Megyn Kelly had no idea that Ben Shapiro planned to go after her. When he launched into a scathing broadside against what he called “charlatans” and “grifters” in the conservative movement on the first night of Turning Point’s annual conference last week, his pointed inclusion of Kelly shocked the commentator who has long considered Shapiro a friend.
“I was flabbergasted,” she told me, soon after stepping off the same stage, where her searing response to Shapiro was rapturously received by the crowd. “I thought, ‘Who do you think you are?’”
When more than 90,000 people gathered at a stadium in Arizona for Charlie Kirk’s funeral in September, speakers at the pyrotechnic-infused revival predicted a new dawn for conservative politics. The coalition, unified in its support for President Donald Trump and its horror at Kirk’s killing, was in harmony. “This is new territory for the Republican Party,” Turning Point COO Tyler Bowyer said at the time. “The fusion of Christ in our politics is changing the culture. It’s unifying everyone. This is our civil-rights movement.”
Just a few months later, at Turning Point’s AmericaFest gathering in Phoenix, that unity collapsed into an internecine feud between rival factions vying to define Kirk’s legacy and steer the future of right-wing politics.
Moments after Kirk’s widow, Erika Kirk, opened the conference with a speech calling her late husband a “peacemaker” and urging an end to the squabbling, Shapiro issued a blistering jeremiad that recalled William F. Buckley Jr.’s attempted excommunication of the far right. “The conservative movement is in serious danger,” Shapiro said, “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.”
He denounced Candace Owens—a podcaster he once employed at The Daily Wire, the media company he co-founded—who has emerged as the chief purveyor of conspiracy theories about Kirk’s murder. Her videos investigating the killing, infused with all the drama of a true-crime documentary, have been viewed millions of times.
Shapiro extended his criticism to those he said have “refused to condemn Candace’s truly vicious attacks,” naming Megyn Kelly, Tucker Carlson, and Steve Bannon. A few hours later on the same stage, Carlson fired back. “To hear calls for like, de-platforming and denouncing people at a Charlie Kirk event, I’m like, what?” Carlson said, with an air of annoyed confusion. “I mean, this kind of was the whole point of Charlie Kirk’s public life, and I think that he died for it.”
Aidan McLaughlin
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