The left is looking for a reason to care about CPAC

The left is looking for a reason to care about CPAC

Infiltrators come in all shapes and sizes.

As someone who has taken a camera into a hostile environment for the specific purpose of generating viral content, I can tell you that at pretty much any conservative event you attend, you’re going to run into at least one lefty with an agenda. It’s almost impossible to prevent—when you open up your conference to the paying public, you’re welcoming the public to attend.

The Conservative Political Action Conference isn’t just a 3-day sprint for conservative activists; it’s chum in the water for liberals looking for a scoop. Those who attend aren’t there to learn, or even to laugh—they’re there to catch you doing something stupid.

More from the Huffington Post:

Roaming the halls of CPAC on Thursday were five members of the group, American Bridge. They were wearing attendee badges, meaning they paid for the privilege of being there. And they were wielding cameras, five in all.

“We have done CPAC before,” said Jesse Lehrich, the group’s deputy communications director. “But not to this extent.”

Lehrich, who appeared dressed in an outfit that one would imagine fits a conservative conference — a patriotic splash of blue jacket, red tie and lighter shirt — said that the goal was to find a viral moment. He assumed that it would come from one of the side panels, when the cameras were off and some of the less polished speakers would appear.

“The panels off the main stage tend to be the stuff that other people don’t see,” he said.

It’s the “less polished” (read: untrained and most likely less famous) speakers that usually bear the brunt of a liberal assault. Most progressives already know that when they listen to someone like Ted Cruz or Ben Carson speak, they’re going to hear something they’ll disagree with. They might even hear something they think is crazy; but that’s pretty much old news because it’s something their audience is already expecting. Disagreement doesn’t earn clicks—the unexpected does.

This is why they target panelists and “men on the street.” Some of the best discussions I’ve ever been a part of occurred in the context of a panel, but those are also the discussions that involved disagreement, debate, and at least one person standing up and saying something controversial.

These situations are prime targets for people doing opposition research, mostly because the candid nature of the talk coupled with the relatively unsophisticated support structure backing panelists and other, more casual participants leaves those caught in the frame almost completely defenseless.

Confession: I only spent about 2 hours at CPAC yesterday, and still managed to encounter a handful of people who said something that I strenuously disagreed with. It’s the nature of CPAC—establishment, tea party, libertarian, all mashed up into a ball and thrown into the frying pan with branded swag and an open bar. This tells me that it’s going to be incredibly easy for people from American Bridge and other organizations to find something to post “proving” that CPAC is nothing but a reincarnation of the KKK. You’re going to see the videos scroll across your Facebook feed. It’s going to happen.

When it does, remember—the right has never been the party of the hivemind. In fact, we reject the hivemind at every opportunity because above all things we value the freedom of one man to speak his mind, and another to speak his mind about what he just heard from the other guy also speaking his mind. That’s the emphasis here, and something I’d push anyone confronted with this content to focus on: would you rather sit back and allow a little crazy in your life, or live in the kind of world where there’s no such thing as the freedom to speak your mind about what matters most?

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