The Conservative Political Action Conference, a multiday annual event held just outside Washington that brings together conservative activists and students from around the country, has always been more than the political circus it’s often portrayed as in the press. Certainly, one can find fringe political groups and bizarre objets d’art among the tables in the Gaylord Resort’s exhibition hall each year. Nevertheless, the largest presences at the event are the very groups that form the heart of the conservative mainstream, such as the Heritage Foundation and the National Rifle Association. Typically, they’re joined by a roster of fairly well-known Republican politicians who always appear on the bill.

Part of the conference’s significance is that it’s a place where figures from the outer edges and the inner circles of the conservative movement publicly intersect, offering onlookers a glimpse at where the right is heading as a movement. In the mid-2010s, one of CPAC’s politically outré regulars was, of course, Donald Trump. He has claimed over the course of his presidency that it was his reception at the conference and his conversations with Matt Schlapp—chairman of the American Conservative Union, which organizes the event—that convinced him to run in 2016. His rapturously received return this weekend felt like a true kickoff to his reelection bid. “I believe that this year’s CPAC,” Schlapp said in a speech early in the conference, “is really the start of the presidential campaign.”

There were, however, three days of programming before Trump arrived Saturday to take center stage. The conference’s theme this year was “America vs. Socialism,” and just about every event and panel referenced the rise of the Democratic left in one way or another. The right’s conception of that Democratic left remains ludicrously expansive. After ominously narrated black-and-white footage of the regimes of Stalin, Mao, and Hitler, an eight-minute introductory video played for attendees turned to hits against not only Bernie Sanders—whose honeymoon in Moscow and qualified praise for the policies of figures like Fidel Castro were mentioned throughout the conference—but also the other Democratic candidates, including Pete Buttigieg and Michael Bloomberg. Bloomberg, in fact, seemed to take up as much or more time as Sanders in the video, which took aim at his stop-and-frisk policies and the allegations of gender discrimination and sexual misconduct levied at him and his company. This was all evidence, the video insisted, of the “bigotry” and “sexism” innate to socialist ideologies. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, and antifa also made obligatory cameos.

The remarks from most of the conference’s speakers were about as predictable. In a panel titled “Prescription for Failure: The Ills of Socialized Medicine,” there were familiar lines about the rationing of care and long wait times in Canada that have long served as brickbats against Medicare for All. A variety of speeches drew a contrast between the successes of market economics and the poverty of communist regimes. The most creative speech in this vein came from congressman and former baseball player Roger Williams, who was speaking on a bill titled “Socialism: Wrecker of Nations and Destroyer of Societies.”

“Today, I’ve decided to create two all-star teams,” he said. “One is the all-socialist team—we’re going to call them the Comrades. And the other is the all-capitalist team—we’re going to call them the Patriots. On the socialist Comrades all-star team, you will recognize their players: Joseph Stalin. Karl Marx. Hugo Chavez. Vladimir Lenin and Fidel Castro. They’re all proponents of socialism, who made promises they could never, ever keep. They left men, women, and children starving in the streets while stuffing their own pockets with other people’s money.”