First, here’s the good news – since the election, CNN is beating Fox News in average viewers.  Now the bad news – Fox and CNN both are losing to Newsmax.  Why?  Fox isn’t “Trumpy” enough for the red hats, but still unwatchable for normal people.  Newsmax and an even worse OAN have taken over the alt-right folks who are abandoning Fox in droves as more of their anchors have acknowledged that Trump has no chance of stealing the election from Biden.  If you’ve never watched Newsmax and OAN, don’t bother.  By way of description, if Fox News is manure, Newsmax and OAN are nuclear waste.  They have created a Superfund site of toxic and deadly conspiracy theories, gross exaggerations, and freeform lying.  And Trumpists lap it up. Since the election CNN has averaged 1.73 million viewers, more than double a year ago. Fox News Channel averaged 1.56 million and MSNBC 1.53 million viewers.  More important, Newsmax, a safe haven for delusional Trumpists to hide from gravity and arithmetic, Newsmax beat Fox for the first time ever.  Newsmax commentators, even today, continue to peddle the lies that Trump is going to prevail over Biden.

Newsmax and OAN (as well as some remaining Fox programming) engage in prodigious lying, creating toxic propaganda that has now made it impossible for normal people to engage their viewers in any kind of productive debate.  In recent days, I’ve attempted discourse with several people, and it’s like arguing with an audio recording that’s running backwards.  These folks have bought in to the Dominion fairytale, the suitcases full of ballots narrative, and even the new “Office of the President-Elect” story ignoring the decades of the use of that term.  Even talking to these folks is exhausting because you simply can’t make any progress.

Even though Trump will soon be hiding at Mar a Lago and fighting criminal and civil charges in New York, the damage he inflicted and made recovery of our democracy even more remote.  I personally don’t see a route to recovery.