Most House Republicans have cosponsored a bill declaring that life begins from the moment of conception, a position under increased scrutiny after the Alabama Supreme Court ruled that frozen embryos are “unborn children.”
This Congress, 125 House Republicans — including Speaker Mike Johnson — have cosponsored the “Life at Conception Act,” which states that the term “human being” includes “all stages of life, including the moment of fertilization, cloning, or other moment at which an individual member of the human species comes into being.”
The bill does not include any exception for in vitro fertilization (IVF), a reproductive treatment that allows mothers to fertilize several eggs outside the womb in order to increase the chances of a viable pregnancy.
Several healthcare providers in Alabama have already halted IVF programs in the wake of the ruling, given that IVF treatments may include the discarding of fertilized eggs, which may now violate the state’s Wrongful Death of a Minor Act.
The lack of an IVF exception is notable, given the carveout contained within a previous version of the Life at Conception Act introduced by Republican Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky in 2017.
“Nothing in this Act shall be construed to require the prosecution of any woman for the death of her unborn child, a prohibition on in vitro fertilization, or a prohibition on use of birth control or another means of preventing fertilization,” reads the 2017 bill.
Look at that. They actually took out an IVF exception. That’s a conscious act. Remember, these are people who believe that frozen embryos are babies that need to be adopted. They call them “snowflake babies.” (Maybe we can get a full Handmaid’s Tale program going to force prisoners to incubate them for all the people who are supposedly waiting in line to do that.)
They knew there was no way this monstrosity could ever become law while Roe was still in place. They were performing for their Christian fascist base. Now, all bets are off and they have to face what they have done.
Republican Rep. Alexander Mooney, the main House sponsor of the bill, did not respond to Business Insider’s request for comment on why that exception was not included.
Neither did spokespeople for Speaker Johnson, who largely controls the House floor and whose evangelical Christian views have entailed staunch opposition to abortion in the past.nt
“When a woman is pregnant, science tells us the new life she carries is a completely separate and fully new human being from the moment of fertilization,” Johnson said during a 2021 hearing on Texas’s 6-week abortion ban.
They knew what they were doing. Now there’s a mad scramble to distance themselves from the consequences of their actions, starting with Donald Trump who put out a statement in which he declared himself the savior of IVF but he’s the guy who loves to take credit for overturning Roe Vs Wade. And that decision was the basis for the Alabama Supreme Court ruling.
Trump appeared before the Black Conservative Federation (although the crowd seemed mighty white) and this is what he had to say:
Trump: These lights are so bright in my eyes I can't see people… I can only see the Black ones. I can't see any white ones. That's how far I've come. That's a long way isn't it? pic.twitter.com/CBBJWJRxnH
Trump claims the Black community “embraced” him because he was indicted on criminal charges: You see Black people walking around with my mugshot pic.twitter.com/HJD8EYpsKY
Trump: "Unlike racist Joe Biden, I spent my entire life working with Black Americans to build buildings…"
*Trump was sued by the U.S. Justice Department for allegedly engaging in housing discrimination against Black-Americans. The lawsuit was settled.pic.twitter.com/fergYvGOz9
Trump's administration replaced the Affirmatively Fair Housing Act with a new rule that made it harder for communities to offer public comments about the new fair housing rules. This essentially made a Black public invisible when it came to overhauling fair housing policy. https://t.co/Ag8YNvoXO8
Trump at the Black Conservative Federation Gala: You know Cary Grant? He was this very handsome guy… Sidney Poitier, I thought he was very handsome right? pic.twitter.com/CPjjrRXcAN
Ask me why I do what I do and my answer is not that altruistic. I hate feeling like political road kill. When I’m doing I don’t feel like a victim. This morning (FWIW) I’ll be electing members to the Democratic National Committee for the next four years from North Carolina. I want change agents. Not people intent on adding another bullet item to their long political resumes but not do anything with the position (and there will be plenty of those in the running).
Yeah, the system is flawed. But as my friend Anat Shenker-Osorio says, “Forget about the lesser of two evils, and focus on choosing a president open to hearing you out on a whole bunch of evils.”
What do you say to people who are burned out on the idea that we have to fight fascism again this November? How can you keep them focused despite an unending sense of crisis, through another election cycle that looks a whole lot like the last one?
Keep your eye on what really matters — making room for progressive change
Here’s what I say. When you look at the actual progressive gains that we have had in our society, when you look at the landmark civil rights legislation — the de jure, not de facto, end of segregation — when you look at women finally having their inherent right to vote be recognized — by the way, I refuse to say that women were given the right to vote or Black folks were given the right to vote. We had the right all along. Some people had some trouble understanding that, because that’s what it means to be endowed by a creator — whether you believe in one or not — with inalienable rights. Like no one’s giving those out. That’s just by virtue of being human…
But I digress. The Americans with Disabilities Act, marriage equality, the eight-hour workday, child labor laws — all of the gains that I think any real progressive person would point to as What are the things that have actually moved society along? — none of those, none, have happened because we elected the right person. None of those have happened by ballot. Even if some of marriage equality happened by ballot initiative, all of those things have happened because there has been pressure — sustained, smart, strategic pressure from outside of the electoral system.
Elections aren’t everything — they’re just part of the struggle
I don’t think that any person within the civil rights movement would ever have thought, “Oh, well, it’s really just a question of who we elect president. We’re just going to work on who’s going to be president.” And thought that that was actually going to create legislation.
F.D.R. himself said prior to passing the New Deal (and, obviously, it was a big deal that he was the person in charge at that point), “If you want these things to happen, make me. Make me.”
And so what I say to people who are burned out — after empathizing with them, because, again, I do try to follow my own advice, and I don’t start with, “How dare you?” or, “Do you not understand that fascism is on the rise?” That kind of discourse is not empathetic, not active listening, not starting with a shared value.
Accept the limitations of the system — and look towards real goals
The place that I’ve come to is this: that it is a correct assessment. It’s my assessment, too, that the electoral system is a piece of garbage. I mean, it really just truly is a piece of garbage. And another bit of language that I refuse to use, I never talk about saving our democracy or restoring our democracy. We don’t have a democracy. We have never had a democracy.
A democracy isn’t an electoral college. It isn’t a Senate and a system that grossly overrepresents rural people, that lets acres of land vote, and means human beings in California and New York don’t count equally and doesn’t let people in D.C. vote period, full stop, or be represented.
I think that it’s not accidental that we have measurably historic distrust of institutions, that we have what we call double-no voters. Double-no is like, “Don’t like him, don’t like him.” That is all just a product, and proof, of the fact that the electoral system is — and this is the most generous thing I can say — garbage.
Forget about the lesser of two evils, and focus on choosing a president open to hearing you out on a whole bunch of evils
So what you do is acknowledge that issue. You say that an election — choosing who is going to be at the helm of this system — is choosing who is going to be responding to us when we’re agitating through other lanes. It’s choosing who is in power when we say, “No, this policy is unjust and unfair.”
Is it someone who is going to allow that speech to occur? Is it someone who is going to permit protest in front of the White House? Is it someone who is going to allow us to march? Is it someone who — on the more positive side — is going to march alongside the UAW when strikes are happening? Or is it someone who has told us that he will be sending you to the gulag for daring to speak out against him?
Sometimes I feel really perplexed by people who say, “The system is broken. Voting for the lesser of evils is still evil. We’re going to vote third party,” or, “We’re not going to vote top-of-ticket, or not vote at all.” What’s mystifying is not that these people have identified — rightly, because I agree — that the electoral system is garbage, but that they think that they can use the electoral system to fix the electoral system?
That doesn’t make any sense to me. The message is vote for our freedoms, strike for our families, march for our futures. We vote for Biden-Harris and for Democrats on November 5th. And on November 6th, we have a general strike (in my fantasy world where there’s a general strike because I honestly believe that nothing in America is ever going to change unless we withhold our labor). We’re saying, “We elected you. Here’s the deal. Here is what that vote means.”
So here’s the question you want people to keep in mind: What is the world that we want and how do we get it? In pursuit of that, voting is just one of the tools in our toolbox — it may be insufficient on its own, but making the choice is absolutely necessary.
Via Dispatches from the Religious Left, an analysis of the Alabama Supreme Court’s IVF ruling explaining how the judges scooped up this ball and rasn it in for a fringe-right touchdown.
I’d like to focus instead on the majority opinion from Justice Jay Mitchell, which is extreme in its own ways — and highlights the dangerous faux-jurisprudence that the U.S. Supreme Court has encouraged.
In order to reach its ruling, the court needed to ignore its own past precedents that congruence between the state’s criminal-homicide statute and wrongful-death statute was needed. This is important because the state’s Wrongful Death of a Minor Act was passed in 1872. The court had justified expanding that civil law to fetuses in utero based on an expansion of the criminal law to include fetuses in utero and the claimed need for congruence between the two laws. Now that the court wanted to go further than the criminal law, it just ignored those rulings — overruling them without saying so, as Justice Greg Cook stated in his dissenting opinion.
Or, as Justice Will Sellers wrote more bluntly, “To equate an embryo stored in a specialized freezer with a fetus inside of a mother is engaging in an exercise of result-oriented, intellectual sophistry, which I am unwilling to entertain.”
The court also went far afield of what was necessary for its ruling. After claiming that “[t]here is simply no … ambiguity” about the word “child” in the Wrongful Death of a Minor Act, the court then got into what ordinarily would then not have been a part of the opinion at all: An extended discussion of the “Sanctity of Unborn Life’ provision of the Alabama Constitution: Article I, Section 36.06.
Of that, Mitchell wrote for the court, “Even if the word ‘child’ were ambiguous, however, the Alabama Constitution would require courts to resolve the ambiguity in favor of protecting unborn life,” claiming that Section 36.06 “operates in this context as a constitutionally imposed canon of construction, directing courts to construe ambiguous statutes in a way that ‘protect[s] … the rights of the unborn child’ equally with the rights of born children, whenever such construction is ‘lawful and appropriate.’“
This is dicta — a statement that is unnecessary to the ruling — and yet, as a statement in a majority opinion from the state’s Supreme Court, it was a chance for this court to establish this new rule, which undoubtedly will now be applied by lower courts in Alabama.
As Sellers wrote in dissent, “Respectfully, § 36.06 neither operates in such a fashion nor commands this Court to override legislative acts it believes ‘contraven[e] the sanctity of unborn life’“ — a quote from Parker’s even further-reaching concurring theocratic opinion.
Finally, and perhaps most telling, the court — in the closing paragraphs of Mitchell’s opinion — makes clear that it did not need to reach either the statutory or constitutional issues here.
“[T]he defendants pointed out that all the plaintiffs signed contracts with the Center in which their embryonic children were, in many respects, treated as nonhuman property,” Mitchell wrote. “If the defendants are correct on that point, then they may be able to invoke waiver, estoppel, or similar affirmative defenses.”
In other words, if this is true, the court could have issued a ruling that avoided all of the IVF issues — instead ruling that, even if the plaintiffs could bring such lawsuits, they would be barred from doing so here. This is an ordinary practice of courts to avoid reaching more complicated or extensive rulings than necessary for the case in front of it.
But, this court wanted to reach its broader ruling in this case. So, it refused to rule on that pivotal question, with Mitchell instead writing for the court, “[T]hose defenses have not been briefed and were not considered by the trial court, so we will not attempt to resolve them here. We are ‘a court of review, not a court of first instance.’”
Ignoring precedent, going further in its rulings than necessary, and reaching issues that it did not even necessarily need to reach — all in service of a ruling that restricts bodily, family, and reproductive autonomy to advance what Parker’s concurrence makes clear is a Christian nationalism goal.
A patriarchal theocracy
AOC has opinions, of course:
AOC: Not only do they want to go after reproductive freedom, they are going after ivf and contraception. They also want to control what they call recreational sex. This is so clearly a patriarchal theocracy that has embodied itself in the DNA of an entire political party pic.twitter.com/Q7oKlgN7Dk
“If you don’t think this country is sliding toward theocracy, you’re not paying attention,” Charles Blow wrote this week. This is a subculture that’s been simmering just outside of the national public’s view for decades.
Don’t say you weren’t warned. “It’s hard to know what will happen if these people begin to exert even stronger influence over the Republican party in a time of great stress and transition in this country,” Digby wrote in 2010.
A friend this week said she’s less likely these days to admit being a Christian because of these people. That’s okay because they are unlikely to consider her one in their budding theocracy. Given a chance, the American Taliban will not tolerate ordinary Lutherans, Episcopalians, Methodists, etc. Freedom of religion will be guaranteed so long as it’s theirs.
Hilvarenbeek, February 20, 2024 – African elephant Punda has become the mother of a healthy elephant calf after a 22-month pregnancy. This is the third calf born in the Safari Park @Beekse-Bergen in four months. Never before have three African elephants been born in a European zoo in such a short time.
The young elephant is a girl and has been named Tendai. Head zookeeper Yvonne Vogels says: “Everything is falling into place! Mosi means firstborn: the first of the three calves. Ajabu stands for ‘radiant’. It’s wonderful to see how the premature baby, because she was born two months prematurely, is now strengthened and how we see this reflected in her character. And now there is Tendai, which means grateful. Thankful for all the healthy happiness in the herd. We are completely over the moon!”
The zookeepers of the African elephants were alert for the arrival of the calf for several days. Vogels: “On Wednesday we saw a change in the blood values and in principle the calf would be born within 48 hours.” The zookeepers monitored the webcam for five nights, taking turns and every hour. “We regularly thought that the moment had arrived. On Sunday evening, Punda was very restless. The keepers and I decided to spend the night in a room next to the elephant enclosure. The little one was born on Monday morning, February 19 at 9.10 am,” says Vogels.
To allow mother and daughter to recover in peace, the elephant stable will be open to a limited extent in the coming days. Matriarch At 32 years old, Punda is the matriarch of the elephant herd in Safari Park Beekse Bergen. It means that as the eldest of the herd, she plays an important role within the elephant family. When the two previous calves were born, her essential role was visible: she taught her daughters how to care for their young calves.
Punda arrived at the Safari Park with her offspring in 2015 as part of the management program. The management program ensures a healthy reserve population of this species. Elephant bull Yambo came to Beekse Bergen from Spain in 2021 to make his contribution. And with success, because not much later the zookeepers saw the first mating. More space Through the Wildlife Foundation, Beekse Bergen supports the Save the Elephants organization with the Northern Corridors Project. The project will ensure that nature parks in Kenya are connected with each other with corridors. A corridor is a safe passage for wild animals, such as elephants.
The passages are necessary because the population of Africa is growing and the elephant habitat is becoming fragmented, resulting in human-animal conflicts. The aim is to finance one corridor: 60,000 euros are needed for this. More than half of this amount will be collected through an adoption plan for the young elephants. The rest of the amount will be supplemented with other initiatives.
After the exposure of the big confidential informant who claimed Biden had taken 5 million dollars in bribes from the Ukrainian government this wee, there is some hope that the Biden impeachment probe may collapse. It’s possible. It’s also quite likely that it won’t for all the reasons Susan Glasser lays out in the New Yorker:
“Smirnov’s allegations were the foundation of the entire impeachment drive,” Raskin told me. Without them, “the impeachment investigation has ended in substance if not actually in form . . . the whole project lies in ruins.”
But I am not fully convinced. In today’s Congress, the fight, somehow, must always go on. For years, Trump and his backers have fed elaborate conspiracy theories about the President and his son to their base. This particular trope about Biden and Ukraine and the bribe that wasn’t is unlikely to die off swiftly. Raskin readily admitted that some Republicans in Congress were likely to keep pressing the matter even after its source had been discredited—“like Confederate soldiers lost in the woods somewhere,” still fighting on long after the war was over. In the way of conspiracy theories, he fears that Smirnov’s takedown may soon end up being portrayed as just another deep-state plot to cover up Biden’s crimes. I suspect it will not be long before this prediction comes to pass.
“We were warned that the credibility of this statement was not known and yet my colleagues went out and talked to the public about how this was credible and how it was damning,” Representative Ken Buck, a Colorado Republican who has started occasionally challenging his party in public, said this week. Of course, they were warned. We all were. The point was not the veracity of the accusation but the fact that Republicans had an accusation to make.
Political memory in America is shockingly attenuated. In 2019, Trump was impeached by a Democratic-controlled House for demanding that Ukraine help him politically by digging up dirt on Biden. In the “perfect” phone call that Trump himself publicly released, he pushed Ukraine’s President, Volodymyr Zelensky, to open an inquiry into Biden, referring to allegations that Biden had “stopped the prosecution” of Burisma, a Ukrainian energy company that had paid Biden’s son to serve on its board, at a time when the then Vice-President was helping oversee U.S. policy toward Ukraine. This is the same conspiracy theory that Republicans have been pursuing in the current impeachment inquiry into Biden, all these years later. It did not matter to them when the charge was dismissed as unproved Russian disinformation back in 2019, and, I fear, it will not matter to them now that this latest iteration of the tale, with its own Moscow angle, has been discredited too. The circus tent is not coming down; it has taken up permanent residence.
I’m afraid she’s right. I don’t know if they’ll have the votes when it comes down to it. There are a bunch of House seats up for reelection in districts that Biden won in 2020 and they may not be as keen. But I’ll be shocked if they fold up the tent completely. After all, Dear Leader wants his pound of flesh and I really doubt they have the brass to defy him.
Also, who knows what new “evidence” their friends in Russia will provide?
I’ve written before about Christopher Rufo, the young force behind the ant-woke crusade that’s got the GOP all excited. That’s his latest, in response to the news that the Heritage Foundation is laying the groundwork for a massive government intrusion into the American family life, especially the bedroom.
the highly influential heritage foundation, which would help staff and direct a future Trump administration, literally said that a key conservative policy goal is “ending recreational sex.” they said it, not me. IMO we should take them both seriously and literally https://t.co/41fK0rg5Nz
Rufo is all for it, claiming later on Xitter that his comments are all empirical facts.
If only the bitches would just put their biscuits in the oven and their buns in the bed we’d all be so much better off, amirite?
Even little girls under 13 need to understand what they were put on this earth to do. No matter what.
The Tennessee Republican Party has rejected a bill which would have granted an exception to the state's abortion ban for children under the age of 13 who have been the victims of rape. https://t.co/o8TbglNhbO
Rufo’s list of illustrious employers and publishers include the Manhattan Institute and its nutty City Journal, the intelligence-design-friendly Discovery Institute, and scientific racism-spouting doorstop Aporia, just to name a few.
So it comes as no surprise that The Guardian has a piece on Wednesday revealing Rufo’s relationship with a magazine called IM-1776, a journal of the “dissident right” with quite a few anonymous contributors (almost universally not a good sign when talking about right-wing publications).
IM-1776 is the sort of magazine that publishes sentences like this with a straight face:
The public schools in [Los Angeles] were essentially ghetto daycares, but without having the good sense to segregate by ethnicity.
That’s from a piece praising Nayib Bukele, the right-wing president of El Salvador who has, among other things, sent armed troops into his nation’s legislature to intimidate legislators into approving a $100 million loan from the United States that would have gone towards his controversial gang crackdown program that involved the suspension of civil liberties so authorities could round up alleged gang members.
Rufo is MAGA’s propaganda minister. Doctor Zoom notes:
The Guardian also has yet another moment of Rufo admitting out loud his entire discourse strategy, which somehow still manages to fool every freaking mainstream reporter, no matter how many times he says exactly what he’s doing to scare your Fox-loving uncle into believing that white kids at the local high school are being caged, mocked, and forced to eat Jell-O molds:
On the Pirate Wires podcast earlier this month, he told host Mike Solana of his own activism: “I try to play that game, I try to lay traps, I try to provoke certain reactions, I try to launder certain words and phrases into the discourse.”
And it works. At least for a while as the MSM laps it up as the latest sign that MAGA is sweeping the nation. Then whatever it was dies out in the face of reality (I’m looking at you, Moms for Liberty) and they quickly move on to the next. I’ll give him credit. He is prolific.
I wonder if the Democrats will let him slide on this incel-friendly stuff about “recreational sex” (is there any other kind?) They’ve gone off half cocked before (no pun intended) but this one seems even more out of step than usual.
Madame Secretary? Forget the jockeying to be Donald Trump’s vice presidential running mate. U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene told us at a stop in Greenville, South Carolina, ahead of Saturday’s GOP primary there that she has her eye on a key Cabinet position if the former president wins in November.
“I’d be honored to serve President Trump in his next administration in any capacity that he asks me. But I’m certainly particularly interested in Homeland Security. I think it’s the top issue in the country,” she said.
He might have to set up a cage match with Stephen Miller, but I’d guess Miller will end up in the White House again. Somebody has to keep the addled bronzer poisoned Dear Leader on the right path.
Sounds great. I wonder if she could get confirmed by the Senate? Oh wait, that probably won’t be necessary. The Republican Senate majority will change any rules they need to in order to give Trump what he wants. I expect there will be no more pesky impediments.
Note the grift as Trump speaks to the evangelicals. Good Lord.
Trump addressed a conservative evangelical gathering yesterday and it was really something. He says he’s very religious which is true. He worships himself. The extreme self-delusion among these people in thinking that this depraved, corrupt monster is a Bible believing Christian is truly stunning.
Watch a few of these if you get the chance. Then ponder why Biden’s alleged gaffes are on the front page and Trump is being presented as an unbeatable juggernaut.
“A lot of snakes.” Trump mumbles and garbles his words, gets completely confused. pic.twitter.com/b2RqBXxflX
i have no idea what Trump is talking about at this point. if a guy sitting next to me at the bar sounded like this i would peace out. pic.twitter.com/3jd5MoGMS2
Trump: "They want you to say what they want you, what they want to have you say. And we're not gonna let that happen. You're going to say as you want & you're going to believe & you're going to believe in God. You're gonna believe in God because God is here & God is watching." pic.twitter.com/Gr05jpbYet
One of the most frustrating refrains one hears these days is that the Republican Party has “suddenly” gone crazy as if it was a spontaneous explosion of lunacy that came out of nowhere. The fact is that there has been a strain of crazy on the right for a very long time and the allegedly normal Republicans who are now shocked at what’s happened to their party were willfully blind and refused to see how toxic that strain was. All they had to do was attend any Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) of the past 20 years and open their eyes to what their party was becoming.
I’m not talking specifically about ideology here, although there was plenty of odious far right philosophy at this confab going all the way back to its first meeting in 1974. I refer to the smart-ass, frat house attitude that came out of right wing radio, led by the contemptible Rush Limbaugh and all the spawn that followed him. Sure they pretended to be pious conservative Christians dedicated to bringing morality back to decadent America but down in the basement where people sold their right wing wares, there was always a plethora of nasty merch. From creepy t-shirts to crude caricatures of Black people (especially the Black first family) they made good money selling racist, sexist insults to their devoted fans.
This year, they’ve outdone themselves with what may be the most blatantly anti-American toy they’ve ever featured at a CPAC conference: a January 6th themed pinball machine described by The Hill as:
The game can be played over several modes, including “Stop the Steal,” “Fake News,” “Peaceful Protest,” “It’s a Setup,” “Babbitt Murder” — a reference to the Jan. 6 rioter who was shot and killed by police after trying to climb barriers at the Capitol — “Have Faith” and “Political Prisoners.” As you play each mode, videos from the insurrection play on a screen above.
January 6th is now literally a game to these people.
The first couple of days have largely featured the usual culture war shock jock commentary. For instance Florida congressman Byron Donalds, rumored to be a VP contender, demonstrated his homophobia by sharing this lovely little anecdote:
“Little boys are little boys. Little girls are little girls. When I was a little boy, I liked little girls. This is a good thing. This is the natural order that keeps society progressing.”
Alabama Senator Tommy Tuberville was interviewed by podcast host Ben Ferguson and claimed that “we are at war” because the communists, socialists and Marxists believe that children are part of the United States government and that “Hillary Clinton said it takes a village, why, because she doesn’t like your home.” Queried later by reporters about the ruling by the Alabama Supreme Court essentially making IVF fertility treatments unconstitutional, he claimed he was “all for it” because “we need more kids.” When it was explained that this would actually prevent people from having kids, he said that was a different conversation and that he hadn’t read the bill. Of course it wasn’t a bill it was a state Supreme Court decision. Byron Donalds, also said that he was in favor of the ruling as did presidential candidate Nikki Haley in a different venue, although both seemed to be as confused as Tuberville.
The panels so far have been the usual obnoxious fare. There was one called “Cat Fight? Michelle vs. Kamala” in which a panel of white people trashed the former First Lady and current VP with one of the participants implying that Michelle Obama is a man, one of the right’s favorite tropes. It brought gales of laughter from the entire panel and the audience.
There was another panel called “Babies R Us” which I thought could be an appropriate title for any of the panels considering the amount of whining and temper tantrums they all feature. But this one was about how happy all the panelists were that Roe vs Wade had been repealed, celebrating the fact that their entire agenda is now going to be enacted.
But all that fun and frivolity doesn’t hide the even darker turn the conference has taken. For all of its extremism in the past, it’s only since Donald Trump that they’ve been welcoming authoritarian dictators to the conference. Yesterday, the self-described “coolest dictator” El Salvador president Nayib Bukele received a “rock-star welcome” from the crowd (who had probably never heard of him until that moment.)
JUST NOW – President @nayibbukele: "Who elected Soros to dictate public policy and laws? Why does he feel entitled to impose this agenda?
Soros and his cronies hit a brick wall in El Salvador… El Salvadorians are now immune to his influence. No one believes his lies anymore." pic.twitter.com/bL2ZgG1RYY
It’s a little unoriginal but you really can’t go wrong with a little Soros bashing in a right wing crowd. On Saturday the new far right president of Argentina, Javier Milei, will be there to talk about “fighting socialism and corruption.” (CPAC has already featured Hungary’s Viktor Orban at earlier conferences.) Authoritarians are the big gets for these meetings nowadays and, needless to say, the superstar wannabe “dictator for a day” Donald Trump will be the keynote speaker as he has been for the past eight years. This is the conference that launched his political career back in 2012 and in recent years it might as well have changed its name to TPAC.
Interestingly, this year’s meeting is apparently pretty sparsely attended or at least it was in the first couple of days. Numerous shots of empty seats have been circulating on social media. If they weren’t such hypocrites, one might imagine that conservatives might be put off by the raging scandal around the organization’s leader, Matt Schlapp, who is under investigation for the sexual assault of a young male staffer and has been accused of several others of drunkenly groping them at various conservative functions. The Daily Beast reports that subpoenas were recently issued to various CPAC officials seeking information about document shredding in relation to the lawsuit amid other claims of financial mismanagement.
CPAC is a mess and you have to wonder whether it’s on its last legs. The truth is that as much as Trump loves CPAC, the MAGA faithful prefer the newer, more exciting conferences put on frequently by Turning Point USA, run by activist Charlie Kirk. He’s more edgy and fun. Why just this week on his podcast he and his guests fantasized about beheading people on national TV.
Charlie Kirk fantasizes about children watching televised executions, saying “At a certain age, it's an initiation” and “I would totally tune in to see some pedo get their head chopped off” pic.twitter.com/Wl7nNQBVPY
One of the guests on that podcast was Jack Posobiac, a notorious right wing activist who spoke at the beginning of the CPAC conference and made quite a stir when he said, “welcome to the end of democracy. We are here to overthrow it completely. We didn’t get all the way there on January 6th, but we will endeavor to get rid of it and replace it with this right here” showing his fist. Former White House adviser, grifter and podcaster Steve Bannon said “amen!”
That’s what MAGA really wants to hear these days. Even the crude insults toward Michelle Obama and speeches by dictators are too soft for this crowd. Why, even Donald Trump is a bit of a RINO these days. CPAC for all its petty spitefulness just doesn’t give them the same thrill anymore. They don’t want frat house humor and obscure Latin American leaders. They want blood.
