JTA — On the first day of AmericaFest, Turning Point USA’s (TPUSA’s) convention in Phoenix, Ben Shapiro lit into a host of conservatives that he said were “frauds and grifters.”

He listed Candace Owens, Tucker Carlson, Megyn Kelly and Steve Bannon as “charlatans who claim to speak in the name of principle but actually traffic in conspiracism and dishonesty.” Together, he said on Thursday, they presented a danger to the conservative movement.

Shapiro was extending an assault that he began earlier in the week during a speech at the Heritage Foundation, a heart of conservatism that has been thrown into turmoil by its president’s backing of Carlson after Carlson hosted the Holocaust denier and avowed antisemite Nick Fuentes on his podcast.

An Orthodox Jew and avowed supporter of Israel, the conservative US pundit has been mounting a public effort to repudiate antisemitism and similarly aligned forces within his own Republican party. His campaign comes as the GOP’s younger flank has become increasingly disillusioned with American support for Israel in the aftermath of its war against Hamas in Gaza.

Conspiracy theories about Jews and Israel have proliferated in young right-wing spaces, to the point where Shapiro — who has long preferred to focus on conservative culture-war issues — is now staking his future on rooting them out.

“If you host a Hitler apologist, Nazi-loving, anti-American piece of refuse like Nick Fuentes,” Shapiro told the AmericaFest crowd, “if you have that person on your show and you proceed to glaze him, you ought to own it.” Shapiro used a Gen Z slang term for flattery to allude to Carlson’s interview with Fuentes, elsewhere blasting other rivals for promoting conspiracy theories linking Jeffrey Epstein to the Mossad.

But Shapiro’s address did not go over well with everybody. Much of the energy at AmericaFest, which TPUSA staged in the shadow of the shocking murder of the group’s founder Charlie Kirk earlier this year, appeared to be lining up behind the figures he targeted — several of whom, like Carlson, also took the stage.

“To hear calls for deplatforming and denouncing people at a Charlie Kirk event, I’m like, what? That’s hilarious,” Carlson said in his own speech. Yet he also took the time to defend his thoughts about Jews. “I’m not an antisemite for a very specific reason. Not because it’s unpopular or my donors don’t like it. I’m not an antisemite because antisemitism is immoral in my religion.”

Carlson wasn’t alone in his disdain for the Daily Wire CEO, who, for years, had been considered a tastemaker for the young right. Steve Bannon, as part of a speech in which he also called to “re-Christianize America” and mocked........

© The Times of Israel