“The law is a teacher,” Michael Knowles said last month as he launched into one of his darkly ministerial rants about punishing trans and LGBTQ people. But for Knowles and his colleagues at The Daily Wire, it seems the law is more like a weapon, and one that they feel increasingly comfortable aiming at their perceived enemies.

This year alone, several of the site’s marquee stars — including Knowles, Matt Walsh, and Candace Owens — have called for massive expansions of the death penalty and the prison-industrial complex, and have celebrated state-backed repression of ideas and freedom of assembly though bans on books and LGBTQ events. Taken together, these calls to expand state capacity to reinforce existing racial and gender hierarchies — by targeting those who deviate from or challenge those structures — articulate a broader ideology, with the unambiguous goal of using state power to make life in the United State intolerable for anyone they label as a disfavored group or organization.  

On May 23, the Daily Wire announced that it would begin working in partnership with Twitter to stream its shows for free on the increasingly extremist-friendly platform. It remains to be seen what effect this will have on the Daily Wire’s overall reach, but the move signals the outlet’s potential ascension, or at least aspiration, to serve as an alternative to Fox News. The joint effort with Twitter will also likely increase the ability of Daily Wire hosts to directly affect government policy; for instance, Walsh was an early supporter of a Tennessee bill, now a law, that prohibits gender-affirming care for trans youth. The outlet already has a sizable footprint on Facebook, generating millions of interactions through its anti-trans content. At the same time, YouTube has at times demonetized or suspended Daily Wire shows for violating the platform’s anti-hate speech policy.

Conservative media have historically embraced the rhetoric of small government while simultaneously advocating for expansive “big government” policies that entrench existing inequalities. Right-wing media have long advocated for using state power to control abortion and reproductive rights, to limit marriage rights to heterosexual couples only, to prohibit and penalize the use of racialized drugs, to expand policing in majority Black and brown communities, and to construct racist legal regimes, such as Jim Crow. That suite of policies in no way represents a small or limited vision of government — it exerts tremendous coercive power over individuals’ daily lives.

Current right-wing punditry, especially at the Daily Wire, has abandoned even the fig leaf of small government rhetoric. Daily Wire hosts now openly embrace the power of the state to punish, imprison, and kill those under its control, as the examples below —  all from this year alone — demonstrate.

The Daily Wire’s approach to the death penalty: “Just execute them all”

Among Daily Wire hosts, Walsh is the most open in his desire to use state power to execute people he has deemed undesirable. As Media Matters previously reported, Walsh praised Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis for signing a bill in early May that would expand the death penalty as a potential punishment for people convicted of sexual assault of a child younger than 12. The new law is in direct violation of Kennedy v. Louisiana, a Supreme Court case that ruled the death penalty is available as punishment only if the offender murders the child as well.   

Walsh’s endorsement of DeSantis’ new law needs to be understood within the larger campaign right-wing media have waged against LGBTQ communities. Over the last year, conservative pundits have resurrected the myth that gay people, trans people, nonbinary people, and drag performers are a threat to children, referring to them as “groomers” and “pedophiles.” Florida’s expansion of the death penalty under the guise of protecting children is in fact an extension of the state’s totalitarian project to eliminate trans people from public life all together, a goal that Daily Wire hosts share.

In discussing the new law, specifically in the context of the Kennedy decision, Walsh celebrated the fact that in theory “we don't have to make choices” between executing murderers and child sex abusers. “We can execute all of them.” 

“We should be able to, anyway. Execute all the worst people, all of the worst criminals. Just execute them all,” he added. “And this is the right first step. There's a lot more that needs to be done. I mean, this is actual criminal justice reform.”

Walsh then justified his policy on the grounds that long-term imprisonment is costly, when in reality, studies have consistently found that the death penalty is more expensive than life-without-parole sentences. “I would say that along with everything else, it is an unjust and undue burden on society,” Walsh said. “You know, as a taxpayer, I should not be required to keep child rapists alive just because we're too squeamish to execute them as we should.” 

He then proposed further cutting costs by abolishing the criminal appeals process for these cases all together. 

“And if we're really starting to understand that society — if we're really starting to reform the system, you know, then we're going to start talking about not only are we executing these people, but we're doing it quickly. We're not giving them 30 years to appeal, OK? The conviction is passed down, you're convicted, you're guilty, you've been found guilty, and then the execution is carried out the next day — how about, carried out at dawn following the conviction.”

Walsh had made similar comments in February. After describing what he sees as a vast conspiracy in the medical community to cover up the harms of gender-affirming care — which is in fact safe and associated with positive health outcomes — Walsh outlined his preferred remedy.

“The next step under a Trump administration, or any Republican administration, should be to arrest the culprits, the hundreds and hundreds of them, if not thousands of them, and throw them in federal prison,” Walsh said. “Now, this can't be a matter of simple fines and financial penalties – I mean, that should be part of it. But the only real recourse here, the only semblance of justice, would be prison sentences, very long ones.”

“Now, if it were up to me, you know, we'd go further than that,” he continued. “As far as I'm concerned, mutilating and castrating children should be legally considered a capital crime and it should earn the prescribed penalty for such crimes. But if we can't have that, then prison will have to suffice.”

Walsh’s bloodlust doesn’t end there. He has advocated for expanding the death penalty to include people convicted of selling illicit drugs, a position he shares with former President Donald Trump. In his May 18 episode, Walsh read a news story about the spread of xylazine, a tranquilizer that is sometimes combined with illicit drugs, including fentanyl.

“The people that are actually selling this stuff, the people that are responsible for turning our cities into zombified wastelands, we should be discussing much more severe penalties for them,” Walsh said. “And when I say, ‘much more severe,’ I mean the most severe penalties — the death penalty.”

“It is a form of murder,” Walsh added. “You’re giving these drugs — the fact that they want it doesn’t make it any different, doesn’t make it better. You are killing people en masse and the distributors of these drugs are mass murderers, there’s no question about that, and they should face the penalties prescribed for that.” 

Walsh isn’t the only Daily Wire host who sees the salutary effects of expanding the death penalty. His colleague Knowles has called for the return of public executions, which “would do a lot to bring back the deterrent effect of capital punishment, certainly,” a position he shares with other conservatives.

Hangings in the town square, or their contemporary equivalent, would also have the added benefit from Knowles’ perspective of foregrounding Christianity in public life. “And so, we live our lives trying to put it out of our head. But death is very important,” Knowles said. “It's one of the four final things — death, judgment, heaven, and hell. You're living your life as a preparation to die, and you need to be prepared for your death.”

In May, Knowles offered his own circumscribed support for DeSantis’ bill to expand the death penalty, again appealing to the Bible’s authority. 

“Ron DeSantis says we’re challenging that now if you rape a child, pretty much the most heinous crime you can imagine, you get the death penalty. Totally agree with that in principle,” Knowles said. “I see no problem with that in principle. I see no problem with the death penalty in principle. In fact, I think it's quite natural, biblical.”

Knowles' hesitancy was due to his fear that the law could create unintended incentives, but he had no compunctions about the morality of it. 

“I don't actually agree with this particular instantiation of the death penalty in practice,” he said. “In principle, I do. But in practice, the only reason I don't is that as a matter of prudence, if you don't kill child rapists, if you, if the punishment is not execution, then it creates some incentive for the rapist not to murder his victim. So if there's any way that through the law, we can incentivize a rapist not to murder his victim, I think that's probably wise and prudent. In principle, they deserve death, certainly.”

Daily Wire hosts frequently find inspiration from some of the world’s most oppressive legal punishment systems. In late May, Knowles criticized a New York Times tweet about a new anti-LGBTQ law in Uganda, claiming that the paper’s social media post had implied that the death penalty could apply to all gay people in the country.

“The death penalty is not for just being a little light in the loafers; the death penalty is for raping children,” Knowles said. He then contrasted the Twitter post to the Times’ print article, which foregrounded that aspect of the new law and clarified what the social media feed elided.

“The New York Times is defending Ugandan child rapists to own the cons,” he added, referring to conservatives. “Now call me a hardliner if you want, but I think it is not unreasonable to execute child rapists.”

“Attempted child rape only gets 14 years in prison,” he continued. “If anything, that aspect of the law is too lenient.”

Walsh praised the law as well, calling for its universal implementation and doubling down on his call to expand the death penalty beyond capital offenses. “This should be happening everywhere,” Walsh said. “Of course child rapists should be put to death. The idea that you can only put someone to death if they also kill their victim — it’s absurd, really. It’s an absurd idea.”

The Daily Wire’s vision for using police and prisons against its enemies: “We have to stop them aggressively, by force, by law.”

The death penalty is the ultimate form of state violence, but not the only one. As the above examples demonstrate, Daily Wire hosts frequently fantasize about incarcerating their declared enemies for extraordinary lengths of time.

Walsh hands out theoretical prison sentences with all the gusto of a tyrant-in-waiting. In addition to demanding mass arrests of LGBTQ health care providers and people who sell drugs, he also called for “life sentences for those who falsely accuse someone of rape because to falsely accuse someone of rape is just as bad as being a rapist,” specifing on Twitter that life sentences should be “mandatory.” 

After the singer Lizzo defied Tennessee’s ban on drag shows, Walsh tweeted: “Throw her in jail.” He tweeted that a middle school teacher who gave her kids an LGBTQ-themed book “deserves to be in prison.” When college students protested an appearance by anti-trans activist Riley Gaines, Walsh wrote: “They all should be expelled and thrown in prison.”

During his June 2 show, Walsh illustrated how he repurposes anti-LGBTQ language to demand the imprisonment of the Daily Wire’s other enemies — in this case, a teacher giving students a sex ed lesson. Walsh played a clip of a teacher describing some of the basics of human sexual anatomy and then explaining that some big box stores sell sex toys.

“I can keep saying it and sounding like a broken record, but I will say it every time — that woman should be in prison. That should be a prison sentence,” Walsh said. “That’s the next step, the next phase — or it should be, for Republicans. There’s been a real effort to ban this kind of discussion from classrooms, which is good, but next we need to start saying that the teachers who engage in this behavior are sexual predators.”

“You are preying sexually on kids. You need to go to jail for that” Walsh added. “We will know that some semblance of sanity has been restored to this country when we see a video like that, but instead of just cutting off, it ends with police officers walking into that room, putting that disgusting predator in handcuffs, and carting her out of the room, and then throwing her into a jail cell. Throwing her into a cage like an animal.” 

Far and away, Walsh directs most of his carceral demands at LGBTQ communities. On June 6, he reacted to a video of the West Hollywood Pride parade by saying every participant, and potentially every spectator, should be imprisoned for life. “In a functioning, civilized society, everyone involved in that parade — really a combination of public indecency and child abuse — would be arrested and never let out of prison.” 

In March, Walsh laid out a typically vengeful fantasy of how to deal with parents who brought their children to an all-ages drag show. 

“There are varied motivations for all of these adults,” who either performed at or attended the show, Walsh said. “But one thing that they all have in common is that they should all be sitting in a prison cell right now, and we will know that we have restored some semblance of sanity and dignity in our culture when — but not until — we start seeing law enforcement officers swarming these kinds of events, handcuffing every adult in the room, and frog marching them out of the building and into a prison cell.”

He then endorsed submitting drag performers to the very real threat of sexual violence at the hands of other incarcerated people or guards. “You can take the drag perverts, in their thongs, and just throw them right in the jail. We’ll see how sexually expressive they want to be in that environment,” Walsh continued. “And then you take the kids away from the parents, and you throw the parents into jail right alongside them.”

“That’s how we have to respond, because these perverts are not going to stop on their own. They will only get more brazen,” he concluded. “We have to stop them aggressively, by force, by law. And that’s why we need every Republican presidential candidate for 2024 to promise a federal ban on these child drag shows.” 

Walsh isn’t the only Daily Wire host who frequently demands that parents lose custody of their children and face prison time if they have attended an LGBTQ event. On March 3, Knowles called for “the heavy hand of the state” to separate families, jail parents, and shutter businesses that host drag events.

“I don't see how these parents should be permitted to keep their children,” Knowles said. “They're abusing their children. They're sexually abusing their children by taking them to these events.” 

“I don't see how whatever company is hosting this should be allowed to keep its doors open,” he continued. “All of this should be shut down by the heavy hand of the state. All of these people, other than the children, should be arrested and some of them should face pretty severe consequences.”

Knowles used the phrase again on June 8, also targeting LGBTQ people and organizations that support them. “We need the heavy hand of the state to go in, as our duly elected representatives, and break up that Pride cartel,” he said.

In May, Knowles reacted to a TikTok post calling for civil disobedience from trans people and their health care providers to protest anti-LGBTQ laws in Mississippi. “If they do that, then we need to give them what they ask for,” Knowles said. “If they do that — say, ‘We’re gonna break the law, consequences come what may’ — we need to throw them into prison. And that’s going to be the next step.”

“Signing the legislation is really really great, and it’s good stuff for the Republican governors who have done that and legislatures that have done that, but now, when people break the laws, when they peddle porn to kids in elementary schools, when they trans the children — we’re getting reports that in Texas Children’s Hospital some of these quacks perform sex change procedures on kids as young as 11, OK?” Knowles continued. “When these people break the law, we need to throw the book at them.” 

Knowles then mischaracterized former Marine Daniel Penny’s killing of Jordan Neely, a Black unhoused subway performer, to further articulate whom the law should punish and whom it should protect. “We’re now living in a system in which if you’re a good American Marine who has served your country, you’re a good patriot and you protect people from a career-violent criminal with dozens and dozens of arrests, including for assault, and you protect them from a guy who’s saying, ‘I’m going to kill an F, I’m gonna kill, I don’t care, I’m prepared to die,’ you’re gonna go to prison — they’re going to throw the book at you.”

“But if you chop off kids’ genitals, you’re not even going to get a slap on the wrist, OK? We’re living in that system right now,” Knowles concluded. “And we need to flip that situation. We need to live in a system that does not punish people for doing good things, but encourages them to do good things. And we need to live in a system that punishes people for doing bad things — very, very bad things, in this case.”

Fellow Daily Wire host Owens has also called for people who provide gender-affirming care to trans youth to be imprisoned and prevented from practicing medicine. On May 16, Owens discussed a video from a TikTok personality named Zaya who described the challenges she faced following bottom surgery.

Owens blamed Zaya’s transition on the so-called social contagion effect — an anti-trans fiction that has been debunked — concluding that “Zaya was then harmed by a doctor who should be in prison. I believe that if you are chopping off people’s penises you should probably be in prison and you should not be allowed to practice medicine at all.” 

Like her Daily Wire colleagues, Owens doesn’t limit her calls for harsh prison sentences to LGBTQ communities. She joined Knowles in invoking Neely as an appropriate target of state power, arguing that his previous arrest record showed the state had been too lenient in doling out punishment, and that subjecting Neely to custodial measures amounting to torture would’ve been in his own self-interest.

“So, yes, if he had been locked up and in solitary confinement — which is where I would have put him if I was running that city — then he would still be alive. He would be,” Owens said. “Someone that has 44 arrests over 10 years is someone to me that does not deserve another chance, OK? He should have been locked up permanently about 40 arrests ago.” 

In addition to Owens’ extreme and tyrannical proposition that four arrests should result in lifetime imprisonment, it’s worth underscoring how dictatorial her concept of judgment and sentencing is. She imagines how she would respond “if I was running that city,” articulating a revealing conceptual slippage that transforms an elected mayor into a totalitarian ruler who also occupies the role of judge and jury.  

The Daily Wire’s desire to control adults’ behavior extends to their imagined subjects’ media consumption habits as well. On at least two occasions this year, Walsh has called for a ban on pornography. In one instance he proposed imprisoning people in the industry. 

On May 3, Walsh discussed a Utah law mandating age verification to access Pornhub in the state. Industry representatives and free speech advocates opposed the law on the grounds that the law was unconstitutional and counterproductive to its stated goals of protecting minors. Walsh responded to the objections by calling for a total ban on pornography under threat of prison.

“It behooves you, if you’re a porn enthusiast or if you’re someone who is involved in the porn industry — it behooves you to figure out a way to keep this filth away from kids, because if you can’t figure it out then the next step is that it’s all banned,” Walsh said. “And then anyone involved in Pornhub goes to prison. How about that?”

“I’d be fine with just skipping right to that part, but if we’re not, then I think this is a reasonable compromise,” he continued.

Walsh returned to the topic on May 30 in a segment dedicated to porn’s supposed responsibility for the purported decline of testosterone in men in the United States, and what he argued was the lower birth rates that resulted from it.

“If our political leaders wanted to take a serious step to increase fertility rates, by the same token, they could start passing laws to help free the population, especially the young male population, from the stranglehold that the porn industry has on it,” Walsh said.  

The overt desire for centralized, discretionary carceral power also finds expression in the Daily Wire’s collective adoration of El Salvador’s president, Nayib Bukele. Just as Knowles found common ground with Uganda’s anti-LGBTQ law, Daily Wire hosts have repeatedly praised Bukele, a right-wing authoritarian who has dramatically expanded his country’s carceral system by building a so-called “mega-prison” under the pretext of addressing gang violence.

Knowles celebrated the new prison — which is rife with human rights abuses — at least three times this year, including arguing in February, “We in the United States need to follow the lead of the government of El Salvador.” 

Owens echoed him in early March. “You would think that America should look at this and applaud it and say, ‘We need this,’ because crimes are getting so insane in America,” she said.

Days later, Walsh struck the same note. He began by discussing a Financial Times report that found the prison was “overcrowded by design” and if filled to its expected capacity would provide space that “is a fraction of what is expected for humane incarceration and less than half the minimum required under EU law to transport midsized cattle by road.”

After playing footage from inside the prison aired by CNN, Walsh commented, “This is actually justice,” before affirming the prison’s cruelty as a desirable feature. 

“Prisons are not supposed to be comfortable,” he added. “They are supposed to be the kinds of places that you really don’t want to go to. It’s supposed to be a punishment. You’re supposed to suffer when you’re in prison. That’s what punishment is meant to do. It is meant to cause suffering.”

“Not just suffering for its own sake but for a purpose — and the purpose ultimately is justice,” he continued. “There is no such thing as justice if you are not causing suffering to evildoers.”

The next month, Walsh pushed for authorities in the United States to construct “50 new prisons” to produce exactly that type of suffering. “And if you don't have the money for it,” he suggested, “then raise the taxes in these cities.”  

The Daily Wire’s totalitarian drive to outlaw same-sex marriage and adoption, criminalize gender-affirming care, and "ban transgenderism entirely”

Sometimes the Daily Wire hosts’ threats of state violence are implicit, rather than overt. The network’s on-air talent frequently calls for bans of various sorts — typically of books or events associated with LGBTQ communities and identities, or of institutions that provide health care to trans people. In these cases, the repressive apparatus of the state looms in the background, its coercive power unstated but omnipresent. 

On June 8, Walsh hyped a hoax he performed on a healthcare provider for trans people, then laid out his desired consequences. “Several states now have more than enough justification to issue subpoenas to these telehealth providers to see just how fraudulent their operations really are, and how far this goes,” he said.

Back in early February, Walsh responded to Minnesota trans activist Amber Mom expressing her fear that her state — which she described as relatively accepting — could pass bans on trans health care and her resulting desire to “flee the country.” To Walsh, that was a desirable outcome.

If Mom is “doing that, you know, in part in response to some of the laws that were — that are being passed around the country, then I consider that another great benefit of those laws,” he said.

Later that month, Knowles praised an anti-trans bill in Kansas that, in his words, was “a beautiful bill because it doesn't just say don't trans the kids,” but because “it bans transgenderism for all practical purposes in the state for everybody.”

“I love this bill because it is so much more aggressive than the other bills we've seen,” Knowles added, repeatedly using the phrase, “You have to ban transgenderism entirely.”

In addition to the existing onslaught of state bills targeting LGBTQ communities, Knowles frequently advocates for even more extreme laws. 

On May 21, Knowles argued against adoption rights for same-sex couples, saying “we should outlaw” surrogacy.

Three days later, Knowles elaborated on his point. He read a paragraph in a news item about two married Black women who were struggling to find a Black sperm donor, and reiterated his arguments for prohibiting same-sex adoption while strongly implying that same-sex marriage should be illegal too.

“Whatever laws we need to pass to make that paragraph unintelligible, or less intelligible than it already is, to make it implausible in society — we need those laws,” Knowles said. “‘A woman and her wife’ — that is not real. That is not a semantically meaningful phrase. That is not the sort of thing that ought to be culturally accepted or understood, and it certainly shouldn’t be legal.”

He added that donating sperm is “extremely disordered and obviously should be illegal.”

“How are we going to fix that?” Knowles asked later in the segment. “Are we going to fix that by boycotting the sperm banks? Are we going to fix it by boycotting USA Today? No. We can wield our cultural and commercial power. The only way to fix that is by wielding political power.”

“The only way to fix that is by changing the law and then enforcing the law and then having the law be a teacher and changing the culture in the process,” he concluded.  

During the same show, Knowles implored the conservative movement: “The Pride flag symbol, we need to make that toxic,” and then “to bring in the cavalry, we've got to come back in with more political force to ban some of this stuff and to say no.”

The next day, Knowles celebrated Montana’s new law banning drag shows for children, commenting: “That’s great news. Keep it up Montana.” 

In addition to pushing to use state power to control acceptable family formations and social functions, Knowles repeatedly expresses his desire for the state to ban books. In April, Knowles defended banning books and LGBTQ events, as well as sodomy laws, by appealing to the United States’ history of discriminating against gay and trans people.

“Banning books is very American. Banning drag shows is obviously very American,” Knowles said.

“All sorts of weird sexual behaviors were illegal in the United States until the Supreme Court invented some right to do weird sex stuff in the mid-2000s, OK?” he added. “So, it is deeply, deeply American to proscribe this sort of weird behavior.”

The examples go on. “If the book is being banned by just and wise and prudent authorities, then maybe don't read the book,” he said in January. DeSantis’ book bans are “something he deserves praise for,” Knowles said in March. In May, he appealed to biblical precedent to support not only banning books, but burning them as well.

Punishment, conformity, and control

The Daily Wire’s articulated philosophy is one of discipline, punishment, and conformity, rigidly and ruthlessly enforced by state power. The mechanisms of achieving the Daily Wire’s desired society are prisons and police, to be deployed against internal enemies who challenge these hosts’ authoritarian, theocratic vision of society.

Walsh, Knowles, and Owens are very clear about the future they want. Those who want something different — a society that is more just, more equal, and more free — need to be just as clear in their opposition.