Speaking of the mainstream media, Republican voters found out in the primaries that many members of the conservative media were just as unreliable as the MSM. Although there are certainly true-blue Trump believers among them, I suspect that a lot of the outlets and media figures backing him saw a wave of enthusiastic fans of “the Donald” and concluded that it would spike their traffic numbers if they ran out in front of the parade. Many of them benefited from doing exactly that. For example, Sean Hannity got good ratings out of pushing Trump. Sarah Palin got back in the spotlight for five minutes; Ann Coulter got a new book. The rest of us got Hillary. It doesn’t seem like such a fair trade, but do you think any of them will pay a price for promoting a candidate who never had a chance to win? It’s doubtful, because the only place with less accountability than the federal government is the Republican party.

Alex Jones has been a conspiracy theorist for years, and WorldNetDaily spent Bush’s second term promoting the insane idea that W. was going to merge the United States, Canada, and Mexico into one country. Did their traffic drop after doing that? If anything, both Jones and WorldNetDaily are more popular than ever. So do you really think the members of the conservative media who misled their readers by hiding all the flaws of a hopeless candidate will pay any price for doing that? They should, but it seems unlikely.

In a related matter, as the Left has gotten ever more easily offended, conservatives have become ever more anxious to offend. There’s a lot to be said for refusing to be hemmed in by political correctness, but we’ve gotten to the point where many conservatives have embraced the idea that if political correctness is bad, then anything that’s politically incorrect must be good. This has created an environment where saying foolish and inflammatory things can be a major career enhancer for conservatives. If you can say something that makes liberals talk about how much they hate you, but conservatives won’t walk away even if you make them cringe, that’s a recipe for selling books and getting on TV. This may be great for the careers of a few people, but it also gives the public at large a terrible impression of conservatives. Even if they say some things you agree with, the last thing that anyone who cares about the conservative movement should want is for the public to base its opinion of it on people who are trying to offend as many people as possible to get attention.