On Tuesday’s show this week, Fox News host Tucker Carlson revealed that he had tried to take the Russian “collusion” accusations and the launch of subsequent investigations seriously for about three months. It is Carlson’s job as a journalist to keep an open mind for as long as possible when such a serious allegation has been made. He apparently kept that open mind for three months, until the ridiculousness of it all could not be ignored.

A majority of the left, the Democrats, and their “mainstream” media arm have pounded the spurious collusion narrative for over two years. How much of that narrative they actually believe to be true is an open question that will someday hopefully be answered.

And then there was that vast swath of the American public that never, not for a moment, believed the charges. For them, the very idea that Donald Trump strategized with Russian apparatchiks, operatives, spies, whatever, was always patently ridiculous. For them, the investigations, particularly Mueller’s, which gives new and ironic currency to the phrase “trumped up,” was always what President Trump said it was, a “witch hunt.”

Now, the release of the bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee’s report has borne out what those millions in the nation’s electorate always believed: there was no coordinated effort between Trump and the Russians to win in 2016.

But the damage has already been done by our long (and unfortunately still ongoing) national collusion nightmare. Especially for younger members of the Trump brigade, or older members who may not have been tuned in to the scorched-earth tactics customarily deployed over the political landscape. Citizens who embraced Trump’s America first ideology and strategy with a degree of idealism and political naiveté. These citizens knew something was wrong in Washington, and across the globe actually, but either hadn’t been around or been engaged enough to track the Watergate scandal, or Ken Starr’s Clinton probe. They might have only had a fleeting sense of how far the two major parties will go to upend the other’s standard bearer.

They know now, and it has been a bruising indoctrination. And this time the damage is worse.

There was never any collusion. The entire debacle has been a Deep State plot to depose a president. The Deep State-promulgated disillusionment about our country’s true power nexus and electoral process has done much to erode the faith of a generation not yet baptized in the fires of partisan destruction.

There are heroes, as it looks as though Robert Mueller too may come up with nada on a collusion fraud that has been perpetrated on the people.

California Congressman Devin Nunes has battled back with legal countermeasures related to congressional oversight from the very beginning. America’s Mayor and Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani, though at times muddling the defense narrative on his cable news appearances, never wavered in his conviction that the entire trope was a lie. In his cable appearances, Trump legal adviser Joe diGenova could barely contain his scorn for the debacle that was taking place. Even liberal Alan Dershowitz has called out the unprecedented prevarication used to float what credible analysts have labeled an “attempted coup.”

On the conservative media push-back front, acknowledgement must go to Sean Hannity, who has indefatigably questioned the collusion accusations and given a platform on his show to many of the most effective truth detectors: author and former Fox host Gregg Jarrett, investigative journalist and Fox News contributor Sarah Carter, and The Hill’s John Solomon, to name but a few.

The villains in this ignominious episode are too numerous to mention, but certain names rattle off: Comey, Brennan, Clapper et al. harped incessantly with assertions and implications that are in grave danger of being exposed as outright lies. The mincing visage of Peter Strzok, the harridan Nellie Orr and the rest, now forever associated with nefarious surreptitiousness.

Regarding the preponderantly leftist media, the Lemons, the Maddows, commentators like Chris Matthews and Joe Scarborough; the reality of their unmitigated collusion with the Democratic Party is no longer even subject to debate. Their entire presentation on the alleged Russian connection over the last few years can be summed up in the mantric phrase: “It’s coming.” As a backdrop to their bias, they manufactured an estimated 93 percent negative coverage of the president to augment that presentation.

The Destroy Trump comedians were unrelenting in their collusion “humor.” Late Night’s Stephen Colbert is now forever enshrined in the “cock-holster” position he distastefully ascribed to the commander-in-chief. Bill’s Maher’s comedic obsession with the dossier’s salacious and unverified “golden shower” allegation has put the HBO host himself at ground zero.

It is not “coming,” and the void of substance created by the Senate Intel report is dropping with a thud heard ’round the world.

The dossier and FISA applications were always rubbish They blatantly tried to take President Trump out, and if the designs of this tragic episode’s ultimate elected villain, California Congressman Adam Schiff, gain traction, they will continue to do so.

But the investigatory paradigm has shifted. And the damage done to the body politic, not to mention the reputations and credibility of a leftist media formerly tarred with bias, and now feathered as rank partisan propagandists, will be lasting.

On a personal note, I can vouch that the Russian collusion madness trickled down into my own neighborhood, a busy intersection at which an unhinged leftist periodically stationed himself and danced around holding a sign depicting a shirtless Vladimir Putin and the words, “Impeach!” It was all I could do not to roll down my window and suggest that he “get help,” but I held fire. The man was obviously deranged.

A great number of citizens across the country believe, and have always believed, that the idea that Donald Trump worked with Russians in a coordinated attempt to win the presidency is insane.

A major investigation has just wrapped, but it is unlikely that any lasting cease fire has been achieved.

As John Wayne used to say, in a simpler time in America, “Mount up!”