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Politics Steve Bannon: ‘Ben Shapiro is the Farthest Thing from MAGA’ A major right rift was on full display at the event hosted by the organization founded by the late Charlie Kirk. Conservative activist group Turning Point USA held its annual “AmFest” event last week under the slogan “America’s Future Starts Here.” The American right’s future was in question. The high-profile speakers Ben Shapiro, Tucker Carlson, Steven Bannon and others demonstrated a major rift on the right, particularly regarding Israel. In his speech, Shapiro harshly denounced Carlson for refusing to “condemn Candace’s truly vicious attacks—and some of them are speaking here—are guilty of cowardice.” He was speaking of the MAGA influencer Candace Owens, an alumna of both TPUSA and Shapiro’s own Daily Wire, for what he saw as attacks on Turning Point after Kirk’s death. Owens has also been a harsh critic of Israel. Shapiro would also slam Carlson for hosting the open antisemite Nick Fuentes on his program. Those were specific criticisms from Shapiro. But overall, Shapiro appeared to be trying to cancel those who dared to deviate from the neoconservative line. Carlson began his speech by acknowledging Shapiro’s: “I just got here, and I feel like I missed the first part of the program. Hope I didn’t miss anything meaningful.” Tucker mocked, “I don’t think I did. No, I’m just kidding, I watched it. I laughed. To hear calls for, like, deplatforming and denouncing people at a Charlie Kirk event, I’m like, what?! That’s hilarious.” Carlson highlighted Kirk’s career as a free speech absolutist and also noted that the outspoken pundit had been under intense pressure for allowing the former Fox News host at his event. Particularly the event Carlson was speaking at that very moment. “The whole, like, Red Guard Cultural Revolution thing that we so hated and feared on the left—that we did everything we could to usher in a new time where you could have an actual debate—I mean this kind of was the whole point of Charlie Kirk’s public life and I think that he died for it. I really believe that,” Carlson said. He continued, “And I know a lot about it because the last several months of Charlie’s life were devoted in part to arguing about this event, in fact this speech, in fact my speech here, which he asked me to do earlier this year, this summer, and was immediately put under just immense pressure from people who give money to Turning Point—I would assume good people—but who wanted him to take me off the roster.” The backdrop to this was a months-long war of words between neoconservatives like Shapiro and the talk radio host Mark Levin, who have been trying to keep conservatives firmly in a pro-Israel lane, and America First and MAGA conservatives like Carlson, who have questioned the U.S.’s relationship with that country and the morality of what’s happening in Gaza. Before Charlie Kirk was assassinated in September, the TPUSA founder appeared increasingly to question U.S. support for Israel’s military actions in Gaza, and also said his continued support for conservatives critical of the Jewish state’s policies, like Tucker Carlson, had cost him donors. Former Trump adviser and early MAGA influencer Steve Bannon got to that point quickly and went after Shapiro directly. “Now, Benji Shapiro sat up here last night, and he was all, you know, ‘It’s all about the truth,” Bannon began. “Ben, I’ve known you a long time, brother. You can’t handle the truth,” he continued. “Let’s face it, Ben Shapiro is the farthest thing from MAGA. Let’s be blunt. He is a hardcore never-Trumper.” Bannon described moments in which he believed Shapiro was trying to undermine the MAGA movement, including the Daily Wire’s earlier support of Texas’s Senator Ted Cruz and Florida’s Governor Ron DeSantis over Trump. “He tried to turn it to Ted Cruz from Donald Trump because he hated Donald Trump,” Bannon said. “In the general election, he barely supported Donald Trump…. When President Trump gets sent back to Mar-a-Lago, the very first individual that jumped on the Ron DeSantis train, the Israel First train, was Ben Shapiro.” Bannon said Shapiro has been against Trump all along and Israel was always his primary concern. “And those are the darkest days we had. In ’21 and ’22, you guys were there,” Bannon said, referring to the TPUSA audience. “He’s consistently been against Trump, and now the president doesn’t back the Greater Israel Project. What is Greater Israel? It’s not about Israel itself. It’s about an expansionist Israel, an imperial Israel that Netanyahu and that crowd have thought up. And the Israel First crowd is Ben Shapiro, Tel Aviv Mark Levin, and many others that want to put that ahead of America’s interests!” At the end of his life, Kirk had alliances with all of these speakers. One of his last interviews ever was on Shapiro’s show, in which Kirk questioned the pro-Israel host about the ongoing war in Gaza. Those were questions Charlie Kirk could ask at the time and still maintain connections with both Shapiro and Carlson. Three months since his death, at his own Turning Point USA conference, an Israel Firster demanded that those who ask such questions be excommunicated from the right, while America Firsters mocked him and doubled down. America may or may not be at some kind of turning point. The conservative movement is. The post Steve Bannon: ‘Ben Shapiro is the Farthest Thing from MAGA’ appeared first on The American Conservative.

Politics The Neoconservatives Are Attacking Trump Nominees Again The smear job on Jeremy Carl is symptomatic of a broader rhetorical dysfunction. There is a particular tic in American public discourse in which openly made articulations of mainstream sentiments are breathlessly reported as “gotchas.” To take a very old but exemplary instance, Kevin Williamson was fired from the Atlantic for an old tweet in which he suggested that women who procure abortions should receive the same punishment given to murderers. Well, like millions of Americans, Williamson believes abortion is murder; QED. You might disagree with his premise or his conclusions, but the sentiment itself is not exactly fringe stuff, or particularly surprising coming from a socially conservative commentator. This kind of framing isn’t an exclusive technique of the left. Right-wing outlets are prone to it, too—hysteria when liberals propose normal liberal things like raising taxes or increasing welfare spending, which do in fact have support in broad swaths of the American public. The silliest iterations are reserved for bouts of internecine skull-bashing, though. Back in January, the staunchly neoconservative Jewish Insider went after Michael DiMino, then a nominee to be deputy assistant secretary of defense. DiMino’s great sins were suggesting American exposure in the Middle East, including that engendered by its commitments to Israel, is disproportionate to its interests. The framing was not “why DiMino is wrong”; it was, “Can you believe DiMino said this stuff?”  This is not in fact persuasion. Presenting the things someone says in a public forum and saying, Can you believe this person thinks this? does not win arguments. It will rile up the people who already agree with you and are hostile to the object of the attack, but this is itself risky business if the positions are not so outre as advertised. In that case, DiMino was in the end confirmed. But Jewish Insider is back at it, this time going after Jeremy Carl, a nominee for assistant secretary of State and occasional contributor to these pages. The Saturday article’s headline: “State Dept. nominee espoused antisemitic views, downplayed the Holocaust.” My God, Montresor! That sounds pretty bad.  Things start to soften as soon as you get to the lede, though: “Jeremy Carl, a Trump administration nominee for a senior position at the State Department, has expressed a range of derogatory views of the Jewish community, characterizing in writings and public interviews the community as holding a victim mentality, downplaying the significance of the Holocaust to the Jewish story and experience, musing about the need to address the what he called the ‘Jewish Question’ and characterizing Jews as religiously incorrect and in need of conversion.”  Well, all right. What does this boil down to? In some podcast appearances, Carl noted that Jews tend to lean to the left in America, said that invocations of the Holocaust are sometimes deployed cynically to shut down disagreements, and articulated the standard Christian orthodoxy that all must be converted to be saved. He also says Israel is a locus of disproportionate attention in American politics, and that the presence of antisemites in the right is in fact convenient for those attempting to shut down criticism. From the article: “Nobody can just take a small sip of the drink in front of them, which is the ‘Jewish Question,’ and imbibe carefully and have a mature discussion on it,” Carl said. “[They] need to overdose massively on it, to the point that they just begin saying completely ridiculous and absurd things.” Carl said that such activity makes him shy away from “critique” of the Jewish community “because you don’t want to be lumped in with these clowns.” He declared that Jewish activists “love the Groypers because they’re just so discrediting of anyone who would ask questions about any of this,” referring to Jewish political activism. None of these assertions, even if you believe them to be incorrect, is something outside the pale of normality; that’s presumably why Carl felt comfortable making them on a public podcast. Carl himself made this point in his comments to Jewish Insider. (Of course, all this stuff is down below the paywall, so most people will see little more than the scary headline.) And the very exercise of the article illustrates what Carl was describing—the conflation of antisemitism and good-faith disagreements to score some points.  For whatever it’s worth, I would humbly submit that a grandee of the Claremont Institute, an eccentric West Coast hero-cult devoted to Leo Strauss and Harry Jaffa and currently chaired by Thomas Klingenstein, is probably not in fact a dyed-in-the-wool antisemite. Much less so when, as noted in the article itself, the said grandee grew up in a secular Jewish household. I would humbly submit that such an assertion is absurd and discrediting. It doesn’t have to be this way. For example, while there are things that I can disagree with in the latest for Compact from Carl’s fellow Claremont man, David Azerrad, he presents arguments. He doesn’t present the other team’s statements and say, “Look! Can you believe this?” But the hit on Carl is of a type that is basically unproductive. When America First conservatives complain about their intraright opponents shutting down debate rather than engaging, this is what they’re talking about. And, when the same conservatives observe that these attacks also seem disproportionately oriented toward gumming up the Trump administration’s staffing and hampering its signature policies, it’s hard to argue. The post The Neoconservatives Are Attacking Trump Nominees Again appeared first on The American Conservative.