It was entirely expected that the worst year in my lifetime should have the worst election in my lifetime. Not because the second-best president in my lifetime (after Ronald Reagan) lost, but because we don’t know for sure that he did. I would rather be certain that the ghost of Joe Biden won outright than see the greatest nation on Earth embarrass itself like Venezuela. Sadly, the unprecedented goalpost-shifting and manipulation by the Left, bolstered by the usual obsequious accommodation by the Right, has created a national humiliation that will fester for a long time to come, no matter who gets inaugurated in January. Should that be Biden, I shall leave it to more expert political analysts to dissect the cause and effects of such a disaster, while I’ll focus on the cultural, media, and artistic ramifications. And I’ll start with the most astonishing example of media suicide in my lifetime — that of the Fox News Corporation (FNC).

Trump broke every other news entity even before he took office in 2017. CNN, MSNBC, the Washington Post, the New York Times, and the rest have always been left-wing, only with an illusory veneer of neutrality. Trump smashed the veneer, accurately calling them “fake news” amid their swirl of lies about him: Russian campaign collusion, the neo-Nazis “fine people” hoax, the impeachment-unworthy phone call to Ukraine, the “botched handling of COVID” that killed 200,000 people, and more. The visionary Roger Ailes and Rupert Murdoch built FNC as the singular center-right alternative to the mainstream vortex, an oasis for discouraged conservatives. The creation paid off when Fox won higher ratings and greater profit than its cable news rivals combined. All they had to do this year to stay on top was fairly cover the president, unlike the competition, and they couldn’t manage that. To cite the constantly correct O’Sullivan’s First Law (coined by eminent American Spectator contributor John O’Sullivan), “All entities that are not explicitly right-wing will become left-wing over time,” and Fox News proved the rule.