CPAC Head’s Wild Claim Trump Is Being ‘Tortured’ By Democrats a la Putin or Xi Highlights Bizarre Opening Remarks

AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana

Matt Schlapp, the chairman of the American Conservative Union which puts on CPAC, opened Thursday’s session of the Conservative Political Action Conference alongside his wife Mercedes. The two repeatedly accused the Democrats and the left of being anti-American and embracing “authoritarianism” while boasting about barring left-leaning journalists from covering the event.

Matt Schalpp, who is currently facing multiple accusations of sexual assault and a $9 million lawsuit from a former male staffer over alleged sexual misconduct, spoke after his wife and began by declaring “this is our time” and leading the MAGA crowd in a chant against the “UN, the WHO, and the World Economic Forum.”

“To the gentleman there who gave the middle finger salute, I think that is just fine,” Schlapp added while his wife laughed.

Schlapp then went on to rage against the media and doubled down on his Wednesday announcement that CPAC would not give press passes to left-leaning journalists.

“If you call yourself a journalist, but you spend all your time trying, trying to destroy America and trying to destroy Americans who love America and trying to destroy conservatives and patriots and people from MAGA and yes, J6, if that’s what you do, we don’t want you here. You can buy a ticket and just act like any other normal citizen,” Schlapp said to applause.

Later in his speech he also praised former President Donald Trump and echoed Trump’s recent comments that he has been treated like Alexei Navalny – the Russian opposition figure who recently died after years of imprisonment and brutal physical torture in a Siberian gulag.

“There’s an important thing going on in our country in which the whole world is watching. And that is there is a unique American who is being persecuted, who is being tortured, who is the victim of the democratic policies based on the world’s worst dictators, whether it be Putin or whether it be Xi,” Schlapp said, referring to the Chinese leader who has forced the Uyghurs into mass detention camps rife with forced labor, forced sterilization, and other atrocities.

“The Democratic Party and Joe Biden doing everything they can to collude, to use the deep state, to use lawfare to put Donald Trump in prison. Can we send a loud CPAC message to President Donald J. Trump and his family that we stand four-square with him,” Schlapp concluded to applause from the crowd.

Watch the clip above.

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