Thread by @daveweigel

Watching Ron Johnson at Ralph Reed's Faith & Freedom Coalition, struck by how much this sounds like what I heard from liberals for four years. "We focused all of our energy on winning the presidency, on winning senate races," ignoring county and school board races.

School boards have been full of conservative-vs-liberal action for decades; the idea that liberals took them all over while conservatives slept is a stretch.

Rep. Ann Wagner talks up both her Born Alive abortion bill, but applause was as loud or louder when she said she'd been to the border and Biden policies were "allowing thousands of women and children to be trafficked across the border and sold into slavery."

Wagner accuses Ilhan Omar and the squad of "bigotry and hatred against Israel and their own country," citing Omar's comment about "unthinkable atrocities committed by the US, Hamas, Israel, Afghanistan and the Taliban."

Steve Scalise mostly focusing on abortion, looking forward to "this new Supreme Court" revisiting Roe and, like Wagner, talking up their "born alive" bill discharge petititon. "In the state of New York, they are killing babies born outside the womb and calling it abortion."

Scalise has riffed through a few topics, though I lost the thread when he suggested Democrats were shutting down steel plants in America to buy steel from China. nwitimes.com/business/local…

Rick Scott, tying up a list of Democratic outrages like their spending bills and HR1: "Their agenda is systemic socialism and they're proud of it."

"The Democrats don't want free and fair elections. They want elections that only Democrats can win."

"We're living in a nation where these woke, rich football players are kneeling for the Pledge of Allegiance," says Rick Scott. (NB: The kneeling's been during the anthem, the Pledge isn't recited at NFL games.)

Scott had encouraged the audience to stand up and do the pledge - "why not? We believe in it!" He's twice compared the lockdowns of churches to how protests were allowed and encouraged. The outside/inside part of that aside, I expect to keep hearing that as a campaign issue.

"Everybody knows that life starts at conception," Scott says. "There are two types of people: Those who admit it, and those who lie about it." The pro-life generation is winning: "A baby is a baby. It's not that hard."

Rep. Ronny Jackson takes stage, and says being Trump's doctor was the best job he'd ever had, better than Congress. "It's not quite as professionally satisfying, and it's a lot more frustrating than I thought it would be."

Jackson told the audience he had no prepared remarks, but he's got the same 15 minutes as other speakers. He's currently riffing on how it's a "done deal" that Rs will win the House and how we are "heading to a Marxist, socialist existence in this country."

Jackson has twice, remorsefully, said he expected to be in Congress during a second Trump term. "I thought I was going to get there with Donald Trump in the Oval Office, I'd have this unique relationship."

"I think my time's up," Jackson says - there's 4 minutes on the clock though he may be restoring some time after Scott went over. He did not mention his big push yesterday, to demand that POTUS take a mental acuity test.

Sen. Marsha Blackburn is first speaker of the day to go after the Equality Act. Her case against it: Passage "would mean that boys who self-identify as female" would compete in girls sports and domestic abuse shelters would "have to take in men who self-identify as females."

Ted Cruz kicks off his speech by saying he's going to do a "radical thing" and tell the truth. "Christopher Columbus discovering America was a good thing. George Washington was an American hero." Also: "We should stand for our national anthem."

Interestingly, one of Cruz's real-talk points is "marriage is a holy covenant before God." Even at a social conservative conference, saying it's between a "man and a woman" is passé. But applause for Cruz's final point: "There is a difference between boys and girls."

"The left is like the Terminator. They never stop. They're soulless, have no brain, and red eyes." The threat: "They want to convince patriots across the country that when you think obvious thoughts, you're alone."

"Andrew Breitbart once said, politics is downstream from culture," says Cruz. "Today, politics IS culture." He looks at the media row to inform us "dimwits" then when he says "call to arms" he will be speaking rhetorically.

"The slumbering church needs to wake up. The patriots across our nation who reject the stinking pile of lies that the left is selling, we need to wake up and we need to engage."

Cruz now offering an accurate historical definition of Critical Race Theory, which begins on a dunk on an unnamed reporter who asked him to define it. (Not me!)

"It is every bit as racist as the klansmen in white sheets," Cruz says of CRT.

Cruz talks up the school board election in South Lake, TX, best rundown of that I've seen is here nationalreview.com/2021/06/how-so…

Lindsey Graham is introduced with a video highlighting his advocacy for Kavanaugh and Barrett; that said, apart from the Fulton decision (which was 9-0), most of the talk of SCOTUS here is aspirational, on what they're going to do with MS's abortion case

Graham taking the stage to accept FFC's Scalia award: "I don't know if I deserve it, but I'll take it, because I don't deserve half the crap I get and I have to take that."

Graham still generating the most laffs of any speaker. On Trump: "We found common ground. He likes him, and I've come to like him."

Graham gently nudges the crowd on 2020 election obsession - which is of course shared by Trump, who he keeps praising. "There’s some shenanigans in these elections," he says. "But don’t you think it’s time to tell America what we’ll do for them in 2022?"

Graham lies about a detail of SR1, saying it would replace state redistricting with a commission in "Washington" appointed by Democrats. It would actually require every state to have individual, 15-member commissions: 5 Ds, 5 Rs, 5 Is. electionlawblog.org/?p=103123

Graham also says a 2022 GOP win would show "the party of Trump" is alive, a continuing walk-back of his break w Trump on 1/6 washingtonpost.com/politics/linds…

Graham thanking the crowd for advocating for the Barrett confirmation: "Do you know how hard it was to do what we did, to get someone on the Supreme Court 43 days before an election?"

Marco Rubio up now, warning that Marxist ideology has infiltrated everything from schools to corporations. "The old Marxism used economics to gain control. The new Marxism uses identity politics."

"We have federal employees who have to go to two or three day courses, forced to choose where they are in the oppression matrix."

In his intro for Pence, Ralph Reed praises his work on the covid task force, and adds that the virus's release was maybe done with "the intention of the Chinese government." (It's so easy for "lab leak" theory to blur "cover-up after accident" and "bioweapon" theories.)

A few cries of "traitor!" when Mike Pence starts talking at Faith & Freedom Coalition summit; the people shouting it are being led out or leaving, one guy in Bikers for Trump swap filming himself.

Pence's speech incorporates a lot of lines he's been using since the campaign about the Trump record; "we isolated Iran as never before," moving embassy to Jerusalem "kept our word to the American people and our most cherished ally."

Pence mentions Macron saying Biden put America back in "the club," which fired up conservatives: "The only club I want a US president part of is labeled U-S-A!"