MAGA Feud Erupts at TPUSA Event

A rift within the MAGA movement came to a head at Turning Point USA's (TPUSA) AmericaFest this week, with conservative personalities like Ben Shapiro and Tucker Carlson engaging in a war of words during their time on stage.

Shapiro, co-founder of The Daily Wire, took the stage at AmericaFest on Thursday, where he launched into a blistering condemnation of Carlson and others he described as charlatans and grifters who "traffic in conspiracism and dishonesty."

One of the main criticisms Shapiro levied against Carlson was his platforming of individuals like White nationalist Nick Fuentes, among others.

He asserted that hosts are "indeed responsible for the guests they choose and the questions they ask those guests" and tore into Carlson's interview with Fuentes, someone he noted late TPUSA founder Charlie Kirk opposed.

"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 contended, adding that Carlson "ought to take responsibility" for doing so.

Approximately an hour after Shapiro delivered his speech, Carlson took the stage and seemed to mock Shapiro's attempt to "deplatform and denounce" people who disagree with him.

"I just got here, and I feel like I missed the first part of the program. Hope I didn't miss anything meaningful. But I just want to say I don't think I did," Carlson quipped. "No, I'm just kidding. I watched it. I laughed."

He added that he "laughed that kind of bitter sardonic laugh that emerges from you and, like, upside-down world arrives. When your dog starts doing your taxes, and you're like, 'Wait, it's not supposed to work this way.'"

While he didn't mention Shapiro by name, Carlson seemed to take multiple jabs at Shapiro's speech, saying it was "hilarious" to hear "calls for, like, deplatforming and denouncing people at a Charlie Kirk event."

"Charlie stood firm in his often-stated and deeply held belief that people should be able to debate, and if you have something valid to say, if you're telling the truth, you ought to be able to explain it calmly and in detail to people who don't agree with you, and that you shouldn't immediately resort to, ‘Shut up racist,’" he railed.

Carlson also spent some of his time on stage defending himself 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 asserted.

After Shapiro's speech highlighted the infighting taking place within the MAGA movement, Carlson denied its existence, maintaining the coalition built by President Donald Trump is still holding together.

"The Trump coalition, and the supposed civil war going on within that group, I don’t think it’s real," he told the audience. "I think it’s fake. I think it’s totally fake."

The following day, conservative commentator Megyn Kelly took the stage for a conversation with TPUSA contributor Jack Posobiec, and she tore into Shapiro for acting as a gatekeeper of the conservative movement.

"[Shapiro] thinks he's in a position to decide who must say what to whom and when," Kelly said. "So, I don't think we are friends anymore. I've been a very good friend to Ben."

During his speech the day before, Shapiro noted that, despite their recent disagreements, Kelly was still "a person I consider a friend."

Kelly recalled inviting the Daily Wire co-founder to speak during her "Megyn Kelly Live" tour last month, noting that their "mix-up" stemmed from Carlson, not disagreements over Israel.

"He just recently came on my tour, as did you, and I gave him the most kind introduction I could possibly give him because I know that he's losing subscribers — a lot. And, so, I tried to do something nice for him by giving him a long 10-minute intro and personally vouching for him. And we mixed it up on Israel out on stage," she recounted.

"It wasn't Israel because we're on the same place on Israel. We mixed it up over whether Tucker Carlson should be excommunicated from the conservative movement, which I do not believe."

According to Kelly, the two hugged and said goodbye after Shapiro's appearance on her tour and even shared a "nice text exchange a couple of days later, saying our friendship was important to us."

"And the next thing I saw was him attacking me on stage last night as a coward," she told Posobiec. "That's not friendship. And I think that's fine with me."

Steve Bannon spoke on stage the next day.

“Now, Benji Shapiro sat up here last night, and he was all, you know, “It’s all about the truth.”

Ben, I’ve known you a long time, brother. You can’t handle the truth. Let’s face it, Ben Shapiro is the farthest thing from MAGA. Let’s be blunt. He is a hardcore never-Trumper. He’s a hardcore never-Trumper. In the spring of ’16, he tried to upend Breitbart. He walked off the job, made a big deal about some incident in Mar-a-Lago with Corey Lewandowski.

He tried to turn it to Ted Cruz from Donald Trump because he hated Donald Trump. In the general election, he barely supported Donald Trump.

The first sign of– when President Trump gets sent back to Mar-a-Lago, the very first individual that jumped on the Ron DeSantis train, the Israel First train, was Ben Shapiro.

[…]

Shapiro called Breitbart “Trump Pravda.” When he left, he called it Trump Pravda—and he was right. We had to be. There was no other news site that was supporting President Trump.

When poor Megyn Kelly came out in that first debate and made what now look like some innocuous questions about Trump’s Facebook page or his Twitter feed about Rosie O’Donnell and others, have Jack Posobiec ask her how it turned out. We unleashed the dogs. We were maniacs.

Why? President Trump had no backing. He had no backing at Fox. He had no backing at National Review. And in ’16, that would have driven him out of the race. So we had to be there.

But Ben Shapiro is like a cancer, and that cancer spreads. It’s a cancer, and it metastasizes. He tried to take over Breitbart, and I ran him out of there. He tried to take over David Horowitz, who was his mentor. Don’t ask me—ask the guy who’s associated with David Horowitz what he did there. He tried to take that over.

And mark my word: he will make a move on Turning Point, because he’s always been envious of Charlie Kirk. Envious of Charlie Kirk.

This is not about speech. It’s not about deplatforming. This is about power politics and what Charlie Kirk believed in to the core of his being—that America makes decisions for America, and Americans make decisions for America. That was Charlie Kirk.”

This emerging fracture within the conservative movement was touched upon by Erika Kirk at the outset of the event.

She recalled her husband being a "peacemaker" and a "coalition builder" and that, after his assassination in September, "we saw infighting. We've seen fractures. We've seen bridges being burned that shouldn't be burnt. We saw a lot on full display.

"And what I knew as a wife — and I'm the same exact way as him — If you are trying to put up fight or flight mode, we're always fight mode. We don't retreat," she added.