Civil war: Ben Shapiro and Tucker Carlson tear MAGA apart

Tucker Carlson reacts on the day of a fireside chat with Republican presidential nominee and former U.S. President Donald Trump at 'Tucker Carlson Live on Tour' at Desert Diamond Arena, in Glendale, Arizona, U.S. October 31, 2024.

President Donald Trump’s decision to start a war against Iran has caused a civil war within his political coalition, the so-called MAGA (Make America Great Again) movement. This schism is perhaps best personified by two right-wing pundits, Ben Shapiro and Tucker Carlson – and it reached a new level of intensity on Thursday.

For supporting Trump’s war, which he started after being persuaded by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Shapiro has previously been attacked for his pro-Israel views and seen the ratings crater for his publication, The Daily Wire. By contrast Carlson has officially left the Republican Party, declaring in June that he could not support “a political party that is not loyal to the United States. I voted Republican my entire life, I have been a consistent defender for 35 years of the Republican party, but there is no defending this. I'm out.”

On Thursday Shapiro doubled down, posting on X an anti-Carlson promotion for his new video on his increasingly-unpopular YouTube channel. While Shapiro’s previous attacks focused on the Iran war, on this occasion he took on Carlson’s critiques of capitalism. In his promotion he showed an image of Carlson’s face made up to look red and angry.

“The American Dream is the promise of a process: if you work hard, and make smart and virtuous decisions, you will live a better life than your parents, and your children will live a better life than you do,” Shapiro posted. “That process requires free markets, free minds, equal justice before law, and social fabric. Government’s job is to protect the American Dream. Don’t listen to the demoralization agents trying to destroy it in the name of utopian schemes, Left and Right.”

On Wednesday night Carlson provoked Shapiro with a post critiquing Shapiro's defense of high prices under Trump, saying “Ben Shapiro to America: shut up and eat your goyslop. Overpriced burritos are more than you deserve.”

“Goyslop” is an anti-Semitic term, which promotes the false claim that Jews conspire as a group to create expensive and low-quality food for non-Jews to eat. At the same time, Shapiro has repeatedly defended Israel’s decision to convince America to declare war against Iran. He has also repeatedly vilified Muslims and defended Israel’s human rights abuses against Palestinians.

Speaking with this journalist for Salon in 2019, Shapiro described being targeted with anti-Semitism, saying that “my view is that you have to call it out wherever you see it. You and I have gotten anti-Semitism from some of the same places, obviously. I mean, I’ve gotten enormous amounts of hatred from the alt-right, and while folks on the far left try to lump me in with the alt-right, that is the height of absurdity on every possible level.”

He added that “it’s honestly one of the most reprehensible things that I’ve experienced personally, people trying to lump me in with people who have legitimately threatened to kill my children … so that’s always a party.”

In that same interview, Shapiro also defended capitalism by saying that all parents can afford to feed their children in America. Elaborating on this, he argued that the government should seize children from families whose parents were too poor to be able to afford to feed them without free school lunches.

“I don’t see how that lacks compassion in any way,” Shapiro told this journalist. “If you are unable to feed your child, and you cannot find a social fabric to help you take care of that child, your child should not be with you. You’re living in the freest, most prosperous country in the history of the world. It is not all that expensive to pay for a child’s lunch.”

Also in 2019, Carlson spoke with this journalist for Salon, a conversation in which he critiqued capitalism. He expressed sympathy with President Abraham Lincoln’s 1861 quote — which this journalist introduced him to — that “labor is prior to and independent of capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital and deserves much the higher consideration.”

“Hold on, I’m writing this down,” Carlson said. “I hadn’t read that. OK, first, God bless you for noticing that. You are like the only person noticing that part of the script [his critique of tax rates that benefit the wealthy], which to me was the essence. That’s the big question, tax rates.”

He later added, “the hope for me, as the guy who wrote it — the thing that interested me the most, the thing that I was most upset about — was the tax differential between labor and capital, and you never hear that. I literally can’t remember the last time I heard someone even mention that fact.”

In that same interview, Carlson downplayed the importance of racism and sexism in American life.

“I would never make the case that racism doesn’t exist, or it’s not a factor,” Carlson said. “Of course it does and it is. But in the end, our racial differences or sex differences are immutable differences that can’t be fixed. They can’t be changed. They’re set at birth, so it’s not only counterproductive, but in my opinion, it is an intentional diversion away from conversations about things that we could potentially change, like tax rates.”

He also hinted that conversations about those issues were an intentional diversion from economic matters.

“I hope I don’t sound like a conspiracy nut, because I’m not,” Carlson said. “I’m not claiming the moon landing was fake, but I do think it’s very interesting that 95 percent of our conversations are either about Trump’s temperament, or about race and gender, and those are the only topics you think about.”

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