CPAC first came to town in 2021, not long after another rightwing conference, the QAnon-linked “For God & Country Patriot Roundup.” Like the 2021 gathering, this year’s event included conservative speakers from across the country and beyond. Former President Donald Trump came again. U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz made another appearance. Hungary’s far-right prime minister, Viktor Orbán, even took a
break from demonizing refugees and migrants in his country and made the 5,600-mile trip to demonize refugees and migrants in Dallas. To hear CPAC organizers tell it, they picked Dallas because it’s in Texas, a state they apparently view as one of the last bastions of freedom in a country beleaguered by progressives.
To Cal Jillson, a professor at Southern Methodist University and an expert on Texas politics, CPAC’s decision to hold its conference in Dallas a second year in a row is “unusual.” Still, he said, “They find Texas to be particularly comfortable, ideologically and in partisan terms. It’s the largest American red state.”
When the day’s events kicked off early Thursday afternoon, a rabbi who’d traveled from Israel led a bizarre prayer in which he asked God to rid us of “Biblical illiteracy,” “Godlessness” and “moral relativism.” The attendees stood with their hands folded across their paunches, their heads bowed in prayer. He warned of “the haughty forces of darkness who wish to enslave us with their manufactured fears and experimental morality.” Behind the rabbi, a giant video screen read in bright letters, “Awake, Not Woke.”
