If you think the title of Ben Shapiro's latest podcast episode lacks subtlety ("Tucker Carlson Sabotages America"), wait until you hear the rest of it. Shapiro characterizes Carlson as a "super spreader of vile ideas ... coward ... terrible friend ... and master of gaslighting." In Monday's monologue, Ben Shapiro did something most commentators on the Right are too scared to do: He drew a bright red moral line and named names. His warning was blunt. The American Right, he argued, is being deliberately fractured by a small but loud faction of white identitarians orbiting around Nick Fuentes — and that faction is being normalized and laundered into the mainstream by Tucker Carlson and, shockingly, defended by institutions like the Heritage Foundation. Shapiro begins by defining what this fight is not about. It is not about free speech, and it is not about “cancellation.” Fuentes has every legal right to speak, he says, and Tucker has every right to interview him. Shapiro stresses that he has opposed de-platforming Fuentes, even though he considers Fuentes “odious and despicable.” Free speech, properly understood, is freedom from government coercion — not a right to be promoted, signal-boosted, and flattered by major conservative platforms. What this is about, Shapiro argues, is drawing moral lines. Conservatives once understood that refusing to promote certain ideas — Nazism, open racism, calls for political violence — was not “cancellation,” it was sanity. Choosing not to launder those ideas for a mass audience is itself an exercise of free speech and free association. To make the stakes clear, Shapiro walks through Fuentes’ own words. Fuentes has encouraged followers to “kill, rape and die” for him. He mocks Jim Crow as no big deal, claims white people are “justified” in being racist and avoiding black Americans, celebrates “Hitler Friday,” questions the Holocaust in cute “cookie” analogies, and repeatedly blames “the Jews” for every war and for secretly running the...
No hoodwinking or hornswoggling here.
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