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Being Denied a Press Pass at CPAC Was the Best Way to Cover the Conference

This is what happened when MAGA people thought I was one of them.

STEPHANIE MENCIMER

I’ve attended the Conservative Political Action Conference almost yearly since 2009, always as a credentialed reporter. While there, I’ve seen the early attacks on President Barack Obama, the improbable popularity of libertarian Texas Rep. Ron Paul. I witnessed the rise of the Tea Party, listened to dozens of failed political candidates like former GOP vice presidential candidate Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, and was in the house for Donald Trump’s first appearance in 2011. In February 2020, I even got exposed early to Covid, just before the world shut down. But this year, CPAC head Matt Schlapp decided that the organization would no longer give press passes to “left-wing media.”

“So CPAC has a new rule,” he told former Trump adviser Steve Bannon on a segment for the right-wing cable outlet Real America’s Voice. “If you’re a propagandist, you can buy a ticket, like everyone else. But you’re not in the media, and we’re not going to credential you by saying you’re in the media.” Bannon congratulated Schlapp for the epic troll. “People’s heads are blowing up,” Bannon said gleefully.

Of course, the liberal media is still covering CPAC. It’s the oldest and largest conservative gathering in the country, launched in 1974 by veterans of Barry Goldwater’s failed 1964 campaign for president. Today, it’s held in a convention center just outside of Washington, DC, where it runs from Wednesday until Saturday when Trump is expected to appear. The fact that the whole thing was live-streamed makes it easier for those who did not want to shell out the admission fee.

I took Schlapp at his word and simply bought a ticket. I wasn’t thrilled to be contributing $295 to a conservative organization currently spending a lot of its money defending Schlapp from a lawsuit by a male Senate campaign worker who alleges that Schlapp groped him in the car while he was working for Herschel Walker in Georgia. And yet, the general admission pass did not turn out to be the liberal own that Steve Bannon and the CPAC boss seemed to think it would be.

For instance, without my official press badge, people have been nice! No one has hissed “fake news” at me in the bathroom line. Rather than turn their backs and march away upon my approach, conference attendees have chatted me up unprompted. Admittedly, it felt a bit uncomfortable, and I usually disclosed that I was a reporter. But sometimes, they’d already let fly the unfiltered crazy stuff they would never have said on the record.

Exiled from the press pen, I was just part of the audience, a space previously off-limits to reporters. To say the least, it was enlightening. On Friday, for instance, I listened to a main-stage speech from Chris Miller, a Republican running for governor of West Virginia. Because of its tax-exempt status, CPAC bans speakers from openly campaigning there, so he was listed on the program simply as “businessman.”

Like virtually every other speaker at the event, Miller devoted several of his allotted five minutes to railing against transgender healthcare. “Woke doctors are literally making boys into girls,” he declared. “They’re practicing mutilation, not medicine. They should be in prison.” At that point, a burly man in a giant black cowboy hat sitting next to me leaned over conspiratorially and proclaimed, “I think we should hang them all! I really do.” And he laughed like we were in on the same joke. I confess that I was too cowardly to tell him I was with the left-wing fake news.

Later, during a speech by South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem, I was sitting next to a woman in full-on MAGA gear. When Noem declared, “There are some people who love America, and there are some people who hate America,” my neighbor gave me a small heart attack. “Get the FUCK OUT!” she yelled furiously, ready to rumble. “Get the FUCK OUT!” Meanwhile, the old man in the camo Trump hat next to her had somehow fallen asleep.

In the hotel lobby outside the CPAC main stage, the right-wing cable network Real America’s Voice had set up a studio. Bannon spent most of the conference holding court there and interviewing various MAGA celebs like Kash Patel, who President Donald Trump had once put in charge of counterterrorism at the National Security Administration, or Rep. Byron Donalds (R-FL), the rare Black conservative in the mix. The studio often drew a crowd that rivaled that of some of the speakers on the main stage. It certainly rivaled the convention in volume.

While I was taking in the spectacle, a middle-aged man in a gray suit came up to me and pointed to a nearby 7-foot-high poster of Tucker Carlson’s face. “Do you know why that’s here?” he asked. I explained that it was an ad for Tucker: The Biography, a book written by Chadwick Moore, a gay journalist and former liberal. “Oh, I see,” he replied. The man clearly wanted to keep talking, asking me what I was here for, which was unusual since in the past my press badge said it all.

My inquisitor had come to CPAC to see what people were saying about school choice and was disappointed to discover that the answer to that question was nothing. Education policy, he lamented, was nowhere to be found at this event. Indeed, what passed for policy discussions at CPAC this year was largely limited to mass deportations and attacks on trans athletes. The sober panels about the national debt, balancing the budget, or Social Security reform that once commanded top billing were a relic of another era before CPAC became an extension of Trump Inc., devoted to all the MAGA grievances like racial equity, the evils of windmills, or bans on gas stoves. When I finally was able to explain that I was a reporter who’d been denied a press pass, the man launched into an earnest yet incomprehensible spiel about how the government is censoring people. Politely, I fled into the crowd watching Bannon. 

After two days of passing as a CPAC attendee, I marveled at how weird it was to be on the other side like this. Over the past 15 years, I have attended dozens of right-wing conferences and events, even in the Trump White House, and always as a credentialed reporter. This time, instead of being treated like the enemy, I was briefly embraced as part of the tribe, and it became clear how seductive this could be for some people. I saw up close how people felt liberated to be their worst deplorable selves in what they believed was a safe space, surrounded by supportive, like-minded enablers.

Even so, I missed the media gaggle. In 2019, CPAC claimed in tax filings that it had credentialed more than 2,000 journalists, making it as much of a reporter reunion as a political event. When I interviewed Schlapp about the conference two years ago, he bragged about letting all the journalists in, because it showed that CPAC was “the center of political gravity.” He made noises about how messy democracy can be and the importance of expanding the audience for his show. All of that seems to have changed. Yet, I wasn’t surprised when my application to cover CPAC was denied. MAGA world has not been friendly to the mainstream media, despite all its professed concern for free speech. In the past few years, I’ve been kicked out of MAGA events or denied press credentials—most recently to every Trump event in Iowa during the caucuses in January. CPAC had often seemed like the last holdout. 

Keeping liberal reporters out of the press pen will probably not win Schlapp better news coverage. It certainly won’t keep those reporters from asking hard questions about his management of the American Conservative Union, the nonprofit behind the conference, or the other men who have now raised additional sexual assault allegations against him. In fact, the experience of covering CPAC outside the pen has been so enlightening that even if he decides next year to give me official credentials, I might just buy a ticket and sit with the rabble.