Ben Shapiro gave an impassioned speech at TPUSA’s Amfest 2025, to a huge positive reaction from those in the audience and across the political spectrum – with the exception of the Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens wing of politics, and as well as with Megyn Kelly, all of whom were mentioned in Shapiro’s speech as part of or at least coddling the conspiracy theories that threaten to destroy conservatism.
You already know my views on what Tucker has become, What Happened To Tucker?
Something has gone very wrong. Maybe his true self finally was freed of the constraints of corporate news, or maybe something else influenced him. But now he is — in my estimation — a malign force and not just as to Jews and Israel, but also to the Trump agenda which he seems determined to undermine.
Shapiro hit on those points and many more:
This ignited a tit-for-tat war on stage and social media, with Tucker and Kelly expressing indignation, and Owens (who was not invited to Amfest) invoking Nazi-level accusations against Jews:
Here is Shapiro’s speech and Q and A, in full, with the transcript of the speech only below:
Well, thank you so much. Thank you so much. It’s obviously a massive honor to be here at Turning Point USA. It’s even more of an honor to follow Erica Kirk, a heroic figure and a true American patriot.I really believe that the best way to judge the goodness of a man is to see the goodness of his wife and his children. And on that measure, Charlie was unsurpassed. Erica and her children are in all of our hearts.And of course, this is an incredibly bittersweet moment. It’s absolutely bitter because of the murder of our friend Charlie Kirk, an irreplaceable human being. I knew Charlie from the time he was 18 years old, and I watched him build himself into one of the most powerful exponents of conservatism in America—one of the most powerful coalition builders in American history.But it’s also sweet to see the number of people who continue to remember Charlie each and every day and to carry on his mission.Today I want to talk about the future of the country. And the future of this country—this amazing country—relies on the future of the conservative movement. It relies on what TPUSA defines as its core mission: freedom, free markets, and limited government. And most of all, most of all, the future of this country relies on truth.This country relies on truth because victory—true, real, lasting victory—cannot be achieved without truth. Victory without truth is victory for a lie. And that is no victory at all. And unity without truth is no unity. It is merely solidarity in falsehood.We live in a chaotic time—when lots of people are asking lots of legitimate questions about the conservative movement. What ought we to think about the relationship between free markets and traditional virtue? How should we craft a pragmatic foreign policy that spreads our interests and upholds our ideals? What governmental means are appropriate to achieve political ends?All of these questions aren’t new, of course. They’ve been asked for as long as human beings have been talking about politics—thousands of years. And over the course of this conference, you’ll hear a lot of opinions on a lot of these questions. I have my own perspectives on them. Of course, you can hear them every single day on my show. My fundamental values have been the same for 25 years: peace through strength on foreign policy, traditional values on social policy, free markets with regard to economics.But today, I want to talk about something even more important: how to discern those attempting to speak truth from frauds and grifters.Because something is new: an informational environment rife with both opportunity and chaos. Opportunity because the legacy media gatekeepers are no longer in charge of what we see and what we hear. And chaos because an anarchic informational environment means we actually have to be smart in how we assess the information and arguments that we hear.Why does that matter? Because today the conservative movement is in serious danger. It is in danger not just from a left that all too frequently excuses everything up to and including murder. The conservative movement is also in danger from charlatans who claim to speak in the name of principle but actually traffic in conspiracism and dishonesty—who offer nothing but bile and despair—who seek to undermine fundamental principles of conservatism by championing [inaudible] and grievance.These people are frauds, and they are grifters, and they do not deserve your time. And they are something worse than that: a danger to the only movement capable of stopping the left from wrecking the country wholesale.So today I want to discuss five obligations that people who speak to you on matters of importance have to you. I want to speak to you about our duties.Our first duty is truth. We owe you the truth. That means we should not mislead you. It means we shouldn’t hide the ball. We shouldn’t be deliberately obscure about what we’re telling you. We have an obligation to clarity and to honesty. This means that we actually have to be clear in the language that we use.We should not traffic in generalities. We should not say things like “they shot Charlie” without specifying whom we mean by “they.” The person who allegedly shot Charlie Kirk—and whom all the evidence points to—[inaudible].If we are going to target ideological movements, we should talk about the fact that the radical trans movement treats all those who oppose it as existential threats. Or if we’re going to talk about the Democratic Party making room for the radical trans movement and echoing its inflammatory rhetoric, well, we should talk about that. Those are specific problems, and they require specific responses.When people say “they shot Charlie,” however, they are instead trafficking in vagary that results in increased hatred without proposing any effective response. They are fostering despair and rage, and that makes things worse.We must also be honest about what people say and do, regardless of what that means coalitionally. It is the job of politicians to build coalitions. It’s the job of those of us who try to shape public opinion to hold politicians to account, and to hold them accountable to our values.We must not let fear of audience deter us from telling the truth. We must not let fear of other hosts deter us from telling the truth.So, for example, if Candace Owens decides to spend every day since the murder of Charlie Kirk casting aspersions at TPUSA and the people who work here—who worked with Charlie every single day, his best friends—to cast aspersions at Mikey McCoy and Andrew [inaudible] and Blake [inaudible] and Tyler [inaudible], and yes, at Erica Kirk; and to imply, or outright claim, complicity in a cover-up over Charlie’s murder; to spew absolutely baseless trash implicating everyone from French intelligence to Mossad to members of TPUSA in Charlie’s murder or a cover-up in that murder—then we, as people with a microphone, have a moral obligation to call that out by name.Erica Kirk and TPUSA never, never should have been put in the position of having to defend themselves against such specious and evil attacks, particularly in a time of mourning.And the people who refuse to condemn Candace’s truly vicious attacks—and some of them are speaking here—are guilty of cowardice. Yes, cowardice.The fact that they have said nothing while Candace has been vomiting all sorts of hideous and conspiratorial nonsense into the public square for years is just as cowardly.Second, because we owe you the truth, we owe you the duty to speak out of principle, not personal feeling. It should not matter whether we despise someone or whether we love someone. The question is what they say and what they do, and whether those things are morally decent or not. On a political level, do they foster freedom, justice, and prosperity? On a personal level, do they treat others as they would wish to be treated? Personal feeling is not a substitute for moral judgment.To take, again, the Candace Owens situation as an example: friendship with public figures who say or do evil things is not an excuse for silence on the matter. Politics is not the sisterhood of the traveling pants.Politics is about principle. And if you are willing to sacrifice basic truth and simple principle in favor of emotional solidarity, you have betrayed your fundamental duty to the American people.First off, I should break the omertà here and just be a little bit clear. The notion that people in our industry are close friends—like we all take holiday breaks with each other and go to each other’s kids’ graduations and stuff—is generally untrue. Some people do that. Most of us don’t. We see each other at conferences, and we talk on the phone, and all the rest. We’re business colleagues.But even if it were true that other public figures were our best friends—our very best friends—that does not relieve us of our duty to speak out of principle, and not to cover up evil or shy away from addressing it out of friendship.So no, Tucker Carlson, it is not an excuse to go silent on Candace’s targeting of TPUSA—or to mirror her lines of questioning because you love Candace personally.The same holds true of Megyn Kelly, a person I consider a friend, characterizing Candace as a young mother and thus shying away from condemning her actions—or [inaudible] me about them. That is a non-starter. Meghan Markle is a young mother. Ilhan Omar is a young mother. That doesn’t matter.And when Megyn said this week, quote: “My goal and my job here is to try to understand, yes, where Candace is coming from on this,” and says she sees no purpose in inserting herself, quote, “into this on one side”—that is a moral and logical absurdity. There is only one moral side here: Erica Kirk’s side.You know—the side of the widow with two children whose husband was shot live on camera in front of all of us. Friendship with the person accusing TPUSA of a cover-up of Charlie’s murder is no excuse for cowardice.Third—and relatedly—we have a duty to take responsibility for what we say and do. If we hire awful people, we’re responsible for that. I have some experience there, as you might suspect.That means that if we offer a guest for your viewing, we owe it to you to ask the kinds of questions that actually get at the truth. If we agree with a guest, that’s fine—but we should own it.So, for example, if you host a Hitler apologist, Nazi-loving, anti-American piece of refuse like Nick Fuentes—you know, the Nick Fuentes who said that the Vice President of the United States is a quote, “fat gay race traitor married to a Jeet”; the person who said that Charlie Kirk was a quote, “idiot”; the person who said—and pardon my language here, it’s his quote—that he quote, “took Turning Point USA and [inaudible],” and that’s why it’s filled with “gripers”—if you have that person on your show and you proceed to glaze him, you ought to own it.There is a reason that Charlie Kirk despised Nick Fuentes, and indeed even chided Dinesh D’Souza for debating him. 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. He built Nick Fuentes up, and he ought to take responsibility for that—just as he ought to take responsibility for glazing pornographer and alleged sex trafficker Andrew Tate, or for mainstreaming fake historian and pseudo-Nazi apologist Daryl Cooper as America’s best and most honest popular historian. Hosts are indeed responsible for the guests they choose and the questions they ask those guests.Fourth, because we have a duty to truth, we also have a duty to provide you with evidence of the claims that we make. Emotive accusations, conspiracy theories, and “just asking questions”—that’s lazy and stupid and misleading. None of them are a substitute for truth. None of them are a substitute for evidence.So when Candace Owens says, “I don’t know…,” [inaudible].When Steve Bannon, for example, accuses his foreign policy opponents of loyalty to a foreign country, he’s not actually making an argument based in evidence. He’s simply maligning people that he disagrees with—which is indeed par for the course from a man who was once a PR flack for Jeffrey Epstein.Check the record.Our duty to provide you evidence means we actually have to do much more than just ask questions. Just asking questions is something my five-year-old does, and it’s really cute when it comes from my five-year-old. But when grown men and women spend their days just asking questions without seeking answers, they are lying to you.In fact, they’re doing something even worse: they are seeding distrust in the world around you, and they are enervating you in the process.So, for example, if many speakers—including Tucker Carlson and others—get on stage here at TPUSA and claim without proper evidence that Jeffrey Epstein was running a Mossad rape ring being covered up by the Trump administration, they are not actually uncovering a conspiracy or effectuating a solution. They are claiming a special providence to information they won’t let you see—which builds their power and leaves you with none.They are also implicating in their speculation actual human beings—good human beings—like Kash Patel and Dan Bongino and Pam Bondi and yes, the President of the United States, even if they’re too cowardly to say President Trump’s name. And that means you won’t trust those good people in the future. You haven’t gotten smarter. You’ve just been manipulated.When forced to demonstrate their evidence, these same people will often refuse to provide it. They’ll claim ignorance. They’ll pretend they’re outside the system and don’t have access to actual information. You know: they’re “just asking questions.” But many of these same people have direct pipelines to informational sources.So, for example, if Tucker wants answers to his questions about, say, Jeffrey Epstein, he could call the Vice President of the United States. He’s quite close with him. But he won’t, because that might undermine the empty speculation.None of this means there aren’t actual, real conspiracies in the world. Of course there are. But actual conspiracies require actual evidence.Yes, there was a Russiagate conspiracy, and we know the names of the people involved and what they did. We know Hillary Clinton and Fusion GPS and James Comey and Loretta Lynch and Adam Schiff. We know all of those people.Yes, there was a COVID-19 conspiracy. We know that Anthony Fauci worked to shut down alternative solutions from people like Jay Bhattacharya. But when people posit a conspiracy and then provide you no evidence, they are doing you a fundamental disservice—and they are making you stupider in the process.Finally, because it is our job to make the lives of our audience better—right? That’s really our job: to give you more information to make your lives better—we have a duty to propose solutions.That’s why we have to talk about our problems: in order to find the solutions. That’s what politics was supposed to be about, after all—finding solutions to our common problems. If we speak endlessly about the problems we face without ever positing a solution other than wrecking the system or centralizing power in a cult-like figure, we are not finding solutions. We are merely making problems worse.Just asking questions, positing vague conspiracies, raving like Alex Jones about the secret confederacies that control your life—none of it makes your life better. None of it. In fact, it makes your life markedly worse. That’s because if you truly come to believe that nothing in your life is in your control, you can’t even take control of your own life. You despair of your ability to change your own circumstances—and then you fail. And you must not fail.Because here is the most fundamental truth of all in the United States: for all of its problems—many of which, a huge number of which, are real and serious—the United States is still the greatest [inaudible]. That begins with truth. We owe you that quest for truth. You owe yourselves that quest for truth.[inaudible]—constitution ever devised by man.Thanks so much. Happy to take a couple questions.
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