A daily roundup of the biggest stories in right-wing media.
In National Review Tuesday, Dennis Prager urged Never Trump conservatives to fall in line behind the president:
I have concluded that there are a few reasons that explain conservatives who were Never-Trumpers during the election, and who remain anti-Trump today.
The first and, by far, the greatest reason is this: They do not believe that America is engaged in a civil war, with the survival of America as we know it at stake.
While they strongly differ with the Left, they do not regard the left–right battle as an existential battle for preserving our nation. On the other hand, I, and other conservative Trump supporters, do.
Prager went on to write that the election of Hillary Clinton would have “doomed” America. “That’s it, in a nutshell,” he wrote. “Many conservatives, including me, believe that it would have been close to over for America as America if the Republican candidate, who happened to be a flawed man named Donald Trump, had not won.”
National Review’s Jonah Goldberg penned a response to Prager’s column. “Even figuratively, the idea that conservatives should operate like loyal troops to a political leader, is fraught with intellectual, philosophical, and historical problems,” he wrote. “I’m not going to try to psychoanalyze Dennis’s motivations here. But I will say that this essay reads more like an effort to affirm what a talk-radio audience wants to hear than a good-faith effort to understand and persuade conservatives that he claims to admire.”
On Twitter, the New York Times’ Ross Douthat argued that Trump’s election rendered Prager’s case moot:
In other news:
Both RedState and the Daily Caller published posts highlighting Trump’s seeming reversal on the validity of anonymous sources following a Tuesday morning tweet of a Fox story on Jared Kushner that quoted one. “Personally, I don’t think Trump thinks far enough ahead to understand how he contradicts himself or those he sends out to defend his positions,” RedState’s Susan Wright wrote.
Breitbart ran an “exclusive” on former Trump adviser Carter Page’s request to the House Select Committee on Intelligence for an investigation into “the possibility of ‘collusion’ between Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign and members of the Obama administration in perpetuating the unsubstantiated narrative about Donald Trump and Russia.”:
Speaking to Breitbart News on Tuesday, Page stated, “Last year’s collusion between the Clinton campaign and the Obama administration whose leader endorsed her was so blatant, extensive and obvious that it might be difficult for Congressional and law enforcement investigators to know where to even begin.”
In his Tuesday letter to Conaway and Schiff, Page offered to testify in an open hearing. He charged “serious mismanagement of Obama Administration appointees assigned to the U.S. Intelligence Community” to investigate alleged Russian interference in the latest presidential election.
A number of conservative media personalities on Twitter slammed comedian Kathy Griffin for a recent photoshoot featuring the bloodied, severed head of President Trump. “Many people were quick to point out the double standard at what would have happened if a conservative had been pictured clutching the bloody head of a Democratic president,” Townhall’s Christine Rousselle wrote.
Alt-right personality and pizzagate theorist Mike Cernovich, author of Gorilla Mindset: How to Control Your Thoughts and Emotions and Live Life on Your Terms, speculated that Griffin was “satanic.”
