Matt Drudge has run the most read conservative website in the country for years, but he almost never tweets. This morning, even he was moved to sink the boot into failed Alabama Senate candidate, Roy Moore.

After leading his page of links with the phrase “BANNON BUSTED”, he opined on the president’s favorite platform, “Luther Strange would have won in a landslide... Just too much crazy in nerve racking times. There IS a limit!”

Pundits defending Roy Moore: do you really want to go down with this ship? Read more

He caught the mood that began to settle on conservative media late last night after it was announced that deep red Alabama had elected a Democrat for the first time in a quarter century. There were excuses, there were what-ifs, and above all there was scapegoating. In particular, Steve Bannon, who had promoted Moore, came under heavy fire, and not just from those conservatives who have always resented his influence. Fox News and the Daily Caller were among the outlets who seemed keen to throw Bannon under the bus. The president also suffered the blame – the New York Times’s Ross Douthat gloomily wrote that the repudiation in the Jones victory was “foreshadowing a larger repudiation soon to come”.

On the populist side of conservative media, there was a desire to once again blame establishment conservatives for the right’s misfortunes. It doesn’t make much sense, but why stop now?

Publication: Infowars

Author: Paul Joseph Watson, Alex Jones’s most loyal and long-suffering sidekick, is pushed out front to try to transform Moore’s defeat into something other than an utter humiliation for the site, and his boss.

Why you should read it: Alex Jones is a Trump shill, which means, naturally, that he shilled for Roy Moore as well. Despite his obsession with political and celebrity pedophilia, he spent the last month making all manner of excuses for Moore’s behavior towards underage girls, even assimilating it to distinctive Southern manners.

Remarkably, many white voters in Alabama seemed to take the same view. Thanks in large part to black voters, Moore lost anyway, so how to respond? Infowars resorted to a tried and true tactic: get PJW to trawl Twitter for liberal triumphalism, and beat it up as evidence of a hate movement.

Extract: “Chris Menahan has compiled even more tweets in the same vein that demonstrate how the left is completely obsessed with disparaging white people to the extent that this is becoming more of a serious hate movement than just a handful of demented idiots on social media.”

Publication: Breitbart

Author: Sean Moran covers Capital Hill for Breitbart; we’ve considered his work before.

Why you should read it: Using one of Breitbart’s standby techniques, this story stitches together a series of tweets from #NeverTrump conservatives to show their perfidious opposition to Moore. Better this than reflecting on Moore’s inadequacies as a candidate, or the poor judgement of Breitbart boss, Steve Bannon, in supporting him.

Extract: “Several establishment Republicans cheered as the Alabama Senate Republican candidate Judge Roy Moore lost to his Democratic opponent Doug Jones.”

Publication: National Review

Author: “The Editors” hammer home the same message carried elsewhere by NR writers David French, Jim Geraghty, and Theodore Kupfer: this is Trump’s and Bannon’s fault.

Why you should read it: You get the impression that National Review writers had been honing their lines for a while. David French said that Alabama conservatives had “declared that partisanship isn’t worth grotesque moral compromise”. Ben Shapiro wrote that “Moore ran the worst campaign in recent memory”. Kevin Williamson asked “So what have Steve Bannon and the rest of the half-bright moneyed dilettantes – and their talk-radio and cable-news cheerleaders – accomplished?” Jim Geraghty said that Moore “may very well have been the worst Senate nominee for any major party in American history”.

Last night, the moment finally arrived where the chief organ of movement conservatism could kick a President who had defied their wisdom and prognostications while he was well and truly down.

Extract: “Trump and Bannon thought they were cleverly getting in front of the parade of an inevitable Moore victory, in ruby-red Alabama. Instead, they associated themselves with a man credibly accused of preying on young girls and got rebuked by Alabama voters whose standards weren’t as low as theirs.”

Publication: Frontpage

Author: Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow stationed at David Horowitz’s Front-page Magazine. The Forward ran an interesting report on Robert Shillman, who funds the fellowship and a range of other activities from anti-Islamic activists like Horowitz and Pamela Geller.

Why you should read it: Greenfield’s piece is not just sour grapes. It’s a way of explaining away the successful mobilization of anti-Moore forces, and the local, grassroots effort that elected Doug Jones. By putting it all down to the machinations of national political consultants, he’s implicitly arguing that the only authentic result in a southern state is a Republican victory.

Whatever you think of his case, it’s not an answer to the problem that Trump, and his poor political instincts, are now causing for Republicans throughout the country.

Extract: “The game may appear to be played in Alabama or Georgia, but the players are actually in Washington DC. The strategy failed quite a few times before it finally worked in Alabama. But political consultants can lose a thousand times. They only have to win once. And the win in Alabama will mean big bucks.

And it will mean that the Dems will try to crack conservative states by ‘Mooring’ Republicans. Alabama offers a new strategy for winning by depressing the Republican turnout while relying on Obama to boost the minority vote.”

Publication: The Federalist

Author: Robert Tracinski is one of the most seasoned writers at the Federalist, and unlike many of his colleagues has held down positions in mainstream media outlets. While others there have been engaging in the right wing blame game, Tracinski tries to look inward.

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Why you should read it: Tracinski is just one of those wondering this morning about the limitations of Trumpian populism and its omnidirectional resentments. Just because it worked spectacularly well that one time in 2016 does not mean it can be applied elsewhere. If the opposing candidate is unobjectionable, it’s pretty thin gruel. If Trump’s base stays home, and the people who they most fear turn out, anything can happen. Expect more worried reflections on this theme in coming days.

Extract: “Angry populism and hating the media is not a philosophy, it is not a political ideology, it is not a platform for governing and it’s not an all-purpose excuse for the character flaws of poorly chosen candidates. That’s the message we can take from the strange, apocalyptic sign of a Democrat getting elected in 2017 in Alabama.”



