In between speeches at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) this Friday, two hosts were shouted down after they asked the audience to abide by the hotel's rules and wear masks.

"I know this might sound like a little bit of a downer, but we also believe in property rights, and this is a private hotel," American Conservative Union (ACU) executive director Dan Schneider told the crowd. "And we believe in the rule of law and we need to comply with the laws of this county that we're in, and a private hotel just like your own house gets to set its own rules.

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene's father might have even wackier beliefs than his notoriously conspiratorial congresswoman daughter.

The newly elected Georgia Republican promoted the right-wing QAnon conspiracy theory and others before entering politics, but her father Robert D. Taylor published a 600-page novel Paradigm to reveal his own "revolutionary" theory -- which he called "The Taylor Effect" -- to unlocking the mysteries of the stock market, reported Politico.

Many Never Trump conservatives were hoping that after former President Donald Trump left the White House on January 20 and President Joe Biden entered the White House, the Republican Party would abandon Trumpism and return to a more traditional conservatism. Instead, the GOP has doubled down on its extremism; even Rep. Liz Cheney — arch-conservative daughter of former Vice President Dick Cheney — is being slammed as a RINO (Republican In Name Only) by Trumpistas. Never Trumper Tom Nichols examines the state of the Republican Party in an article published by The Atlantic on February 25, arguing that the 2021 GOP is — like the Soviet Communist Party circa 1978/1979 — destined for collapse.

"The Republican Party has become, in form if not in content, the Communist Party of the Soviet Union of the late 1970s," the conservative Nichols laments. "I can already hear the howls about invidious comparisons. I do not mean that modern American Republicans are communists. Rather, I mean that the Republicans have entered their own kind of end-stage Bolshevism, as members of a party that is now exhausted by its failures, cynical about its own ideology, authoritarian by reflex, controlled as a personality cult by a failing old man, and looking for new adventures to rejuvenate its fortunes."