Beware crank-right ‘Podturf,’ incredible shrinking CPAC and other commentary

War desk: Beware Crank-Right ‘Podturf’

“Astroturf” — advocates who pretend to have grassroots support — might be the best term for “a small circle of podcasters on the right who condemn President Trump’s strikes on Iran yet claim to speak for all ‘MAGA,’ ” thunders The Wall Street Journal’s Kimberley A. Strassel. “All evidence shows they remain a tiny minority,” but “Democrats and their media allies want you to believe” this bunch of “outliers” is representative. “The nation is being podturfed.” The risk? Voters, congressional Republicans or even the White House will fall for “the podturf ruse,” mistaking the views of the few for those of the many. Trump “and his proxies need to do a far better job” stressing “the importance of the strikes, the successes and the end game.” 

From the left: Incredible Shrinking CPAC

CPAC, the Conservative Political Action Conference, has become a “lackluster affair,” reports Mother Jones’ Stephanie Mencimer. It “has strayed far from its roots as a conservative policy confab and increasingly served as a platform for some of the GOP’s most morally compromised representatives,” “a sorry lot of wannabes and has-beens,” including “catastrophically failed Trump attorney general nominee Matt Gaetz” and “minor reality TV star” Todd Chrisley. Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton is “an underwhelming candidate to fill a speaking slot once” filled by President Ronald Reagan. “It can’t help the convention’s appeal” that CPAC Chairman Matt “Schlapp is its MC”; given how he in 2024 “settled a sexual misconduct lawsuit, reportedly for almost $500,000, filed by a man . . . who had accused Schlapp of groping him.” Is Schlapp worth the $830,000 the group paid in “in tax year 2023, according to the group’s most recent IRS 990 form”?

Liberal: Class Warfare Is a Loser

“Whether they march to the MAGA drumbeat or roost on the progressive left, populists share a need for scapegoats,” grumbles Will Marshall at The Hill. “Trump’s populist elixir is more potent” than his progressive imitators’ “because it fuses working Americans’ cultural and economic grievances.” Working-class voters are telling pollsters “that they interpret Democrats’ attacks on wealth as punishing hard work and success,” yet progressives still insist “that Democrats can only reach non-college voters by amping up the volume on class warfare.” They wrongly assume some “hidden majority of Americans” is “eager to import European-style social democracy.” Rather than scapegoat billionaires, Dems should be “convincing voters they have a serious plan to spur economic growth and lift worker productivity.” A growing economy is a “precondition for raising living standards and unlocking upward mobility for all working Americans.”

Chicago view: Justice System Failed Sheridan

The murder of college student Sheridan Gorman allegedly by an illegal alien has angered advocates for “stronger enforcement of the nation’s immigration laws,” note the editors of the Chicago Tribune, but that’s not the only issue. Jose Medina entered the country in May 2023, and “a month later, he was arrested on a misdemeanor charge of shoplifting.” His failure to appear in court prompted the issuing of a warrant for his arrest; “why was the arrest warrant for Medina not enforced for the past two-plus years?” Law enforcement must “determine how Medina fell through the cracks” to reassure the public that “our system of justice will do everything possible to keep them safe.”

Venture capitalist: Fund Creativity in Sciences

Federal R&D funding is “more than 30 times what it was in 1956,” and “more scientists are trained and more papers published than ever,” yet “revolutionary breakthroughs are becoming rarer,” warns Michael Gibson at City Journal. Happily, “American science may soon get a lot more exciting” with the appointment of “Silicon Valley financier Jim O’Neill as director of the National Science Foundation.” America “has lost sight of what it takes to produce new inventions and discoveries,” leading grant-makers to “misjudge talent.” The NSF’s goal “should be to buy discoveries, not prestige.” America has “the money and the talent”; applying the lessons of tech financing can make the NSF “the fire for American ingenuity instead of being a steward of stagnation.”

— Compiled by The Post Editorial Board