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Hot air and ill-informed banter

You are here: Home / Politics / Glibertarianism / Under Cover of Darkness Open Thread: CPAC, ‘Preferrably Consensual’, Part the First

Under Cover of Darkness Open Thread: CPAC, ‘Preferrably Consensual’, Part the First

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Back in 2014, DougJ quoted TPM’s Josh Marshall:

… In recent years, especially since Obama became President, CPAC’s wild press popularity and attention has been driven by what we might call a tacit conspiracy of derp between the event organizers and the people who cover it. You be outrageous; we’ll be outraged. And everyone will be happy. (After all, crap like this doesn’t happen by accident.) This has become even more the case as the contemporary Conservative Movement has become less a matter of ideology than a sort of performance art…

So, not really outside the CPAC norms when “Dad to 5 angels, husband… American Conservative Union Chair” Matt Schlapp announced a spot at this year’s conference for the freshest Hot Young Contrarian ‘Conservative’…

Per the Washington Post:

… [The announcement] came just hours after Yiannopoulos, who has told college audiences that “feminism is cancer” and that the gay rights movement should abandon transgendered people, appeared on HBO’s “Real Time with Bill Maher,” leading to progressive criticism of Maher.

Contrary to some reporting, Schlapp said, Yiannopoulos was not giving the conference’s “keynote” speech, which typically closes out the weekend. But his prominent invitation underscores how much the presidential victory of Donald Trump — whom Yiannopoulos calls “daddy” — changed the tone of mainstream conservatism.

Earlier this month, after University of California at Berkeley police canceled a talk by Yiannopoulos and put the campus on lockdown amid protests against his speech, Trump threatened to pull federal funds from the institution….

By 2015, the first year that Schlapp presided over the ACU — and thus over CPAC — the event was welcoming back some previously ostracized speakers. This year, Breitbart chief executive-turned White House strategist Stephen K. Bannon has a speaking slot; Kellyanne Conway, another key strategist, is on the ACU’s board…

But then!… some of the sulking True Conservatives who feel CPAC has gotten entirely too ‘edgy’ (not everybody is a fan of ‘performative’ anti-Semitism, or of sending an army of twitter-trolls to harass actress Leslie Jones) dug through Mr. Yiannopoulos’ copious online archives…

[Audio NSFW]

Oh, how the Lie-brals rejoiced!…


(If there’s a betting pool, I call Ross Doubthat.)

(Continued on next rock… )

Reader Interactions

34Comments

  4. 4.

    Mnemosyne

    But it was just, like, satire and stuff! Why are you libtards so humorless?

    Also, last I heard, he lost both the CPAC slot and his book contract, so we got a notch in our collective belts.

  8. 8.

    Yarrow

    Interesting to see that CPAC actually has a line they won’t cross. I honestly didn’t think it was possible.

  12. 12.

    BlueDWarrior

    @Felonius Monk: I’m pretty sure Bill Maher is really glad for letting him on his show.

    At some point liberals have a point about this thing we call “common fucking decency” and Milo has blown past that marker several years ago. But too many people want to get caught up in “But we’re hurting their FEELINGS” and “But then we’ll be just as bad as they are”.

    (And I thought that before this whole deal about ‘normalizing pedophilia’ came up)

    [Edited for clarity]

  15. 15.

    opiejeanne

    @Mnemosyne:

    last I heard, he lost both the CPAC slot and his book contract, so we got a notch in our collective belts.

    He got an advance for the book of $250k, after he conned donors out of $100k for that white male scholarship nonsense. He won’t starve, but you have to wonder what Simon & Schuster were thinking.

  17. 17.

    Anne Laurie

    @opiejeanne:

    you have to wonder what Simon & Schuster were thinking.

    That the Wingnut Wurlitzer market is always willing to spend good cash on doorstoppers in book wrappers, intended not for reading but for coffee-table display as markers of the owners’ tribal affiliations.

    Not as though the book, when extruded, was gonna be worth reading. There were stories, when the original contract was signed, that Milo had plagiarized a bunch of stuff in “his” first book — not to mention the long-standing rumors that his Breitbart posts were written by a bunch of unsupervised, unpaid interns. Didn’t seem worth posting about at the time, since Milo was still a mere generic RWNJ ‘edgelord’.

  18. 18.

    Calming Influence

    My father was an Army colonel in North Africa in WWII. After the war he was on Eisenhower’s staff in Paris implementing the Marshall plan. He was a Republican.
    I so wish he were still alive; he was so smart, so honest, and had such a gift for laser focused vulgarity. His take on Trump would be epic.

    That said; Dad, we got this.

  20. 20.

    Calming Influence

    I believe the First Amendment requires that Milo be allowed to bloviate ad nauseum and anyone who doesn’t like it is breaking the constatusion.

  22. 22.

    mai naem mobile

    So Rep. Paul Gosar(R – AZ D-bag) was supposed to be holding a town hall event on Thurs. Douchebag cancelled last minute and turned it into a tele-townhall. Chickenshit got scared. My sister knows the owner of the facility(a Best Western) who is pissed off because they had people book rooms who were going to stay there the night of the townhall. They’re going to lose not just those bookings but lose out on bookings that they didn’t take because of they thought the rooms were already booked and they don’t get any cancellation charges because it’s within the no fee cancellation period. Way to make friends with small business Rep. Gosar!

  23. 23.

    gene108

    Milo is the living embodiment of Cleek’s Law.

    But sadly there will be others.

    Cleek’s Law, like the Laws of Thermodynamics, is an underlying force in our universe that will always hold true.

  25. 25.

    ThresherK

    @Calming Influence: “Precision F-strike” is a great thing in a person. In the military i wonder if his peers (ones who used profanity more casually) recognized the weight it carries when someone.like your Dad used it.

  27. 27.

    Pangloss

    Is Trump still going to pursue cutting off funding for the University of California system because they protested Milo speaking to their young people?

  28. 28.

    Bruce K

    Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, this is what happens when a group decides to use Cleek’s Law as a guiding principle. You get people who you decide are good allies because they’ve angered the groups you’ve declared to be The Enemy, and then you find out too late that The Enemy’s anger was entirely justified and you’re stuck trying to defend the indefensible.

  30. 30.

    SFAW

    @different-church-lady:

    It’s hard to believe he doesn’t have a cabinet position by now.

    The day is still young.

    Shitgibbon may create a “Department of Pedophilia That’s We Need Because the Libtards Hate It,” just so that he can name Vile-o as Secretary

  32. 32.

    Tenar Arha (same Tenar, more Nameless Ones)

    People did tell Berkeley & other colleges & Simon & Schuster & Bill Maher etc about this stuff. That guy has a track record even back before Gamergate of harassment & worse in the Internet. He didn’t deserve the platform & legitimacy he got from ANY of those fucking naïve morons who were trying to prove abstract points on the backs of the people that walking talking a-hole hurt. They can all go to hell along with him.

  33. 33.

    Chip Daniels

    @Bruce K:
    IN skimming a few rightwing sites, that is exactly the position some are taking- that Milo is cool because he makes the right people angry.
    What bizarre is to see the double backflip pretzels they tie themselves into by declaring that Milo is just exposing the real pedophilia of liberals by something argle bargle derpity.

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