Anti-Muslim Conspiracy Theorist Is Back At CPAC After Years Of Drama

Frank Gaffney is back at the Conservative Political Action Conference that for a time shunned his extremist views.

Gaffney, the founder for the Center For Security Policy, led a panel Thursday titled “Countering the Global Jihad” where he invited some of Europe’s most notorious anti-Muslim voices to weigh in on how the Western world should be combatting the perceived threat of Islam.

Gaffney was once barred from CPAC. As former CPAC Chairman David Keene told ThinkProgress in 2011, Gaffney had “become personally and tiresomely obsessed with his weird belief that anyone who doesn’t agree with him on everything all the time or treat him with the respect and deference he believes is his due, must be either ignorant of the dangers we face or, in extreme case, dupes of the nation’s enemies.”

Gaffney has made repeated claims that anti-tax activist and ACU board member Grover Norquist is a peddler of Muslim extremism. In 2014, while he was still on the outs with CPAC, the Huffington Post reported Gaffney launched an effort to bar Norquist and fellow ACU board member Suhail Khan from participating in the conference. But that was just one one instance in a years-long effort by Gaffney to block Norquist from CPAC.

Gaffney wrote that they “have for years been running influence operations against conservatives on behalf of the Muslim Brotherhood and other Islamist causes.”

Calls to Norquist, Gaffney and CPAC organizers about why Gaffney was back at the conference this year were not immediately returned.