I’m a week out from my first (and likely only) CPAC experience. It took me several days to recover — to exorcise the experience from my body and soul.
I wrote a lengthy article about my takeaways from the event (helpful in purging the experience). But I can’t stop thinking about (and laughing about) the ridiculous session titles and the way MAGA elite use language to continually form the minds of the MAGA faithful.
Mara Richards Bim
The session titles from the event were intended to incite rage and lead to further brain rot. The human mind is malleable for good and for ill. The language the MAGA elite constantly invokes is like acid dripping on the brains of the MAGA faithful. The session titles provide a lens into that language and the world of MAGA.
There were the Anti-Muslim session titles:
- MAGA vs. Mullah Madness
- Ilhan Omar “Family” Values
- No Nukes for Jihad
- Jihad Juggernaut: Ending Christian Persecution
- Don’t Sharia My Texas
There were the titles intended to cast Democrats as Marxist communists and conflate them with actual Chinese communists:
- Commies Go Home: The Stories of the American Heroes of Gotion
- K-Pop Communist Hunters
- Defeating Communism, and We Mean It
- Get Schooled: Don’t Let Woke Marxists Raise Your Children
There were the titles intended to show the country’s military dominance:
“Any way you word it, MAGA elite are cultivating hate and conspiracies.”
- Make Iran Great Again
- Breaking Stuff and Killing Bad Guys: The Case for Western Military Dominance
There were the titles that normalized the government’s fascist tendencies:
- Europestan: Can Europe Survive?
- This One’s for George Soros (an especially odd, brain-rotting episode where right-wing leaders from Australia, the UK, Japan, Brazil, Hungary and Germany took the stage to push their countries’ fascist candidates)
- Lock ‘Em All Up: The Weaponization of the Justice Department (This rates especially high on the brain-rot scale because the speakers, without a hint of irony, spoke of locking up Trump’s “enemies” for having weaponized the Justice Department against him.)
- The President Will Sue You Now: How the Legacy Media was Defeated
- The Censorship Industrial Complex
- The Justice League: Restoring the Constitution, a Fireside Chat with Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche (The first iteration of The Justice League appeared during World War II and the fight against the Nazis. Now this band of superheroes is being coopted by neo-Nazis and fascists.)
Then, there are the titles that were just weird:
- Peace Room: Steve Bannon (The framing of Bannon, host of “The War Room,” as “peaceful” and calling for unity and peace among the MAGA coalition was surreal.)
- Canceling Satan
- Cigars, Steaks and Ivermectin: A MAHA Survival Guide
Any way you word it, MAGA elite are cultivating hate and conspiracies. Language matters.
When MAGA elite stand onstage in places like CPAC and call those of the other political party demonic, Marxist, communists over and over, it matters.
When they make scapegoats of Muslims — both the individual politicians and Muslim-Americans as a whole — they are cultivating hate.
When the MAGA elite spread conspiracies about the government’s response to COVID (ignoring that lockdowns began under Trump), when they push Ivermectin as a “cure-all,” when they lie about Democrats harming kids, they are causing irreparable harm to our collective body politic.
Before I attended CPAC, I believed at some point MAGA supporters would collectively turn on the president and the MAGA elite. But after attending, I now see that never will happen.
Much ink has been spilled about the grievances that formed the minds of MAGA. Whatever the sources of their original grievances — which may have at one time elicited sympathy — they have been spiritual de-formed by worshipping in word and deed a man who delights in unrestrained power and the cruelty he is able to wield from it.
As a Christian, I believe in the power of the Resurrection and redemption. I never will give up hope on individuals within the MAGA religion. But as a collective, the movement is irredeemable.
Mara Richards Bim serves as a Clemons Fellow with BNG and as the first Justice and Advocacy Fellow at Royal Lane Baptist Church in Dallas where she recently was ordained to the gospel ministry. She earned the master of divinity degree and a certificate in spiritual direction from Perkins School of Theology at SMU. She also is an award-winning theater artist and founder of the nationally acclaimed Cry Havoc Theater Company, which operated in Dallas from 2014 to 2023.
Related article:
10 takeaways from CPAC 2026 | Opinion by Mara Richards Bim