Exclusive — Matt Schlapp at CPAC: ‘Woke Is on Trial’

ORLANDO, Florida — American Conservative Union (ACU) chairman Matt Schlapp told Breitbart News exclusively that at this year’s Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), “Woke is on trial.”

The official theme of this year’s annual gathering of thousands of conservatives—relocated here in central Florida for its second year in a row now from the Washington, DC, area—is “Awake Not Woke.” This conference comes at an interesting time for conservatives, after victories in last year’s off-year elections–especially in Virginia’s governor’s race and ahead of an all-important looming midterm election in November.

It also comes days before the first regularly-scheduled primary, on Tuesday in Texas, and just weeks before other states head to the polls later in the cycle, beginning in early May and continuing through the summer, to select the GOP’s next generation of standard-bearers. This CPAC also comes as states across the country have finally joined Florida in ditching virus restrictions—masks are off basically everywhere, just as they have been here for years, and vaccine passports are being ditched in places as leftist as D.C.—something Schlapp could not help but point out at the outset of a feature interview ahead of this year’s conference.

“It’s funny someone reminded me a Republican governor canceled CPAC at the end, right before we were starting to plan,” Schlapp told Breitbart News. “We had to scramble and we had to find a venue—we came to Florida because of Gov. DeSantis’s leadership. Then, we showed the world we didn’t all die—and the straw poll demonstrated how upset people were at this closure and mandate mentality. Then the next thing you know, during CPAC–I don’t know if you remember, but it kind of came back to me–but Governor Abbott, Governor Tate Reeves, all of a sudden they were saying, ‘We’re open, we’re not shut down.’ It started this whole cavalcade. So, what’s happened in a year—we’ve dominated this conversation of what America stands for. So with our theme, Awake Not Woke, people get it wrong—inflation is terrible and high taxes and spending is terrible, but that’s not what the election is about. The election is about, wait a minute, you guys are doing unconstitutional things that we never would have contemplated in this country, you’re saying everything is about racism, and look at what the polls are showing. Even blacks and hispanics are saying ‘no way, man, I’d rather associate with the Republicans than with this crazy idea that my daughter is a boy or my son is a girl or my girl has to compete against men or the craziness in schools.’ To me, woke is on trial. I think we’ve won the policy discussion on all the economic questions. But now the question is even further, which is are we still going to love America?”

Republicans are finally, as a party, beginning to formally fight the culture wars on things like battling transgendered insanity, the detrimental effects of open borders migration, Critical Race Theory being forced on children in schools, fighting crime amid a wave of lawlessness, and more. House GOP leader Kevin McCarthy has leaned into fighting these battles, and now Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin showed the GOP how to win in a state that’s been trending by doing so. Rank-and-file Republicans across the party have begun joining the fight, with people like Sens. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) and Marco Rubio (R-FL) over the past year picking major culture war battles. The most recent iteration of this phenomenon is Sen. Rick Scott (R-FL), the chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee (NRSC), releasing a detailed 60-page plan to “Rescue America” filled with culture war policy positions.

“I didn’t read it in detail, but everything I saw about it I loved,” Schlapp told Breitbart News of Scott’s plan.

As a result of the failures of the Democrat Party—which completely controls Washington right now with majorities in the U.S. House and U.S. Senate as well as holding the White House—combined with Republican embrace of these culture war issues, Schlapp thinks Republicans could sweep into offices in November that nobody is even thinking about right now. Some signs of that have already begun, with a special City Council election earlier this week in Jacksonville, Florida, flipping back to the GOP from the Democrats, and recent school board recalls in San Francisco, California, of all places.

“This is where I’m going to show my age, but I’ve been here before,” Schlapp said. “I was a congressional staffer and previous to being a congressional staffer people like Rudy Giuliani won. Richard Riordan won in Los Angeles. All of a sudden strange things started to happen in big cities—they weren’t socialists back then, but they were Democrat-friendly. But they realized that would result in having unsafe streets and less economic opportunity. They didn’t think a city was a safe place to raise their kids and it’s amazing how that shifts things politically immediately. I don’t know if it’s the case that many Republicans—the difference between now and then is with the pandemic, the Republicans, so many, moved out of those blue states. So maybe the Lee Zeldins and the others that are fighting these uphill climbs, maybe they can’t win because maybe the numbers aren’t where they need to be, but I think this year what we’re going to find is not only an overwhelming victory in the House of Representatives, but what really matters now is your local community too. I think we’re going to have a lot of victories—I think any candidate who says they’re not going to defund cops but they’re going to fund cops and make sure they’re well-trained and have the resources they need to fight crime, I think they’re going to win. I think any candidate who runs for the school board, it doesn’t matter what their party affiliation is, if they say actually we want the parents to being involved in the schools—that’s what they used to say when I was young: we want the parents involved because when the parents are involved it’s good for the kids. But now we have these educrats who don’t want the parents involved or they have to hire a lawyer to figure out what’s going on in their kids’ classrooms. I do think you’re right—I think we’re going to win in places people never expected us to win.”

When former President Barack Obama was winding down his second term, a potent mix of issues swirled together to create the right environment for the rise of Donald Trump to the White House: out-of-control immigration, a hampered economy, American adversaries on the rise worldwide, and a sense of abuse of power by the federal government. Those same conditions are brewing again under President Joe Biden’s administration, and much more quickly, paving the way for a rightwing comeback of epic proportions. Schlapp said that what Obama did was nothing compared to what Biden is doing and enabling now.

“Obama did many terrible things, but his only legislative achievement was Obamacare, which was an embrace of a more socialized form of medicine—it was not surrounded by a lot of language like you have today,” Schlapp said. “What you have today is a Democratic Party where it’s fricking scary to listen to them when they say what they want to do, when we see what they’re doing, it’s alarming to people who aren’t that political. Hispanic and black families aren’t looking for their young boys and girls to be all confused about their gender. They want their girls to compete against girls in sports. They don’t want their boys being brought up to believe they shouldn’t be men. It’s really changing politically. I think those sets of issues alone—if you look at what’s happening with the school question. If you talk to immigrants who are people of faith, certainly Christian or Jewish, they’re disgusted by the schools they have to send their kids to because they don’t have the financial means to send them any other place. Then that reminds everybody of the $90 million or whatever that Black Lives Matter raised during the year of violent Black Lives Matter riots with dead cops. No kid got a laptop, no kid got a scholarship to go to a better school, no black pastor got a grant to have an after school program to help troubled families. As a matter of fact, the ideology was to destroy families because families are a patriarchal institution from western civilization. This is alarming to people. It’s alarming to immigrants, legal immigrants. It’s alarming to anybody of faith. And I just think the Democrats don’t know what they’ve done. They don’t know the damage they’ve done. But here’s the thing: There’s no going back. They can’t have a speech tomorrow and say yes we’ve always been for higher taxes but we’re not going to be for higher taxes anymore. How do they un-woke themselves? I don’t think they can. I think this is going to get worse and worse as the year goes on.”

Republicans could be heading for historic gains in the upcoming midterm elections, and could sweep into majorities in both the House and Senate this year. What’s more, in some places in recent elections, Republicans have outperformed expectations significantly among key demographics like Hispanic voters.

“You have the Florida-Texas Hispanic phenomenon where you can run statewide as a Republican and get 50 percent of Hispanics, but you look at some of these other states and that seems almost impossible,” Schlapp said. “Now, what you’re seeing across the nation is that dynamic is happening across other states. In other words, what we’ve said is don’t pander to Hispanics by opening up the border—help them with policies that allow their families to flourish and their companies and businesses to flourish. It’s worked so much better.”

But as to whether there is a broader political realignment looming, Schlapp is unsure at this time.

“I’d say on the realignment question this is something the egghead political scientists like to talk about, so I’ll leave that to the experts, but I will say that would only be the case if you see a 2022 and a 2024 seismic shift,” Schlapp said. “We really haven’t seen a seismic shift in a long time. We’ve really kind of had this muddling around the middle—Bill Clinton was elected twice without a majority, George W. Bush was elected in that closest of all elections, Donald Trump seemed to be busting out of that in 2016. To what extent was it the cheating, to what extent was it the Zucker-bucks, but he added millions and millions of new voters which you would have thought would have been the beginning of a realignment, but we’ll never kind of know. So, now we have this chance again to say: Was Donald Trump ready to bust the mold in 2020 until these weird things happened with the virus? The next two cycles, I think, tell us.”

If and when the Republicans win, though, Schlapp said they absolutely must deliver—and if they do not, it could spell the end of the GOP.

“My view is in 2022 if the House flips to the Republicans in big numbers–and I think it will, I don’t know who the Speaker will be, but McCarthy is the presumptive Speaker,” Schlapp said. “There is a lot of pressure on them to deliver. If they do not deliver, I really think it’s going to be the beginning of the end of the Republican Party. People talk about historical illusion all the time, but the Whig Party comes to mind. You can only straddle for so long before your brand is you’re just a weenie. I think that’s what the Republican Party is struggling with. You’ll see this this weekend at the four days here, people are aligned to the Republican Party by and large for the most part, but people feel like they’ve been burned before. They feel like when Donald Trump won we had majorities and we didn’t take care of business in Congress because they disagreed on policy, but also they were uncomfortable with how messy the fight was going to be. We’re going to spill some food on our shirts and some blood on our collars, and they were not interested in that and Trump was—the party wants to see us get our uniforms dirty and really fight for it. If we would fight half as hard for the things we say we believe in as the other side does for everything they believe in, we would have held on to so many institutions over the decades. But we don’t believe in that—we believe that we only fight in the most perfect of weather on the most perfect of fields and that means you hardly ever fight. We’ve always relied on judges to do our bidding, but we saw in the election that judges aren’t always going to do our bidding. If we don’t create the framework for judges to feel comfortable to do their job, they won’t. That means it falls right back on the politicians in Congress; they’ve got to do the hard things. We can’t keep avoiding the hard things.”