Tucker Carlson unloaded on Ben Shapiro during his speech at Turning Point USA’s Conservative Student Action Summit in Tampa on Friday night for his “absurd” dismissal of concerns over the Jeffrey Epstein files, accusing him of blindly trusting the government and discouraging tough questions.

Earlier this week, the Department of Justice said that Epstein had no secret “client list” of elite pedophiles and reaffirmed his 2019 death was a “suicide.” When questioned about the findings by a reporter, President Donald Trump grew irritated and asked, “Are you still talking about Jeffrey Epstein?”

The handling of the case has prompted calls for Attorney General Pam Bondi’s resignation and massive discontent within the MAGA movement.

In a video about the news, Shapiro urged his followers to move on and parroted the government’s claims about what happened.

“I don’t have any reason to believe those people are lying to me, and they have better information than I do,” Shapiro said. “All I can do, rationally speaking, from my own perspective, is say that I believe them.”

Carlson took issue with Shapiro’s take and made it known to a room packed with young conservatives.

“I watched Ben Shapiro yesterday,” Carlson began as the crowd booed.

Carlson continued, “No, before you boo him, I thought he made a really solid point. He’s like, ‘It happened a long time ago. Who cares? And by the way, we should trust the government and whatever the bureaucrats tell us. And by the way, it’s wrong to ask a lot of unauthorized questions.’”

“I just wanna go on the record to say that, no, that’s absurd. And it’s exactly the kind of thinking that I personally voted against in the last election,” Carlson said.

During his speech, Carlson also asserted that Epstein was working on behalf of the Israeli government.

Carlson explained:

I think the real answer is Jeffrey Epstein was working on behalf of intel services, probably not American. And we have every right to ask, on whose behalf was he working? How does a guy go from being a math teacher at the Dalton School in thelate 70s with no college degree to having multiple airplanes, a private island, and the largest residential house in Manhattan? Where did all the money come from? And no one has ever gotten to the bottom of that because no one has ever tried. And moreover, it’s extremely obvious to anyone who watches, that this guy had direct connections to a foreign government.

Now, no one’s allowed to say that the foreign government is Israel because we have been somehow cowed into thinking that’s naughty. [cheers] There is nothing wrong with saying that. There is nothing hateful about saying that. There’s nothing anti-Semitic about saying that. There’s nothing even anti-Israel about saying that…

And you have the right to expect your government will not act against your interests, and you have a right to demand that foreign governments not be allowed to act against your interests. [cheers] That’s not creepy. It shouldn’t be forbidden. And yet all of us have trained ourselves to believe that you can’t say that somehow. That that’s like too naughty and forbidden. And the effect of making that off-limits has been to create a lot of resentment and I’ll say it, hate online, where people feel like they can’t just say, “What the hell is this? You have the former Israeli prime minister living in your house? You have all this contact with a foreign government. Were you working on behalf of them? Were you running a blackmail operation on behalf of a foreign government?

By the way, every single person in Washington, D.C. thinks that. I’ve never met anyone who doesn’t think that. I don’t know any of them that hate Israel. But no one feels they can say that. Why? And I think the longer we play along with it, the more subterranean and creepy and hateful the conversation becomes. So, I think it’s better just to say it right out loud.

https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2025/07/watch-tucker-carlson-blasts-absurd-ben-shapiro-urging/