CPAC Celebrates the Assault on Democracy
CPAC is back in town. Always renowned for bringing together some of the most odious anti-LGBTQI+, anti-democracy figures in U.S. and global circles, the Conservative Political Action Conference is returning to Washington with a vengeance — and a viciously triumphalist one at that.
For years, the global LGBTQI+ movement — the Council for Global Equality included — has been warning how attacks on our communities are the proverbial canary in the coal mine for democracy, civil society, and the rule of law. Now, as President Trump and Elon Musk lead the assault on the bedrock of American democracy, their allies and acolytes will gleefully throw lit matches into the coal mine from the CPAC stage.
From Project 2025 to the global anti-rights movement, the 2025 CPAC agenda is a Who’s Who of bad actors, a program full of politicians, media figures, and others pushing the unholy marriage between the extreme libertarianism and white supremacist Christian dominionism—both of which are dedicated to eradicating the secular, inclusive state, in the United States and throughout the world. Under rhetoric such as “efficiency” and “defending women,” CPAC attendees will celebrate the dismantling of lifesaving institutions such as USAID, the elimination of legal guardrails such as independent inspectors general, and the wholesale erasure of transgender citizens from legal recognition.
Vice President J.D. Vance, fresh off of haranguing America’s closest allies in Europe, has kicked off CPAC in earnest. Unsurprisingly, then-Sen. Vance’s one-man campaign last year to delay Stephanie Sullivan’s nomination to serve as U.S. Ambassador to the African Union because of her defense of LGBTQI+ human rights in Ghana revealed not only his anti-LGBTQI+ animus but his disdain for the professional foreign service officers of the State Department.
The role of PayPal billionaire Peter Thiel — known for his open contempt for democracy — in bankrolling Vance’s first Senate run and continued political ascension is well-documented. But Vance’s connections to Opus Dei and to the dominionist New Apostolic Reformation movement, his disdain for inclusive democracy, and his declaration that Trump should “do what [Hungarian President] Viktor Orbán has done” in banning LGBTQI+ discussions from the schools all deserve much closer attention.
CPAC attendees will hear from plenty of Trump Cabinet members and advisors this weekend. Those include UN Ambassador-designate Elise Stefanik, who is sure to realign the United States with Russia and the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation in an anti-LGBTQI+ bloc at the United Nations; “border czar” Tom Homan, whose stewardship of Trump’s vicious anti-immigrant agenda will send countless queer refugees into dangerous, often deadly detention centers and transit countries; and openly gay Ric Grinnell, the former acting Director of National Intelligence and current interim Director of the Kennedy Center, who will surely give cover to the Trump Administration as it tries to divide LGB Americans from their transgender and nonbinary compatriots.
Several world leaders will be in attendance to pay tribute to the return of Donald Trump, most notably President Javier Milei of Argentina. Milei has unapologetically mirrored Trump, from pulling Argentina out of climate change accords and the World Health Organization to eviscerating the government budget and lavishing praise for Elon Musk. Just last month at Davos, Milei lashed out at “the LGBT agenda,” “nefarious gender ideology,” and “radical feminism” while equating LGBTQI+ parents with child abuse. (In response, thousands of LGBTQI+ Argentinians joined an anti-fascist march protesting Milei’s remarks—perhaps a sign of things to come in the United States.)
[NOTE: as we went to press, Milei offered Musk, a last-minute addition to the conference schedule, a gift chainsaw, which the mega-billionaire proceeded to wave in the air while accusing Democrats of “treason” and while celebrating the wanton destruction of the federal government that he is leading.]
Also speaking from the CPAC stage is Eduardo Bolsonaro, a member of the Brazilian Chamber of Deputies and son of the rabidly anti-LGBTQI+, anti-feminist President Jair Bolsonaro — who just this week was charged with plotting a coup to overturn his 2022 election defeat.
The far-right world leader who will be most present at CPAC even in physical absentia will be Hungary’s authoritarian President, Viktor Orbán. Establishment conservatives have unabashedly turned to Orbán as their model for hollowing out American democracy from within. Perhaps the most obvious example of this is Kevin Roberts, the president of the extremist Heritage Foundation and featured past speaker at CPAC Hungary, whose close relationship with Orbán led Heritage to lead the development of Project 2025 as the means to import Orbanism to America.
Viktor Orbán’s strongman disdain for liberal democracy, immigrants, and LGBTQI+ people, and his self-proclaimed role as a champion of Christianity, Western values, and the imagined traditional family make him a rock star for the thousands of nativists and authoritarians attending CPAC this week. Would-be autocrats from Eastern Europe and the Balkans to numerous U.S. states have parroted his mix of anti-LGBTQI+, anti-immigrant, and anti-bureaucracy to win reactionary populist support. Ron DeSantis’s copying of Hungary’s so-called anti-LGBTQI+ “propaganda” law in passing Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” attack on free speech is just one example of the global spread of Orbanism.
While Orbán will not be attending personally CPAC DC this year, he will be the keynote speaker at CPAC Hungary in late May. But Orbán and Orbanism will be well-represented this weekend in Washington, by Miklós Szánthó from the Centre for Fundamental Rights, the host of CPAC Hungary, as well as by regional allies such as Prime Minister Roberto Fico of Slovakia, Prime Minister Hristijan Mickoski of North Macedonia, and former Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki of Poland (who was just elected President of the European Conservatives and Reformists grouping in the EU Parliament, succeeding Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni).
Our colleague monitoring CPAC DC in person this weekend reports how Patriots for Europe are distributing copies of the book, Viktor Orbán is Winning … Not Just Every Four Years but Every Day: How Hungary’s Leader is Turning Heads and Moving Hearts. And CPAC Chairman Matt Schlapp — who will no doubt appreciate a distraction from this week’s newest allegations of him groping another man nonconsensually at a Virginia bar — will interview Balázs Orbán (an advisor to the Hungarian President, but no relation) from the CPAC stage.
The anti-gender/anti-rights movement using attacks on LGBTQI+ people, immigrants, and sexual and reproductive health and rights to undermine the foundations of democracy itself is also well-represented at CPAC. That includes the Hungarian attendees as well as Santiago Abascal, leader of Spain’s far-right party, VOX, which has campaigned hard against LGBTQI+ communities and women’s equality and which keeps close ties with CitizenGO, the movement bankrolled by radical Catholic billionaires in Spain that fights against women’s reproductive health and against LGBTQI+ rights across Europe, Africa, and Latin America.
It also includes Meloni, a featured speaker at the end of the conference schedule, a friend of Elon Musk’s, arguably Europe’s most prominent anti-immigrant leader, and a crusader against LGBTQI+ parents. Meanwhile, the U.S. wing of the anti-gender/anti-rights movement is represented in Washington this weekend by, among others, Kimberly Fletcher and Penny Nance, Presidents of Moms for America and Concerned Women for America, respectively.
Historically, CPAC has been grounded in the politics of establishment, hawkish libertarianism — more Ron Paul and Chuck Hagel than Marjorie Taylor Greene and Nancy Mace, if you will. But as it was at the National Prayer Breakfast earlier this month, Trump’s MAGA coalition of traditional conservatives, the Silicon Valley tech elite, and the religious far right is evident all through this year’s CPAC agenda. The America First Policy Institute think tank has filled Trump’s Cabinet and circle of advisers, including Pam Bondi (Justice), Kash Patel (FBI), Linda McMahon (Education), Doug Collins (Veterans Affairs), and Brooke Rollins (Agriculture) — all of whom but Patel are on the CPAC schedule.
Attorney General Pam Bondi’s loyalty to Donald Trump is well-reported. Bondi is also particularly close with Paula White, Trump’s personal spiritual advisor and proponent of the “prosperity gospel,” whom Trump just appointed as the head of the White House Faith Office. Trump timed the appointment of White and his Executive Order establishing the Faith Office, along with another one aimed at “eradicating anti-Christian bias” and “end[ing] the anti-Christian weaponization of government” to the early February National Prayer Breakfast that is another such conclave of extremists. Examples of purported anti-Christian bias included the Biden Administration’s support of nondiscrimination for transgender Americans and for LGBTQI+ parents in the adoption process.
Bondi’s deep ties to Christian nationalism, especially to the dominionist New Apostolic Reformation, or NAR, demand closer scrutiny. The NAR’s goal is to dismantle the secular state through its capture of “the seven mountains” that make up society: education, entertainment, family, business, religion, media, and government. (Please check out the dramatic account of the NAR recently published in The Atlantic.) Project 2025, in many ways, offers a secular blueprint for the NAR to achieve dominion over the seven mountains and erase the separation of church and state.
By weekend’s end, the parade of authoritarians will pass. President Trump, though not listed on the schedule, will surely make a surprise appearance to bask in the adulation of his most loyal cheerleaders. But these dangerous actors will then return home, whether to Austin or Budapest, to their new offices in Washington and their social media channels with global audiences. They will return energized to continue their crusade to dismantle inclusive, multicultural liberal democracy, at the national, state, and local levels, in multilateral organizations, and all around the world.
And we too must come together, in solidarity with so many allies, stronger and more energized, using and bolstering political and legal institutions, at the grassroots, and through culture change work. We must think of our immediate, urgent needs while also never taking our eye off the long-term struggle. Now more than ever, the reality is clear that promoting LGBTQI+ inclusion is the work of defending resilient democracy.