An Unsettling Glimpse at CPAC Texas

Recently, the Conservative Political Action Conference was in Dallas. Conferences of this sort are often strange affairs, and have been for a long time. But Chris Schlak, an ISI Fellow for USA Today who attended the conference, found unpleasant oddities attached to the proceedings beyond what is reasonable to expect.

It is one thing for Americans to defend the conduct of Viktor Orbán’s government in Hungary in that nation’s European context, where its actions seem reasonably popular to its citizens. It is a different thing entirely to argue that Orbán has lessons that American conservatives can apply directly in our own country. Yet that was the implication both of CPAC’s decision to invite Orbán to Dallas, and of Orbán’s speech. Shlak reports, moreover, that the CPAC audience ate up Orban’s remarks, carefully prepared for American-conservative consumption, “because he used the ‘right’ slogans and attacked the ‘right’ enemies.”

Schlak also discovered stolen-election nonsense in abundance in and around the conference. On one panel, a speaker openly hoped for Republican gubernatorial candidates Kari Lake and Doug Mastriano, of Arizona and Pennsylvania, respectively, to win in the fall so that they can decertify the results of the 2020 election in their states. “If that brings on a constitutional crisis, bring it,” the speaker said. Schlak also found the conference replete with positive references to Dinesh D’Souza’s discredited stolen-election documentary 2,000 Mules.

PHOTOS: CPAC Dallas

Strangest of all, however, was the January 6 “performance art,” as Schlak calls it, that he chanced upon. The performance artist was Brandon Straka, a Capitol riot participant convicted of charges of disorderly and disruptive conduct on Capitol grounds and sentenced in January to three months of house arrest and three years of probation, and also fined and given community-service obligations. At CPAC, Straka pretended to be a prisoner in a fake prison cell. He was, at one point, joined by Representative Marjorie Greene of Georgia.

“It was like watching a WWE wrestling match,” Schlak writes. “Everyone knew it was all fake, but everyone played along anyway.”

Schlak came away from the conference distraught about the state of conservatism. Based on his account, this is understandable. One hopes, however, that it was not a representative experience.