Ben Shapiro’s desperate stand against right-wing antisemitism is receiving major pushback

Showdown at Turning Point USA convention highlights how Jews and Israel have become fault lines in conservative American politics

JTA — On the first day of AmericaFest, Turning Point USA’s (TPUSA’s) convention in Phoenix, Ben Shapiro lit into a host of conservatives that he said were “frauds and grifters.”

He listed Candace Owens, Tucker Carlson, Megyn Kelly and Steve Bannon as “charlatans who claim to speak in the name of principle but actually traffic in conspiracism and dishonesty.” Together, he said on Thursday, they presented a danger to the conservative movement.

Shapiro was extending an assault that he began earlier in the week during a speech at the Heritage Foundation, a heart of conservatism that has been thrown into turmoil by its president’s backing of Carlson after Carlson hosted the Holocaust denier and avowed antisemite Nick Fuentes on his podcast.

An Orthodox Jew and avowed supporter of Israel, the conservative US pundit has been mounting a public effort to repudiate antisemitism and similarly aligned forces within his own Republican party. His campaign comes as the GOP’s younger flank has become increasingly disillusioned with American support for Israel in the aftermath of its war against Hamas in Gaza.

Conspiracy theories about Jews and Israel have proliferated in young right-wing spaces, to the point where Shapiro — who has long preferred to focus on conservative culture-war issues — is now staking his future on rooting them out.

“If you host a Hitler apologist, Nazi-loving, anti-American piece of refuse like Nick Fuentes,” Shapiro told the AmericaFest crowd, “if you have that person on your show and you proceed to glaze him, you ought to own it.” Shapiro used a Gen Z slang term for flattery to allude to Carlson’s interview with Fuentes, elsewhere blasting other rivals for promoting conspiracy theories linking Jeffrey Epstein to the Mossad.

But Shapiro’s address did not go over well with everybody. Much of the energy at AmericaFest, which TPUSA staged in the shadow of the shocking murder of the group’s founder Charlie Kirk earlier this year, appeared to be lining up behind the figures he targeted — several of whom, like Carlson, also took the stage.

“To hear calls for deplatforming and denouncing people at a Charlie Kirk event, I’m like, what? That’s hilarious,” Carlson said in his own speech. Yet he also took the time to defend his thoughts about Jews. “I’m not an antisemite for a very specific reason. Not because it’s unpopular or my donors don’t like it. I’m not an antisemite because antisemitism is immoral in my religion.”

Carlson wasn’t alone in his disdain for the Daily Wire CEO, who, for years, had been considered a tastemaker for the young right. Steve Bannon, as part of a speech in which he also called to “re-Christianize America” and mocked the recent murder of Jewish director and US President Donald Trump critic Rob Reiner, called Shapiro a “cancer” to conservatism.

And Owens, Shapiro’s own former protege, said: “Fuck you, Ben Shapiro.” She made the comment on her YouTube page, where she has been promoting conspiracy theories that Israel had some involvement in Kirk’s murder.

And in remarks to Vanity Fair while at the conference, Kelly, too, countered Shapiro. The former Fox News host blasted him as overly concerned with Israel and said that he and Bari Weiss, the Jewish CBS News editor-in-chief, recently in hot water after she pulled a “60 Minutes” story that reflected badly on the Trump administration, are themselves fueling antisemitism.

“Tucker is not making antisemites. They are,” Kelly, a friend of Carlson’s, told Vanity Fair.

She went on to describe Shapiro and Weiss as part of “this very loud group of pro-Israel activists that is trying to make this the litmus test about whether you get to call yourself a conservative, and they lack standing to do that.”

Kelly also called Shapiro “Israel first,” adding: “I’m sorry, but his behavior has proven that charge to be correct. Why would you divide the American conservative movement — which was gelling, which was becoming much more cohesive for a moment after Charlie died — over Israel?”

Other conference attendees Vanity Fair spoke to said they were siding with Shapiro’s opponents, and some were happy to debate Hitler’s merits in between sessions.

Shapiro’s effort to hold a line in the sand is reverberating through the highest levels of government. US Vice President JD Vance, who also spoke at the conference and is himself close with Carlson, pointedly did not denounce antisemitism during his own address. Instead, Vance seemed to discourage the idea that conservatives should be excommunicating anyone based on their views.

The showdown at AmericaFest was the latest visible sign of how the next generation of conservatives are increasingly turning against Israel while embracing antisemitic talking points.

Openly antisemitic influencers like Fuentes and Myron Gaines are enjoying a rise in popularity on the right, and Gaines attended AmericaFest himself. The podcaster wore a sweater with a picture of Cookie Monster over an oven and the phrase “Let Em Cook” — a right-wing meme mocking Jews who were murdered in the Holocaust.

A recent focus group of Gen Z conservatives, conducted by conservative think tank The Manhattan Institute, also found that several of them espoused antisemitic and pro-Hitler views. One declared that Jews are “a force for evil,” adding: “I don’t see why we support Israel. I think Israel’s a very evil state. The genocide in Gaza, killing all these poor people. And the only reason we really support them is because they are the biggest donors. We have AIPAC, and these are all Jewish-run organizations.”

Asked what they thought of Hitler, one respondent said: “I think he was a great leader, to be honest.” Another, who called himself “Jewish by blood,” said he had read “Mein Kampf” and concluded: “I strangely understood where he was coming from as far as wanting to improve the national state of Germany.”

Histories of antisemitic rhetoric are also continuing to trail more Trump appointees to top government posts. This week, Jewish Insider reported that a senior State Department nominee, Jeremy Carl, has stated that “Jews have often loved to play the victim rather than accept that they are participants in history,” continuing that Jews have a “misplaced religious impulse” because they are “searching for the Messiah that had actually been found.” He added that Jews “love the Groypers,” a reference to the antisemitic movement led by Fuentes, “because they’re just so discrediting of anyone who would ask questions about any of this.”

Carl, a Jewish convert to Christianity, was nominated to the post of assistant secretary of state for international organizations, but his nomination expired at the end of this year’s Senate session without his formal appointment.

Meanwhile, Rep. Elise Stefanik, a pro-Israel MAGA firebrand who had taken on campus antisemitism as a central cause, announced on Friday she was dropping her bid for New York governor. Stefanik will also not seek reelection to Congress, leaving conservative (and many centrist) Jews with one less ally on the right who seemed to have a fast track to Trump.

A right-wing schism, with Jews and Israel at the center of the divide, is increasingly taking shape. More conservative intellectuals continue to exit the Heritage Foundation, the influential think tank, over its founder’s defense of Carlson. Several are migrating over to a new venture started by former US vice president Mike Pence, a pro-Israel Evangelical who has come out in opposition to Trump since his work in the first Trump administration.

It’s all building up to what Andrew Kolvet — a close friend and associate of Kirk who has taken over many TPUSA duties, including hosting Kirk’s eponymous show since the founder’s murder — says are the conservative movement’s new flashpoints: Israel and antisemitism.

“Charlie would go to some campuses, and like 50 to 60% of the questions were about Israel,” Kolvet recently told The New York Times’ Ross Douthat. “For two years that was true.” Young conservatives have been questioning not only the influence of pro-Israel lobbyists like AIPAC, but also the entire US-Israel relationship, Kolvet said.

Kolvet added, “I think Israel has become a symbolic battle about: What does ‘America First’ really mean?”