AmericaFest Battleground in the GOP's Civil War

The crowd swung with Shapiro, who remained in full form. His entire career has been built around his ability to turn denunciation and humiliation into rhetorical performance, and he took it in stride as he leveled accusation after accusation at a number of people he was recasting as enemies. Tucker Carlson was dishonest. Megyn Kelly was taken in by stooges. But, most importantly, they all orbited around one chronic liar and deceitful con artist, Candace Owens, who has decided to build an empire on tearing apart her former allies in their most desperate moments.

“That is not courage. That is cowardice,” he droned decisively.

The gulf between what has now become two reasonably divided sides of the GOP coalition was set to expand more than we had seen in years. Turning Point USA may be the most significant and impactful conservative institution in the United States, outstripping not only the RNC but even legacy think tanks like the Heritage Foundation, influential newer players like the Claremont Institute, or foundational commentariat at places like National Review or even Fox News. Because it holds both youth energy and has acted as a bridge between MAGA America Firsters and more traditional Republican fare, the leadership gap opened by Kirk’s murder has only accelerated the fight over the future of the party.

As has been seen in the past few weeks, the Israel skeptical side of the American nationalist coalition has grown dramatically, signaling the waning influence of Christian Zionism and the turn toward open conspiracism, exclusivist American nationalism, and economic and military isolationism. On the other side is the still populist, xenophobic, and very online contingent led by figures like Ben Shapiro, but they remain wedded to free market absolutism and, of course, the belief that America’s closest true ally is a secure State of Israel. Carlson, Owens, and others have lent weight to the kind of anti-Zionism that emerged specifically from antisemitism in the ranks of white nationalist Nick Fuentes and his groyper army, which itself got its start heckling Charlie Kirk events and Turning Point stage shows. The goal was always for the groypers to move into or infiltrate Turning Point, something that has become visibly true as the organization turns even further to the right and has seen a number of public spectacles revealing white nationalists in its ranks.

But it was the 2025 Turning Point conference that really promised to be the venue where the two sides of the Republican civil war would face off, battling for the future of an organization that presents itself as the next generation’s conservative movement. The position of the organization has, at present, leaned in the direction of Kirk’s widow, Erika Kirk, who has been less than happy with the anti-Israel side, mostly because of the bizarre conspiracy theories that figures like Candace Owens have leveled since Kirk’s death. First came suspicion that Israel and Mossad were somehow involved because Kirk had leaned just slightly away from his absolutist position on Zionism and maintained cordial relationships with Israel skeptics like Tucker Carlson. But Owens, known for taking on what scholar of conspiracy theories Michael Barkun calls “superconspiracies,” theories that encompass all issues and all power into a single mega framework, had to expand. The theory has grown to encompass the GOP, Turning Point, and even Erika herself, all supposedly allies in Israel’s cabal of campus murder.

This may be why it was Shapiro who came in early in the conference, speaking on stage to a crowd that cheered as he jeered his opponents. Shapiro accused Owens of “spending every day since the murder of Charlie Kirk casting aspersions at TPUSA” and at Erika Kirk, and Carlson of refusing to take responsibility for defending Owens and for his softball interview with Nick Fuentes.

“He built Nick Fuentes up and he ought to take responsibility for that just as he ought to take responsibility for glazing pornographer and alleged sex trafficker Andrew Tate, or for mainstreaming fake historian and pseudo Nazi apologist Daryl Cooper as America’s best and most honest popular historian.”

Shapiro went at his typical breakneck pace, and the only true pushback came from one questioner who asked antagonistically about the 1967 bombing of the USS Liberty by the Israeli Defense Forces, an accident that is commonly cited by antisemitic right-wingers, and only very occasionally on the left, as a way of suggesting that Israel does not serve America’s military interests. Shapiro immediately rattled off the evidence he knew supporting its accidental nature before impugning the motives of the questioner.

Carlson began his speech joking about missing the earlier speeches before dipping into his trademark high pitched laugh. He set about using the response to his behavior as evidence of his authenticity, a persecuted truth teller cast in the mold of Biblical heroes, overturning the tables of foreign interests, elite power brokers, and morally bankrupt hucksters. His claim to defense was his Christianity, which, unlike other religions, he framed as universalist and therefore immune to accusations of racism or antisemitism.

“Every institution that tells you to shut up is lying to you… You’re not allowed to ask certain questions. And when you’re not allowed to ask questions, that’s how you know something is being hidden,” he shouted, launching into the claim that every opponent of “America First” is likely bought and sold, perhaps by bankers, or Israel, or both.

“The fastest way to know who controls something is to see who you’re not allowed to criticize,” said Carlson, paraphrasing a well worn white nationalist talking point popularized by Joe Sobran, a precursor figure to the alt right.

Carlson spent a great deal of time attempting to contextualize antisemitism, claiming it was impossible for him to be antisemitic because he is a Christian and therefore cannot judge people as a group for their identity by birth. He then explicitly stated that he could, however, hate people for what they believe.

“Every single one for more than ten years has engaged in a systematic effort to hurt white men because they are white men. That is racism,” spat Carlson. “That is precisely as bad as antisemitism, but it is much more widespread and has been so far much more damaging.”

This has become a common rhetorical strategy for ducking accusations of antisemitism, suggesting that only ethnically derived antisemitism counts while subtly implying that antisemitism directed at Judaism itself is fair game. Carlson suggested that the Anti-Defamation League, which he described as a far left organization, should join his crusade against what he framed as the “real racism” crippling white men across America.

He also directly signaled to the person who had asked Shapiro about the USS Liberty, saying:

“It’s totally fine to ask about why a foreign government tried to sink one of our ships in 1967. That doesn’t make you an antisemite. Sorry. Those are Americans who died.”

Ultimately, Carlson appeared to believe his views were in the minority in the room, making several quips suggesting he was about to be attacked when he opened the floor to questions. Instead, he received softball questions, including one asking whether AIPAC’s influence in Congress aligns with an “America First” ethos, which Carlson immediately answered in the negative.

Carlson was joined by others as the entire weekend descended into vitriol, each side declaring the others enemies with the kind of venom previously saved for "antifa." Ben Shapiro is like a cancer… it metastasizes," said Bannon, who was himself one of Shapiro's targets. Megyn Kelly also expressed outrage since Shapiro threw (mild) criticism her way, and she expressed that in her cordial conversation with former Pizzagate conspiracy theorist Jack Posobiec. Kelly and Posobiec discussed the ideological rifts currently taking place, as if they haven't helped lead hte firing squad, and Kelly said that she resented Shapiro's statement that she should have done more to confront Candace Owens' conspiracy theories (she later took to X to say that"I don't think we [her and Shapiro] are friends anymore.". Conspiracy theories were the common language for AmericaFest, with Kirk's death only the tip of the iceberg, and nativism and Islamophobia were perhaps the only points on which the two sides would come together.

“Ben Shapiro stood on that stage and lied about what’s happening in this movement,” said Candace Owens in her December 19, 2025 YouTube video responding directly to Shapiro’s December 18 speech, as she was unsurprisingly not invited to the Turning Point conference. “Turning Point has decided who is allowed to speak and who must be destroyed… This is not a movement, it’s a cartel.”

Owens’ feed has since descended rapidly into more arcane theories about Kirk’s murder, accelerating with each video topping a million views. She has roped Erika Kirk into her claims as well, though it is often unclear what she believes Kirk’s widow has actually done. In the December 19 video, Owens extended her anger toward Shapiro, accusing him again of lying. She alleged that his invocation of antisemitism is entirely disingenuous, arguing that if you ask questions, “you’re called antisemitic.” This, she suggested, was part of a broader pattern of bad faith endemic to Shapiro’s politics, something she claims to know firsthand as a former Daily Wire employee.

“I will not be lectured about truth by people who profit from deception,” said Owens. “This is about money. This is about influence.”

She dipped very quickly into her latest respite, open and grievous antisemitism, the kind that anyone right or left could recognize. She says that Ben Shapiro sees both white and black people as his slaves because he’s a “Talmudic Jew,” and that the Talmud teaches they should enslave Gentiles, particularly in debt. She alleges the modern world is a debt trap built by Jews, that chattel slavery was not a white phenomenon but a Jewish phenomenon, and that the Talmud sanctions Jews to lie, cheat, and steal against Gentiles when it benefits Jews. These claims are familiar because they have been repeated for centuries in Christian antisemitic diatribes, mostly done from misreading or mistranslating quotes from the Talmud or simply repeating well worn lies whose authorship gets lost in the meme warfare of social media and message boards.

Her primary grievance, however, was with Turning Point USA, the organization that launched her career and which she now presents as a corrupt criminal cartel that “has decided who is allowed to speak and who must be destroyed… they protect their own and sacrifice everyone else.” Within this framing, Erika Kirk becomes a shield used to block scrutiny of who did what and when. Owens argues this is why she has been labeled a conspiracy theorist and an antisemite, to delegitimize her at the very moment when her investigation, she claims, could hold those with power accountable.

Bari Weiss, recently installed as head of CBS News after the nine figure sale of The Free Press to Skydance, brought Erika Kirk on for a conversation in the wake of her husband’s death. Weiss has positioned herself as a free thinking centrist, a posture she has used to market The Free Press to high dollar donors but which also conceals her rightward shift and accommodation to power. Most notably, Weiss’s reactionary centrism is clearest in her unwavering defense of Israel. This stance underlies her affinity for the Kirks, alongside their “debate me bro” approach to politics, and has led her to position herself as a public protector of Kirk’s widow.

Weiss confronted the surge of conspiracy theories that have further devastated the Kirk family, many of which frame Erika as a pawn in an Israeli or Jewish plot of political violence. She sought to draw Kirk into a direct reckoning with figures like Owens, offering her the chance to draw a clear boundary within Turning Point and the broader GOP still loyal to her dynastic control of the organization.

There is a profound difference between what these figures claim to oppose and the reality they advance. While Shapiro and Kirk frame their project as opposition to conspiracy theories, what they are truly defending is Israel. Shapiro himself advanced conspiracy claims in his speech, asserting that “there was a Covid 19 conspiracy” involving Anthony Fauci and that there was a Russia gate conspiracy involving Hillary Clinton, Loretta Lynch, and Adam Schiff. It is also worth noting that Shapiro’s anti working class politics place him at odds with Carlson, who has recently highlighted Shapiro’s belief that no one should be allowed to retire at an age as young as sixty five.

For those who are presumably in the ascendancy of the new Republican establishment, there was an effort to try and weather the split. Donald Trump Jr., for example, said it wasn’t “Tucker Carlson or Ben Shapiro, it’s the radical left that murdered Charlie and celebrated it on a daily basis,” repeating a common talking point with no evidentiary basis. Vice President JD Vance, someone who is the presumptive inheritor of the MAGA movement, also focused on the “far left,” by which he means moderate Democrats, which he says is leading a violent coup against conservatives. They acknowledge the violent rage at the heart of the movement, but they want to make sure the civil war is fought along red and blue lines rather than from within the party.

The conservative movement is built foundationally on conspiracy theories and bigotry, which should make any sudden crusade against conspiracism by its standard bearers deeply suspect. What is actually being defended is the centrality of Israel, Christian Zionism, and a particular strain of international financialism, not truth or justice.

Today’s party is the party of Nick Fuentes, as channeled through other, more established far right figures, and that is the result of years of ideological evolution. The conservative movement always had a far right core, but its ability to self modulate has dissipated, as has the tripartite ideological collage of evangelical morality, free market absolutism, and hawkish foreign policy that gave it coherence in the post Buckleyite right. The Cold War and American imperial interests in the Middle East built the Israel American alliance, and it was only after the interests of capital drove that partnership that ideological justifications for it were cultivated within the party.

But that is breaking down, in part because the ruling class is unsure what is a safe bet, to maintain the hegemony of capital with Israel as an outpost, or to focus on attacking the left through a self destructive America First nativism. Since conspiracy theories are essential for redirecting the anger of the working class away from those responsible, and because antisemitism is the most identifiable and trusted meme in that arsenal, it means that any right wing populist movement that wants to cultivate class anger and direct it away from capitalists will have to build up the specter of a Jewish cabal. This means, ultimately, that throwing Israel under the bus, the logical conclusion of many of their antisemitic conspiracy theories, may be what’s necessary to stop a working class uprising, one that might do something like join unions or flood the streets if it had a coherent idea of how to confront its economic and political disenfranchisement. The party has two opposing views on how to harness energy and protect power, both of which are engaging in a full throated civil war over which strategy, and which personality, will lead.

As I argued in a recent essay for Inkstick Media, this may mean that the wing of the GOP that treats hawkishness on Israel as non negotiable, particularly American Jewish conservatives who have been disproportionately pulled rightward by this issue, may ultimately find their allies outside the party as it slides further into nationalism. This is why Weiss’s courting of Erika Kirk matters. As a non Jewish, pro Israel right wing voice, Kirk may help normalize a reactionary centrist position as the most effective way of defending the U.S.-Israel relationship. The Free Press is more consistently pro Israel than any major American conservative publication, and despite its occasional liberal postures, it is more hawkish than most neoconservatives. At the same time, Weiss has drawn extraordinary sums from wealthy donors, particularly in the tech sector now orbiting Trump, suggesting that this faction may be able to wield significant political power with fewer rank and file conservatives. This may ultimately be where Shapiro, and perhaps even Kirk, end up, as Carlson, Owens, and their allies pull the base of Turning Point USA away from alignment with Israel.