Swamp Monsters by Matt Dixon

Author:Matt Dixon [DIXON, MATT]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Published: 2024-01-03T00:00:00+00:00

The conference area of the Rosen Shingle Creek was packed with conservatives from across the country.

It was February of 2022, and they were gathering for the Conservative Political Action Conference, or CPAC, which has made Florida a common right-wing stop in recent years. The hotel was filled with conservative media outlets and stars of the far-right movement, including Matt Gaetz, Kari Lake, and Marjorie Taylor Greene, who were milling around with adoring grassroots activists. Panel discussions such as “Lock Downs and Mandates: Now You Understand Why We Have a Second Amendment” dotted an agenda that catered to the increasingly violent instincts of a Republican base that felt its way of life was slipping away—in part because groups like CPAC told them it was.

Any snapshot of CPAC’s 2022 Orlando event would have given the impression that it was Trump’s Republican base to lose, but scattered throughout were signs of insurgency. These included numerous MAKE AMERICA FLORIDA hats and T-shirts, which became popular as DeSantis’s star rose during the pandemic and—though you couldn’t tell from a glance—voters on the cusp of casting aside their Trump allegiance for the governor heralded him as a bright light in an era of supposedly decreasing freedoms.

“I just moved here from California six months ago, and Governor DeSantis is a big reason why I did it,” said Liem Bui, who was among the people sporting DeSantis swag at the packed CPAC event. “About forty years ago, I escaped Vietnam looking for freedom. He has created a heaven on earth for freedom. It’s why I escaped California for here.”

Trump was the scheduled keynote speaker and easily won the event’s 2024 straw poll, pulling in 59 percent of the vote compared to DeSantis’s second-place 28 percent. But at times it felt like the governor, not the ex-president, was the main draw. Because Trump had secured the keynote spot, though, this didn’t draw his ire in the moment, but there was a realization among some people that the reaction to DeSantis at the event was one to keep an eye on: although DeSantis had been given a daytime speaking slot (not exactly prime time), he’d still drawn one of the biggest audiences and given one of the most applause-filled speeches of the weekend.

“CPAC, let me welcome you to the freest state in these United States,” DeSantis said to massive cheers as he opened his twenty-minute speech.

The speech itself wasn’t particularly polished, stringing together DeSantis’s go-to talking points as if for a greatest hits album, but the robotic recitation didn’t much matter. Those in attendance ate up every word, responding energetically each time DeSantis transitioned from one red-meat issue to the next. There were pandemic-era favorites such as the “biomedical security state” and an insistence that Florida had resisted a transformation into some “Faucian dystopia,” but the overarching theme was that the state was on the vanguard of a culture war—and DeSantis needed faithful soldiers to help with the fight.

“We need people all over the country to be willing to put

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