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The conservative world erupted this month as Tucker Carlson announced he would buy property in Qatar and Ben Shapiro took the stage at AmericaFest to publicly denounce him as one of the “frauds and grifters” diluting the movement. Carlson’s declaration and Shapiro’s broadside have exposed a poisonous undercurrent in parts of our movement — a readiness to purge dissenters rather than defend the principle of free speech.
On December 7, 2025, at the Doha Forum, Carlson told the Qatari prime minister that he planned to purchase a place in Doha to prove, as he put it, that he is “an American and a free man” who will live and speak where he chooses. That frankness set off an eruption from self-appointed guardians of conservative purity who rushed to denounce him for choosing to spend his own money where he pleases.
Predictably, some rivals and loudmouths on the right seized the moment to attack; figures such as Senator Ted Cruz and others mocked or condemned Carlson online, turning a personal decision into a tribal test. The fury was amplified on social platforms, where performative outrage now substitutes for sober judgment and principled disagreement.
Ben Shapiro’s speech on December 18, 2025, at Turning Point USA’s AmericaFest went further, naming people he believes are undermining conservatism and using broad labels to dismiss them instead of engaging with inconvenient facts. That kind of moralizing from media gatekeepers reads less like a defense of principle and more like a campaign to police thought within our ranks.
Conservative readers should be wary of the new orthodoxy: if loyalty to an organization or an echo chamber becomes the standard, then conservatism dies the quiet death of conformity. Carlson’s willingness to speak to foreign audiences and refuse to be boxed in by establishment expectations is exactly the stubborn independence the right needs, not the sort of timid, career-minded censorship Shapiro and others now peddle.
Hardworking Americans know the difference between principled opposition and petty internecine warfare. We should defend freedom of speech and the right of conservatives to question both foreign policy groupthink and domestic media elites, rather than join televised shaming rituals that only serve the left by making our movement weaker.
