From the moment you saw the speaker lineup at Turning Point USA’s year-end conference, the biggest national event for the organization since the assassination of its founder, Charlie Kirk, you could see the trouble waiting to happen.
No, the group did not book podcaster Candace Owens, who has spun a seemingly endless variety of conspiracy theories around Kirk’s murder, insisting that the alleged assassin, Tyler Robinson, was merely a pawn of larger, more sinister forces. (In early October, Owens claimed that Kirk appeared to her in a dream and told her “that he was betrayed.” It is very difficult to corroborate her sources.)
But Turning Point did invite big-name podcasters such as Tucker Carlson and Megyn Kelly, who have steadfastly refused to utter a critical word about Owens’s unhinged rants and unfounded accusations.
In late September, Kelly posted on X, “If you need me to condemn Candace or Tucker for their opinions in order to listen to me, then I may not be for you.”
And in a Nov. 12 interview with British journalist Harry Cole, Carlson said of Owens’s conspiracy theories, “The whole ritual of, ‘You know this person. This person said something I don’t like. In order to be a good person, you must denounce this person’ — obviously, I’m never going to — I would die before I played along with that.” He then insinuated that the official investigation into Kirk’s assassination was a cover-up: “If you’re telling me that because the U.S. government or some law enforcement agency issues a statement that doesn’t even make sense, that I’m required somehow morally to accept that and not ask any questions — like, can you hear yourself?”
The smiling faces of Carlson and Kelly were lined up on a poster for the conference alongside podcaster Ben Shapiro, longtime Trump ally Stephen K. Bannon and Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard. (I realize this is a quaint and old-fashioned notion, but currently serving U.S. intelligence officials should not be speaking at a partisan pep rally.)
On Thursday, as the conference kicked off, Shapiro decided to address the elephant in the room.
“If Candace Owens decides to spend every day since the murder of Charlie Kirk casting aspersions at TPUSA and the people who work here, who worked with Charlie every single day, his best friends … and, yes, at Erica Kirk and to imply or outright claim complicity in a cover-up over Charlie’s murder, to spew absolutely baseless trash implicating everyone from French intelligence to Mossad to members of TPUSA in Charlie’s murder or a cover-up in that murder, then we as people with a microphone have a moral obligation to call that out by name.”
But later in the program, Carlson contended that Shapiro’s call to disavow Owens represented “deplatforming,” an effort to shut down someone’s ability to reach an audience.
“To hear calls for, like, deplatforming and denouncing people at a Charlie Kirk event, I’m like, ‘What? This is hilarious,’” Carlson laughed. He called Shapiro’s remarks “the whole, like, Red Guard, Cultural Revolution thing that we so hated and feared on the left.” (This seems a wee bit hyperbolic, as China’s Cultural Revolution killed up to 2 million people between 1966 and 1976, with massacres and literal cannibalism.)
For his part, Bannon bellowed, “Ben Shapiro is like a cancer and that cancer spreads.”
It’s an extremely convenient two-step from the pro-Owens wing of MAGA: Criticizing Owens for her unsupported accusations is censorious “deplatforming,” but calling Shapiro “a cancer” is just routine give-and-take.
The conference climaxed with an address by Vice President JD Vance, heir apparent to President Donald Trump. Vance audaciously claimed, “President Trump did not build the greatest coalition in politics by running his supporters through endless self-defeating purity tests.”
What? Trump doesn’t run his supporters through purity tests?
Ask Marjorie Taylor Greene, Thom Tillis, Liz Cheney, Brian Kemp, Jeff Flake, Paul D. Ryan, Ben Sasse, Justin Amash, Peter Meijer, Don Bacon, Denver Riggleman, Jaime Herrera Beutler … The entire Trump era is littered with Republican elected officials who disagreed with Trump and found themselves driven out of office. Ask former Cabinet officials like John Bolton, Elaine Chao, H.R. McMaster, Jim Mattis, John Kelly or Nikki Haley. Heck, ask his former vice president, Mike Pence! A pro-Trump crowd was ready to hang Pence over his willingness to certify the results of the 2020 election on Jan. 6, 2021. That doesn’t count as a “purity test”?
Sure, Trump’s tests are less ideological, because the president is erratic and capable of changing his thinking with little warning. But Trump imposes personal loyalty tests all the time. Somehow when it comes to Owens or Carlson — or perhaps white supremacist Nick Fuentes? — everyone’s supposed to just put aside differences and sing kumbaya?
I suppose if Turning Point USA wanted its conference to make a big splash, it accomplished its mission. But a movement led by a president who made regular appearances in the world of professional wrestling now has rallies that resemble WrestleMania with podcasters, complete with boasts and threats and chest-thumping.
When you book a bunch of clowns, don’t be surprised if you end up with a circus.
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