The kids aren’t alright.

That’s the unmistakable takeaway from a weekend filled with shocking developments surrounding the views of young conservatives, punctuated by a Turning Point USA conference that turned into a proxy war between mainstream voices led by Ben Shapiro, looking to create guardrails against antisemites and conspiracy theorists within the MAGA movement, against a growing cadre of bad-faith right-wing influencers leading the charge to embrace extremist voices into the conservative coalition.

The conference concluded with Vice President JD Vance all but taking the side of the extremists, while offering fulsome praise to his friend, Tucker Carlson, as an essential part of the Republican Party coalition.

The last several days also featured news of an eye-opening Manhattan Institute focus group of Gen Z Nashville-area conservatives reluctant to offer any negative reaction toward Adolf Hitler and sharing numerous antisemitic stereotypes about Jews. (One 29-year-old woman offered this representative reaction about Hitler: “I think he was a great leader, to be honest. I think what he was going for was terrible, but I think he showed very strong leadership values.”)

The weekend ended with a Jewish Insider scoop that a Trump administration nominee for a senior position at the State Department has a long track record of making derogatory comments about the Jewish community, characterizing Jews as religiously incorrect and in need of conversion.

This moment was further underscored by the hideously antisemitic tirade that Candace Owens went on over the last few days, barely eliciting any serious pushback from conservative movement leaders. Meanwhile, former journalist Megyn Kelly, during her own speech Friday at the TPUSA conference, chose to go after Shapiro and CBS News Editor-in-Chief Bari Weiss even as Kelly has publicly steered clear of criticizing Owens, citing the fact that she’s a young mother and a personal friend. (Shapiro, she said, is no longer a friend after he criticized her in his speech Thursday night.)

Shapiro, long one of the leading voices on the right, opened the conference with a warning that the conservative movement is in danger 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 called out Tucker Carlson, Owens and Kelly by name. “We must not let fear of audience anger deter us from telling the truth; we must not let fear of other hosts deter us from telling the truth,” Shapiro warned. “The fact that Candace has been vomiting all sorts of hideous and conspiratorial nonsense into the public square for years on end while others fly cover for her is … cowardly.”

Shapiro received a characteristically warm reception for calling out the crazy, but the fact that he was outnumbered by voices whose extreme views would have long been marginalized by the conservative movement but are now tolerated, if not embraced, is a sign of our times — and a warning of where the MAGA movement could be headed without more leaders speaking up. 

Outside of Shapiro, there weren’t many leaders following suit. 

Vance, the favorite to win the GOP presidential nomination in 2028, sided with the extremists during his Sunday address to close out the conference. “President Trump did not build the greatest coalition in politics by running his supporters through endless, self-defeated purity tests,” Vance said to applause. 

In an interview with Unherd’s Sohrab Ahmari, he offered fulsome praise to Carlson: “The idea that Tucker Carlson, who has one of the largest podcasts in the world, who has millions of listeners, who supported Donald Trump in the 2024 election, who supported me in the 2024 election — the idea that his views are somehow completely anathema to conservatism, that he has no place in the conservative movement, is frankly absurd. And I don’t think anybody actually believes it.”

He also appeared to defend both anti-Israel Democrats and Republicans for their antipathy towards the Jewish state, saying nearly of the critics were not motivated by antisemitism. “99% of Republicans, and I think probably 97% of Democrats, do not hate Jewish people for being Jewish. What is actually happening is that there is a real backlash to a consensus view in American foreign policy.”

Culture is typically a leading indicator of where our politics is headed. The developments of the past week offer numerous real-life examples that back up the polling that shows that younger Americans hold overwhelmingly more critical views of the Jewish people than other generations, with antisemitic beliefs strongest among the most conservative cohort. One characteristic example: A recently-conducted Manhattan Institute poll found that over half of Republican men under 50 “believe the Holocaust was greatly exaggerated or did not happen as historians describe.”

We’re seeing a preview of where our country could be headed without a change in direction. And while that may sound pessimistic, the reality is there’s a lot more that can be done to deal with the growing Gen Z radicalism — like scrutinizing the social media platforms that incentivize hateful content and singlehandedly create a marketplace for such extremism. 

The ongoing dispute between Ben Shapiro and Tucker Carlson took center stage on Thursday during the opening night of Turning Point USA’s AmericaFest, the organization’s annual gathering and its first since the killing of TPUSA founder Charlie Kirk in September. 

Attempts by TPUSA CEO Erika Kirk, who took the helm after her husband’s death, to project unity within the MAGA movement at the summit — including by announcing her endorsement of Vice President JD Vance in the 2028 presidential election — were overshadowed by the barbs traded by Shapiro and Carlson in their respective speeches. The two men spoke within three hours of each other at the Phoenix, Ariz., event, with Shapiro taking the stage first.

Shapiro began his remarks by warning that conservative commentators including Candace Owens, Tucker Carlson, Megyn Kelly and Steve Bannon are “frauds and grifters” who are threatening the future of the Republican Party. In addition to Carlson, Kelly and Bannon are slated to speak at the four-day conference.

“Today, the conservative movement is in serious danger, not just from the left that all too frequently excuses everything up to and including murder,” Shapiro said. “The conservative movement is also in danger 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, who seek to undermine fundamental principles of conservatism by championing aggravation and grievance.”

“These people are frauds and they are grifters, and they do not deserve your time,” he added.

Shapiro criticized Kelly and Carlson for refusing to condemn Owens for espousing and promoting conspiracy theories surrounding Kirk’s assassination, and highlighted Bannon’s ties to Jeffrey Epstein while noting that Bannon “accuses his foreign policy opponents of loyalty to a foreign country.”

Regarding Kelly, Shapiro noted that while he considers the former Fox News host to be a friend, he criticized her argument that Owens’ behavior was undeserving of criticism because she’s a young mother and a personal friend.

“Meghan Markle is a young mother. [Rep.] Ilhan Omar (D-MN) is a young mother. That doesn’t matter,” Shapiro told the crowd. “Megyn said this week, ‘My goal and my job here is to try to understand where Candace is coming from on this,’ and says she sees no purpose in inserting herself ‘into this on one side.’ That is a moral and logical absurdity. There is only one moral side here, Erica 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?” he continued. “Friendship with the person accusing TPUSA of a cover up of Charlie’s murder is no excuse for cowardice.”

Shapiro also criticized Carlson’s platforming of Andrew Tate, the controversial influencer and alleged sex trafficker; neo-Nazi Nick Fuentes; and Darryl Cooper, a known Holocaust revisionist and a Hitler apologist who produces his own history podcast. Shapiro called on Carlson to “own” his part in mainstreaming the three into the conservative movement. 

“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 the guest, that’s fine, but we should own it,” Shapiro said. “So, for example, if you host a Hitler apologist, Nazi loving, anti-American piece of refuge like Nick Fuentes, … if you have that person on your show and you proceed to glaze him, you ought to own it.”

Carlson took the stage later on in the program Thursday evening, and began his remarks by revealing he had “laughed” while watching Shapiro take digs at him. He later criticized Shapiro’s push to purge fringe figures such as Fuentes and Owens from the conservative ecosystem. 

“I just got here and I feel like I missed the first part of the program. Hope I didn’t miss anything meaningful. I don’t think I did. No, I’m just kidding, I watched it. I laughed,” Carlson said, later adding: “To hear calls for, like, deplatforming and denouncing people at a Charlie Kirk event, I’m like, what? That’s hilarious.”

When Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts posted a controversial video in October defending Tucker Carlson and his interview with neo-Nazi influencer Nick Fuentes, Ben Shapiro quickly became one of the most prominent conservative voices criticizing the venerable conservative think tank.

Shapiro furthered that criticism in a fiery speech on Wednesday at the Heritage Foundation’s Washington headquarters, where he called on the institution to draw lines against Carlson and ensure that the right-wing podcaster is not considered to be part of the conservative movement. 

“I want to begin by acknowledging the elephant in the room. The conservative movement is in flux. It’s in flux because of the systemic failure by conservative leaders to do what any good leaders must do: define and maintain the foundations of that movement,” said Shapiro, who had previously called out Heritage in a November episode of his podcast. “This is our job.”

Shapiro, who has supported President Donald Trump’s efforts to cut down on immigration, used immigration enforcement as an analogy for how the conservative movement should define the acceptable boundaries of debate.

“No country can exist without borders and no conservative movement can exist without principles it will defend against those who degrade them, even from within,” Shapiro argued. “The Heritage Foundation has always been the institution defining the contours of conservatism. If the Heritage Foundation wishes to retain its status as a leading thought institution in the conservative movement, it must act as ideological border control. It must continue to draw the contours of legitimate, real conservatism. This is what the institution exists to do.”

Shapiro, who has been affiliated with Heritage for years, described the think tank as “perhaps America’s leading institution in helping to define and shape the contours of conservatism.” But what followed was a word of warning, cautioning Heritage that continuing to align with people like Carlson will ruin the conservative movement.

“If, as the Heritage Foundation proclaims, our goal ought to be to formulate and promote conservative public policies based on the principles of free enterprise, limited government, individual freedom and traditional American values and a strong national defense,” Shapiro stated, “then we must stand up against those who would pervert and twist the conservative movement into a movement without principles, or worse, a movement that promotes the very opposite of the principles that conservatives hold dear.”

Over the next 20 minutes, Shapiro laid out exactly why believes Carlson and his conspiratorial worldview run counter to the ideals of American conservatism: Carlson called on America to ally with Russia; Carlson “has unending critiques of the free market, mirroring Marxist thinkers”; Carlson “promotes a conspiracy theory by which the American people have lost total control of their lives and thus have no real ability to shape policy”; Carlson has spoken of Iran with admiration and treated Qatar “as America’s foremost ally in the Middle East”; and he has hosted “America’s foremost Hitler apologist,” Nick Fuentes. 

“The term ‘American conservatism’ has a meaning. That meaning is embodied in the Heritage Foundation’s mission statement,” said Shapiro. “Those who oppose those principles definitionally oppose American conservatism. That is just definitional. Such people are not ideological allies. They are not part of the rich debate that is constantly ongoing between various strands of conservatism. They are opponents, and they ought to be treated that way.”

Welcoming those opponents as if they are part of legitimate debate over conservative ideas does a disservice to the political cause, Shapiro argued.

“Which brings us,” he added, “to Tucker Carlson, who has become, by any honest assessment, an opponent of conservatism, an outsider masquerading as an insider and destroying the character of the conservative movement in the process.”

At the end of his speech, Shapiro talked about what he described as “the promise of conservatism and the promise made by the Heritage Foundation,” that Americans should consider themselves lucky to be in this country and that they have agency to chart their own destiny. 

“That promise only exists if conservatives do our job to draw lines, to create borders, to protect our principles, to defend those principles, to conserve,” he said.

Afterward, Roberts joined Shapiro onstage for a moderated conversation. He did not address the content of Shapiro’s speech, or anything he said about Carlson.

“You and I agree far more than we disagree on things, and the disagreement is truly friendly,” said Roberts, who has been navigating internal dissent and staff defections following his video defending Carlson. 

Later, before the conversation wrapped up, Roberts said to Shapiro: “Count on Heritage to fight with you.”