Okay, I don’t want to go out on a limb here, but I do detect a few signs of intelligence on the “right”, largely prompted by disgust over Trump’s hysterical reaction to his defeat and, even more, his clear willingness to overturn the results of the election by having state legislatures appoint their own electors in defiance of the election’s actual outcome. The National Review’s Rich Lowry is clearly, well, dismayed by the Donald’s clear lack of interest in, you know, democracy (“Trump’s Ugly Exit”) and “the Editors”, whomever they may be, reached a similar conclusion (“Trump’s Disgraceful Gambit”):
Getting nowhere in court, the White House appears to be shifting to a political strategy based on blocking the certification of results and getting state legislatures to appoint Trump electors in states Trump lost. This is a profoundly undemocratic gambit that, if it were to enjoy any success, would precipitate a major constitutional crisis.
For his part, Kevin Williamson has smartened up to the point that he realizes the whole Republican Party is crap:
And what we are seeing now, in the twilight of Trump’s kookery, is the merger of QAnon, the Republican Party, and the large part of the conservative movement that earns its bread by peddling miracle veggie pills to gullible elderly people on the radio. When I first starting writing about QAnon, some conservatives scoffed that it wasn’t a significant phenomenon, that it had no real influence on the Republican Party or conservative politics. That is obviously untrue. Rather than ask whether conspiracy kookery is relevant to Republican politics at this moment, it would be better to ask if there is anything else to Republican politics at this moment. And maybe there is, but not much.
This raises some uncomfortable questions for conservatives. One of those questions is: How long are we going to keep pretending that this madness isn’t madness? Another is: How long will we continue to pretend that what’s being broadcast by Fox News and talk radio is political commentary rather than the most shameful, irresponsible, and unpatriotic kind of sycophantic for-profit propaganda?
Kevin is also so far off the reservation as to claim that “sovereignty” is a bad thing. Yeah, that’s right. The sacred right of America to kick butt around the world has to give way to, well, sharing! Fortunately, Kevin is still down with hanging women who get abortions.
Well, lest you think the world’s grown honest, rest assured that Tucker Carlson, for one, is not falling for this shit. It’s true that Tucker publicly gagged on Sidney Powell, but a week later he’s assuring us that he knows the election was “rigged”, because Google controls America!.
The 2020 presidential election was not fair, and no honest person would claim that it was. The system was rigged against one candidate and in favor of another, and not in ways that were hidden from view.
… [A]bove all, Democrats harnessed the power of Big Tech to win this election. Virtually all news and all information in the English-speaking world travels through a single company, Google. A huge percentage of our political debates take place on Facebook and Twitter. If you use technology to censor the ideas that people are allowed to express online, ultimately, you control how the population votes. And that's exactly what they did. They rigged the election in front of all of us and nobody did anything about it.
I’m guessing there are a whole lot more Tuckers than Kevins out there in Red America. And I can only hope that Joe Biden’s middle name is “Lucky”.
Afterwords
There was a time when Kevin Williamson was afraid of Tucker Carlson, first sneering at the size of his audience (“0.8 percent of Americans”) and “explaining” afterwards that he meant that this 0.8 percent was the 0.8 percent of Americans who are totally cool! (See here in the “Afterwords”.)
