By Abby Zimet, Used with Permission From Common Dreams
CPAC is back! Weirder, shriller, fringier, more paranoid than ever, with many empty seats but God allegedly still on the side of the cranks and zealots. Cue vapid, vicious, fear-mongering goons who, now saying the ugly part aloud, bray about evil trans people, stampeding “aliens,” looming communists and pet-marrying while heralding Christian nationalism, “cool” dictators, the “Bible Uncancelled” and the glad “end of democracy.” A republic if you can keep it: Welcome to today’s forsaken, brutish GOP.
Of course CPAC 2024, in all its shabby lunacy, reflects the increasingly rabid party – Free J6! – from which it sprang. Once a marquee conservative event that drew top GOP lawmakers and presidential contenders, it’s become an “emptier, jankier, lower-rent” affair by a party lunging ever further into the wingnut galaxy, its hapless denizens endlessly spouting stupid, awful things. Klan Mom MTG: Judge Arthur Engeron should be “disrobed” for undervaluing Mar-A-Hellhole. Trump lackey: His overlord’s “Never Surrender High-Tops” will get him black votes because “Black America loves sneakers, especially in the inner city.” DeSantis: Their V.P. should be a white man because “we don’t want people representing 10 or 15% of the party to be in the driver’s seat.” Tommy Tuberville: “These socialists and Marxists (want) to control our children” like Hillary’s “it takes a village” because “she doesn’t like your home (and) she wants to indoctrinate your children”; also, the government “has become the father, they hate Christianity, they are going to come after you.”
The creepy avatar for this assemblage of “craven rodeo clowns” is House Speaker Mike Johnson, a smarmy, doe-eyed, coup-plotting, Christian fundamentalist who’s spent his career working for hate groups, arguing deviant” homosexuals will destroy democracy, same-sex marriage is like people marrying their pets, and abortion is the killing of both “unborn children” and potential “able-bodied workers in the economy.” Boasting the Bible is “my worldview,” he took his then-13-year-old daughter to a Purity Ball where she pledged to him and God her “purity of mind, body and soul,” he promotes a “Covenant Eyes” app that allows him and his 17-year-old son/ “accountability partner” to monitor each other’s porn habits – clean slates all around! – and before he became Speaker God began waking him at night to prepare him to serve as Moses leading the nation through a “Red Sea moment…The Lord impressed upon my heart something was going to occur.” And it was: The House was in such chaos they chose a backbench demagogue who thought governance meant saving America from heathens.
Evidently, it doesn’t. Teetering with a bare majority and boisterous hard-right clique, having lost another special election, seen its fake Biden impeachment implode and failed to address not just a looming shutdown but in fact anything at all, the bumbling House threw a dim-witted Hail Mary and decided to impeach Homeland Security head Alejandro Mayorkas – a move widely derided as “ridiculous” – for failing to fix the border after they sabotaged a bi-partisan bill to fix the border. Then they holed up at a Miami resort to lick their wounds at a leadership retreat where, rather than giving them leadership, Johnson gave them a sermon complete with Biblical references about America’s ungodly moral decline, which made lawmakers worried about keeping their jobs grumble they were “not at church” and what the hell? Meanwhile, with the GOP’s SCOTUS-facilitated war on women, IVF, and even “recreational sex” in full swing, Johnson fudges on his past (and future?) efforts to go after contraception – “I really don’t remember any of those measures” – and lurches ahead crafting the patriarchal theocracy of his dreams.
In that he’s in step with The Big Orange Guy, who says once in power he’ll create a task force to fight imaginary “anti-Christian bias” by “Marxists and fascists” (FYI not the same); he’s also plotting with a right-wing think tank whose mission is to re-define America as “a nation under God,” with a mandate declaring, “Freedom is defined by God, not man.” In pursuit of Gilead – and because last month his PAC raised $8,508 as he spent $3.9 million, mostly on lawyers – he just spoke to a gathering of evangelical broadcasters while hawking gold IRAs “to protect your retirement from D.C.’s policies” and Ivermectin: “Make Care Great Again.” He decried Dems murdering babies, “taking away knocker fields from children” and creating “dirty roads, crime, graffiti, swastickers.” He also boasted “everybody on both sides” agrees Roe had to go, he’s beating Haley by 91 points, “Israel is the capital of Israel,” and “you’re going to say as you want (and) believe in God” through “the love of Christ and the voices of famed…evangell…lllical….people and…eee-vangelis.” Ok, so he can’t say evangelical, but sure he’s your guy.
Big Awful Guy’s implausible fervor was dutifully, garishly replicated atCPAC, held at the fantastically named Gaylord Convention Center outside D.C., where his and God’s faithful touted “the greatest nation in all the world,” except for, you know, the swastickers. Amidst red, white and blue everything and pounding bad music, the meager crowd drifted through a half-empty exhibit hall offering a Jan. 6-themed pinball game, a vibrating board to stand on to magically lose weight, an 18th-century-style booth likening Biden to King George lll, and a mountain of tawdry MAGA merch: “Woke Tears” water – “identifies as transparent” – rhinestone hats blaring “I Love Jesus” and “Fuck Biden,” Trump shirts, hammocks, bobbleheads, sparkly gun-shaped purses. Sponsors were fewer and tackier: Moms For America, many groups with the word “liberty,” Newsmax with ads shouting “you don’t need those woke streaming services,” and now they’re letting their fascist flag fly proudly, the previously banished John Birch Society. Streaming was by the insurrectionist-favored Rumble; links often didn’t work, but went to a donation page.
Attendance was much sparser than previously, down from around 13,000 to the hundreds; when photos emerged of speakers facing a sea of empty seats, a right-wing site wailed, “What an embarrassment.” Country singer Natasha Owens sang the national anthem in a huge black dress declaring“2nd Amendment Protects the First,” and a banner trumpeted the new theme, tweaked from the unfortunately DeSantis-themed “woke” shtick: “Where Globalism (WHO and the UN) Goes To Die.” Speakers were mostly not totalitarian BA-listers: The mayor of Riverton, Utah, an Oklahoma rep, the head of CPAC Australia, Peter Navarro who’s headed to jail, a “businessman” who like everyone railed against transgender health care: “Woke doctors should be in prison.” But there were several big shots: Stephen ‘Goebbels’ Miller, Mike ‘Pillow’ Lindell, Disgrace to All Brain Surgeons Ben Carson, the new authoritarian presidents of Argentina and El Salvador, and a ragged array of VP hopefuls – Noem, Vance, Scott, Stefanik, Gabbard, Ramaswamy – all of whom, in a relative universe, Big Guy has called “good” and “solid.”
Welcome speeches were by CPAC’s devout Queen and molesting King, Mercedes and Matt Schlapp. Greeted with limp applause – “Lemme hear you! Wake up!” – Mercedes declaimed, “Be not afraid!” before telling her 17 listeners, “We’re gonna take this country back (from the) leftist propaganda machine.” “You are instruments,” she said. “God has put you here at this time to do this great work that needs to be done…Communism pushes the culture of death, we push the culture of life. You are assembled here in front of God to be the front line in this battle.” Facing multi-million-dollar sexual assault – and now document-shredding – charges by several young men, Matt announced, “This is our time, this is our moment.” Pledging his support for the “unique American who is being persecuted, who is being tortured” by communist “lawfare,” he turned to his sorcerer in the sky: “Lord God, you said that if we trust in you we will mount up with wings like eagles. Well, God, we’re ready to soar.” Like many, Tik Toker Incrediberry is dubious in a country where, in an election between Jesus and Satan with an “R” by his name, “Jesus would lose in a landslide.”
Still, they gathered for workshops titled The Bible Uncancelled, No Woke Warriors, God’s Children Are Not For Sale, Bidenomics: Bad For America’s Health, Would Moses Go to Harvard?, Putting Our Heads in the Gas Stove, Ramaswamy Unplugged, Going Full Hungarian: Stopping Georgey (sic) Soros, From Gaza to Greenwich Village: A Guide to Fighting Contemporary Jew-Hatred, and What You Talkin’ Bout Fani Willis,presented by esteemed legal scholar and Black linguist Jim Jordan. He was also among a host of out-Trumping-Trump speakers – paranoid losers, zealots, liars, a “who’s who of who won’t accept the results of the election” with wildly unintelligible notions and short attention spans – to offer 20-minute rants about an amorphous, all-powerful “left” who control damn near everything, which is why they can’t have nice things. “The left controls big media, big tech, big corporations, big sports, academia, Hollywood, the Senate and White House,” he whined, before bravely adding, “But the left doesn’t control we the people.”
But we the people, it turns out, often make little sense. Lara Trump said Dems think “you can change your gender like you change your shoes, and that at night she and the other son lead their kids in saying their prayers and the Pledge of Allegiance. Elise Stefanik said Ivy League campuses are “dens of anti-Semitism” where “radical leftist rot (is) destroying the minds of the next generation.” The Daily Wire‘s Michael Knowles, quoting Humpty Dumpty – “the question is which is to be master?” – said trans people reveal the decline of religion and marriage, which is “nothing other than a sign of God’s love.” “Liberals think they’re God, but they can’t really turn a couple of men, or a couple of women, or three men and a billy goat for that matter into a marriage.” Former Trump something Monica Crowley warned patriots to beware an upcoming “CATFIGHT: Michelle v. Kamala” – it was a workshop – because “Democrats (are) communists, and communists always have a plan…The left has a host group of power brokers working with the deep state, which is real.”
Kristi Noem said right now “there are people who love America and there are those who hate America” and “Joe Biden is destroying America.” Stephen Miller said Trump’s legal cases “are proof big broad laws will be used to crush us.” Kurt Schlichter said “Joe Biden is the capo of a criminal organization.” The U.K.’s Liz Truss said “we need a bigger bazooka against the deep state” after Joe Biden helped destroy her 7-week reign; nobody knew who she was, but one guy thought her speech was “on the same parallel” as U.S. politics. El Salvador’s Nayib Bukele, “the world’s coolest dictator,” who’s detained 80,000 people in his.war on gangs, said he welcomes the fight against “dark forces” in America. And conspiracist Jack Posobiec said when liberals “say democracy, they mean authoritarianism.” “Welcome to the end of democracy! We’re here to overthrow it completely,” he crowed. “We didn’t get all the way there on Jan. 6, but we’ll endeavor to get rid of it and replace it with this right here.” Going full clerical fascist, he clutched a cross. “Because all glory is not to government. All glory to God.”
Meanwhile, Orange Jesus keeps jabbering. On Friday, he told a Black Conservative Gala his criming makes him just like them: “I got indicted and a lot of people said that’s why the Black people like me.” At CPAC on Saturday, after a tinny national anthem by Jan. 6 rioters on a prison phone, he launched into a garbled, bilious, endless tirade, spewing apocalyptic visions of a fever-dream country and “Judgment Day” that will be “my ultimate and absolute revenge.” He said “millions of illegal aliens (are) stampeding across our border” from insane asylums like Hannibal Lecter and “they have languages that nobody in this country has ever heard of – it’s a very horrible thing.” He said “ruthless gangs will explode (into) the suburbs” and while “weaponized law enforcement hunts for conservatives and people of faith, Hamas and Antifa will terrorize our streets (with) their brutal iDEEEo-ology.” He said he’s “a proud political dissident,” Biden is “surrounded by some very bad fascists,” he flew into Iraq with “the best-looking human beings I’ve ever seen” and maybe a guy named “Raisin Cane,” and “they’ll say ‘he rambled'” but “it’s total genius.” Sweet Jesus. Be afraid.
Bruce Gerencser, 66, lives in rural Northwest Ohio with his wife of 45 years. He and his wife have six grown children and thirteen grandchildren. Bruce pastored Evangelical churches for twenty-five years in Ohio, Texas, and Michigan. Bruce left the ministry in 2005, and in 2008 he left Christianity. Bruce is now a humanist and an atheist.
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