CPAC all about paranoia and anger: 'I'm worried that we're going to have a civil war'

NATIONAL HARBOR, Md. — Civil war is on the minds of many conservatives.

At least many of those gathered just outside of the nation’s capital this week for CPAC, the Conservative Political Action Conference. In recent years, the annual meeting has evolved into a populist confab remade in the image of former President Donald Trump.

If the speakers here are correct in their doomsday predictions — and fear-soaked fundraising pleas — attendees have good reason to be scared.

“I'm worried that we're gonna have a civil war in this country,” CPAC attendee Lucy Kruse — wearing a coat embroidered with her home state of Maryland’s busy yellow, black, red, and white flag — told Raw Story outside the convention hall.

Gone are the days of fiscal conservatism. Like the Republican Party itself, since 2016, when former President Donald Trump started his populist takeover of the GOP, this annual event has continued moving further and further to the far-to-fringe-right.

Victimhood abounds. ‘Deep state,’ the media, academia, Hollywood — or ‘the woke,’ as they call it in these parts — and the Biden White House are all conspiring against Trump. His disciples here take his every prosecution personally — Trump is their “J6er-in-chief,” as some call him, after all.

It’s surely a new day in the GOP. Populism has morphed into paranoia. Angst transformed into anger. Conspiracies are now the code — on paper at least — for many of the card carrying conservatives gathered here.

The formerly fringe is now front and center. Everyone seems prepped — or, at the very least, resigned — for chaos to come.

Kruse, now a grandmother herself, says she can relate to what her foremothers endured in the 1860s.

“I’m worried. I'm worried. I think often about the Civil War, and I think often about how they talked about mothers having brothers fighting each other on opposing sides,” Kruse said. “Well, I can tell you that in my family, there are opposing sides, and I'm not supposed to talk about it. Like, I'm supposed to be quiet — they can say anything they want, but I'm not supposed to talk about it.”

A decade ago, Kruse was an outlier on the right, because she supported gun-control efforts. Not anymore.

While Kruse refused to say if she now owns a gun (“I'll leave that up to your imagination”), she senses an armed clash — a contemporary civil war — is just around the corner.

“I think about those things a lot. I think about the Civil War, and I think how horrible it must have been for a mother and a grandmother — which I am — to sit there and see this coming and feel like you have no way to stop it,” Kruse said.

The Maryland grandmother is far from alone here. She’s also not nuts. Kruse is warm, personable, and has a fun sense of humor.

Kruse is also informed. She’s basically weaned herself off Fox News, and not just because they no longer play Trump’s full live rallies.

“I used to be a Fox News person, but — well, I never really loved Fox. I used to go into my mom and dad's house and they watched it 24/7, and I always said, ‘They were the yellers of the news,” Kruse said. “They were in that mode of yelling, yelling, yelling, you know? And it just drove me crazy, but it's funny how you evolve.”

There’s been a lot of yelling at CPAC this week. It’s now soothing to Kruse. She’s at home.

“They're clamping down on everything here in Maryland, so, again, that's troubling as well,” Kruse said. “When you talk to — when you listen to the new President of El Salvador [Nayib Bukele] and him talk about what they experienced there, we better wake up. We better wake up. Like he said, ‘you don't want to experience everything we've experienced.’ And he's the one who said, ‘stand up and fight.’ You have to fight.”

President Bukele isn’t alone. While only a handful of elected American policymakers are speakers at this year’s CPAC, the common theme is that the civil war’s already started.

And — if they’re to be believed, which they surely are here at CPAC — it was President Joe Biden who fired the first shot. And who, they say, continues to do all he can to ‘destroy’ America.

“Joe Biden is clearly in partnership — without saying it, without having a written contract — with the cartels,” Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton told CPAC attendees Friday.

The top law enforcement official in Texas — who barely escaped being impeached by his fellow Texas Republicans just last year — went on to tell the crowd, “we are at war.”

“It is all designed by our own government,” Paxton said of the border crisis. “So we are at war with the cartels, the Chinese importing fentanyl and our own president against the United States and our country and my state.”

While other elected Republicans stopped short of saying the ‘war’ has begun, some pledged to fight to the death anyway.

“I will die – I will fight to my last breath to make sure that our Second Amendment is protected, because that’s what protects our First [Amendment],” Rep. Cory Mills (R-FL) told the crowd Friday.

There’s no gray here. The conference may be titled ‘where globalism goes to die,’ but this is Trump’s turf now and the agenda is all America First. Those who don’t embrace it, according to Gov. Kristi Noem (R-SD), “hate America.”

“This election, the choice is clear. There are two kinds of people in this country right now: Those who love America and those who hate America,” Noem — who served eight years in the U.S. House of Representatives before moving into South Dakota’s governor’s mansion — told attendees. “Those who hate America are working everyday to destroy it, and let’s be clear: Joe Biden is destroying America and taking away your freedoms.”

Freedom’s flowing at this conference where the First Amendment is getting a workout.

While “aiding and abetting” is legalese for anyone found guilty of helping someone else carry out a crime, here at CPAC it’s been tossed around so much one may think it’s part of Biden’s official job description.

“Biden is aiding and abetting the invasion of our nation by thugs, Islamic extremists and Chinese spies,” Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) told the audience Friday afternoon in his address entitled, ‘Burning Down the House.’

Located roughly 10 miles from the U.S. Capitol — which was attacked, including by some gathered at CPAC, on Jan. 6, 2021 — many attendees at this year’s CPAC are proudly celebrating those who stormed the Capitol after Trump lost the 2020 election.

While Capitol Police officers who defended the Capitol on Jan. 6 were awarded Congressional Gold Medals for their valiant efforts to protect American democracy, at CPAC, they’re barely an afterthought. Law and order are viewed differently here, as Biden’s bludgeons, to most.

“I think that the government has gone after these January 6 political prisoners, because they want to make an example out of them,” Helena Gibson, a Virginia resident, told Raw Story. “I think that they're being used as political pawns, so that they can get to Trump.”

Like many here, Gibson’s convinced Biden’s an illegitimate president; Democrats a cabal.

“They can't win an election, so they have to get Trump all penned up in, you know, the traditional sense of the system with false allegations and things that he didn't say and do. And it's a mess,” Gibson said. “I mean, we all know now that the election was stolen.”

If the election was stolen by Biden — a common belief here at CPAC — those in prison for storming the Capitol are ‘patriots.’ Resisting the establishment — whether Democrats or the old guard in the GOP — also makes one a ‘patriot’ here.

Those willing to sacrifice their bodies, futures, and families to try and overturn the 2020 election are now heralded as heroes — heroes memorialized on J6 tees, cookies, DVDs (yes, actual DVDs), and petitions. There’s even a Jan. 6 themed video game for attendees to play at this year’s CPAC.

“It was funny. It was really funny. It’s, like, you’ve got to protect people from the left,” Emerson Young, a student at Ohio University at Athens, told Raw Story after playing. “That’s hilarious.”

Many aren’t laughing though. Rather, there’s an effort underway to make it easy for Trump to pardon all those J6 prisoners if he wins a second term.

“We sometimes call him the J6er-in-chief. He's facing some of those same charges in the same weaponized way and in the same completely abusive manner,” Suzzanne Monk — a J6 activist —- told Raw Story.

Just as the conservative Heritage Foundation has Project 2025 — a roadmap for Trump to staff up to start overhauling the federal government from day one, if he wins a second term — Monk’s crafting a blueprint for Trump to quickly pardon J6 prisoners if he ousts Biden in November.

“We are producing a book for one man: Donald J. Trump,” Monk said. “It's called, ‘How to Pardon the J6ers: A Comprehensive Guide for Donald J. Trump.’ And it will have all of the information. It’s a multi-pronged strategy, as well as a dossier of the information he needs for each and every individual who needs clemency.”

The newly normalized far-right is focused well beyond Jan. 6 prisoners and the national stage they thrust themselves onto. So far beyond the spotlight they’re often hiding in plain sight.

The group Moms for Liberty has been labeled an ‘extremist’ organization by the Southern Poverty Law Center for its ties to militias, espousing anti-government views, efforts to ban books and discrimination.

But here at CPAC — like in the Republican Party at large — they’re heroes, especially for their local efforts to upend school boards and influence the 2024 election.

Like much at CPAC, Democrats remain largely in the dark, even as the storm continues growing, looking more ominous by the hour.

“Huge. They’re huge, man,” Rep. Byron Donalds (R-FL) told Raw Story. “With Moms for Liberty, they’re gonna be a huge part of our elections … so I think that their voices are going to be loud and clear. They're now a major part of us.”

“What do you think of the folks on the left saying that they’re extremists?” Raw Story asked.

“That's what the left always does,” Donalds said. “Man, if you don't agree with the left, you're an extremist. All that means is that they're the real extremists.”