At a Heritage Foundation event promoting his new book, "Lions and Scavengers: The True Story of America (and Her Critics)", conservative commentator Ben Shapiro seized the opportunity to deliver a blistering critique of Tucker Carlson.
Speaking with the foundation’s president, Kevin Roberts, Shapiro warned that Carlson is steering the conservative movement, and the MAGA base, into a dangerous, unprincipled direction.
If we care about conservatism, if, as Heritage Foundation proclaims, our goal ought to be to formulate and promote conservative public policies based on the principles of free enterprise, limited government, individual freedom, traditional American values and a strong national defense. Then we must stand up against those who would pervert and twist the conservative movement into a movement without principles, or worse, a movement that promotes the very opposite of the principles that conservatives hold dear.
We must fight for Conservatism. pic.twitter.com/asgJfScXME
— The Ben Shapiro Show (@BenShapiroShow) December 18, 2025
In his 15-minute speech, he accused Carlson of flirting with socialism, giving softball interviews to dictators like Vladimir Putin and the president of Iran, and hosting “conspiracists on nearly every topic under the sun, uncritically nodding at their most bizarre assertions.”
“Carlson, of course, reserves his chief foreign policy ire, unsurprisingly, for Israel with which he has a peculiar obsession,” he added. “And of course, Tucker Carlson has hosted and glowingly treated America’s foremost Hitler apologist, Nick Fuentes."
“A conservatism that treats Tucker Carlson as a thought leader is no conservatism.”
When the New York Post reached out to Carlson for comment, he responded, "Too funny."
Carlson has become obsessed with “just asking questions,” yet never offers answers grounded in evidence, only speculation. Questioning authority is valuable, but rejecting basic truths and challenging every historical claim under the sun (even something like Winston Churchill being a WWII hero) while embracing every counterhistorical theory signals a collapse of trust in all truth. Society cannot function without trust in our institutions, and actors like Carlson seek to undermine all trust in everything but himself. He is doing little but trying to hijack a movement, President Trump began.
We must be careful not to mistake Carlson for being an arbiter of truth, but a distorter of it.