HATE HAS ITS CONFERENCES: WHAT WAS SEEN AT CPAC 2009

Let’s face it. Right-wingers are one day going to be back in power. It’s the price we pay for a democracy. One thing is for certain however: if we want to actually preserve that democracy, THIS generation of right-wingers should not be the ones we ever put in power. We get reminded of that every year we go to the Conservative Political Action Conference. This year it was more like a warning than a reminder. We knew that conservatives of this stripe were pissed that a black man became president and was going to really be insane because of it this year, but they pretty much served notice that they were beneath contempt and we really dodged a very nasty bullet in not giving this crowd another four years to do what they do. White Supremacists, some who are not so white, anti-Muslim politicians and activists and of course Ann Coulter and Rush Limbaugh were what made up the day for us, and if you heard about Rush’s address to the conference, trust us when we say it was tame compared to the crap everyone else was pulling. There was one funny moment in the conference however. The World Second Darkest White Supremacist Marcus Epstein losing his you-know-what upon seeing DLJ. Screaming at the top of his lungs as his comrades-in-harms stood by wondering what the hell was going on, he was rambling about how we have been causing him grief, and said something about a “mixed couple” chasing him down a street or something. While we have no bloody idea what he is talking about, it is safe to assume he is learning that our tagline is true: Hate has consequences. We are not done with him by a damn sight, and we have only just begun on the rest of this crowd. After this event, we are sure we are going to have company.

One People’s Project

WASHINGTON, DC-Hatemongers never really stay away from the annual Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), even though they are “officially” not welcome. They are simply tolerated once they arrive or keep their profile low. When their agendas are more than a little noticeable, they are often disinvited from any future CPAC events. The Council of Conservative Citizens (C of CC) have been banned a long time ago. The booth for the white-nationalist website VDARE was nowhere to be seen this year. And the ever-diminishing conservative activist outlet Free Republic, a longtime sponsor of the event, had nothing to do with this year’s outing.

But this being the first CPAC of the administration of the first African-American President of the United States of America, organizers had their work cut out for them. The hatemongers were still out in force, and while the hate groups of CPACs past were not openly present, it’s supporters were still there and this time the profile was raised significantly. In fact it was raised so high that one of it’s best representations was courtesy of the man who closed out this year’s conference, talk show host Rush Limbaugh, who gave what was called his first “national address” in his twenty-plus year career as a radio talk-show host.

Limbaugh’s appearance at CPAC generated controversy because he reiterated that he wanted President Obama to fail, a sentiment that he uttered just prior to Obama being sworn-in. What he ended up doing was cause Republicans to go on the defensive. “I don’t think anyone wants anything to fail right now,” said House Republican Whip Eric Cantor, speaking on ABC’s This Week. “We have such challenges. What we need to do is we need to put forth solutions to the problems that real families are facing today.” Meanwhile, Republican Party Chairman Michael Steele, who ditched the last day of CPAC to participate in Tavis Smiley’s State of the Black Union forum in Los Angeles, appeared on D.L. Hughley’s CNN program that evening and slammed Limbaugh and his remarks “Rush Limbaugh is an entertainer,” Steele said. “Rush Limbaugh, his whole thing is entertainment. Yes it’s incendiary, yes it’s ugly.” Steele was responding to Hughley’s comment that Limbaugh was de facto leader of GOP – which Steele promptly reminded him that the job was already taken – by Steele himself. The notion of Limbaugh’s status however, was furthered by White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emmanuel on CBS’ Face the Nation when he said Limbaugh was “the voice and the intellectual force and energy behind the Republican Party.”

By Monday, the heat was on, and Limbaugh responded on his radio show by laying into Steele. “I hope the RNC chairman will realize he’s not a talking head pundit, that he is supposed to be working on the grassroots and rebuilding it and maybe doing something about our open primary system and fixing it so that Democrats don’t nominate our candidates,” a pissed-off Limbaugh said. “It’s time, Mr. Steele, for you to go behind the scenes and start doing the work that you were elected to do instead of trying to be some talking head media star, which you’re having a tough time pulling off.”

Steele supporter Michelle Malkin, was also not happy, and she let him know on her blog. There’s nothing wrong with criticizing Rush Limbaugh. But if you are going to go on Obamedia outlets like CNN and throw around words like ‘incendiary’ and ‘ugly,’ you better back them up,” she wrote, later suggesting, “When liberals sit there and accuse the GOP convention of looking like ‘Nazi Germany’ (referring to a remark made by Hughley), you might not want to sit there, nodding your head, and respond, ‘I agree.'”

Limbaugh’s remarks pale in comparison to the other signs that the conservatives who attended CPAC decided to make their political agenda to be that of a race war. Malkin, whose contribution to CPAC was a mock version of The View television show with two other conservatives and a liberal token, might have found the “Nazi Germany” objectionable, but ironically, she writes for VDARE, a website that is edited by a man who once said that today’s multicultural immigration policy was Hitler’s revenge – and he was at CPAC.

Peter Brimelow and his 24-year-old bride Lydia Sullivan-Brimelow, the two observing their first wedding anniversary on Tuesday, were there for the entire conference, leaving just a few hours before it ended. In an interview with writer Max Blumenthal, Brimelow, declaring that the Republican Party “is a White party” that loses because they do not try to mobilize their base, dismisses support for Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, the East Indian-American who is seen as the frontrunner for the 2012 Republican Nomination for President. “There’s a lot of white guilt in the Republican Party, so he will appeal to that,” he said. “I actually don’t know much about his political views. Does he have political views?”

This position on the part of Brimelow to convince the GOP to ignore nonwhite voters and appeal to only whites, is what was touted by himself, Bay Buchanan and the American Cause during a press conference at the National Press Club in January. Brimelow helped further that position by participating in the inagural at CPAC of a new organization, Youth for Western Civilization. The group, which was a co-sponsor of CPAC, comes with even more irony, because the person who founded it is Marcus Epst
ein, a Korean Jew who is the American Cause’s Executive Director. Epstein’s role in advancing white supremacist causes and its activists has been a curious one for a number of years, but this latest endeavor was too much for even many of the CPAC attendees, some even calling the appearance of this group “creepy”. By Saturday afternoon, Youth for Western Civilization’s booth had been packed up and the group was not to be seen.

Another mainstay of CPAC’s hatemongering has been the ad hominem attacks on Muslims that a number of conservative groups and individuals have been engaging in over the past decade. And the most controversial example of this had to be the appearance of Geert Wilders a Dutch politician and that has made a name for himself as an anti-Muslim activist. In his political manifesto written in 2005, he called for a strict clampdown on the practicing of Islam, including a five-year ban on new mosques and schools, the closing of those mosques deemed to be “radical” and “radical” Muslims expelled from the Netherlands. There will also be a new clause in the Dutch constitution stating the cultural dominance of the Christian, Jewish and humanist traditions. Ironically, he wants Islamic books, especially the Koran banned from the Netherlands, as Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf currently is, even though his manifesto borrows heavily from Hitler’s agenda. He is so reviled that recently he was denied entrance into the UK. Thanks to politicians like Sen. John Kyl however, he did not have any problems getting into the US. The like-minded Senator, hosted Wilders at CPAC along with a screening of Wilder’s anti-Muslim short film Fitna. FrontPageMag’s David Horowitz, blogger Pamela Geller and others funded Wilders’ event, and his handlers approached his visit in the same fashion a white supremacist group handles theirs – as a covert operation. CPAC attendees were told Wilders was going to be there, but was not told when. Then on Friday, flyers appeared announcing that he was speaking in the Blue Room, which is on the other side of the hotel away from the main conference. That flyer also had a rather interesting note at the bottom: “Expect heavy security: no bags or coats allowed, all materials brought in to (sic) the room will be searched, and the event organizers reserve the right to deny entry to or eject anyone at any time.” It was the only event during CPAC that had such restrictions.

Alas, there a group called Muslims for America was not about to let any of this go unchallenged. They participated in the Wilders event and a flyer they distributed challenged him to discuss the Koran with them, no mean feat according to the group, since Wilders can’t even translate it. “Mr. Wilders was brought here by people who want to scare us and cause disharmony amongst us,” the flyer read. “We do not need friends like this.” One pro-Wilders blogger opined that it was their appearance that might have prompted Wilders security to usher him out during the showing of Fitna. “Shame on CPAC! as “Muslims ‘for’ America” educated our young CPAC attendees rather than the great Geert Wilders!” the blogger wrote.

The groups that tabled during CPAC varied in their objects of scorn. There was a group called Parents of Ex Gays and Gays (PFOX) that sought to “cure” those who held a “gay identity”. The group Let Freedom Ring gave out DVDs of their failed 2008 election commercials attacking Barack Obama. Accuracy in Media’s newsletter complained of a double standard in the media because while there was much hue and cry over failed RNC Chairman candidate Chip Saltsman’s distribution of a CD that included “conservative statirist” Paul Shanklin’s song “Barack the Magic Negro”, AIM considered it doubtful that Saltsman would have saw controversy if he instead distributed a DVD featuring Dave Chappelle’s skit about Clayton Bigsby, a blind black man who, not knowing he was black grew up to be the Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan. Former vice-President Al Gore is attacked by another group that produced a documentary attempting to “debunk” the global warming “hysteria” President Obama, the group ACORN Communists, the media and women were all targets of Phylis Schlafly’s Eagle Forum.
Then there was Regnery Publishing, who has a history in white nationalism, from when Willam Regnery signed incorporation papers for the American First Committee, a group that opposed fighting Nazis in World War II, to Henry Regnery starting the publishing company known for publishing books by Ann Coulter and Jerome Corsi, as well as the newspaper Human Events, to William Regnery II, publisher of The Occidental Quarterly, a magazine that espouses white nationalism and whose statement of principles calls for limiting immigration to “selected people of European ancestry.” At CPAC, the folks at Regnery were hawking a new book, The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Civil War. Written by neo-confederate author H.W. Crocker III, Regnery touts the book to “everyone who is tired of liberal self-hatred that vilifies America’s greatest heroes…” A picture of one of those “heroes” is prominently displayed on the cover, Confederate General Nathan Bedford Forrest, a slave trader who after the Civil War went on to found the Ku Klux Klan.
While Rush Limbaugh might have provided the scuttlebutt for the entire conference, and Ann Coulter was there with the usual insults, in the end they were not even the most offensive in the conference. Indeed, year after year the Conservative Political Action Conference seems to outdo itself with the vast array of characters that seem to compete with each other with who can be the most hateful and vile towards the rest of America. Their downfall will be however that this time the rest of America is paying attention, and if that is the case, it will be a long time, if ever, that this generation of conservatives will see the power they once enjoyed.