This is the weekend for the Conservative Political Action Committee (CPAC) to meet, and they’re doing in so in Florida to keep failed, one-term former President Donald Trump from having to travel too far since he’s become a doddering old man who requires frequent diaper changes during the day.
One of the speakers was a woman named Julie Kelly, who is listed as a Senior Writer for something called “American Greatness,” Media Matters reports:
Kelly began her remarks by rattling off a list of things that had been done by an unnamed person:
“He’s using this law enforcement agency, armed agents, military-style vehicles to conduct pre-dawn raids at the homes of political dissidents. Terrorizing these dissidents in front of their children, and, in some cases, their elderly spouses. Hauling them off, concocting charges against them, fabricating evidence, and in almost 100 cases, hauling them off to prison where they have been denied bail.”
Dissidents? That has echoes of the old Soviet Union, where people were hauled away by the KGB and put in gulags for all sorts of nonsensical charges.
Kelly then continued:
“And dozens of them, actually, shipped off to a special political prison in the nation’s capital, where these detainees are then kept away from their family, their defense attorneys, they can’t see the evidence against them – all the rights that those citizens have from their country’s charter are completely gone. No due process. No presumption of innocence. Trials are delays. Evidence is covered up. Their lives are destroyed. Their families are destroyed. Their businesses are destroyed.”
All of that led Kelly to this conclusion, which was eagerly lapped up by the audience:
“The media, of course, helps out the regime in smearing these people and ruining their lives. Now, who am I talking about? Not Vladimir Putin, of course. Joe Biden.”
Apparently, if you storm the Capitol, terrorize members of Congress, and defecate in the halls of the seat of the U.S. government, you’re not a domestic terrorist. To the right-wing Trumpers, such behavior qualifies you as a “dissident.”
While we’ve known for some time now that conservatives are obsessed with Putin, to hear a member of their ranks compare President Biden to a mass murderer like the Russian tyrant is a new level of disgusting.