For a quarter-century, Fox News viewers have celebrated July Fourth as Independence Day from reality, and their patriotic otherworldliness has become darker each year. In the crepuscular days of yore, the Fox audience rather giddily saw America's collapse emerging from presidential philandering. But by now it's midnight in America to this kindred brand of television spectators, trapped as they are in the dreadful darkness of a presidential psychosis.
A late-June YouGov poll found that nearly seven of 10 Fox Newsers blamed the Jan. 6 assault on America's seat of governance (turned a dinghy adrift) on “left-wing protesters trying to make Trump look bad." (Mediaite.) Hours of an investigative House committee's televised refutations of this pseudoconservative delusion had no illuminating effect on these particular viewers. One might speculate that their dimness endured chiefly because they avoided the hearings. But that would be wrong. It has endured because they wish it so.
A 28 June story from Yahoo News, which commissioned the YouGov poll, reported that "the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 insurrection has been building consensus" (52%) for the Justice Department "to pursue criminal charges against the former president." This bare-majority sentiment came about before Cassidy Hutchison's extraordinary revelations. Because of her testimony the nation's eagerness to see that Trump is prosecuted is now likely to intensify, though not spread. Because nothing will change minds in Trumpworld and Foxland.
That the Murdoch family's dupes and rubes believe the Jan. 6 attack was an Antifa ploy to persecute Trump is, of course, thoroughly unsurprising. Yet on the grimly dispiriting side, 43% of all YouGov respondents said far-leftie goons were to blame "a great deal" or "some" — a mere 9-point spread between mass delusion and clearheaded reality.
Which is to say, 43% of voters elected Dick Nixon as president.