Conservative columnist unpacks why Trump’s ‘people in the dark shadows’ comment was so troubling

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“Dark Shadows” isn’t only the name of a 1960s/early 1970s soap opera about vampires, witches and werewolves — it is also a phrase that President Donald Trump is using to rally his far-right base. During a Monday night appearance on Laura Ingraham’s “The Ingraham Angle” on Fox News, Trump claimed that “people in the dark shadows” and “people that you haven’t heard of” are working to get Vice President Joe Biden elected in November.

And conservative Never Trump journalist Bill Kristol, in an article for The Bulwark, points to those comments as examples of Trump’s love of conspiracy theories.

“Perhaps one shouldn’t…. be too alarmed by a politician claiming his opponent is being manipulated by men operating in the dark shadows,” Kristol writes. “Politicians exaggerate and even make up things. It’s life in a democracy. But this wasn’t just any politician. It was the president. And this isn’t just any president. It’s one who’s not been afraid to encourage, or at least excuse, violence by his supporters.” Continue reading.

Right-wing columnist blasts the GOP for standing by Trump: ‘Conservatives have sold their souls for the sheer pleasure of partisan hatred’

AlterNet logoThe Bulwark, launched in December 2018 by two Never Trump conservatives —Charles Sykes and neocon Bill Kristol — has become a go-to website for anti-Trump commentary and reporting on the right. And The Bulwark’s Robert Tracinski, frustrated that so many Republicans continue to reflexively defend President Donald Trump, poses a question in an article posted this week: “Is this the idol to whom conservatives have decided to sell their souls?”

Tracinski, in his piece, makes an argument that MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough and GOP strategist Rick Wilson have often made: that Trump has blatantly violated so many conservative principles, from foreign policy to federal deficits. And one of the pro-Trump right-wingers he takes aim at is talk radio host Rush Limbaugh.

“If you want to see the process by which a soul is corrupted,” Tracinski writes, “consider the case of Rush Limbaugh, the talk show host who became an icon of small-government conservatism — back before he decided that spending and deficits don’t matter.”

View the complete October 10 article by Alex Henderson on the AlterNet website here.