conservative organization, show, including my show, organization, platform, whatever, any tentacle of the conservative movement ecosystem... all of us would kill to have on their staffs, all of us. The fact of the matter is conservatism needs a dozen more Jeremy Boreings.

You may not like the Daily Wire, and to be perfectly candid, Daily Wire is not my cup of tea in terms of infotainment. It's just not, but I'm not the target demographic. I already believe in 99.9% of what they put out there, I'm just not a huge fan of their presentation. It's just a personal taste thing, it's just a personal taste. That's all. That's all it is.

But I'm damn jealous of Jeremy Boreing, the business person. The business mind. He's created a juggernaut. Enough of a juggernaut to send a podcaster an offer worth $50 million, and then some, when it all comes down to it. The movement needs a dozen more of those. Every organization could use Jeremy Boreing's skillset. There are a zillion podcasters out there, and some are better than others. And it's just, it's all personal preference and tastes and the priorities of what they're talking about.

And there's this misconception in the political arena, there is an obsession sometimes, and I think it's an awful one to pursue as you embark on a campaign, you have to write the talking points. What are the talking points?

Do we all have our proper talking points? Members of Congress are always running around Capitol Hill. What are my talking points? What am I saying? What am I saying about X? What am I saying about Y talking points? We need to be on the same page. We need to be singing from the same sheet of music. There's a number of organizations that will pay communications professionals to come up with the talking points so that you sound like a robot and you're repeating the same message, and that's why you get this sort of bland, very bland presentation from a cadre of politicos, whether you're a member of Congress or think tank or whatever.

They all sound the same because they're all saying the same things. And I would counter that needs to be in total reverse. We need to be helping each other for sure, but we ought to be competing with each other for who has the best message because that's going to allow the best message and the best talking points to rise to the top. And so we've got an armada of podcasters that are doing that independently.

And Jeremy saw that and corralled a few of them, their names are well known to you: Candace and Ben and Michael Knowles and Matt Walsh. And they all have their priorities and their pet issues that they like to opine on and they like to give their perspective too. And they've created a juggernaut. There needs to be more of that.

I understand Crowder's point. He wants to control the rights to his program and he wants young, up and coming talent to be able to control the rights to their programs. I am in total sympathy of that, but we live in the now.

If Jeremy Boreing in the Daily Wire cannot make a monetary profit off of you, then they can't pay you. That's just the reality. Now there are, there are the Rumbles and Truth Socials, and there are things emerging to compete, but these things take time. To burden Boreing with the additional charge of figuring out how a right-winger is supposed to make a killing financially without using Facebook or YouTube, I thought was unnecessarily unfair.

And to burden him with that challenge and then to tape him as you make that request and then to release that is unforgivable. Now, the result of Crowder's transgression is going to be, whether he knows it or not, whether we see it immediately or not, but those dozen more Jeremy Boreing that the cause of conservatism needs, whoever they may be, is gonna see all this and say yeah, no thanks. I don't need to be a part of that. I don't need to spend my life's work trying to figure out how I can preach conservatism to a broader audience and recruit people to our side away from the shackles of big tech only to have my on-air talent tape conversations and release 'em to the public. I think that's the harm being done here. It's not the $50 million. It's not even the taping of the audio recording though.

But by releasing it under the auspices of, I'm trying to help the talent that comes up behind me, which I respect, but by releasing it you may have convinced someone of Jeremy Boreing's mindset and skillset who could have helped us to say, yeah, no thanks.

I'll do my own thing. I'll go invest in this or that or the other. That's where you just gotta be careful about this. It doesn't justify potentially turning off someone like a Boreing to come and help.

And that's essentially what Crowder, I think has done. We'll get through it. We'll be fine. And we'll muscle through it. Look people die, right? I don't mean to be so morbid about this, I remember when Bill Buckley passed and people were saying that's it. That's it for the conservatives, or when Rush passed away and said that's it for the conservative movement.

I gotta tell you, I think the conservative movement was on death's door with all these spending bills that have been passed year after year. The federal government's magic trick was passing obscene amounts of money on New Year's Eve-Eve. Conservatives could not fight against it. The establishment figured it out.

How can we neutralize the conservative movement ecosystem, how we can neutralize conservative activism against what we wanna do? We'll just not vote on anything until New Year's Eve.

When everyone's sort of dealing with Christmas and dealing with New Year's and dealing with their organizations that are in flux and their staffs are gone.

Now, there's gonna be lots of voting on lots of things. Now the people can have a voice again on lots of different bills. The rules package was a necessary defibrillator for the cause of conservatism. In order to have some success preaching conservatism, or at least in the public policy arena, you could do one of two things.

You could go into law-fare And a lot of groups are having a tremendous amount of success with the courts, First Liberty, Judicial Watch, those types. Or you can go into the states where a lot of the action had transferred to. You could do that. There's a lot of state-based stuff having a lot of impact.

Bottom line is we're gonna be okay. The conservative movement is going to get past this. So long as we have free speech, the movement will never die, ever, as long as we have free speech. Now, that's hanging on barely, depending on who you talk to. But the counter-argument is if guys are willing to throw out 50 million dollars for their speech then... I think we're okay.

I think we're okay. But I would just caution people, if you're gonna get into this space or better yet, if you're interested in getting into this space consider what Crowder did to be an outlier. An outlier. We need more business minds, like Boreing. That's really the bottom line.

I just hope that this doesn't discourage someone of that ilk to get involved and bring your skill-sets.

I'm a policy guy and a messaging guy. I'm not a business guy. There are policy wonks, there are messengers, there are fundraisers and there are administrators. We have very few business minds. And we need more Jeremy Boreings.

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