PHOENIX — Turning Point USA’s flagship event, AmericaFest, devolved into a verbal food fight on Thursday evening as two right-wing titans traded salvos onstage and revealed a bitter divide in MAGA world.
Conservative commentator Ben Shapiro came out swinging, spending much of his half-hour speech laying into far-right influencers like Nick Fuentes and Candace Owens, describing their rhetoric as increasingly antisemitic and conspiratorial in the wake of Charlie Kirk’s shooting death in September.
In a more surprising turn, Shapiro chastised the man who would take the stage after him, Tucker Carlson, for hosting Fuentes on his podcast last month and platforming a man former Vice President Mike Pence once described as “a white nationalist, an antisemite and Holocaust denier.”
“There is a reason that Charlie Kirk despised Nick Fuentes,” Shapiro said. “He knew that Nick Fuentes is an evil troll and that building him up is an act of moral imbecility, and that is precisely what Tucker Carlson did.”
Shapiro dug further into Carlson:
“He built Nick Fuentes up, and he ought to take responsibility for that.”
Carlson wasn’t the only AmericaFest speaker caught in Shapiro’s sights. The 41-year-old co-founder of The Daily Wire also unloaded on former White House strategist Steve Bannon over his recent rhetoric surrounding Israel.
“When Steve Bannon, for example, accuses his foreign policy opponents of loyalty to a foreign country, he’s not actually making an argument based on evidence,” Shapiro said, following up with an allegation over Bannon’s ties to Jeffrey Epstein.
“He’s simply maligning people that he disagrees with, which is indeed par for the course from a man who was once a P.R. flack for Jeffrey Epstein,” Shapiro said, without clarifying the claim.
New photos released by House Democrats on Thursday show Bannon and Epstein sitting across from each other at a desk.
Carlson, who took the stage shortly after Shapiro, refused to invoke his new nemesis by name. Instead, he chided Shapiro for criticizing him at an event known for its free-speech ethos.
“I laughed that kind of bitter, sardonic laugh that emerges from you in like, upside-down world,” Carlson said of Shapiro’s speech. “It’s not supposed to work this way, to hear calls for de-platforming and denouncing people at a Charlie Kirk event.” Carlson spent some of his speech defending against Shapiro’s allegations of antisemitism. “Antisemitism is immoral. In my religion, it is immoral to hate people for how they were born. Period,” Carlson said. He then tried to downplay the existence of the MAGA infighting that Shapiro laid bare minutes before. “The Trump coalition, and the supposed civil war going on within that group — I don’t think it’s real,” he said. “I think it’s fake. I think it’s totally fake.” But the drama in MAGA world appears to be ramping up. In the moments after their speeches, Owens took to X to reaffirm her baseless claims that Israel was somehow involved in Charlie Kirk’s killing. She posted: “Every time Ben speaks I feel more certain Israel is involved.”
Alex Tabet is a reporter for MS NOW. Recommended
