https://www.yahoo.com/news/infanticide-and-socialism-mark-dark-tone-in-conservative-175854123.htmlNATIONAL HARBOR, Md. — Starving people eating dog food. Parents aborting babies after taking them home from the hospital. That was the dark vision — of creeping socialism and of a******n unrestrained — that marked the opening day of the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), the annual gathering of conservatives that offers an untrammeled view of Republican perspectives, and a sign of where the party is headed politically.
President Trump is expected to speak at the conference on Saturday morning.
Although the Trump economy is booming and the United States is not currently involved in any major international conflicts, the conservative activists and Republican politicians who spoke on the ballroom stage at the waterfront hotel where the annual gathering takes place painted an insistently dark vision of the country. That appears to be a calculated strategy to motivate Republican v**ers ahead of the 2020 p**********l e******n, stoking fear and anxiety about the Democrats’ accretion of power. Progressives were trying to “destroy the country from within,” warned one young conservative activist, Charlie Kirk, in one of the morning’s best received and most bracing speeches.
“They're trying to get rid of all the capitalists,” said Rep. Mark Meadows, R-N.C., at the conclave’s opening session, “Marketing Marxism: There’s Nothing New About the Green New Deal.” Although the panel was billed as a discussion of the Democrats’ proposal for a renewable economy, it quickly turned into an attack on Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., and the progressives now ascendant in the House of Representatives, some of whom are not afraid of the label of “socialist.”
It was a label CPAC speakers were happy to apply, repeating a line of attack advanced by President Trump in recent weeks. “We don’t have to look any further than Venezuela,” Meadow said, where the socialist government of Nicolás Maduro is in the midst of a violent, painful collapse.
Sen. David Perdue, R-Ga., at a subsequent panel on debt, called the Green New Deal “draconian.” That was mild for the first day of CPAC, in a departure from last year’s conference, which was a largely celebratory affair. But that was before the Democrats reclaimed the House of Representatives and Democratic candidates for president launched their campaigns to unseat Trump.
One could have been forgiven for thinking that Ocasio-Cortez, who has been in Congress for not quite two months, was the president of the United States, while the Republican Party — which controls the White House and the U.S. Senate — was a minority party cast out in the wilderness. Ocasio-Cortez’s ideas were frequently invoked, whether her 70 percent tax rate on the wealthy or the t***sition from f****l f**ls that the Green New Deal would appear to represent.
"We’ve got to get to a point where we celebrate capitalism,” Meadows urged. Meanwhile, Matt Schlapp of the American Conservative Union, which hosts CPAC, expressed relief that “eight years of socialism under Obama” had come to an end. He did not specify how Obama’s program constituted socialism.
But if socialism was portrayed as a major menace, it was dwarfed by the menace of late-term a******n. In his State of the Union speech last month, Trump referred to measures in New York and Virginia that expanded protections for women’s reproductive choice. He said that Virginia’s governor, Democrat Ralph Northam, “would execute a baby after birth,” a misrepresentation of the measure that was facilitated by the Democrats’ bungled explanation of what the bill was intended to achieve.
CPAC represented a doubling down on this point, in an apparent bid to motivate anti-a******n activists before next year’s e******ns. Former Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, for example, said that Democratic laws would allow for babies to be taken home from the hospital and aborted thereafter. No Democratic legislators appear to be advancing such a measure, which would be tantamount to murder.