Only Cowards Tolerate Conspiracy Theorists

By Ben Shapiro

Friday, December 19, 2025

 

This is adapted from a speech The Daily Wire’s Ben Shapiro delivered Thursday night at AmericaFest, an annual conference hosted by Turning Point USA. The speech follows remarks Shapiro made on Wednesday at the Heritage Foundation, where he argued that conservatives must denounce influencers that proffer conspiracy theories.

 

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It’s an honor to be here at Turning Point USA.

 

It’s even more of an honor to follow Erika Kirk, a heroic figure and a true American patriot. Erika and her children are in all of our hearts.

 

And of course, this is a bittersweet moment. It’s absolutely bitter because of the murder of our friend Charlie Kirk—an irreplaceable human being. But it’s also sweet to see the number of people who continue to remember Charlie each and every day, and to carry on his mission.

 

Today, I want to talk about the future of the country.

 

And the future of the country relies on the future of the conservative movement.

 

It relies on what TPUSA defines as its core mission: “freedom, free markets, and limited government.”

 

And it relies, most of all, on truth.

 

Because victory—true victory—cannot be achieved without truth. Victory without truth is victory for a lie. And that is no victory at all.

 

And unity without truth is no unity. It is merely solidarity in falsehood.

 

You see, we live in a chaotic time. In a time when lots of people are asking lots of legitimate questions about the conservative movement. What ought we think about the relationship between free markets and traditional virtue? How should we craft a pragmatic foreign policy that spreads our interests and upholds our ideals? What governmental means are appropriate to achieve political ends?

 

All of these questions aren’t new; they’ve been asked for as long as human beings have talked about politics.

 

And over the course of this conference, you’ll hear a lot of opinions on a lot of these questions. I have my own perspectives on them, of course—you can hear them every day. My fundamental values are simple: peace through strength on foreign policy; traditional values in social policy; free markets on economics.

 

But I want to talk about something even more important: how to discern those attempting to speak truth from frauds and grifters.

 

Because something is new: an informational environment rife with both opportunity and chaos. Opportunity, because the legacy media gatekeepers are no longer in charge of what we see and hear. And chaos, because an anarchic informational environment means that we must be smart in how we assess the information and arguments we hear.

 

Why does this matter? Because today, the conservative movement is in serious danger. It is in danger not just from a left that all too frequently excuses everything up to and including murder. 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 enervation and grievance. These people are frauds, and they are grifters. And they are something worse: a danger to the only movement capable of stopping the left from wrecking the country wholesale.

 

So today, I want to go through five obligations that people who speak to you on matters of importance have to you. I want to speak to you of our duties.

 

Truth

 

Our first duty is truth.

 

We owe you the truth.

 

That means we should not mislead you; it means we shouldn’t hide the ball; we shouldn’t be deliberately obscure about what we are telling you. We have an obligation to clarity and to honesty.

 

This means that we must be clear in our language. We should not traffic in generality. We should not say things like “they” shot Charlie without specifying what we mean by “they.” The person who allegedly shot Charlie, and whom all the evidence points at, is a gay, trans-loving furry. If we are going to target ideological movements, we should talk about the fact that the radical trans movement treats all who oppose it as existential threats. Or if we are going to talk about the Democratic Party making room for the radical trans movement and echoing its inflammatory rhetoric, we should talk about that. Those are specific problems, and they require specific responses. When people say “they shot Charlie,” however, they are instead trafficking in vagary that results in increased hatred without proposing any effective response. They are fostering despair and rage. And that makes everything worse.

 

We must also be honest about what people say and do, regardless of what we believe that means coalitionally. It is the job of politicians to build coalitions; it is the job of those of us who try to shape public opinion to hold those politicians to account, to hold them accountable to our value systems. We must not let fear of audience anger deter us from telling the truth; we must not let fear of other hosts deter us from telling the truth.

 

So, for example, if Candace Owens decides to spend every day since the murder of Charlie Kirk casting aspersions at TPUSA and the people who work here—to cast aspersions at Mikey McCoy, and Andrew Kolvet and Blake Neff and Tyler Bowyer, and yes, at Erika 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. Erika and TPUSA never should have been put in the position to have to defend themselves against such specious and evil attacks, particularly in a time of mourning. And the people who refused to condemn Candace’s truly vicious attacks—and some of them are speaking here tonight—are guilty of cowardice. Yes, cowardice. The fact that Candace has been vomiting all sorts of hideous and conspiratorial nonsense into the public square for years on end while others fly cover for her is just as cowardly.

 

Principle, Not Personal Feeling

 

Second, because we owe you the truth, we owe you the duty to speak out of principle, not personal feeling.

 

It should not matter whether we “despise” someone or “love” them. The question is what they say and do, and whether those things are morally decent or not. On a political level, do they foster freedom, justice, and prosperity? On a personal level, do they treat others as they would wish to be treated?

 

Personal feeling is not a substitute for moral judgment.

 

To take, again, the Candace Owens situation as an example, friendship with public figures who do or say evil things is not an excuse for silence on the matter. Politics isn’t The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants. Politics is about principle. And if you are willing to sacrifice basic truth and simple principle in favor of emotional solidarity, you have betrayed your fundamental duty to the American people.

 

First off, I should break the omerta here, and just be clear: The notion that people in our industry are close friends—like we all take holiday breaks with each other—is generally untrue. We’re business colleagues, the same way that everybody else has business colleagues. We don’t attend other hosts’ graduations, or hang out at each others’ houses for Thanksgiving. We see each other at conferences and talk on the phone with each other and all the rest. But even if it were true that other public figures were our best friends, that does not relieve us of our duty to speak out of principle, and not cover up evil or shy away from addressing it out of friendship.

 

So no, Tucker Carlson, it is not an excuse to go silent on Candace’s targeting of TPUSA, or to mirror her insane line of questioning, because you “love” Candace personally. The same holds true of Megyn Kelly—a person I consider a friend—characterizing Candace as a “young mother,” and thus shying away from condemning her actions or fibbing about them. That’s simply a nonstarter. Meghan Markle is a young mother. So is Ilhan Omar, for that matter.

 

And when Megyn says that “my goal and my job here is to try to understand—yes, where Candace is coming from on this,” as she did this week, and says she sees no purpose in inserting herself “into this on one side,” that’s a moral and logical absurdity. There is only one moral side here: Erika’s side. The side of the widow with two children whose husband was shot live on camera in front of the whole world. Friendship with the person accusing TPUSA of a cover-up of Charlie’s murder is no excuse for cowardice.

 

Responsibility

 

Third, and relatedly, we have a duty to take responsibility for what we say and do. If we hire awful people, we are responsible for that—and I have some experience there, as you might suspect. That means that if we offer a guest for your viewing, we owe it to you to ask the kinds of questions that get at the truth. If we agree with the guest, that’s fine—but we should own it. So, for example, if you host a Hitler apologist, Nazi-loving, anti-American piece of shit like Nick Fuentes—the Nick Fuentes who said that the vice president of the United States is a “fat gay race traitor married to a jeet,” the person who said that Charlie Kirk was a “retarded idiot” and that he “took Turning Point USA and fucked it. . . and that’s why it’s filled with Groypers”—and you proceed to glaze him, you ought to own it. There is a reason that Charlie despised Fuentes, and indeed chided Dinesh D’Souza for even debating him: He knew that Fuentes is an evil troll, and that building him up is an act of moral imbecility. And that’s precisely what Tucker Carlson did: He built Nick Fuentes up. He ought to take responsibility for that, just as he ought to take responsibility for glazing pornographer and alleged sex trafficker Andrew Tate, or for mainstreaming fake historian and Nazi apologist Daryl Cooper as “America’s best and most honest popular historian.” Hosts are indeed responsible for the guests they choose and the questions they ask them.

 

Evidence

 

Fourth, because we have a duty to truth, we have a duty to provide you evidence.

 

Emotive accusations, conspiracy theories, and “just asking questions” is lazy and stupid and misleading. None of them are a substitute for truth. So when Candace Owens says, “I don’t know know, but I know,” that’s retarded, and we are all more retarded for having heard it. When Steve Bannon, for example, accuses his foreign policy opponents of loyalty to a foreign country, he’s not actually making an argument based in evidence—he’s simply maligning people with whom he disagrees. Which is par for the course from a man who was once a PR agent for Jeffrey Epstein.

 

Our duty to provide you evidence means we must do much more than “just ask questions.” Just asking questions is what my 5-year-old does. And it’s cute when it comes from a 5-year-old. But when grown men and women spend their days “just asking questions” without seeking answers, they’re lying to you. In fact, they’re doing something worse: They’re seeding distrust in the world around you, and enervating you in the process.

 

So, for example, if Tucker Carlson gets onstage here at TPUSA and claims, without evidence, that Epstein was running a Mossad rape ring being covered up by the Trump administration, they are not uncovering a conspiracy or effectuating a solution. They are claiming a special provenance to information they won’t let you see, which builds their power and leaves you with none. They are also implicating in their speculation actual human beings, like Kash Patel and Dan Bongino and Pam Bondi, and yes, the president of the United States, even if they are too pusillanimous to say it. And that means you won’t trust any of those people in the future. You haven’t gotten smarter. You’ve just been manipulated.

 

When forced to demonstrate evidence, these same people will refuse to provide it. They’ll claim ignorance. They’ll pretend that they’re outside the system, and have no access to actual information—they’re “just asking questions,” of course. But many of these same people have direct pipelines to the informational sources! Tucker Carlson is good friends with the vice president. He could call him up for clarification at any time. But he won’t. Because that might undermine the empty speculation.

 

This doesn’t mean that there aren’t conspiracies—there are. But actual conspiracies require actual evidence. Yes, there was a Russiagate conspiracy, and we know the names of the people involved, like Hillary Clinton and Fusion GPS and James Comey and Loretta Lynch and Peter Strzok and Adam Schiff, and what they did. Yes, there was a Covid-19 conspiracy: We know that Anthony Fauci worked to shut down alternative solutions from people like Jay Bhattacharya.

 

But when people posit a conspiracy and provide no evidence, then they are doing you a fundamental disservice. And they are making you stupider in the process.

 

Solutions

 

Finally, because it is our job to make the lives of our audience better-informed—and just generally better—we have a duty to propose solutions.

 

That’s why we have to talk about our problems—in order to find the solutions. That’s, after all, what politics is supposed to be about: finding solutions to our common problems. If we speak endlessly about the problems we face, without ever positing a solution other than “wrecking the system” or centralizing power in a cult-like figure, we are not finding solutions. We’re merely exacerbating problems.

 

“Just asking questions,” positing vague conspiracies, raving like Alex Jones about secret confederacies that control your life—none of it makes your life better. In fact, it makes it markedly worse. That’s because if you truly come to believe that nothing in your life is in your control, you won’t take control of your life. You’ll despair of your ability to change your own circumstances. And then you’ll fail.

 

And you must not fail.

 

Because here’s the truth: For all of its problems, many of which are real and serious, the United States is still the greatest country in the history of the world. We have the greatest constitution ever devised by man, and the greatest founding philosophy ever put to paper in the Declaration of Independence. In this country, you can make of yourself what you will—and if there are true obstacles standing in your way, we can work together to remove them.

 

That, by the way, is the essence of conservatism: that we live in a world created by God, with a logic and a rationale; that we, as human beings, were created in God’s image, with creative capacity and the ability to choose; and that in a free country of limited government and defined powers, with property rights and equality under the law, our destiny is in our hands—and that we all have a defined duty to make the most of that historic opportunity.

 

Anyone who tries to convince you otherwise is lying to you, and making your life actively worse in the process.

 

That lie may feel good, at least for the moment. It may excuse us from taking the corrective action we can take on a personal level to fix our lives. It may give us someone else to blame for our own failures.

 

But in the end, that lie kills—not just your future, but the country we’ve been given.

 

Conclusion

 

So, for those of us who talk for a living, that is our job: to discuss America’s problems with truth and evidence; to provide possible solutions; and to encourage people to succeed.

 

We who speak to people on a regular basis, who have a microphone and an audience, have duties to you:

 

The duty to speak the truth.

 

The duty to speak from principle, not personal feeling.

 

The duty to take responsibility for our actions.

 

The duty to provide you evidence—to do more than conspiricize or “just ask questions.”

 

And the duty to posit real solutions.

 

If we fail in those duties, you ought not listen to us.

 

But you have duties, too.

 

Far more important duties, to God and to yourself: to do the best for yourself and your family and your country with the abilities God gave you; to be grateful for this extraordinary country; to celebrate what we have all been given; and to fight to preserve it.

 

All of that begins with truth.

 

We owe you that quest for truth.

 

You owe yourself that quest for truth.

 

True victory only comes through truth.