Conservatives Have a New Target—One of Their Own

Tucker Carlson made quite a few enemies this week after questioning a conspiracy theory advanced by one of President Trump's lawyers, the New York Times reports. On Thursday, the Fox News host addressed Sidney Powell's allegation that a leftist cabal—fueled by "communist money" from "Venezuela, Cuba, and likely China"—had hacked voting machines and stolen millions of votes from Trump. "What Powell was describing would amount to the single greatest crime in American history," Carlson said in a 10-minute monologue. "Millions of votes stolen in a day. Democracy destroyed. The end of our centuries-old system of government." But when he sent her "polite requests" for evidence, he said, "she got angry and told us to stop contacting her."

Pro-Trump conservatives swiftly responded. "How quickly we turn on our own," tweeted Bo Snerdley, producer of the Rush Limbaugh Show. "Where is the 'evidence' the election was fair?" Among other reactions, podcast host Roosh Valizadeh tweeted that "as long as Tucker Carlson works for Fox News, he can't be fully trusted." Meanwhile, conservative networks like Newsmax and OAN are letting Trump supporters trumpet theories of election fraud, no matter how vast; one OAN personality, for example, said the real US election results "were found on a computer server that was seized by the US military" in Germany, per the Washington Post. Which leaves Carlson where? "We did not dismiss" Powell's theory, he assured viewers. "We don't dismiss anything anymore. ... We literally do UFO segments." (More Tucker Carlson stories.)