Fascists hate and drag queens love
“Less drag queens and more Chuck Norris!” growled the autocratic menace from the land-locked central European country that lost its empire in the First World War, and stood with Hitler in the Second World War. Viktor Orban had just condemned “race mixing” in Europe, and he was given a hero’s welcome at CPAC in Dallas. Like all fascists, Orban can play the victim like Mozart could play a Stradivarius.
Orban used his psychic powers to predict what would be said about him. Here it is:
I can already see tomorrow’s headlines: Far-right European racist, anti-Semite strongman — the Trojan horse of Putin — holds speech at the conservative conference,” Orban said. “They did not want me to be here, and they made every effort to drive a wedge between us. They hate me and slander me and my country as they hate you and slander you.
Matt Schlapp, who leads the American Conservative Union that organizes CPAC, has defended Orban’s invitation in the name of free speech. “Let’s listen to the man speak,” Schlapp told Bloomberg News. “We’ll see what he says. And if people have a disagreement with something he says, they should raise it.”
Six months have passed since the fascist gathering in Texas, and Matt Schlapp stands accused of being a predator who sexually assaulted a 39-year-old married man who worked on the Herschel Walker campaign. The evidence suggests that Schlapp craved what he condemned — like so many self-loathing religious fanatics and hypocrites on the right. Christopher Hitchens was certainly prophetic when he wrote this:
Whenever I hear some bigmouth in Washington or the Christian heartland banging on about the evils of sodomy or whatever, I mentally enter his name in my notebook and contentedly set my watch.
Sooner rather than later, he will be discovered down on his weary and well-worn old knees in some dreary motel or latrine.
Matt Schlapp is both a professional grifter and one of Washington, DC’s most corrupt lobbyists. Certainly it wasn’t a surprise to read that it was Larry Ellison’s Bay Area Oracle that was his last client. Ellison is one of the fascist movement’s most prolific funders. His attraction to Schlapp is obvious, given Schlapp’s stature within the movement, in which he is a cross between Ernst Roehm and Fritz Kuhn. Amazingly, even as his secret life unravels, CPAC continues to pulverize gay Americans and the drag queen community who are utterly harmless and make people laugh.