Megyn Kelly has never been shy about saying what she thinks. But what she said recently about Ben Shapiro and Mark Levin is something a lot of conservatives have been thinking for a while.
Piers Morgan handed her the microphone, and she ran with it.
And now Megyn Kelly unloaded on Ben Shapiro and Mark Levin over this shocking truth.
The Pile-On Heard Round Conservative Media
On a recent episode of Piers Morgan Uncensored, Kelly and Morgan took turns going after Shapiro and his ally, Fox News host Mark Levin, over their hawkish stance on the U.S. conflict with Iran. Kelly cited polling she said showed deep public opposition to the war, and she didn’t spare Levin in doing it.
“To the extent we have regime change [in Iran], we’ve gone from radical to extremely radical and a group of people that understands that they don’t have to bargain with us at all,” Kelly said, adding that polling showed “70 percent of the American populace does not like this war and it’s up in the 90s when you ask who is opposed to ground troops.”
She went after Levin by name, suggesting he’d like to see boots on the ground and more aircraft carriers in the region. Morgan spotted the opening and twisted the knife on Shapiro.
“A person who’s gone very quiet is Ben Shapiro, our friend who loved to whack us for our supposed terrible positions on all this,” Morgan said on air, “but he’s gone very quiet because his own business is now getting seriously damaged and people running away from watching his show because they know the narrative he’s been putting out there has been proven in front of our eyes to be incredibly unsuccessful.”
The Numbers Are Ugly, and Shapiro Admitted It
The Daily Wire laid off 13 percent of its workforce in the early months of 2026. Shapiro confirmed it himself on his podcast, calling it “truly sad” and saying the cuts “really sucked.” He added that he was personally working to find other jobs for the people who were let go.
Some reports put the actual figure much higher. Candace Owens, who used to work at The Daily Wire before a very public falling out, claimed 50 percent of the staff was cut, then revised that estimate upward to 60 percent. The Daily Wire disputed those numbers, and Shapiro’s 13 percent figure is what the company stands behind.
But even setting aside the dispute over raw headcount, the viewership picture tells its own story. YouTube analytics tracked by VidIQ showed Shapiro’s channel views down significantly from their peak in late 2024. His podcast, which once sat comfortably in the top tier of conservative media rankings, dropped to 43rd on Spotify’s charts, according to reporting in The Washington Post.
The Daily Wire’s website, once a major driver of conservative internet traffic, became what one publication called “one of the great traffic losers in conservative media.”
Never-Trumpers Wearing MAGA Gear
Kelly didn’t stop at audience numbers. She went straight at the credibility question that a lot of America First conservatives have been raising quietly for months.
“The nerve of Ben Shapiro and Mark Levin, both of whom are two original ‘Never Trumpers,’ to now cloak themselves in MAGA gear and act like they’ve been with Trump all along,” Kelly said on her show.
That’s a charge with real history behind it. Both Shapiro and Levin were vocal critics of Donald Trump during the 2016 primary. Both came around after Trump secured the nomination and eventually became supporters. But neither was there at the beginning, and both have been among the loudest and most consistent voices in conservative media calling for military confrontation with Iran, a position they held long before Trump was in a position to act on it.
Put those two facts side by side and the pattern is visible enough.
Shapiro fired back hard, calling Kelly “an unbelievable coward” for criticizing the Iran situation without directing her criticism at Trump himself. “You don’t like President Trump? You don’t like what he’s saying? Just say his name, you coward,” Shapiro said on his show. He also called Tucker Carlson out for what he described as the same kind of cowardice.
A Conservative Media Civil War Nobody Wanted to Admit Was Coming
The feud between Shapiro and Kelly goes back further than the Iran debate. Kelly says Shapiro attacked her at the Turning Point USA AmericaFest event in late 2025, lumping her in with people he accused of enabling antisemitism. She was blindsided by it, given that she had spent years on her show pushing back hard against the campus protests that erupted after October 7, 2023.
And the Shapiro-Morgan fight has its own separate history. Shapiro publicly called Morgan a “clickwhore” in a pinned post on X. Morgan called Shapiro’s attacks on him “outrageously disingenuous,” saying Shapiro had edited clips of his interviews to make it look like Morgan gave guests a free platform without pushback, leaving out the parts where Morgan challenged them directly.
What’s driving all of this isn’t just personality clashes. The Iran conflict cracked open a fault line in conservative media that had been building for years. Voices like Carlson, Kelly, and others who took a more skeptical view of foreign military intervention built massive audiences with that positioning. Shapiro and Levin staked out the hawkish side. Now that the U.S. is actually at war with Iran, those two camps can’t coexist politely anymore.
Shapiro, for his part, pushed back on the collapse narrative. He noted that The Daily Wire’s streaming service, DailyWire+, ranked sixth on Podtrac’s top global podcast chart with more than 41 million streams, downloads, and views as of April 2026. He’s not wrong that those are still large numbers. But the direction of travel is hard to spin, and he knows it.
What It Means Going Forward
The conservative media landscape is reshuffling in real time, and the Iran war accelerated something that was already underway. Audiences that once rallied around an “anti-woke” banner are now sorting themselves by foreign policy instincts, and the divide cuts right through the middle of what used to be a unified right-of-center media ecosystem.
Shapiro built The Daily Wire on a model that worked brilliantly for about a decade. Sign talent, build their audiences, keep them under one roof, and monetize at scale. But once it became easy for individual creators to go independent and take their audiences with them, that model started showing cracks. Candace Owens left. The feud with Carlson went public. Kelly is now openly calling Shapiro a Never-Trumper on air.
And the viewers are watching all of it, and making their own choices about where to go.
Whether Shapiro’s audience stabilizes or keeps bleeding depends on questions that polling and podcast charts can’t fully answer. But Piers Morgan calling you quiet is one thing. Your own staff cuts are something else entirely.
Sources: Mediaite; Megyn Kelly Show transcript via Media Matters; Yahoo News / The Daily Wire layoff reporting; PJ Media; Barrett Media; The Washington Post; Deseret News; The Nation