Cockburn

If you lay down with dogs you get fleas. If you make your bed with demented conspiracy theorists, you become mentally ill. This is the unfortunate position that certain sections of the American right have found themselves in following the presidential election last year. Lots of Americans had — and still have — suspicions about the massive surge in mail-in voting in November. It’s hard to blame them. The 2020 election was a very strange one on any number of fronts. But no sane person can possibly now deny that the Trump campaign, in its attempts to prove the election a fraud, engaged in and with some serious charlatanry.

'A lie will gallop halfway round the world before the truth has time to pull its breeches on.’ So said Cordell Hull, President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s secretary of state, long before the internet. Now we live in the virtual age. What’s true is barely relevant. No sooner has a man shot 10 people dead and been taken into custody than his suspected motives are shoved into the great culture-war grinder and splatted out of a million social media accounts. So we saw this week with the arrest of Ahmed Al Aliwi Alissa, who was presumed white as quickly as he was guilty after pictures of his arrest yesterday in Boulder, Colorado circulated online. Alissa made the mistake of looking a bit pale in the grainy images.

'Tucker Carlson is the new Donald Trump.' So said CNN’s Brian Stelter on his Sunday program, Reliable Sources. Stelter was apparently handed his own TV show based on the principle that at least one CNN host ought to resemble the network’s target audience. Nevertheless, he is correct. Progressivism needs Tucker to be Trump, and so for the moment, he is. To work in cable in the age of Donald Trump was to live life on easy mode. For years, channels tried desperately to hook viewers with endless updates on missing white women, murdered white women or murdering white women. Suddenly, with Trump, none of that was needed. Every day brought a fresh outrage, a new ridiculous statement or tweet or national policy. The news cycle shrank from a week to a day to mere hours in some cases.

The Conservative Political Action Conference is in full swing. The ACU has upped sticks and thrown its annual shindig in Orlando rather than its usual home in National Harbor, Maryland. Former president Donald Trump is to give his first speech since leaving office tomorrow and the leading lights of the Republican party — Ron DeSantis, Kristi Noem, Ted Cruz, Mike Pompeo — have been making their cases to be 2024 nominee (or Trump’s VP) on the main stage. But you know all that. You’ve seen it on Twitter. That’s not what you read Cockburn for. You want to hear about the cocktails, the ruckus, the maskless flirting, all the unbridled diesel-strength freedom the great state of Florida has to offer.

What will the conservative movement look like post-Trump? Establishment Republicans seem eager to shake former President Donald Trump's influence on the party and the new right would like him to be a kingmaker for years to come. But while pundits opine and politicians dream, three young conservatives are building. American Moment, a new nonprofit organization founded by Saurabh Sharma, Nick Solheim and Jake Mercier launched Wednesday. The organization is dedicated to reshaping the political class to reflect populist priorities. Sharma is the former Chairman of Young Conservatives of Texas, Solheim the founder of The Wallace Institute for Arctic Security and Mercier an independent writer and editor.

Why is Neera Tanden, Joe Biden's nominee to head up the Office of Management and Budgets, stumbling where his other cabinet picks have sailed through confirmation? The senators who say they won't vote for her see her as an obstruction to Biden's efforts to govern in a bipartisan manner. 'Neera Tanden has neither the experience nor the temperament to lead this critical agency,' Sen. Susan Collins of Maine said yesterday. 'Her past actions have demonstrated exactly the kind of animosity that President Biden has pledged to transcend.