An older white man sits among rows of MAGA merchandise at CPAC.

This CPAC Performance Art Is the Most Bananas Thing You’ll See Today

Vivian Kane

Published: Aug 5, 2022 03:19 pm

The Conservative Political Action Conference is happening right now in Texas and in addition to the usual terrifying speeches from extreme right-wing personalities, CPAC is also trying its hand at performance art. It’s … something.

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Hello I would like to share with you the most astonishing thing I have ever seen

At this CPAC booth you receive a silent disco headset that plays harrowing testimony from people arrested for participating in J6

Instead of dancing, you stand around and watch this guy cry pic.twitter.com/cin6F5zDhz
— Laura Jedeed is On Bsky (@LauraJedeed) August 5, 2022

Right in the middle of what appears to be the merch floor, CPAC put an actor in a fake jail cell so that people could watch him cry into his MAGA hat while listening to testimony from alleged/admitted/convicted insurrectionists.

These extremist MAGA conspiracy theory conservatives love to accuse people of being “crisis actors.” They’re constantly accusing everyone from abortion rights protesters to school shooting victims of being actors hired to evoke empathy for what they see as being a made-up cause, and then they go and do this.

It’s truly beyond comprehension.

CPAC has a literal crisis actor lol https://t.co/Wby9TJ71xo
— Brock Wilbur (@brockwilbur) August 5, 2022

(via Laura Jedeed on Twitter, image: Brandon Bell/Getty Images)

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Author

Vivian Kane

Vivian Kane (she/her) is the Senior News Editor at The Mary Sue, where she's been writing about politics and entertainment (and all the ways in which the two overlap) since the dark days of late 2016. Born in San Francisco and radicalized in Los Angeles, she now lives in Kansas City, Missouri, where she gets to put her MFA to use covering the local theatre scene. She is the co-owner of The Pitch, Kansas City’s alt news and culture magazine, alongside her husband, Brock Wilbur, with whom she also shares many cats.