Photograph by Martin Schoeller.

The night of January 10, 2013, was a triumph for Ben Shapiro, his first big score—but Jeremy Boreing, the Hollywood producer who’s the architect of Shapiro’s vertiginous rise, couldn’t get past the wardrobe.

Dressed in a dark junior-banker suit, with his College Republican flop dangling over his forehead, Shapiro, then the editor at large at Breitbart News, had been booked on Piers Morgan Tonight to discuss his new book, Bullies: How the Left’s Culture of Fear and Intimidation Silences America, and to debate gun control. But Shapiro’s tactics revealed themselves shortly after the break, when he called out Morgan for “standing on the graves of the children of Sandy Hook” in order to criticize gun owners. “Honestly, Piers,” Shapiro said, “you’ve kind of been a bully on this issue.” He continued, “You tend to demonize people who differ from you politically.” At one point, he handed Morgan a pocket Constitution to educate him on the Second Amendment. Shapiro was both smart (he has a degree from Harvard Law) and obnoxious (he once described Palestinians as living in “open sewage”), snotty and fearless, and he displayed a preternatural talent for getting under the skin of gibbering libs. Fourteen minutes, and millions of views later, Shapiro had accomplished his goal: he’d gone viral.

As he watched the Morgan hit, Boreing realized that Shapiro’s look, while perfectly adequate for a right-wing think-tank talking head, wasn’t going to cut it in many of the demographics they wanted to conquer. Shapiro quickly agreed to revise the right-wing-dork look, and the makeover began: Boreing and a wardrobe stylist emptied Shapiro’s closet almost completely, took him to Macy’s to re-stock, gave him an objectively better haircut, replaced his personal trainer, and presto, the Ben Shapiro look emerged—a decently-fitted button-up shirt in neutral blues and grays, tucked into better-fitting jeans, and a jacket that didn’t look too expensive. He wasn't exactly a GQ cover subject, but he was, quite crucially, no longer an Alex P. Keaton stereotype. “You can only be good at so many things. Ben is good at a great many things. This is not one of them,” said Boreing. “So, we structure it for him and simplify it for him. That’s why he always looks like Ben.”

Before Shapiro, Boreing was a fairly obscure Hollywood figure, perhaps best known for helping to produce Etienne!, a buddy movie about a dying dwarf hamster. His primary political affiliation was as the managing director of Friends of Abe, a quasi-secretive salon of conservative entertainment-industry professionals, which he had taken over from Forrest Gump actor Gary Sinise. Years earlier, Andrew Breitbart, a celebrity in his own right within Friends of Abe, had introduced him to Shapiro, and they became fast friends, both serving time at Truth Revolt, a now-defunct Web site, started as the right’s answer to David Brock’s Media Matters, which churned out reliable content attacking the mainstream media and their secret funders. Truth Revolt placated its ancient donors at the David Horowitz Freedom Center, a nonprofit condemned by the Southern Poverty Law Center, but it was far too earnest, and barely made a ripple.

Months before the Piers Morgan interview, Boreing and Shapiro had devised a site that would eventually become the Daily Wire, which they viewed as a next-gen media company representing the 21st-century right—an heir to Drudge and Breitbart, supercharged with modern-media hood ornaments, like podcasts and video, which happened to be Boreing’s specialty. To get attention, they needed personality: someone to put forward their attacks, and someone who could withstand being attacked, too. After the Morgan hit, it dawned on both that Shapiro had to become the brand. “‘You being a brand brings a lot of security. . . . You being a front man gives us a ton of security,” Boreing recalled telling him. “I can better accomplish that with video. I can expose a lot more people to you with video, I can expose them to you in a way that they’ll remember, because people are visual. . . . Let me make you famous and we’ll have a much louder voice and a much bigger platform to advance our interests.”