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The Ladies of CPAC

Jill

Republicans would like you to know that they aren’t all old white men, and that their movement is actually really hip and young. Why? Chicks!

[Anyone have time to do a transcript?]

Amanda covered this one pretty well, but I think it’s particularly interesting that the video starts out with, “At CPAC this year, the wonks have some company: Women!” Not only are “wonks” and “women” presumably mutually exclusive, but the implication is that “women” aren’t really part of CPAC or the conservative movement — they’re more there to keep the men company. The women are there for show, but the dudes are the real event. Very nice.

15 thoughts on The Ladies of CPAC

  1. I’m pretty sure both Coulter and Malkin have appeared numerous times at previous CPACs. The real stories out of that little corner of entertainment this year was a homophobe getting booed off the stage and the neocons desperately trying to pretend that the Ron Paul people didn’t dominate the con.

  4. This “anyone have time to do a transcript?” thing is really really bothering me. I know you’re busy and you have a full-time job and a life and have a huge moderating responsibility with this blog. I know how incredibly difficult it can be to put together a transcript, especially a good one.

    But if you don’t consider a post completely until it has a transcript, why are you putting it up incomplete and asking your community members to complete it for you? Why not wait until you or another member of your team has time to do transcripts? Or ask people in your community to do transcription for you before putting a post up?

    People who want or need transcripts shouldn’t be your afterthoughts. We’re part of your community, too. When you slap a “oh, yeah, I need a transcript!” up on a post, or any variation thereof, you’re leaving us out. We can’t see or hear your video, or understand the context of this post.

  5. the implication is that “women” aren’t really part of CPAC or the conservative movement
    Nothing else in the video refutes that, either. Every woman he interviewed was either working publicity or a nervous, giggling college student who couldn’t articulate why she came. (With the exception of the brief Ron Paul fan.) I don’t know if he deliberately sought that out or it was just a side effect of zeroing in on young ‘attractive’ girls only.

    There’s something so creepy and toxic about every part of this video, but I think the worst is that a young woman literally told him “leave me alone” and he made sure to milk as much footage as possible of her and then plaster it on the internet anyway, with a jokey “REJECTED!” caption.

  6. @Anna. . . If you don’t want to provide the transcript then don’t. But this forum is interactive. They post topics for discussion so we are as much a part of that as they are. So it seems logical that those of us participating can participate and contribute by putting up transcripts if we have the time. There’s alot more of us participating than there are of them posting.

  7. Anna has hardly asked for anything unreasonable. I’ll have a transcript up as soon as I can – I’m a bit of a slow transcriptionist I’m afraid! – with apologies to those of you who are unable to access the video in the meantime.

    1. Chally and Anna are right, and Anna isn’t asking for anything unreasonable. For the record — and not to sound too defensive here, although I suspect it will come out that way — I’ve been putting up requests for transcripts because other bloggers and commenters have explicitly said that they are happy to respond to such calls if the blogger putting up the original post doesn’t have time to transcribe a video. I wasn’t trying to shift the burden onto the rest of the community, but rather to take others up on an existing offer, which makes posting videos easier and less time-consuming for me (who, as Anna said, does have a full-time job; I do most of my blogging either at 6 a.m. before work, or at 11 p.m. after work) and still accessible to the entire community.

  8. Hopefully we can sort something more satisfactory for all out, readers, but in the mean time, here is the transcript for this video:

    Upbeat music. Shaky shot of a brightly-lit room full of people.
    A black screen appears with white words: ‘At CPAC this year, the wonks have some company’.
    Three young women are standing against a wall, the two towards our right are laughing, talking (we can only hear the music) and looking at the camera whereas the third one is more focussed on the camera.
    Black screen: ‘WOMEN!’
    A woman in a beige top appears in a close-up, shaking her head a little and looking at the camera.
    Black screen: ‘The Daily Caller sent Mike Riggs to speak to them’
    A close-up of woman in a black outfit appears, she’s laughing.
    Black screen: ‘Here’s what the ladies had to say’.
    A woman in a jacket and a pink top and a woman in a jacket and a red top appear.
    Woman with pink top: We’re here with our college Republicans from Indiana Wesleyan University trying to strengthen our Republican views.
    Back to the woman in the beige top: Why am I here? Um, besides the obvious [holds up things mostly outside the camera frame] um –
    Riggs, out of shot: You can hold up the obvious if you want to park [?] it on our website
    Woman: [holds up book] The obvious being…
    Riggs: The War on Success.
    Woman: Yes, The War on Success by Tommy Newberry.
    Back to the women wearing pink and red respectively.
    Riggs: Okay, and what are your pet issues?
    Woman with pink top: Kat [perhaps Cat] would you like to answer this?
    Woman with red top: What are my issues? [Woman with pink top nods.] [indecipherable].
    Back to the woman in beige: Um, I don’t know, my parents are really conservative and they kind of instilled those values to me and that’s why.
    Back to the two women.
    Riggs: What are you ladies doing when you’re not at CPAC? Besides being students I guess.
    Woman in pink: We protest, we [laughs] just kidding.
    Back to woman in beige.
    Riggs: So you’re another first timer.
    Woman in beige: Yeah, I’m a first timer. [nods]
    Riggs: Okay, so what do you think so far, what are your impressions.
    Woman: [looks around] I just got here twenty minutes ago, it’s really interesting, ah, there are a lot more people than I thought there would be.
    Riggs: Ah, lots of cute conservative boys? [woman smiles and laughs just a little] Can you speak to that?
    Woman: Ah, [nodding] I haven’t been able to speak to that yet but I’ll let you know indecipherable].
    A sign with ‘American Solutions’ and ‘AmericanSolutions.com’ on it appears on a board. The shot moves up so we can see it’s being held by someone in a bald eagle suit (the bald eagle being a symbol of the USA). The music is starting up again. The eagle points with a wing at a woman in a suit to our right. She is handing out papers.
    Black screen: REJECTED! “Leave me alone”
    Close up of the besuited woman. She walks away. The camera moves haltingly back to the eagle.
    Back to the three women from the start. Music stops.
    Riggs: How many conferences have you gone to?
    Woman on the right: This is… only our third together? [Woman on the left counts on her fingers.]
    Woman in black: I’m Faith Hammon, and I’m working as publicist on site for Steven Baldwin and Kevin McCullough, and I’m also the even planner behind CPAC.
    Two new women, one in white and black and one in white.
    The former: It’s electric. It’s kind of an electric feeling here [the latter nods]. Everybody’s excited, the want to learn more, they want to go back and do something about it in their communities.
    Back to Faith: [Indecipherable] at nine o’clock in the morning, we have free wifi, we have video games, Xboxes, Wiis, Dance Dance Revolution on all day.
    Back to the three women.
    Riggs: Ah, what brings you here? To CPAC specifically. [They look at each other]
    Woman on the left: Oh, conservative values, [raises a hand] rock on!
    Back to Faith: [indecipherable] airing live from 9 to 5, we have different speakers and DVD screenings, and booths giving away free dip and dots and free iPods.
    To three new women.
    Riggs: And why are y’all here?
    Woman on left: We’re college Republicans and we’re interested in a conservative movement.
    Woman on right: And I’m also like helping [indecipherable] campaign for [breaks off, looks at the others, grins] I’m not gonna –
    Riggs: Okay, so do you think that the event as a whole is cooler this year, like-
    Faith: Absolutely it’s cooler. I mean, ’cause especially when you dress up all day, you need a place to sit that’s comfy besides those terrible conference chairs, so we have these fabulous black leather couches, which are actually really bouncy if you wanna try them. So that’s the most comfortable place to hang out.
    Back to the original three women.
    Riggs: So I’ve heard that in previous years CPAC is kind of like nerdy-
    Woman in middle: Seriously?
    Woman on right: Ah, like do we look nerdy to you?
    Back to the latest three women, though the one on the right is out of shot:
    Woman on left: Ah the attendance is definitely way up.
    Woman in middle: Well, I wasn’t here last year, but I know they have [indecipherable] [shrugs at the woman on the left].
    Riggs: Huh. Lots of cute boys? Have you seen cute boys?
    Woman on left: We’re not here for boys –
    Woman in middle: – yeah –
    Woman on left: – we’re here for politics.
    Scrolling credits on a black screen, music starts up again:
    ‘Congrats to CPAC for attracting women!
    ‘Credits
    ‘Copyright The Daily Caller
    ‘Produced by Mike Riggs
    ‘Featured music Be Your Own Pet’

  9. Oh wow Chally that was painful. I. Dang. I commend your fortitude.

    Women can’t be wonks, apparently? These are mutually exclusive traits?

    They look like jerks and they are. The scary part is how much legislation in the US comes directly out of CPAC and gets passed into law verbatim. Not so much at the national level but they do a whole lot of state and local work. One of their big things lately has been trying to get cities to force landlords to check renters’ immigration status and not rent to dirty Mexicans “illegals.” Which is itself in violation of federal immigration law but it does a fine job of letting all the Spanish-speaking brown people in town know they aren’t welcome which was the point anyway. It’s the latest version of the Sundown Town.

  10. I’m really sympathetic to that, Jill, for what it’s worth. I just get frustrated because it seems often as an after thought instead of as an important part of the post itself. (Also, you don’t sound defensive to me, you sound like you’re telling us your situation and why you’re doing things.)

    If I may make a suggestion? People are happy to do transcripts, maybe setting up an email list or discussion group like on Google Groups where you ask people who having time/inclination to do a transcript before you put up the post? Then you can put up posts with the transcript attached?

    Thank you.

  11. I don’t know if this has been discussed here before, but Youtube has an easy to use captioning service which is then editable to fix any machine errors. The service was rolled out last year and designed by a deaf google programmer. I believe, though I am not sure, that the text of the closed captioning can also be posted as a separate transcript.

    I originally looked at the comments to see if anyone had made a different point entirely: there is so much coercive flirting on this video! And strange nerd hating. Watching this really cemented my hatred of the word “ladies”

  12. Rebecca: I think it’s great that Youtube has a captioning service. However, captions don’t make video material accessible for deafblind people, or people with ancient tech/bad internet connections, or people for whom video is confusing or loud or distracting or difficult to process in other ways. Real text provides accessibility in a few ways that captioning does not.

  13. That video made me — unexpectedly — sympathetic to the CPAC women. He completely fails to take them seriously.

    I wonder if the asymmetry works both ways — is conservatism unfriendly to women because there aren’t enough women in it? We always assume the causality goes the other way.

    But after all, you could see 70’s feminism as being created by women who participated enthusiastically in civil rights and anti-war movements that didn’t necessarily treat them equally. Women started saying, “Hey, we’ve been helping, but what about us?” If you don’t have enough women conservatives to begin with, you can’t get the same dynamic repeated on the right.

  14. Ha! LOL @ the link to Amanda’s take on this crapola.

    Nicely played, Amanda. I am LOL’ing!

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