Thread by @dburghart

My biggest takeaways from today's #CPAC2022 coverage are:

1. how dominant the anti-woke message has become and how it fuses COVID denial, racism denial, anti-trans, anti-sex ed, anti-public schools message into one big bundle of white victimhood.

2. how they're trying to sweep Jan. 6 under the rug and reframe the conversation to be about a "faulty" 2020 election and push for voter suppression laws. That Stop the Steal figures like Jenny Beth Martin, and Senators like Hawley and Cruz headlined are signs of further trouble.

3. How, like we'd anticipated, anti-immigrant politics are emerging just in time for the mid-terms. The myth of the border is used as a way to shift the blame on everything from crime rates to the opioid epidemic onto immigrants.

4. how the antisemitic attacks against George Soros continued to swirl through the conference. (plus not a single pro-Israel message throughout the day.

5. just how bereft of ideas the wing of the GOP represented by CPAC really is. More oil drilling is the solution to Putin's invasion of Ukraine? Really? That the best you've got? There was nothing else on the agenda. Not even the tax-cut, deregulation agenda of yore.

6. How the attack on "Big tech" still has hold, mostly because they want to push new far-right competitors like GETTR, Truth Social, etc.

7. Trump still has a firm grip on this wing of the movement. MAGA is trying to stomp out any opposition.

8. How the failure of the current administration to have a bold vision for the country is allowing the right to fill the vacuum, claiming Biden wants to ram CRT, vaccines, and pronouns down everyone's throats to drive up inflation and make America look weak and feckless.

9. How tight the messaging is at #CPAC2022. The talking points are strong at this conference. There were multiple instances of virtually identical language being used to describe everything from CRT to Soros.

10. A lack of crowd enthusiasm for anything but the most brazen appeals to the sense of white dispossession and white victimhood. There was also a sense that they'd already won the war against reproductive rights and were ready to move on.

As a final aside of the day, I was pleasantly surprised to find that, unlike the Super Bowl, the event wasn’t wall-to-wall with crypto, NFTs, and other such scams. Still holding on to the Gold peddlers at CPAC!

Ok, one last one, I promise.

My favorite #CPAC2022 sponsor is.... drumroll, please...

MAGA Hammocks!