Ben Shapiro Is Mounting a Last Stand Against Right-Wing Antisemitism. It’s Not Going Well.
24th December 2025
On the first day of AmericaFest, Turning Point USA’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 pundit has been mounting a public effort to repudiate antisemitism and similarly aligned forces within his own party. His campaign comes as the GOP’s younger flank have become increasingly disillusioned with American support for Israel in the aftermath of its war in Gaza.
The reason it’s Not Going Well is that “The Right” doesn’t have the same dog in this fight that Ben Shapiro and the Jewish Telegraph Agency do.
I understand that Jews in general are very sensitive to sniffs of antisemitism because they’ve been on the receiving end of genocidal expressions of the same, but that doesn’t justify going all Hunt for Heretics and Sinners on people who have different points of view that, quite frankly, don’t actually comprise meaningful antisemitism.
This is the same sort of CrimeThink expedition in which the Left has been engaged for the last fifty years; it doesn’t look any better when worn by pro-Israel people, and actually hurts the cause they nominally support by providing fodder for the real antisemites who are watching from the sidelines rubbing their hands with glee.
UPDATE: Vance declines to draw a line against rising influence of antisemitic figures in Republican party Let the panic begin!