Hey, everybody. Welcome to the Muckreg podcast. I'm Jared Yates Sexton. Bad news.

Co-host, friend, loyal companion, Nick Houseman, out for the day. Down in Florida, Desantis land,

as we are going to discuss later on in this solo episode of the Moncrack podcast.

We miss him dearly, but this week I am at the controls,

which means you're going to spend a little quality time with yours truly.

We got to talk about some escalation today.

We got to talk about how the process of right-wing radicalization takes place.

We have some incredible examples of exactly how that takes place, how it works, how these pipelines of ideas come into law.

We will go ahead and start with the CPAC Convention in Washington, D.C. As we've discussed in the past on this show, CPAC is sort of ground zero

for right-wing extremist ideology and legislation.

This is the preeminent extremist conservative conference.

It was where Trumpism was more or less born, but it has been churning for decades now.

It is legendary for being one of the launching pads for

Ronald Reagan's eventual assent to the presidency. It is a bunch of panels and speeches and

meetings and get-togethers where everybody from the billionaire donor class down to the diehard Republican voters

meet, press the flesh, figure out where things are going and what they're going to do.

This has, you know, we've seen it takes so many different shapes.

You know, from Victor Orn of Hungary, who we'll have to talk about in a little bit, came in and gave

some incredible tips to the Republicans on how to recreate the illiberal state that he

has created in Hungary, which they have taken to heart and have carried out.

This year was noticeably a little bit different.

And there are a lot of reasons for this.

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