This is the New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker.

Welcome to The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. At the end of December, Turning

Point USA, one of the most important conservative organizations in the country, held its annual conference, America Fest.

The speakers included mainstays of conservative media like Tucker Carlson, Riley Gaines,

Megan Kelly, and Jesse Waters.

Kicking things off was Ben Shapiro.

Founder of the Daily Wire and host of one of the most popular podcasts around.

Shapiro began by celebrating Charlie Kirk, Turning Point's co-founder, who had been

murdered just a few months earlier.

I really believe that the best way to judge a goodness of a man is to see the goodness of his wife and his children.

And on that measure, Charlie was unsurpassed.

Erica and her children are in all of our hearts.

But Shapiro's real subject that day was the dangers facing the conservative movement.

Instead of focusing on opponents on the left or the few

remaining never-Trumpers, he looked inward. Shapiro warned of people he called charlatans and

grifters. He called out Tucker Carlson by name for friendly interviews with the accused sex

trafficker Andrew Tate and with anti-Semites like Daryl Cooper and Nick Fuentes.

If you host a Hitler apologist, Nazi-loving, anti-American piece of refuse like Nick Fuentes,

you know the Nick Fuentes, who said that the vice president of the United States is a, quote,

fat gay race trader married to a...

If you have that person on your show and you proceed to glaze him, you ought to own it.

Shapiro called out Megan Kelly for hosting Candace Owens, Shapiro's former colleague,

...