Erika Kirk opened the Turning Point USA conference on Thursday with a speech in which she described her late husband Charlie as a “peacemaker”. With him gone, she suggested, the lines of fissure on the Right have opened up: “When he was assassinated, we saw infighting. We’ve seen fractures. We’ve seen bridges being burned that shouldn’t be burned.”
The TPUSA conference in Phoenix, which continues through Saturday, was the first since Kirk’s assassination, and easily the biggest in its history. The corridors and escalators were packed like a subway at rush hour. As befit the campus-based organisation, there were zoomers everywhere, but there were also middle-aged moms and dads and seniors wearing hearing aids. The crowd of about 30,000 was way too large for the main event space, so thousands of people stood and sat on the floor of the exhibit hall watching the speeches on a Jumbotron.
As Erika’s speech anticipated, infighting took the front stage almost at once, reflecting what is commonly described on the Right as a burgeoning “civil war” in the conservative movement over America’s relationship with Israel. The two sides of that war are personified by two personalities, both of whom spoke at the event: Carlson and Ben Shapiro.
“As Erika’s speech anticipated, infighting took the front stage almost at once.”
Shapiro followed Kirk on stage. The biggest threat to the Right, he told the audience, is not just the Left, but “charlatans”, “frauds”, and “grifters” within the conservative movement. He wasn’t coy about who he was talking about. The first of these “grifters” was his former colleague at the Daily Wire, Candace Owens. Owens’s contract with the outlet was terminated in March 2024 after she stridently criticised Israel for its war in Gaza and made remarks Shapiro and groups like the Anti-Defamation League deemed to be antisemitic. Owens was close friends with Kirk, and since his assassination she has devoted her extremely popular podcast to questioning the FBI’s account of the crime. With scant evidence to offer, she has wondered if, among other things, the Israeli government was behind it.
In his speech, Shapiro condemned not just Owens, but also those on the Right who have refused to criticise her. He named Megyn Kelly, Steve Bannon, and Tucker Carlson.
Jonathan Choe, a reporter with TPUSA’s news division, Frontlines, was having dinner with his team while all this was going on. “As we’re ordering tacos, we’re glued to our phones,” he told me. “Half the table was shocked and angry, not so much by the content of what Ben Shapiro said, but how divisive it was.” Choe said he was expecting the speakers to focus on Kirk’s legacy, in order to build a base of unity upon which to move forward. Shapiro had done the opposite.
“Ben Shapiro is among the most annoying human beings on the face of the planet,” Joe Allen, who co-hosts the War Room podcast with Bannon and who attended the conference, told me. “He has the gall to gaslight anyone who points out his obvious, self-serving agenda.”
Just over an hour after Shapiro’s speech, Carlson came out on stage. “To hear calls for deplatforming and denouncing people at a Charlie Kirk event,” he cackled, “I’m like what?”
Shapiro has railed against Left-wing “cancel culture” for years. But recently he has been calling for Carlson to be exiled from the conservative movement over his political beliefs and over his relatively friendly interview with the openly racist and antisemitic influencer Nick Fuentes. At a speech at the Heritage Foundation a few days ago, he referred to it as “ideological border control”. Carlson equated the tactic to leftists calling everyone they disagree with bigots. “‘Shut up Nazi’ is the same as ‘shut up racist’,” he told the TPUSA crowd.
Carlson also told the audience that political machinations were behind the civil war on the Right, a split he believes is “fake”. Shapiro has openly questioned the wisdom of nominating JD Vance to inherit the MAGA movement, whose purported values are more closely aligned with the Carlson faction than his own. “A lot of people don’t want JD Vance,” Carlson said. “They’re stirring things up to push him out. Why? Because he’s America First.”
The phrase “America First” has been under strain in the MAGA movement for the past two years. Since Israel began its war in Gaza, there has been simmering discontent within the Right-wing nationalist movement about the degree of Israel’s influence over the United States and the brutality of Israel’s military campaign. Carlson, Owens and congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene have spoken about it openly. Some spectators at the Turning Point conference agreed.
“I’ve been to Israel and to Palestine,” said Joe Allen. “I don’t have a dog in that fight. But the Israel lobby forces me to address it. What I see in Israel is a sophisticated, technically advanced nation exhibiting extraordinary cruelty to its less advanced and developed neighbour. I don’t want a dollar of my taxes going to fund it.”
When Shapiro took aim at Carlson, Ricardo Taqueno, a 47-year-old father who lives near Portland, Oregon, yelled “Get off the stage, Ben!”. Taqueno, by his own admission, is no expert on Israel. But recently, he told me, he has begun noticing how much power the country exerts over the United States. He was once a Shapiro fan, but now believes he has become a tool for a foreign interest. He doesn’t rule out Owens’s theory that Israel may have been behind Kirk’s murder.
Noah Sanders, a high-school senior in Tennessee, told me he grew up in a conservative Christian household, and was taught from childhood to revere Israel. Now, he said, some young Christian conservatives are seeing the country differently.
Another young man who wouldn’t reveal his name told me that scepticism about Israel has become a consensus opinion among American zoomers. Young people have watched the carnage of the war on TikTok and Instagram, whereas older generations have seen a more sanitised version of it. He compared it to young people in the Sixties watching the Vietnam War unfold on TV. “We’re seeing the horrors in Gaza,” he said. “We’re seeing people talk so highly of another nation, a nation that may be carrying out horrific war crimes, while we’re supposed to be America First.”
Carlson resonates with these young conservatives. “Killing people who committed no crime is immoral,” he told the crowd, “… and you are seeing now a very intense effort to convince you otherwise.” He told the audience that he regularly reads the Beatitudes, from Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount. “And killing tens of thousands of children, and then making excuses for it on behalf of a foreign government is not in there. It’s antithetical to that.”
On the second day of the convention, Bannon and Kelly each took the stage and threw barbs at Shapiro. “I found it kind of funny that Ben thinks he has the power to decide who gets excommunicated from the conservative movement, which shows a wilful blindness about his position in it,” Kelly said.
Carlson described the split in the conservative movement as “jockeying for position” for who will replace Trump, and, accordingly, which faction will hold sway over the next Republican White House. And it’s certainly that, but it’s also a more substantive split. In a breakout session at the conference on Generation Z, one of the panelists told the audience that, after watching members of the Millennial and Gen X generations die in Iraq for nothing, “we don’t want to fight in foreign wars that the American people don’t have a stake in.” He was stating what was, until just a few months ago, a core value of America First, but which has now, with war with Venezuela on the horizon, been swept under the carpet.
Trump himself has almost entirely abandoned the America First agenda. Instead of waging economic war on China, he is overriding national security concerns by expediting sales of American microchips to Chinese companies. Instead of creating a human-centred industrial policy, he is returning to free-market orthodoxy, championing the complete deregulation of Artificial Intelligence. And instead of keeping the United States out of foreign entanglements and focusing on problems at home, he’s trying to provoke a new regime-change war. The only major plank he has stuck with is immigration, so he’s supercharging it by stripping naturalised Americans of their citizenship so he has something to show his base. At this moment, Trump’s priorities look more like those of Ben Shapiro than those of Tucker Carlson. No wonder Shapiro wants to prevent the larger debate from happening.
