The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

CPAC: Another Day, Another Deadline

Posted on | February 28, 2019 | Comments Off on CPAC: Another Day, Another Deadline

 

NATIONAL HARBOR, Maryland
After I hit my deadline about midnight, I strolled down Fleet Street to The Public House, where I was hailed by a guy who was talking to a group of college Republicans attending their first CPAC. “This is Stacy McCain — he’s been at 14 consecutive CPACs,” said the guy, whose name I had forgotten, but who knew me from back in the Tea Party days. The college kids were part of a Leadership Institute (LI) group, and I made a joke about getting punched in the face — which is what happened to LI organizer Hayden Williams at Berkeley. The ongoing campus culture war is a topic that will be addressed here at CPAC by none other than Hayden Williams himself, and I was happy to talk to a few of these kids gathered outside The Public House, telling them stories like how I first met Andrew Breitbart at CPAC in 2007. But I digress . . .

Part of my predicament at CPAC is that I’m supposed to be doing actual journalism here, and this interferes with just having fun, which is what I’d rather be doing. Wednesday night, while everybody was out partying, I was holed up in my room trying to make sense of the notes I’d scrawled during the day and turn this into 800 words of Final Wisdom. You’d think, after all these years, it would get easier by constant practice, but it never really does. At 10 o’clock, I was around the 250-word and getting from there to 800 in two hours . . . Well, do the math. Yet I think I managed to produce something worth the effort:

Jacob Wohl is a 21-year-old Trump supporter from California who laughs at how much he’s hated by liberals: “Of course they hate me. I’m destroying everything they love.” Wohl is a political prodigy. Having started his first business while still in high school, he was investigated by the Securities and Exchange Commission when he was only 18 years old, an investigation he believes was a “Deep State” reprisal for his outspoken support of Trump during the 2016 campaign.
When we met in the lobby bar of the Gaylord Hotel on the first day of the 46th annual Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), I had no idea how notorious Wohl is. Just the previous day, he’d been banned from Twitter, where he had more than 180,000 followers, after bragging to USA Today about his plans to use fake accounts to play havoc in the 2020 presidential campaign. Basically, Wohl intends to use social media to influence Democrat primary voters into supporting fringe candidates with no chance of beating President Trump. Such mischief-making by private citizens is not illegal. Liberals have spent the past two years fuming over conspiracy theories about “Russian collusion” in the 2016 campaign, but there’s no law against Americans trying to influence election outcomes, or else everybody at CNN might be in federal prison. . . .

You can read the rest of my column at The American Spectator.

Now I have to take a shower then go back, Jack, and do it again.

 

Category: CPAC

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