Mona Charen's courageous stand at CPAC

Over the years, CPAC has seen an increasing number of contenders for Big-Time Conservative Pow-Wow status. Red State Gatherings and Americans for Prosperity's Defending the American Dream Summits are replete with the big-name speakers, panel discussions and radio rows that are such big attractions at CPAC. Several magazines host cruises and retreats that feature big names and big ideas.

Still, CPAC's the oldest and the one that gets the most "mainstream" coverage. Since 2014, Matt Schlap has been the CEO of CPAC. His background is commendable enough - political advisor, Vice President for federal affairs at Koch Industries - but he's one of these people who became quite taken with the Very Stable Genius early on. The nature of the lineup of scheduled speakers, some later disinvited, at CPAC has skewed populist since he's been at the helm. This year the audience reveled in the presence of was subjected to the likes of David Clarke and Sebastian Gorka.

Now it's 2018, and the VSG is president and is said by his enthusiasts to have rocked the joint when he spoke. So this is a fired-up bunch of enthusiasts. 

Into that milieu waded Mona Charen of National Review and the Public Policy Center, and she had the guts to play the skunk at the garden party. She was asked, during a panel discussion, about the Left's treatment of women. Her answer didn't sit well with the Trumpists:

"I'm actually going to twist this around a bit and say that I'm disappointed in people on our side for being hypocrites about sexual harassers and abusers of women who are in our party, who are sitting in the White House, who brag about their extramarital affairs, who brag about mistreating women," she said.

Declining to mention Trump by name, Charen said conservatives are guilty of "look[ing] the other way" when it comes to the president and other Republican men who have faced allegations of sexual misconduct.

"This was a party that was ready to ... endorse Roy Moore for Senate in the state of Alabama even though he was a credibly accused child molester," Charen said.

"You cannot claim that you stand for women, and put up with that," she told the crowd, as several members of the audience shouted, "Not true!"

Charen's comments were met with heavy boos inside the conference hall, and she was later spotted leaving the conference with a three-person security detail.

Earlier on in the panel, she issued a strong rebuke of Marion Le Pen, the niece of former French right-wing presidential candidate Marine Le Pen, whose own appearance at CPAC drew scrutiny from some conservatives who have accused her of enabling far-right groups with racist views.

"There was quite an interesting person who was on this stage the other day. Her name is Marion Le Pen," Charen told the crowd, suggesting Le Pen was only invited because of her surname.

"And the Le Pen name is a disgrace," she added. "Her grandfather is racist and a Nazi. She claims that she stands for him. And the fact that CPAC invited her is a disgrace," Charen said.

The parallels to the way the feelings-driven mob of adolescent public policy wannabes in Florida at CNN's town hall about guns treated Dana Loesch are striking. Inconvenient facts must not be brought up in settings ostensibly about the quest for truth, but in reality about mindless adherence to an emotionally gratifying set of presumptions.

I look forward to Charen's own observations about her experience.