It’s been a banner week for toxic men on the comeback trail. Former New York governor Andrew Cuomo continues to lead the polls in the city’s mayoral race. At Cannes, Kevin Spacey accepted a lifetime achievement award from Better World Foundation and compared his #MeToo fall from grace to screenwriter Dalton Trumbo’s decade-plus exile on the HUAC blacklist. (Trumbo landed there for his leftist politics, it should be noted, not via sexual assault accusations from multiple men.) Then Ben Shapiro’s Daily Wire announced its latest move in its entertainment division; hiring the disgraced Mike Richards, the ex–Jeopardy producer and on-camera successor to the show’s late host Alex Trebek. He will join Shapiro’s company as his entertainment division president.

In recent years, The Daily Wire has been part of a trend of conservative, ideologically driven production companies looking to move into mainstream entertainment. Other players include Chick-Fil-A’s media production arm and the evangelically minded Angel Studios (Sound of Freedom, King of Kings). The question is, can you be a ideology-forward entertainment company and break out of the toxic right-wing media bubble to reach a broader mass audience? Certainly there’s plenty of successful conservative pop culture out there, from Taylor Sheridan’s Yellowstone and all its spin-offs to Joe Rogan and his cohort of “just asking questions” bro-podcasters to the never-ending syndication of sitcoms starring Tim Allen and Kelsey Grammar. Modern country music has always tilted right. If it’s true, as Andrew Breitbart once put it, that “politics is downstream of culture,” right-wing success in pop culture is likely a big reason we have the president we do now, or at least evidence of that demographic. For all the conservative whining about liberal Hollywood, Ronald Reagan, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and Donald Trump all based much of their political careers on mainstream Hollywood celebrity.

But this new breed of conservative pop culture marks a dramatic escalation into hard-right territory. When Trump named his special ambassadors to Hollywood, he included Jon Voight and Sylvester Stallone—but sensing somehow that the gesture wasn’t provocative enough, he added Mel Gibson. Voight and Stallone are pretty far right, but Gibson was written off years ago for behavior that has nothing to do with conservatism.

The other entertainment concerns keen to mainstream the MAGAsphere have their own versions of what might be termed the Mel Gibson problem. Angel Studios, which describes itself as a faith-based production company, delivered a $230 million hit with its child-trafficking thriller Sound of Freedom—but still could not separate its film from the movie’s QAnon devotee star Jim Caviezel, who espoused Q theories about adrenochrome harvesting in interviews with discredited child rescuer Tim Ballard. True, the movie found an audience, but it also found that audience. “It did hurt my work,” director Alejandro Monteverde told Variety while distancing himself from his star’s conspiracy theories. Monteverde further explained that he began writing the film in 2015, before QAnon emerged. “There’s people that are too close to the film that are in politics,” he said in reaction to a Trump-sponsored screening of the film attended by Caviezel and Ballard, “So it’s like, I love you, but I have to keep my distance.” The movie’s Q-adjacency didn’t seem to hurt it at the box office, but at the same time, Sound of Freedom wasn’t able to shake the impression that it was cultish and weird. (That stigma certainly wasn’t helped by the later revelations of Tim Ballard’s own history of alleged sexual trespasses, including a lawsuit filed last year accusing him of sexual trafficking.)

No company has failed harder at breaking free of the bonds of MAGA narrowcasting than Ben Shapiro’s troubled media concern The Daily Wire. Hiring Mike Richards is not a surprise move for Shapiro’s firm, which has made its struggling entertainment brand a salvage yard for damaged celebrities. If you don’t remember Richards’s name, it’s probably because his game-show hosting career self-destructed after only one day. Before that, he was Jeopardy’s Emmy-award winning producer and a former production hand at The Price is Right and Wheel of Fortune. While at Jeopardy, Richards and other producers launched a post-Trebek host search that included LeVar Burton, Mayim Bialik, and George Stephanopoulos. Then Richards pulled a Dick Cheney, who, you may recall, was hired to vet vice-presidential candidates for George W. Bush and then gave himself the job (he denies he had any say in his improbable hiring). Not long after Richards took over, The Ringer ran an investigative piece covering 41 podcast episodes of The Randumb Show, which features Richards making derogatory comments about Asians and women. The Ringer also uncovered accusations of sexual harassment, discrimination, and wrongful termination suits during his tenure at The Price is Right.

With Richards’s toxicity badge unlocked, Sony, the show’s owner, fired him. It’s not like people with a checkered past don’t deserve a shot at redemption, but it’s pretty obvious that neither he nor The Daily Wire care about that—and in the Trump 2.0 Era, it does not look like anyone on the right’s asking. As the Wire’s Gloria Taylor put it in the company’s press announcement about Richards’s hiring, “He’s won 5 Emmy’s, produced over 4,000 hours of network programming, and run some of the most iconic shows the world has ever known. Thank you to the purple hairs. Please ‘cancel’ more creative geniuses.”

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Richards had done a mea culpa in a People profile, but that was evidently a little too woke for the Wire. Considering how much of President Trump’s pre-political fame rests on The Apprentice—and considering that Department of Homeland Security chief Kristi Noem is actively pursuing a game show where immigrants compete for citizenship in the United States—maybe The Daily Wire sees MAGA game shows as the future of entertainment. The possibilities are endless: Who Wants to Work for a Billionaire?, Straight Eye for the Queer Guy, Are You Smarter Than a Homeschooler? and The Real Housewives of Johannesburg all leap to mind.

Despite aggressively investing in film production, distribution, and sitcoms, Shapiro’s company hasn’t found a way to make a dent in mainstream pop culture outside the right-wing media bubble. His stable of canceled and/or belligerent geniuses serve mostly to reinforce the company’s narrow niche. The Daily Wire’s best-known product so far has been the animated half-hour sit-com Mr. Birchum, starring Adam Carolla as an anti-woke woodshop-teaching dad, which specializes in tired trans and soy-boy humor about modern life. In addition to bringing on Carolla, Shapiro’s company recruited some well-known comedy talent onto the show, including Patrick Warburton and Rob Riggle. It also featured cancelled creative geniuses Roseanne Barr and Megyn Kelly, who both lost mainstream careers over dumb comments on race.

Mr. Birchum did not come close to the kind of culturally conservative comedy success that Netflix has had with anti-woke comedians like Andrew Schulz. The Daily Wire has also made movies with the same trolling mentality. After Mandalorian action star Gina Carano made a long series of social media posts full of ant-vaxx conspiracy theories, blockheaded Holocaust analogies, and transphobic commentary, Disney fired her. She duly landed at The Daily Wire, where its film production company starred her in a western feature film, 2022’s Terror on the Prairie. “We’re making entertainment-first content, challenging content, adult content,” Daily Wire cofounder and co-CEO Jeremy Boreing said of the company’s film strategy in an interview with IndieWire. “We’re not making Hillary’s hard-drive story, and we’re not making rag-tag football players find Jesus in the third act.”

Fair enough—but after Carano transformed her image from MMA action star in a Soderbergh movie and two top franchises to transphobic anti-vaxxer, and then you star her in your movie, you’re not exactly breaking out of the conspiracy-and-redemption niche. When Boreing made a piece of thinly veiled satirical agitprop, 2023’s Lady Ballers—a cross-dressing comedy in which a group of men in drag trounce their opponents in a women’s basketball league—there wasn’t even an effort to woo mainstream audiences. Instead, the producers peppered the movie with cameos from aggressively noxious, entertainment-last personalities like Shapiro himself, Senator Ted Cruz, Matt Walsh, and Candace Owens.

This isn’t exactly a shocking development. After all, The Daily Wire built its brand on extreme right-wing trolling, and the company’s first instinct is to recruit people whose behavior got them fired from actual “entertainment first” companies. Lucasfilm fired Carano. NBC fired Kelly, ABC fired Roseanne—and Sony fired Mike Richards. The entertainment conglomerates in question weren’t acting out of woke zealotry, and none of their CEOs sport purple hair, no matter what Daily Wire flacks may think. Instead, they are market-minded producers who don’t want distractions. Shapiro and his colleagues appear bent on a distractions-only target demo.

A purist strategy like this has perils of its own. Some ideologically sensitive viewers turned on Terror on the Prairie because they expected a Daily Wire movie to be 100 percent woke-free. “Watching this movie made me realize the pattern that is forming with Daily Wire movies,” online critic letsgobrandon complained. “They all follow ‘strong, independent’ female characters who either have to rescue the men who are incompetent, or defeat the men who are evil. If I want the feminist messaging, I can go to Hollywood, they have plenty of that.”

Angel Studios, meanwhile, announced in Cannes this week that it has signed Aaron Eckhart to star in its “inspirational thriller” The Old Man in the Dunes. The studio’s current animated film, King of Kings (2025), is based on Charles Dickens’s “The Life of Our Lord” and features the voice-acting of Oscar Issac, Kenneth Branagh, and Uma Thurman. The studio deliberately packages its religious themes with entertainers who are familiar to movie audiences—artists people have come to respect over years for excellent work. That’s a far more plausible model of crossover appeal for right-leaning entertainment than trolling the mainstream audience with your latest proud-to-be-canceled hires.

Shapiro’s company, by stark contrast, makes it hard to attract genuine talent. In 2024, actor-producer Letitia Wright got the film Possum Trot made. It’s about a real-life East Texas couple, Bishop W.C. Martin and Donna Martin, and their efforts to help 22 families adopt 77 children. After they finished filming, Angel Studios agreed to distribute. Then, without consulting Wright, the studio entered into a deal with Shapiro’s Daily Wire. In an Instagram statement, she posted: “To be clear, after we completed the production of this film, Angel Studios were brought on board to handle its distribution and they later partnered with The Daily Wire,” Wright wrote. “That was not my decision, and I was not given an update or made aware of this decision. I am in no way aligned or affiliated with The Daily Wire. I am thankful for all who want to positively champion this film and campaign to serve children. However, I do not condone using this beautiful film for divisive political purposes. That is not why I joined the project.”

Most producers of small, indie-financed passion projects are thrilled to get a distributor—unless even the noncreative inclusion of a brand as toxic as Shapiro’s comes up. Wright did eventually take down her post, perhaps not wanting to dissuade people from seeing the movie because of The Daily Wire’s involvement, but the revulsion was clear.

Considering the number of MAGA YouTube channels and manosphere podcasters with millions of followers, a massive audience is there for the new cultural right. You can already see seasoned Hollywood leftist Matt Damon appearing in Andrew Schulz Netflix promos and Damon’s frequent collaborator Ben Affleck promoting his movies on Theo Von’s show. But you can also see Schulz appearing with his new baby, Von distraught over Gaza, and Joe Rogan calling Trump’s deportation program “horrific.”

There are signs of humanity there, however muffled they may be in the greater din of aggrieved bro-posturing. Not so with Shapiro’s company, which is still in “go woke, go broke” mode. That’s exactly what its base wants, and it’s a tiny base compared to the mainstream. The Daily Wire is not a brand you can fix, no matter how many uncancellations it tries to bring to pass.