CPAC Lineup Includes Hate Group, ‘Patriot’ Leaders
Brimelow was not the only prominent radical figure right in CPAC’s line-up. Other all-stars include:
This afternoon, Center for Security Policy President Frank Gaffney, the Muslim-fearing former Pentagon official who in 2011 called for the resurrection of the McCarthy-era House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) - this time to target Muslims - spoke on national security and the military budget.
Also this afternoon, Family Research Council President Tony Perkins, who among other things spreads the lie that pedophilia is “a homosexual problem,” gave an untitled presentation.
CPAC regular Cliff Kincaid, head of the antigovernment “Patriot” group Accuracy in Media (AIM), today presented an award to CBS News reporter Sharyl Attkisson. Attkisson, as Media Matters observes, faces much criticism from within the journalism industry for accepting an award from Kincaid, who at CPAC in 2009 suggested that the President is a communist who was not born in the United States. When he’s not advancing conspiracist propaganda, Kincaid spends a lot of energy defaming LGBT people. Pontificating last year on the pending repeal of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” he suggested that openly gay soldiers would “demand sexual favors to rise in the ranks. … [I]t is a recipe for national suicide.” AIM has also published guest columns by Scott Lively, co-author of The Pink Swastika, which advances the utterly false claim that “the Nazi party was entirely controlled by militaristic male homosexuals.”
Michael Boldin of the Los Angeles-based Tenth Amendment Center, will offer two showings of “Nullification: The Rightful Remedy,” a film which promotes the Center’s thesis that each state has the constitutional right to invalidate and disregard virtually any federal law it dislikes. Popular among among neo-Confederates and antigovernment “Patriots,” the concept of “nullification” relies on a spurious interpretation of the Tenth Amendment (which reserves to the states and the people any power not explicitly given to the federal government), and flies in the face of more than two centuries of jurisprudence.
Pam Geller and Robert Spencer of the anti-Muslim hate group Stop Islamization of America (SIOA), will speak tomorrow on “Islamic Law in America: How the Obama Justice Department Is Selling Us Out.” Geller is a birther who made a spectacle of herself last Thanksgiving when she accused Butterball Turkey of “stealth jihad,” and last month crossed yet another line by celebrating the U.S. soldiers who were caught on video urinating on dead Taliban fighters in Afghanistan. Spencer, who adopts a more sober and scholarly mien, is an entirely self-taught “expert” in the study of modern Islam and the Koran. His writings were cited dozens of times in the manifesto of Anders Breivik, the terrorist who slaughtered 77 people in Norway last July because he believed they were enabling Muslim immigration.
On Saturday, a clumsily named panel on “Immigration - High Fences, Wide Gates: States vs. the Feds, the Rule of Law & American Indentity” will feature anti-immigrant superstar Kris Kobach, who, before his election as Kansas’ secretary of state, authored a series of draconian, anti-immigrant “enforcement-only” laws, including Arizona’s S.B.1070 and Alabama’s H.B. 56. Also onstage will be ProEnglish’s Vandervoort.