It’s a strange phenomenon that people can hold terrible politics while being otherwise decent human beings, and that others can have praiseworthy political beliefs that stand at odds with their personal odiousness. Roger Ailes, the former longtime Fox News head who died yesterday, belongs in neither of these two categories, being instead a combination of both politically and personally reprehensible.

He did more to shape modern politics than almost any other figure in recent history, first perfecting the art of substance-less image-making, and later pioneering a once-unique form of ugly, fear-mongering propaganda that brought us eight years of Bush and, at last, Trump.