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Matt Schlapp

'Normalizing' Nazis: CPAC Chief Enraged Over Report On White Nationalists

Critics are blasting CPAC, the Conservative Political Action Conference, as the embattled head of the organization that puts together and hosts the event, Matt Schlapp, is attacking NBC News over its report that states: “Nazis mingle openly at CPAC, spreading antisemitic conspiracy theories and finding allies.”

“Nazis appeared to find a friendly reception at the Conservative Political Action Conference this year,” writes Ben Goggin, NBC News Digital deputy editor for technology. “Throughout the conference, racist extremists, some of whom had secured official CPAC badges, openly mingled with conference attendees and espoused antisemitic conspiracy theories.”

“The presence of these individuals has been a persistent issue at CPAC. In previous years, conference organizers have ejected well-known Nazis and white supremacists such as Nick Fuentes,” NBC News also reported. “But this year, racist conspiracy theorists didn’t meet any perceptible resistance at the conference where Donald Trump has been the keynote speaker since 2017.”

Schlapp is the head of the American Conservative Union. He and his wife Mercedes Schlapp were once described as the “Trump-Era ‘It Couple’.” Now he is facing a $9 million lawsuit over alleged sexual assault, including “aggressive fondling,” after Republican strategist Carlton Huffman, a staffer at the time for the failed Herschel Walker senatorial campaign, says Matt Schlapp groped him in January of 2023.

CPAC’s list of speakers last week included the far-right ultra-conservative president of Argentina, Javier Milei, who “gave Donald Trump on Saturday an ecstatic hug,” the AP reported. Donald Trump, calling himself a “proud political dissident,” delivered the keynote address at CPAC on Saturday. CNN described it as “lie-filled.”

Schlapp was both furious and dismissive of NBC News’ report.

“NBC’s claim that there was a Nazi presence at CPAC 2024 is false, misleading, and grossly manipulative—especially coming from a writer who has carried the water for Hamas in much of his reporting on the Israel-Gaza war,” Schlapp wrote in a statement posted by CPAC to X. “When we come across someone at CPAC peddling any kind of anti-semitism, we deal with them immediately. Knowing this, NBC weaved together lies and fabrications to create a false perception, and we won’t stand by idly while NBC engages in willful misinformation.”

In a separate post, Schlapp also wrote:

“Yawn. This is a tired old cliche. The Neo-Nazis in our midst are the ones controlling our college campuses and major institutions and grossly populate the newsrooms of corporate media, calling for an Israeli surrender.”

NBC’s Goggin responded:

“The Nazis introduced themselves to me at a mixer and said they were national socialists, started talking about skull measurements and pushing the conspiracy theory that all races were being controlled Jewish people. They were posting about their presence at CPAC online.”

He also provided photos and video:READ MORE: Democrats Discredit GOP Claims on IVF as Republicans Try to Regain Ground After Fallout

CPAC’s list of speakers last week included the far-right ultra-conservative president of Argentina, Javier Milei, who “gave Donald Trump on Saturday an ecstatic hug,” the AP reported. Donald Trump, calling himself a “proud political dissident,” delivered the keynote address at CPAC on Saturday. CNN described it as “lie-filled.”

Schlapp was both furious and dismissive of NBC News’ report.

“NBC’s claim that there was a Nazi presence at CPAC 2024 is false, misleading, and grossly manipulative—especially coming from a writer who has carried the water for Hamas in much of his reporting on the Israel-Gaza war,” Schlapp wrote in a statement posted by CPAC to X. “When we come across someone at CPAC peddling any kind of anti-semitism, we deal with them immediately. Knowing this, NBC weaved together lies and fabrications to create a false perception, and we won’t stand by idly while NBC engages in willful misinformation.”

In a separate post, Schlapp also wrote:

“Yawn. This is a tired old cliche. The Neo-Nazis in our midst are the ones controlling our college campuses and major institutions and grossly populate the newsrooms of corporate media, calling for an Israeli surrender.”

NBC’s Goggin responded:

“The Nazis introduced themselves to me at a mixer and said they were national socialists, started talking about skull measurements and pushing the conspiracy theory that all races were being controlled Jewish people. They were posting about their presence at CPAC online.”

He also provided photos and video:

“Either CPAC is lying about having no idea about this, or they simply don’t have a grasp on who they approved to come to their conference…,” Goggin added.

“Nazis, antisemitism, the great replacement theory, [white supremacist Nick] Fuentes, have become so common among conservatives that I think attendees, even journalists, didn’t think too deeply about them being at CPAC. There was very much an ‘oh them’ attitude about the nazis.”

“It really illustrated how successfully extremists have shifted the Overton window. This year, they were expected, and their presence was tolerated,” he added.

Critics blasted CPAC.

“At CPAC, avowed Nazis mingled openly & spread antisemitic conspiracy theories, as speakers welcomed the ‘end of democracy.’ They are all saying the quiet part out loud. And most GOP lawmakers are silent (or cheering). This is how extremism is normalized,” warned Amy Spitalnick, CEO of the Jewish Council for Public Affairs. Spitalnick “led a group that won a $25 million judgment against the neo-Nazis who organized the deadly 2017 Charlottesville march in Virginia,” The Times of Israel reported in 2022.

“Seriously, read this @BenjaminGoggin piece and tell me those of us ringing the alarm bells on increasingly mainstreamed Nazism are being hyperbolic,” Spitalnick added.

“CPAC denies the presence of Nazis at their conference this year, but when I reported that @cpac was teeming with white nationalists in 2022 there wasn’t a peep from Matt Schlapp about it,” wroteTexas Observer special investigative correspondent Steven Monacelli.

Former Rep. Mondaire Jones (D-NY), currently a candidate for Congress running to unseat U.S. Rep. Mike Lawler (R-NY), said: “I am appalled that Nazis were allowed to attend CPAC—an event Donald Trump headlined again this year. Make no mistake: the Republican Party and Trump have empowered white nationalists for years.”

Responding to the NBC News article, former U.S. government official Mike Walker wrote on X: “This is not Munich, 1933. This is Washington, DC, 2024.”

Reprinted with permission from Alternet.

Trump Keynotes New York Event Infested With 'Nazi-Linked Groups'

Trump Keynotes New York Event Infested With 'Nazi-Linked Groups'

The New York Young Republican Club recently held its annual gala in New York's financial district, and former President Donald Trump gave the keynote address with some of the global far right's most notorious political figures in attendance.

According to Talking Points Memo (TPM), the gala's attendees included not just American far-right politicians like Reps. Lauren Boebert (R-CO), Matt Gaetz (R-FL) and Paul Gosar (R-AZ), but also European right-wing extremists like Austrian politician Gerald Grosz and European Parliament member Susanna Ceccardi, who is from Italy's far-right Lega party. German politician Maximilian Krah — whose party, Alternative fur Deutschland (AfD) has been criticized as a "neo-Nazi party" — was also at the event.

"Donald Trump rubbing elbows with Nazi-linked groups might be surprising if Trump’s last month wasn’t defined by him parroting Hitler and Mussolini, and promising to rule as a dictator so he can rip away Americans’ freedoms and round up millions of Americans into detention camps," said Ammar Moussa, who is the rapid response director for President Joe Biden's reelection campaign.

"The American people rejected Trump and his MAGA attacks on democracy in 2020, and it’s why he’s going to lose again next November," Moussa added.

Gerald Grosz was initially a member of Austria's far-right Freedom Party, which was founded by Anton Reinthaller — a former Nazi Party leader and SS officer. Grosz and his colleague Jorg Haider, who was the son of a Nazi stormtrooper who praised Adolf Hitler's regime, eventually joined a Freedom Party offshoot. While they all come from different countries, TPM described Grosz, Ceccardi, and Krah as comrades-in-arms in movements that are "staunchly nationalist and anti-immigrant" in nature.

Prior to Trump's speech, he was introduced as the "45th, 46th and 47th presidents of the United States," which alludes to Trump's baseless conspiracy theory that he was the rightful winner of the 2020 presidential election. Trump doubled down on his "dictator" comments during his speech, repeating that if elected to another term he would assume dictatorial powers on day one of his administration to build a border wall and "drill drill drill."

The New York Young Republican Club's flirting with global far-right figures is in line with how international political scholars have described the modern GOP. In 2019, Harvard University political scientist Pippa Norris surveyed roughly 2,000 political experts around the globe on the authoritarian leanings of various modern far-right parties. She found that the American Republican Party has more in common with authoritarian, fascist-adjacent parties like Turkey's AKP and Hungary's Fidesz than with their counterparts in G7 countries like the Tories in the UK and the conservatives in Canada.

Reprinted with permission from Alternet.

Why Republicans So Desperately Need Hunter Biden Right Now

Why Republicans So Desperately Need Hunter Biden Right Now

The right is positively giddy over the so-called Twitter files. House Republicans called a press conference to declare that their very top priority will be investigating Hunter Biden's laptop. Rep. Elise Stefanik promised in July that if given the majority, Republicans would get "accountability" from the "Biden crime family." The victim narrative — that big Tech rigged the 2020 election by suppressing the Hunter laptop story — is all the rage on the right.

"We're learning in real-time how Twitter colluded to silence the truth about Hunter Biden's laptop just days before the 2020 presidential election," Rep. Kevin McCarthy tweeted, and the whole right-wing chorus has sung along. They haven't been this energized since the FBI executed a search warrant at Mar-a-Lago. Laura Ingraham cheered Elon Musk on for uncovering the "fact" that Twitter "worked overtime" to elect Biden. Republican National Committee Chair Ronna Romney McDaniel offered that "If Joe Biden were a Republican, this would be getting nonstop coverage by the mainstream media. Their blatant bias would be unbelievable except it happens EVERY SINGLE TIME." Self-described "psychedelic adventurer" Joe Rogan suggests that this proves that "The deep state is 100% real. The swamp is real. They're real monsters, and they were really trying to get rid of him (Trump) by lying."

The notion that a laptop delivered to the New YorkPost by Rudy Giuliani two weeks before the election and rejected by The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Fox News and others should not have been treated skeptically is the dicier proposition. Further, the hyperventilating about the assault this represents on the First Amendment is risible. Twitter, a private company, was free to ignore the request. Even if Biden had been president at the time, there would be no violation of the First Amendment. Government officials not infrequently request that journalists refrain from publishing material, often about military secrets. Newspapers sometimes comply and sometimes not. It's only a violation of the First Amendment if the government coerces the journalists.

Nor did Twitter's temporary suspension of the Post's account sway the election. As Cathy Young notes, 1) the ban lasted only about 36 hours; 2) the ban may have heightened interest in the story rather than suppressing it, and in any case, the story was available via a Google search; and 3) the whole narrative about Biden's participation in Ukrainian corruption, the gravamen of the laptop story, is false.

So what is this really about? Consider the timing.

For seven years, the right has been explaining, excusing, avoiding and eventually cheering the most morally depraved figure in American politics. That takes a toll on the psyche. You can tell yourself that the critics are unhinged, suffering from "Trump derangement syndrome," but then Trump will do what he always does — make a fool of you. You denied that Trump purposely broke the law when he took highly classified documents to Mar-a-Lago and obstructed every effort to retrieve them. And then what does Trump do? He admits taking them! You scoff at the critics who've compared Trump with Nazis. And then what does he do? He has dinner with Nazis! (And fails to condemn them even after the fact.) You despised people who claimed Trump was a threat to the Constitution, and then Trump explicitly calls for "terminating" the Constitution in order to put himself back in the Oval Office.

Hunter Biden seems to be a mess. But there is nothing relevant to public policy or civic virtue here. Joe Biden is hardly the first president to have troubled family members. But Joe Biden didn't hire Hunter at the White House, and if there is any evidence of the president using official influence on Hunter's behalf, we haven't seen it. The Department of Justice under Trump opened an investigation into Hunter Biden. President Biden has left it alone. It's ongoing.

The right has a deep psychological need for the Hunter Biden story. They desperately want Joe Biden to be corrupt and for the whole family to be, in Stefanik's words, "a crime family" because they have provided succor and support to someone who has encouraged political violence since his early rallies in 2015, has stoked hatred of minorities through lies, has used his office for personal gain in the most flagrant fashion, has surrounded himself with criminals and con men, has committed human rights violations against would-be immigrants by separating children from their parents, has pardoned war criminals, has cost the lives of tens of thousands of COVID patients by discounting the virus and peddling quack cures, has revived racism in public discourse, and has attempted a violent coup d'etat.

They know it. But here's something else they need to meditate on: Even if everything they're alleging about Joe Biden were true; even if he did pull strings to help his son and even profited unjustly thereby, it still wouldn't amount to a fraction of what Trump did. And it still won't wash out the "damn'd spot."

Mona Charen is policy editor of The Bulwark and host of the "Beg to Differ" podcast. Her most recent book is Sex Matters: How Modern Feminism Lost Touch with Science, Love, and Common Sense. To read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate webpage at www.creators.com.

Reprinted with permission from Creators.

Danziger: His Struggle

Danziger: His Struggle

Jeff Danziger lives in New York City. He is represented by CWS Syndicate and the Washington Post Writers Group. He is the recipient of the Herblock Prize and the Thomas Nast (Landau) Prize. He served in the US Army in Vietnam and was awarded the Bronze Star and the Air Medal. He has published eleven books of cartoons and one novel. Visit him at DanzigerCartoons.com.