CPAC Head Tells Steve Bannon the Conference Has ‘New Rule’ Blocking Passes for Left-Wing Journalists

Bannon: “Because people’s heads are blowing up, not just — not just globalism goes to die, but maybe journalists who are actually information warfare participants, right, on the left, maybe their access goes to die also, sir, from what I’m hearing this morning?”
SCHLAPP: “Yeah. You know, we gotta get smarter, We have people that run around and say they’re journalists, and if you look at their feeds, a hundred percent of their stories are let’s get what Republican, what conservative, as you said, who can we mischaracterize who loves America and let’s go get ‘em and let’s make trumped-up charges on them from anonymous sources. And Russ Vought, who’s a hero of mine and many, has had to deal with this, and everyone who does anything that’s worthwhile has to deal with this. You have to deal with it probably more than anyone or just — that would be Donald Trump who deals with it more than anyone. So this tactic they’re using against Trump is intergalactic, but they’re using similar tactics against all of us. So CPAC has a new rule: If you’re a propagandist, you can buy a ticket like everyone else, but you’re not in the media and we’re not going to credential you by saying you’re in the media. Now, there’s plenty of left-wing people who are in the media, who actually, you know, at least 20 percent of the time or 25 percent of the time they’ll take on the Menendez or they say Biden is too old, you know, they at least have some coverage that you could say, ‘Okay, there, some journalism there.’ But, as we know, what’s happened to these corporate media entities is they’re a hundred percent, if you listen to MSNBC, it’s a hundred percent anti-Trump, anti-America, anti-conservative every moment of every day. They never have any kind of honest treatment of anything and they run anybody off from the station who used to be at least somewhat honest some of the time, like Chris Matthews and such. So, you know, let’s get real, let’s not credential them anymore and we’re not going to do it.”
Bannon: “They had — I think it was Henry Olsen, I think it was in The Washington Post, they had a piece that CPAC is irrelevant now or lost its relevance, because you look at, it’s all these populist, nationalist speakers, they’re all MAGA or MAGA-affiliated, they’re all — like, you’ve got the vice president’s poll coming up in and virtually all the VP candidates you’ve got speaking, which I think are all of ‘em, are all MAGA, are all populist, nationalist, and that you’ve lost the Reagan fusionists and the libertarians, and I think — and even Grover Norquist said, ‘You know, CPAC is over. It’s not as relevant anymore because it’s just gone full MAGA, it’s full populist, nationalist. And you you were brought in, and we were one the drivers of that when I was a Breitbart to get you in there, because the thing had gotten so — let’s just be blunt, it was just the lobbyists, it was pay-to-play by lobbyists and it had gotten just — it had gotten ridiculous. And you came in to turn it around. What’s your response to Henry Olsen? Because Henry’s a pretty smart guy. What’s your response to him?”
SCHLAPP: “You know, as I said to someone who called me on this the other day, bless their hearts. I’m sorry that Grover Norquist isn’t quite the power that he used to be and his dinners aren’t quite as impactful as they used to be because they could never kind of get comfortable with this idea that things were changing. You know, there are — I love Reagan, Reagan’s one of my heroes, but there are Reagan people that believe we gotta run all the plays we ran in the 1980s, in the same order. And if we do that, we are going to lose. Just like all successful head coaches or CEOs or leaders, you gotta read the current battlefield and you better come up with new strategies. And we haven’t done a very good job of doing that. And one of the things that you helped us with is to kind of shuck CPAC’s old way of doing things and listen to people and try to make it relevant. It’s why we’re going to get more media attention over the course of these four days than any of the venerable institutions in our society, all those award shows, all those sporting events. We will get more attention here, we’ll get attention from both the left and the right. Some people on the right will try to destroy us, everyone on the left will try to destroy us, but no one can deny this is where everything goes down. All these vice presidential contenders are here. Donald Trump’s here, even though it’s the same day...”