Tom Nichols on how to deal with the threats: I made a joke on Twitter the other day that I thought deserved a better reception than it got. I was reading about Kari Lake bleating about how other Americans, if they wanted to “get” to Donald Trump, would have to “go through me” as well as “through 75 million Americans just like me … most of us are card-carrying members of the NRA.” I said that Lake’s political career was like the origin story of Jonathan Matthias. I made that joke because I’m a nerd and I’m old. Matthias is the bad guy from the classic 1971 Charlton Heston movie The Omega Man,a postapocalyptic thriller in which almost everyone in the world is wiped out by a germ-warfare disaster. Heston has an antidote; the other survivors end up as light-sensitive ghouls that can go out only at night. Matthias (played by the legendary character actor Anthony Zerbe) was, before the plague, a blustery celebrity television newscaster, and he later uses his charisma to organize his fellow sorta-vampires into a cult built around hating Heston and all modern technology. It’s less funny if you have to explain it, but the idea of Kari Lake going from television anchor to cult leader after a pandemic seemed pretty on the nose, and her whole Grand Guignol act is so close to Zerbe’s melodramatic thundering that I couldn’t resist. But maybe the joke isn’t that funny. Lake may be inane, but insofar as any of her…