CPAC straw poll smashes media narrative of divided conservative movement
Source: The Washington Times stories: Politics · Bias: Center Right
Summary
The media narrative saying that activists at the Conservative Political Action Conference were divided was shattered following the release of the confab's annual straw poll Saturday.
CPAC straw poll smashes media narrative of divided conservative movement
Center Right
The media narrative saying that activists at the Conservative Political Action Conference were divided was shattered following the release of the confab's annual straw poll Saturday.
Notorious CNN host Abby Phillip's efforts to defend communist New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani's demand for air conditioning went sideways when one of her guests caught her in a huge hypocrisy.
The post Conservative Catches CNN Host Abby Phillip in a Glaring Hypocrisy as She Defends Communist NYC Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s Absurd Demand on Air Conditioning (Video) appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.
A conservative writer scolded Democrats on Thursday for not focusing on President Donald Trump’s unprecedented corruption in the months leading up to the November mid-terms.“For all intents and purposes, nobody cares,” The Dispatch’s Nick Catoggio wrote. He described Trump’s blatant profiteering from being in office, which is without any analogous example in modern American history. Agreeing with a source in the Senate who said that the indifference to Trump’s corruption means “we’re just screwed,” he argued that “any explanation of why we’re screwed begins with the promiscuous civic delinquency of the American right, but we’ve been over that many times and don’t need to belabor it here.”He denounced Republicans who give Trump a pass on his grift by saying that “depending upon what sort of Republican you are, you’re either an enthusiastic member of a fascist personality cult, a brain-damaged hyperpartisan willing to excuse anything to keep the left out of power, or so embarrassed by where Trumpism has led that it’s easier psychologically to pretend its abuses aren’t happening than to confront them.”Yet in addition to Trump’s own party, Catoggio criticized Democrats — especially those on the left — since “few on the left seem to care very much about the president’s corruption either.” Instead they seem more interested in opposing Israel and trying to purge the party of its centrist leaders.He adds that this is a great missed political opportunity.“If ever there were a moment when you might expect anger at Trump’s financial corruption to break big among voters, this is it,” Catoggio said. “In the middle of an affordability crisis, with huge numbers of Americans exasperated by the cost of living, evidence that the president is profiting lasciviously from his office is everywhere you look.” His financial disclosure forms reveal that he earned $2.2 billion in 2025, almost quadrupling his income from 2024, of which roughly $1.4 billion “came from businesses related to cryptocurrency, an industry his administration regulates (sort of?) and for which he’s a key policymaker.”He added, “Trump did suspiciously well in 2025 with conventional securities, too. At least three times last year, he purchased shares of Nvidia shortly before major announcements that boosted the company’s value. He also made hundreds of stock purchases the day before announcing that he was ‘pausing’ his ‘Liberation Day’ tariffs, which sent markets soaring. All told, according to the Financial Times, he engaged in more than 22,000 stock transactions during his first 11 months back in office. Over four years as president, Joe Biden engaged in 13.”Refraining from discussing Trump’s conflicts of interest, “petty graft like kickbacks” and selling pardons, “we’d be here all day.” The bottom line is that, as presidential historian Douglas Brinkely told NBC News, “What strikes me as remarkable is how many pies Trump has his fingers in. There is no precedent to compare it with. No president in the 20th or 21st century has had something that’s vaguely comparable.”Instead of exploiting this opportunity to win elections on a populist theme, Catoggio suggested that left-wing populists are relatively indifferent to those issues compared with others that rile up their base. By doing this, though, they are normalizing Trump’s unprecedented corruption and making it easier for both him and future perpetrators to get away with it.Indeed, Catoggio said Democrats’ failure to adequately bring up and emphasize Trump’s corruption has made it easier for Republicans to obscure that what Trump is doing far and away exceeds the actions of any of his predecessors.“Someone should run a poll asking whether corruption was worse under the last two Democratic administrations or under the criminal syndicate that runs the government now,” Catoggio said. “I’ll be surprised if opinion deviates wildly from the usual party lines. That’s the sort of ignorance and moronic tribalism that a Democratic strategist looking to galvanize voters this fall would be banging his or head against by flogging the issue of Trump’s unethical behavior.”If this attitude continues into the 2028 election, it could be disastrous — and Catoggio suspects that is exactly what will happen.“Some left-wing strategists will ask themselves this: If attempting a coup wasn’t corrupt enough to stop Americans from reelecting Trump himself in 2024, why would the president’s insider trading and crypto scams dissuade them from reelecting some entirely different Republican in 2028?” Catoggio wrote. “If voters were willing once before to lay aside all ethical considerations about national leadership in order to vote their wallets, why wouldn’t they do so again?”He concluded, “‘We’re just screwed’ is anathema to anyone who cares about politics, an endeavor based on the devout conviction that we’re not screwed as long as the faction one supports gets to be in charge.
The Supreme Court has previously been accused of having a far right ideology, engaging in judicial activism rather than strict constructionism and moving to empower President Donald Trump even at the expense of the Constitution.“In the wake of Slaughter, presidents now hold the keys to the kingdom,” wrote Ryan J. Owens, a political science professor and director of the Institute for Governance and Civics at Florida State University, for The Dispatch on Thursday. Owens was referring to the Supreme Court case of Trump v. Slaughter, which overturned a 1935 case holding that presidents could not fire commissioners of independent agencies except for cause. By allowing Trump to fire a Federal Trade Commissioner, Rebecca Kelly Slaughter, simply because she is a Democrat, the majority of justices brushed aside concerns that this would allow civic and non-partisan institutions to be manipulated for political ends.Owens argues that the Supreme Court was correct to make it possible for presidents to effectively implement their agenda so long as voters can remove that president. Yet he also argued that this is not in itself enough to help America.“If the president can remove agency officials at will and Congress continues to delegate substantial authority to the executive, the president will have become more powerful than the Framers possibly imagined,” Owens wrote. “The Supreme Court must now finish the job. Revive the nondelegation doctrine. Make Congress legislate again.”He then quoted a Trump-appointed judge, Justice Neil Gorsuch, who suggested in his decision that it might be time “to reinvigorate the intelligible principle doctrine and recognize that Congress cannot delegate its legislative authority.” Agreeing with this principle, Owens argued that “the court’s Slaughter opinion hints at such. Somewhat surprisingly (and unnecessarily), the majority opinion positively referenced A.L.A. Schechter Poultry Corp. v. U.S. (1935), the last case in which the court struck down a law for violating the nondelegation doctrine. The Slaughter opinion further called the Federal Trade Commission Act’s delegation ‘startingly abstract.’ This sounds an awful lot like a formalist court ready to revive the nondelegation doctrine now that the president’s removal power is back in its rightful constitutional place.”Owens continued that “constitutional formalists and liberals should hope the Supreme Court revives the doctrine—formalists, because it would return legislating to Congress where it belongs, and liberals because they fear an empowered Trump.” He then concluded that, while he believes the Slaughter decision corrected an earlier case with which he disagreed, he hopes “it follows this great ruling with another.”
Conservative commentator John Podhoretz called a pastor "actively evil" for expressing concerns about his interracial family while the future of birthright citizenship was still uncertain.Right-wing pastor Joel Webbon posted the concerns on June 29 on X alongside a photo of his multiracial family, which includes a Black daughter."Because of an interracial family, my grandchildren may not get to have a country," Webbon wrote. "Adopting children of another race/nationality is biblically permissible, and in some cases, may be even commendable. The real problem is that women make great mothers, not civil magistrates."He posted the day before the U.S. Supreme Court upheld birthright citizenship in a 6-3 ruling, with Justice Amy Coney Barrett, who has also adopted Black children, casting one of the deciding votes.After the court upheld birthright citizenship, Podhoretz lashed out."Wow. You are actively evil, and the fact that you minister to a flock is a tragedy for your community and all of humankind," he wrote on X."What's crazy is that this is obviously extremely racist but it's also still euphemism," The Atlantic staff writer Adam Serwer wrote on Bluesky. "What he means is if he ever has to see someone who isn't white he 'doesn't have a country,' it is not about rights or citizenship but race purity which even edgelords are still queasy about expressing directly.""…Their model of 'rights' is 'we are oppressed when denied the right to be a racial overclass,'" he continued.Webbon, who hosts the Right Response Ministries podcast, has previously argued that interracial marriage falls outside God's "normative design."
