Daily Wire head Ben Shapiro announced over the weekend that his company will be branching out beyond its current news and podcasts into the entertainment content production business, including movies and television. It’s the Daily Wire’s effort to begin to counter the overwhelmingly left-leaning, woke products that comprise the bulk of what Americans currently consume as entertainment.
As Shapiro wrote at the Daily Wire . . .
My mentor, Andrew Breitbart, always said politics is downstream of culture. What he meant by this is that more people are shaped by the culture that surrounds them than by politics directly: we consume movies and TV shows; we get together and discuss the latest in sports; we join in churches and at universities and at restaurants to discuss our lives. We swim in a sea of culture. In large part, we’re defined by the culture in which we swim. …
[C]onservatives have never truly understood the cultural battle. Yes, we occasionally fight the culture war — from time to time, we fight back against some idiotic TV show or nasty movie; we’ll mobilize others to unsubscribe from Netflix over promotion of reprehensible material; we’ll stop watching the Oscars after being insulted one too many times. But the simple truth is that we conservatives live increasingly in the same culture as those on the Left. Because our media are national in scope, we consume the same sort of material as those who disagree with us. We may yell at Netflix and Apple TV and Hulu and Disney+ and ESPN, but most of us still subscribe to one of those services. And Daily Wire and Fox News and conservative media aren’t competition for those services, either in what they do, or in the numbers they reach. Fox News’ primetime numbers this year, which were stellar, averaged about 3.6 million people. Netflix has over 70 million US subscribers. The difference between the reach of political content and entertainment content is at least an order of magnitude. There is a reason millions of people believe lies about conservatives. They’ve been trained to do so by a culture that despises conservatives.
So conservatives have two choices: they can tune out, or they can find alternatives.
The first entertainment product Daily Wire will bring to market is a movie about a Columbine-style school siege and shooting titled Run Hide Fight.
Again from the Daily Wire:
Run Hide Fight immerses viewers into a day in the life of Zoe Hull (played by Isabel May), a 17-year-old high school senior who is working through a complex relationship with her father (Thomas Jane) while coping with the recent loss of her mother to cancer. Zoe is just weeks shy of graduating when a quartet of nihilistic classmates siege her high school’s cafeteria to perpetrate a mass shooting. She manages to escape the building and help others flee, too, but then realizes she’s uniquely prepared to take on the shooters and save lives.
“Run Hide Fight is ultimately a movie about courage in the face of evil,” said Daily Wire’s [Co-CEO Jeremy] Boreing. “The Columbine massacre was a transformative moment for our country, and for me politically. It was the first time I saw how the media can form a narrative, in complete contravention of the facts, and have that narrative become the dominant perspective on a consequential event.”
Watch the trailer above. Our friends, the hoplophobic harridans and the rest of the civilian disarmament industry, will no doubt hold the movie up as an example of America’s violent gun culture and use the school shooting the movie depicts as a call for more gun control laws. But the movie also appears to present a high school-aged girl — one who hunts with her father and knows her way around a rifle — in a positive light as she fights back against the killers.
The movie will be available online beginning January 14. A journey of a thousand miles starts with one step.