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In the run-up to the 2016 presidential election, a slew of far-right websites popped up and cashed in on content propping up then-candidate Donald Trump. And those sites continued to rake in millions of dollars during Trump's time in the White House. But since 2020, the right-wing media cash spigot has effectively slowed to a trickle.

A new report in the Atlantic found that since the 2020 election cycle, the most prominent pro-Trump websites have seen their once robust traffic dry up. Writer Paul Farhi analyzed data from media analysis website The Righting, which focuses on conservative publishers, and reported that of the 10 most popular right-wing websites, traffic was down by an average of roughly 40%.

"The flow of traffic to Donald Trump’s most loyal digital-media boosters isn’t just slowing, as in the rest of the industry; it’s utterly collapsing," Farhi wrote. "Some of the bigger names in the field have been pummeled the hardest: The Daily Caller lost 57 percent of its audience; Drudge Report, the granddaddy of conservative aggregation, was down 81 percent; and The Federalist, founded just over a decade ago, lost a staggering 91 percent."

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"FoxNews.com, by far the most popular conservative-news site, has fared better, losing 'only' 22 percent of traffic, which translates to 23 million fewer monthly site visitors compared with four years ago," he added.

According to Farhi's research, the primary reason for the precipitous drop in clicks for far-right websites is ultimately due to Facebook. Conservative publishers were for years dependent on Facebook engagement as a primary source of traffic. The social media platform's algorithm (the complex code that determines what content shows up in a user's feed) had predominantly favored outrage, as content that provokes a negative reaction is more likely to get a user to click, like, comment or share a post.

In 2020, Vox reported that the Facebook algorithm was overwhelmingly favorable to conservatives, with far-right pundits like Ben Shapiro and Dan Bongino bringing in tens of millions of clicks per month from Facebook engagement. Progressive media analysis group Media Matter for America found that anti-transgender content in particular generated a disproportionate amount of clicks for conservative websites. New York Times columnist Kevin Roose found that "conservative pages were beating out liberals’ [pages] in making it into the day’s top 10 Facebook posts with links in the United States, based on engagement, like the number of reactions, comments, and shares the posts receive."

Amid a wave of criticism from Congress and international bodies over Facebook being exploited by bad actors to influence elections, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced changes to the algorithm in 2018 aimed at promoting content from friends and family over news publishers. He further tweaked it in 2021 to further deprioritize content from publishers, which has, over time, resulted in far fewer clicks for the conservative publishers that used to dominate the platform.

"All of this monkeying with the internet’s plumbing drastically reduced the referral traffic flowing to news and commentary sites," Farhi wrote. "The changes have affected everyone involved in digital media, including some liberal-leaning sites—such as Slate (which saw a 42 percent traffic drop), the Daily Beast (41 percent), and Vox (62 percent, after losing its two most prominent writers)—but the impact appears to have been the worst, on average, for conservative media."

According to Farhi, conservatives are now retreating from websites depending on clicks to other forms of media entirely, like podcasts, Substack newsletters, YouTube channels and videos on the far-right broadcasting platform Rumble.

"There’s a lot of choice," said The Righting owner Howard Polskin. "Even if [the big] sites went out of business tomorrow, there are a lot of voices still out there."

Click here to read Farhi's Atlantic article in full.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) complained that Democrats had ignored Senate procedures after they voted down two articles of impeachment against Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas.

In a vote along party lines, Democrats managed to table the two articles of impeachment. Republicans cried foul because the move circumvented a Senate trial.

"We've set a very unfortunate precedent here," McConnell said following the vote. "This means that the Senate can ignore, in effect, the House's impeachment."

"And by doing what we just did, we have, in effect, ignored the directions of the House, which were to have a trial," he added. "No evidence, no procedure, this is a day that's not a proud day in the history of the Senate."

In a move that broke Senate precedent, then-Majority Leader McConnell refused to grant a hearing to Merrick Garland, President Barack Obama's nominee for the Supreme Court in 2016. The decision marked a significant shift in the handling of Supreme Court nominations.

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In August 2016, McConnell expressed pride in blocking Obama's nominee, a sentiment echoed by the 11 Republican members of the Senate Judiciary Committee who also opposed any proceedings for Garland.

"One of my proudest moments was when I looked Barack Obama in the eye and I said, 'Mr. President, you will not fill the Supreme Court vacancy,'" McConnell said in a speech at the time.

Critics called the minority leader hypocritical after his remarks on Wednesday.

"Isn't Mitch McConnell being rather hypocritical in saying the Senate should have respected the wishes of the House for an impeachment trial?" Ben McCrory asked on X (formerly Twitter).

"McConnell can shove it on precedence and the institution. He’s done enough to break that body and this country," another commenter wrote.

Watch the video clip below or click the link.

Billy Dee Williams stunned Bill Maher by saying actors should perform in blackface if they want to, prompting Maher to exclaim "The theater would be bombed!"