6: A Plot to End the American Experiment

The Lincoln Project

News Commentary, News, Government, Politics

4.6 • 9.1K Ratings

🗓️ 23 February 2021

⏱️ 22 minutes

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Summary

Host Reed Galen is joined by Lincoln Project Senior Advisor Stuart Stevens to preview the upcoming Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) and predict what will be discussed along with what dangers this conference could pose to our nation’s democracy. This year’s CPAC will be the first time Donald Trump gives a public address since leaving the White House.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome back to the Lincoln Project. I'm your host, Reed Gail. Joining me for this week's
0:13.8	episode is our Senior Advisor Stuart Stevens. Stuart, how are you? Good to see you, man.
0:19.6	And this week we want to talk about CPAC, the conservative political action conference
0:24.2	2021 that will start in just a couple of days. You know CPAC was for a long time a place where
0:32.2	Republican grandies from every part of the party came and spoke to usually very young supporters,
0:40.7	but it was an audition. It was a place where folks could come and give their peace if they wanted
0:45.5	to be running for Senate. They wanted some national office. They wanted to run for president,
0:49.1	whatever the case might be. And with Trump, it really provided him a platform even before he was
0:55.2	president, before he ran for president to speak to folks that he otherwise would not have been
1:00.5	able to contact. And so what we've seen since Trump's ascension both to the nomination of the
1:07.4	Republican party and then ultimately to the presidency is it became the one place where
1:12.1	there was probably the purest form of MAGA you were going to find in any one place. And I think
1:17.1	that we'll see that later this week. And so Stu, you know, when just get your sense, I know that
1:21.8	you've probably had to attend several of these. When you've gone, what have you seen?
1:26.7	Well, you know, I mean CPAC, Ronald Reagan spoke at the first CPAC and gave the shining city
1:32.2	on a hill speech. If you were looking at the American political conservative movement of Republican
1:37.4	party, you could do an interesting anthropological study just focusing on CPAC. What started out as
1:45.1	supposed to be a gathering of movement conservatives has turned into this freak show. And it really
1:53.2	epitomizes the hollowness of what turned out to be the conservative movement embodied by the
1:59.6	Republican party that they believe in nothing. Marie Le Pen spoke there, the air and leader to the
2:05.6	fascist party in France. We've gone from sort of being a beacon of freedom to a representative of
2:11.2	that which we fought against in the greatest generation. The extraordinary thing about this is none
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