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1ST TIME TRUMP NO SHOW 10 YRS? JDV? RUBIO? IRAN WAR

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President Donald Trump vowed that in his second term, he would go after the foes that he claimed "weaponized" the government against him. In a deep dive on the failed effort, New York Magazine writer Andrew Rice explained that little has come from it.

Writing Monday, Rice described the story of Jan. 6 attacker Jared Wise, the FBI agent who egged on pro-Trump rioters at the U.S. Capitol as they assaulted Capitol Police officers. While Wise recently resigned, he was a key player in the so-called "weaponization working group" within the Justice Department.

"The term weaponization was one of Trump’s rhetorical tricks, a fancy way of saying 'I know you are, but what am I?'" wrote Rice. "So what if prosecutors had indicted him on four occasions and convicted him of 34 state felony counts? That just meant the government was criminal. During his campaign, Trump had promised retribution. They had tried to get him, so he would get them back"

Wise was hired to join the "weaponization working group" along with other close Trump allies. Attorney General Pam Bondi created a target list in her memo: "Jack Smith, the special counsel who twice indicted him; Alvin Bragg, the Manhattan district attorney who convicted him; and New York attorney general Letitia James, who had brought a civil fraud case against him and his family."

Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, who oversaw the effort officially, was a key Trump defense lawyer who purports to be dedicated to Trump's weaponization cause.

After it became clear that lawyer Ed Martin couldn't get confirmed to be a U.S. Attorney, he took over the day-to-day efforts of the "working group." Another on the team is Neil W. McCabe, a national personality for the Real America’s Voice channel, a pro-Trump political commentary channel.

The story said that Martin prepared for his role as the "captain" of the weaponization working group by reading books about the Italian Mafia. He then divided the DOJ leadership into “competent and incompetent villains," one ex-federal prosecutor told Rice.

Rice explained that during the first Trump administration, the DOJ was populated primarily by Federalist Society members who simply saw Trump as a means to achieve their political ends. "In Trump II, the conservative bar was no longer sending its best."

Blanche and Martin began to clash, however, as it became clear that the two were taking different approaches, creating a "source of tension," one department official involved in the operation described. Blanche wanted to hold people accountable for weaponization "without becoming the weaponizer yourself." Martin was an arrest-at-all-costs kind of ideologue.

The only thing the DOJ has been able to achieve is going after New York's James for stating on a mortgage application that the house would be her primary residence. Another targeted former FBI Director James Comey for allegedly lying under oath before Congress. The U.S. attorney appointed by Trump wouldn't put his name on the cases. He was ousted and they found someone who would. Judges found the appointment to be unlawful and contrary to the laws that set deadlines for appointing a U.S. attorney. Both cases have fallen through.

Another effort was to prosecute Sen. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), but the prosecution couldn't move forward, and those in the U.S. attorneys' office fear it has stalled completely.

According to the report, Blanche has been furious about the failed attempts, saying this is what happens when they're not cautious in their approach.

Someone familiar with Blanche's thinking told Rice, “That’s how big wins end up as gigantic, embarrassing losses."

The weaponization working group under DOJ expanded. They began working with other Trump loyalists at the White House, IRS, Department of Homeland Security, Office of the Director of National Intelligence and CIA. They were looking for anyone in President Joe Biden's administration they could find who broke the law.

Trump was furious. According to right-wing host Steve Bannon, the president wanted to see "perp walks." He hasn't and it has been over a year.

Wise, the FBI agent who participated in Jan. 6, was once a well-respected agent. One former colleague called him "smart" and "detail-oriented." Some had other opinions. One alleged that after Wise became a squad supervisor, “a number of things fell through the cracks." Wise grew irritated that he was taken off monitoring homegrown extremists to manage staff.

“This happens in the Bureau all the time,” the former colleague told Rice. “It’s called orders.”

Wise later said in court documents that it was Trump who inspired him to leave the FBI. He claimed he heard someone disparage Trump and was so furious he quit. He then took a job working for Project Veritas, a political organization that at the time was trying to shift into "something resembling a political-intelligence service," the report said.

Meanwhile, Martin has failed in his efforts to go after Comey and James. He appeared on Bannon's show and was pressed to work on the 2020 matters. Martin said he was on it. Since then, the DOJ has seized ballot documents and servers from the Fulton County Board of Elections, despite the judge expressly saying they could only take "copies." Officials complained that by taking everything, there was no longer a way to compare any discrepancies.

Behind the scenes, Blanche wasn't supportive of the cases.

"They tried to shut it down,” McCabe told Rice of the prosecutions.

Martin ended up ensnared in his own scandal, allegedly leaking grand jury information from their Schiff probe. He was stripped of all of his titles and would only be working on pardons from that point forward. Since then, Blanche has been hit by Martin's allies as having a "Democrat mentality."

The report noted that U.S. attorneys discovered that a way to make a name for themselves is by using their offices to go after Trump foes. So, subpoenas dropped for "John Brennan, the final CIA director under President Obama, who was one of at least 30 current and former intelligence officials who were served at that time."

“What they’re doing here is exactly what they accused the former administration of doing,” said one person the FBI contacted for information about the earlier Trump probes, Rice said. “Taking that tinge of what they want to believe and turning that into a criminal prosecution.”

The DOJ then began going after six lawmakers who worked in the military or intelligence. They have failed there too.

Overseeing all of this was Blanche. A "dismayed" former friend told Rice, “I keep waiting for there to be some red line that he won’t cross."

Over the recent CPAC event in Texas, Blanche told the crowd he's still pressing to be successful.

"Everybody’s afraid that in the next administration, if we don’t win, we’re going to all be investigated and indicted," Blanche said. "And why are they afraid? Because that’s exactly what happened during the last administration."

At each turn in every investigation where someone in the Trump orbit was prosecuted, it was approved by a grand jury and a judge. In the case of several who were convicted and later pardoned by Trump, juries found them guilty, or they entered a plea agreement, admitting their guilt. Thus far, the same has not been true of the targets of the "weaponization working group."

Rice noted that about a day after he sent fact-checking requests to the Justice Department, Wise announced his resignation. A few hours later, Bondi was fired by the president. He alleged on X that he could only “fully expose the abuses by the FBI and DOJ” if he were “outside of government.” Blanche now runs the DOJ.

“Americans are in the painful process, of realizing that our government isn’t so different than the evil ones they’ve told us about for many years," Wise wrote on X.

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rww

03/30/2026

by

Kyle Mantyla

During a Friday CPAC appearance, FCC Chair Brendan Carr bragged that he’s remaking the media by pushing out left-leaning figures, declaring, “[President Donald] Trump is winning.”

Adam Johnson has rarely voted and embraces his role as clown prince of Jan. 6. Floridians will decide whether a man who tried to upend democracy can help lead one.

January 6 insurrectionists say police used excessive force while trying to stop them from storming the Capitol.

Review of Kai Schwemmer’s broadcasts undermines claim ‘process of growth’ had led him to abandon bigoted views.

The president is the "undisputed champion of beautiful clean coal," and he has the trophy to prove it.

Viral clips of the far-right white supremacist are growing his audience.

CPAC was never cool, but it was once exciting. In 2026 the conference was no longer a hotbed of insurgents against a Republican establishment, let alone a place where factions of conservatives maneuvered for dominance. It wasn’t even an out-and-out MAGA pep rally that celebrated the ascension of Trump. It didn’t have a clear function anymore. Instead, it just felt like an event held out of habit.

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MAGA age divide over Trump on full display at CPAC: 'It's Biblical' - Alternet.org

AN 3 26

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'Wrong answer': Conservative CPAC audience cheers impeachment - Alternet.org

'John Brennan's days as a free man are numbered': CPAC speaker - Alternet.org

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AN TC 3 26

There is a pall over the Make America Great Again, or MAGA, movement. Donald Trump overpromised. His public support has fallen. Some “America First” die-hards now openly criticize him.

Amid war, economic challenges, democratic backsliding, the Epstein files and Americans shot dead in the street by government agents, Trump’s support is softening and his vow to bring a “golden age of America” is looking more like a political winter for Trump and his MAGA movement.

This is my big takeaway from this year’s annual Conservative Political Action Conference, or CPAC. The event, organized by the American Conservative Union, launched with an international summit on March 25, 2026, and runs through March 28 in Grapevine, Texas.

Don’t get me wrong. The attendees are decked out in red, white and blue MAGA merch: sequined “Trump” purses and jackets, USA flag bags, ties and headbands, and, of course, iconic red MAGA caps. As always, they chant “USA,” even if not as often or as loudly as before.

Starting with the first talk by Rev. Franklin Graham, speakers here are still singing Trump’s praises. They underscore what they regard as major Trump 2.0 accomplishments: combating illegal immigration, cutting taxes, a budding economic boom, deregulation, U.S. gas and oil output surging, administrative state winnowing, pro-Christian policies and pulling the plug on the “woke” agenda.

These issues are foregrounded in sessions with titles like “Walls Work,” “Don’t Let Woke Marxists Raise Your Children,” “MAGA vs. Mullah Madness,” “Commies Go Home” and “Cancelling Satan.” In between, pro-Trump advertisements checklist Trump’s accomplishments.

This rose-tinted view is to be expected. After all, CPAC – a cross between a political rally, networking mixer and MAGA Comic-Con – is all about galvanizing the conservative base. Beneath the surface, however, MAGA is churning.

Major grievances

An anthropologist of American political culture and author of the book “It Can Happen Here,” I have been studying MAGA for years and attending CPAC since 2023. Attendees at last year’s CPAC, held a month after Trump’s inauguration, were jubilant, with nonstop talk of “the comeback kid” and “the golden age.”

Why is the mood at this year’s CPAC more subdued?

Enthusiasm for Trump is dampened because some of his supporters feel he has betrayed America First principles, failed to fulfill key campaign promises and been unable to supercharge the economy. Here are their major grievances:

‘America First’ vs. ‘Israel First’

“America First” is the guiding principle of MAGA. It encompasses border security, prioritizing the U.S. economy and ensuring rights such as free speech. It also means avoiding unnecessary wars.

This is why Trump’s support of the June 2025 “12-day war” on Iran led Tucker Carlson, Marjorie Taylor Greene and other MAGA influencers, who have tens of millions of followers, to criticize Trump. The conflict, they contend, served Israel’s interest – their phrase is “Israel First” – not those of the U.S.

Their criticisms became even more pronounced after the U.S. again began bombing Iran on Feb. 28, 2026. The criticism is part of a growing MAGA fissure with pro-Israel stalwarts such as conservative activists Mark Levin, Laura Loomer and Ben Shapiro, who support U.S. intervention in the Middle East. Things got so bad that after Levin called his fellow conservative media personality Megyn Kelly “unhinged, lewd and petulant,” she dubbed him “Microp---- Mark.”

But the MAGA unease with the war extends well beyond the “America First” influencers.

It includes figures from the fringe far right such as provocateur Nick Fuentes, center-right “brocaster” Joe Rogan, and even the Trump administration itself – as illustrated by an intelligence officer whose resignation stated, “Iran posed no imminent threat to our nation, and it is clear that we started this war due to pressure from Israel and its powerful American lobby.”

Notably, none of the main Trump critics have been scheduled to speak at this year’s CPAC. Some now call it “TPAC,” or the Trump Political Action Conference.

The Epstein files

MAGA also has a strong populist and anti-elite streak of conspiracy thinking.

Large numbers of Trump supporters, for example, believe there is an elite plot to what they call “replace” the white population with nonwhites through mass immigration. Many also bought into the QAnon conspiracy theory, which centers on the idea that Trump is fighting Satanic, deep state elites who are running a child sex trafficking operation.

On the campaign trail, Trump vowed to take down political, deep state and global elites. He also promised to release the Jeffrey Epstein files, which QAnon conspiracists and others believe prove elite debauchery, including pedophilia.

Trump didn’t deliver. He backtracked and stonewalled on the release of the Epstein files, raising MAGA suspicion that Trump himself is implicated or is protecting elites. Remarkably, one recent poll found that roughly half of Americans, including a quarter of Republicans, believe the Iran war was partly meant to distract from the Epstein files.

Economy and immigration

Trump is also facing headwinds on the bread-and-butter issues of the 2024 election: the economy and immigration.

At CPAC, speakers have repeatedly given him kudos for shutting down the border. Acknowledging the MAGA in-fighting, conservative commentator Benny Johnson said he wanted to “white pill” – or buck up – the audience by reminding them that Trump had stopped an “invasion” and brought “criminal alien border crossings down to zero.”

As a photo of Trump’s bloodied face after the assassination attempt in Butler, Pennsylvania, on July 13, 2024, was displayed, Johnson claimed, “Our God saved President’s Trump’s life for this moment.”

But fewer Republicans approve of his handling of immigration compared with a year ago. Like many Americans, a growing number have misgivings about the strong-arm tactics used by government immigration enforcement agents in places such as Minnesota.

For many, the economy remains a serious worry. A recent poll, conducted before the Iran war, found that the vast majority of Americans, including large numbers of Republicans, are concerned about inflation, jobs and the cost of living. Health care, including the lost Obamacare subsidies, is also a source of consternation.

Few people believe the economy is “booming” – let alone that a “golden age” has arrived – as Trump and his allies often proclaim. The war with Iran, which has led to stock market declines and gas pump hikes, has only added to the unease.

MAGA ‘shattered’?

Amid the recent MAGA in-fighting about the Iran war, conservative podcaster Tim Pool proclaimed, “The MAGA coalition is shattered.”

Not exactly. Despite the many challenges Trump is facing, the vast majority of his MAGA base voters still support him – including almost 90% backing his war with Iran.

But Trump’s support has eased in several ways. First, even his hardcore supporters worry about the economy, and they want him to declare victory and exit the war. And second, Trump has lost support on the edges. Many people in the key groups with which he made crucial inroads in the last election – such as young men and nonwhite voters – have turned from him. The same is true for independents and other Trump voters who don’t identify as MAGA.

Trumpism isn’t dead, as the MAGA-merched crowds here at CPAC make clear. But Trump is struggling through a political winter that could signal the early stages of his MAGA movement’s decline.

Alex Hinton, Distinguished Professor of Anthropology; Director, Center for the Study of Genocide and Human Rights, Rutgers University - Newark

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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RWW

03/18/2026

by

Kyle Mantyla

Markwayne Mullin has an incredible story. The Republican U.S. senator is an entrepreneur and former mixed martial arts fighter. That unique experience has been a core part of Mullin’s political brand and featured in multiple campaign ads, including one that showed off his punching bag workouts alongside footage of President Donald Trump declaring, “Markwayne Mullin, you don’t want to fight with him.” However, following his nomination by Trump to lead the Department of Homeland Security, some aspects of Mullin’s record have come under scrutiny.

The late child sex offender Jeffrey Epstein's "sprawling web" continues to ensnare the MAGA movement.

Pastor-theologian Douglas Wilson advocates theocracy, the restriction of the franchise from women and nonbelievers, and much else—and he is closer than ever to real power.

A DHS insider noted Gregory Bovino had an internal investigation looming when he announced he was quitting.

Sen. Dave McCormick (R-PA) claimed that having an identification card is required “to have a child” in the U.S. He did not elaborate as to when or to whom he thinks the ID would need to be presented.

Once a failed Senate candidate, Jackson Lahmeyer hopes to benefit from a party captured by Christian Nationalism.

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User Clip: Steve Bannon Nazi Salute

C-SPAN

https://www.c-span.org › video › user-clip-steve-banno...](https://www.c-span.org/video/?c5154286/user-clip-steve-bannon-nazi-salute)

Feb 20, 2025 — Steve Bannon throws a Nazi salute on stage at CPAC 2025. The crowd loves it.

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maga since forever’: mercenary mogul Erik Prince pushes to privatize Trump deportation plans

Notorious Blackwater founder is lobbying allies in White House for private contractors to assist in mass deportations

Ben Makuch

Sun 16 Mar 2025

Silicon Valley has played a sizable part in the early days of Donald Trump’s new administration, but another familiar face in the Maga-verse is beginning to emerge: businessman Erik Prince, often described by his critics as a living “Bond villain”.

Prince is the most famous mercenary of the contemporary era and the founder of the now defunct private military company Blackwater. For a time, it was a prolific privateer in the “war on terror”, racking up millions in US government contracts by providing soldiers of fortune to the CIA, Pentagon and beyond.

Now he is a central figure among a web of other contractors trying to sell Trump advisers on a $25bn deal to privatize the mass deportations of 12 million migrants.

Erik Prince and Daniel Noboa

Ecuador enlists founder of Blackwater private army as ally in ‘war’ on crime

Read more

In an appearance on NewsNation, he immediately tried to temper that his plan had any traction.

“No indications, so far,” said Prince about a federal contract materializing. “Eventually if they’re going to hit those kinds of numbers and scale, they’re going to need additional private sector.”

But the news had people wondering, how is Prince going to factor into the second Trump presidency?

Sean McFate, a professor at Georgetown University who has advised the Pentagon and the CIA, said: “Erik Prince has always been politically connected to Maga, the Maga movement, and that’s going back to 2015.”

Prince, himself a special forces veteran and ex-Navy Seal, is a known business associate of Steve Bannon, the architect of Trump’s first electoral win. Prince even appeared with him last July at a press conference before Bannon surrendered to authorities and began a short prison sentence for defying a congressional subpoena.

“He comes from a wealthy Republican family,” said McFate, who has authored books on the global mercenary industry and is familiar with Prince’s history. “His sister, Betsy DeVos, is the former education secretary, and he’s been a Maga, not just a Maga, he’s been a Steve Bannon, Maga Breitbart Republican, since forever.”

Beginning during the two Bush administrations, Blackwater was a major recipient of Pentagon money flowing into wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. But a massacre in Baghdad at the hands of some of his contractors led to prison sentences, congressional inquiries and blacklistings of the firm.

Years later, Trump would come to the rescue: pardoning all of the Blackwater mercenaries involved in the massacre.

Now, with the current administration, which is doling out free advertising to Elon Musk and other Maga loyalists, Prince has a new and familiar ally in Washington.

“This is a big market time for him,” said McFate. “He’s very quiet when there’s a Democrat in the White House and gets very noisy when a Republican, especially Trump, is in the White House; I expect this to be one of many things he will try to pitch.”

Do you have tips about private military contractors or the world of Erik Prince? Tip us securely here or text Ben Makuch at BenMakuch.90 on Signal.

McFate said Prince is nothing if not an “opportunist” and an “egotist” with a penchant for getting into media cycles.

“If Trump or somebody says ‘That’s an interesting idea,’ he will pump out a PowerPoint slideshow proposing an idea, whether or not he can do it,” he said. Prince also has the ear of Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, and was a character witness for her Senate confirmation.

There’s no denying Prince is a relentless pitchman, offering world governments billion-dollar plans to privatize wars or other less expensive espionage activities. For example, he was recently named to the advisory board of the London-based private intelligence firm Vantage Intelligence, which advises “sovereign wealth funds” and other “high-net-worth individuals”.

Post-Blackwater and under new companies, he has proposed missions in Afghanistan, Ukraine, Congo, Libya and, purportedly, Venezuela – a country he often mentions as ripe for overthrow on his podcast, Off Leash. rare earth minerals?

A senior commander in an alliance of former Venezuelan soldiers who defected from the Chavista regime told the Guardian his organization has been asking Prince for help against the country’s current president, Nicolás Maduro.

“We have sent messages to Mr Erik Prince to try to see if we can meet,” said Javier Nieto Quintero, a Florida-based former captain in the Venezuelan military and leader of the Venezuelan dissident organization Carive. “If he wants, we can provide help, support in terms of information, intelligence, or any other area based on the freedom of our country.”

Nieto Quintero, who said Prince has yet to respond, and Carive was used in a failed operation against Maduro in 2020 led by a former Green Beret. In what is notoriously known as the “Bay of Piglets”, six of Nieto Quintero’s men were killed and close to 100 captured, including two former US servicemen recruited for the job who were freed two years ago from a Caracas prison.

Prince’s eye has undoubtedly been focused on Venezuela, a country with vast oil reserves that has long been in the crosshairs of Trump’s retinue. In recent months, Prince has supported a Venezuelan opposition movement called Ya Casi Venezuela, claiming to have raised more than $1m for it over the summer. The Maduro regime is now investigating Prince’s links to the campaign, which it paints as a sort of front for western governments fostering its downfall.

Venezuela has reason to fear Prince and his connections to American spies: the CIA, with a rich history of covert actions in Latin America, was at least aware of a plot to overthrow Maduro’s predecessor Hugo Chávez in 2002.

“We were in contact with Ya Casi Venezuela, but a meeting never took place,” said Nieto Quintero. “We have continued to grow and strengthen our ranks and our doctrine, our plans, our institutional, military, security and defense proposals.”

Prince is officially active in the region. Last week, Ecuador announced it would be partnering with Prince in a “strategic alliance” to reinforce the country’s controversial “war on crime” with his expertise.

Prince did not respond to a request for comment sent through his encrypted cellphone company, Unplugged. Ya Casi Venezuela did not answer numerous emails about its relationship with Prince. As of now, no business deal between the Trump administration and Prince has been signed or publicly disclosed.

But across his career as both a shadowy contractor and a political figure, who just graced the stages of the latest Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) to applause and then spoke to Harvard Republicans, the public and private sides of Prince remain somewhat antithetical.

“He likes to be in the news, which makes him a very bad mercenary,” said McFate. “Frankly, most mercenaries I talk to in Africa, the big ones, despise him.”

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duck 4 25

YouTube

https://www.youtube.com › watch?v=Omt50rGZ4n8

FULL SPEECH: Nayib Bukele, President of El Salvador, Addresses CPAC in ...

President of El Salvador Nayib Bukele addresses CPAC 2024 in Washington, D.C. Stay up to date on Right Side Broadcasting Network coverage, go to rsbnetwork.c...

Created by:Right Side Broadcasting Network

96K views

24 min

News for cpac bukele

Wait, why did Trump take a jab at the "dictator" conservatives love last night?

motherjones.com

271d

Milei and Bolsonaro attend fascistic CPAC conference in Brazil

wsws.org

271d

El Salvador's president gets rock-star welcome at conservative gathering outside Washington

apnews.com

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AP News

https://apnews.com › article › cpac-nayib-bukele-trump-conservative-dc454b92a57fad8907b376b6eacf5b7e

El Salvador's president gets rock-star welcome at conservative ...

NATIONAL HARBOR, Maryland (AP) — El Salvador's President Nayib Bukele received a rock-star welcome Thursday at a conservative gathering outside Washington as he urged people to "unapologetically fight" against what he called "dark forces.". At the annual Conservative Political Action Conference, Bukele told people to use El Salvador as a warning.

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Vox

https://www.vox.com › 2024 › 2 › 24 › 24081448 › cpac-trump-republicans-bukele-milei

Why two of Latin America's most controversial leaders are at CPAC - Vox

Feb 24, 2024The two leaders are important voices at CPAC as conservatives work to draw in Latin American voters before the election in November; Bukele in particular is popular among Salvadorans living in the ...

Videos for cpac bukele

8:56

Why El Salvador's Bukele Is a Model for Trump's Inner Circle | WSJ

366K views

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CPAC - President Nayib Bukele recalls the story of an...

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CPAC on Instagram: "At CPAC, President Nayib Bukele discussed the importance of the people deciding the direction of their nation without being told what to do by globalists. That is what helped him transform El Salvador into the safest nation in the western hemisphere. Now, he's helping President Trump make America safe again by housing dangerous illegal immigrant criminals in an El Salvador prison."

1.8K views

Instagram

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CPAC on Instagram: "President Nayib Bukele recalls the story of an illegal immigrant who was arrested and released SIX TIMES by U.S. law enforcement. President Trump: "That was the liberal establishment, but they're not running things anymore in this country. We're now run by people with great common sense""

6.5K views

Instagram

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CPAC on Instagram: "No one elected George Soros to impose his agenda on the people. But the people of El Salvador elected Nayib Bukele and Soros hit a brick wall there. In November, Americans elected Donald Trump, and now, Soros is hitting a brick wall here too."

6.8K views

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TRUMP & BUKELE: A BUDDING BROMANCE?

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NPR

https://www.npr.org › 2024 › 02 › 23 › 1233577076 › el-salvador-president-nayib-bukele-receives-a-warm-welcome-at-cpac

El Salvador President Nayib Bukele receives a warm welcome at CPAC

Feb 23, 2024PERALTA: Indeed, says Cuellar, in that speech at CPAC, Bukele presented himself as the, quote, "evolution of the Trumpian formula," a president who got past the democratic guardrails to bring a ...

Author:Eyder Peralta

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YouTube

https://www.youtube.com › watch?v=u0e_grWEcB0

JUST IN: El Salvador President Nayib Bukele Warns Of 'Dark ... - YouTube

At CPAC, El Salvador President Nayib Bukele decried "globalism" and warned about social and civilizational decline.Fuel your success with Forbes. Gain unlimi...

Created by:Forbes Breaking News

4M views

24 min

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NBC News

https://www.nbcnews.com › news › latino › growing-alliance-republicans-latin-american-right-on-display-cpac-rcna139795

Republicans invite Latin America's Nayib Bukele, Javier Milei to CPAC

Feb 23, 2024El Salvador President Nayib Bukele and Argentine President Javier Milei will speak at the conservative conference this week, and CPAC has already held spinoffs in Brazil and Mexico.

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cpac.org

https://www.cpac.org › post › conservative-leaders-flock-to-bukele-inauguration-in-el-salvador

Conservative Leaders Flock to Bukele Inauguration in El Salvador - CPAC

Jun 5, 2024CPAC joined a cohort of American conservative leaders that flocked to El Salvador to attend the inauguration of President Nayib Bukele for his second term. Donald Trump Jr, Kimberly Guilfoyle, Representative Matt Gaetz, Senator Mike Lee, reporter Sara Carter, and more conservative figures attended the inauguration and festivities. "It is quite brave of Nayib Bukele to welcome prominent ...

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Los Angeles Times

https://www.latimes.com › world-nation › story › 2024-02-23 › la-na-pol-el-salvador-bukele-cpac

El Salvador president gets big welcome at U.S. conservative event - Los ...

Feb 23, 2024El Salvador's autocratic president gets rock-star welcome at pro-Trump CPAC event . ... Bukele said Thursday that it had taken 50 years; two wars; 250,000 deaths; the displacement of a third of ...

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cpac.org

https://www.cpac.org › post › cpac-celebrates-inauguration-of-el-salvador-president-nayib-bukele

CPAC Celebrates Inauguration of El Salvador President Nayib Bukele

Jun 4, 2024El Salvador President Nayib Bukele was elected to a second term in February of this year and was sworn in just a few days ago on June 1. Matt and Mercedes Schlapp along with a CPAC delegation that included Elaine Beck, Veronica Birkenstock, former ambassador Ron Johnson, and more attended the inauguration festivities. "El Salvador has a great President in President Bukele.

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La República

https://larepublica.pe › mundo › 2024 › 02 › 24 › que-es-el-cpac-evento-que-reune-a-milei-bukele-trump-y-otras-figuras-politicas-conferencia-de-accion-politica-conservadora-estados-unidos-2168496

¿Qué es el CPAC, evento que reúne a Milei, Bukele, Trump y otras ...

Feb 24, 2024Nayib Bukele, presidente de El Salvador, fue el primero de los líderes de Latinoamérica en hablar en el foro que inició el miércoles 21 y culminará este sábado 24. En su intervención ...

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RWW VID

02/21/2025

by

Kyle Mantyla

Jack Posobiec told CPAC that Trump is not violating the Constitution because "Trump is the living embodiment of the American Constitution."

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'You have been gaslit': CPAC oozes MAGA's 'male inequality' agenda

People react as U.S. President Donald Trump (not pictured) addresses the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) annual meeting in National Harbor, Maryland, U.S., February 22, 2025.

Matt Laslo February 23, 2025

NATIONAL HARBOR, MD — This just might be the year American men finally overcome centuries of political, cultural and marital oppression that have ravaged the gender and kept guys locked out of key policies, like the Violence Against Women Act.

That’s what one conservative vendor peddled at this year’s Conservative Political Action Conference. And they’re not alone. The oft-repeated message being subtly driven into CPAC attendees – is that the era of male victimhood is over.

Culture wars are now king.

In years past, the conservative confab focused on fiscal responsibility and cutting federal spending. This year — even as Republicans in Congress and the White House debate trillions of dollars in budget cuts — leaders stoked gendered culture wars.

“Don't allow this broken culture to send you a message that you're a bad person because you're a man, because you like to tell a joke, because you like to have a beer with your friends or because you're competitive," Vice President J.D. Vance told CPAC attendees Thursday.

Eradicating diversity, equity and inclusion, or DEI, initiatives may have merely been a stepping stone. Conservatives have rallied behind a new, if antiquated, gospel of manhood as they work to turn back time and eviscerate what they call "wokeness" in real time.

At CPAC, this is truly a man’s world, or will be soon if the resurgent right succeeds.

“Male Inequality”

Masculinity is everywhere here at CPAC. It’s tangible, making this year’s conference feel more like an all-male retreat than the policy-focused escape the annual event was before President Donald Trump remade American conservatism in his image.

In these conservative confines, there’s no gender pay gap (even as statistics show women earn roughly 75 cents for each dollar a man makes). Women’s suffrage, practically speaking, is a fairy tale of a bygone era. While Bibles abound, the Book of Ruth and its strong, central female cast, is an afterthought (if a thought at all).

The real problem is “Male Inequality,” according to the newly launched Men’s Equality Network, or MEN.

‘Areas of Male Inequality’ — a pamphlet MEN are handing out at this year’s CPAC.

At CPAC, MEN seeks to drum up support for the hashtag #genderequalityformen, while also giving away free caps emblazoned with “Watchdog: Stop the gender agenda.”

MEN's tagline succinctly sums up the mission that drives the group: “assuring due process, fairness and equal opportunities for men.” And while they may only be a few weeks old, MEN has already attracted 18 partners, ranging from United Families International to the Child Custody Coalition.

The group is so new, it hasn't held its first meeting. But MEN soon plans to start hosting monthly training sessions with partner organizations, then storm the marble halls of Washington, demanding equality for men.

And MEN has allies in powerful places in Trump’s Washington.

"Our culture sends a message to young men that you should suppress every masculine urge, you should try to cast aside your family, you should try to suppress what makes you a young man in the first place," Vance opined from the CPAC main stage. He, like MEN, provided no evidence to support his contention.

While the group is surely easy to single out, it's far from alone in its drive to restore manhood to its properly patriarchal perch at CPAC but also throughout society.

"Go fu#% yourself Planned Parenthood”

Entering this year’s hall of vendors at CPAC, it’s seemingly impossible to miss the loud magenta “Go fu#% yourself Planned Parenthood” banner next to a cardboard cutout of President Trump.

Defund Planned Parenthood photo (Photo credit: Matt Laslo)

A few rows away, at first blush, the booth for "Date on the Right" seems dedicated to online romance for Republicans. But the material seems more focused on connecting hardline conservatives with their policy dreams.

Instead of promising long-term love, the group’s selling point feels more politically inclined than lifemate: “Dating for conservatives: only two genders – male and female allowed. No pronouns but male or female allowed.”

Other booths are dotted with free swag seeking to uproot political correctness — “I support free speech, not political correctness,” reads one sticker — through slogans like, “God, Guns and Girly Things” or “Woman: an adult human female.”

“We have an entire generation of young men who are smoking weed, watching porn, not getting married — not even pursuing women,” American Principles Project President Terry Schilling told CPAC attendees. “We have this thing called incels — involuntary celibates. It's terrible. And we can't become a great nation again — we can't make America great again — until our men are great again.”

“You’ve been gaslit to high heaven”

For attendees, conservatives are undeniably victims. The thousands gathered at CPAC are set on righting those past perceived wrongs.

“You’ve been gaslit to high heaven every time you picked up a newspaper in the United States,” conservative anchor Megyn Kelly told the crowd. “Every time you’ve turned on CNN. You’ve been lied to. You’ve been bullied — or seen others with lesser power — bullied by the media and the leftist Democrats. You have been a victim of overbearing and controlling leftists who think they are the final arbiters of what’s best for you and your life.”

While this may be MEN's year, conservative women aren’t going quietly.

CPAC may be a man’s world these days, despite all the powerful women in today’s GOP, like White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt, who, at 27, is the youngest person to ever hold the prestigious role.

On the CPAC stage this week, former White House communications director Mercedes Schlapp — wife of CPAC chair Matt Schlapp who a sheriff wrote up earlier this month for allegedly groping a man — asked Leavitt about being a woman in Trump world.

"Look at the White House and look at the exceptional Cabinet President Trump has put together," Leavitt said. "While we don’t care about identity politics…the president has appointed Susie Wiles, our first female chief of staff in United States history; Brooke Rollins heading up as our secretary of agriculture — look across the entire Cabinet. There are incredible women — Linda McMahon, leading the Department of Education — the list goes on and on."

As for her advice to young women, Leavitt departed from her party’s new man-centric mantra.

"Stay strong, speak the truth and don’t let anybody tell you that you can’t achieve your dream, or you can’t get to that next step. Just believe in yourself, because there will be a lot of people who don’t believe in you, who cast doubt on you, who talk bad about you," Leavitt said. "Screw ‘em. It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter."

NOW READ: Whoever tries to tell you that Trump is Christian needs to look up this passage in the Bible

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IF YOU CAN SURVIVE GRETA SCOLDING, THEN NEO-NAZI OK

Vice President JD Vance, in a rare public appearance, told the audience at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) that America’s “cultural message” tells young men they should “suppress every masculine urge” and become “androgynous idiots.” His comments on Thursday were well-received at the far-right conference, but more widely, were quickly denounced, as critics urged him to revisit his own remarks and his own societal and religious beliefs.

“I think that our culture sends a message to young men that you should suppress every masculine urge,” the Ohio Republican said, to cheers (video below). “You should try to cast aside your family, you should try to suppress what makes you a young man in the first place.”

“And I think that my, my message to young men is, don’t allow this broken culture to send you a message that you’re a bad person because you’re a man, because you like to tell a joke, because you like to have a beer with your friends or because you’re competitive.”

READ MORE: ‘Cowardice’: GOP Faces Backlash After Report Suggests Death Threat May Have Swayed Vote

Vance went on to claim that “our cultural message is, I think, that it wants to turn everybody into whether male or female into androgynous idiots who think the same, talk the same and act the same.”

“We actually think God made male and female for a purpose, and we want you guys to thrive as young men and as young women, and we’re gonna help with our public policy to make it possible to do that.”

Fred Wellman is a graduate of West Point and the Harvard Kennedy School, an Army veteran of 22 years who served four combat tours, and is now a political consultant and the host of the podcast “On Democracy.”

“Nobody thinks that,” Wellman wrote, responding to Vance’s remarks. “We just don’t want our young men to rape women. This isn’t hard. This guy is such a f— incel.”

“This guy is too much of a chicken to stand up publicly to a guy who he privately described as a ‘moral disaster’ or to defend his own wife’s honor from a punk kid who said we should ‘normalize Indian hate.’ Obsequious, snivelling, Vancely cowardice ain’t masculinity,” decried U.S. Rep. Sean Casten (D-IL).

Appearing to mock the vice president, The Atlantic’s Jemele Hill asked, “Who told men they can’t have beer with their friends? What I miss?”

Self-described former “Republican flack” and conservative Christian, Kristy Campbell, appearing to denigrate President Trump’s attack on Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy this week, noted, “I don’t think it’s a good idea to lecture on masculinity at CPAC – which was launched in 1974 with an incredible speech by future president Ronald Reagan about freedom and America’s role in the world – when you just capitulated to Russia.”

READ MORE: Musk’s Cuts Now ‘Hobbling’ Major Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s Research Facility: Report

Award-winning author Jennifer Erin Valent blasted Vance, saying, “What he’s really aiming at isn’t the ability to exercise true masculine strength but rather the ability to be a jerk without accountability. And since he brought God into it, I advise him to take a walk through the gospels and see how his brand of manhood measures up to Christ’s.”

“These guys aren’t reviving masculinity, they’re reviving being a dick. There’s a difference,” wrote Justin Kanew, a writer, producer, and political activist who appeared on the 15th and 18th seasons of “The Amazing Race.” Kanew runs the progressive platform The Tennessee Holler.

“For somebody who supposedly is so smart, JD Vance really says some stupid things,” blasted CNN political commentator Maria Cardona. “No, our culture does not tell young men that they cannot be masculine. But hopefully they are getting the message that that masculinity has to come with decency, compassion, generosity, and confidence that you can be all these things and that actually define real confident manhood. Real men don’t have to go around proving that they are real men.”

Emmy-nominated writer and comedian Mike Drucker asked, “is masculinity when you never stop fucking whining about everything? that seems to be the vance demo.”

David J. Bier, director of immigration studies at the libertarian Cato Institute, remarked, “Is the message young American men need to hear: ‘keep drinking beer with your friends and telling jokes that might offend people’? That doesn’t make you a ‘bad person,’ but there’s something broken in a culture that thinks that’s the most important message to give kids.”

Watch Vance’s remarks below or at the link.

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It Can Happen Here – Mother Jones

3 24 editor’s note:The below article first appeared in David Corn’s newsletter,Our Land. The newsletter comes out twice a week (most of the time) and provides behind-the-scenes stories and articles about politics, media, and culture. Subscribing costs just $5 a month—but you can sign up for a free 30-day trial ofOur Land [here

In 1935, Sinclair Lewis published the novel It Can’t Happen Here, which told the story of fascism triumphing in the United States. The book was a reaction to the rise of Hitler and Mussolini in Europe and the spread of demagogic populism in the United States by Huey Long, the strongman governor of Louisiana, and Father Charles Coughlin, the wildly popular antisemitic radio preacher. In Lewis’ alternative universe, a politician named Buzz Windrip, who champions “traditional” values and who promises to restore America to greatness, defeats FDR in the presidential election of 1936 and then through a self-coup seizes dictatorial powers. He establishes a paramilitary force to do his bidding, curtails the rights of women and minorities, and locks up dissidents and political foes in concentration camps. Eventually, his reign leads to civil war. It’s a grim tale.

The title of his book was the proper use of irony (the expression of an idea through language that normally means the opposite). While many Americans at the time looked at the failure of democracy in Europe and thought that the United States would be immune to such retrograde forces, Lewis, whose wife, journalist Dorothy Thompson, had reported on developments in Germany (and was the first American journalist to be expelled from the Nazi state), believed otherwise.

America did not succumb to the fascist wave. Long was assassinated. Coughlin was forced off the air. The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and the United States’ entry into World War II led to the end of the America First movement that might have produced a demagogic alternative to Roosevelt. No Buzz Windrip emerged.

Over eight decades later, the ghost of It Can’t Happen Here haunts American politics. Donald Trump has often been compared to Windrip, and various commentators have harkened back to Lewis’ novel to explain the threat Trumpism poses to American democracy.

Looking at the Conservative Political Action Conference (a.k.a. CPAC), recently held outside Washington, DC, last week, one can wonder if it is indeed time to once again crack open the Lewis novel. At a panel led by Steve Bannon, the convicted (for contempt of Congress) and indicted (for money laundering) top strategist of the MAGA right, Jack Posobiec, a prominent conspiracy theorist of the alt-right, declared, “Welcome to the end of democracy. We are here to overthrow it completely. We didn’t get all the way there on January 6, but we will endeavor to get rid of it and replace it with this right here.” He apparently was referring to the Trumpian vanguard present in the room, and Bannon interjected, “Amen.” Posobiec, an early promoter of the Pizzagate conspiracy theory that led to a dangerous shooting at a Washington, DC, restaurant, added, “All glory is not to government. All glory to God.”

Were they joking? It didn’t sound like it. Other speakers at CPAC demonized those outside the MAGA realm. Gov. Kristi Noem (R-S.D.), who’s angling to be Trump’s veep pick, proclaimed, “There are two kinds of people in this country right now. There are people who love America, and there are those who hate America.”

Stephen Moore, a Trump adviser, asserted that “one of the most evil left-wing organizations in America is the AARP.” For his part, Trump, at CPAC, brayed that the United States will fall apart if President Joe Biden is reelected. He painted quite the picture. Medicare, Social Security, and health care will “collapse,” along with public education and the economy. The US will be “starved of energy.” Hamas would run wild in American streets. Guns will be confiscated, and the suburbs will be “destroyed.” The stock market will implode. America will be obliterated in a world war.

Trump and his minions were engaged in an orgy of despisal akin to the “Two Minutes of Hate” Orwell imagined in 1984.And Trump was hardly breaking new ground at CPAC. Months ago, he used the fascistic term “vermin” to lambaste his political foes, and more recently he complained that migrants were “poisoning the blood” of the United States.

These latest outbursts provide even more reason to wonder if Lewis’ worries ought to be updated for the present. After all, Trump did plot to retain power illegally and incited violence to do so—and following that he remained the leader of one of the two national parties, has been supported by tens of millions of Americans, and has a good shot at winning the 2024 presidential election. And now he’s deploying classic fascistic rhetoric and fearmongering, and his fellow cultists in the GOP and conservative movement are enthusiastically cheering him on, depicting those who don’t agree with them as enemies of America, and openly threatening democracy and embracing autocracy.

With all this going on, my colleagues at Mother Jones and I picked a good time to launch a new project we’re calling “It Can Happen Here,” which is producing short video reports on the latest signs of creeping authoritarianism and the danger it poses to the American political system. These videos are designed for posting on various social media sites (Twitter, Threads, Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok), where they can serve as bite-size reminders of what’s occurring. Here are the first few we’ve posted:

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We’re still working out some of the bugs and tweaking the formatting. (The producer of the videos, Sam Van Pykeren, is a wizard.) As you can see, each one includes a caveat: We don’t want to hype the threat, but we don’t want to ignore the warning signs. It’s important to not go overboard and come off as a Chicken Little. But let’s not dismiss the real peril the republic faces: A man who plotted to subvert the constitutional order is in a position to regain power, and his crew has been cooking up plans to implement authoritarian policies and to inject Christian Nationalism into the US government, should Trump manage a comeback.

Would Trump go as far as Windrip? He vows to deport millions of people, which would require massive detention camps. He has consistently pledged he would prosecute and imprison his critics and rivals. He has said (jokingly or not) he would act as a dictator only on his first day in office. He has threatened to use the power of government to crush media outlets he doesn’t favor. This is all Windripish. Moreover, throughout MAGA-land, it’s easy to find Trumpists who denigrate democracy and scheme work-arounds to direct elections. And the Alabama Supreme Court justice who last week handed down an opinion stating that fertilized embryos are people—a ruling that imperils in vitro fertilization treatments—has stated that the Bible dictates that conservative Christians ought to rule over government, as well as business, media, and education.

Those who believe in a demographically diverse, socially and culturally tolerant, and democratic America would be fools to turn a blind eye to this tide. For some, warning of fascism might seem hyperbolic. But it appears that Trump and his team do worry about being portrayed as endangering democracy, for they have resorted to assailing Biden as the real threat to democracy. This projection/rubber-and-glue tactic is as good an indication as any that concerns about the wellbeing of American democracy in a Trump 2.0 era are well-founded.

“When Fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross.” This quote is often attributed to Lewis, but there’s no proof that he ever said or wrote that. But the line sounds like it came from Lewis, and it certainly does apply to the present moment. Consequently, I expect we will be busy with our “It Can Happen Here” videos. You’ll be able to see them, if you follow me on Twitter/X (@davidcorndc), Threads (@davidcorn1), Instagram (@davidcorn1), or Facebook. As we say in each video, if we don’t pay close attention to this, it can happen here.

David Corn’sAmerican Psychosis: A Historical Investigation of How the Republican Party Went Crazy, a New York Times *bestseller, has been released in a new and expanded paperback edition.

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February 28, 2024 5:00 pm

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what is happening in the hearts of former President Donald Trump’s supporters?

As an anthropologist who studies peace and conflict, I went to the annual meeting of the Conservative Political Action Conference, or CPAC, to find out. I wanted to better understand the Make America Great Again faithful – and their die-hard support for Trump.

The event began on Feb. 21, 2024, in National Harbor, Maryland, with Steve Bannon’s routine, untrue banter about how President Joe Biden stole the 2020 election, and it peaked with an angry speech from Trump three days later. In between, I sat among the MAGA masses listening to speaker after speaker express outrage about American decline – and their hope for Trump’s reelection.

Everywhere I turned, people wore MAGA regalia – hats, pins, logos and patches, many with Trump’s likeness. I spent breaks in the exhibition hall, which featured a Jan. 6 insurrection-themed pinball machine featuring “Stop the Steal,” “Political Prisoners” and “Babbitt Murder” rally modes and a bus emblazoned with Trump’s face. Admirers scribbled messages on the bus such as, “We have your back” and “You are anointed and appointed by God to be the President.”

Those on the left who dismiss the CPAC as a gathering of MAGA crazies and racists who support a wannabe dictator do not understand that, from this far-right perspective, there are compelling and even urgent reasons to support Trump. Indeed, they believe, as conservative politician Tulsi Gabbard stated in her CPAC speech on Feb. 22, that the left’s claims about Trump’s authoritarianism are “laughable.” This is because CPAC attendees falsely perceive President Joe Biden as the one who is attacking democracy.

Here are my top three takeaways from CPAC about Trump supporters’ current priorities and thinking.

people pray during the opening ceremony of the Conservative Political Action Conference on Feb. 22, 2024.

1. There’s a Reagan dinner – but CPAC is Trump’s party

Former President Ronald Reagan runs in CPAC’s DNA. Reagan spoke at the inaugural CPAC in 1974 and went on to speak there a dozen more times.

In 2019, the conservative advocacy group the American Political Union, which hosts CPAC, published a book of Reagan’s speeches with commentary by conservative luminaries. In the preface, Matt Schlapp, the head of the American Political Union, says he often asks himself, “What would Reagan do?”

CPAC’s pomp gala, held Friday, is still called the “Ronald Reagan Dinner.” But Reagan is otherwise hardly mentioned at the conference.

Reagan’s ideas of American exceptionalism have been supplanted by Trump’s populist story of apocalyptic decline. Reagan’s folksy tone, relative moderation and clear quips are long gone, replaced by fury, grievance and mean-spirited barbs.

2. There’s a method to the madness

Many commentators and critics, including groups like the Southern Poverty Law Center, view CPAC as a frightening or bizarre gathering of white nationalists who have a nativist agenda.

In 2021, commentators said the CPAC stage was shaped like a famous Nazi design called the Othala Rune, which is a hate symbol. Schlapp denied this claim and said that CPAC supports the Jewish community, but various commentators took note of the uncanny resemblance.

This year, CPAC refused to give press credentials to various media outlets, including The Washington Post, despite the organization’s emphasis on free speech.

Some speakers, including Trump, have been known to regularly voice support for white nationalism and right-wing extremism, including speakers who promote the false idea that there is a plot to replace the white population. I discuss this idea in my 2021 book, “It Can Happen Here: White Power and the Rising Threat of Genocide in the US.”

Indeed, the U.S.-Mexico border was a constant topic at this year’s CPAC, which included controversial anti-immigrant speakers such as the head of Spain’s far-right Vox party and a representative of Hungary, whose leader stated at the 2022 CPAC that Europeans should not become “mixed-race.” Hungary will also host a CPAC meeting in April 2024.

Many of the sessions have alarming titles like, “Burning Down the House,” “Does Government Even Matter” and “Going Full Hungarian.” There are right-wing, populist speakers like Bannon and U.S. Rep. Matt Gaetz.

Overall, the program is informed by a conservative logic that largely boils down to God, family, tradition, law and order, defense and freedom.

Of these, God looms largest. As a result, CPAC’s hardcore conservative Christian orientation is anti-abortion rights, homophobic and oriented toward traditional family structure and what it considers morality.

Schlapp co-wrote a book in 2022 that warns of the dangers of “evil forces” – what he considers to be progressives, the radical left and American Marxists. Schlapp’s book title even dubs these forces “the desecrators.” Such inflammatory language is frequently used at CPAC, including by Trump during his Saturday speech.

Matt Schlapp, chairman of the American Conservative Union, left, and his wife, Mercedes Schlapp, speak during CPAC on Feb. 22, 2024.

Jose Luis Magana/Associated Press

3. Trump believers think he is their savior

CPAC’s love of Trump is shocking to many on the left. But at CPAC, Trump is viewed as America’s savior.

According to his base, Trump delivered on abortion by appointing Supreme Court justices who overturned Roe v. Wade. They believe that, despite evidence of mixed results, Trump had wide successes at securing the border and creating jobs. For example, during Trump’s time as president, the U.S. economy lost nearly 3 million jobs, and apprehensions of undocumented migrants at the border rose.

Trump’s CPAC speech, like his campaign speeches, harped on such supposed achievements – as well as Biden’s alleged “destruction” of the country.

Conservatives roll their eyes at liberal fears of Trump the despot. Like all of us, they acknowledge, Trump has flaws. They say that some of his comments about women and minorities are cringeworthy, but not evidence of an underlying misogyny and hatefulness, as many critics contend.

Ultimately, CPAC conservatives believe Trump is their best bet to defeat the radical-left “desecrators” who seek to thwart him at every turn – including, as they constantly complained at CPAC, social media bans, “fake news” takedowns, rigged voting, bogus lawsuits, unfair justice, and lies about what they call the Jan. 6, 2021, “protest”.

Despite these hurdles, Trump battles on toward the Republican nomination for presidential candidate – the hero who CPAC conservatives view as the last and best hope to save the USA.

Alexander Hinton, Distinguished Professor of Anthropology; Director, Center for the Study of Genocide and Human Rights, Rutgers University - Newark

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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Former Trump aide Stephen Miller told the MAGA activists gathered near Washington, D.C. last week for the annual Conservative Political Action Conference that conservatives must be willing to use power more aggressively against their opponents. He railed against district attorneys and other officials for not arresting teachers who violate new state laws that restrict teaching on race, gender, and sexuality.

Miller, an architect of the Trump administration’s anti-immigration policies, has been promising MAGA activists that if Trump returns to the White House, he “will unleash the vast arsenal of federal powers to implement the most spectacular migration crackdown.” Miller’s America First Legal group is part of the far-right Project 2025, which has prepared a battle plan for the movement to “take the reins of government” in a new Trump administration. The Heritage Foundation, ringleader of the Project 2025 scheme, was at CPAC recruiting foot soldiers willing to carry out the plan.

In a recent article for Political Research Associates’ “The Public Eye” magazine, I noted that Project 2025 reflected a “movement-level, ideological shift away from a libertarian mistrust of government power and toward an authoritarian view of government power being used ruthlessly—whether as a righteous force wielded to advance a ‘biblical worldview’ or turned against an ‘administrative state’ supposedly captured by a radical Marxist left.”

Miller provided ample confirmation about the MAGA movement’s intentions, down to his dismissal of libertarianism as “a terrible ideology” that might be fine for academic debates but not in the real world, where he said public officials have a responsibility to “defeat evil.”

Excerpts from Miller’s appearance on a Friday, Feb. 23 CPAC panel:

Call it a mental illness, call it a spiritual failing, call it a moral deficiency, call it weakness, softness, or just being pathetic. There is something really broken in the conservative brain. They’re afraid not only of conflict, we know that. But there’s an even deeper fear, a deeper fear than all that, which is having power, and using power. Conservatives are addicted to the language of libertarianism, which is fine–you know, it’s a terrible ideology, but in an academic setting, okay, have these debates. …

You elect a state supreme court justice, you elect an Attorney General, and so on and so forth, to have an office with specific powers, duties, and responsibilities, with the expectation that they will use that authority to defeat evil, to protect the good, and to accomplish positive change in society. And you have to use that power fearlessly. …

A number of states, for example, have passed laws, saying that you can’t have this in the curriculum, or you can’t have that in the curriculum, and you can’t teach DEI and so on and so forth. Without exception, I can promise you, all the commies in the classroom changed the name of their lecture, changed one word, changed one little paragraph in the syllabus and did the exact same damn thing every single day because they’re communists and that’s what they do. Were they sued? No! Were they arrested if they broke a law and it’s applicable? No! Did any D.A. anywhere, if you’re talking about trans issues, think of arresting somebody for abusing children with trans ideology? No, we write blog posts about it. That’s what we do. So until we get serious, all the way down to the local DA, all the way up to the state A/G. and every office in between, including judges, electing people who have power and will use that power and measure their success by change in the real world, then we aren’t going to be able to beat the left.

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The global far right comes to CPAC | Media Matters for America

liz truss?!

The Conservative Political Action Conference has its eyes beyond the water’s edge in 2024, and far-right movements from around the world have flocked to National Harbor, Maryland to address the conference’s audience of conservative die-hards. The event’s 2024 motto, “where globalism goes to die,” is apparently making an exception for global movements with authoritarian and isolationist strains. Representatives and leaders from these movements have taken to the stage to prescribe how to replicate their harsh tactics in the United States. As the conference’s influence has waned domestically, CPAC has expanded its horizons in recent years, launching auxiliary events across the globe in countries like Mexico, Japan, Hungary, Brazil, South Korea, and Australia.

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At CPAC, Steve Bannon says Trump will "drive the vermin out of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue | Media Matters for America

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Matt Schlapp: "I don't even know if you call this an election. This is like the 2.0 of the American Revolution." | Media Matters for America

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:{:{try for underdog status? pretend never prez bc fail? / fox/gop party of no, no policies?}:

rubber glue? compared himself to Navalny?!}:

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Donald Trump said something at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) on Saturday that stood out to experts on democracy and authoritarianism.

The former president has consistently cast himself as the victim of Joe Biden, even going as far as to compare himself to the man who was purportedly killed by Putin because he stood up to the leader politically.

But Trump took that even further at the CPAC event, referring to himself as a "political dissident" being persecuted by Biden's regime.

"I stand before you today not only as your past and future president, but also as a proud political dissident," he said on Saturday, adding, "I am a dissident."

This didn't go unnoticed by Trygve Olson, the author of the Lincoln Democracy Institute's research project, the "Democracy Index." He said the comment "might be the most disgusting statement of Donald Trump this week which is saying something."

"Nelson Mandela was a dissident. Alexander Navalny was a dissident. My friends who are imprisoned in Belarus are dissidents," he wrote. "You sir, are not a dissident by any stretch of the definition."

The democracy expert then continued:

"The fact you even claim to be insults those around the world who are (or have been) persecuted for political reasons."

Trump's "dissident" line was also highlighted by New York University professor Ruth Ben-Ghiat, an expert in authoritarians, fascism, and propaganda. She compared the comments to something Benito Mussolini might say.

"Going strong since Mussolini: the tyrant as victim," she wrote. "Now Trump is a dissident persecuted by the 'Biden regime.'"

Political analyst Sarah Reese had this to say on social media.

"Trump claims that he is a political dissident. I don't think he knows what those words mean."

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critics are blasting CPAC, the Conservative Political Action Conference, as the embattled head of the organization that puts together and hosts the event, Matt Schlapp, is attacking NBC News over its report that states: “Nazis mingle openly at CPAC, spreading antisemitic conspiracy theories and finding allies.”

“Nazis appeared to find a friendly reception at the Conservative Political Action Conference this year,” writes Ben Goggin, NBC News Digital deputy editor for technology. “Throughout the conference, racist extremists, some of whom had secured official CPAC badges, openly mingled with conference attendees and espoused antisemitic conspiracy theories.”

“The presence of these individuals has been a persistent issue at CPAC. In previous years, conference organizers have ejected well-known Nazis and white supremacists such as Nick Fuentes,” NBC News also reported. “But this year, racist conspiracy theorists didn’t meet any perceptible resistance at the conference where Donald Trump has been the keynote speaker since 2017.”

Schlapp is the head of the American Conservative Union. He and his wife Mercedes Schlapp were once described as the “Trump-Era ‘It Couple’.” Now he is facing a $9 million lawsuit over alleged sexual assault, including “aggressive fondling,” after Republican strategist Carlton Huffman, a staffer at the time for the failed Herschel Walker senatorial campaign, says Matt Schlapp groped him in January of 2023.

READ MORE: Democrats Discredit GOP Claims on IVF as Republicans Try to Regain Ground After Fallout

CPAC’s list of speakers last week included the far-right ultra-conservative president of Argentina, Javier Milei, who “gave Donald Trump on Saturday an ecstatic hug,” the AP reported. Donald Trump, calling himself a “proud political dissident,” delivered the keynote address at CPAC on Saturday. CNN described it as “lie-filled.”

Schlapp was both furious and dismissive of NBC News’ report.

“NBC’s claim that there was a Nazi presence at CPAC 2024 is false, misleading, and grossly manipulative—especially coming from a writer who has carried the water for Hamas in much of his reporting on the Israel-Gaza war,” Schlapp wrote in a statement posted by CPAC to X. “When we come across someone at CPAC peddling any kind of anti-semitism, we deal with them immediately. Knowing this, NBC weaved together lies and fabrications to create a false perception, and we won’t stand by idly while NBC engages in willful misinformation.”

In a separate post, Schlapp also wrote:

“Yawn. This is a tired old cliche. The Neo-Nazis in our midst are the ones controlling our college campuses and major institutions and grossly populate the newsrooms of corporate media, calling for an Israeli surrender.”

READ MORE: ‘Insultingly Stupid’: Trump’s Move to Toss Out Classified Docs Case Torn Apart by Experts

NBC’s Goggin responded:

“The Nazis introduced themselves to me at a mixer and said they were national socialists, started talking about skull measurements and pushing the conspiracy theory that all races were being controlled Jewish people. They were posting about their presence at CPAC online.”

He also provided photos and video:

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“Either CPAC is lying about having no idea about this, or they simply don’t have a grasp on who they approved to come to their conference…,” Goggin added.

READ MORE: Smirnov Scandal: Experts Call for Investigations, Warn GOP of Possible Conspiracy Charges

“Nazis, antisemitism, the great replacement theory, [white supremacist Nick] Fuentes, have become so common among conservatives that I think attendees, even journalists, didn’t think too deeply about them being at CPAC. There was very much an ‘oh them’ attitude about the nazis.”

“It really illustrated how successfully extremists have shifted the Overton window. This year, they were expected, and their presence was tolerated,” he added.

Critics blasted CPAC.

“At CPAC, avowed Nazis mingled openly & spread antisemitic conspiracy theories, as speakers welcomed the ‘end of democracy.’ They are all saying the quiet part out loud. And most GOP lawmakers are silent (or cheering). This is how extremism is normalized,” warned Amy Spitalnick, CEO of the Jewish Council for Public Affairs. Spitalnick “led a group that won a $25 million judgment against the neo-Nazis who organized the deadly 2017 Charlottesville march in Virginia,” The Times of Israel reported in 2022.

“Seriously, read this @BenjaminGoggin piece and tell me those of us ringing the alarm bells on increasingly mainstreamed Nazism are being hyperbolic,” Spitalnick added.

“CPAC denies the presence of Nazis at their conference this year, but when I reported that @cpac was teeming with white nationalists in 2022 there wasn’t a peep from Matt Schlapp about it,” wrote Texas Observer special investigative correspondent Steven Monacelli.

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Former U.S. Rep. Mondaire Jones (D-NY), currently a candidate for Congress running to unseat U.S. Rep. Mike Lawler (R-NY), said: “I am appalled that Nazis were allowed to attend CPAC—an event Donald Trump headlined again this year. Make no mistake: the Republican Party and Trump have empowered white nationalists for years.”

Responding to the NBC News article, former U.S. government official Mike Walker wrote on X: “This is not Munich, 1933. This is Washington, DC, 2024.”

See the photos and video above or at this link.

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2 24 msnbc steele panel not place for ideas, up and comers, now just trump show, keep out all non rw media? but...

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NBC Nightly News interviewed a woman at CPAC about the Alabama Supreme Court’s ruling that frozen embryos are legally children. The network did not mention that the woman, Dawn Bancroft, previously pleaded guilty in federal court to a misdemeanor charge and was sentenced to 60 days in prison for her participation in the January 6 attack on the Capitol.

During its February 22 edition, NBC Nightly News broadcast two stories about the continuing fallout from the court’s decision, which has imperiled patients’ access to in vitro fertilization treatments in Alabama. In its second story — which connected the ruling to reproductive rights as a broader political issue — NBC’s reporter went to the Conservative Political Action Conference, a major annual right-wing event, to gather reactions from right-wing women. “Women we spoke to were in full support of IVF,” said the reporter.

NBC aired the opinion of only one woman — Bancroft, a convicted January 6 rioter whom a chyron identified merely as “Doylestown, Pennsylvania resident.”

Video file

CitationFrom the February 22, 2024, edition of NBC's NBC Nightly News with Lester Holt

NBC News covered Bancroft’s sentencing in 2022, also noting that she was from Doylestown:

A Jan. 6 Capitol rioter who recorded herself saying that they were looking for House Speaker Nancy Pelosi “to shoot her in the frickin’ brain” was sentenced Thursday to 60 days in prison, according to officials.

The attorney for Dawn Bancroft, 59, of Doylestown, Pennsylvania, asked for a fine only but a federal judge in Washington sentenced her to the 60 days in prison that prosecutors sought, according to court records.

Prosecutors called her comments about killing Pelosi “among the most graphic statements uttered by any rioter on Capitol grounds that day,” but acknowledged there was no evidence she intended to carry it out.

“Be that as it may, just as Bancroft felt herself caught up in the negative energy of the day, her reckless words could have easily led or inspired others to act violently towards members of Congress or police officers,” prosecutors wrote in a sentencing memo.

Even Bancroft admitted the Alabama ruling was “disturbing.”

NBC has every right to interview CPAC attendees for its political stories. However, the network has a duty to disclose to its audience whether those attendees violently attacked the Capitol and publicly called for the murder of Democrats.

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CPAC panelist Penny Nance: Let’s make abortion “unthinkable” | Media Matters for America

Matt Schlapp: "We have to intimidate, in the nicest of ways, all these elected officials that continue to flout the law" | Media Matters for America

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August 28, 2023 

Tags: James Ho Kari Lake Marjorie Taylor Greene Matt Schlapp Round-Up CPAC

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CPAC’s longtime treasurer unloads in resignation letter: 'Cancer has been metastasizing'

David BadashandThe New Civil Rights MovementMay 25, 2023

The longtime treasurer for the American Conservative Union, the organization that hosts the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), has quit and issued a damning resignation letter citing how the organization is handling funds for the defense of its chairman, Matt Schlapp, accused by a GOP operative of sexual assault.

Bob Beauprez, a former GOP Congressman, personal friend of Schlapp, and American Conservative Union (ACU) board member and treasurer, wrote the board in March saying, “I cannot deliver a financial report at the upcoming board meeting with any confidence in the accuracy of the numbers,” as New York magazine‘s Ben Jacobs reports.

When the lawsuit was filed the board fronted Schlapp $50,000 to hire an attorney. Beauprez “wrote he was blindsided when Schlapp told him that he had raised another $270,000 from donors to ACU and its related foundation, ACUF. His shock grew when he said ACU’s lawyer told him in February at CPAC that the money ‘was already either dispersed or invoiced.’”

RELATED: Male Staffer Sues Matt Schlapp for $9 Million – Lawsuit Alleges ‘Sexual Battery’ After ‘Aggressively Fondling’ Groin Area

“I have to admit that I feel like I’m in the dark,” Beauprez told the board. “I have received no further information about what additional costs have accrued since then … I assume any monies paid are either coming from Matt personally or from ACU/F. But, again, I don’t know, and it is most unsettling.”

In January, a Republican political aide in his 30’s working at the time of the alleged assault for the Herschel Walker campaign, filed a lawsuit against Matt Schlapp for $9.4 million. It accuses Schlapp of “aggressively fondling” his “genital area in a sustained fashion” while the two were alone in a car, as The New York Times reported.

The Daily Beast also reported the staffer was suing “for battery, defamation, and conspiracy.”

“In a letter, the staffer’s attorney, Tim Hyland of Hyland Law, called Schlapp a ‘sexual predator,’” The Daily Beast added.

Schlapp, through an attorney’s statement, has declared the allegations he “groped” and “fondled” the male staffer’s crotch without consent after buying him drinks at two different bars, “false.”

Meanwhile, New York magazine’s Jacobs notes that Beauprez also said he told the board during its March meeting, “there was no mention of the case, no status update, no summary of expenditures to date, no word regarding acceptance of coverage from either our D&O [directors and officers] insurance company, or Matt’s personal liability carrier, no opportunity to ask questions, etc., etc. I thought this was not only inappropriate, but unconscionable.”

He pointed to their “fiduciary obligation to be made aware of what, how, and why monies are being spent, especially involving a corporation insider such as the chairman.”

READ MORE: DeSantis Says He Will Turn ‘Woke Military’ Away From ‘Gender Ideology’ and Reach ‘Settlement’ in Russia’s War Against Ukraine

Beauprez alleged that when some “have sought answers to some of what seem to be obvious and necessary questions … we have been accused of ‘not having Matt’s back’ and ‘trying to stage a leadership coup.’”

He also warned the organization’s “operating procedures are in direct conflict with our own bylaws,” which could lead to invented “charges” by a “rogue DA.”

NEW YORK reports that Beauprez “also said Schlapp refused to give any specific information about the finances of the 2023 CPAC conference held in March.”

“Matt always responds in much the same way, ‘It looks like we made about $500,000, maybe more.’ I hope that’s roughly accurate, but I’d like to also see the financial data upon which Matt has reached this conclusion.”

“A cancer has been metastasizing within the organization for years,” Beauprez concluded. “It must be diagnosed, treated, and cured, or it will destroy ACU/F. You simply cannot survive like this.”

RELATED: Watch: Matt Schlapp Gets Pulled Away From Reporter at CPAC Asking About the Sexual Assault Allegations Against Him

In 2021, citing unnamed sources, the conservative website The Dispatch reported, “federal investigators are currently looking into possible criminal campaign-finance misdeeds at ACU during Schlapp’s tenure. As part of the investigation, the FBI has interviewed former and current ACU employees about the financial dealings of the organization and its leaders.”

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Alexander Hinton, Rutgers University - Newark

In early March 2023, I mixed with the Make America Great Again faithful at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference – a popular meeting, often known as CPAC, for conservative activists and political figures.

I walked, ate and sat with the attendees at the National Harbor in Maryland over the course of four days. Many of them were dressed in MAGA and pro-Trump gear such as sequined hats and shirts that said things like “Trump won” the 2020 election. A few had tattoos of Trump’s face.

Media reports show that CPAC, which did not publicize the number of attendees, had lower-than-normal attendance and fewer high-profile sponsors.

Approximately 62% of CPAC attendees participating in a straw poll said they support Donald Trump for president in 2024.

Understanding CPAC

Many commentators and others have labeled CPAC extremist. The program was loaded with sometimes incendiary figures reviled by the left, including Republican Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene and Matt Gaetz, as well as former Trump political advisers Steve Bannon and Stephen Miller.

I am a scholar of extremism in the United States and went to CPAC for two reasons. First, I wanted to hear firsthand what conservatives, and especially Trump followers, said. At a time of high political polarization, it is important to understand different positions.

Second, almost half of people in the U.S. fear political violence and civil war. I wanted to take the pulse of the conservative right and assess points of division ahead of the 2024 presidential election.

The conference’s theme was “Protecting America Now.” Who and what were the perceived threats? And, amid the polarization, was there any common ground shared by conservatives and liberals?

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I discovered five frequent demons at the conference: there were China’s Communist Party and border criminals – including Mexican drug cartels and undocumented immigrants. “Radical left Marxists” and the ideologies of “wokism” and “transgenderism” were also frequent targets.

While I also found a few glimmers of hope for political common ground between the left and right, it was apparent that Trumpism – and the election denial, misinformation and scapegoating that come with it – is stronger than some think and, I believe, remains a threat to U.S. democracy.

A man in a wheelchair goes past a booth in a convention room that says 'Believe in America, not the media.'

CPAC attendees visit booths promoting political groups and products for sale.

Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

China

China was one of the biggest common enemies identified at the conference. Just days after senior U.S. intelligence officials said that China is the United States’ biggest national security threat, speaker after speaker at CPAC harped on this theme.

The first day included panels titled “Caging the Red Dragon” and “No Chinese Balloons Above Tennessee.”

Such language plays to the growing number of Americans who view China as the country’s biggest enemy.

Border criminals

The focus on China connected to another target at the conference – Mexican cartels that engage in human and drug trafficking. This includes groups that bring fentanyl – a drug that is Chinese-manufactured or made from Chinese-produced chemicals – into the U.S.

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Many speakers accurately noted the staggering number of fentanyl deaths in the U.S., including over 100,000 overdose deaths in 2021. But they did so in often apocalyptic terms.

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They were quick to blame the Biden administration, ignoring that these issues have a long history and also existed under former President Donald Trump.

The crisis, CPAC speakers said, includes large numbers of undocumented migrants crossing the border – who they sometimes derogatorily referred to as“illegal aliens.” Oddly, those crossing the border were depicted both as victims of the violent cartels and as criminal and economic threats to Americans.

American Marxism

CPAC speakers and attendees spotlighted what they saw as equally dire demons lurking within the country.

“Radical leftist Marxists” – a stand-in for all Democrats – stood at the top of the list. These leftist radicals, CPAC speakers suggested, were intent on turning the U.S. into a socialist country like China in which the state controlled bodies and minds and quashed individual rights and freedoms.

The Democratic Party “hates this country,” Fox TV personality Mark Levin claimed on the CPAC stage.

“This American Marxist movement,” he continued, his voice raising, “took off big time during COVID” and then “rode the wave of Black Lives Matter, Antifa and the cop-hating, to advance this racist, Marxist, bigoted, socialist, anti-American agenda – which is everything today the Democrat Party today stands for!”

The crowd responded with loud applause and cheers – ignoring that these often repeated claims have little basis in reality.

Wokism

This anti-American agenda, Levin and other CPAC speakers argued, was illustrated by “wokism.”

Being woke generally means understanding societal issues like racial and social justice. But CPAC speakers, who didn’t define the term, suggested that these efforts were really part of a “radical leftist” plot to control what people think and say – an idea that the right has derided as “political correctness” in the past.

‘Transgenderism’

There was also an emphasis on gender and the perceived threat of transgender people. Some of the anti-transgender sentiment was casual, such as when Rep. Gaetz quipped, “We had to spend four, five days asking the Chinese spy balloon what its pronouns were before we were willing to shoot it down.”

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Perhaps the most strident remarks were made by conservative political commentator Michael Knowles, who stated, “for the good of society … transgenderism must be eradicated from public life entirely.”

Despite his inflammatory language and use of “transgenderism,” a derogatory term suggesting that transgender people have “a condition,” Knowles received loud applause.

So, too, did other speakers who disparaged transgender identity – an issue that has become a culture wars flashpoint.

The Anti-Defamation League, among other human rights groups, has shown that the idea transgender people are predatory “groomers” or pedophiles is false and is being circulated by some Republicans only for political gain.

In March 2023, Tennessee became the first state to pass a law that restricts drag performances in the presence of children – a move that likely violates the First Amendment’s free speech protection and, in my view, is based on fear, not facts. Other Republican-led states are considering anti-drag legislation.

A large crowd of people look toward a screen that shows a white man in a dark suit. Next to the screen is a large American flag

[Guests listen to former President Donald Trump address the Conservative Political Action Conference as the headline speaker.

The warrior

By the time Trump took the stage, the CPAC crowd was primed. People danced and waved “TRUMP WAS RIGHT!” placards.

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Trump offered an apocalyptic vision of the country’s future.

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“Sinister forces” are seeking to turn the U.S. into a “lawless open-borders, crime-ridden, filthy, communist nightmare,” Trump said.

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Trump promised to fight back against these forces. “I am your warrior,” he told the adoring crowd. “I am your justice.”

The rocky ride ahead

I went to CPAC to find areas where the left and right might find common ground. Both sides worry about issues like inflation, fentanyl and crime. And, even as they may disagree on the path to get there, both want a better future for the country.

But politics is another demon lurking in the room. Most of the speakers at CPAC seemed to be there to rile up the crowd, which included many activists.

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This was especially true of Trump, whose divisiveness was on clear display at CPAC.

All of this suggests the U.S. faces a rocky ride to the upcoming 2024 election.  The Conversation

Alexander Hinton, Distinguished Professor of Anthropology; Director, Center for the Study of Genocide and Human Rights, Rutgers University - Newark

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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March 6, 2023 

Tags: Donald Trump Jon Minadeo Marjorie Taylor Greene Thomas Homan Round-Up CPAC Goyim Defense League

remember when they booted alt rt?

nick f with pillow zel sweatshirt? pix] r ww

national Harbor, Maryland — White nationalist Nick Fuentes may have been kicked out of the Conservative Political Action Conference in National Harbor, Maryland, but other white nationalists and their sympathizers found their way in.

Fuentes, the leader of the America First white nationalist youth movement, briefly made it into CPAC at the Gaylord National Resort & Convention Center Thursday, even snagging a photo with Mike Lindell, the election conspiracy theorist and sugar daddy to right-wing causes. But, as in previous years, Fuentes, who was granted his first ban from CPAC in 2019, was removed from the premises and his rally permit was revoked.

Matt Schlapp, the president of the American Conservative Union, which hosts CPAC, confirmed Fuentes’ removal Friday. In a statement on Instagram, Schlapp claimed that Fuentes’ “hateful racist rhetoric and actions are not consistent with the mission of CPAC” and claimed to be concerned about antisemitism.

We removed Nick Fuentes from his attempt to attend our conference. His hateful racist rhetoric and actions are not consistent with the mission of CPAC. We are pleased that our conference welcomes a wide array of conservative perspectives from people of different backgrounds, but we are concerned about the rise in antisemitic rhetoric (or Jew hatred) in our country and around the globe, whether it be in the corridors of power and academia or through the online rantings of bigots like Fuentes.

But despite banning Fuentes, CPAC gladly welcomed politicians who cozied up to him or spread hate themselves. The main event of the MAGA carnival was, of course, President Donald Trump, who had dined with Fuentes and Kanye West this fall and failed to denounce the white nationalist after news broke of their dinner. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, who has a long history of antisemitic conspiracy theories and racist comments, took the stage Saturday to bash trans people; last year, she had spoken at Fuentes’ white nationalist AFPAC conference and failed to denounce Fuentes until it became politically expedient to do so. Sebastian Gorka, a former Trump adviser and alleged member of a Nazi-allied political group in Hungary, provided CPAC with a hateful transphobic tirade Saturday morning. And Stephen Miller, a former Trump adviser known for his affinity for white nationalism, called on House Republicans to defund the Department of Homeland Security unless every undocumented immigrant that crosses the border gets “shipped back to where they came from.” So much for standing against hateful or racist rhetoric.

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene speaks at CPAC on March 3, 2023.

Meanwhile, followers of Fuentes’ white nationalist movement, who refer to themselves as groypers, milled about in the conference entrance Saturday wearing their blue America First hats before security asked them to leave. As they exited the building, they began chanting “We want Nick!” and briefly set up their America First flags in front of the hotel. They were shooed off the premises.

But some groypers found their way back into the conference and past the Secret Service checkpoint, leaving their blue America First hats at home in favor of small AF pins, a Pepe the Frog sticker, and a “Ye is Right” hat. They chatted with Ryan Sanchez, a former member of the Rise Above Movement, a white nationalist street gang, and Greyson Arnold, a pro-Nazi blogger whose services were once employed by the Washington state GOP.

One groyper wearing an AF pin calmly explained to this reporter why he did not believe women should have the right to vote or hold elected office. “I don’t think a lot of people shouldn’t have the right to vote. I shouldn’t have the right to vote,” he added, explaining that he’s 21, doesn’t own property or have children and thus, in his opinion, shouldn’t have a say in the direction of this country.

He and another groyper identified themselves as “incels,” comparing their involuntary celibacy to a disability. They insisted that they do not hate women despite believing that women should not vote or hold political office. Of course, just minutes earlier, Sanchez, Arnold, and other groypers in their group had harassed Amanda Moore, an independent writer who had gone undercover in MAGA world in 2020 and 2021, gleefully calling her “a slut.”[

[Nick Fuentes (left) and Ryan Sanchez (right) pose for a photo. Sanchez posted this photo on his Telegram March, 5, 2023, with the caption, “Nick Fuentes’ rally last night was by far the most exciting event at CPAC. I am so glad to see so many factions of the Right put aside our differences and stand together.”

Undeterred by his banishment from CPAC, Fuentes vowed to hold an event nearby following Trump’s speech Saturday at an undisclosed location—revealed first by the Southern Poverty Law Center to Fuentes’ disappointment. As a line of mostly young men waited to enter the conference room at The Residence Inn by Marriott across the street from CPAC, a CPAC Shabbat event came to a close down the hall, with Jewish CPAC attendees milling about the same entrance from which groypers were entering. While the America First event was free, it was not open to the press, and this reporter was turned away.

In a livestream of the event, Fuentes is seen addressing attendees wearing a large black puffer jacket and sunglasses despite the dark room while Christian, dystopian, and abstract images flickered on the screen behind him.

“Transgenderism has got to go because it’s not true,” Fuentes says, agreeing with The Daily Wire’s Michael Knowles, who earlier that day had called for the eradication of “transgenderism.” “Well, in that case, feminism has got to go, too. Liberalism has got to be eradicated.”

“At the end of the day you know what else has got to go in a Christian society?” Fuentes asks the crowd.

“Democracy?” a woman yells out from the audience.

“Well that,” Fuentes says. “The other thing that has got to go from the public life at the highest levels is this Talmudic Judaism.”

His followers hollered their approval, erupting into chants of “Christ is King!”

Tags: Matt Schlapp Mike Lindell Nick Fuentes Ryan Sanchez America First CPAC Rise Above Movement

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https://boingboing.net/2023/03/06/trump-boasts-of-packed-audience-for-his-cpac-speech-photo-tells-a-different-story.html

https://boingboing.net/2023/03/06/**trump-gave-an-unhinged-rant-at-cpac-about-his-friendship-with-putin-and-wwiii**.html

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'Populist and belligerent': Republican Party 'sad' state of division on full display at CPAC

Maya Boddie March 06, 2023

The 2023 Conservative Political Action Conference revealed the Republican party's undeniable current state of division, Axios reports.

Per Axios, the GOP was formerly "defined by its general ideological unity on three core conservative principles: free markets, a muscular foreign policy and traditional social values," but now the party's vocal MAGA members have "moved the GOP's center of gravity toward a more protectionist, populist and belligerent outlook."

The Daily Beast columnist, Matt Lewis, recently wrote:

It's easy to highlight how unstable the GOP has become in the last decade. But the most obvious changes involve tone, attitude, temperament, and sanity. Policy preferences have largely taken a back seat to nihilism, showmanship, and culture war battles that don't easily track with our recent past experience.

READ MORE: 'A professional grassroots huckster wing': GOP strategist torches CPAC 'scam'

According to Axios, former President Donald Trump invoked an extreme sense of division in the room during his speech, declaring, "We will expel the warmongers, we will drive out the globalists, we will cast out the communists, we will throw off thepolitical class that hates our country."

He continued, "The Republican Party was ruled by freaks, neocons, open-border zealots and fools. We're never going back to the party of Paul Ryan, Karl Rove, and Jeb Bush" — before he lambasted Senator Rick Scott's (R-FL) attempt to cut Social Security.

The potential 2024 GOP presidential candidate also surpassed Florida Governor Ron DeSantis — who missed the conference for his book tour – by more than 40 percent in a straw poll.

In addition to disagreements over the existence of federal programs, Republicans' starkly different opinions on the war on Ukraine also emerged on stage.

[READ MORE: Donald Trump buried over his 'bad Batman' speech at 'lackluster' CPAC

Axios reports:

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) targeted Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in her speech Friday, telling him to "leave your hands off of our sons and daughters."

But two of the highest-profile speakers — former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley — are unapologetic Ukraine hawks (Haley is running for president, and Pompeo is considering it).

Asked about Haley's presidential campaign, Greene said: "I don't listen to Nikki Haley and I don't think she's going to do well in the primary."

According to ABC News, a staffer for a potential 2024 candidate said, "As somebody that's been involved in the movement for 20-plus years, it's sad, because it was at one time the premier event for conservatives to come together."

READ MORE: How CPAC has gone from 'serious and wonky' to increasingly unhinged and 'Trumpified': conservative

Axios' full report is available at this link. The Daily Beast's full report is here (subscription required). ABC News' report is here.

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CNN fact checker knocks down more than a dozen false claims made by GOPers at CPAC

Meaghan EllisMarch 04, 2023

A CNN fact-checker recently slashed through more than a dozen false claims that derived from this weekend's Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) currently underway in Dallas, Texas.

On Saturday, March 4, CNN's Daniel Dale penned an analysis to offer insight and clarity on the claims. In his analysis, he began with a clear introduction about the false claims he intended to debunk.

Starting with the first day of the conference, Dale researched claims made by Reps. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) and Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) and offered corrections to refute their inaccurate remarks.

READ MORE: Fact checker reveals Trump stole credit from Obama with 1 outrageous lie 56 times in 2019

"The members of Congress, former government officials and conservative personalities who spoke at the conference on Thursday and Friday made false claims about a variety of topics," Dale wrote.

"Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio uttered two false claims about President Joe Biden. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia repeated a debunked claim about Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky," he added.

"Sen. Tommy Tuberville of Alabama used two inaccurate statistics as he lamented the state of the country. Former Trump White House official Steve Bannon repeated his regular lie about the 2020 election having been stolen from Trump, this time baselesly blaming Fox for Trump’s defeat," he wrote.

Dale went on to address claims from Reps. Kat Cammack (R-Fla.) and Rep. Ralph Norman (R-S.C.)

READ MORE: 'Highly misleading': CNN brutally fact-checks Kevin McCarthy's latest series of unfounded claims

"Rep. Kat Cammack of Florida incorrectly said a former Obama administration official had encouraged people to harass Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh. Rep. Ralph Norman of South Carolina inaccurately claimed Biden had laughed at a grieving mother and inaccurately insinuated that the FBI tipped off the media to its search of former President Donald Trump’s Florida residence," he wrote. "Two other speakers, Rep. Scott Perry of Pennsylvania and former Trump administration official Sebastian Gorka, inflated the number of deaths from fentanyl."

In total, Dale debunked 13 misleading claims made by Republican lawmakers during the conference.

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perhaps organizers of the Conservative Political Action Conference haven’t liked the coverage of their event this year, or perhaps the event is in as much disarray as those news reports say, but whatever the case, CPAC appears eager to keep critical media out, relegating reporters to a corner of the ballroom from which they can’t see the stage and denying others credentials.

But that hasn’t stopped reporters in attendance from seeing what’s going on: CPAC is underwhelming this year.

Thursday saw no side panels, or activism boot camps. Likely GOP presidential candidates like Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and former Vice President Mike Pence are skipping the event. Senate and House GOP leadership are noticeably absent, save Rep. Elise Stefanik.

Of course, CPAC still has a few big names in GOP politics who, in taking the stage Thursday, showed just how far to the right the party has gone. The day started with Rep. Jim Jordan, chairman of the House Judiciary committee, discussing how he’s going to use the power of the committee to possibly impeach Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas.

Freedom Caucus Reps. Scott Perry and Ralph Norman bragged about their caucus’ ability to wreak havoc on Kevin McCarthy’s ascension to the speakership. Sens. Ted Cruz and J.D. Vance trashed Merrick Garland as the most “partisan” and “politicized” attorney general in United States history—a laughable claim that is par for the course here, along with the trans-bashing and Fauci booing. But what is most noticeable is what is missing.

Even with various prominent Republican politicians in attendance, the back half of the main ballroom is empty, and the front’s enthusiasm is muted. Gone are the hundreds of libertarian-inclined college students traditionally known for filling CPAC’s hallways. Ticket sales have lagged and premium package holders from past years remain unregistered, according to The Washington Post.

Like usual, Matt Schlapp, the president of the American Conservative Union, the group behind CPAC, is on stage at regular intervals, but the sexual assault allegation against him hangs in the air. In January, The Daily Beast reported that a staffer on Herschel Walker’s Senate campaign who was put in charge of chauffeuring the conservative activist says that Schlapp groped him while he was driving and invited him back to his room. Schlapp denies the allegations and blames “fake journalists… pushing this leftist agenda and lying.” But the allegations seem to be sticking around, as are questions about his influence waning, with even Fox News pulling out of the event.

But it’s not just Schlapp that’s causing CPAC problems. It’s Trump. Under Schlapp’s leadership, CPAC turned into Trump’s circus, and as Trump has lost some of his luster among Republicans, so too has the convention.

Across the river in Washington, D.C., a group of conservatives are holding an alternative to CPAC, called Principles First,with its organizer noting that “When CPAC convenes this weekend, you’ll sooner find a golden statue of Trump than a conservative principle.” And in Florida, both DeSantis and Pence are set to attend a closed-door donor retreat held by The Club for Growth, a conservative anti-tax behemoth that spent$150 million the last two election cycles. Noticeably absent from their invite list of potential GOP presidential candidates is Trump.

Schlapp briefly acknowledged Thursday that elected officials were skipping out this year’s CPAC. He said that he’s heard from people that “It’s really hard that at CPAC you don’t have every elected official.” But he said it didn’t matter. “You’re going to solve the problems in this country,” he told the half empty ballroom.

Tags: Donald Trump Jim Jordan Matt Schlapp CPAC

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https://www.mediamatters.org/matt-schlapp/stale-jokes-and-empty-seats-cpac-falters-its-first-day

sparse turnout

https://www.alternet.org/nikki-haley-cpac-wokeness/

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https://www.mediamatters.org/education/cpac-panelist-cites-bible-call-bring-paddle-back-schools

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when white nationalist Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes says that his America First Political Action Conference (AFPAC) is badly needed because the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) is too liberal, it is a wild claim because CPAC is way to the right of where it was 35 or 40 years ago. CPAC, founded in 1974 by the American Conservative Union (ACU) and Young Americans for Freedom (YAF), has become increasingly extreme along the way.

CPAC's first keynote speech, back in 1974, was given by then-California Gov. Ronald Reagan. It is hard to imagine the CPAC of the 1970s and 1980s hosting a far-right authoritarian like Hungarian Prime Minster Viktor Orbán, who was the guest of honor at a 2022 CPAC event in Dallas. But the more the Republican Party moved to the extreme right, the more that CPAC moved with it.

In an opinion column published by the Daily Beast on March 2, Never Trump conservative Matt Lewis examines CPAC's evolution and laments that 2023's "Trumpified" CPAC bears little resemblance to the "serious and wonky" CPAC of the 1980s.

READ MORE:C**PAC official melts down over Joe Biden's 'semi-fascist' label despite its embrace of Viktor Orbán

"What a long, strange trip it’s been," Lewis argues. "CPAC and I were born the same year. In 1974, Ronald Reagan spoke at the very first CPAC gathering. He began by introducing three Vietnam POWs. One of them was, you guessed it, John McCain. In 2019, the ghost of John McCain was attacked from the stage of CPAC…. To be sure, CPAC speakers have long existed on a spectrum, somewhere between William F. Buckley and P.T. Barnum. But in the last dozen years or so — coinciding, it seems, with the election of Barack Obama, and then exploding with Trump's election — it began skewing very heavily toward the Barnum end."

Lewis notes that only 11 years ago, in 2012, he was CPAC's Blogger of the Year. And in the past, CPAC welcomed everyone from ABC News' Sam Donaldson to conservative columnist George Will. But those days are long gone.

"My conclusion is this: If you want to know what the conservative movement will look like in five years, look at what today’s CPAC hall is like," Lewis explains. "That is a scary thought, because if that analysis turns out to be true, Donald Trump is the GOP's future. After all, he's their celebrated hero. And with Ron DeSantis presumably sitting this CPAC out, he's the only game in town."

READ MORE: Hungarian autocrat Viktor Orbán rails against same-sex marriage in CPAC speech

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Greene (R-GA), a far-right Christian nationalist extremist, kicked off her speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC)Friday morning by telling the room filled with many empty seats that theleft is “coming for our children,” in her hate-filled, lie-filled, fear-mongering, anti-LGBTQ speech portraying her cause as virtuous because, she preached, “our God is bigger.” That God, she promised, would help her pass anti-transgender legislation that “will make it a felony to perform anything to do with gender-affirming care on children.”

“The left has told us something that should put fear in the heart of every parent,” Greene said as she began her speech. “Not just parents – every single person.”

“They said they’re coming for our children,” Greene declared.

“I think the Republican Party has a duty. We have a responsibility, and that is to be the party that protects children,” her speech (video below) continued.

Greene again falsely claimed that Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said “he wants our sons and daughters to go die in Ukraine,” which is the exact opposite of what he said. She attacked the San Francisco Gay Men’s Chorus for “literally singing we’re coming for your children,” referring to a 2021 “tongue in cheek” song the group received right-wing death threats over because it advocated for teaching children to love and “not to hate.”

She did not offer any other examples where “the left” said they are “coming for our children."

she called medical experts who support transgender children a“billion dollar industry that mutilates the genitals of children” and claimed “they have a target, or should I say a victim?”

Describing transgender children and teens as “confused,” Greene told her audience, “everyone knows that when you’re growing up, I mean, think about it. How many times did you say when you’re a kid you wanted to be a fireman or a doctor or a police officer. You wanted to be something when you’re an adult, but when you grew up, you became something else.”

READ MORE: Watch: Trump Falsely Accuses Biden of Creating a ‘Marxist Equity Enforcement Squad’ and Calls for ‘Restitution

rather than offer support for transgender children and teens and their families, Greene repeatedly called them abused “victims” and said many of them “have diagnosis of autism, mental illness, they have depression, they have anxiety, they have psychosis. Many of them live in foster care. So they already have lived lives of abuse. And these victims come in thinking they’re going to find happiness and they’re going to find security in their identity because they think they can change their gender. These boys think they can become girls. These girls think they can become boys,” as she described gender-affirming surgery that almost never takes place on minors.

Greene announced her bill, the Protect Children’s innocence act, which she said “will make it a felony to perform anything to do with gender affirming care on children.” She boasted it would pass because of God.

“Our God is bigger. And our God, our God is the God that created us man and woman in His image, He created us in our God is the God that created our children. And because of him, we will get this bill passed and the Republican Party will be the party that protects children from such an evil that I cannot believe it exists in this time.”

Watch Greene’s full speech below or at this link.

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see schlapp 3 new grope, more staff quit 2 23

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schedule and speakers list for this week’s Conservative Political Action Conference make it clear that the gathering will be dominated by the undemocratic and unprincipled power-seeking strategies for which former President Donald Trump and the MAGA movement are known.

Lying About Elections, Undermining Democracy

The choice of Kari Lake to keynote the event’s gala, the “Ronald Reagan Dinner,” makes it clear that CPAC will continue to promote damaging false claims about voter fraud. Trump’s refusal to admit that voters rejected him in 2020 fueled the violent attempt to stop Congress from affirming President Joe Biden’s Electoral College victory.

Following in Trump’s footsteps, Lake has refused to accept her defeat by Arizona voters in last year’s governor’s race. Instead, she inflames supporters with bogus claims of election fraud, filing lawsuit after rejected lawsuit seeking to overturn her loss. Right Wing Watch reported that this month Lake took her complaints to two programs hosted by far-right broadcasters who have called for violence against political opponents. On one, when the host claimed that conservative Christians are being provoked to unleash “violence or bloodshed,” Lake responded, “I don’t know how much longer the people can take it.” As we saw on Jan. 6, 2021, this strategy is dangerous for democracy.

In addition to Trump himself, other speakers include Trump family members, right-wing funder and promoter of debunked election conspiracies Mike Lindell, MAGA strategist Steve Bannon, and far-right “Pizzagate” promoter Jack Posobiec.

Previous CPAC gatherings have celebrated authoritarian strongmen leaders like Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban and Brazil’s former president, Jair Balsonaro, whose supporters attacked government buildings after his defeat. Bolsonaro’s son Eduardo, a right-wing legislator, will speak at CPAC this year.

‘Parents with Pitchforks’: Limiting the Freedom to Learn

Right-wing political leaders are aggressively restricting freedom in the name of attacking “wokeness,” which they have invoked to restrict honest teaching about racism, purge library books that feature Black and LGBTQ characters, and deny access to essential health care for transgender people. This is an expansion of the cynical right-wing strategy launched during the Trump administration to vilify “critical race theory” and then slap the label on anything right-wing activists didn’t like.

One strategy in the war on “wokeness” is stoking racial resentment and grievance among conservative white voters. Before last year’s election, a group run by former Trump adviser Stephen Miller ran digital ads denouncing “anti-white bigotry” and falsely claiming that the Biden administration “put white people last in line for COVID relief funds.” Miller, an architect of Trump’s anti-immigrant rhetoric and policies with a documented affinity for white nationalism, is listed as a CPAC speaker.

One Thursday CPAC segment dubbed “Parents with Pitchforks” includes Virginia Lt. Gov. Winsome Sears, whose boss Gov. Glenn Youngkin has just launched an investigation of the AP African American Studies class attacked by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis. Another segment on “Sacking the Woke Playbook” features Sen. Tommy Tuberville and former acting attorney general Matt Whitaker, who once insisted that all judicial nominees should share his “biblical view of justice.”

Christian Nationalism

Also likely to be promoted at CPAC is the increasingly aggressive Christian nationalism espoused by religious-right activists and promoted by far-right politicians like Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene and North Carolina’s vehemently anti-LGBTQ Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson, who exclaimed in 2021, “As for this not being a Christian nation, yes, it is! If you don’t like it, I’ll buy your plane, train, or automobile ticket right up out of here.”Both Greene and Robinson are listed as speakers at this year’s gathering. Scholars have documented that white evangelicals are the group most likely to strongly embrace Christian nationalism, and those who do are more likely to support authoritarianism and political violence.

A ‘Principled’ Alternative?

A group of non-Trumpist conservatives has organized an alternative to CPAC, which they call the Principles First Summit. In a Substack column promoting the summit, organizer Heath Mayo denounced the evolution of CPAC in the Trump era, saying “What once set a budding movement’s standards for principles and character is now a showcase of its worst ills.” CPAC, Mayo wrote, “actively applauds a conspiratorial fringe of our politics completely unmoored from ethical constraints and moral commitments.”

Tags: Donald Trump Eduardo Bolsonaro Jack Posobiec Kari Lake Marjorie Taylor Greene Mark Robinson Mike Lindell Stephen Miller Steve Bannon Winsome Sears Censorship Christian Nationalism CPAC CPAC 2023 Critical Race Theory Stop the Steal CPAC

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mma 2 23 // santos grope groin

following a monthlong absence from the network's on-air programming, conservative luminaries Matt and Mercedes Schlapp have found safe harbors with rival right-wing media outlets. The Schlapps had been frequent guests on Fox News and Fox Business until last month’s report of sexual assault.

Fox News and Fox Business have continued to leave frequent guests Matt and Mercedes Schlapp off their programming since a January 5 report that a Republican campaign staffer assigned as Matt’s driver in October said Matt had sexually assaulted him.

According to Media Matters’ internal database of cable news guest appearances, Matt appeared on Fox News’ weekday programs at least 29 times in 2022, and Mercedes appeared at least 56 times. Fox quietly pulled the Schlapps off-air after several appearances on the Fox channels in early January, and the network never mentioned the report or the subsequent lawsuit against the Schlapps filed by the staffer.During their hiatus from Fox, both Matt and Mercedes have instead appeared on Fox’s right-wing media rivals, such as Newsmax.

Matt is the chair of the American Conservative Union, which hosts the Conservative Political Action Conference. Fox’s relationship with the Schlapps runs deeper than just hosting them dozens of times last year: Fox Nation has sponsored every stateside CPAC since 2019,one year after the streaming network launched. In 2021, Fox Nation was a “Featuring Sponsor” at the event, paying at least $250,000, and it was a top sponsor again in 2022. Even before Fox Nation started sponsoring the event, Fox News hosts often spoke at CPAC: Jeanine Pirro in2017, Sean Hannity in2015, and Tucker Carlson in2013.

It remains to be seen whether Fox will continue to support CPAC while the network continues to keep the Schlapps off its programming and ignores the report of sexual assault by Matt, aside from one story on FoxNews.com weeks ago. But at least one other right-wing media outlet, Newsmax, is welcoming the Schlapps, even as it too ignores this story. (Republican lawmakers are reportedly ignoring it as well.) Newsmax gave the Schlapps free rein to comment on GOP politics without asking them to address the report about Matt.

Newsmax provided a safe space for both Matt and Mercedes Schlapp on January 27, interviewing them on separate programs and failing to bring up the lawsuit filed against both of them or the sexual assault report. Instead, Mercedes was asked for her opinion about the Paul Pelosi video, a Biden judicial nomination, and DirecTV’s supposed “deplatforming” of Newsmax. Matt was asked about Trump's recent culture war attacks and the reelection of Ronna McDaniel as the Republican National Committee chair. [vids]

matt was also interviewed on January 27 and again on February 2 by right-wing podcaster Steve Bannon,Trump’s disgraced former strategic adviser. In the most recent appearance on Bannon’s show, Matt promised that the 2023 CPAC will be “a little bit Hungarian” in its treatment of unfriendly media outlets, possibly to avoid reporters asking difficult questions about him. Bannon did not bring up the report of sexual assault during either of these appearances.

Mercedes also had a safe space during her January 27 appearance onWMAL’s O’Connor & Company. While neither the lawsuit nor the allegation against Matt were mentioned during the interview, co-host Larry O’Connor closed it by saying to Mercedes: “I know you've been through hell the last couple of weeks” and offering his support.

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cpac once has legit policy presented?

According to a report from Rolling Stone, the speeches thus far at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Dallas have been larded with "dark" threats of coming violence as the speakers brushed aside any discussion about the Jan 6 Capitol riot.

With Donald Trump --who instigated the Capitol insurrection -- taking the stage on Saturday, Tim Dickinson wrote that in many cases the speeches, "...menaced America with what seemed to be thinly veiled calls for violence."

Case in point, he notes, was a speech given by recently convicted former Donald Trump advisor Steve Bannon who proclaimed to the crowd, "We are at war."

"Repeating the Big Lie that the 2020 election was stolen from Donald Trump,Bannon insisted that Joe Biden is an 'illegitimate imposter.' Calling on Republicans to send 'shock troops' to Washington, Bannon promised the crowd they had an opportunity to 'shatter the Democratic party as a national political institution'." he wrote. "He alleged that theparty has been overrun by 'radical, cultural Marxists'and 'groomers' who 'want to destroy the Republic.'Bannon insisted the GOP must pursue absolute victory over 'power-mad and lawless' Democrats, asserting: 'There can be no half measures anymore'."

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) doubled down on Bannon's heated rhetoric, exhorting the crowd with the claim, "It’s like the old Roman Colosseum where you slam on a breastplate and you grab a battle axe and you go fight the barbarians. As they say in the military world, it is a target-rich environment.”

"The rhetoric of revolution and frontline confrontation went hand-in-hand with other speakers and presenters who cast the American left as demonic, evil, and destructive — in other words the kind of enemies who deserve to be dealt with harshly," the report states before adding, "CPAC has long been a political circus, a relatively harmless sideshow. But its latest incarnation has become manifestly dangerous — more fascist than farce. It is holding up alleged perpetrators of political violence as martyrs. It is demonizing its domestic political opponents as diabolical 'enemies within.' And it is giving MAGA supporters a militaristic frame for their charge to the 'front lines' of America’s culture wars."

"In short it is playing with fire. But it’s the rest of us who may get burned." Rolling Stones' Dickinson concluded.

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https://www.mediamatters.org/tucker-carlson/right-wing-media-spend-week-rallying-around-viktor-orban-after-he-gave-what-his-own

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an 8 22

In 2022, former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin has been conducting her first political campaign since 2008, when she was GOP presidential nominee John McCain’s running mate. Palin, endorsed by former President Donald Trump — someone McCain expressed vehement contempt for — is running for a U.S. House of Representatives seat in Alaska. And like other Republican candidates of 2022, she is, according to Mother Jones, resorting to Trump’s Big Lie playbook.

Trump continues to falsely claim that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from him — a claim that has been repeatedly debunked. Palin, Mother Jones’ Emily Hofstaedter reports in an article published on August 9, borrowed from Trump’s Big Lie narrative when she appeared at the Conservative Political Action Conference’s CPAC Texas gathering in Dallas on Thursday, August 4. The event featuring Palin was billed as “She’s Back! An Interview With Sarah Palin.”

Hofstaedter explains, “Interview host and CPAC Vice-Chair Charlie Gerow introduced her as ‘one of the leaders in the conservative movement’ before they embarked on a 20-minute conversation that included plenty of misinformation about the integrity of American elections. Palin and Gerow hit many of the cherished Republican talking points that attempt to undermine faith in the electoral process, including Dominion voting machines, mail-in ballots, and ranked-choice voting.”

READ MORE: 'Two deranged people': Steve Schmidt slams Trump's growing alliance with Sarah Palin

Palin was highly critical of ranked-choice voting at CPAC Texas, telling the crowd, “It’s bizarre, it’s convoluted, it’s confusing, and it results in voter suppression. It results in a lack of voter enthusiasm because it’s so weird…. It doesn’t matter if you win by getting the most votes. It matters if you have more second or third place votes depending on how the voters are ranking you.”

But Hofstaedter stresses that Palin’s claims about ranked-choice voting are untrue, pointing out that Maine has been using it since 2016 without any problem.

Amy Fried, a political science professor at the University of Maine, told Mother Jones, “There isn’t a higher rate of incomplete or spoiled ballots in ranked-choice races compared to ballots in elections using plurality voting. Nor is turnout lower.”

Similarly, New York University law professor Rick Pildes told Mother Jones, “There’s no evidence voters have been confused or don’t understand how to rank candidates one, two, three.”

READ MORE:Federal judge shoots down Sarah Palin’s request for new defamation trial against the NY Times: 'Motion denied'

Hofstaedter points out that Palin also criticized Domination Voting Systems’ equipment at CPAC Texas.

“After the 2020 elections, Trump lawyers Sidney Powell and Rudy Giuliani claimed, without any evidence, that Dominion voting software was switching votes for Trump to (Joe) Biden,” Hofstaedter notes. “Repeatedly, this assertion has been proven false.”

READ MORE:How 'relic of the past' Sarah Palin helped shape the 'outrageous' GOP politics of today: journalist

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nazi rhet

https://www.alternet.org/2022/07/libertarian-writer-slams-the-gops-creepy-affection-for-viktor-orban/

On  Saturday, July 23, far-right Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán — who is adored by the MAGA movement in the United States — gave a speech in Romaniathat was controversial even by his authoritarian standards. Orbán used the rhetoric of the Great Replacement theory, a cornerstone of modern White supremacist and White nationalist ideology, and he claimed that a “mixed-race world” is hurting western countries. The speech was so extreme that even Zsuzsa Hegedüs, a long-time ally and adviser, slammed it as “openly racist” and “a purely Nazi diatribe worthy of Joseph Goebbels” when she submitted a resignation letter on Tuesday, July 26.

Regardless, Orbán is still scheduled to speak a Conservative Political Action Committee (CPAC) gathering in Dallas in August that will also feature former President Donald Trump and Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia. And conservative/libertarian journalist Cathy Young, in an article published by The Bulwark on July 28, slams Orbán “apologists” in the Republican Party who continue to openly embrace and praise the Hungarian prime minister despite his extremism. Young is especially critical of MAGA journalist Rod Dreher, a senior editor for Patrick Buchanan’s publication The American Conservative.

During his speech in Romania, Young notes, Orbán praised “Le Camp des Saints” (“The Camp of the Saints”), a 1973 novel by far-right French author Jean Raspail. The book has an overtly racist, anti-immigrant outlook and is adored by White nationalists in France and other countries. And Orbán described it as “outstanding,” saying, “I recommend it to anyone who wants to understand the spiritual developments underlying the West’s inability to defend itself.” Typically, those on the French far right who praise “Le Camp des Saints” also praise Renaud Camus’ 2011 book “Le Grand Remplacement” (“The Great Replacement”), which is considered essential reading among White supremacists and White nationalists.

READ MORE:CPAC 'proud' to host Hungarian strongman Viktor Orbán to 'fight against socialism'

“Raspail’s novel — the full text of which can be easily found online — is highly popular with the American and European far right,” Young observes. “Erstwhile Trump adviser Steve Bannon is a fan. So is Steve King, the former congressman from Iowa who managed to become a pariah even in the Trumpified Republican Party by wondering aloud why such terms as ‘White nationalist’ and ‘White supremacist’ should be considered offensive. So is Stephen Miller, the immigration policy chief in the Trump White House.”

Young continues, “Dreher doesn’t exactly love ‘The Camp of the Saints.’ He read it back in 2015 in response to refugee crisis in Europe, and reported that it is ‘a bad book, both aesthetically and morally,’ but nonetheless one with ‘something valuable to say to us’ — namely, that ‘the sentimental liberal humanitarianism’ of the West’s elites and their longing for ‘redemption for the West’s sins’ will bring about the death of western civilization by stripping it of the will to defend itself against the invading hordes from the Third World.”

“Le Camp des Saints,” Young notes, “is not just about the ‘clash of civilizations’ but, quite explicitly, about racial warfare: White people versus everybody else.”

“Given the expressions of complicated feelings by some of the book’s sympathetic American readers,” Young writes, “it’s important not to lose sight of the fact that Orbán glowingly endorses ‘The Camp of the Saints’ without any kind of ‘yes, it’s awful and racist, but’ disclaimer. Considered together with his comments about ‘race-mixing,’ his unqualified praise for Raspail’s book looks very much like a mask-off moment.”

READ MORE: [Former psychotherapist explains why Trump-loving Americans are drinking deep from Orban’s fascist well

Young continues, “The enthusiasm for Orbán among American ‘national conservatives’ like Dreher was creepy enough before the speech in Romania,” Young explains. “Orbán’s quasi-authoritarian drift, his demonization of dissenters and aliens, and his fondness for Vladimir Putin are all long-established aspects of his politics and persona. But now, the Hungarian prime minister is rather brazenly flirting with White nationalism — something that the NatCons have strenuously disavowed. If they still want to embrace Orbán and his ‘vision,’ will they have any credibility left when claiming that they stand for a civic nationalist creed and consider racial ethnonationalism abhorrent?”

READ MORE:Critics are horrified as Trump endorses strongman Viktor Orbán in Hungarian election

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https://www.salon.com/**2021/07**/12/trump-cranks-it-up-at-cpac-why-raising-the-spectacle-of-right-wing-madness-right-now-is-so-scary/

no lnx

Every revolutionary movement needs a martyr and it appears that the MAGA revolution has finally found one for itself.

Ashli Babbit, the Jan. 6th insurrectionist who was shot by a security guard as she climbed through a broken window just a few feet away from members of Congress, is Donald Trump's Horst Wessel, the German brownshirt who was murdered in 1930 and turned into a martyr by the Nazi propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels. Trump himself is making the case for Babbit, having mentioned her in every appearance he's made in the last week.

At his recent Florida rally, Trump wondered: "Who shot Ashli Babbit? We all saw the hand... Now they don't want to give the name." At his press conference on Wednesday in which he announced his laughable "class action" lawsuit against the Big Tech companies, he went a little bit farther saying, "there were no guns in the Capitol except for the gun that shot Ashli Babbitt. And nobody knows who that man were...the person that shot Ashli Babbitt right through the head, just boom. There was no reason for that."Then this past weekend he went all the way, describing the insurrection as a love fest and Babbit as an innocent victim in an interview with Fox Business host Maria Bartiromo:

Bartiromo took the ball and ran with it, saying that Babbitt climbed out of a broken window (as if she was trying to escape the vicious gunman) after which both she and Trump speculated that the officer who shot Babbitt was part of a Democratic official's security detail, casually mentioning Chuck Schumer in the process. The implication was obvious: the Democrats shot Ashli Babbitt for no good reason. The fact that we have all seen the footage of the shooting is irrelevant: We can believe them or we can believe our lying eyes.

Over the weekend, Trump appeared at his second CPAC conference in five months — this time in Texas. (Salon's Zachary Petrizzo delivered these dispatches from the event.) Trump gave his usual speech, to a notably more excited crowd than the last one in February in Florida. He's barely able to keep from announcing to his adoring fans that he's running again and they are all clamoring for him to do it. And it's clear that he will be running to avenge his bogus claims that he actually won the election. The Big Lie will never die.

It all sounds bizarre but when you talk about this stuff in the context of CPAC, it is really not all that crazy. Sure the violent insurrection gives their standard reckless rhetoric a feeling of urgency that wasn't there before, but if you look back you can see that's been there for decades.

Back in 1973 when the American Conservative Union (founded in 1964) first started holding these get-togethers, the GOP was in terrible disarray in the wake of Watergate and far-right organizers saw an opportunity to reshape the party in their conservative image. They invited Ronald Reagan to give the first keynote and the "New Right" never looked back.

CPAC has always been used as a way to take the temperature of the party activists and in that way, it's very instructive. The straw poll that's taken every year (or now, every few months, apparently) has not always been predictive of the party's nominee, but it shows what ideas and issues most excite the base. It's almost certain that the feedback loop between this group and the right-wing media guides the party as much as party officials and pollsters do.

 For the first quarter-century, the conference was an ideological gathering designed to promote the conservative movement agenda of anti-communism, small government, strong military, Christian Right values, low taxes, etc. But with the rise of the right-wing media — first talk radio, then Fox News — by the turn of the century, it became much more of a right-wing celebrity spectacle that sought to shock the political media, which loved to cover it since it was always held in DC. (This is the first year they've ever held the event outside of DC.) 

In fact, for the past 20 years, CPAC was basically the same circus that Trump took on the road for his beloved rallies. During the Bush years, politicians showed up and there were panel discussions of issues but the stars of the show were people like Ann Coulter, who pretty much made her name at these events.And they said things which, looking back, make January 6th seem inevitable.

At the 2002 meeting, Coulter said, "we need to execute people like John Walker in order to physically intimidate liberals, by making them realize that they can be killed, too, otherwise, they will turn out to be outright traitors." A few years later she made news again with another notorious speech:

On Democrats: "Someday they will find a way to abort all future Boy Scouts."

College professors: "sissified, pussified." Harvard: "the Soviet Union." John Kerry: the other "dominant woman in Democratic politics."

Her post-9/11 motto: "Rag head talks tough, rag head faces consequences." For good measure, she threw in a joke about having Muslims burn down the Supreme Court — with the liberal justices inside.

Then came questions. A young woman asked Coulter to describe themost difficult ethical decision she ever made. "There was one time I had a shot at Bill Clinton," Coulter said.

She meant that literally. Meanwhile, down in the bowels of the hotel hosting CPAC, they sold merchandise with adorable sayings such as "Happiness is Hillary Clinton's face on a milk carton" and "Rope. Tree. Journalist. Some Assembly Required."At the next year's event, Coulter said, "I was going to have a few comments on the other Democratic presidential candidate, John Edwards, but it turns out you have to go into rehab if you use the word 'fa**ot,'" and when she was rebuked for saying it, she called it "speech totalitarianism."

There is nothing new under the right-wing sun.

In recent years, some of the acts were scrapped. Coulter was not invited in 2015, and in 2017 the right-wing provocateur Milo Yianopoulos was canceled when it was revealed that he had made positive statements about pedophilia. They were no longer needed anyway. The show was by then dominated by Donald Trump who had made his first big political splash there in 2013 spreading the "birther" lie, which the attendees ate up with a spoon. And while Coulter climbed her way back to CPAC this weekend, participating on an obscure panel going on about immigration and making grotesque racist statements, as usual, her act doesn't shock anymore and nobody cares. Who needs Coulter anyway when you have Trump?

HEATHER DIGBY PARTON

Heather Digby Parton, also known as "Digby," is a contributing writer to Salon. She was the winner of the 2014 Hillman Prize for Opinion and Analysis Journalism.

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https://www.alternet.org/2021/07/cpac-2021-2653755199/

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Jesus, guns and COVID denialism’: How CPAC’s Dallas gathering was an unhinged mix of ‘ and ‘voice-in-your-head stuff’

Lauren Boebert speaking with attendees at the 2020 Student Action Summit, hosted by Turning Point USA at the Palm Beach County Convention Center in West Palm Beach, Florida, Gage Skidmore

Alex Henderson July 12, 2021

During its July 9-11 event in Dallas, the Conservative Political Action Conference featured a long list of GOP wingnuts — from former President Donald Trump to Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas to Rep. Lauren Boebert of Colorado, a QAnon supporter. Never Trump conservative Charlie Sykes analyzes the gathering in a July 12 column for The Bulwark, lamenting that it was full of "cray-cray voice-in-your-head stuff."

Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas has described Sykes as someone who "used to be conservative," which is wildly misleading but not surprising coming from Cruz. Sykes is still conservative, and The Bulwark is a right-wing website. But the Republican Party, as the CPAC event demonstrates, has moved so far to the right that a traditional non-Trumpian, non-extremist conservative like Sykes is now considered a RINO (Republican in Name Only) in Trumpworld and the 2021 GOP.

"In fairness," Sykes writes, "CPAC has never been mistaken for a gathering of philosophers; it was described as the 'Star Wars Bar Scene of the conservative movement' long before the Trump Era. But this weekend's confederacy of dunces, with apologies to John Kennedy O'Toole, was, nevertheless, a window into what conservativism has become."

CPAC crowd applauds a comment about the U.S. failing to reach a 90% vaccination rate https://t.co/iGX6FD4SaU

— Andrew Solender (@Andrew Solender) 1625957915.0

[vid]

Boebert: We’re here to tell government we don’t want your benefits. We don’t want your welfare… https://t.co/Gk8WenGrls

— Acyn (@Acyn) 1625945792.0

Sykes adds, "To the extent that the right believes in anything these days, it seems committed to standing up for neo-Nazis and Holocaust deniers on social media platforms, while pushing to fire school teachers and college professors who teach forbidden topics in schools. This is not be confused with 'cancel culture,' which is now exclusively deployed to refer to virtually any criticism aimed at right-wing figures."

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https://www.alternet.org/2021/07/the-extremism-at-cpac-2021-shows-why-democrats-go-on-the-defensive-in-2022-journalist/

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many Never Trump conservatives were hoping that when now-President Joe Biden won the 2020 election, Republicans would abandon Trumpism. Instead, they doubled down on it, and the recent 2021 Conservative Political Action Conference in Dallas was a celebration of Trumpian extremism — from anti-vaxxer paranoia to the Big Lie about the 2020 election to praising the January 6 insurrectionists as heroic. According to liberal Washington Post opinion columnist Greg Sargent, CPAC 2021 should serve as a wake-up call for Democrats and encourage them to do everything imaginable to prevent a red wave in the 2022 midterms.

Sargent, this week in his column, explains, "Back in the dark ages of the last century, the right-wing culture war was often described with a reference to the three Gs: God, guns and gays. These days, the right-wing culture war is perhaps better described with three Vs: vaccine derangement, validation of White racial innocence, and valorization of insurrectionists. Over the weekend, the Conservative Political Action Conference treated the nation to a parade of such obsessions."

The lineup at CPAC 2021 in Dallas ranged from former President Donald Trump to Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas to a QAnon supporter: Rep. Lauren Boebert of Colorado.

"We were told the large percentage of Americans who remain unvaccinated against COVID-19 is a cause for ecstatic celebration," Sargent notes. "We were told 'Marxist' Democrats want to indoctrinate your children to be ashamed of their whiteness. And, of course, we were told that the election was stolen from Donald Trump. This zombie lie was delivered to CPAC by the former president himself, who previewed this by telling Fox News that the January 6 rioters were 'peaceful people' and that they are this current moment's true victims of injustice. If there's one thing that all this lunacy confirmed, it's that such culture-warring will be central to GOP efforts in 2022."

Sargent notes that the 2010 and 2014 midterms — back when Barack Obama was president — far-right Republicans successfully used culture war fear-mongering to rally their base.

"Today's vaccine denial and valorization of insurrectionists carry serious echoes of the Tea Party during the Barack Obama presidency," Sargent recalls. "In 2010, protesters confronted Democratic lawmakers with vile slurs, and Republicans told endless lies about 'death panels.' In 2014, the GOP went all-in on the lie that Obama would allow terrorists to import Ebola across our border. Republicans were in no way penalized for any of this. Instead, they won two smashing midterm victories."

Sargent wraps up his column by urging Democrats to put Republicans "on the defensive" in the 2022 midterms.

"This might include asking anti-critical race theory Republicans why they think our cadets are such snowflakes that they must be shielded from hard truths about their country's past," Sargent writes. "Or asking why Republicans are doing far too little to encourage GOP voters to endure a little pinprick to protect their friends, relatives and neighbors from dying of a deadly disease. Or why they're trying to bury the truth about their own party's complicity in an effort to sack the U.S. government with mob violence."

The columnist adds, "Ask yourself this: Why is it that Democrats spend far more time denying lies — that they want to indoctrinate your children with White shame and send jackbooted government thugs to kick down your doors and force vaccines on you — than Republicans spend denying any of those charges against them, which are true?"

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white nationalists prep for 'physical' altercation with security at Dallas CPAC conference

Zachary Petrizzo Salon

July 09, 2021

DALLAS —White nationalist and Unite the Right attendee Nicholas Fuentes, de facto leader of the ultra-far-right "groyper" movement, has announced that he plans to attending a Conservative Political Action...

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https://www.alternet.org/2021/03/cpac-nazi-symbol/

cdv

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CPAC veers into neo-Nazi fantasy — was it deliberate?

President Donald J. Trump delivers his remarks Saturday, Feb. 29, 2019, during his appearance at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) at the Gaylord National Resort and Convention Center in Oxon Hill, Md. (Official White House Photo by Tia Dufour)

Chauncey DeVega and Salon March 02, 2021

Once upon a time, the Conservative Political Action Conference was a relatively traditional and "mainstream" gathering of many divergent currents on the political right.

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Fueled by the obsessive racist backlash against Barack Obama's presidency and paranoid fantasies about a bogeyman fictional version of "the left," the Republican Party rapidly became more extreme, contemptuous not just of "liberals" but of multiracial democracy and reality itself. During those years, CPAC came to resemble a political zoo or circus where assorted cast-offs, broken toys and fringe figures from the Republican Party and conservative movement could gather together and hatch their nefarious plots.

As a result, during the Obama era CPAC became something of a bellwether or leading indicator of the Republican Party's embrace of right-wing extremism and anti-democracy fervor.

Writing at the Washington Monthly, David Atkins summarizes this:

But CPAC isn't a sideshow. It's the main stage of the conservative movement, predicting its future behavior in an era of widening asymmetric polarization. CPAC presaged the rise of the Party of Reagan over that of Gerald Ford and Dwight Eisenhower. It heralded the scorched-earth confrontational politics of Newt Gingrich in the Bill Clinton era. It elevated George W. Bush at a time when the mainstream GOP still saw itself more in the mold of John McCain. It celebrated the Tea Party before GOP legislators had fully embraced it. And it promoted openly racist birthers and conspiracy theorists like Donald Trump at a time when the the mainline GOP was producing superficially anti-racist autopsies and promoting candidates like Marco Rubio and Spanish-speaking Jeb Bush.

So if we want to know where the Republican Party is heading today, we should pay close attention to CPAC.

It is now an obligatory stop for Republican presidential candidates and others seeking high office to win the approval. This year's CPAC gathering — held in Florida rather than Washington, D.C. — was of course where the recently deposed former president and authoritarian cult leader announced his return to public life and plans to further dominate the Republican Party.

Today's Republican Party did not slip and accidentally fall into neofascism and racial authoritarianism. Rather, it willingly leapt into that cesspool. CPAC has devolved into a "safe space" where such vile ideas are cultivated and normalized.

In her landmark 1951 book "The Origins of Totalitarianism," Hannah Arendt previewed the way today's Trump-controlled Republican Party has devolved into a fascist authoritarian movement, a cultural and political force that transcends voting, campaigns, elections and other forms of "normal" political behavior.

On Twitter, author Jared Yates Sexton recently echoed Arendt with a contemporary warning:

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Continuing to pretend like we still live in a two-party representative system will only give room and cover to a fascist movement that is intentionally and systematically demolishing democracy and civil liberties. We must recognize the reality of the threat.

What we've witnessed, over the past few years, is the reveal of the GOP as a fascist movement to protect the white, wealthy, and powerful, an angry and violent rejection of democracy and human dignity. There is no saving them, there is no unity, there's only avoiding tragedy.

At this year's CPAC gathering, the escalation that Sexton describes became even more grotesque and dangerous. As reported by many reporters, journalists, and other observers, the main stage at CPAC was shaped like the Othala or Odal rune, an ancient proto-Germanic symbol worn more recently on the uniforms of some of Hitler's most fearsome soldiers, including the infamous Waffen-SS.

In our own time, the Odal rune has also been adopted by neo-Nazis and other white supremacists in both the United States and abroad in an effort make their politics appear more palatable and normal to "mainstream" conservatives and other members of the right wing.

Predictably, Matt Schlapp, the organizer of this year's CPAC gathering, denied any connection between the shape of the main stage and Nazism. Notably, Schlapp did not order the design of the stage changed after he was made aware of its ominous symbolism and history.

Ultimately, it is not the physical design of the stage at the 2021 CPAC gathering that is concerning, but more importantly the white supremacist and other racist and anti-human values and ideas being shared and reinforced by the event's speakers and attendees.

To better understand the relationship between the Odal symbol, Nazism, white supremacy, CPAC, today's Republican Party and the broader right-wing movement, I asked a range of experts from various backgrounds for their insights.

James Scaminaci III, expert on right-wing politics and extremism:

Starting with the disclosure that Steve Bannon's Breitbart sanitized and mainstreamed neo-Nazi propaganda during the 2016 Trump campaign, that Trump himself retweeted neo-Nazi imagery during the campaign, and that within conservative media outlets there were "ghost" white nationalists, this shows that the infiltration has never stopped. Moreover, the displays are becoming even more overt.

I suspect, in a similar vein with Trump's use of "88" notations, that this not initially intended for GOPers or conservatives who may or may not be aware of such imagery. Rather, it is intended for those on the left to notice and bring it out in the open, and then the right can have a culture-war fight about it. This reinforces their narratives of "cancel culture," and their persecution complex. I think it is part trolling, part "owning the libs," and using the libs to educate their own publics.

Moreover, the neo-Nazis and Klan, since at least 2005, have used conservative gatherings to infiltrate and spread their message. They approached the Tea Party with sanitized messages, hid their Nazi tattoos, and tried to coax them toward their viewpoint. They did this during the nativist anti-immigration movement between 2005 and 2008. They mixed with middle-class protesters. They've done this with the "reopen" campaigns. There is also speculation that at least some of the boogaloo militia were disguised neo-Nazis pushing their accelerationist agenda. Neo-Nazis and the Klan have had a chance to mingle with conservative, Christian GOP voters. You can see this in the conflation of the neo-Nazi "white genocide" with the more sanitized "great replacement" conspiracy theory.

Ultimately, what I see with the image at the CPAC conference is part of a long-term trend where neo-Nazis sanitize their rhetoric, sanitize their personal presentations and infiltrate the GOP, the Christian right and the "conservative" movement.

Gavriel Rosenfeld, historian, and author of "The Fourth Reich: The Specter of Nazism from World War II to the Present," "Hi Hitler! How the Nazi Past is Being Normalized in Contemporary Culture" and "The World Hitler Never Made: Alternate History and the Memory of Nazism":

Whether or not the much-commented-upon use of an Odal rune was coincidental or deliberate in creating the CPAC conference stage, the GOP in recent years has flirted with symbols and images used by the American and European far right.

GOP politicians, including the now ex-president, have earned warranted suspicion for playing symbolic footsie with right-wing extremists in the form of various social media postings, retweets, and other dog-whistle endorsements.

Most of these endorsements have involved new symbols used by the far right: Pepe the Frog, the VDare/Lion Guard Lion symbol (proposed as a possible symbol of a future Trump-led Patriot Party), white power "OK" salutes, etc. Thus far, while many MAGA supporters overtly use Nazi-era symbols (black sun, SS runes, etc.) the GOP itself has rarely endorsed actual symbols used in the era of classical fascism.

The most notable exception was probably Trump's retweeting of tweets smearing antifa with the Nazi-era red triangle sewn onto the uniforms of left-wing concentration camp prisoners.

The Odal rune would be a notable exception to this, but at this point, CPAC has plausible deniability until better evidence surfaces.  I'd say we are right to be vigilant about paying attention to (and calling out) the increasing willingness of the far right to "say the quiet part out loud" in terms of overt imagery, even if occasionally the fears are misplaced. For some time now, left-liberals are justified in being fearful of the increasingly unhinged right.

Tim Wise, anti-racism activist, speaker, and author of the new book "Dispatches from the Race War":

There are two ways of understanding this. The first is as a strange coincidence, in which a right-wing party whose leader has told white nationalists and assorted fascists to stand back and stand by, and claimed some among the Nazis in Charlottesville were "fine people," just so happens to design the stage at their signature event in the shape of a Nazi symbol.

The second is as a deliberate wink and nod to those within the conservative movement who know the white nationalist base of their party and are signaling to it. But here's the thing: Whichever of these is true hardly matters.

The Nazis will see this as a subtle endorsement of their ideology. That means more terrorism, more death and an ever-increasing threat to democracy. Which is why even if the design were innocent, this simply goes to show that the right has no interest in guarding against white racist terror by distancing itself from the kinds of people who stormed the Capitol or shot up the Walmart in El Paso or organized Unite the Right in 2017. Because if they wanted to disavow and distance from that bunch they would take pains to avoid things like this. They would work to avoid any sniff of Nazi impropriety. They want it both ways — to punch and then hide their hands. The rest of us must make it clear: This is who they are. It is who they have been for a long time.

Jean Guerrero, journalist, investigative reporter and author of "Hatemonger: Stephen Miller, Donald Trump, and the White Nationalist Agenda":

The use of Nazi iconography is clearly meant to thrill the GOP's increasingly racist base and to trigger the libs, as well as supporters of American democracy. No one should be surprised. They want people speculating about whether the symbol was used deliberately so as to distract from the now unquestionable reality, which is that the Republican Party is an extremist party. Mainstream Republicans have embraced white supremacist ideas that pose a danger to communities of color, just as they did in California during the '90s amid fears about the "browning of America." Stephen Miller is no longer a fringe figure of the party. He is the Republican Party.

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Miller is always laundering white supremacist ideas through the language about heritage. I'm not surprised by the use of this specific symbol. What it dog-whistles is "white heritage."

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alt rt has afpac w/ gosar az  and steve king

https://www.alternet.org/2021/03/cpac-fascism/

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Republicans' fascism two-step was on display at CPAC 2021

Amanda Marcotte March 01, 2021

If you want a perfect emblem of the current state of Republican politics, look to the story of how Rep. Paul Gosar, R-Ariz., spent this past weekend.

On Friday night, Gosar attended a conference for unvarnished fascists, where the main organizer gave a speech calling for America to be white nationalist country and openly celebrated the insurrection spearheaded by Donald Trump on Jan. 6. On Saturday, while speaking at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), Gosar lamely claimed to denounce "white racism," clearly feeling that those magic words erased his participation in and support for those who are organizing white racists to take over the country through force.

It should be silly that Gosar believes that simply declaring "I denounce" is enough to negate all his concrete actions in favor of white nationalism, but the sad fact is that he has good reason to think it will work. After all, that's how things have been working for years in this country. Call it the fascism two-step: First, Republicans do something overtly fascist. Then they wave off concerns about their fascism by faking umbrage and relying on the widespread belief that "it can never happen here" to paint their critics as hysterical. Gosar was just a particularly blunt and obvious example, but it's the strategy that's been used throughout Trump's presidency and now is being heavily employed to minimize the attempted insurrection.

Much was written, both on social and plain old regular media, about how CPAC this year was cementing Trump's power over the GOP and turning the party into a cult of personality for their orange-hued buffoon of a leader. Indeed, it's both alarming and darkly funny, from the rapturous reception of his predictably whiny stemwinder to the ridiculous gold statue of Trump that was on display, which drew thousands of jokes about golden calves. But really, the Trump worship is only part of what is the bigger and much scarier story of CPAC.

The conference was geared around the task of completing the transformation of the Republican party into an overtly authoritarian — even fascist — party that is focused on seizing and holding power against the will of the American people. The Trump idolatry is part of that — what's a fascist party without a cult around a narcissistic leader? — but ultimately, Trump still functions as he always has, which is as a tool for his followers to get what they want, and not an ends in himself. And what they want, as CPAC made quite clear, is to make the U.S. a white nationalist country, which is always what the "MAGA" slogan stood for.

The CPAC straw poll showed only 55% of attendees endorsed Trump as their favorite for the Republican presidential nominee. However, a full 97% approved of Trump's performance in office, despite him ending his presidency by launching a coup that ended in a bloody attack on the Capitol. Trump himself they can leave or take. But the insurrection and the violent assault on American democracy? That is what the CPAC crowd is all about.

As Heather "Digby" Parton noted at Salon Monday morning, "Trump went out of his way to cancel a whole lot of Republicans he considers disloyal, promising to do everything in his power to 'get rid of 'em all,'" and then proceeded to name "every single GOP politician who voted for impeachment individually, his voice dripping with venom."

This is a result, of course, of Trump's famous narcissism and his obsessive cataloging of his enemies. But it is also, and more importantly, about something else: Purging the party of anyone who isn't on board with a fascist agenda. The targets of Trump's wrath are the only Republicans who drew the line at a violent attempt to overthrow the government. This isn't about just remaking the party in his own image, but remaking they party as one explicitly supportive of violent insurrections. Frankly, it won't be a hard task, since, as his pathetically short list showed, few Republicans were even interested in opposing his coup in the first place....

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don jr at cpac Tpac fail, PO'd at mccarthy; kim g sez he will do more out of office than biden

https://www.alternet.org/2021/02/trump-evangelicals/

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While some Republican lawmakers are fighting to return to some form of traditional political normalcy, other lawmakers and members of the political party are pushing for a new direction.

The first night of the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), which featured some of the most contentious Republican lawmakers like Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.), signals the Trump era may be far from over. When Cruz took the stage, he made his perspective quite clear as he suggested that he will remain a Trump loyalist for years to come.

"There's a whole lot of voices in Washington that want to just erase the past four years, want to go back to the world before," Cruz said. "Let me tell ya right now: Donald J. Trump ain't goin' anywhere."

Hawley expressed similar remarks. While he admitted that he is aware of the fact that he is not the most popular lawmaker, he and other conservatives like him are not going anywhere.

"I'm not going anywhere," Hawley proclaimed as he insisted the "radical left, their corporate allies [and] the liberal media to cancel me." He added, "I'm here today, I'm not going anywhere and I'm not backing down, not a chance!"

According to Hawley, Republicans like him are the future of the political party. "I just want to say to those people who say to us, 'Oh, you're the past, your moment has passed, it's over, it's Joe Biden's America now,' we're not the past, we're the future, we represent the future of this country," the junior senator said. "We're not going to back down to the woke mob, we're not going to back down to the cancel culture, we're not going to be told what we can say or do."

A new editorial published by The New York Times notes how the first night of the CPAC underscores the uncertainty of the Republican Party's future. The publication notes that "in recent years, CPAC has evolved from a family reunion of Republican libertarians, social conservatives and a hawkish foreign policy establishment into Trump-chella."

This year has been no exception, with speaker after speaker focusing on the pet issues of the former president. "Are your votes being distorted?" one ominous video asked, flashing photos of President Biden on the big screen. Mr. Trump plans to address the crowd on Sunday and anything he says about his future political ambitions will inevitably overshadow the entire event....

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compensatory cpac rant ie pound the table? FREEEE_DUMB! wow combines star wars and nazi ref, also mel gibson

https://www.alternet.org/2021/02/ted-cruz-speech/

U.S. Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX), fresh from near-universal condemnation over his Cancun vacation during the Lone Star State's ice and snow storms, power outages, and water shortage, spoke at CPAC Friday morning in an apparent effort to win back some of his lost approval rating.

He screamed for nearly a minute.

"These are dark days and the media tells us this is the new Galactic Empire forever and 1000 years, but already Joe Biden and the radicals in his administration they are already overshooting, they are already going too far, their policies don't work, they are disasters, they are bad, they are destroying jobs, they are stripping our freedom," Cruz said, screaming out unsubstantiated falsehoods.

"There is a natural pendulum to politics and the country will come back to sanity and mark my words, 2022 is going to be a fantastic election year, and so is 2024, as we stand together and defend liberty, defend the Constitution, defend the Bill of Rights of every American. In the immortal words of William Wallace, 'Freedom!'" he screamed.

Watch:

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huh?

young pharoh anti-sem israeli pedo

https://www.alternet.org/2021/02/cpac-ripped-for-hypocritical-move-canceling-reprehensible-guest-from-speaking-at-anti-cancel-culture-event

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https://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/its-back-after-2019-outrage-american-priority-festival-and-conference-2020-promises-golf-tournament-and-a-whos-who-of-far-right-speakers/

doral

It’s Back: After 2019 Outrage, American Priority Festival and Conference 2020 Promises Golf Tournament—and a Who’s Who of Far-Right Speakers

By Kristen Doerer | September 15, 2020

Simona Papadopoulos (left) poses with her husband George Papadopoulos (center) and another model after her bathing suit fashion show at the American Priority Festival and Conference. Screenshot of Simona Papadopoulos' since deleted tweet.]

At last year’s American Priority Festival and Conference, a macabre video that superimposed President Donald Trump’s face on a figure shooting the president’s perceived political opponents in a mass killing spree, reported on by The New York Times, caused outrage. This year, the AMP festival, unhindered by the global coronavirus pandemic, will feature a who’s who of right-wing and far-right speakers, all gathered together at the Trump National Doral Miami Oct. 8-11.

The “YUGE lineup”—their words, not ours—includes returning speakers, such as far-right Rep. Matt Gaetz of Florida, convicted felon Roger Stone, whose sentence was commuted by President Donald Trump, and far-right activist and One America News Network figure Jack Posobiec, who pushed the “Pizzagate” conspiracy theory, according to an organizer’s email Monday.

Anti-Muslim activist and right-wing conspiracy theorist Laura Loomer will also return to the stage. After winning the GOP nomination to represent Florida’s 21st Congressional District in the U.S. House in August, Loomer received Trump’s congratulations as she rubbed shoulders with a series of far-right figures at her victory party. Failed congressional candidate and QAnon conspiracy theorist DeAnna Lorraine, who recently accused Trump of “taking his base for granted” by wearing a mask, is another featured speaker. (We’ll see how many COVID-19 cases come out of this year’s festival.)

George Papadopoulos—who went to federal prison for making false statements to FBI agents about the timing of his contact with Russian intermediaries in 2016—will return to Trump Doral as well. Last year, Papadopolous spoke on an “Unmasking the Russian Hoax” panel, while his wife Simona Papadopolous held a swimsuit fashion show during the pool party portion of the festival.

Described as “Four days of God, country, and MAGA at the spectacular Trump National Doral resort in Miami, FL,” the conference promises “everything you could want in a patriot event.” And in case that description doesn’t excite you, the email promotes a golf tournament for an additional cost, a “MAGA pool party”—which no doubt means more patriotic swimsuits—and even spa deals:

AMP is also hosting a celebrity golf tournamenton the world-famous Blue Monster course with net proceeds benefiting the American Priority Foundation! Come play golf with some of the most patriotic names in sports, TV, and politics. Tournament entry is $500 and available as an option when you register. This makes a great gift for those golf fans!

AMP is also hosting a screening of Dinesh D’Souza’s blockbuster new film ‘Trump Card’, shooting a music video for a brand new patriot anthem by Alex Jordan, kicking off with a MAGA pool party, and hosting many surprise special guests.

The festival and conference was conceived as a pro-Trump, millennial-focused alternative to the annual Conservative Political Action Conference held in Washington, D.C., byAli Alexander, a right-wing political operative, and Alex Phillips, a conservative donor who owns a small telecom company in Virginia. Alexander—who previously went by Ali Akbar and who has ties to far-right figures such as Unite the Right white supremacist attendee Matt Colligan—has recently floated the idea of revamping a 2018 effort discredit mail-in voting ahead of the 2020 presidential election, dispatching Trump supporters to places where ballots are being counted?. Posobiec, who helped announce the first AMP festival in 2018, also promoted Alexander’s latest ploy to discredit mail-in voting.

The first AMP festival, held in 2018 in Washington, D.C., was effectively a flop, with one speaker even canceling after seeing the dismal turnout. Last year’s event, held in Doral, managed to attract more attendees but not quite the millennial and Gen Z crowd that was intended. Though younger conservatives were in attendance, the event attracted plenty of Generation X and baby boomer attendees, featuring such groups as the graying “Bikers for Trump.” Millennial MAGA stars were featured, including the Deplorable Choir, Ricky Rebel, a singer-songwriter known for being unapologetically both pro-Trump and gay, and right-wing activist Scott Presler.

It also ironically prevented reporters from covering its events—centered around the concept of free speech and the First Amendment—by allowing only “invited” media, barring Right Wing Watch’s Jared Holt from entry. In 2018, Alexander had explained the “invite only” policy this way: “Frankly, any press reporter who writes a hit piece on us is not getting a press credential.”

An Aug. 7 email promises panels with “leading experts on Medical Tyranny, Tech Censorship, Educational Freedom, The China Threat, Pandemic Response, and much more!” Last year, speakers peddled conspiracy theories and called for civil war. After coverage of the events and the crude video by the New York Times, ProPublica, and other outlets, AMP temporarily took down its page.

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As Right Wing Watch reported last year, “The conference could have been dismissed as a meeting of the fringe, but big-ticket speakers like Don Trump Jr. and Sarah Huckabee Sanders lent legitimacy to the conference, as did more respectable Republican groups like the Leadership Institute, which held a series of trainings in side rooms.” While AMP 2020 has yet to secure high-profile Trump administration or Trump family speakers, its location at the Trump Doral and the degree of coziness Trump has gotten with such formerly fringe figures say enough.

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MARCH 3, 2020 12:01 PM

At CPAC, Everything Is Socialism and the Only Solution Is More Trump

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https://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/trump-uses-coronavirus-fears-to-advance-bannons-far-right-agenda/

When President Donald J. Trump delivered his latest market-rattling remarks on the coronavirus pandemic from the Oval Office on Wednesday night, political reporters collectively scratched their heads over the president’s announcement of a ban on travelers from Europe and cargo coming from the continent. (The cargo ban was later walked back.)

But anyone paying attention to the rise of the global right knew what Trump was up to: using well-founded fears of the virus’s spread in the U.S. to strengthen the hand of Stephen K. Bannon, Trump’s erstwhile chief White House strategist, in the former’s quest to weaken the European Union.

In his remarks, Trump blamed European travelers for “seeding” the “foreign virus”—first identified in China—on American shores, and blamed Europe for the spread of the new coronavirus, because, he said, the E.U. had not banned travel from China as the U.S. has. “And taking early intense action, we have seen dramatically fewer cases of the virus in the United States than are now present in Europe,” Trump said, conveniently omitting the fact that Europe has a viable testing regimen, while it’s still impossible for most people in the U.S. to obtain a test for COVID-19, as the new coronavirus is formally known. Consequently, no one knows just how many people in the land of the free are freely walking around, spreading the virus. Nor do we know how many deaths from respiratory failure are due to the new virus.

While a number of claims made by Trump in the remarks he delivered from the Resolute Desk have since been walked back by various government agencies, it is notable that a clarification from the Department of Homeland Security says that the European countries affected by the executive order signed by Trump include only those in the Schengen area, which means those that are party to a multi-nation agreement to maintain open borders among them. Most of those 22 nations are members of the E.U.

In other words, this is an ideological and punitive action against those nations for daring to act in coalition—and for having demonstrated, since 1985, the value of such a compact.

Since before his ouster from the White House (for saying mean things about Trump’s son, Don Jr., daughter Ivanka and son-in-law Jared Kushner that were reported in the Michael Wolff book, “Fire and Fury”), Bannon has been working on growing the right-wing nationalist parties in Europe, Brazil and elsewhere, with a foremost goal of busting up the E.U. While he served as an executive at Cambridge Analytica, Bannon helped fuel the Brexit referendum that has led to the United Kingdom’s departure from the E.U.

In his Wednesday-night remarks, Trump said that the U.K. would be exempt from his European travel ban—never mind that confirmed COVID-19 cases in the U.K. leapt by more than 20 percent since Trump spoke to the American people yesterday from the Oval Office, now standing at 596, with 20 deaths reported. “However,” according to the BBC, “the actual number of people infected could be between 5,000 and 10,000, the government’s chief scientific adviser Sir Patrick Vallance said.”

Politico notes that the parameters of his European travel ban functionally exempt travelers from Trump’s own properties in Scotland and Ireland.

In addition, Trump’s framing of COVID-19 as a “foreign virus” fits neatly into one of Bannon’s newer projects, a group he calls Committee on the Present Danger: China, whose major donor, Guo Wengui, appears to be Bannon’s latest sugar daddy, now that he’s said to have been abandoned by his former patrons, Robert and Rebekah Mercer.

While Trump and Bannon may have their personal differences, it is clear that they’re working in tandem. The constellation of right-wing actors that forms the alliance colloquially known as Bannon World are firmly on team Trump, as was obvious at last month’s Conservative Political Action Conference, which has become, for all intents and purposes, an arm of the Trump campaign. (The conference is run by Matt Schlapp, whose wife Mercedes works for the Trump campaign. Matt Schlapp and his roster of speakers at the four-day conference almost all effusively praised the president, with many urging his reelection.) Bannon World speakers at CPAC included former White House adviser Sebastian Gorka, Brexit Party Chairman Nigel Farage, Brazilian politician Eduardo Bolsonaro and China critic Gordon Chang.

The American Conservative Union, which stages CPAC, reported last week that one this year’s CPAC attendees—revealed today to be the Republican donor Alan Berger—tested positive for the virus after attending the conference.

Tags: Donald J. TrumpDonald Trump Jr.Eduardo BolsonaroGordon ChangGuo WenguiIvanka TrumpJared KushnerMatt SchlappMercedes SchlappMichael WolffMiles KwokNigel FarageRebekah MercerRobert MercerSebastian GorkaSteve BannonBannon WorldCoronavirusEuropean travel banglobal far-rightAmerican Conservative UnionBBCCommittee on the Present Danger: ChinaDepartment of Homeland SecurityEuropean UnionPolitico

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