Earlier this year, Rachel Alexander wrote a couple of columns complaining about Republican infighting while insisting that Democrats are supposedly more unified. She still hasn’t exhausted the subject, as expounded upon in her April 22 WorldNetDaily column:
The level of infighting among conservatives is at a strange all-time high, despite the fact the conservative MAGA base now controls much of GOP politics. Every day I see conservatives slamming other conservatives on social media, saying the rudest things to each other, resorting to personal attacks. I believe this is the result of the internet allowing the proliferation of so much information, combined with the rise of social media, making it easy for people to hide behind their phones and laptops and say rude things to others they would never dare say in person.
It is destroying efforts to accomplish anything, because people don’t want to work together, and they would rather pick apart someone’s tactics than actually get anything done. Instead of a couple of ways to accomplish something, such as fighting election fraud, you can now find a hundred ways to fight election fraud on the internet. Everyone is now an expert with an entitled opinion because they can do research, so no one trusts anyone anymore, even those with lengthy credentials in the area being addressed.
A member of Congress told me, “It’s about their need to feel important, not an ideology, to accord them the respect that they feel they personally deserve.”
She was particularly annoyed that right-wingers who obsess over purported election fraud get dismissed as grifters:
Since I write about election fraud a lot, I see all the division in this area. The term “grifter” is thrown around constantly to dismiss perfectly valid election-integrity efforts. Heaven forbid someone actually gets paid for their work! Most grassroots activists aren’t rich, so insisting they work for free in order to avoid that label is ridiculous. The whiners complain about where the money is going – and they don’t know where the money is going, it’s just speculation – pretending that paying lawyers, accountants, expert investigators, etc. doesn’t cost money. It’s really a jealousy and greed problem.
Actuall, it’s a factual problem. She offered no evidence that these “election-integrity efforts” are “perfectly valid” — in fact, pretty much all right-wing claims of election fraud have been discredited — so concerns about where the money is going is quite valid, since most of the folks profiting off this narrative don’t offer detailed disclosure of where, exactly, the money goes.
Alexander then tried to blame secret ‘Democratic operatives” for infiltrating right-wing groups and sowing division:
The feds who instigated entering the U.S. Capitol on J6? That kind of thing is taking place everywhere, with Democratic operatives disguised as the far-right, attacking conservatives and goading them into being loud, rude and acting obnoxiously. It’s not hard to get them into trouble this way; the average American commits three felonies a day and doesn’t know it. “Show me the man, and I’ll show you the crime.”
I have friends questioning friends, wondering if they’re controlled opposition. The amount of time some conservatives spend trying to dig up dirt on other conservatives is appalling. Instead of researching leftists, there’s this strange new interest in investigating our friends. Can you imagine doing that in the era of President John F. Kennedy? No one investigated his extramarital affairs; hardly anyone talked about it. He was beloved by members of both parties. It’s doubtful he could have been elected president today in this #MeToo era.
Needless to say, she offered absolutely no evidence to back up her claim. She then praised Democrats for an alleged lack of infighting:
Notice how rare infighting is on the left. It’s because they are the party of authoritarianism, while we are the party of individual rights. They do what they’re told; there is little tolerance for dissent. That’s why they all have the same DNC talking points – we see them over and over again ad nauseam on X. They’re years ahead of us in forward-thinking tactics, so much that they’ve outsmarted us and left us in the dust as we pick up the pieces on the defensive. Now we’re fighting being prosecuted and canceled.
Alexander began her May 20 column with a similar complaint:
One of the many ways Republicans sabotage each other is by blasting candidates in primary races for allegedly lacking experience and qualifications. While Democrats often settle on one candidate early in the primary race – unlike us with our emphasis on treating people as individuals, Democrats are much easier to herd and control top down with groupthink – we have these long, bruising primaries where we demolish each other over every tiny imagined flaw, draining funds and leaving little for the general election contest.
I believe most primary elections aren’t held until very close to the general election so we individualistic Republicans can spend most of the race beating each other up instead of the Democratic candidates.
From there, she descended into her usual attacks, claiming without evidence that recent Republican candidates lose because Democrats engaged in “cheating”:
With Democrats cheating to steal elections, Republicans need every advantage they can get. Trump was elected due to his star quality. By the time Barack Obama became president, I predicted we’d never see another Republican president again unless we ran a celebrity, and thankfully Trump showed up.
In Arizona, Kari Lake is facing criticism in the primary for lacking qualifications, since she spent her entire career in broadcast media. But she’s a “Trump in heels,” as the left has labeled her. Her star power gives her an advantage; she’s leading her primary opponent Sheriff Mark Lamb by an astounding 29 points in a recent Rasmussen Reports survey. Lake is hyper smart and runs circles around the mainstream reporters during press conferences and other events. Having covered politics for almost 30 years in the media, she is arguably more qualified than someone who served in elected office for a handful of years.
Would these armchair critics say that a brilliant person who spent their life in politics, but never held office, was not qualified?
Other candidates around the country who faced similar criticism include Herschel Walker and Dr. Mehmet Oz. Everyone knows they lost their U.S. Senate races due to the cheating, not because they were really bad candidates. A Rasmussen Reports exit poll taken after the 2022 election found that Lake really won the Arizona gubernatorial race by 8 points. Even mainstream polls had her ahead by a few points immediately before the election. Fox 10/InsiderAdvantage showed her ahead by 3 points, and the progressive pollster Data for Progress had her up 4 points.
About that Rasmussen “exit poll” claiming that Lake won by 8 points: it’s garbage. As the Washington Post explained, the poll was paid for by a Republican group and conducted months after the election, meaning it was not a real “exit poll.” The poll actually weighted its results to an exit poll rather than the actual election results, and the weighting system it used claimed that independent voters voted for Lake by 14 points, which runs highly counter to actual exit polling finding that independent voters supported Lake’s opponent by 7 points. So, yes, garbage.
Alexander again complained that Democrats supposedly do this sort of thing better:
Meanwhile, the left is aggressively getting people into political positions who are clearly unqualified, but placed there as a reward for their money. Biden promised when running for president that he wouldn’t do that. But according to The Hill, the Campaign Legal Center found that “all but one of the non-career ambassadors President Biden has appointed are political contributors, many of whom evidently lack the qualifications required by federal law.”
His 55 appointees contributed more than $22.5 million to Democratic committees, averaging $400,000 each. Many of them were “bundlers,” fundraisers who collected donations from others and delivered them to Biden’s campaign.
Alexander failed to mention that the Hill article also noted that “every president of the modern era has awarded about 30 to 40 percent of ambassadorships to political appointees — often deep-pocketed campaign contributors giving enormous sums to a president, his party and its candidates.” So this is not a departure from established practice, no matter how distasteful it looks.