Conservative columnist Mona Charen, who was loudly booed at the Conservative Political Action Committee (CPAC) Conference over the weekend and had to leave the event under guard after criticizing fellow attendees for hypocrisy on women's issues, wrote an opinion piece in The New York Times on Sunday saying there is "nothing more freeing than telling the truth."
She stressed that this "must be done, again and again, by those of us who refuse to be absorbed into this brainless, sinister, clownish thing called Trumpism, by those of us who refuse to overlook the fools, frauds and fascists attempting to glide along in his slipstream into respectability."
Charen, a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center who had previously worked for President Ronald Reagan and first lady Nancy Reagan, as well as New York Rep. Jack Kemp, questioned how conservative women can "hope to have any credibility on the subject of sexual harassment or relations between the sexes when they excuse the behavior of President Trump? And how can we participate in any conversation about sexual ethics when the Republican president and the Republican Party backed a man [Roy Moore] credibly accused of child molestation for the United States Senate?"
Charen explained that, as a known conservative critic of Trump, she was surprised to be invited to speak at the conference and considered declining but decided to give the address "for the sake of every person who has watched this spectacle of mendacity in disbelief and misery for the past two years."
She wrote that "For traditional conservatives, the past two years have felt like a Twilight Zone episode. Politicians, activists and intellectuals have succumbed with numbing regularity, betraying every principle they once claimed to uphold."
But she said she had to give the speech, because "too many of us have given up the fight. We've let disgust and dismay lead us to withdraw while bad actors take control of the direction of our movement."
She also slammed CPAC for inviting demagogues like Sheriff David Clarke, Jr., and Marion Maréchal-Le Pen, granddaughter of Jean-Marie Le Pen who has endorsed his "Holocaust-denying, anti-Semitic and racist" attitudes.