Tucker Carlson, National Review, and even the Powerline guys have now publicly noted that neither Trump nor his lawyer's have produced evidence to support claims of a rigged election.

This will have absolutely no impact, not the slightest, on 80-90% of conservatives.

This is because "conservative intellectuals" and their ideas have always been completely irrelevant to the motive functioning of the conservative movement. One would hope this would spark some reflection and self-criticism in those circles. But it won't do that either.

The conservative movement pays conservative intellectuals to produce useful ideas and they sometimes circulate those ideas. The movement doesn't do this because they think those ideas correspond to truth. They do it because they think those ideas advance their interests.

This is what is so inane about people like Cathy Young prattling about cancel culture. No one gets cancelled harder than conservative intellectuals who forget their place and stopped being useful. Ask Bill Kristol and J-Pod. Hell, they're actually going to try to cancel FOX NEWS.

No one calls this cancel culture because the epistemic closure of the conservative movement is so complete and so taken-for-granted at this point that people just assume its not worth mentioning that its knowledge system is totalitarian.

This is also the double-game that critics of cancel culture play. On the one hand, they accept at face value that American conservatives are "classical liberals" and refuse to recognize the profoundly anti-democratic impulses of that movement.

But, at the same time, they lay the accusation of epistemic closure only at the feet of legacy media and the academy, because who ever expected more from the conservatives anyway.

You can't have it both ways. If conservatism is "classically liberal" then we need a unflinching account of how and why its knowledge ecology tolerates election rigging fantasies.

If it's illiberal and authoritarian, we should plainly recognize it as a threat to democracy.