CPAC’S Magic Kingdom
On Monday, the organizers of the annual right-wing clambake known as CPAC said in a tweet that they had “just learned that someone we invited ... has expressed reprehensible views that have no home with our conference or our organization. The individual will not be participating at our conference.”
For those who had made a close study of CPAC’S schedule for the four-day gathering in Orlando, Fla., this message was met with a certain degree of confusion and requests for more specificity.
Could they be referring to former NRA infomercialist Dana Loesch, who in 2016 called the mainstream media “the rat bastards of the earth” and said she would be “happy, just frankly, to see them curbstomped”? (The “just frankly” was a nice touch.) Or was it U.S. Sen. Mike Lee, R-utah, who in October tweeted “democracy isn’t the objective; liberty, peace, and prospefity (sic) are.” (It’s always nice to see the Harvard comma.) Or could CPAC have broken ranks with the actor Jon Voight, who in 2019 said that the scourge of racism had “been solved long ago by our forefathers”? (Maybe not the forefathers involved in chattel slavery, one supposes.)
No, no and definitely not — all three are as of this writing still on the agenda. It emerged that the views that were deemed too reprehensible even for CPAC were those of Young Pharaoh, a Black hip-hop artist and conspiracist whose virulent anti-semitism will be pretty hard to uncover if you lack access to the internet and can’t read English. (CPAC’S events for its Jewish attendees will be held in the Florida Ballroom.)
The watchdog organization Media Matters for America published a story on Young Pharaoh’s hateful vitae on Monday. Within hours, CPAC 2021 — the theme of which is “America Uncanceled” — had canceled his appearance in a panel discussion called “Please Check the Number and Dial Again: Doubt, Dynfunction and the Price of Missed Opportunities,” a title so vague it could be about anything from telecom policy to teen romance.
One of the remaining participants in that session is Shemeka Michelle, a social media figure who told the crowd at a pro-trump rally in Georgia in late November that she was willing to “drag Lindsey Graham out the closet” if the Alabama senator failed to support his caudillo with sufficient gusto, and last fall suggested that Breonna Taylor was a
“thug missus” who was partly responsible for her own killing by Louisville, Ky., police officers because of her former boyfriend’s police record.
So reprehensibility is a bit of a flexible standard for the organizers of CPAC, which will
reach its climax Sunday afternoon with a speech by former President Donald Trump, making his first formal — though the fingers palsy while typing that word in this context — address since he departed the White House last month.
While it might seem to some observers that the Republican Party is undergoing a crisis of conscience in the wake of the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol, CPAC remains a safe space for Trump superfans and former White House officials, or at least the ones who haven’t spoken out against the administration’s chaos and dysfunction. One notable exception is ex-vice President Mike Pence, who has appeared at every CPAC since 2017 — including a memorable 2020 speech that was interrupted by a Trump impersonator carrying a sex doll over his shoulder. The fake Trump was eventually revealed to be the comedian Sacha Baron Cohen, and the sequence ended up in last year’s “Borat Subsequent Moviefilm.”
It’s possible that this interruption was traumatic enough to prompt Pence to take a break from CPAC this year. Or perhaps his absence has something to do with the angry mob that threatened to hang Pence outside the Capitol last month after he announced he would not attempt to use his Senate role to hold up the certification of the electoral college results, and Trump’s rather lackluster response to those death threats.
We now know that Pence almost got killed by the mob, but the notion that any of CPAC’S all-stars are at risk of anything — including being “canceled” — is as rich as the desserts available at any of the dozens of steak joints along Orlando’s International Drive. While corporate sponsors were a bit harder to come by for CPAC this year, one major remaining backer is Fox Nation: The streaming service of Fox News Channel is apparently in fence-mending mode with Trump’s acolytes after what was perceived as heretical coverage of Trump’s loss drove many to switch to Newsmax and OAN.
For those who still believe or at least propound the lie that the 2020 election was stolen, CPAC will offer a half-dozen events assailing how the vote went down, though it’s unclear if the many elected GOP officials on the roster will be calling into question the legitimacy of their own elections.
For these people, CPAC will be like a trip to Disney World — just a short drive from the Hyatt Regency, the home of this year’s gathering — in which you never have to wait on line for the best rides and Mickey and Minnie bring you all the hot dogs and soda you want, all day long.