Ben Shapiro is absolutely right: conservatives must clean up their act - Adam Chapman

The Daily Wire editor used his opening speech during Turning Point USA’s annual youth conference - the first one held since Founder Charlie Kirk's assassination - to launch a blistering attack on the grifters and charlatans on the Right.

Shapiro singled out Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens for peddling conspiracy theories and falsehoods that echo antisemitic tropes.

He's spot on. Carlson's recent highlights include interviewing Nazi apologist Daryll Cooper, who claimed it was Churchill, not Hitler, who was 'the true villain of WW2' and Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes.

Owens, who left Shapiro's Daily Wire back in March amid tensions over alleged antisemitism, has flooded social media with baseless claims about Israel's malign influence in the world, including that Israeli spies were involved in Kirk’s death.

She has also claimed Jews were "in control" of the slave trade, and in her latest video on X, she holds up a copy of "The Talmudic Jew" by August Rohling, who has been widely discredited as an antisemite.

Before the usual suspects start howling that I am "shutting down legitimate debate" about Israel's actions in Gaza, it's worth pointing out that this taste for conspiracy extends far beyond the Jewish state.

Owens has made bizarre claims about the French First Lady, covid vaccines and moon landings, while Carlson likes to get into Ukraine, UFOs and 9/11.

This “just asking questions” tactic beloved by much of the online Right is a way to promote conspiracy theories while maintaining plausible deniability.

It's also incentivised in a world where algorithms select for outrage.

But it's doing significant brand damage and shattering trust in institutions.

Douglas Murray's recent bust-up with podcaster Joe Rogan and comedian Dave Smith demarcated this new dividing line on the right, which pits elitism against the impulse to challenge prevailing narratives.

This is having real-world effects in the realm of foreign policy. American Firsters reject the neoconservative belief that America should be the world's policeman, or as Shapiro put it, "peace is achieved through strength".

In this regard, the new Right appears to have gobbled up the complete works of Noam Chomsky.

Indeed, the lunacy on the Left is increasingly being mirrored on the Right.

While the Democrats imbibed woke orthodoxies, from critical race theory to trans activism, conservatives could credibly argue that they were the arbiters of truth and reason.

That is no longer the case.

I don't sign up to everything Shapiro has to offer mind you - I part ways with him on abortion and gun control, for example.

But he's right to stand up for traditional Conservativism, which approaches new ideas with suspicion and defends institutions.

Shapiro's position as an economic libertarian and social conservative at least makes sense.

What does this new intake stand for?