Former CPAC Head Says GOP Becoming a Cult
February 2021 - Mickey Edwards served eight terms as a Republican Congressman from Oklahoma and was head of the American Conservative Union - the group that organizes the annual Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) - for five years. But he doesn't mince his words when describing the state of today's Republican Party or when discussing the attendees at the 2021 CPAC event, held earlier this month in Orlando:
"The Republican party really no longer stands for any kind of principles, conservative or otherwise," Mr. Edwards told an interviewer in late February.
"The party seems now to be completely following the lead of one man wherever he goes, which is the definition of a cult. Now all that matters is, 'Trump is for this, we're for this.' And that includes denying truth, denying fact, denying reality. It's such a disconnect from what's really happened in the world."
 (Golden Trump (Calf?) Statue at 2021 CPAC Event)
Mr. Edwards went on to say that the speakers at this year's CPAC "are living in an alternate reality in which facts don't matter, the Constitution doesn't matter."
During the course of the interview, he was asked about Matt Schlapp, the current ACU chair who has been repeating Mr. Trump's massive voter fraud lie. Mr. Edwards replied:
"He doesn't have the job that I used to have because when I was head of CPAC, it was a group that was based on conservative principles. We were strong supporters of the Constitution. We believed in free elections. We believed in democracy. These people don't believe in any of those things."
"You know, they're no different than the people who flock to other totalitarian leaders in other countries," he added. "They're no different than they are in Hungary, they're no different than they used to be Germany. Whatever their great leader says, they do, and there's no underpinning of fact, there's no underpinning or concern about the norms of free democracy."
 (Edwards photo from gettyimages)
Perhaps Mr. Edwards most damning indictment of the current crowd of so-called conservatives was the following:
"Ronald Reagan could not get elected to anything by the people who were at that CPAC conference this year."
(Although we disagree with many of the policies that Mr. Reagan promoted, we'll bet anyone dollars to donuts that Ronnie would have put Donny and his cult-like followers in their place when it came to the Constitution and their trashing of our democratic values and institutions.)
| 
