Thou Shalt Have No Steven Crowders Before Me
How Idol Worship Turns Your Brain Off
"I don't call those friends who betray and ruin you."
― Alexandre Dumas | The Count of Monte Cristo
There’s an angle to this whole Crowder/Daily Wire debacle that I haven’t seen anyone else talking about, and I’d like to explore it a bit with you. When we place people on pedestals, we blind ourselves to what’s really going on, and we lose our ability to discern the truth. Let’s break it down.
If you’ve been on political Twitter in the last week, it would have been almost impossible to avoid news of the scuffle (to put it mildly) between Steven Crowder and the Daily Wire - Daily Wire made Crowder an offer, and Crowder publicly threw them under the bus. He may not have named them initially, but he didn’t leave much room for doubt as to who it was, so he might as well have.
We’re going to spend a little time breaking down the business side, so we can get to the deeper repercussions of this whole scenario.
Business 101
If you haven’t had a chance to catch up, don’t worry, you won’t need to for this article’s purposes, but I summarized it at the bottom if you’d like the recap.
That being said - if you have the ability to understand a basic terms sheet, and the fact that what Daily Wire sent over was a preliminary offer with room for negotiation, there are only two ways to read this situation:
Steven Crowder is a moron.
Steven Crowder was maliciously exploiting friends for mailing list subs.
And I don’t think Steven Crowder is a moron.
You see, we’re not an enlightened civilization, we’ve just sterilized our paganism.
No matter how you slice it, Daily Wire was offering Crowder an arrangement almost identical to what he does now. Currently, Crowder airs his show on YouTube. After about 45 minutes to an hour, he says “Piss off, YouTube!” and he cuts to a behind-the-paywall, Mug Club only segment for another 30/45 minutes.
“But Patrick!” You might be saying, “That sounds just like all the Daily Wire shows!”
You’d be right. It is.
Both models work like this: offer a tonne of free content, and use that free content to leverage subscriptions for your premium content. Not complicated.
So what happens when your ability to publish that free content goes away - you get banned from YouTube, for example? You have way less audience to promote your premium content to, thus way less people are becoming premium subscribers.
This is exactly what Crowder does now. That’s why he self-admittedly toes the line for Big Tech on his YouTube segments, “This is too spicy to talk about on YouTube, but join Mug Club and we’ll talk about it on today’s Mug Club segment.”
Yet somehow, Crowder became supremely offended when, in Daily Wire’s offer sheet, they added a clause that says Crowder’s pay will be reduced if he gets YouTube strikes that prevent him from attracting new premium subscribers, which is exactly what happens to him now. No YouTube = No New Money.
So why should Daily Wire bear all that risk? And if Crowder really did have a problem with the offer that exactly replicated his current business model, he could have just negotiated for something different - they were all friends, after all, right?
I think Crowder knows this, which is why I believe he manipulated this whole thing to create drama, in the hopes of driving up numbers for a mailing list that he has to start from scratch since losing his to the Blaze.
Which brings us to Part 2…
How Idol Worship Turns Your Brain Off
The above seems pretty simple. If you watched all 3 relevant videos; Crowder complaining about the offer, Jeremy Boreing’s breakdown of the offer, then Crowder’s response where he revealed he maliciously recorded his friend Jeremy and played out of context clips to make him look bad - I don’t know how you can come away with any other impression except that this was a super shady and cynical play by Crowder.
Except people did - A LOT of them.
Why?
Well, to be blunt, some people just don’t have an abundance of sense. These people I have no problem with - they can’t help it, and God bless them, I can only pray they’re doing their best. I’ll let C.S. Lewis explain:
“God will not love you any the less, or have less use for you, if you happen to have been born with a very second-rate brain. He has room for people with very little sense, but He wants every one to use what sense they have.”
― C.S. Lewis
That leaves us with those that should know better. I encountered A LOT of these on Twitter - people who are clearly intelligent enough to grasp the truth, but persist in closing their eyes to it. So what’s their issue? Why are they siding with Crowder, when they know full well that his claims of, “I’m just doing it for up-and-coming creators” or, “It’s not about the money” are total BS?
You must not make for yourself an idol of any kind or an image of anything in the heavens or on the earth or in the sea.
I’ve been thinking a lot about idol worship.
You see, we think we’re a very posh, modern, civilized society…
Don’t fool yourself.
The pagans sacrificed babies in service of the gods.
We abort babies in service of ourselves.
The pagans beat drums and availed themselves of temple prostitutes.
We go to nightclubs and prostitute ourselves.
The pagans worshipped Gaia and made sacrifices to appease her.
Environmentalists worship the earth and sacrifice the world’s poorest by denying access to fossil fuels.
The pagans worshipped idols.
We worship Donald Trump and Steven Crowder.
Ouch.
And you thought I was only coming for the lefties.
You see, we’re not an enlightened civilization, we’ve just sterilized our paganism. We all worship something, that’s what makes the idea of God so necessary for ordering our personalities. You can either worship something temporal, fallible, even downright malignant, or you can worship something eternal, perfect, and the author of love itself. Too often we fall into the trap of worshipping the first, even if we think the object of our worship is deserving, or heroic.
A belief in God isn’t a comfort blanket for the naïve, it’s a fundamental lens that elucidates ordered reality itself.
But hero worship will not save us. Donald Trump. Elon Musk, maybe? Steven Crowder. All of them have done great things in their own right, accomplishing monumental feats that I truly believe have helped push our culture in the right direction. Champions of Free Speech, Assassins of Fake News, Innovators, Sparks of Genius.
But Trump, alas, has turned into a curmudgeonly boomer shouting into the void about a 3-years-old “stolen” election he could never make the case for in a court of law - the only place it counts.
Elon Musk… well actually, I’m not sure if I can say anything bad about Elon Musk. His Neuralink thing might be a little creepy, I don’t know.
And Steven? From all appearances, Steven just stabbed long-term friends and allies of his in the back, to stir up buzz for what? Growing his mailing list? I loved the dude, but that’s just gross - bitterly disappointing.
But I can come to terms with that, and talk about it honestly, because Steven Crowder is not my Lord and Saviour.
That doesn’t seem to be the case for so many, who are bending over backwards to defend a guy they think can do no wrong. They can’t imagine he would ever have anything less than noble intentions because they forgot the very thing that makes all of this idolatry, fundamentally.
Steven Crowder is human.
Humans mess up. We do shitty things to ourselves and to friends. God doesn’t. That’s what makes us, us, and Him, Him. When you forget that fact, you become stupid, because you are no longer living in reality. You start defending people you know you shouldn’t be defending because your cognitive dissonance prevents you coming to terms with the fact that someone you thought you could do no wrong just acted a malicious fool, and it breaks your brain.
A belief in God isn’t a comfort blanket for the naïve, it’s a fundamental lens that elucidates ordered reality itself - when your view of man, or a specific man, exceeds your view of God, you are no longer living in accordance with fundamental reality, and you have willingly chosen stupid.
Don’t be stupid.
The Recap (for those who scrolled down to get the full context)
Once upon a time, Steven Crowder and the Daily Wire were very good friends, and were on each other’s shows all the time, having a jolly good time.
When Crowder left his previous network, Daily Wire made Crowder an offer of $50,000,000 over 4 years to come make his show at Daily Wire
Crowder countered, saying he wanted $120,000,000 over 4 years
Daily Wire said “I don’t think we can do that, but best of luck, we’re still friends.”
Crowder put out a video ripping the offer apart (importantly, without naming Daily Wire), saying the author of the offer was in bed with Big Tech, wasn’t truly conservative, and was screwing over younger creators with predatory clauses
Jeremy Boreing of the Daily Wire then put out a video claiming authorship of the offer, and broke it down line-by-line with full transparency, pretty much discrediting Crowder’s narrative entirely
Crowder responded with another video, revealing he had recorded a phone call with Jeremy Boreing (remember, a good friend of his), that apparently made Jeremy the bad guy. Although, all he played were CNN-level chopped-up clips of Jeremy talking, with zero context, and even then, everything Jeremy said was pretty much Business 101.
It appears Crowder and the Daily Wire are no longer friends.
Psst, here’s a tweet thread from Ben Shapiro where he gave a pretty succinct timeline of the relevant events. I know, I know… “But, bias!” - from all the information out so far, no-one/nothing has contradicted Ben’s timeline, breathe. Also I encourage you to watch all the videos as well for the full context: here’s one, two, and three.
Here is the timeline.
— Ben Shapiro (@benshapiro) January 20, 2023
Prior to October 5: Steven's agent requests we send an offer.
October 5: We submit a non-binding term sheet.
November 2: Steven tells Jeremy he wants $30M per year and us to send him a new offer, refusing to red-line the term sheet.