Welcome to the Gaylord National Resort & Convention Center. Your companions are two Frenchmen: Julian Feeld and Anthony Mansuy. They attended the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) so you didn’t have to. Enjoy the CPAC International Summit where leaders like Liz Truss (UK), Eduardo Bolsonaro (Brazil), Morse Tan (South Korea), Steve Bannon (1933 Germany), and representatives from Japan, Australia, Hungary, Mexico, and Israel gathered to plot a far-right international coalition and whine about how their Big Beautiful Boys have been so poorly treated. Join Julian and Anthony as they run into JFK Jr (who is alive and well) as well as a whole lot of January 6 rioters, including one that still has a lot of love for QAnon. This is the first of a two-part episode based on our latest field reporting in Washington DC.
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Anthony Mansuy: https://x.com/AnthonyMansuy
Editing by Corey Klotz. Theme by Nick Sena. Additional music by Pontus Berghe. Theme Vocals by THEY/LIVE (https://instagram.com/theyylivve / https://sptfy.com/QrDm). Cover Art by Pedro Correa: (https://pedrocorrea.com)
https://qaapodcast.com
QAA was known as the QAnon Anonymous podcast.
Welcome to the QAA Podcast, episode 313, Two Frenchmen at CPAC, part one of two.
As always, we are your hosts, Jake Rokotansky, Julian Fields, Anthony Monchie, and Travis View.
The Secret Service had tightened security and we were stuck in the press pen at the back of the conference room with the rest of the haters and losers.
Well, that's not entirely true.
There were a decent amount of right-wing media and content creators around us cheering the president's speech.
Sitting to my left was an overweight man who looked to be in his late 50s and was breathing heavily.
Instead of applauding the president's quips, the man drummed his fingers on the long, slim desk that extended across our row.
He was here with his wife, presumably covering the Conservative Political Action Conference, or CPAC, for some obscure media outlet.
In front of him on the desk was a small portable blood pressure monitor and a torn open candy wrapper labeled Sweet Street.
I felt like shit.
I was exhausted, in the process of catching a cold, and beaten down by four consecutive days of psychotic conservative rhetoric.
The only real time I spent away from CPAC was a stint at the Capitol where a conference was held by Enrique Tarrio, the leader of the Proud Boys, Stuart Rhodes, the founder of the Oathkeeper Militia, and an assortment of other people who were prosecuted for the January 6, 2021 Capitol riot.
It had involved a lot of loud screaming, the launch of a meme coin, and the eventual arrest of Tarrio.
But we'll get to that.
The point is, I felt terrible.
And Anthony, the French journalist and repeat guest writer on the podcast with whom I was attending the conference, wasn't faring much better.
He was fidgety, wild-eyed, and had sent me an extremely worrying voice message from the press pen just an hour previous.
I'm about to fucking, like, hang myself.
Please, come back.
Stop.
Like, I'm not gonna survive this.
I urge you to come back instantly, please.
You put it in there, motherfucker.
I urge you to come back instantly, please.
That was the very last minute of a four-day incredible stint.
If there's anybody on the podcast that understands your mindset and that tone of voice, it is me, brother.
I know exactly.
How do you feel?
By, like, the worst people.
They're closing in.
The anxiety is pitching up.
You've got one friend in the world and he's not there and he's not picking up his phone.
He left for so long.
He left for so fucking long.
It was insane.
There was nothing to do.
Just wait for Trump to speak.
Another bit that I really appreciate you, Anthony, for is having two phones and somehow keeping both of them at 1% the entire time.
Like, I was always looking over and he'd have, like, a totally smashed screen on a phone that, of a small size, a size I don't even think they make anymore.
And it always had, like, he'd be like, it's 1%.
I'm like, how?
My phone, when it's at 1%, is, like, probably going to shut down.
Like, it doesn't actually even ever say 1%.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
You know, they changed.
I think it's my conspiracy theory is basically Apple, like, killing your phone with updates so that the old phones, like, Don't function anymore.
So I can keep it for like three hours at 1%.
I think this is the most mainstreamed and embraced conspiracy theory ever.
Yeah, that's a sweet one.
It's just a fact, I think.
Three hours at 1%?
That's like the candles burning for eight nights on Hanukkah.
Well, his way of doing it is he also had a totally piece of shit, like a portable battery that he kind of plugged in intermittently, but also sucked shit.
shit so it was just it was amazing it's like he's traveled he's like traveled back from the future with like just like horrible like future tech and like different machines to like keep it alive like until he can make it back to the portal absolutely Absolutely.
I was barely paying attention to what Trump was saying, knowing full well that the speech would be available online in the aftermath.
The idea was to soak up the vibes of the audience, which would be hard to discern from the YouTube video.
Unsurprisingly, the vibes were rancid.
The more I soaked up, the worse I felt about the country.
Myself, and the world.
I desperately needed to get the fuck out, but the doors were closed, and I knew that once I exited, there would be no re-entering until Trump had left the building.
So I sat there despondent, with a hog to my left and a Frenchman to my right, slowly leaking sanity points.
Then, something finally happened.
To the left of the press pen were gathered a group of January Sixers, Proud Boys and Oathkeeper militiamen, bonded by their experiences of the riot, the prison time a lot of them served, And the full pardon they recently received from President Donald Trump.
A few of them were carrying their federal prison IDs.
Members of the press had converged on them after they'd started chanting, J-6!
J-6!
J-6!
early in Trump's speech, when he was thanking various people.
The J-6ers would get a passing mention near the end of his 75-minute speech, but only as part of a list of, quote, political prisoners the president pardoned.
J-6 hostages, he called them, explaining that they were treated terribly for years.
Trump has pardoned more than 1,500 J-6ers since taking office.
I walked up to this small metal safety barrier separating the press pen from the general audience.
One of the J-6ers, Brian Mock, was holding a red Labrador puppy in a service dog coat.
He explained that it was for emotional support.
He had served time for assaulting multiple officers and even breaking a flagpole in half and hurling it like a spear at a line of police.
Quote, Got sprayed directly three times, took a flashbang, and took down at least six cops, he later wrote to a friend by text.
He and other J6ers were talking to the press, attempting to communicate how unjustly they had been treated by the judicial system.
One of the most vocal among them was Rashan Aboual-Ragep, a single mother of two from New Jersey who had served two months of jail time and 36 months of probation.
Quote, They destroyed my life and my kids' lives, she explained.
So fuck you, Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, Shifty Schiff.
DOJ and FBI? We're going to get justice by law!
Another female J6er, who I was unable to identify, pointed her finger at the reporters, adding, The hunters will become the hunted now.
Keep that in mind.
I checked the time.
I was going to have to leave for the airport soon.
Then a man thrust out his hand to give me his contact information.
He had scrawled it on the back of his federal prison ID and smudged black ink a few moments prior.
Aha, so his handwriting looks like Slender Man.
Yeah, it's very hard to use a kind of ink pen on like a smooth plastic surface.
So it really is smudged to help.
But I noticed a word repeated a few times.
It was his online username.
Crumb, it said, with a Q. Over the last four days, I had not seen a single overt reference to QAnon.
Not even a t-shirt or a sticker.
There were some oblique references, sure, like Elon Musk saying that his mind felt like a storm, or Steve Bannon referring to a great awakening, but this was the first time I saw a proper cue anywhere.
The man holding out the card was Matthew Webler from Decatur, Georgia.
In a security video from the Capitol on January 6, he could be spotted in a high-visibility jacket wearing a giant cue flag as a cape.
Webler was eventually sentenced to 45 days in jail for his participation.
When the feds raided his home, they found the gear he'd been wearing on January 6, but they also claimed to have discovered a few other items.
A small amount of suspected methamphetamine, a homemade short barrel rifle with a silencer attached to it, ammunition and two magazines, additional unregistered silencers, and other firearm parts and tools.
Because Webler had former convictions, including an aggravated assault from 20 years prior, he was prohibited from possessing firearms.
Federal firearm charges added nearly five years to his jail sentence.
By the time he was speaking to me in that CPAC crowd, Webler had served nearly four years of jail time.
In the process of digging a bit deeper into him, I found a letter Webler wrote from jail.
In it, he explains that, quote, Because of Q, I am somewhat of a celebrity here, and get along with absolutely everyone.
He was given a full pardon by Trump, and I knew this because when we spoke he was wearing a t-shirt that said, Full pardon, January 6th Patriots, which he had purchased at CPAC. Was anybody allowed to purchase those, or did you have to prove that you had gotten the full pardon?
No, I think you're just, you know, you can be just like an ally.
You're just supporting an ally.
I asked Webler why his username spelled the word crumb with a Q. Crumb with a Q, because I follow Q. I don't post on it and stuff like that, but I follow Q, and I took on that non-name, you know, just online.
I was interested to know what Webler thought about Q all these years later.
Specifically, I wanted to know if he felt like QAnon's biggest promises, the storm and the great awakening, had come to pass.
Do you still tell with Q?
He hasn't posted in forever.
I'm too busy.
I'm too busy just studying the Constitution and writing letters trying to unite my community and all that.
I don't have time to be, you know.
Do you think the storm is still coming?
He's on the stage.
He's on the stage.
So at that moment he was pointing to the tiny Donald Trump way far in the distance at the other side of the room.
Still trusting the plan.
I continued asking questions.
So do you think the Great Awakening worked?
We are now able to have conversations with liberals and they understand.
And we're not screaming at each other anymore.
They can actually see our side when they think we're crazy conspiracy theorists.
They're like, hold on, wait a minute.
Actually, all this stuff is pretty well true.
It might not all be true, but it's opening people's minds to being able to question.
You know, because nobody questioned.
They thought that the CDC cared about us.
Wow, this is progress.
To be fair, I was asking Webler about relatively vague concepts that could be generously interpreted.
So I decided to ask him what he thought about the predictions contained in the very first Q drop from October of 2017. The first drop promised to put Hillary Clinton in jail or that she was going to be arrested within 48 hours.
Do you think that's still happening?
I have no idea.
When it comes to the drops and trying to interpret them, I don't.
Most of them I think it is to get you to start thinking and to start questioning things and figuring things out and open your mind.
As far as thinking that any of it was really going to happen, not on face value, none of it.
Wow, not on face value, none of it, he said.
I really had to get to the airport.
But before I left, Webler told me about his political plans.
I'm planning on running for Congress in Congressional District 4 in Atlanta, Georgia.
When are you going to put the papers in for that?
I'm not sure yet.
It's just, the plan's just starting, so, and it may be this cycle, but maybe not till the next cycle.
So, we'll see what happens.
As I sat in the back of my ride to the Ronald Reagan Airport, I was amazed that I had, at the very last minute, found traces of QAnon at an otherwise sanitized CPAC.
Maybe the podcast hadn't sent me out here for nothing.
I decided to visit Matthew Webler's substack and give-send-go on my phone, just to see what he was saying online.
Minutes later, I had an extremely queasy feeling, for a variety of reasons that will become clear in a moment.
His online writings point to a very online person.
He refers to himself as Anon, and spells friends, friends, F-R-E-N-S. He references the fact that he's been queued, which means that a post he made on the chans was referenced in a queue drop, in this case, a meme he posted.
It's also clear that there's some mental illness at play.
He refers to himself as We throughout his current writings, and at one point states that he's going to explain, quote, who Mr. Webler was and who Crumb is.
It appears that Webler now goes by Crumb Lead Bread and considers his original name a part of his past.
This may be because Webler's life as he once knew it is basically gone.
Two weeks after his home was raided and he was arrested, the police returned with the Department of Family and Children's Services and removed their recently adopted son, who was two months old, from his mother's custody.
In the aftermath, she called Webler in jail.
He wrote about the incident.
That phone call was the absolute lowest point of my life.
I had to stand there and listen to her screaming that they took her son and it was all my fault.
I couldn't say or do anything.
I could only listen.
I wanted to wrap her up in my arms and assure her that it would all be okay, but I couldn't.
I was helpless.
A few months later, she filed for divorce.
My entire world had been decimated in a few short months.
I was completely defeated.
What made me feel even worse was that Webler, in his writings, still supported Trump.
Now, here I have to explain a very long passage in his writing where he basically posits that Trump sent a secret signal that day because at one point in his speech on January 6th, Trump told the people assembled that he was going to march on the Capitol with them to express their First Amendment rights.
But then he just kept yapping.
He just was talking and talking.
And Webler's theory has become that he did that on purpose because he knew that a bunch of bad elements like Antifa or the feds were there and that that would make them go immediately.
But then he would keep people who wanted to listen to him like Webler behind and that this was a way of actually saving them from essentially being at the head of this fake riot, you know, this fedsurrection, as they call it.
So here's Webler in an open letter to Trump that he posted online explaining how he processed what happened that day.
You knew that many of us were unknowingly marching off to become cannon fodder in a forlorn hope.
It had to be one of the hardest things you have ever done.
It was more than likely the sole contributor to your reported foul words immediately after and in the months following, the 6th of January, 2021. Sir, I am some of that cannon fodder.
I lost everything.
My wife, son, dog, everything.
I want you to know that it is okay.
I wouldn't change a thing.
I would do it again a thousand times over.
This is not easy by any means.
We are often lonely and heartbroken.
Sometimes we are just plain weary.
There have been many moments of anger as well, I shamefully confess.
I have spent many moments railing at both you and our Creator.
It is not anger over the loss, but anger over being kept in the dark.
It is totally justifiable anger, and is better to let out than to keep in, but at the same time, could have been addressed in a far better way.
I apologize for that, sir.
Despite wanting to many times, we have neither quit nor turned our backs.
We get up every morning and soldier on.
We work to learn, grow, and better ourselves in every way we know, so that when we soon rejoin the fray, We will be far better equipped soldiers.
I mean, he believes that Trump sent him off to have his life destroyed, knowing, on purpose, essentially.
And he's apologizing to Trump for getting mad about this.
Yeah.
This is like conversations with God when you're like, Jesus, I cursed you, and like, I'm sorry.
By the time I had read through a couple of Webler's blog posts and letters, my trip to Washington, D.C. felt obscene.
I was supposed to head home and create content from these broken lives, this grotesque and hollowed-out culture?
I put my phone away and stared blankly at the passing cityscape, thinking back to just four days prior, when I was in a car heading in the opposite direction.
Tuesday, February 18th, 2025. It was a cold Tuesday night and a dull moon reflected off the bay as my taxi crossed the bridge into Washington, D.C. I watched a small red light blink near the top of the floodlit Washington Monument and thought about all the plane accidents that had been happening recently.
A car just ahead of mine had a Harris Waltz bumper sticker, an artifact from a different era, a different reality.
I dropped my bags in my hotel room and met Anthony down in the lobby.
He hadn't slept properly in days.
His heart was freshly broken, and I would later find out he had a cold that he was about to transmit to me.
Over fried chicken sandwiches, we discussed our mutual feeling that the gears of history were turning forward a notch, and not in a good way.
I felt like we were about to attend the funeral of liberalism, jettisoned by the American imperial project, its sheen no longer needed.
Just a stepping stone on the way to the grim, obvious conclusion of capitalism.
That night I slept poorly, sweating in the starched, unfriendly sheets of the hotel bed.
Wednesday, February 19th, 2025. The next morning, Autony was waiting for me on the sidewalk in front of the hotel, smoking a cigarette and looking slightly fresher than he had the night before.
It was snowing lightly and colder than ever.
We called a car and drove south into Oxon Hill, towards the Gaylord Resort and Convention Center.
We had no idea what to expect.
It was our first CPAC, just two French guys wandering into the rotten, beating heart of American conservatism.
Our plan for the day was to get our press passes and scope the place out.
As far as we could tell from the broken website, nothing would be kicking off until the next day.
The very first person I recognized as we entered the lobby was Vincent Fusca, the first guy some QAnon followers decided was JFK Jr., back from the dead and in disguise.
Fusca was impossible to miss.
Black, straw-like hair down to his shoulders, glasses, facial hair that looked painted on, always in a suit and t-shirt, always wearing a fedora and a mischievous smile.
He was chatting with a small group near the front desks.
As I approached, The guy who had just walked up to them struck up a conversation.
Another insurrectionist.
He said.
Jay Sixer?
The guy in the group asked.
Yeah, man.
I saw you get shot at.
And that's how I learned that a sizable number of people who had participated in January 6th were present at CPAC. Like Coachella for guys who raided the Capitol.
When you walked into that lobby and the first person you saw was Vincent Fusca, did you feel like you were, like, dead?
Or you were like, oh, like, this is definitely a simulation.
Like, if this is the first guy that I'm seeing when I walk into CPAC. Yeah, I was expecting to wake up in the hospital bed a second later.
Like, oh.
He was everywhere.
He always placed himself.
Right where everybody could see him, you know, so he can get some love.
And lots of women were coming and hugging him and stuff.
Oh, yeah, he knows where his bread and butter is.
Yeah, yeah.
I think over the course of four days, we bumped into him like dozens of times.
Oh my god.
I have another exclusive information because when Fosca gave Julian his phone number, I actually could look at his contact list and he's the kind of guy who puts, you know, ones and A's before his friend's name so that...
You know, they're higher up on the contact list and they're easier to find.
That's awesome.
That's stupid information, but I could see it.
Yeah, when I later got his number because I was trying to get this t-shirt, which I'll get into, I put his name in the phone and he was like in the middle of telling me his name and I just turned the phone and he was so excited that a French journalist just knew who he was.
Just knew.
Wow.
His eyes just lit up under that fedora.
I actually met him last year in Philadelphia when I was making a profile of RFK Jr. And yeah, he gave me his phone number and he harassed me the next night to get drinks with me.
I was like, shit, I don't want my last night to be with Vincent Fosca.
Yeah, yeah.
You don't know how long he'll keep you in a place.
Do you guys think that the hair is attached to the hat and if you were to take it off, they would just be bald underneath?
Yeah, maybe.
The entire head might pop off.
He might be like some sort of Playmobil man.
That is what his beard always makes me think of, is how Lego figures just have the painted on facial hair.
The two J6ers slapped each other on the back and started chatting excitedly as I took a selfie with Fusca.
He was wearing a t-shirt that said, Trump's Guardian Angel, with a picture of what looked like the crowded bleachers of a political rally.
I would find out more about it later.
For the next three days, it felt like we could not escape him.
Every time we'd turn a corner, there Vincent was, it was uncanny.
The guy was some sort of MAGA leprechaun.
We descended an escalator towards the booth where press passes were being issued, and that's when I truly understood the scope of the venue.
It was basically a geodome.
A massive open structure flanked by multi-level hotel rooms on each side.
One of its faces and the entire ceiling were made of gridded glass.
During the day, natural light flooded the entire place.
On the ground floor at the center was a giant pavilion that contained two standalone brick houses, trees, hedges, and a big food court.
We were basically in an enormous terrarium covered by a glass firmament, breathing rarefied, air-conditioned air.
The place had multiple restaurants, ballrooms, convention floors, and even a built-in spa called Relâche, which roughly translates to LECO or relax in French.
Giant monitors and banners advertised CPAC and Newsmax everywhere.
It felt totally surreal, like a Disney-fied fascist rally with treats and amenities for the business class.
Anthony and I wandered around, gawking at the place and marveling at what humanity had wrought.
This Newsmax banner is so fucking melted.
It's like, it says Newsmax.
Real news for real people.
Which is, it couldn't be more wrong.
It's fake news for imaginary people.
Wow.
Get him!
Get him, King.
Rachel Maddow over here.
You know, when I walked into it, the first thing I saw, it was really disheartening, was probably underpaid people of color telling fascists, you know, the directions to the rooms where they would meet together, you know, and work out how to better cut, you know, like social security and stuff.
Oh yeah, don't forget a person of color who was there available to shine people's boots.
Just grim, grim stuff.
We were a little early to pick up our press passes, but we headed to the booth anyway to see if they'd already started issuing them.
And thank God we did, because we would have otherwise missed an event that we didn't even know was happening as part of CPAC, the International Summit.
A stout blonde woman explained to us that we could get separate passes for it if we had media accreditation, which we did, or so I thought.
Anthony gave her his name and showed her his French press ID, and she gave him a lanyard, turning to me.
I said I didn't have my press ID with me, but could provide photo ID and my name should be in her system.
I had been approved under Antony's outlet, something CPAC had confirmed by email.
The woman was too busy rounding up a small gaggle of media people to lead them to the summit, however, and she waved off my offer to provide photo ID. You're with him anyways.
It's fine, she said, giving me a lanyard pass as well.
I put it around my neck.
I would only understand later how lucky I'd been to have things go down this way.
We followed the woman up an escalator towards a high-ceiling conference room where rows of chairs had been installed for the audience.
In the back of the room, in front of a row of flags from around the world, was a U-shaped table with printed nameplates for all the attendees.
Matt Schlapp and his wife Mercedes would be in attendance, as well as ex-Prime Minister of the UK Liz Truss, Eduardo Bolsonaro, the son of Brazilian ex-president Jair Bolsonaro, the head of the Mexican far-right party Eduardo Verastegui, the chairman of the Japanese Conservative Union J. Aeba, as well as representatives of conservative organizations from Hungary, Korea, Australia, Italy, and Israel.
Presiding over them was Steve Bannon, founder of conservative outlet Breitbart, ex-chief strategist to Donald Trump, and host of the War Room podcast.
I took photos of all the nameplates, noticing that they had misspelled Eduardo Bolsonaro's.
So, it says Eudardo Bolsonaro.
What an Eudardo.
We milled around the room for a moment, briefly speaking with a fellow Media Pass haver, a heavyset middle-aged dude in an End Child Trafficking t-shirt promoting an organization called Veterans for Child Rescue.
He told me he'd been on a few operations to save kids in Tennessee and Texas, but explained that it ends up being a lot of research.
Before I knew it, I was standing next to Liz Truss and Steve Bannon, taking pictures of them.
They seemed delighted to hang out with each other.
Steve had his customary three layers of clothes and three pens clipped to his shirt.
Eventually, everybody took their seats and Matt Schlapp kicked things off.
And before I play this clip, I just want to mention that Matt Schlapp has multiple sexual misconduct and assault allegations, including one that he settled for $480,000 just last year, and a new one just a few days before CPAC kicked off.
Both of these incidents involved groping men without their consent.
The latest incident saw Matt Schlapp allegedly hover near a guy at a bar in Virginia, and when he was finally confronted by the dude who was there with his girlfriend, Schlapp grabbed his genitals while staring him in the eyes.
Schlapp was escorted out of the venue by the manager, but he had forgotten to close his tab, so the night ended with the bartender repeatedly calling his name out.
Matt Schlapp!
But he was nowhere to be found, because he'd been kicked out for grabbing a guy's dick.
Awesome stuff.
Anyways, here's the clip of him kicking it off.
Okay, everyone.
Thank you for being here to the official start of CPAC. We did our first annual CPAC International Summit because so many of you from around the world were RSVPing and coming.
And, I don't know, Mercy and I like to be good hosts.
And, of course, she said to me, what are you going to do with all these people that are showing up in our country?
We need to all meet.
And CPAC being CPAC, we knew it had to be substantive.
We got to start talking about the problems that we all share in each of our countries.
With that, Schlapp got to the important things at hand.
Sucking Trump off.
Hungarian style.
But is anybody in the room happy that Donald Trump won?
We try to have fun with our sessions tomorrow.
And my favorite title, because I came up with it, Miklos, is What's Hungarian for?
where Trump won and you know it.
What is Hungarian for Trump won and you know it?
The song, you mean?
No, no.
How do you say it in Hungary?
Trump won and you know it.
Trump used it.
I stay on the best.
Perfect.
I think it'll be on a t-shirt very soon.
And by the way, the song that the Hungarian politician was referencing is this one by Natasha Owens.
Trump won and you know it.
Trump won and you know it.
The fake news will never show it.
Cause it's true.
Trump won and you know it.
We got dead people voting.
Dropboxes and Dominion.
I'm just glad that a Hungarian politician knows that song.
What a cool world.
Listening, like, back to that now, because that came out, like, in 2020, right?
Yeah, it was, like, an election denial thing.
Yeah.
It sounds like a Saturday morning children's song.
Like, something that you would have, like, a man in an animal costume, like, with a bunch of, like, you know, toddlers sort of, like, you know, bobbling around him, like, all singing together.
It has a very childish sort of quality to it.
Oh, yes.
Or Christmas advertisement, you know, for toys, stuff like this.
Yes, exactly.
Schlapp went on to blab in his zero charisma way about how many people around the world love Trump, how if we let the Marxist win in America, the world will be worse off for it.
And finally, lauding Steve Bannon for the work he's done building an international right calling him a one-man political party.
Then he addressed a pretty obvious contradiction in these efforts.
How ironic it is.
We hate the globalists.
But strangely enough, we've built a global juggernaut.
It's weird, but it is a fact.
We're all working together to stop the global elites who want to destroy our civilization as we know it.
We've all worked together to stop the global elites who are all sitting here in this room together.
I mean, you can't...
Right-wing talking points at this hour, at this late hour, are so fucking melted, and they're all so full of, like, I don't know, Alex Jones talking points and, like, online lingo.
I mean, we are far gone, folks.
Very, very far gone.
This globalist elite, Schlapp went on to explain, was attacking good, honest, far-right politicians through lawfare.
The two prime examples being Brazilian ex-president Jair Bolsonaro, recently indicted for a coup plot, and South Korean president Yoon Suk-yeol currently being impeached for an attempted coup that saw him invoke martial law.
I think that ended with him, like, barricading himself in his home and, like, the police had to extract him.
And there was like a whole booth, like a CPAC Korea booth that was all just like, you know, just complaining about this and they had books published about it already.
Like they desperately want it to be a thing, you know, that is included in the American conversation.
Now, of course, for Americans in attendance, like this shit is like, it's kind of like, okay, just play your role.
Say Trump is awesome.
Say we're just like you guys.
We're having the same kind of problems and then move on.
Anything more complicated than that and they are going to...
Lose attention.
Like, they do not care.
Like, you are just there as a kind of ornament to the American spectacle, okay?
Get in line, folks.
But anyways, Schlap's point was that, like Trump, they were unfairly being prosecuted.
Bolsonaro's son Eduardo, and by the way, at some point they did replace his name plaque with one that was spelled correctly, tried to downplay his father's failed attempt at a coup.
Yesterday my father was indicted for a coup d'etat, attempted coup d'etat.
We say that it's the Disneyland coup d'etat.
So, this is a great argument because he's basically saying that if his dad were a real dictator, he would have done a better job at taking over the government.
Which is funny because it basically means that he was too incompetent to make it work, but also too incompetent to cover up his attempt.
Which checks out because, you know, in our episode, The Joker Bombs Brazil, which we did with Caio Almendra and Andrew Fishman from The Intercept Brazil, you really kind of get a sense of like an entirely incompetent organization that printed their...
Plans for a coup on, like, the office printer and shit like that.
Very messy.
I would like to know what a Disneyland coup d'etat looks like.
I mean, is it like the seven dwarfs sort of, like, charging the magic castle when you come in?
I mean, what does that look like?
Pluto just, like, holding Mickey's severed head over the crowd.
The blood of the bourgeois!
At the end of his little speech, Eduardo Bolsonaro started complaining that there are laws in Brazil which allow a presidential candidate to be rendered non-eligible, which is very funny because, honestly, if we had that in the United States, I don't think we'd be quite in this mess.
And you can hear Schlapp in this clip jumping in to bring up Trump at the end, despite the fact that Trump was not disqualified from running for a second term, even though he was convicted.
So it's, you know, he basically after this, you won't hear it, but he changes the topic extremely fast and like moves to the next speaker because he realizes, oh, wait, I don't think I'm making the point that I want to make.
You don't have this law here that turn someone non-eligible.
We have that in Brazil.
A court in Brazil can turn anyone in non-eligible person.
So you cannot run in the election.
Well, that's why they wanted to put Donald Trump in jail, right?
That's kind of a big talking point, by the way, now.
It's like, yeah, they tried to jail him so he couldn't run again.
I mean, I don't know.
We're just like floating in this kind of gray area where it's like, yeah, of course they wanted to prosecute Trump for his crimes, despite the fact that other politicians are constantly getting off scot-free.
But also, like, we should do that.
We should do it for all these politicians.
I mean, they would all be in jail.
We wouldn't have to deal with any of these fucking people.
Nancy Pelosi would be in fucking jail for insider trading.
All these people would be in jail.
Crimes against humanity.
These guys, like, can't, they can't let go of the past.
It's like, Trump won, like, kind of, in my opinion, sort of against all odds, you know, two non-consecutive terms.
And yet they're like, well, and they almost didn't let him.
You know what I mean?
It's like, dude, like, you guys won, like, should be elated, but they're still, they can't let go of these past grievances because, like Julian was saying earlier, like, trying to act And so the only thing really to hold on to is your anger at the other party for their perceived aggression against your guy.
Well, the narrative has to contain victimhood, right?
Because you want these people to keep fighting.
Yeah.
And so there has to be like a strong opponent, right?
Some evil force that continues to be powerful and work against you instead of like deeply cowardly jellyfish-spined motherfuckers and or people on the verge of death who look like they're kind of peering from inside of their collar.
Yeah, the way they constantly talk about themselves, about how they're being an oppressed underdog, is just running into the fact that they won and control everything.
They have total control over the federal government, but somehow they still have to whine about how they're being oppressed and not as powerful as they want to be.
So it is a strange, incoherent soup.
Yeah, I mean, we've seen this, obviously, is like when a person takes control properly of a country and like just installs themselves forever, they are still constantly undermined by the secret threat of communism, you know, and this is used as an excuse to like, you know, purge people of the federal government, of their jobs. purge people of the federal government, of their jobs.
And then eventually, I mean, you know, purge some people, you know, we don't want these, there's too many, there's too many of these people that don't like me around.
Yeah, they can't say, all right, we won.
So that actually, you know what, that means actually the system works and we take full responsibility for everything that happens from here on out.
Yeah, no, of course not.
Matt Schlapp then turned to the Korean delegation, who were also complaining that their candidate was being unfairly attacked through their judicial system.
In their opinion, his attempt at suspending parliament by instating martial law, which then led to his impeachment, was in fact the real coup.
Apologies in advance for the crackling sound in parts of this clip.
A cameraman for a right-wing media outlet was unwrapping a chocolate bar right near the mic.
Oh my god, come on.
I know, I know.
I know, the Treatlerite allegations are hard to beat.
Oh my god.
This man is trying to get podcast content.
He's out here in the field trying to get a real scoop, and he can't avoid the unwrapping of Treat.
Yeah.
So, Ambassador Tan, you know, you're facing similar problems in Korea, where there's a lot of irregularities.
And it seems like a tool that's used in more countries is when you have a political disagreement with someone, you impeach them, you prosecute them, you try to convict them.
You're exactly right.
It sounds like there's some common themes here across countries.
And in South Korea, you have...
A coup in process, an insurrection happening, where the rightfully elected president, President Yoon, has been impeached, and they used a mechanism inside of Korea that's only supposed to be used for things like treason to arrest him,
to throw him into solitary confinement, and now his case is before the Constitutional Court, and the person who wants to take over the country, Lee Jae-myung, The head of the Democratic Party of Korea.
He's a communist.
He has allegedly been forking over millions of dollars to North Korea.
Wants to turn the country over towards the Chinese Communist Party as well.
And what's very ironic is many times the things they accuse President Yoon of are the very things they're doing themselves.
They're saying he's an insurrectionist when they're trying to topple him.
from the rightfully elected presidency.
Okay, I couldn't understand anything that was happening in that clip because all I could listen for was the crinkle.
Okay, that clip was one minute and 26 seconds and this man is fumbling with that candy for the entire time.
I could just imagine his sweaty big fingers, you know, trying to be quiet and he's like, but I really need this snack.
And I remember thinking to myself when you were talking that everybody else around the table and in the audience checked out entirely.
He spoke for, like, 80 seconds.
That was way too long and not interesting for them.
Yeah.
They don't fucking know the ins and outs of whatever the fuck is happening in Korea.
Like, come on, just say you love Trump.
Koreans love you.
He did a good job mentioning North Korea because, like, everybody, like, paid attention.
Yeah, wait, they're bad.
Oh, yeah, Chinese communists.
Yeah, we know that.
Bad, bad.
That's bad.
Yeah, I think that from now on, like, all right-wing talking points should have to have, like, a soundtrack of, like, someone, like, unwrapping and slurping on a little treat in the background.
Just to really kind of show people what this country's about.
Yeah, like straw-penetrating Capri Sun.
But, like, this is so funny.
Like, I wonder if when they're planning CPAC next year, they're like, ah, forget the international.
No, but that didn't do very well.
Low attendance.
People look bored.
Like, because you're right.
All they're there to do is to be like, we're winning.
Go, Trump.
Everybody loves Trump.
Trump's so awesome that other countries don't even care about their own problems.
They're worried about us and Trump and what's he going to do, and they love him.
Well, that's...
The thing about the international summit is it wasn't really for people.
Like, some people did wander in and there was some audience, but it was more for, like, this immense amount of people that had traveled from all around the world.
It was, like, every weird European crusty fascist, like, smelling like piss and decaying.
And just, like, young kind of Hitlerite types.
Like, everybody had really gathered there.
I heard so many different languages.
In fact, I think there was a point in the...
In the food court, where I believe, like, some Austrian guys were just making fun of the place for being called Gaylord, which, you know.
That's funny.
But yeah, no, what's really happening here is the building of a kind of international coalition of far-right parties that, you know, to be fair, are gaining a lot of ground.
So I think that's the point.
Like, yes, the Americans are checking out, but this was like a smaller room.
It was before CPAC even officially started.
And the general audience that wandered in, I mean, they were just kind of extra because the people really there were, I think, you know, kind of there in a way to like absorb.
And I think that America's got a good blueprint now for some of these people on how to assert power in their own countries.
So that's how I felt this thing was, which is incredibly creepy and fucked.
Because I guess this was like the first proper international summit, as Matt Schlapp discussed.
Like, they had always had some international speakers, but this year it really felt like, you know, a kind of coalition of different...
that could all basically agree on some of the most awful talking points So, after everybody agreed that this was very unfair and that poor Korean Trump was being treated very unfairly, it was time for Richard Grinnell to regale everybody with an incredibly drawn-out story about flying to Venezuela to get American hostages released.
And during his speech, you could tell Steve Bannon was bored out of his mind because the story basically amounted to, we flew to Venezuela, we picked up six Americans, and then we flew back.
But he told it over 12 minutes.
As if it were like Black Hawk Down, including a point where he hugged one of the released hostages and like cried, but he also had to be like, no homo, you know, you know I'm a tough guy, but I still teared up.
And I don't know, the whole thing just sucked so bad.
it was clearly like Grinnell trying to sound like he was very cool and important because I guess he's going to be the guy who is sent out by Trump to like get back the hostages, which just involves usually following through on already agreed upon hostage exchanges and stuff like that.
Anyways, when Grinnell was finally done, Bannon briefly made fun of him saying that he was three quarters of the way through the story and quote, thought it was the takeover of the Kennedy Center, which didn't get many laughs because like not as many people are that tuned in to like, I don't know, American crisis moments.
and Bannon definitely, like, knows all of them, has read a lot about these kinds of things.
So he then shifted gears and used Grinnell's story as a jumping-off point for his own alarming message.
And what that shows, and what your story showed...
Bannon went on to explain that the opponents of the far right want to jail and kill all their beautiful boys.
Remember, if Donald Trump did not win on November 5th, they were going to drop a superseding indictment the next day.
Donald Trump, the indictments of Jack Smith came to 300 years in prison, and they wanted...
Donald Trump to die in prison.
Just like they want President Bolsonaro to die in prison.
Just like they want President Yun to die in prison.
The stakes were playing.
Look at Rick.
They couldn't be playing for higher stakes.
And they don't think they've lost yet.
The deep state, the administrative state, what's happening in this very city.
Next door we have 600 volunteers.
Who are the tip of the spear of the precinct strategy and getting out the vote.
And they're geared up.
Why are they here a day early for CPAC, which is their big annual gathering?
They understand we're still at war.
This story is far from over.
They indicted one of the best men in this world yesterday in Brazil on nothing to send him to prison to die.
Just like they want Trump to die.
Just like the Chinese Communist Party wants you to die.
Moments before, Bannon was next door in another ballroom speaking to his grassroots volunteers who continue working on what he calls the precinct strategy.
This is his long game.
So here is from a 2021 ProPublica article.
When the January 6th insurrection failed, Bannon continued his campaign for his former boss by other means.
On his War Room podcast, which has tens of millions of downloads, Bannon said President Trump lost because the Republican Party sold him out.
Quote, This is your call to action, Bannon said in February, a few weeks after Trump had pardoned him of federal fraud charges.
The solution, Bannon announced, was to seize control of the GOP from the bottom up.
Listeners should flood into the lowest rung of the party structure, the precincts.
It's going to be a fight, but this is the fight that must be won.
We don't have an option, Bannon said on his show in May.
We're going to take this back, village by village, precinct by precinct.
Precinct officers are the worker bees of political parties, typically responsible for routine tasks, like making phone calls or knocking on doors.
But collectively, they can influence how elections are run.
In some states, they have a say in choosing poll workers, and in others, they help pick members of boards that oversee elections.
After Bannon's endorsement, the precinct strategy rocketed across far-right media.
Viral posts promoting the plan racked up millions of views on pro-Trump websites, talk radio, fringe social networks and message boards, and programs aligned with the QAnon conspiracy theory.
Suddenly, people who had never before showed interest in party politics started calling the local GOP headquarters or crowding into county conventions, eager to enlist as precinct officers.
They show up in states Trump won and in states he lost, in deep red rural areas, in swing voting suburbs, and in populous cities.
So this takes This technique continues to be his focus, and he continues to rally people to slowly kind of invade from the bottom, which is cool and, I mean, smart.
This man has a will to power.
Like, this man knows how to grassroots organize.
I don't think there's anything to learn from here.
Bannon ended his speech at the CPAC International Summit by thanking Matt Schlapp for having Trump's back when the entire GOP establishment wanted to move on after he lost the election to Joe Biden.
People don't understand, when you had CPAC down in Florida and did that...
During COVID and everything like that, there was all this back chat, right?
This is the dead-enders, right?
These are the dead-enders on the Trump movement.
Trump's finished.
Trump's over.
This is that grassroots.
They've basically been destroyed.
You know, we're going to have all these other candidates.
It took courage.
And it's that courage.
Remember, courage is that virtue upon all the other virtues rest.
And when I look in South Korea, I see courage.
When I look at the Bolsonaro's, I see courage.
When I see Rick Grinnell, I see courage.
That's the defining thing.
It's not policy.
It's do you have the guts and the balls to sit there and go, we're going to win and you're not going to defeat us.
Throughout Bannon's speech, I was sitting next to an ancient European fascist who smelled like piss and kept cheering.
A guy with a Make Europe Great Again polo shirt was directing his cameraman in the aisle.
Another man had a tote bag celebrating Bolsonaro, Malay, and Trump.
So it has the Brazilian flag and the Bolsonaro slogan, Deus Patria Familia Liberdade, which is God, Country, Family, and Liberty.
Then there's Make America Great Again, Trump, and the American flag.
And finally...
There's the Argentine flag with Viva la Libertad, carajo, by Javier Millet, which is like, you know, long live liberty, damn it, or freedom.
All the best slogans from all the best countries.
Yeah.
We then had to sit through a long discussion among the different European far-right factions about the evils of what they kept calling Volk Ideology, Marxists, and how Brussels was terrified of their coalition because it threatened the EU's liberal elites.
The whole thing left me feeling pretty queasy.
In some ways, Bannon was seeing his efforts yield real results.
Europe's far-right was ascendant.
They've been winning.
They really have.
I mean, it is insanely worrying how quickly votes are starting to trickle into far-right parties in a variety of countries.
I know that in France, Anthony, the situation is pretty bad.
I mean, do you want to speak on that for a moment?
Oh, yeah, yeah.
But last summer, we had parliamentary elections that were not on schedule because we had the European elections before all across the continent and the far-right, the Front National, the national rally, had about like 35% of the vote, I think.
It's a one-round election, so it kind of gives you a sentiment of the electorate.
And this is the moment Macron decided to call for new...
Unscheduled parliamentary elections, which everyone thought would go the wrong way.
And in the first round, they arrived first, the far right, but then there was kind of a coalition on the left which allowed the left to arrive first in the second round.
And the far right became third, which was a huge moment of relief for us.
But still, we have presidential election in two years.
Macron will not be able to, because of term limits, he won't be able to present himself.
So it's all up in the air.
You know, like the civic discourse is more and more shaped and media discourse is more and more shaped by the far right.
Every day is getting worse.
So yeah, I don't know if this is Bannon's making because, you know, we have our own problems.
But I guess there's a wave, you know, going through all of the West and more that we are not immune to.
It doesn't help that, like, Macron went out of his way after the election to not make the left's victory integrated into the process, right?
Right.
He was supposed to, by tradition, name a prime minister from that left coalition.
And he's refused to do that.
Right.
Because basically the parliament is split into three three thirds.
Like you have the third one third is the left, which is a coalition of the Greens, the quote unquote socialist party, which is a social liberal type party, like Democratic Party in the US and the France Insoumise, which is the actual left wing party.
Then you have the center with like the coalition of parties around Macron.
And then you have the far right.
And it's basically like, it's roughly like three thirds, almost equally dispersed.
And so you need to have a coalition to have a prime minister between two of these three thirds.
And Macron didn't want the left to govern because they campaigned on overturning most of the things he had done.
So he turned to a coalition between the far right and the center, even though the left arrived first.
And it lasted for about a couple of months.
And then a new prime minister is now in power.
And I think he's caught up in a scandal of covering pedophile actions in a Catholic school in the south of France.
So I think it's not going to last for very long.
Yeah, covering up.
And so, yeah, yeah, that's a really weird situation.
So there's a chance we might go back to the polls this summer.
Damn, you hate to see the liberals decide to hand it to the right when faced with the decision between ceding anything to the left and just basically saying, hey...
This seems to happen over and over again, right?
I don't know, man.
Why do they do that?
I have no idea.
Better not look into it.
I was glad we'd arrived a day early to CPAC because it allowed us to attend this summit.
Very few journalists were even aware it was happening.
Only Politico has an article dedicated to this momentous gathering of ghouls.
Here's what Ben Jacobs had to say.
All speakers at the international summit tried to tie their country's struggles to those conservatives say they face in the United States.
Liz Trust, who was briefly British Prime Minister in 2022, complained about how unelected judges were ruining Great Britain.
Balas Orban, an aide to Hungarian strongman Viktor Orban, said that the Hungarian leader's vision was the same as Trump's.
No migration, no gender, and no war.
I love the idea of just not having gender.
Like, I'm sorry.
No gender.
We're all soup.
That doesn't even make sense.
They've really gone off the rails with all the gender stuff.
Like, it's insane.
Like, the amount of times that I heard the word Volk, because they can't pronounce Volk, and cancel culture.
Maybe it's because they want to say Volk.
Yeah, exactly.
When they say it, it does sound like they're saying Volk ideology, but then they actually do want Volk ideology.
They don't want Volk ideology.
Orban also named enemies.
Quote, the Volk Hydra.
USAID, Brussels, George Soros, the Rockefeller Fund, Gates Foundation, Hollywood, the whole network.
This prompted Grinnell to jump back in and say that Elon Musk was cutting off all money going to left-wing NGOs and wokeness.
He further praised Musk saying, Thank God for Elon.
He's saving our money and making the world better.
Which, that checks out, right?
That's what you found in your episode on him, right?
Is that he's saving money and making the world better, right, Travis?
No.
Good.
By the time Amichai Chikli, the Israeli Minister of Diaspora Affairs, started speaking, I had already grown restless and was walking around the room.
Some of the most gung-ho CPAC attendees had slowly trickled in to check out the summit, including a group of five boomers in yellow sequined jackets with giant glittering red letters hanging around their necks.
If you put the boomers in the right order next to each other, their outfits spelled out Trump.
Of course.
And I imagine myself like holding them like the little guy in Street View, just dropping them in the right order.
There we go.
Another woman was dressed as the Statue of Liberty with lettering on the back of her dress that said, Trump Tribe of Texas.
Like I mentioned, the room was a real hodgepodge of MAGA freaks, ancient European fascists, weird Latin American fascists, and young strivers like kind of trying to make their name in this like rising scene.
The Israeli minister thanked Hungary for their immigration policies, basically not letting Muslim people in, because it made their capital what he called one of the safest, least anti-Semitic cities in Europe.
So, that's really cool.
Israel's, like, so down.
He explained that Israel was fighting a, quote, spiritual war against the evil terrorist Hamas.
This prompted Matt Schlapp to further compliment Israel and the Hungarian politician to explain that the left supported Islamism.
And anti-Semitism, which is something that you hear a lot in France as well, right?
Like, they have, like, a term in France, Islamo-leftists, Islamo-gauchists.
Yeah, that's it.
Just insane.
Just the new version.
It's like the new version of, like, Judeo-Bolsheviks, but it's because of...
Israel, like, joining this coalition, they've managed to, like, flip it on its head, and it's like, well, yeah, okay, we're recreating, like, everything that Hitler stood for, but not against Jewish people, because Israel's on our side too, which really misses the point that, like, Israel is an insane fascist nation as well, and that they just want to do exactly the same thing, but to different people.
Yeah, the Islamogoshist thing is really real here, and it kind of contaminated the whole left, this accusation, because, you know, Since there was a coalition last summer between the left and the social democrats, all the center-right people have tried to detach the social democrats from the left,
from the France Insoumise, saying that because of support from the Palestinian cause, they are anti-Semitic, and basically to break the alliance and to allow for Macron or maybe the far right to win the next time.
And so it's extremely problematic now for any alliance among the left.
Yeah, I mean, I think they learned from the Jeremy Corbyn thing.
Like, this is how you cleanse the supposed left of any kind of actual left influences and just turn it into a kind of Keir Starmer-style centrist party that might as well be Macron, that, you know, that might as well be a right-wing party.
It's insane.
It's very, very sad what's happening.
Also, you briefly spoke with a French politician, right?
And you described a moment where you both kind of went over the fact that, like, Spoilers, you know, Steve Bannon, during his speech on the main stage, did a Hitler salute.
And we'll get to that in part two of our adventures.
But the point is that this obviously generated a lot of uncomfortable moments because there were tons of Israelis there, like wearing their kippahs.
Like there was a real kind of showing of people with like kind of outwardly...
So yeah, can you kind of describe what happened when you spoke to the French politician in a cafe?
So she's the number two in one of our two far-right parties in France.
So she's the co-leader of this movement, and she was there at CPAC. And so Steve Bannon, the previous day, had made a Nazi salute during his speech, at the end of his speech.
And so I was talking to her, like, how do you call what Steve Bannon did, right?
And she said, I think it was a Nazi gesture, but it's not like something that sums up what CPAC is.
It's not all that CPAC is, so that's why I'm staying.
And she said that in the context of Jordan Bardella, who's the leader of the national rally in France, the main far-right party, and she's his competitor.
So he's like, yeah, but whenever the media doesn't like something, which was a Nazi salute, he's trying to make appeals, like to be more pleasing to the media, so he's going to go in the direction of what the media wants.
That's why he cancelled his speech.
Because that's what he did.
He cancelled a speech.
He was supposed to be giving the next day after a violent salute.
And so what...
Her name is Sarah Knafo.
She's a European Parliament elected official.
And she said that, you know, if Sipak was anti-Semitic, if Sipak was Nazi, do you think this guy...
And she pointed to Amichai Shikli, who's the Israeli minister of diaspora.
He was entering the cafe we were in.
And he's like, do you think he would be meeting?
He would be staying here?
And what happened was that Hamihai Schickly actually was going to meet guys from the FPO.
FPO is the Austrian far-right party founded by actual Nazis in the 50s.
And whose president I checked, whose president called himself last year the Volkskanzler.
Volkskanzler means Chancellor of the people.
And the only one person who ever used that name for himself was named Adolf Hitler.
So, straight up, it's like, would you think the Israelis would be here if it was...
And then he sits down with, like, the new Hitler from Austria.
It's so awesome.
I don't like using gotchas on far-right people because it doesn't work, but this is a big one, right?
That is an insane moment.
Do you think that he...
And then he sits down and shaves his beard into a little mustache.
Yeah.
Ah, fuck.
Fuck, man.
What a cursed world.
Mercedes Schlapp then went on to praise an organization called Patriots for Europe.
Their Hungarian vice president, Kinga Gall, was in attendance.
Their French president, Jordan Bardella, would cancel his speech, as we mentioned, at CPAC a few days later after Steve Bannon performed a Nazi salute during his speech on the main stage.
But we're going to get to that a little bit deeper in the second part.
You have an outsized role in this, right?
That's right!
I'll tease it.
I'll tease the next episode in saying that I was the one who noticed it live.
Some people did not believe me, including Anthony, so I went and found the video as we were, like, in the cab going back.
And I was like, no, no, no, I'm going to find it.
And finally I found it.
And he was like, oh, yeah.
Okay, yeah, that is.
And so I was the first to post it online.
All those fucking liberal accounts that circulated afterwards, they had the exact same cut from the exact same video.
I'm gonna call you out for stealing my video, okay?
This is about me.
Not the Nazi threat.
Not a fascist takeover in the United States.
My views.
Me.
Me.
Should've watermarked it.
That's so true.
Just like a big annoying watermark that just says Julian Field across it.
That's right.
Being a totally normal guy online.
The main struggle of patriots for Europe is that the EU has a...
Cordon sanitaire, or sanitary cordon, which is essentially an agreement between centrist pro-European groups to deny the far-right jobs, such as presidencies and vice-presidencies of the European Parliament's committees.
So, of course, the far-right wants this sanitary cordon cut.
This was brought up by another far-right politician in attendance, Carlo Fidanza of Italy.
By this point, the conversation had wandered too far into the weeds for most Americans, who were slowly trickling out of the room.
Mercedes Schlapp remarked, Sounds like you need a doge in Europe!
Which just sent chills down my spine.
Like, the last thing we need is the I am become meme guy to come and do his shit in Europe.
Like, just go back to fucking South Africa.
Specifically, South African jail.
I'm looking into this, the doge thing, and apparently you need to pronounce doggy.
No.
Stop?
Yeah, you have to say doggy.
I will not be saying that.
That's how they call it, actually, among themselves.
So this is like one piece of information that I want people to know and get crazy about.
Censor him, please.
Censor him.
After a painful speech by the head of CPAC Japan, which had to be live translated, the summit was finally over.
And by the way, I later looked into this guy, Jay Aeba, and it turns out that's an entire rabbit hole in and of itself.
So briefly, he's a member of a cult founded in the 1980s called Happy Science, and they are far-right nationalists, military expansionists, and historical revisionists.
The guy behind it, Ryuho Okawa, claims to be the incarnation of a supreme being.
It seems that between Falun Gong, the Moonies, and Happy Science, Republicans will ally with absolutely any cult, as long as they hate the Chinese Communist Party.
So anyways, Happy Science started a political party called the Happiness Realization Party, which Jay Aeba was the head of.
And then the Happiness Realization Party in turn founded the Japanese Conservative Union, which Jay Aeba is the chairman of.
And Aeba also runs CPAC Japan.
So anyways, back to the story.
Night had fallen over the Gaylord Resort and Convention Center.
Altony had long since abandoned me to go interview a federal worker for his story about Elon Musk and Dogi.
You happy?
I love it.
Piece of shit.
I headed downstairs to get my media pass that would grant me access to the rest of the conference over the next three days.
But while I'd been at the summit, a giant line had formed at the booth.
CPAC had granted media passes to 250 people, many of them fringe right-wing outlets.
There had also been a glitch with their computers, slowing the entire process down further.
I was looking at an extremely long wait.
Towards the end of the line, I ran into friend of the show Dave Weigel and chatted with him for a bit, ultimately deciding that I'd just pick up my badge tomorrow and the wait would surely be much shorter.
While I wandered around the Geodome, I spotted a couple of freaks we've covered on this podcast in the past, namely Jack Posobiec, who was chatting with some attendees in a hallway, and Mike Lindell, who was on the expo floor signing copies of What Are the Odds, his 2019 book about his journey, quote, from crack addict to CEO. And the cover is so awesome.
It's one of those, like, visual illusion, like, plasticky things where if you kind of, like, tilt it one way, he's like his old crack self.
No, no.
And then you tilt it again, and it's his new happy self.
Yeah, I have this book, by the way.
Oh my god.
It was free.
You could just pick it up and get it.
I have the book.
I am very happy to say.
And then I picked up next to that book when I went and picked it up for free because it was just sitting there.
I also got a t-shirt that you can see behind me that is the G.I. Joe logo, but instead of G.I. Joe, it says, Let's Go Brandon.
So, another for my collection.
Mm-hmm.
Okay.
The expo floor was clearly still getting set up for tomorrow, when the larger CPAC would be kicking off.
A frail little old lady asked me to take a picture of her in front of a giant bus parked in the middle of the expo floor.
Make sure Donald Trump is in it, she told me, referring to the enormous decal on the side of the vehicle.
I politely complied, and she seemed satisfied.
That night, back at the hotel, I couldn't sleep.
I fantasized about moving back to Europe.
Then I remembered Europe is going to shit too.
So I fantasized about my skin splitting and my muscular structure shooting out of it like a rocket, shimmering slick and red as I rose high above the crust of the earth and exploded into liquid stardust.
I thought of the tiny red droplets suspended in the vast, unknowable blackness.
This did not help me sleep, so I played Marvel Snap on my phone until like 3am.
Nice.
I've been there, dude.
Sometimes when I'm lying awake at night thinking about all of the horrible futures that await me, I imagine a giant guillotine swinging down and severing my head so that I don't have to...
It's like, oh, well, there's no blood in your brain.
You can't think about anything anymore.
The next day, I'd find out my press pass had been disabled.
What?
The end of part one.
Wait a minute.
Wait, wait, wait.
Nope.
Nope.
That's it.
I'm doing a cliffhanger.
Wait, so you're going to have to pull a snake Plissken and break back into CPAC? I'm going to have to pull something.
Oh, man.
Wow.
This is probably one of my favorite episodes we've done in a while.
This is fantastic.
Horrifying, but fantastic.
Yeah.
And Anthony will have to get you again on a time delay for the second one, which we'll record next week.
I mean, this week has been a truly horrifying experience for me, being sick after returning from this awful conference and then having to write this.
And I also wrote an article for Jacobin.
By the way, please go check out my stuff on Jacobin.
You can find it at my Twitter, Julian Field, F-E-E-L-D. But I wrote a very long article about QAnon and its legacy in culture and politics.
But also very soon...
Thank you.
Thank you.
Just as Mr. Musk is become meme, I am become journalist.
Go check it out.
It's a great article.
Thanks, Jake.
It's a really solid check-in of where we are, where QAnon is, how it's been folded into general republicanism, how conspiracy ideology has become mainstream.
It's terrifying, but it's a really good sort of like...
I don't know.
You know how when kids are growing up in movies, you'll see parents make a little tick on the wall to show how tall they've gotten?
This is like that for far-right conspiracies as they've kind of been folded into politics.
Really good job, dude.
I think it's also useful for people who just have not followed QAnon at all.
You can send it to a total normie, and I run through any concept you need along the way.
Without, like, getting, you know, stuck in the weeds.
And, uh, yeah, that's it.
Anthony, um, thanks for the cold.
It sucked.
And, you know, I mean...
But we're glad you guys had each other, at least.
It is true that there were many moments where I was like, if Antony weren't around to at least decompress after this with me, I would have been losing my mind way, way worse.
I probably would have shut down after a couple days, just gone into some sort of fugue state.
I spent three more days in DC after that.
They were miserable.
I didn't want to tell you about this, but yeah, like very, very bad.
Yeah, that city is horrible.
And I feel like that and just the kind of greater Virginia area, if we can get like the Pentagon and the CIA and like all these things just kind of, if we could, Mr. G, please allow me to request a tactical intervention.
All right, well, that's it.
And thank you for listening to another episode of the QA podcast.
Please do support us so we can do more of this.
Patreon.com slash QAA. You can just pay us five bucks a month, which is, you know, with Bidenflation, that's, I mean, that's not even a fucking beer.
So go and sign up, and you'll get access to our entire archive of premium episodes.
Anthony, where can people find you online?
They can find me on Twitter, at AnthonyMansui, and I write in print-only magazines, so unfortunately, you won't be able to read me any anyway.
Sad, sad, sad, sad stuff.
But yes, if you are French, go pick up a copy of Society and read Anthony's great pieces.
A very, very good journalist.
An aging art form.
We're ink printed on paper.
A lot of people aren't doing it anymore.
A lot of people don't know how to read.
Unless off a screen.
I do like that the American press ops woman called you Mansui.
That is how it's spelled.
M-A-N-S-U-Y for people.
A new gender.
Wow.
No gender.
You're not allowed to have gender anymore.
Gender is illegal.
For everything else, we have a website, qaapodcast.com.
Listener, until next week, and may the deep dish bless you and keep you.
Such a sultry, beautiful voice.
Thank you, Anthony.
Bye.
We gotta send you some deep dishes.
Yeah, thanks to you that I found out what it was.
Oh, yeah.
I don't know if Lou Malnati's delivers internationally.
I'll have to double-check.
I don't think they do.
We have auto-cued content based on your preferences.
You know, they say in one of American traditions, the best shall we last.
That's not a section of the Bible, but that's not meant to be an insult towards anyone.
But Jay Aiba from, what did you say?
I was going to say it's the first shall we last.
Oh, what did I say?
I feel like Dan Quill.
It's kind of what they meant, though.
Oh, I feel like Joe Lodge.
It's the best is yet to come, and the first shall be last.
