I can't wait for the Saturday Night Live cold open Saturday, and I haven't watched the show in years.

These are uncanny times. Some dear rightest friends and older relatives have swallowed this whole.

Some commentators are not amused and able to identify what it is.


Taking Giuliani’s Insane, Un-American Press Conference Seriously

It doesn’t require Snopes or a team of investigative researchers to debunk it. But that is its power.

Unconstrained by having to present any evidence at all, the Apple Giuliani Gang concocts a conspiracy that sounds manifestly true to voters who have been trained to believe that the left is evil incarnate, but sounds so preposterous to everyone else that Republican elected officials can avoid engaging on the merits while they accuse The Media of being mean to them for asking about it and mock liberals for panicking over this subversion of our democracy.

And so the conspiracy theory exists in an uncanny valley: It’s advanced by the president of the United States and believed by untold millions of his followers but at the same time it’s so ludicrous that it’s impossible to put into context for audiences who do not exist in the Trump Alternative Universe. It is both deadly serious and utterly ridiculous. And it will persist in perpetuity if it is not decisively disproved and Republican leaders are not forced to reckon with it and crush it.

Otherwise the Trump team will get away with convincing millions upon millions of people that our democracy is no different than China’s or Venezuela’s. That President Trump had the election stolen from him by a shadowy cabal of Soros-funded Antifa and the ghost of Hugo Chavez.

They will get away with co-opting an entire political party for the advancement of this undemocratic charade.

And if they aren’t stopped, the next time there’s an election close enough to take by schnook or by crook, Republican voters will demand that they do it.

This is not the time to look away.