Sen. Ted Cruz speaks at CPAC on Friday. | Joe Raedle/Getty Images

CPAC organizers begged attendees to wear masks — and got booed.

One of the most enduring clips from the 2020 Conservative Political Action Conference was Mick Mulvaney dismissing the coronavirus pandemic as a media-driven “attempt to bring down the president.” More than 500,000 deaths and a year later, the first two full days of CPAC 2021 in Orlando, Florida, illustrated how little conservatives have learned.

Throughout the day on Friday, speakers characterized the coronavirus — which continues to claim more than 2,000 lives each day in the US — as something that only liberal wimps worry about or, more nefariously, as little more than a pretext Democratic public officials have used to shut down businesses and schools.

This type of rhetoric might seem absurd to people who take science