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What’s CPAC? Everything You Wanted To Know But Were (Rightly) Afraid To Ask

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CPAC, the Conservative Political Action Conference, is an event held annually by a group of American right-wing conservative extremists, hell-bent on taking down Barack Obama and the Democratic Party, instilling fear in America, “taking their country back” to the stone age, and propagating so-called “American values” of selfishness, ignorance, and Christian bible-centric governing.

CPAC Hallmarks

The hallmark culmination of each CPAC are the results of the straw poll, in which the CPAC attendees vote for whom they want the Republican presidential nominee to be, and the closing speech.

Read: “Who Will CPAC Nominate As GOP 2012 Presidential Nominee?” for a full list of this year’s straw poll nominees.

Watch: Glenn Beck- Keynote Speech at CPAC 2010

Winners of the CPAC straw poll in years past have rarely won the GOP presidential nomination, much less the presidency. Last year’s winner was Ron Paul, who interrupted Mitt Romney’s three-year streak. George W. Bush did win in 2000, and Ronald Reagan won in 1976, 1980, and 1984.

CPAC closing speakers of recent years past have included right wing extremist icons such as Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Ann Coulter, and Newt Gingrich. Often, the speakers mention the Republican deity, Ronald Reagan, who himself spoke at CPAC a dozen times.

Waning Importance Of CPAC

Despite the fact that this year’s CPAC has drawn its largest crowd ever, an estimated 11,000 attendees, an obvious indicator of the waning importance of CPAC, organized by the American Conservative Union, the oldest conservative lobbying organization in the country, is this year’s closing speaker, Rep. Allen West. An extreme right-wing freshman Republican politician, West is best known for falsely claiming, “I have a clearance that even the president of the United States cannot obtain because of my background.” The closing speaker, by comparison, last year was Glenn Beck, and the year prior, Rush Limbaugh.

This year’s CPAC, which began today and runs through Saturday evening, boasts the following list of confirmed speakers, most of whom represent the GOP of the 20th Century. A few notable exeptions are the Tea Party favorites, such as fraudulent journalist Andrew Breitbart and Rep. Michele Bachmann.

Another obvious indicator of the waning importance of CPAC is that the most-well-known GOP member, Sarah Palin, along with Marco Rubio, Senator Jim DeMint, will not be attending this year’s CPAC. (The Atlantic asks today, “CPAC Begins, but Does It Still Matter?“)

This year’s confirmed speakers include:

Rep. Michele Bachmann
Gov. Haley Barbour
Hon. John Bolton
Andrew Breitbart
Arthur Brooks
Herman Cain
Ann Coulter
Gov. Mitch Daniels
Hon. Newt Gingrich
David Horowitz
Wayne LaPierre
Sen. Mike Lee
Sen. Mitch McConnell
Rep. Ron Paul
Sen. Rand Paul
Hon. Tim Pawlenty
Gov. Rick Perry
Hon. Mitt Romney
Hon. Donald Rumsfeld
Rep. Paul Ryan
Hon. Rick Santorum
Phyllis Schlafly
Sen. John Thune
Rep. Allen West

Events, Panel Discussion, Speeches

Some of the events during this year’s CPAC include panel discussions and presentations, such as, “The Left’s Campaign to Reshape the Judiciary,” “How Political Correctness is Harming America’s Military,” “Why The Conservative Party Is The Next Step For The Tea Party,” “Lawlessness, Racialism and Terror at Obama’s Department of Justice,” “Reagan at 100: Role Model for the Next Generation,” “Repealing Obamacare: In The States, In Courts, and In Congress,” and “Traditional Marriage and Society.”

Controversaries: God and The Gays

Several large controversies have plagued this year’s event. First, Muslims. As you know, Islamophobia is a big social issue gripping Fox News-based Americans. So, a panel discussion, “The Importance of Faith & Religious Liberty in the US & Abroad,” sponsored by Muslims for America, surely will draw strong reactions, especially as there is another presentation, “The Ground Zero Mosque: The Second Wave of the 9/11 Attacks,” sponsored by the American Freedom Defense Initiative. This event features bigot extraordinaire Pamela Geller, and is the worldwide “special screening” of a trailer for the new AFDI documentary, “The Ground Zero Mosque: The Second Wave of the 9/11.” Talk about a conflict!

But wait, there’s more!

Another Islamophobia event, “The Sharia Challenge in the West,” takes place on Saturday.

Hopefully there’s strong security at these events.

Then there’s the “problem” of “the gays.”

GOProud, a gay Republican organization, is attending this year’s event, and as a result, many right-wing bigots and their organizations, such as the Heritage Foundation and the Family Research Council, Senator Jim DeMint, and other Republican heavyweights decided to not attend.

Read: “In CPAC’s Conservative Circus, Are Gays The High-Wire Act At CPAC 2010?

Erick Erickson, possibly America’s least self-aware citizen, and a CNN contributor and founder of RedState, a right-wing blog, today wrote, “GOProud is not a conservative organization.”

He adds, “GOProud has taken one of the favorite leftist bullet points and brought it straight into CPAC. You oppose affirmative action? You’re a racist. You oppose gay marriage? You’re a bigot.”

“Those groups and people who have sat out CPAC this year have done so not because they hate the gays, as Grover Norquist and GOProud would have you believe, but because GOProud is not a conservative organization and its agenda is not a conservative agenda.”

More anti-gay controversary at CPAC: Politico reports, “A POLITICO reporter just got handed a flier telling parents and young people that “radical homosexual front groups and their supporters will be in attendance to push their perversion on you.” This comes as some social conservative groups are boycotting CPAC in protest of the gay Republican group GOProud’s attendance.

So, does CPAC matter? Yes and no. Yes, because it propagates and celebrates anti-American extremism, and no, because it propagates and celebrates anti-American extremism.

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News

Election Denialism Embraced by ‘Large Proportion’ of Trump’s Followers: Report

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Since at least 2012 Donald Trump has been engaging in election denialism. Now, a tenet of the Republican Party, the refusal to accept official election results they don’t like is ingrained in a large number of his followers.

“I think that the powers that be on the Democratic side have figured out a way to circumvent democracy,” Darlene Anastas, 69, of Middleborough, Massachusetts, told NBC News. The network “spoke to more than 50 Trump supporters, most of whom said they don’t believe Biden can win legitimately in November.”

Poll after poll,” NBC also reported, “has found that a large proportion of the Republican electorate believes the only reasons Joe Biden is president are voter fraud and Democratic dirty tricks, buying into former President Donald Trump’s baseless claims about the 2020 election.”

NBC spoke with 72-year old George Crosby, from Fitzwilliam, New Hampshire, who said, Democrats “cheat like crazy” (video below).

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“I think they cheated before, and I think they’re going to try to do it again, because they’re a bunch of communists,” Fitzwilliam added.

38-year old James Russon of Eagle Mountain, Utah told NBC, “There’s no way Biden could legally … win without unfair means.”

“He added that the only way Biden could prevail would be through ‘cheating’ or ‘a lot of deceased people voting.'”

62-year old Randall Minicola of Las Vegas said it would be “impossible” for Biden to win. “I don’t think he’s got a following. I mean, you look who’s behind him — the only thing he’s got is ghosts behind him. That’s what I believe. Where’s the supporters then? Are they in the basement with him? I don’t think so.”

NBC News did not report on where these particular GOP voters got their information or how they came to believe these claims, but it did note the “possibility of another election in which large numbers of Republicans refuse to accept a Biden victory has also been stoked by influential conservatives.”

READ MORE: Trump Would Not Oppose State Pregnancy Surveillance or Abortion Prosecution

Trump’s election denialism is so strong that in 2020 CNN published “A list of the times Trump has said he won’t accept the election results or leave office if he loses.”

Election denialism continues to be spread throughout the right.

“A senile man is not going to get elected in the most powerful country in the world unless there’s fraud,” former Fox News host Tucker Carlson said in March, NBC noted. Carlson, a purveyor of conspiracy theories, has spoken very positively about Russia and its authoritarian president, Vladimir Putin, and against Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky.

Numerous studies and fact checks have found mail-in voting to be safe and secure, with little opportunity for fraud, yet just last week Carlson, like Trump, was claiming massive election fraud. Undermining Americans’ faith in democracy was a main goal of Russian President Putin’s 2016 attack on the U.S. elections, according to a 2017 report issued by a group of U.S. Intelligence agencies.

But just last week Carlson claimed, “About one in five mail-in ballots in the last election was fraudulent, handing Biden the presidency. We know this because the people who committed the fraud have admitted it in a new poll.”

A portion of NBC’s report from Thursday also appears in this January 2024 NBC News video.

Watch the video below or at this link.

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Trump Won’t Commit to Accepting Election Results if He Doesn’t Win State He Falsely Claims He Won

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Falsely claiming he won the state of Wisconsin in the 2020 presidential election Donald Trump is now refusing to commit to accepting the 2024 results for the Badger State this November.

In an interview with Wisconsin’s Milwaukee Journal Sentinel Trump appeared to dance around the issue, declaring he would only accept the official results “if everything’s honest.”

“If everything’s honest, I’d gladly accept the results,” Trump told the paper’s Alison Dirr and Molly Beck in an interview Wednesday. “If it’s not, you have to fight for the right of the country.”

“But if everything’s honest, which we anticipate it will be — a lot of changes have been made over the last few years — but if everything’s honest, I will absolutely accept the results,” he said.

The Journal Sentinel reports Trump “offered similar conditions when asked the same question by news outlets in 2016 and 2020.”

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“I’d be doing a disservice to the country if I said otherwise,” he said.

In that interview Trump once again falsely claimed he won Wisconsin in 2020, a state President Joe Biden actually won by more than 20,000 votes.

“If you go back and look at all of the things that had been found out, it showed that I won the election in Wisconsin,” Trump told the newspaper. “It also showed I won the election in other locations.”

Trump’s “Big Lie,” that the 2020 election was “rigged” against him, along with his support for the January 6, 2021 insurrection, have been central to his 2024 campaign.

“Trump’s refusal to accept the results of the last presidential election in Wisconsin and his new comments placing conditions on when he would accept the results of the next election come as Republicans are seeking to persuade GOP voters to restore their trust in the state’s system of elections and embrace absentee voting,” the Journal Sentinel reported. “There’s no evidence to support that Wisconsin’s election was tainted by cheating or fraud in 2020. The results have been confirmed by recounts in Dane and Milwaukee counties that Trump paid for, court rulings, a nonpartisan state audit and a study by the conservative legal firm Wisconsin Institute of Law & Liberty, among other analyses.”

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In October of 2016, weeks before Election Day, during the final presidential debate, Trump was asked if he would make the commitment “that you will absolutely accept the results of this election?”

“I will look at it at the time,” Trump replied. “I’m not looking at anything now, I’ll look at it at the time.”

He then went on to sow doubt about the credibility of the election.

Trump’s refusal to accept election results stretches back more than a decade, even before he ran for president.

After he refused to accept his loss in 2020, ABC News reported “Trump has longstanding history of calling elections ‘rigged’ if he doesn’t like the results.”

“On election night in 2012, when President Barack Obama was reelected, Trump said that the election was a ‘total sham’ and a ‘travesty,’ while also making the claim that the United States is ‘not a democracy’ after Obama secured his victory.

“We can’t let this happen. We should march on Washington and stop this travesty. Our nation is totally divided!” Trump wrote on Twitter

One month later, in December of 2012, Trump tweeted, “The electoral college is a disaster for a democracy.” Ironically, four years later he became president after losing the popular vote to Hillary Clinton, but winning the Electoral College.

Watch the video above or at this link.

READ MORE: ‘Antisemitism Is Wrong, But’: Marjorie Taylor Greene Pilloried for Promoting Antisemitic Claim

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‘No Place for Antisemitism’: Biden Denounces Violent Campus Protests, Hate Speech and Racism

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President Joe Biden made rare, unscheduled remarks from the White House Thursday morning, denouncing the recent violent protests on college campuses, and telling Americans there is “no place” for antisemitism anywhere across the nation. He also denounced “hate speech” and “racism,” while declaring his support for the right to peacefully protest.

“There should be no place on any campus, no place in America for antisemitism or threats of violence against Jewish students,” President Biden declared. “There is no place for hate speech, or violence of any kind, whether it’s antisemitism, Islamophobia, or discrimination against Arab Americans or Palestinian Americans. It’s simply wrong. There’s no place for racism in America. It’s all wrong. It’s un-American.”

“Violent protest is not protected,” Biden said strongly. “Peaceful protest is.”

Stressing “the right to free speech,” and the people’s right “to peacefully assemble and make their voices heard,” President Biden also declared the importance of “the rule of law.”

READ MORE: Noem Insists 14 Month Old Dog She Shot Was ‘Not a Puppy’ Sparking New Backlash

“We are not an authoritarian nation where we silence people or squash dissent,” the President also said, praising the ideal of peaceful protests, which he said are in the “best tradition of how Americans respond to consequential issues.”

“But,” he added, “neither are we a lawless country. We are a civil society and order must prevail.”

America is a “big, diverse, free thinking and freedom-loving nation,” Biden said, denouncing those “who rush in to score political points.”

“This isn’t a moment for politics, it’s a moment for clarity.”

“It’s against the law when violence occurs. Destroying property is not a peaceful protest. It’s against the law. Vandalism, trespassing, breaking windows, shutting down campuses, forcing the cancellation of classes and graduations. None of this is a peaceful protest,” he warned. “Threatening people, intimidating people. instilling fear in people is not peaceful protest. It’s against the law. Dissent is essential to democracy but dissent must never lead to disorder or to denying the rights of others so students can finish a semester and their college education.”

READ MORE: ‘Antisemitism Is Wrong, But’: Marjorie Taylor Greene Pilloried for Promoting Antisemitic Claim

“Look. It’s basically a matter of fairness. It’s a matter of what’s right. There’s the right to protest, but not the right to cause chaos. People have the right to get an education, the right to get a degree, the right to walk across the campus safely without fear of being attacked.”

“I understand people have strong feelings and deep convictions in America. We respect the right and protect the right for them to express that. But it doesn’t mean anything goes. It needs to be done without violence. Without destruction, without hate, and within the law. And I’ll make no mistake. As President, I will always defend free speech. And I will always be just as strong standing up for the rule of law. That’s my responsibility to you the American people. My obligation to the Constitution.”

The President also responded to reporters’ questions, including saying he saw no need to call up the National Guard.

Watch the videos above or at this link.

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