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.”

Under pressure from Elon Musk, Donald Trump Jr. and prominent right-wing activists in the wake of the assassination of Charlie Kirk, the Anti-Defamation League is removing from its website the Glossary of Extremism and Hate, one of the organization’s signature anti-hate resources. 

The database identifies over 1,000 terms relating to extremist ideologies and groups, and it has faced scrutiny in recent days after viral social media posts revealed that the Glossary of Extremism included an entry about the slain Turning Point USA founder and his organization. 

Musk, Trump Jr., Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R-FL) and other conservatives slammed the civil rights organization for its apparent portrayal of Turning Point and Kirk, just weeks after his death, as extremists.

An ADL spokesperson confirmed to Jewish Insider that the organization removed the glossary entirely and that it does not consider TPUSA an “extremist group.” The glossary no longer appears on the ADL website. 

“With over 1,000 entries written over many years, the ADL Glossary of Extremism has served as a source of high-level information on a wide range of topics for years. At the same time, an increasing number of entries in the Glossary were outdated. We also saw a number of entries intentionally misrepresented and misused,” the spokesperson told JI. “At ADL, we always are looking for how we can and should do things better. That’s why we are moving to retire the Glossary effectively immediately. This will allow ADL to explore new strategies.” 

But although the Glossary of Extremism and Hate has been deleted from the ADL’s site, material about Kirk and TPUSA — including criticism of the group for its ties to “a variety of extremists” — still appears in another resource on the ADL’s website. A spokesperson described that “backgrounder” as one of “a multitude of resources on its website that address extremism and its many expressions.” 

The ADL first published its backgrounder on Turning Point in February 2019. The piece was then updated in January 2023 and again on Monday afternoon, after screenshots of the page itself and the glossary entry on TPUSA circulated on social media. The edited version softens some of the ADL’s language about TPUSA while holding firm on its description of the group’s more extreme elements.

The ADL’s page on TPUSA, which will remain on the website, but not as part of a searchable glossary entry, appears in a section about “Extremism, Hate or Terrorism.” Prior to this week, the entry stated: “Since the group’s founding, Kirk has moved further to the right and has promoted numerous conspiracy theories about election fraud and COVID-19 and has demonized the transgender community.”

“Kirk also promotes Christian nationalism: the idea that Christians should dominate the government and other areas of life in the US. TPUSA continues to attract racists to the group. Numerous TPUSA representatives have made bigoted remarks about minority groups and the LGBTQ+ community,” the TPUSA entry continued. “White nationalists have attended TPUSA events, even though the group says it rejects white supremacist ideology.” 

Kirk was one of the most influential conservative activists in the country until he was shot and killed at a Utah university speaking engagement this month by a perpetrator who wrote in text messages to a romantic partner that he “had enough” of Kirk’s “hatred.” Utah Gov. Spencer Cox said earlier this month that the suspect was “deeply indoctrinated with leftist ideology.”

The ADL’s webpage about Kirk, which remains active, still says that Kirk “created a vast platform that was used by numerous extremists and far-right conspiracy theorists. A number of such individuals speak and attend his annual AmericaFest and other events sponsored by TPUSA.”

But the updated page edited some of the language about Kirk and took a more subdued tone towards TPUSA. The ADL now describes the group as “a political student organization that appeals to a wide range of conservatives, from moderate Republicans to the far-right. TPUSA has played a significant role in GOP politics and elections, helping to galvanize young people.” 

The ADL also added a lengthy section about Kirk’s support for Israel, and goes on to say that TPUSA and Kirk “publicly supported the state of Israel and spoke out against its critics. These views made him a target of prominent voices from the extreme right such as the Groypers.”

Still, the ADL states that TPUSA “has promoted some conspiracy theories,” and that some people tied to TPUSA “have a history of bigoted statements about the Black community, the LGBTQ community and specifically transgender people, and other minority groups.”

The ADL spokesperson told JI that an organization’s inclusion in its Glossary of Extremism did not necessarily mean the group was a hate group. “To be clear, inclusion in our glossary did not mean that the purpose of the group was to promote extremism or hate, and Turning Point USA is not an extremist group,” the spokesperson said. 

“We recognize that TPUSA repeatedly stated that it rejects white supremacist ideology; however, as we noted in our materials, white nationalists openly attended their events and some people affiliated with the organization had a history of bigoted statements about minority groups. So we felt it important to have it covered both in the glossary and as a fuller backgrounder with more in-depth research on the group,” the spokesperson added.

On Sunday, prior to the changes, Musk decried the ADL’s descriptions of Turning Point as “deeply wrong” and in need of an immediate correction. 

“The ADL needs to change this now,” Musk wrote on his X platform.

Trump Jr. wrote that ADL’s inclusion of TPUSA in its glossary was “disgraceful.”

In a tweet alongside a screenshot of the organization’s prior page about Turning Point, Luna, who represents Florida’s Gulf Coast, said the ADL “has some explaining to do.” “Seems to me like if they don’t agree with you, they will label you a ‘hate group,’” she wrote on X on Monday morning.

“‘America First’ is not hate speech. Turning Point USA is not a hate group,” Luna wrote in a subsequent tweet later Monday. 

Andrew Kolvet, the longtime executive producer of Kirk’s podcast, posted earlier in the day: “Good morning to everyone except the pro-Antifa, anti-Christian hate group known as the ADL.” The Antifa remark was in reference to criticism from conservatives over how the ADL classifies the far-left group on its site.

This is not the only time the ADL has recently reassessed its educational resources. In late 2023, the organization eliminated a major educational program, “A World of Difference,” after 40 years. The organization published a slew of anti-racism resources in the summer of 2020, following the murder of George Floyd, but some of them have since been removed from its website. In 2022, the ADL promised to review its educational content following a Fox News investigation that slammed the group’s use of “concepts from critical race theory.” 

Under CEO Jonathan Greenblatt’s leadership, the ADL has had to fight off critics from both the ideological left and the right as it grapples with its mission amid rising antisemitism within both political parties. 

When Greenblatt took the helm of the organization a decade ago, replacing longtime ADL chief Abe Foxman, he faced criticism from some on the right for taking the organization in a liberal direction. In the first Trump administration, the ADL came out against the White House on several occasions, including by signing onto a lawsuit challenging the president’s policy banning travelers from several Muslim nations. 

Greenblatt has also taken on progressive critics who disagree with the ADL’s stalwart support for Israel, and his assertion that anti-Zionism is antisemitism. After the Oct. 7 terror attacks, the organization has leaned more deeply into its pro-Israel ethos and its work targeting antisemitism, stepping back from some of its focus on other forms of hate. 

More recently, the organization has taken steps in the second Trump administration to reach disaffected conservatives — angering some longtime supporters in the process. In January, the ADL hired a lobbying firm with close ties to Trump to assist on its antisemitism work. 

When Musk made a hand gesture during Trump’s inauguration that resembled a Nazi salute, Greenblatt took flak from some in the Jewish community for coming to Musk’s defense. He has since said he should have “framed” his comments differently. 

This story was corrected to note the timing of when the ADL eliminated its “A World of Difference” program.