OVERTON WINDOW WATCH: "THE ELECTION WAS STOLEN BUT THE THIEVES WON'T BE CAUGHT" IS NOW THE MODERATE GOP POSITION

We're being told that the right is beginning to accept the reality of Joe Biden's victory. CNN's Brian Stelter writes:

There was a perceptible shift in the right-wing winds on Monday...

The best example of this shift came at 10 p.m. Eastern on Fox, when Laura Ingraham told viewers that "unless the legal situation changes in a dramatic and unlikely manner, Joe Biden will be inaugurated on January 20." ...

Ingraham went on to say that Trump has every right to pursue "all legitimate legal challenges to this outcome." But, she said in not so many words, Biden is taking charge.

"To say this constitutes living in reality," Ingraham said.

So she accepts Biden's win as legitimate? Well, no, not exactly. She also said:

Now, legal challenges continue in a number of states. Serious questions about vote counting, poll-watcher access, are outstanding....

Now, to say this does not mean I don't think that this election was rife with problems and potential fraud.

Laura Ingraham breaks the news to her audience: If I told you there was an excellent phenomenal chance that the Supreme Court was going to step in and deliver a victory to President Trump, I’d be lying to you pic.twitter.com/F2CFgACBmd

— Acyn Torabi (@Acyn) November 24, 2020

So Ingraham's message isn't "Biden is the legitimate victor and you need to come to grips with that fact." It's "Biden cheated, but you need to come to grips with the fact that he's going to get away with it."

Tucker Carlson impressed a lot of liberals and moderates a couple of days ago when he noted the lack of hard evidence offered by Trump lawyer Sidney Powell. Stelter suggests that he's now pivoting away from election irregularities as an explanation for Trump's loss. Carlson did say this:

"The 2020 presidential election was not fair. No honest person would claim that it was fair. On many levels, the system was rigged against one candidate and in favor of another. And it was rigged in ways that were not hidden from view. We all saw it happen."

Carlson didn't deny that Biden won. But he blamed the media and Big Tech for enabling it. "If you are a Trump voter and you suspect this election was stolen, was rigged, you are onto something," he said. "And it's the tech companies, above all, that did it. Keep that in mind."

As Hot Air's Allahpundit put it, Carlson said the election

was rigged in “soft” ways, like the media refusing to ask Biden a hard question and Democrats making it easier to vote by mail and Twitter temporarily suppressing the Hunter Biden story.

But before Carlson said all that, he said this:

You've heard a lot over the past few days about the security of our electronic voting machines. This is a real and serious issue, no matter who raises it or who tries to dismiss it out of hand as a conspiracy theory.

Electronic voting is not as secure as traditional hand counting. It never will be as secure. Voters can see this, because it's obvious, and it makes them nervous. And why wouldn't it make them nervous? Our leaders have given us every reason not to trust technology. The people now telling us to stop asking questions about voting machines are the same ones who claimed that our phones weren't listening to us. They lie. We all know that.

Other countries don't use electronic voting because they know it undermines confidence in democracy. A system cannot function if no one trusts the vote. That's true here, too, as we're finding out. Going forward, we need to find out exactly what happened in this month's presidential election, no matter how long it takes the investigation to unfold or how much it costs.

Because Carlson said this and then pivoted to the influence of the media and the tech industry, Stelter believes he's trying to steer the discussion away from how the vote was conducted. But that's not how his audience is likely to interpret what he said. The Trumpers believe that electoral fraud has been proven beyond a reasonable doubt -- and if some people, including election officials and judges in contested states, don't believe it, maybe it's for the same reason that the public doesn't believe Joe Biden is the Antichrist: because the truth has been suppressed by the media and the tech giants.

Allahpundit, who's one of the smarter right-wing pundits, writes:

I’ve always thought Trump would eventually settle on that sort of argument to explain why he lost, that liberal influence over major opinion-shaping institutions meant he was always at a deep disadvantage. And I do think he’ll come around to that position eventually, although he’ll never quite relinquish the claims of outright fraud and cheating the way Carlson and Ingraham might.

It's not either/or -- it's additive. Trump will give both explanations for why the evil Democrats won and why they got away with it, and so will the vast majority of Republican voters.

And so a position Trump seems to be slowly embracing is that yes, Democrats cheated, but they hid their tracks so well the theft will never be discovered, and the evil media Establishment helped them do it.

And this is now the moderate position on the right, the position that represents acceptance of the results.