A little over a year after the assassination of Charlie Kirk, Turning Point USA has become the playground for neocon Ben Shapiro to propagandize for the War on Iran of which Kirk was vehemently opposed — a stunning co-opting of his legacy allowed by the organization's new leadership.
Shapiro headlined TPUSA’s ‘Love It or Leave It’ tour at the University of Texas at Austin on Oct. 7 and then at the University of Iowa on Oct. 8. During his appearance, Shapiro defended the war on Iran, which Charlie Kirk spent his final days rallying President Trump and the MAGA movement to oppose, and even said that the U.S. should go further in exacerbating the conflict.
"I think the big mistake in the Iran war was stopping. I think that we should not have paused. I think the pause earned us nothing. I think the MOU is a mistake back in April," Shapiro said, trashing President Trump's efforts at bringing the war to an abrupt end.
“I was advocating back in April that what we actually should do is we should bomb their oil refineries on Carg Island, bomb South Pars, destroy their capacity to pump and refine and then say that the Saudi’s, UAE, Bahrain and Israel, you guys have oversight now,” Shapiro continued.
A questioner from the audience brought up the point to Shapiro that if the U.S. had bombed Iran’s oil fields, they would have retaliated by bombing the Saudis and the UAE’s energy infrastructure — causing the U.S. economy to crater. Shapiro responded that the massive economic burden placed upon Americans would be a small price to pay to harmed Israel’s top enemy in the region.
"That is called the cost of war and if what it means is that Iran is unable to recover economically, then Iran is unable to recover economically. I was unaware that war is a completely anodyne enterprise,” Shapiro said.
“I will say I’m kind of astonished in a certain way by the attribution of great loss to the United States in this war given the fact that any comparative effort by the United States in literally all of our history. This amounts to a drop in the bucket in terms of cost,” he added.
The War on Iran has contributed to the affordability crisis that could hurt Republicans in the Midterms, but that does not concern Ben Shapiro in the slightest. He can always hightail it to Israel if America falls into ruin. Most working and middle-class Americans, unfortunately, do not share that luxury.
If the midterms do prove to be disastrous for Republicans, expect Shapiro and other neocons to line up a series of fall-guys and scapegoats to shirk blame for the predictable failures of the policies which they advocated. And there will be no Charlie Kirk around with the courage and the clout to hold them accountable.
