Ben Shapiro lashes out at Tucker Carlson, Nick Fuentes, Candace Owens, and Megyn Kelly at Turning Point USA conference
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From Turning Point USA's AmericaFest, streamed on Rumble on December 18, 2025
BEN SHAPIRO: 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] about them. That is a nonstarter. Meghan Markle is a young mother. Ilhan Omar is a young mother. That doesn't matter.
And when Meghan 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: Erika 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 [bleeped] it and that's why it's filled with groypers — 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 an alleged sex trafficker, Andrew Tate, or for mainstreaming fake historian and pseudo-Nazi-apologist Darryl 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.