During a week when the top-rated prime-time show on the country's leading conservative cable news network broadcast propaganda from the stringently anti-liberal government in Hungary, the Republican Party's most outspoken right-wing populists held a fundraiser in the backyard of the GOP's leading critic of the party's direction.
The $2,000/couple fundraiser — hosted by Peter and Stephanie Lamelas, Dan and Carleen Brophy, and Jay and Karen Kemmerer, owners of Jackson Hole Mountain Resort — featured conservative rabblerousers U.S. House Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene and Jim Jordan, and former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows.
That this group of Republicans would hold a fundraiser to enhance the power of the faction of the party most inclined to follow the former president down conspiratorial rabbit holes of self-serving mendacity is hardly surprising. What's a little audacious is that they did it in the home state of Liz Cheney, the member of the House GOP who's been this faction's most uncompromising, vociferous critic.
Cheney has antagonized many in her party by refusing to "move on" from the Jan. 6 insurrection. First she voted to impeach the former president for his role in inciting that day's events. More recently, she agreed to serve on the House select committee investigating the deadly attack on the U.S. Capitol after Jordan and his colleague Indiana Rep. Jim Banks were barred from serving by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, helping to keep the committee bipartisan. And in between these events, she's been a constant gadfly, speaking out nearly every day about ominous, anti-democratic trends in her party.
This makes Cheney quite popular in the dwindling ranks of Never Trump Republicans as well as among the mainstream media's many centrist liberals. But Cheney's stands have also left her politically vulnerable in her home state, where she is likely to face a potent primary challenge from the right in 2022.
In holding a big-ticket fundraiser in Cheney's home state, the faction of the GOP aiming to take her down has fired its first round of high-powered artillery in her direction.