Ben Shapiro, JD Vance, and Omer Shem Tov: Two Bickering Eagles and a Canary

 Disclaimer: I didn’t go to TPUSA-AmFest 2025, I merely watched the Rumble streams. Go look up these speeches, they’re all on Youtube and Rumble.

     In December of 2025, in Arizona, Turning Point USA (TPUSA) hosted its annual America Fest (AmFest), which is an event where conservative minded students meet up, hang out, share ideas, learn from other campuses etc. However, this year’s AmFest was a bit different.

     This past year’s AmFest was TPUSA’s first major nationwide conference since the Memorial Service in September of 2025 in honor of their late founder Charlie Kirk. Yet even as it celebrated Kirk’s life and legacy, a widening rift was apparent over the future of the American Right. Nowhere is this clearer than in the opening and closing keynote speeches of the whole event, those by Daily Wire Co-Founder Ben Shapiro, and the 50th Vice President, J.D. Vance, respectively (KWTX; AP News). Both men agree that the American Right must move forward; they sharply disagree on how. Yet, mid-way through the event, a sobering warning came from someone outside this quarrel: Omer Shem Tov. Drawing on his 505 days in Hamas captivity, he warned that darker forces are spreading beneath the noise of the American Right’s squabbles.

     Ben Shapiro began his speech by honoring Charlie Kirk, his legacy, and emphasizing TPUSA’s importance to the future of the American Right and the Nation as a whole. He quickly start’s to address the internal questioning happening amongst conservatives, and more importantly, the idea that truth is important to the future of America. He immediately begins by discussing how one discerns from a person speaking truth, versus who he calls frauds and grifters. Shapiro discusses the fact that the media landscape of 2025 is a quote, ‘informational environment rife with both opportunity and chaos.’, and he goes on to state that legacy media no longer control what one sees and hears anymore. Shapiro stresses that one must stay vigilant in this informational landscape. He stresses that the American Right’s major threat isn’t simply the external leftist threat that celebrated Kirk’s muder, but from internal threats. Ben Shapiro described them as the following,

      

“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 innovation and grievance. These people are frauds and they are grifters and they do not deserve your time. and they are something worse than that.”

 – Ben Shapiro, at AmFest 2025

     There is a lot in that quote, but the idea is simple : wolves in sheep’s clothing. Where certain actors may use all the proper ‘buzzwords’ to get your attention and sound legitimate, but use their platform to spread conspiracism and a dishonest message. Shapiro stresses that one, to survive in this new reality we find ourselves, must be clear, i.e. no generalities when we speak our minds. Which makes sense, speaking in generalities can be a slippery slope into dishonest messaging if interpreted incorrectly. 

     Ben Shapiro immediately then uses Charlie Kirk’s assasination and the aftermath as an example, which is … a choice. He immediately cites the evidence in the investigation on Kirk’s assasination, more or less states that all evidence found points to only one suspect, who Shapiro calls a bunch of loaded labels but I will not indulge that temptation on paper. Then, he goes on a little bit of a rant on the actors who’ve used Kirk’s death as a bounce pad to spread conspiracy theories.

     Shapiro specifically namedrops many commentators on the right, including Candace Owens, Tucker Carlson, Nick Fuentes and Megan Kelly. Candace Owens, in Shapiro’s telling, had spent considerable time since the day after Kirk’s death hurling accusations at TPUSA and people close to Charlie Kirk – suggesting complicity and/or a cover-up and tossing around sprawling conspiratorial insinuations (he mentions everything from foreign intelligence services to Mossad-style allegations and “cover up” narratives). It is important to note that Brian Harpole, Kirk’s head of security, went onto podcaster Shawn Ryan’s show, denouncing these conspiracy theories (Shawn Ryan Show #254). In addition, Erika Kirk, widow of Charlie Kirk and TPUSA CEO, has also addressed and denounced Candace’s behavior stating, “you’re(Candace Owens) making hundreds and thousands of dollars, every single episode … going after the people that I love.”(Fox News, Dec 11 2025). Shapiro isn’t simply calling Candace Owens wrong; it’s that if one has a platform, they have an obligation to call out this sort of behavior explicitly and by name, because words have consequences. Spewing claims as fact without evidence is dangerous — no different from slinging cocaine or fentanyl and profiting from poisoning the general public.

     Shapiro, not long after discussing Candace Owens, discusses a major point: just because someone is your friend, it doesn’t absolve you from calling out their behavior. He immediately calls out Tucker Carloson for not treating Candace’s attacks as disqualifying and Megan Kelly’s posture as ‘trying to understand where Candace is coming from’. In Shapiro’s view, these two failed to realise there is, in his words, ‘only one moral side’ — that of Erika Kirk and her children. In the same vein, he broadens it to platforming: if you host someone vicious or extremist and then “glaze” them, you own that choice. Going on to denounce Tucker Carloson yet again for platforming Nick Fuentes,who’s a known extremist and white supremacist on the right. He cites Nick Fuentes as the kind of figure Charlie Kirk hated and refused to legitimize, and he argues Tucker deserves blame for building Fuentes up—along the same lines as promoting other toxic influencers and pseudo-historian/apologist types. For context, Charlie Kirk himself routinely denounced Fuentes and his ‘groyper’ crowd. One infamous example came at UCLA in 2019, when Donald Trump Jr. walked out of an event due to excessive heckling (The Guardian, 10 Nov 2019). 

     Shapiro ends this speech by stressing that if one has a platform, they are responsible for what they say, who they invite to share that platform, and to substantiate claims properly with evidence. Most importantly, he emphasizes one’s duty to truth, and principle. Stating that one has a duty to speak the truth and speak from principle even if it's not comfortable. Shapiro also tells his audience that we have a duty, to G-d, to self, to family, to country. With his recurring motif in his speching being ‘true victory only comes through truth.’ In essence, Ben Shapiro believes that legitimate actors in the American Right, must act with principle and with a ‘quest for truth’ in the forefront of their motivations. Not long after his speech, a student from Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles asked about the current splintering in the American Right and asked about how one could restore unity. Ben Shapiro answered quickly, and his first line was merely, “... I think that unity has to be reliant on first principles.”

       Vice President J.D. Vance spoke as the closing keynote speaker of AmFest 2025. Before proceeding, I must clarify the scope of this piece. The vast majority of the Vice President’s speech reads like a rehearsal State of the Union: Vance goes through the accomplishments of the Second Trump Administration and encourages the audience to continue to engage politically and put pressure on political leaders. I will not be going over each of these accomplishments and their impact on the country. That is not in the scope of this piece. Instead, I’m focused on how Vance thinks about coalition maintenance — and what he identifies as the American Right’s major threats.

      At the startof his speach, the Vice President thanked Erika Kirk and her support for the Second Trump Administration. Immediately after, Vance opened by saying this line,

“I didn’t bring a list of conservatives to denounce or to deplatform, … But let me just say, the best way to honor Charlie is that none of us here should be doing something after Charlie’s death that he himself refused to do in life. He invited all of us here. … And we have far more important work to do than canceling each other.”

 –Vice President J.D. Vance at AmFest 2025

    Certainly a choice of words, considering how the opening keynote began. In essence, Vance implicitly recast Shapiro’s ‘principle-first’ approach to intra-movement accountability as ‘canceling each other’. He goes on to say that the best way to honor Charlie Kirk is to ‘invite all of us here’. That sounds nice on the surface, and is decent advice for building a coalition. However the way Vance phrased it could lead one to think that forming an effective coalition discourages one to make certain moral and ideological boundries. Which is exactly how not to run a coalition, or at least an effective one. And as a reality check, did Charlie Kirk and/or TPUSA sever ties with anyone over views and issues? Actually, yes. In 2019, a TPUSA brand ambassador by the name of Ashley St. Clair was disgraced and fired after photos surfaced that she was at a dinner with people who were known to be white supremacists and antisemits (JNS, Oct 2 2019). And in November of 2019, at North Carolina State University, Charlie Kirk openly said the following on stage,(Spectrum Local News, Nov 14 2019)

“People who openly identify as white supremacists came to my event tonight.

They have no place in the conservative movement.

We must unequivocally denounce this vile ideology whenever it shows its ugly head.”

–Charlie Kirk on X(formerly Twitter), November 13th 2019

     To be fair to Vance, I don't believe his intent was to encourage the blurring of moral bounderies, as reflected by the Christian framing he used in the latter half of his speech. I won’t be diving into the framing of his speech — it is available in full on YouTube/Rumble. The point is narrower: his phrasing is broad and can be misread. Words matter.

    When discussing ‘who to invite’ it is important to consider that there is a difference in situation and two apply to TPUSA. The first is who to invite to debate, there can truly be no limits, this is the definition of an open forum. The second situation is who to partner up with in a coalition, and this is where principles matter. Consider the great coalitions of history: the Seventh Coalition that finally defeated Napoleon at Waterool or the Allied Powers of the Second World War, they all had commonality in some way. For both, they had a common enemy. For the Seventh Coalition, it was Napoleon I. For the Allies of World War II, it was Hitler and Imperial Japan. These coalitions also had shared goals. For the Seventh Coalition, it was the restoration of the French Bourbon Monarchy and reforming a balance of power in Europe. For the Allies of World War II, it was stopping Germany and Japan from continuing their wars of mass atrocities. Sure, the members in these coalitions had their differences and were broad. The important thing is, they had commonality. Coalitions thrive on commonalities, and there are three important keys. Commonality in Goals, Opponents, and Principles. An effective coalition has major commonalities in two of three of these things. Of course the best sort of coalition has all three keys accounted for. In the first example, the Seventh Coalition aligned across all three keys: goals (a restored Bourbon monarchy and a rebalanced European order), opponent (Napoleon), and principles (a shared commitment to restoring monarchical legitimacy and stability). The Allies of World War II, generally aligned on two of the three keys: goals (ending Germany and Japan’s wars of mass atrocities), and opponents (Hitler and Imperial Japan), while their principles underlying their vision of a postwar world diverged drastically..

      The American Right now faces the question of where its commonalities lie beyond a mere common label. Vance continued his speech and framed the American Right’s primary threat as the American Left, and especially extreme elements. He wants for the American Right to quickly regroup and reform to quote ‘save the country’. This framing suggests that he believes the key for moving forward is commonality in opponents.

     In summary, Ben Shapiro argues the biggest issue in the American Right is internal rot and poor movement hygiene, while Vance believes that the current moment in history doesn’t give the Right the luxury of what he calles ‘self-defeating purity tests’. However, both are true of the American Right: it’s suffering from internal rot and doesn’t have the luxury of time for internal purity spirals. The threat to the American Right is not merely internal or external; for far darker forces are at play.

     Omer Shem Tov was taken hostage by Hamas during the October 7th attacks on Israel. He endured 505 days of captivity and was released in late February 2025. Not long after his release, Omer began appearing in interviews and conducting speaking engagements. He has described his motives for his speaking tour as raising awareness of the ongoing hostage crisis following Oct. 7 (WPBF; CBS; AP News), and as an expression of gratitude to the people who advocated for his release. TPUSA invited Omer Shem Tov to speak at AmFest, and he accepted. He told Jewish Insider that he accepted this invitation to share his captivity testimony, pay tribute to Charlie Kirk, and stress the importance of the U.S.–Israel relationship. Omer Shem Tov’s speech was on Dec. 19 2025 (Israel Campus Coalition) — one day after Ben Shapiro’s speech(TPUSA).

     Omer Shem Tov began his speech by thanking TPUSA for inviting him to AmFest, framing it as a great honor. Then he goes through his experience being at the Nova Music Festival on October 7th with friends, then suddenly being abducted into Gaza by Hamas Terrorists on the back of a pickup truck. Omer spends the first half of his speech describing his captivity. The isolation. The lack of fresh air and sunlight. The starvation and dehydration. The darkness and silence. He described his faith being awakened in the horrid conditions of his captivity. This summary is not doing his testimony justice, I seriously urge you to look it up and watch it.

     After this, Omer quickly frames his experience in captivity as one of a much larger fight. He stated the following.

“What I experienced is not just my story. It is a part of a much larger fight. We have seen this same radical terrorist commit violence in Israel, in Europe, not long ago, just last week in Australia (Boni Hanukkah Terrorist Shooting 12/14/2025), and even here in the United States. Including the attack in Washington DC where two national guardsmen were shot (Shooting of National Guardsmen 11/26/2025). This is the evil we're fighting. This is not a distant conflict. These are terrorists who attack freedom wherever freedom is undefended.” 

–Omer Shem Tov at AmFest 2025

     What is being said here, is blunt. It almost makes the squabbles of movement hygiene versus coalition maintenance, well noise. Omer Shem Tov in less than a few minutes, has stated that the greatest threat to freedom itself, is under a terrorist threat. His claim is simple: this is not distant. And if it is not distant, then our political arguments cannot be treated as harmless sport. The struggle is not confined to Israel, or Europe, or “somewhere else.” Freedom and Moderate America, from both the Left and Right, are under threat not because of internal squabbles, but because of an existential extremist threat that we as a Nation have ignored for far too long. 

     Omer continues by honoring Charlie Kirk by validating his stance on Hamas. He does this by saying.

“Charlie Kirk of Blessed Memory once said, ‘Israel is a civilized country. Hamas are savage animals.’ Take it from someone who spent 505 days as their hostage. He was right.”

 –Omer Shem Tov at AmFest 2025 on Charlie Kirk.

He then re-emphazies that the fight is between Good versus Evil, Freedom versus Terrorism. Ending his speech on an omnious warning about evil spreading.

     Considering everything discussed, what does the future of the American Right hold? Well, it's unclear and that’s disturbing. With Charlie Kirk’s assassination leaving the American Right shattered and splintering all while ‘evil is spreading’, in Omer Shem Tov’s words, is not a great position for any coalition to be in. Shapiro is correct that there is an internal rot within the American Right and it has to be addressed. Vance is also correct that the American Right is not really in a position to spiral into purity inquisitions, but not for the reason he stated in his speech. Omer Shem Tov openly and explicitly announces the real threat, an attack on freedom itself from a global and domestic terrorist threat. Coming from a guy who’s literally looked in the eyes of his terrorist captors, that is not the kind of omen to ignore.

      And you, dear reader, who’s probably exhausted with me analysing speeches and phrasing, must be a bit worried and confused as to what you should do? Frankly, and I hate that I sound like my professor, you need to read history. Figure out how modern drama fits into the patterns of history. We always pray that people don’t repeat history, but History has a way of forcing her hand to make patterns that rhyme in the embroidery that is time. Be detailed, look at the ‘big picture plots of history’ and the minutia of what were seemingly minor squabbles, since many times minor squabbles end up affecting the ‘big picture plot’ or even forming its own. If you’re on campus, I’d like to invite you to play a little game, bear with me, I’m almost done.

      Think about the different clubs, especially those of a political nature, and how they interact with each other, spend a few weeks taking notes. Pick one club to fixate on, whether its TPUSA, SSI, SJP, YDSA, or whatever exists on campus, pick one. After some time, say a good 8 weeks, if you’ve been diligent, read through these notes. Who’s in the leadership and more importantly how did they behave? How do they recruit? Were they victims of political violence? If so, where does it come from and why? These are just a few questions you’ll need to ask yourself looking through these notes. However, after these, focus on an aspect, leadership behavior to allies and/or opposition, club behavior with other clubs and/or student body, etc. again just pick one. Then look through history, and find at least a few examples that may fit. You’ll find pretty quickly that there are some situations, even at the campus level that rhyme with history, which is creepy. The lesson is simple however, we are in a time when it's paramount to read history to make sense of the mess we call our current reality. The American Right may need to look to its past for guidance on how to move forward in this dizzying time with darker forces snooping around their squabbles.

E.L.