Christopher Mathias at Huffington Post has written a great piece about CPAC and the White nationalist confab AFPAC (America First Political Action Conference) that was being held at the same time. I urge you to read the whole thing. Here’s an excerpt:
At about 9:30 p.m., Fuentes stepped in front of the Marriott lectern, according to a livestream viewed by HuffPost, and got the night underway. He began by praising what he felt made his movement so successful: “Our secret sauce … young white men!” The crowd — and it sounded like a sizable one; Fuentes claimed over 1,000 attendees — broke into rapturous cheers and applause.
Fuentes then, as Russian bombs fell over Ukraine, led the crowd in a chant of “Putin! Putin!”
And finally, before introducing the first mystery speaker, Fuentes issued an apology. His first choice, he explained, had a family emergency. Thomas Homan, who oversaw the Trump administration’s brutal anti-immigration policies as head of ICE, had arrived at AFPAC, Fuentes claimed, but had to rush away. He sadly wouldn’t be speaking.
Homan confirmed to HuffPost in a phone call this week that he had indeed arrived to speak at AFPAC. His assistant had arranged the appearance, he said, and Homan said they may have confused Fuentes’ group for another one. “So many names of conservative groups sound the same,” Homan said.
While sitting at a table waiting for the conference to start, Homan said he looked over the agenda for the evening and decided he’d better Google Fuentes’ name. He saw some stories labeling Fuentes a white nationalist, but he was doubtful of them — Homan said he himself has unfairly been called a bigot and a racist for “enforcing immigration laws.” But then he found a recent story that did disturb him, about Fuentes praising Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. This prompted Homan to leave the conference before it started. He says he never met Fuentes. “Shame on me for not doing my research,” Homan told HuffPost.
I asked Homan if it inspired any self-reflection that someone like Fuentes would want him at AFPAC. Homan said he didn’t know why Fuentes invited him, reassuring me that he himself is not a racist, he just likes secure borders.
A few minutes later Homan called me back to make sure I understood something. “I’m not saying this is a bad group,” he said of Fuentes and the groypers. “I’m saying I don’t know.”
Don’t worry, Fuentes assured his supporters after sharing the news about Homan; he had wrangled someone just as well known. “She is a standard-bearer of Trumpism in the U.S. Congress,” Fuentes said. “She is pro-life, she is proudly America first … We are honored, we are humbled and excited to welcome her to the stage right now … I think this is going to be the beginning of something great — the representative from Georgia, Marjorie Taylor Greene!”
Greene, who had just heard Fuentes cheer on Putin and admit to leading a movement for “young white men,” hugged Fuentes and took her place behind the lectern.
She began her speech by invoking her faith, leading the groypers to break into a chant of “Christ is king!” Then Greene — a transphobic QAnon conspiracist booted off Twitter for promoting COVID denialism who was stripped of her committee assignments last year for advocating violence against Democrats — told the assembled white nationalists that they, like her, were “canceled Americans.”
“You’ve been handed the responsibility to fight for our Constitution and stand for our freedoms, and stop the Democrats who are the communist party of the United States of America,” she said.
The evening’s other mystery guest speaker was Janice McGeachin, the Republican lieutenant governor of Idaho, whom Trump recently endorsed in her bid for the governorship. She told the assembled white nationalists to “keep up your good work fighting for our country.”
Gosar, last year’s top-billed speaker, appeared via a pre-recorded video this time, delivering a brief, forgettable statement. It was his home state colleague who stole the show.
Arizona state Sen. Wendy Rogers appeared at AFPAC remotely, via video conference, standing in front of the Arizona state flag. She addressed the crowd as “groypers,” to great cheers, and praised Fuentes, who she said had been “de-platformed everywhere” for saying things that anger “the media and the far left.”
“I truly respect Nick because he’s the most persecuted man in America,” Rogers said, adding that AFPAC was “standing up to tyranny.”
Then the state senator called for their mutual political enemies to be executed.
“I’ve said we need to build more gallows,” Rogers said. “If we try some of these high-level criminals, convict them and use a newly built set of gallows, it’ll make an example of these traitors who have betrayed our country.”
She wasn’t the only AFPAC speaker to call for murder.
“Tony Fauci literally unleashed a bio weapon on the world,” far-right podcaster Stew Peters told the crowd at one point, falsely blaming the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases for the coronavirus pandemic. “Why is this man running around free instead of hanging on the end of a noose somewhere?” […]
On Wednesday, the Arizona state Senate voted 24-3 to censure Rogers over her gallows remarks. The rare bipartisan resolution has no practical effect beyond rebuking Rogers, and also makes no mention of white nationalism.
“I do not apologize, I will not back down and I am sorely disappointed in the leadership of this body for colluding with the Democrats to attempt to destroy my reputation,” Rogers wrote in response to the censure.
Thomas Zimmer, who teaches 20th century history at Georgetown University, watched clips from AFPAC with horror, and was particularly alarmed by Rogers.
“This is not some far-right internet troll, but a Republican state senator, and it’s impossible to adequately understand American politics without grappling in earnest with why her radicalism is widely seen as justified on the Right and within the GOP,” Zimmer wrote in a tweet.
“I fear that — after four years of Trumpism in power, after January 6, with rightwing fascistic militancy now all around us — we have become so accustomed to outrageous political acts that we might be becoming numb to how bizarre, how extreme, how dangerous these developments are,” he added.
AFPAC dragged on for hours, long after the nightly fireworks at Disney World exploded in the nearby sky — a spectacular sight that, for Orlando locals, has been rendered routine — and as, thousands of miles away, Ukrainians repelled a Russian attack in Kyiv.
“Now, [the media is] going and saying, ‘Vladimir Putin is Adolf Hitler,’ as if that isn’t a good thing,” Fuentes said in the closing speech shortly before 2 a.m., before adding, “Oops, I shouldn’t have said that.”
The room went wild.
Fuentes praised the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, too, pointing out that a few people in the crowd had been arrested for their actions that day. “I’ll reiterate just for you,” he said, “Jan. 6 was awesome.”
He paid lip service to some right-wing conspiracy theories about the attack being orchestrated by the FBI as a ruse to arrest conservatives, saying such theories “may very well be true.”
“But,” he added, “I was proud to be an American on Jan. 6, 2021. And I’d like to believe it was real. I’d like to believe Americans have the heart and the guts and the balls to do what they did on Jan. 6. I’d like to believe what they did was real.”
Fuentes wore a VIP badge to Trump’s speech in Washington, D.C., on Jan. 6, 2021, shortly before hundreds of people stormed the Capitol — something he encouraged. “Keep moving towards the Capitol; it appears we are taking the Capitol back!” he told them through a megaphone. “Break down the barriers and disregard the police. The Capitol belongs to us!” […]
Bleeding Into CPAC
Hours before she spoke to the groypers, soaking up cheers from a crowd of young men who savor saying racist slurs on livestreams and who would very much like it if America were a whites-only country one day, I had spotted Greene flitting around CPAC, relishing her celebrity status, posing for photos, and being interviewed at one of the many media booths.
Greene was scheduled to appear on CPAC’s main stage on Saturday at 11:15 a.m. as part of a panel on cancel culture that was set to be broadcast live on Fox Nation.
Before dawn that morning, I emailed the American Conservative Union, the group that organizes CPAC. Greene had just been the featured speaker at a conference of Nazi sympathizers; would she still be an official part of CPAC’s line-up in the morning?
I wanted to know if Greene lending the imprimatur of her office to a group of groypers was enough for CPAC to, well, cancel her. I hadn’t gotten a response by 10 a.m., so I called an ACU spokeswoman named Allison. She sounded somewhere between panicked and annoyed, either with me or with her bosses, I couldn’t tell. No comment, she said. She had passed my message along to the heads of ACU, she told me, adding: “It’s out of my hands.”
A short time later, for the second time in less than 12 hours, I watched Greene walk onto a stage to loud cheers.
[…]
As Ben Lorber, a research analyst at Political Research Associates and one of the foremost chroniclers of the groypers, noted recently: “The rising hard-right flank — represented in Congress by [Greene], Gosar and others — is setting the conservative agenda, and they view these leaders (correctly) as the out-of-touch establishment.”
Republican candidates across the country, including Senate hopeful and “Hillbilly Elegy” author J.D. Vance, have all sought Greene’s endorsement. A stroll around CPAC showed how the GOP is, in many ways, her’s and the groypers’ party now.
By the way, they chanted Trump, Trump, Trump at the groypers conference too …