CPAC 2026 Debrief: Why I Came & What I Saw

Hey, everyone, Derrick Brose here with the Conscious Resistance Network. And CPAC is over. I'm here in Dallas, Texas, in my hotel room, checking out in about 20 minutes. And I figured I wanted to do just one video before I head back to Mexico. Sort of a debrief for everything that I saw. And first off, I just want to start off by thanking everybody who did donate to my crowdfunding campaign. Truly, I couldn't have done this without your support. And this is why I love being an independent journalist, because I'm only accountable to you guys and to the truth. And. And with your support, we were able to raise $2,500 that went to paying for this hotel, paying for my flight, paying for the ubers back and forth across Dallas, which were like $25 each way. So those add up, as well as making sure I could eat a little bit of food while I was here. And I'm really grateful for that. So thank you to everybody who donated. All of this is for you. So first off, let me answer the question. The title, why I came. You know, some of you know that I am an anarchist, non voting person who doesn't believe in the system and sees that it's rigged and doesn't support either party. So your questions are. Derek, why are you even there? I've seen a few people commenting on Twitter and Facebook like, this is a waste of time. Why are you even bothering? So let me just make it clear. Yes, I am an anarchist. I put on my anarchist hat and I say, screw all this stuff. Politics isn't the answer. Don't trust any of these people. But also, I have another hat. I put on my journalist hat and I'm actually proud to be part of the long line, long tradition of anarchist journalists, people who have been anarchist activists and philosophers and thinkers who've also supplemented their income by being journalists. And so I am both. I am both an anarchist, but also I can be objective and put on my journalist hat and come to events like this and try to talk to people, try to confront politicians, of course, which is one of the reasons I came here, and really try to do honest reporting for you guys. And just so you know, in case you aren't aware, I'm doing this strategically. You know, I come here, yes, again, as an activist, as an anarchist, and as a journalist. My goal is always with my journalism, to use it, whether it's articles, documentaries, podcasts, or interviews and stuff like this, to pull people into my work, help them question the system, and then ideally, lead them towards solutions. So that's why I'm here. So if you don't care, feel free to scroll past, Feel free to wait for the next video. You don't have to comment and tell me, derek, this is pointless. Why are you there? It's really a waste of both of our time. So nevertheless, again, thanks to everybody who has been supportive and following along. And now let's get into a few factors. Cpac. This is my first cpac, if you don't know. It's Conservative Political Action Conference, Political Action Committee. It's by the American Conservative Union. It's been around for 50 years. It has been seen as one of the biggest, if not the biggest conservative events of the last 50 years. And even so in the MAGA era, in the Trump era, where people have, you know, Trump came in 2015, he came in 2016, he's come most years except for, I think, one year he missed in his first presidency and then he didn't show up this year. Nobody really from his higher up, his administration showed up. JD Vance didn't show up. Marco Rubio. There was other people like RFK and Dr. Oz and Jay Bhattacharya and other officials, but no one high up. None of his sons came this year. So this is my first year. But based on what I've seen in past, reporting past videos and talking to people, yes, attendance was down, but was it only in the hundreds? Was there zero people here? No. I know a lot of you are seeing these videos and pictures that are being posted on social media by the mainstream and by independent media saying, look, all the seats are empty. Or look at this old man, he fell asleep. Yeah, that is true, but that's only sort of part of the picture. I also saw completely full rooms. In fact, the room was entirely packed and people standing ovations. Nick Shirley, the young YouTuber who allegedly exposed some fraud, the room was packed for Ted Cruz, the room was packed for RFK Jr and the room was overflowing whenever they had the Crown Prince of Iran, who we're going to talk about Iran, Iran in just a moment because that was a big focus of this. But so there were definitely times when the room was entirely full and overflowing. And in fact, like, again, it seemed like a big chunk of that was Iranians who are part of the diaspora, who are here in the United States or even Canada. I talked to people who said they drove 15 hours just to be there for that. So that was, you know, interesting. But yes, attendance was down compared to past years. It wasn't in the hundreds, I would say at least a thousand people. I've seen some numbers saying somewhere between a thousand to three thousand, but that's not very high compared to other past years or not even to Turning Point USA's America Fest, which I think that that happened last year in December, and, and it's coming up again at the end of this year. And there they reported had 10,000 plus people there. So numbers way down here, it does seem to be like CPAC really isn't the main place. There's a lot of factors in there that I'll leave other people to debate and discuss. I mean, some people of course would say it's the Iranian war, it's people are sick of Trump and he's broken promises. That may be true. Now, of course, this was the die hards of the die hards. It was a mix of young people. There were some young people. They were still, I would say less than half, less than a quarter, mainly older folks, you know, boomers. And it just is what it is. And I also post this on social media. They did a straw poll, which is basically where they, you know, ask people to come take a poll and they're like, you know, they bragged about. And on our poll, everybody who voted had to show their id and they did different things like, do you support Trump's performance? Who do you think should be the next president? By the way, overwhelmingly, it was Marco Rubio at the top and J.D. vance. But according to their straw poll, they said that 85% of attendees supported Israel still and 90% supported the job that Trump has been doing. Now, of course. Did everybody there vote? Who knows? I talked to some people. No, no, we definitely know that everybody didn't vote. I talked to some young people who said they didn't vote. So you have to kind of think about that. If there's 3,000 people in attendance, let's give them that number. And half of them voted. And then these are the numbers they show. And then of course, you have to trust, like if the numbers were much lower, would they actually show that? If the numbers show that Trump has lost a lot of support, would they be willing to show that? Now, of course, when they were in the room and they announced these numbers, the entire room cheered and screamed and everything like that. So I think it's fairly accurate. And I asked on social media, and I'm asking you guys watching this, do you think that that's a fair representation of the overall broader conservative voting public? Now, I'm not talking about just the conservative Republicans who are going to vote, you know, for Republican candidates no matter what, of course, those people are just going to support the party line. But what's important to understand is that this coalition that we're told that Trump built, which I believe some of it, some of it I think is bullshit, it involved independents and libertarians and bitcoiners and maha moms and all sorts of people, many of whom. And anti war activists, many of whom who are now like, look, Trump lied, I don't support him anymore. And so they wouldn't even be the people coming to this event. Not to mention the event's very expensive. Parking's like $30 a day. You know, with these kind of things, like the working class people aren't going to be here because they can't afford to take off for four or five days, fly to Dallas, you know, be at this expensive thing where all the food's expensive and all that kind of stuff. So this is just a representation of the people who could afford to be here and who attended and who chose to vote. But still, I'd love your thoughts on it. So about why I came here again, I was here to try to confront different politicians. I had a whole list of politicians, including everybody from. Let me go ahead and give you my names here. Secretary of Agriculture, Brooke Rollins, the Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi, which, you know, there was no way to get near most of these people, but especially him, NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya, Senator Ted Cruz, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. There was also a list of other people. I mean, I just, I tried to get as many people as possible. And the truth of the matter is I just couldn't get close to them. I mean, with these kind of big ten events, sometimes it's like that. And then if you're following me on social media, I did just post this morning, just a short little couple of minute clip of sort of behind the scenes of what it's like for me when I'm doing this. Because if there are not allotted times to ask questions, there's not press conferences or the speakers aren't coming to mingle with the normies, us regular folk, there's really no chance to get to them. So then what you have to do, what I do is you start to learn the building, okay, where are the entrances, where are the exits, where are they most likely to take people like this out of if they're trying to sneak out without being seen? And that's usually the back entrance, the service entrance, exits, things like that. So I go walk around the building and kind of like, okay, let me look around. Okay, this is where they're going to be coming out of. That's how I confronted Tulsi Gabbard a couple years ago, for example, by knowing where she was going to walk out of the and making sure to be there. But because there was border czar Tom Homan, because there was different officials, like I said, not top officials in Trump's administration, but officials who do have Secret Service protection or at least police protection, there was really just no way for me to get to them. And so, in fact, the only confrontation I was able to do was of former now retiring Border Patrol commander Greg Bovino. That has been posted on my channel already. And then I did briefly question Matt Gaetz about Epstein and he sort of laughed me off. I posted that on Telegram. I will post it elsewhere. It's just like a 30, 45 second clip. But what I decided to shift to once I realized that wasn't going to happen is to start interviewing attendees. And I've, I did release one interview with an Iranian woman, which you guys, I encourage you to see on my channel. And then I did interview three other people, which I will be editing today at the airport and then releasing either today Sunday or tomorrow Monday, so you guys can get a sense of what they thought. And I asked mainly, what do you think about the Iran war? Do you support Israel? And then I also asked like, do you support the Maha movement? And so you'll kind of get to see a little bit of what some people thought. Now let's shift to Iran because as I said, this was one of the big topics of the day. Obviously this is because Trump, as I'm even recording this, Is they're moving 3,500 U.S. troops, more troops towards Iran, where it seems to be like they're planning for, they're planning to invade Iran or at least one of the islands near Iran. And this war is about to expand. And so this has been a big topic. And yes, there were lots of Iranians, Iranian Americans in attendance to come wave their flags. They had rallies inside. They were chanting, you know, they were really making their presence known, making sure the media saw them. And a lot of them were there to support the so called crown prince, the shah's son, one wanting him to return to Iran and to not to be the king, although some people were, they were chanting king, king, you know, over and over. But to be sort of a temporary leader as Iran is transitioned towards democratically representative government of some kind. Right now, the Interesting thing about this is that the. As I've talked about, the. The Crown Prince, his father was installed in 1953 with the help of the US and the UK government, what's known as Operation Ajax. Now, I do think it's more nuanced than I and others have been saying. I'm learning that more and more as I dive deeper into this, and I'll be doing more videos on this soon. But it is a fact that the US and the UK government, the CIA and MI6, helped him rise to power and support him, and that many Iranians did, and some still do believe that he was a puppet of the US Western governments and that he was a dictator and things like that. Now, what is interesting is Iranians, Iran is a big country, and Iranians, just like Americans, just like Canadians, Mexicans, and people all around the world, they have their own thoughts. You know, imagine that they are a complex people with diverse opinions. And so there was a huge crowd. In fact, the majority of people at CPAC were there to support the Shah, to support Reza Pahlavi. And they were, you know, chanting and, you know, crying and just. I mean, it was a huge celebration. And so lots of those people definitely do support his movement. At the same time, there are. There were people that I spoke to, like the woman I released in the interview the other day, who are not. Who are not supportive of him, who generally support the US bombing Iran, but also want the Iranian revolution, what may be coming, to be led by the Iranian people. And so there's. There's multiple views here. So again, you've got some people outside of Iran, the Iranian diaspora, who are in support of the Shah, the Shah's son, and they want him to be sort of the leader. And according to some polls, as much as 30% of Iranians outside of Iran support him. Now, as far as how much support he has in the country, that's almost impossible to know, but it seems to be not a whole lot. And then there are other Iranians, like the woman I spoke to the other day, and one of the women I spoke to, I had a lot of conversations off camera that I didn't record. And these women support Mariam Rajivi, who is. She's a. She's an Iranian dissident who is the president of what they call the National Council of Resistance of Iran, the ncri, which also promotes itself as, like, an organization that is trying to lead the resistance to Iran. So you have two kind of competing groups. You got the people who support the Shah and you got the people who support the nc, NCRI and who support this woman Miriam. And she did come from. She was originally involved in what's known as the mek. And for those of you who've heard of the mek, it's been accused of being a cult by the US Government, by Human Rights Watch and others. And I'll be honest, it sure seems like many of the practices, they do seem cult, like in terms of separating people from their families, really, kind of like intense training sessions there. They appear to be a Marxist group, Communist group, some people will say. And obviously for some people that's automatically like Marxist communists. They're bad. But it's also hard to know the truth, right? I will say there are plenty of reports from Iranians who have left and people who kind of left the group who say, yes, it's very cult like. And there's others who are like, no, it's not a cult, but it's pretty intense. And, you know, I didn't like the way things went. So you got a mix of opinions. And again, this is not to say that all Iranians believe this way. All Iranians believe this way. Things are more nuanced and not black and white like a lot of people want them to be. Nevertheless, Mariam Rajavi was part of the MEK. And then in 1989, she was actually a leader of the MEK with her husband Masood Rajavi. And then in 1989, she basically, from 1989 to 1983, she was secretary General of the group. And then she started to become Iran's interim president of the ncri, the group that she's now in charge of. And at that point, after she was elected to the National Council Resistance of Iran, she stepped back from the MEK and kind of, you know, stopped being involved. But there are a lot of people who basically say the NCRA is the mek. And so some of the Iranians, when I was speaking to one of the women who was in support of the of Maryam and against the Shah, I was talking to her again, just off camera, and she was telling me like, yeah, you know, this is what we think. And I immediately noticed that the other Iranians who were in Port of the Shah, they started staring at us and they started filming. And I told her, I said, I think they're watching you. Like, they don't like us talking right now. And then next thing I know, we're swarmed by some of these Iranians who are like, you know, she's being funded by, by the regime. She's being funded by the current leadership. Don't talk to her. And she just starts filming and she's basically saying, saying, no, they're being funded by, you know, somebody and funded by Israel, you know, because there is, and I will include an article below, there has been some reports that the support for the Shah, the Shah's son, the Crown Prince, is actually being funded in part by Israel. Because even at his speech in cpac, he said, if I'm. If I'm put into power or when I help transition Iran, Iran will be a great friend to Israel. Iran will serve American interests. Which in my mind, I'm like, why does Iran need to serve American interests? Yes, I'm born in the America, in the United States, but I don't think every country needs to serve American interests. But the people, the women that I spoke to is mainly women I spoke to that were supportive of the Shah. They definitely think like, yeah, the US should be supporting Israel. The US should be supporting. I mean, Iran should be supporting Israel. Iran should be supporting the US and so you have both sides, and there's more sides than the resistance to the current regime. Of course there, you know, there's more groups than what I'm saying today, but mainly at cpac, it was the supporters of the Shah and it was the supporters of the NCRI and this Mariam woman, Mariam Rajavi, who were kind of going back and forth. And the supporters of Mariam Rajivi and the NCRI were definitely in the minority, and they were surrounded by a lot of the supporters of the Shah. So this woman got surrounded. All these ladies came over and they're like, don't talk to her. She's being paid. And I said, she said, you guys are being paid. And I was kind of just caught in the middle. But I'm just there again, as a judge, journalists, to just learn and hear opinions. So after I finished talking to the woman who was in support of the ncri, I switched and kind of started talking to some of the ladies who were in support of the Shah. We started talking about Operation Ajax. And it was really interesting because they basically were denying that Operation Ajax happened. They were denying that the Shah was a dictator or that he was repressive to his people. They said that, you know, the country was one of the best times it's ever been, which is true. Iran did grow and modernize in a lot of ways under the Shah. But that's true with a lot of totalitarian regimes. They can do a lot of good things and still be Very repressive of their people. Those things can both coexist. And the interesting thing is these women couldn't really grasp, or at least a couple of women couldn't really grasp what I was saying. Look, I'm not in support of the Iranian government. I'm not telling you I hear what you're saying, all the horrible things your families have gone through, but we can both be against the Iranian government and support your resistance movement and say we don't think the US government should be involved in there. They just, a lot of, some of the women just couldn't like accept that they thought like, no. So, you know, you're just gonna leave us there? You have to, you know, this is like you're leaving Hitler to kill his people and you guys aren't doing anything. And I was trying to explain, look, I'm an anti interventionist. You're not really going to convince me that the US should be sending troops and Americans and money and time and energy over there. I don't think that's, you know, and I also don't think it's going to work out the way you want to. So anyways, before I move on, Mariam Rajabi again, she comes from the mek, she's president of the ncri. She was with her husband, her husband passed away. Now she's seen as like the main leader. She has a 10 point plan. And one of the women that I was speaking to was like look up her ten point plan. Her ten point plan is about abolishing discrimination against women and, and that women will have the freedom to dress how they want. And you know, she was kind of seeing the praises of it, saying that it was a positive thing. And she even pointed me to, there's eight House Resolution 100 which was introduced a couple years ago, expressing support for the Iranian people's desire for a democratic, secular and non nuclear republic of Iran, condemning violations of human rights and state sponsored terrorism by the Iranian government. And I did get exchange emails with some of these women and I said look, please, I want to learn more. Send me your information, I'll send you more information about Operation Ajax and, and let's get to know each other. That's, you know, I'm not claiming again to be an expert that I understand everything about Iran and that I'm, I'm, you know, I'm obviously not from there, I don't have family there. And I even talked to one of the ladies who was in support of the Shah, her 15 year old daughter and I asked her like, how do you feel about this? Like, you're pretty young, you know, do you think you really understand everything? And, you know, not to say young people can't understand complex issues, but she did say that she would. That she would be. That she had been to Iran and that she. When she went there, she was forced to wear a hijab and that she didn't like it and that she wants, you know, she wants there to be more freedom. So it was interesting overall, Like, I basically just got to talk to Iranians in support of the Shah, which were the majority, and Iranians who were not supportive of the Shah. They all oppose the current government, but they accuse each other of being controlled fronts. The people in support of the Shah accused the NCRI and people supporting Mariam Rajavi to basically be part of the Mek cult and representatives of the current regime. She said, you know, it's just the current regime undercover. They're going to get empowered and they're just going to keep things how they are. The other side, the ncri, they accused the supporters of the Shah basically to being funded by Western interest or by Israel. But it's interesting that pretty much all of these groups seem to be in support of Israel for the most part. And of course, there are Iranians who are secular. There are Iranians who are. Who are Muslim. There are Iranians who are Christian. I met some Christian Iranians there. There are Iranians, you know, who don't have anything to do with religion. It is a complex topic, guys. But overall, this was just interesting for me because this became, like, the focal point of a lot of cpac. And it's interesting to see conservatives walking around in an event where a lot of people are speaking Farsi and speaking other languages kind of mixing together. And I only think it's. It's a temporary alliance because Trump is launching war. And the Iranian people, much like the Venezuelans before them, are like, yes, thank you, Trump. Thank you, Bibi. Thank you for saving us. And, oh, man, I wish and I hope and I pray that it will be good for them. I don't have much faith in that. I don't think that what they believe is happening is going to turn out for the good of their people. I worry that it will turn into a civil war and that there will be more conflict, especially if Trump is about to send these troops that we're seeing in. And overall, I just don't think it's the place of the United States to go in there. So I'll have more to say on Iran in future videos, of course. But this was clearly a major topic as you can tell at some point cpac. And so I think that's where I'm gonna end it today guys. I do have, as I said, a couple more videos, man on the street style interviews, talking to attendees, including about Iran and other things. Stay tuned for those, those videos. Thank you again to everybody who has supported me and who has funded this trip. I'm excited to get back home and continue my work. Stay tuned for more videos in the coming days and weeks guys. And if you like what I have done here, even though I didn't get to confront all the people I wanted to please support my work by going to the consciousresistance.com invest. You can support me at Buy Me a Coffee. You can support me on Substack, you can, you know, send me money other ways. There's all sorts of ways to support and of course the best thing to do is just share my content. Tell your friends that you found somebody who is an independent journalist who tries as much as possible to be nonpartisan and unbiased and objective and stick to the truth and bring you the complicated, complex, nuanced facts as they are. So thank you guys so much for listening. Until next time. Remember, you are powerful, you are beautiful and you are free. Peace.