CPAC’s Four-Day Sermon of Unrelenting Fear Has Set Trumpism on a New Path

The once-staid conservative conference now terrorizes its attendees with the notion that they will soon have no choice but to fight a war for Trump’s vision of America.

Read the full article at The New Republic

Flames engulf the American flag. This inescapable image blazes on the five enormous screens in the Trinity Ballroom in Dallas’ Hilton Anatole. In every direction, fire crackles over the speakers and the music swells. The video smash cuts to a statue of George Washington splattered with red paint as if mauled by some rough beast’s blood-soaked paw—an ursine murder scene frozen just before the inevitable aftermath of our founding father torn down and dashed to pieces on the pavement. An instant later, we see a group of protesters with a rope do just that.

“There’s really a great desecration going on,” a disembodied voice intones as this apocalypse plays out above and around us. “Anything that’s good, anything that’s holy, anything that’s truthful, is being attacked.”

This is CPAC Dallas. We are watching a trailer for “The Culture Killers: The Woke Wars.” By the time this three-day conference ends, we will all have seen this two-minute clip, which plays between nearly every speech, at least a dozen times.

“Cancel culture is real, and it’s coming to a neighborhood near you,” we are told over and over again by Matt Schlapp, who heads the American Conservative Union that hosts the conference. Screaming, rabid protesters flood the screens and our senses. “You’ll lose your job. You’ll be kicked out of the store. You won’t have your place in society.”

This trailer plays between the speeches, but it grows increasingly difficult to separate one from the other…

…From far enough away, the ritual fury might look like some demented two-minute hate, but this is incorrect. The CPAC experience, which used to be a more staid affair geared toward allowing young conservatives to network in Washington, D.C. among the GOP’s institutional power players, has devolved completely. It has become a four-day fear.

Read the rest at The New Republic