Ben Shapiro Offered Steven Crowder $50 Million, And He Is ... Pissed?

Workers of the world, unite.

Sad news, everybody! Two of conservative media's biggest heartthrobs are in a bit of a tiff.

Steven Crowder, who has just recently left Glenn Beck's The Blaze, did a little video earlier this week on all of the offers he's gotten from rightwing media sites hoping to steal him for themselves because he is the Blanche Dubois of conservative media. One of the contracts he was offered, however, insulted him to his very core by proposing to pay him $50 million over the course of four years (and $75 million over six) to produce video content for them — but less than that if he were demonetized by hosting sites or barred entirely from the platform.

Crowder, who has been demonetized on Youtube for the last three years, accused said publication of being in bed with "Big Tech" and punishing their "guys" to please liberals.

Here's the worst part — do not, kids, under any circumstances sign a contract with people who claim to be conservative but will penalize you 25 percent for any demonetization or sponsor boycott.

Look, let me read this to you. If any of the major platforms – no I'm sorry, that's the second one. Let me go back to the first one. There's another 20 percent. It's 45 percent if you get a content strike.

Let's start with the demonetization. If blank is boycotted or dropped by more than 50 percent of the advertising partners the company is not able to replace within 90 days, the fee will be reduced by 25 percent. That's a sponsorship boycott.

So that's saying, hey, hey, hey, liberals. Boycotts work. They work on our guys. We'll punish them for you.

Our boycotts do work. Largely because we actually stop buying the product of the company we have an issue with instead of going out and buying it in order to dramatically destroy it on video.

And then — if you get to then — if you get a strike, meaning a suspension, another 20 percent reduction. And then another 20 percent if it happens on Apple and then another 10 percent if it happens on Facebook and then another 10 percent if it happens on Spotify.

Imagine you're deplatformed, as we've seen in the past, where all of the major entities decide to remove you in one day. Rather than having a conservative alternative, you would now be down to 5 to 15 percent of the revenue of your contract.

Think about this for a second. 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 on their behalf.

If it were somehow all the way down to five percent because he was entirely deplatformed and unable to do his job, this means that Crowder could still make $2.5 million over the course of four years for doing literally nothing. That is not too bad! However, all of the percentages added up actually amount to 60 percent, which means that he could get banned from all of the platforms, be entirely unable to fulfill the terms of his contract for however many shows he was supposed to do, and he would still make $20 million.

This is all quite rich, given that every Labor Day, Crowder posts a monologue about how people who celebrate Labor Day are "picking [their boss's] pocket" so that they could go eat barbecue and drink beer while business owners, the real workers, have to work all day to keep the lights on. Where is his empathy for the poor business owners now?

It turns out that the poor business owner in this case is one Ben Shapiro and the business is his website, The Daily Wire, which has since responded with an hour-long video from chief executive Jeremy Boreing explaining that it was just a proposal for a contract and some of those things could have been negotiated out and they assumed Crowder would counter-offer for more money. Boreing also said that he asked Crowder how he thought it should work if he doesn't bring in any revenue because he's been kicked off of every platform or demonetized and Crowder responded that he should still be paid the exact same amount. Again, very interesting given his feelings about workers and labor rights and what have you.

Shapiro also responded to Crowder's video, sharing that he was a little hurt that someone he had been friends with for over a decade would do him like that and explaining that if he gets demonetized, the site can't earn money off of his labor, which would be the reason for hiring him in the first place.

“Ben Shapiro reacts to Steven Crowder's accusations against The Daily Wire: "There is something rather nasty about attacking people who have been friends for over a decade"”

— Jason Campbell (@Jason Campbell) 1674147505 

It's not a great feeling to agree with Ben Shapiro on anything, but yes, that is generally how things work. The Daily Wire's purpose in trying to hire Steven Crowder was to profit off of his labor. The reason they were willing to pay him such an ungodly amount of money was because they expected to make a lot of money off of him. Crowder getting deplatformed would hinder their ability to do that — and so they put it in his contract that, in the event that this happened, they would be able to recoup some of their loss.

Imagine what they'd say if a minimum wage worker pulled something like this.

As much as the stars of the conservative media profess to "love" capitalism, most of them are not 100 percent clear on how it actually works. Perhaps as a result of having to defend its excesses for so long, they've created an idealistic construct of capitalism based not in self-interest but in selflessness — in the benevolence of job creators and the virtue of hard workers. So too, are advertisers meant to be selfless patrons, paying no attention to any "return on investment" in their quest to support freedom of speech, no matter how incredibly offensive it may be (unless it offends conservatives, in which case the One Million Moms are on the case).

It is within this construct that Crowder's issues make sense. He feels that he is a good and virtuous person — unlike all of the bad, lazy poor people he always complains about — and that the Daily Wire should reward this by paying him lots and lots of money regardless of how much money he brings them.

Of course, there's probably more at play here than Crowder simply finding a proposed contract insulting. Shapiro is persona non grata on the far Right these days, which has been leaning pretty hard into the antisemitism lately. While Crowder has also long been considered too mainstream for their tastes (and frequently grouped in with Shapiro and Matt Walsh as not being radical enough), he is currently being cheered by some on the far Right for standing up to what they call "Conservative, Inc."

The fact is, by positioning himself as a "true believer," Crowder will be able to expand his base beyond the Glenn Beck/Ben Shapiro sphere of influence and appeal to the far Right — which is probably pretty necessary for him since they're pretty much the only people using Rumble, the video site that hasn't demonetized him.

 Do your Amazon shopping through this link, because reasons .

Wonkette is independent and fully funded by readers like you. Click below to tip us!