CPAC Part 1: About CPAC

This post is divided into 3 parts:

Part 1: About CPAC, some history, and the Gaylord
Part 2: CPAC 2020, and what I saw there this year
Part 3: AFPAC


Part 1: About CPAC

    CPAC holds (held?) a dear place in my heart because I've been there many times. Starting out, it was very entertaining to hear "true conservatives" give speeches, and get pictures with conservative celebrities. I had pictures with many people, my favorites were Ann Coulter and Marion le Pen (the latter photo disappeared when my computer crashed). Other photos with people, like Rick Santorum, I no longer care for, or can even remember for sure who I got photos with. But it was about 5 per year, so at least 30. One time Dana Perino was lost in the Gaylord ("lost," hehe) and I helped her find where she was supposed to go. The Gaylord is pretty big.

    Here's a picture of CPAC 2004, the 31st CPAC. (Not at the Gaylord.)

    It took CPAC 31 years to get to that amount of prestige. I wonder if AFPAC can do better.

    CPAC grew over the years, and in 2013 stopped going to DC hotels and held its first conference at the Gaylord National Convention Center in National Harbor, Maryland, about 20 minutes from DC.

This is the outside of the Gaylord, with the photo taken from the water. The Gaylord, with all 15~ floors of hotel rooms, is in the shape of a U, with glass in the center. There are sets of elevators on each side. The entrance and lobby are on the left side, and the convention ballrooms/rooms are on the right side.

Here's a photo from the inside. The 2nd floor has White tile, and ends at the gazebo thingy. The 1st floor has White tile as well, and you can just see the bar/lounge. Then the "Atrium" below the first floor has a brick floor and little restaurants and a bunch of trees, plus a fountain. See the rooms and the 3 elevator shafts on the side? The convention center part is beyond that.

Here's another picture.

And another, showing the bar/lounge.

This is the lobby, under the gazebo. To the right is the bar/lounge.

The Gaylord has conventions pretty much all year, oftentimes multiple at once. Every year I've been to CPAC, there has been at least one other convention. People often get confused while searching the Gaylord for CPAC registration. This year was particularly bad; there were hardly any signs or volunteers to point you in the right direction.

When you get past the 3 elevator shafts, you arrive in the convention area. This was the best picture I could find, but it's only about 25% of the convention area. You can barely see it says, "Chesapeake Rooms." Look below at the green square. That's them.

The thin blue square on the bottom shows the approximate location of the 3 elevator shafts. The Chesapeake Rooms are for breakout sessions, and for the Gold, Silver, and Bronze lounges, where the people who paid more can get refreshments and that sort of thing. Room #7 is usually the Speaker room, because the stage (purple square) exits there, by the light blue box. CPAC used to just rent sections A and B of the Potomac Ballroom (pictured above in the blueprints, and shown in my video below), but since 2018 they've rented C and D as well.

    The orange bar in the blueprint picture is "radio row," with a row of about 40 booths for media broadcasters. The yellow part is a balcony that Patrick Casey and other IE members spent most of their time on in 2018. Casey told me he wasn't that interested in normie politics, so I wasn't surprised they spent much of their time there. That's all on the 2nd floor.

    There's nothing for CPAC on the 1st floor (lobby), besides media registration always being there.

    There's an entire CPAC hub down in the Atrium, filled with sponsors of the event, shilling their products or pet issues. But we'll get to that later. Let's move on to CPAC attendance.

It looks like it took 15 years to reach 1000 people, and now
it's been 10~ years since it plateaued at 10-13k.

    CPAC has grown, but it seems like it may plateau because only so many people can fit into one convention center. The year 2017 was a bit of a mess. They sold so many tickets that people couldn't fit into the room to see Trump, so hundreds of people were upset and had to sit in 'overflow rooms' and watch speeches on screens. Since then, they've rented aforementioned C and D sections of the Potomac Ballroom (another 200~ feet of rooms to put extra seating in the back). This year, they had bleachers in the back. You could barely see the speakers from there. Sad! The one good thing was that this year I went to an overflow room while Trump spoke, and only THREE people were in it. Either everyone got in, or the people stuck outside decided to leave (unlikely).

    CPAC is horribly lacking when it comes to archiving its conferences, or at least putting that information online. You can barely find speaker lists for certain years. I almost wish I had saved all the schedule booklets, but I didn't. I did save my credentials though.

Sarah Palin trolling Bloomberg with the Big Gulp is a classic.

    But lately CPAC hasn't been holding true to "conservative values," whatever they are. Is Ann Coulter conservative? Ann hasn't been to CPAC since 2014 where she said this:

(10 seconds)

    Michelle Malkin was at CPAC 2019, but she specifically mentioned immigration and called out CPAC for not talking about it. I don't think she'll be allowed back anytime soon. Maybe one day.

Her entire speech became about amnesty, GOP grifters, immigration, and our dim future

    Trump was at CPAC 2011, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2017, 2018, 2019, and 2020. CPAC 2016 was like a bloodbath, with most of the people hating on Trump because he wasn't "conservative." Now, CPAC caters to Trump, and banned Romney in 2020, because Romney didn't support Trump, despite people in 2016 saying Romney was more conservative than Trump.

    Sometimes CPAC let's the Log Cabin Republicans (a gay group) attend the conference. Sometimes they don't.

    "Conservapedia.com" says CPAC banned "MassResistance" because it was against gay marriage. The site even explains how Gavin McInnes and Owen Shroyer were kicked out this year for no apparent reason.

    So CPAC isn't exactly "conservative" anymore, or it is just when it's convenient. CPAC resorts to banning people who disagree with them IF they're harmless WNs, while letting in the liberal media, who utterly lie about CPAC, conservatives, and Trump.

Click here for Part 2: CPAC 2020