Bravo, Shapiro
On Ben Shapiro's speech at TPUSA
“The future of this country relies on truth.” – Ben Shapiro
In the 1930s, a necrotic tumor of antisemitism, isolationism, and conspiracism threatened to destroy the credibility of the Republican Party. Figures like “Radio Priest” Charles Coughlin, Henry Ford, and the isolationist America First movement forced the party to choose between populist currents and a principled stand against prejudice and misinformation. The Party made the right decision then, and the consequences were profound, but the past has a way of returning. Nearly a hundred years on, Republicans now face the same question.
American Nazis: The 1930s
In the 1930s, American Nazism quietly took root through radio sermons, fascist militias, and youth camps—right under the nose of a nation that largely opposed it. From the Radio Priest to the Silver Shirts, this essay explores how Hitler’s ideas found an unexpected home in the United States.
For much of American history before those days, the Republican Party enjoyed a reputation of moral purpose and popular reform. While the Democrats favored states’ rights and slavery, Republicans believed America meant something. Founded in 1854 in opposition to the expansion of slavery, the Grand Old Party fought for the Union, its Constitution, and freedom from aristocratic slavers. That reputation did not survive the Great Depression, but it was real. Democrats flipped this perspective under President Roosevelt, whose New Deal provided the public of the 1930s some measure of recovery and relief. In the process, they rebranded public provision and the expansion of state power as the will of the people and cast Republicans as the very elites they had always opposed. But it was in those crucial years that Republican leaders, particularly men like President Hoover and Senator Joseph I. France, who demonstrated true moral leadership by condemning the growing bigotry and ignorance on their side of the line. Externally, Republicans clarified their image as a sane and centrist alternative to the Democrats. Internally, the purge reinforced the boundaries of acceptable discourse within party ranks. Last week, history repeated.
In a fiery speech at Turning Point USA’s AmericaFest Conference, Ben Shapiro went scorched earth on Candace Owens and the rot of antisemitism and conspiracy thinking that has eaten its way into Republican politics. He did not mince his words.
Today, I want to talk about the future of the country—this amazing country. It relies on what we need to find as our core mission. Most of all, the future of this country relies on truth. This country relies on truth because victory cannot be achieved without truth. Victory without truth is victory for a lie. That is no victory at all. Unity without truth is no unity. It is merely solidarity in falsehood . . .
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 opportunity and chaos. Opportunity because the legacy media gatekeepers are no longer in charge of what we see and hear. 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? Today, the conservative movement is in serious 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 dishonesty, who seek to undermine fundamental principles of conservatism. These people do not deserve your time. They are something worse than that: a danger to the movement . . .
We owe you the truth. That means we should not mislead you. We should not hide the ball. We should not be deliberately obscure about what we are telling you. We have an obligation to clarity and honesty. We have to be clear in the language we use. We should not traffic in generality. We should not say things like “they” shot Charlie without saying who we mean. The person who allegedly shot Charlie Kirk—who, from all the evidence, points to being a gay, trans-loving furry. If we are going to target ideological people, the radical trans movement treats those who oppose it as threats. We should talk about that. Those are specific problems. They require specific responses. There is increased hatred. There is despair and rage that makes things worse. We must be honest about what people say and do. It is the job of politicians to build coalitions. It is the job of those of us who shape public opinion to hold politicians to account and 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.
If Candace Owens decides to spend every day since the murder of Charlie Kirk casting aspersions at TPUSA and the people who work here with him every single day—his best friends—to cast aspersions at them and at Erika Kirk, and to imply or outright claim complicity in a cover-up over his murder, to spew absolutely baseless trash implicating everyone from French intelligence to Mossad to members of TPUSA, we with microphones have a moral obligation to call that out by name. Erika Kirk and TPUSA never should have been put in the position to have to defend themselves against such specious and evil attacks, particularly at a time of mourning. The people who refuse to condemn these vicious attacks while speaking here are guilty of cowardice. Yes, cowardice . . .
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” is lazy, stupid, and misleading. None of them are a substitute for truth or evidence. When Candace Owens says, “I don’t know, but I know,” that is retarded, and we are all more retarded for having heard it. When Steve Bannon, for example, accuses his foreign-policy opponents of loyalty to another country, he is not actually making an argument based in evidence. He is simply maligning people that he disagrees with. 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 are doing something even worse. They are seeding distrust in the world around you and enervating you . . .
Anyone who tries to convince you otherwise is lying to you, and they are making your life worse in the process. That lie may feel good in the moment. It may excuse us from taking the corrective action we can take on a personal level to fix our lives. It might give us someone else to blame for our own failures. But in the end, the lie kills not just your future but the country we have been given. For those of us who talk for a living, that is our job: to discuss America’s problems with truth and evidence, to provide possible solutions, and to encourage Americans to succeed and make great decisions. We who speak to people on a regular basis, who have a microphone and audience—we have duties to you.
Why the left has no Charlie Kirk
Why does the left have no Charlie Kirk? That question seems to be going around a lot lately. This morning, my social media feed served up two articles that both posed roughly the same question. Namely, why is there no figure on the left who is going into ideologically hostile s…
As a high school student in 2008, Owens sued the Board of Education in Stamford, Connecticut for failing to protect her from students who left three death threats and racist and sexual slurs on her voicemail. With the help of the NAACP, she got a $37,500 settlement from the case. Yet she later claimed, “Obama did a lot to tear the country apart. I do not remember, growing up, having all of these race issues. I really don’t remember it.” She attended the University of Rhode Island where she majored in journalism, but later dropped out. In 2015, Owens was CEO of the marketing agency Degree180, which also ran a political blog, in which she once wrote about “the bat-shit-crazy antics of the Republican Tea Party,” adding “The good news is, they will eventually die off (peacefully in their sleep, we hope), and then we can get right on with the OBVIOUS social change that needs to happen, IMMEDIATELY,” and cited at the top of her list of needed social changes the end of the “gay-transgendered-bi-straight-anything-else conversation.” After a few years as a woke blogger, she reinvented herself as a MAGA activist. In 2018, Owens began working as comms director for TPUSA, but resigned less than one year later after a video surfaced of her at the launch of the group’s UK branch saying:
I actually don’t have any problems at all with the word “nationalism.” I think that the definition gets poisoned by elitists that actually want globalism. Globalism is what I don’t want, so when you think about whenever we say “nationalism” the first thing people think about, at least in America, is Hitler. You know, he was a National Socialist. But if Hitler just wanted to make Germany great and have things run well, okay fine. Problem is, is that he wanted, he had dreams outside of Germany. He wanted to globalize. He wanted everybody to be German, everybody to be speaking German, everybody to look a different way. That’s not, to me, that’s not nationalism. So in thinking about how we could go bad down the line, I don’t really have an issue with nationalism. I really don’t. I think that it’s okay. It’s important to retain your country’s identity.
Other than neglecting to mention that genocide was also one of the problems with Hitler, I have no problem with someone arguing in favor of a nationalism. We need only cast our glance toward Britain, where Owens was speaking, to see what happens when a nation exchanges its sense of national identity for diversity—which is fine if you like it, as I do, but it’s an aesthetic preference that should not come at the cost of culture, tradition, or unity. We can talk about the moral gap between ethnic nationalism and civic nationalism, but even ethnic nationalism is not inherently wrong. Consider Japan, Poland, Israel, or South Korea. These are beautiful places that do not need ethnic diversity in order to improve. Imagine, for example, claiming that Nigeria is inferior because it doesn’t have enough white people. Nevertheless, Owens was out, but she soon joined The Daily Wire, where Shapiro was a co-founder and its ideological anchor. As a result, Owens became one of the most visible black conservative commentators in America, frequently collaborating with Shapiro’s media network and benefiting from its institutional reach. But that relationship began to unravel dramatically in 2023, largely over disagreements surrounding foreign policy, especially U.S. support for Israel and the Israel-Gaza war.
Owens increasingly framed the conflict in ways that Shapiro and others at The Daily Wire viewed as conspiratorial or even potentially antisemitic. Maybe that comment in the UK wasn’t just an innocent remark about identity and unity, after all. Shapiro publicly condemned her rhetoric, and tensions escalated to the point where Owens left The Daily Wire in March 2024, framing her exit as liberation from institutional constraints while critics saw it more as a rupture caused by her refusal to moderate her increasingly batshit claims. But that’s where the money was, and in the following months, Owens built a large independent platform, increasingly emphasizing narratives that positioned her against The Establishment. The situation escalated dramatically after Charlie Kirk’s assassination. Owens, now knee-deep in the shit of at least half a dozen conspiracy theories, was eager to feed the speculation and paranoia surrounding his murder. She questioned the investigation, suggested cover-ups, foreign involvement, and internal betrayal, all without evidence. Erika Kirk, Charlie’s widow and the new CEO of TPUSA, publicly urged Owens to stop and accused her of exploiting the tragedy for personal gain. But Owens simply doubled-down. This month, she urged her audience to read the antisemitic book The Talmudic Jew, by August Rohling, which inspired the Nazi newspaper Der Stürmer.
To be clear, calling out the right’s conspiratorial tendencies is not an exercise in political bias. A healthy two-party democracy requires both wings of the system to be grounded in truth and mutual recognition of reality. You don’t need to support the other party to want it to be sane, coherent, and responsible. This applies on both sides. There should be a healthy version of the left without the excesses of woke culture, just as there should be a healthy version of the right that rejects bigotry and conspiratorial lunacy. But if Democrats honestly want healthier Republican politics, if all those years of lamenting post-truth narratives, the inaccuracy of Fox News reporting, and reality-rejection on the other side really meant anything, then they have to give credit where credit is due—and Shapiro deserves a standing ovation.
But predictably, his words have not been entirely well-received. Megyn Kelly, also mentioned in his speech for making excuses as to why she wouldn’t call Owens out, described his remarks as a “betrayal.” Leftist podcaster Angie Sullivan said, “Ben Shapiro is not the magic Jew. They are not going to stop being white supremacists and antisemitic over at Turning Point, and in MAGA. They are not going to take down their swastika flags, they’re not going to take off their white supremacy tattoos, because of Ben Shapiro.” God help us, if she’s right. But if you think MAGA is infested with hatred and distortion, then Shapiro’s full-throated condemnation of bigotry and conspiracy theories should resonate across the aisle, for he is articulating precisely the sort of commitment to truth that liberals have long claimed to represent. That rhetorical alignment, however partial, should earn recognition from Democrats who genuinely care about the factual integrity of our national discourse.
If you can’t clap when the right says something you support simply because it also says other things that you don’t, you might just be in favor of a one-party state. What the nation urgently needs now is not reflexive praise or dismissal of voices across the aisle, but a willingness to affirm truth wherever it is championed. As our father Abraham once said in his speech at Peoria in 1854, the year his party was founded, “Stand with anybody that stands right. Stand with him while he is right and part with him when he goes wrong.” As such, Shapiro’s message is one worth applauding from any quarter that values truth over faction and facts over fiction. And it is exactly what this moment in American political life needs, not just for Christmas and Hanukkah, but for the future of our republic.
From the feed
An unintended side effect of having a corporate media/NGO/culture complex that is joined at the hip with the Democratic party is that - while Republicans are held to a high standard and heavily slated when they step out of line - the Democrats, who harbor all sorts of poisonous creatures, are given a pass. Which means they lack the capacity for self-awareness up until the point where they have to face the voters, whereupon they are flabbergasted to find that some of their allies (Sharpton, Sarsour, Omar, Tlaib et al) aren't exactly helping their cause. It's the Ceausescus-on-the-balcony moment all over again.
Ben Shapiro gave a great speech that someone needed to say. I wish the person who had said it was the VPOTUS. Instead, both in his speech at TPUSA and in his interview at Unherd, he refused to take unequivocal stands against those espousing antisemitic views. He gave "wishful thinking" stats on antisemitism in America, and cut slack to Carlson because he supported him for VP. Is Vance so intimidated by the whacked-out right that he can so easily sell out his principles? Or was I wrong to think he had the principles to begin with?