Dispatches from CPAC

40 or so miles away, on the Potomac River at National Harbor, just south of Washington D.C., conservatives are holding their annual get together, the Conservative Political Action Conference or CPAC. While I can't image going over there for anything other than sampling for the work I used to do, or snakehead fishing, it's a job for Stacy McCain:

CPAC 2019: Great Minds Think Alike

This morning, Instapundit linked a column by Donald Trump Jr. in which he discussed the media’s demonization of his father’s supporters:

When there’s violence against Trump supporters because of their political beliefs, the media will ignore it until they can’t, and then they’ll downplay it. If that fails, they’ll just proclaim that the Trump supporters had it coming to them because of the “climate of hate” that their political views create.

Yes, and weirdly enough, that’s exactly the point I was laboring to get across in the column I was working on last night:

President Trump and Vice President Mike Pence have both been announced as speakers at this week’s 46th annual Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), but I don’t expect to be inside the Gaylord Hotel’s Potomac Ballroom for those speeches. Presidential security is heavy duty, with lines to get through the metal detectors and lots of muscular guys with ear-pieces and holster bulges standing around looking very serious. Instead of dealing with security hassles and ballroom crowds, I’ll be out in front of the Gaylord watching the left-wing protest mobs that predictably show up wherever the president goes. The fact that CPAC is in National Harbor, Maryland, just outside D.C., makes it a short trip for Washington-based protesters, but Joseph Alcoff probably won’t be there.
Alcoff was a reputed leader of Smash Racism DC, an “Antifa” contingent blamed for mobbing the home of Fox News host Tucker Carlson last November and running Texas Sen. Ted Cruz out of a restaurant in September. Last month, however, authorities in Philadelphia filed 17 charges against Alcoff for his alleged role in an attack on two Marines. . . .

You can read the rest at The American Spectator.

CPAC 2019: Wednesday Scenes — Don’t Hate Me, I’m Only the Media. It's a struggle, but I'll try.

After I’d completed my media sign-in, I headed outside to have a smoke, turned the corner and there in the smoking area was History Channel star Rick Harrison of Pawn Stars fame. He’s a big Trump supporter and will speak Thursday here at CPAC. Rick was talking to a couple of “Angel Parents” whose kids were killed by illegal aliens. One of them was Steve Ronnebeck, whose son Grant was a convenience store clerk murdered over a pack of cigarettes in 2015 by Apolinar Altamirano, a criminal who was facing deportation but had been released from federal custody.

CPAC: Another Day, Another Deadline

Part of my predicament at CPAC is that I’m supposed to be doing actual journalism here, and this interferes with just having fun, which is what I’d rather be doing. Wednesday night, while everybody was out partying, I was holed up in my room trying to make sense of the notes I’d scrawled during the day and turn this into 800 words of Final Wisdom. You’d think, after all these years, it would get easier by constant practice, but it never really does. At 10 o’clock, I was around the 250-word and getting from there to 800 in two hours . . . Well, do the math. Yet I think I managed to produce something worth the effort: . . .

CPAC 2019: #FightOn Video

Today, after the national anthem opened CPAC proceedings in the Potomac Ballroom, they played a five-minute video that captures what it is that conservatives are fighting for, and what we are fighting against. The video was so popular that CPAC officials received requests to make it publicly available on YouTube.

CPAC: ‘The JOOOZZ!’

In the lobby of my hotel, the Young Jewish Conservatives are meeting tonight, and the national media are nowhere in sight because of course, this doesn’t fit the liberal narrative which is that (a) Trump is Hitler and (b) Republicans are Nazis. So many things about CPAC are beyond the perimeter of what the media want to report that if you really want to know what’s going on here, you have to either be here, or read my blog.
. . .
Jacob Wohl, Jack Burkman and Laura Loomer held a press conference today that the media will do their best to ignore:

Rep. Ilhan Omar “married her brother and she defrauded the United States,” Jacob Wohl said Thursday afternoon in a press conference at the Gaylord National Resort and Convention Center. Announcing the result of a recent investigation by the website Culttture that took a crew of conservative activists to the freshman Democrat’s Minnesota district, Wohl presented the findings of their investigation in an eight-page report concluding that Omar’s marriage to her brother, Ahmed Nur Said Elmi, was “part of a nefarious attempted immigration scheme… in the service of two federal felonies: immigration fraud and student loan fraud.”
Omar is one of the most prominent new members of Congress, elected as the first Somali-American as Nancy Pelosi’s Democrats recaptured the House after eight years of GOP control. The latest issue of Rolling Stone features a cover photo of Pelosi posing with Omar, New York Rep. Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, and Connecticut Rep. Jahana Hayes, hailing them as “Women Shaping the Future.”
Wohl appeared with Internet personality Laura Loomer and Republican lobbyist Jack Burkman in the lobby of the Gaylord, where they were surrounded by a scrum of reporters and activists attending the 46th annual Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC). Wohl and Loomer have been banned from Twitter, and contend that their banishments were retaliation for their support of President Trump and their efforts to expose Omar’s anti-Semitic extremism. In her case, Loomer said Twitter succumbed to a pressure campaign by the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), which has connections to Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood. “Why is a designated foreign terrorist organization lobbying with Twitter, an American social media company, to ban a Jewish-American conservative journalist who is exposing the anti-Semitism, the fraud and the terrorism ties that Ilhan Omar has?” Loomer said at the press conference. “It’s egregious.” . . .

You can read the rest at The American Spectator.

CPAC: Getting the Big Ticket

And here’s the really big ticket:

Raheem Kassam had what I wanted — a ticket to his Saturday night invitation-only CPAC party — and he also had something else I wanted, a newsworthy quote: “I think we’re winning.”
A former editor for Breitbart who is now a fellow at the Claremont Institute, Kassam was talking about the Left’s campaign to silence conservative voices on social media. That campaign ensnared him this week, when his personal Facebook account was suspended. Kassam’s ban got the attention of Donald Trump Jr., who tweeted: “I’m sure this was an ‘accident’ like I’ve been hearing from the social media masters. Funny that the accidents only happen one way.” Shortly afterwards, Kassam’s account was restored, a result he credited to the intervention by the President’s son. Facebook never explained why Kassam was temporarily banned, although many suspected it was an attempt to intimidate the popular author of No Go Zones: How Sharia Law Is Coming to a Neighborhood Near You. An ex-Muslim who formerly worked for UK Independence Party leader Nigel Farage, Kassam is not easily intimidated, and he sees the social-media crackdown on conservatives as evidence that the Left is frightened.
“If the other side wasn’t afraid, they wouldn’t be coming down so heavy-handed on people,” Kassam told me in an interview near Radio Row at the 46th annual Conservative Political Action Conference. “If [President Trump] gets re-elected next year, I think you’re going to see serious legislation about this — a Digital Bill of Rights.” . . .

Read the rest of my column at The American Spectator.