Thoughts and Observations of the Spectacle That is Turning Point USA

As most readers are doubtlessly well aware, the first day of the Turning Point Convention on December 18, 2025 was a notable event for the way that Erika Kirk and above all Ben Shapiro made spectacles of themselves. Vivek Ramaswamy also saw fit to tell Americans what their identity is and how it includes him and his kind. In that speecch he insisted that “There is no American who is more American than somebody else,” replete with more “magic dirt” nonsense. He even made the obligatory allusion to Martin Luther King, Jr” with talk about “content of your character.”

Watching Shapiro in particular was a most unenviable task. Concentrating on his speech is made all the more difficult because of the intrusive but utterly correct utterance from any sensible internal monologue: “how do you do, fellow whites?” That spectacle, replete with a devastating confrontation about the USS Liberty in the question and answer portion, was overshadowed by Tucker Carlson’s speech. Shapiro of course denounced Tucker Carlson for not in turn denouncing Candace Owens and more particularly for daring to have Darryl Cooper aka Martyrmade and above all Nick Fuentes on as guests. Shapiro’s speech seems part of a desperate bid to counteract the discrediting that has occurred over the past few weeks. Time will tell if it reverses that trend, but so far things seem to be turning against the Israeli shill. The very next evening, Steve Bannon skewered both Shapiro and America being beholden to Israeli and Jewish interests, culminating with the declaration that “Ben Shapiro is like a cancer that metastasizes.” Megyn Kelly then lambasted Shapiro in a sit-down with Jack Posobiec, even stating she no longer considers Shapiro a friend.

While Shapiro’s bold provocations and the reaction to it are certainly interesting, comments by Tucker Carlson are likely of far greater interest to this publication and its readers for various reasons, above all because this speech was part and parcel of Carlson’s propensity to hedge controversial comments with statements that negate, qualify, or “backpedal” from these statements, either in the same presentation or in the context of recent statements and presentations. Carlson’s speech is of course in the context of having the guests that Shapiro denounced, as well as the interview with Piers Morgan for which the foppish British twit has been rightly excoriated, including—among many other things—forsaking his nation and its posterity “for a good curry:” a particularly contemptible utterance for many different reasons, not least of which that curry of course originated from Britain and because, as Rowan Atkinson quipped in a famous skit, “now that we [have] the recipes, is there really any reason for them to stay?”

Carlson begins with a stern rebuke of Shapiro’s comments. His reproach of Shapiro’s denunciation of Carlson reads in pertinent part:

I watched [Shapiro’s speech]. I laughed. I laughed. that kind of bitter sardonic laugh that emerges from you and like upside down world arrives when your dog starts doing your taxes and you’re like, “Wait, it’s not supposed to work this way.” To hear calls for. . . DEPLATFORMING AND DENOUNCING PEOPLE AT A CHARLIE KIRK EVENT. . . “WHAT? This is hilarious.” [laughter] Yeah, this is hilarious.

That Carlson laughed at Shapiro (both as he delivered his comments and in the account of his immediate reaction) cannot be emphasized enough. Carlson commented further, urging that Shapiro’s rant was antithetical to what Charlie Kirk himself stood for:

I really thought that the impulse to deplatform people or even to use the word platform as a verb, which it’s not. It’s a noun. Don’t steal my nouns. Deplatform and denounce. Why haven’t you denounced somebody else? The whole. . .. red guard cultural revolution thing that we so hated and feared on the left that we did everything we could to usher in a new time where you could have an actual debate. I mean, this kind of was the whole point of Charlie Kirk’s public life. . . . I think that he died for it. I really believe that.

After this brief foray, Carlson focuses much of his attention mitigating or even disclaiming earlier sentiments in past presentations discussed above and doubtlessly others as well. These comments operate from the basic underlying “universal principle” against “hating” people for how they were born, that “it is immoral to hate people for how they were born.” These comments admonish against “hating everyone in a group.” He stressed that it is immoral to punish a people for crimes individuals in that group did not commit. He even asserts that this is a commandment under the Christian religion and morality: “[Y]ou are prohibited by. . . Christianity from hating people for how they were born because God created them with his spark in his image because they have souls.”

From these other assertions he condemned so-called “Islamophobia” and antisemitism. He did however use these admonitions as a vehicle to condemn prejudice and discrimination against white males, particularly in relation to college admissions practices and even hiring practices in recent years and even over the past several decades. As important as this message is, it is needlessly hampered, neutered even by talk about this supposed universal principle discussed above. Carlson unequivocally denounces (in this speech and elsewhere) in-group preferences for whites, a necessary ethos to protect white, European posterity for the evils he confronted Piers Morgan about as just one example. It is impossible, for example, to rectify and prevent The Great Replacement in Britain and Europe in any meaningful way without measures such as remigration which necessarily entails enacting policy based on group identity.

Carlson of course buttressed such rhetoric by absurd off-the-shelf appeals to civic nationalism. Such appeals include the ridiculous assertion that “Most Americans have more in common” than they do not, a demonstrably false assertion. He also asserted that racially conscious commentary should be denounced because “they are trying to divide the country,” a mindless slogan about as stupid as “The Democrats are the real racists.” None of this should be persuasive to anyone, but the crowd reaction suggests otherwise.

Many of these assertions and contentions require the firmest, most vehement repudiation, even as so much of this counterproductive rhetoric relies heavily on various norms and mores deeply embedded in the American tradition and traditional mainstream conservatism more particularly. To some limited extent, judging individuals as such is fine as far as it goes (not far at all, really). Such musings notwithstanding, to only judge individuals only as individuals without looking at the larger picture from the collective whole is to embrace willful ignorance at its worst. No society can function without making group judgment based on various criteria that define a group. Consider for example age requirements for things like driving, voting, and what not. There are doubtlessly youngsters under 16 who possess the maturity, skill, and even height necessary to drive responsibly and safely, and yet society nonetheless operates on a rule requiring an age of 16 because those youngsters who defy this general rule are outliers. Up until recently, society correctly precluded women from traditional male roles such as combat duty in the military, on-the-beat law enforcement and so on because humanity is a sexually dimorphic species and is so despite certain outliers such as women like Brigitte Nielsen being 6’1 that defy, to some limited extent, general differences between the sexes such as strength and height. There are black individuals who defy certain trends, such as an aggregate, collective IQ gap between one-to-two standard deviations, or who defy the collective racial resentment, even racial hatred that defines much of the black populace, or who are not part of “a racial commitment to crime” that characterizes and defines wild overrepresentation of blacks in crime statistics. The existence of such individuals—who are indeed outliers—does not negate the overall trend that defines a majority of the black population. Nor does it give cause to ignore these overall trends or to refrain from policy considerations based on these trends.

In very real, important ways, Carlson deludes himself and his audience by insisting that we are all just individuals. Innate characteristics that are inherent to any individual, most particularly race, matter a great deal. Differences in race are real—they are not just a social construct—just as race is a core, fundamental component of culture, identity, and any cohesive polity defined by common race, language, and history.

External factors such as cultural milieu, religious upbringing, and myriad others further dispel such naïve notions about individual autonomy. Even a cursory review of history and human nature demonstrates that individuals are profoundly determined and influenced by a variety of external factors, including the time and circumstance one is born into, just as they are influenced by what others do in a variety of ways that one can scarcely fathom. Consider as just one example that people often mimic what others do. This is reflected in various phenomena associated with social contagion, from suicide clusters, to transgender nuttery and bulimia rubbing off on a small group of individuals to others, to how a married couple is far more likely to divorce if other couples in the same social circle have divorced or are considering divorce. There are other phenomena, such as the “mere exposure effect,” which dictates that a critical mass of people will like music, cinema, and other expressions of culture merely due to exposure to these cultural expressions.

Carlson makes an even worse error, conflating in-group preference for hatred and asserting that whites advancing white, European interests on a collective basis—that is, having an in-group preference at all—is tantamount to hating individuals in a different group. Implicit in this statement is the absurd idea that such supposed hatred or what might be better described as animus in the context of very legitimate grievances is hatred for each and every individual in that group. Doubtlessly, more and more whites are harboring animus for other groups, and not without good reason. “Black fatigue” is real, and the phrase (as well as a more virulent variant with one racial epithet in particular) has become a familiar adage in Internet parlance for very good reasons: namely, that whites have legitimate grievances about the black collective, involving wildly disparate black involvement in violent and other forms of crime, the racial resentment if not ancient hatred that a critical mass of blacks harbor against whites, and a whole host of other grievances that render black people as a collective irredeemable and incompatible with white society. The same principle applies to Pakistanis, Indians, and other imposters and their role in the reverse colonization of the British Isles and the columns of black and brown hordes in Germany and Europe at large who have no right to even set foot on the sacred continent, let alone seek “refuge” there. A person can rightly hold very negative views about these and other groups collectively while still acknowledging there are outliers to these groups. That there are outliers to these trends, as there are for almost any phenomenon under the sun, does not negate the requirement for collective action, nor does it negate sensible observations and conclusions about the group as a whole. To save British and European posterity will require remigration and resettlement of all such imposters, or at least the vast majority of them. And this is true even if some of them are otherwise nice and decent people. The number of decent, upstanding black individuals does not negate the overall general trend at hand, easily observed and reinforced through centuries of experience and history, that the multiracial experiment has failed, is doomed to fail, and that there are irreconcilable differences between whites and blacks that cannot be solved except by divorce and separation, preferably on a mutually amicable basis.

These and other such utterances, including how Carlson stupidly deflated his confrontation with Piers Morgan about The Great Replacement with silly, pointless disclaimers that he likes Pakistanis and there are many nice individuals who are part of this or that group, demonstrates once again that figures like Carlson are of limited utility. Although some insist they serve no purpose, writings and presentations such as those by Tucker Carlson can be used to help persuade others on those matters they get right, leaving the work of others to explain how and why this sort of senseless pandering and equivocation is wrong. The principal utility of figures like Carlson is that they have helped normalize formerly scandalous topics like anti-white discrimination, The Great Replacement, and other topics that Carlson himself has emphasized but that were taboo even a couple short years ago. That utility must however be harnessed in a way that is separated and bifurcated from these sorts of cowardly, simplistic, and self-defeating qualifications and other sorts of “back-pedaling.”

This unfortunate propensity to backpedal—in comparison and contrast to more sensible utterances—again demonstrates how essential the vital faculties of reason, discernment and discrimination are. Ultimately, to what extent Tucker Carlson will be a net benefit by interviewing figures like Darryl Cooper or even the somewhat unsavory Nick Fuentes will depend on to what extent the larger audience possesses and utilizes these faculties, or more particularly how writers, streamers, and other thought leaders use these faculties and then apply them in any discussion or analysis about events like these. These faculties, used in concert, allow both the individual and a group to discern that Carlson’s denunciation of evils such as The Great Replacement anti-white discrimination, and even his repudiation of Ben Shapiro’s naked Zionism are laudable, but are of limited utility unless such pointless and counterproductive qualifications such as those discussed above are discarded and repudiated outright. The application of these essential faculties in turn allow both the individual and the white collective to discern that such comments against in-group preference, appeals that we are“all God’s children,” admonitions that people can only be judged as individuals are both preposterous and harmful. This underscores the vital role the new populist right has in highlighting when figures like Tucker Carlson “get it right,” while also undertaking the most vital task of arguing and persuading how and why this backpedaling could not be more erroneous or harmful.

https://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/2025/12/22/tucker-carlson-backpedals-once-again/