Smoke ‘em if you have ‘em.
“Are you going to call Trump a domestic terrorist?” the woman asked. It was Saturday afternoon at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Dallas, and I had just identified myself as a reporter to two attendees eating lunch in the food court. The woman, who looked to be in her fifties, told me she had traveled to the influential political convention from out of state. She declined to give her name or occupation. “We’re just so sick of the media telling lies about us,” she said.
The man sitting across from her, an eighty-year-old Vietnam veteran named Frank Dirnbauer, was more forthcoming. Dirnbauer, who works as a retail electricity broker, had driven to the conference from his home in Wylie, a half hour’s drive northeast of Dallas. This was his first CPAC. “I said to my wife that we have to go,” Dirnbauer told me while snacking on pretzels. “We picked today because President Trump is going to be speaking.” He had seen countless Trump speeches on TV but had never attended one.
The woman interrupted our conversation to repeat her question. “So are you going to call him a domestic terrorist?” I handed her my business card and said I would quote Trump accurately and fairly. This did not seem to comfort her. And perhaps for good reason—after all, one of CPAC’s afternoon panels was titled “We Are All Domestic Terrorists.” One of its participants, Texas state board of education candidate Julie Pickren of Houston, began by claiming the title was meant to be tongue-in-cheek. “Nobody in this room is a domestic terrorist,” she assured the thousand or so right-wing activists in the Hilton Anatole’s Trinity Ballroom. The panelists spent most of their time criticizing public schools for supposedly indoctrinating children. New York activist Ryan Girdusky claimed he was put on a “hit list” for speaking up at too many school board meetings.
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