CPAC, the annual Conservative Political Action Conference, had a sleepier start than usual this Thursday morning. Even Matt Schlapp, the chairman of the American Conservative Union, which runs CPAC, noted it during his introductory speech. “Usually by this point in CPAC, there's some amazing controversy going on in the world about something that we've done or we haven't done,” he said. (He might have explained his comment by noting that, overnight, the Republican President had walked out of negotiations, in Vietnam, with North Korea's Kim Jong Un.)
The quiet was broken soon afterward by a five-and-a-half-minute video, which boomed like an action-film trailer and established the theme not only for the rest of the conference but for the Republican Party ahead of 2020: socialism is on the march. The video featured darkly tinted clips of Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who are both self-proclaimed democratic socialists, and also of Kamala Harris and Cory Booker, who have moved to the left in the early stages of their Presidential campaigns. The video also highlighted support on the left for abolishing Immigration and Customs Enforcement; the new wave of left-wing activism, both on and off campus (labelled “mob intimidation”); criticism of Israel and AIPAC by Representative Ilhan Omar (labelled “anti-Semitism”); and Democratic controversies, including Ralph Northam's blackface scandal and Elizabeth Warren's claims of Native American ancestry.
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