It was a Monday night and I was sitting in bed, laptop propped open, watching the debut of Tucker Carlson’s new show, Tucker Carlson Tonight, on Fox News. The Daily Caller, the conservative Web site that Carlson himself co-founded and still runs, would later praise the show for its “epic ratings premiere,” but Tucker Carlson Tonight wasn’t doing it for me. I know Tucker a little bit, and in person he is completely uncensored, unpredictable, and highly entertaining. On his new television program, however, he was the opposite: he recycled the same stories, largely covered elsewhere, and asked the same questions that virtually every other conservative media outlet had covered that day.

To be fair, I was a bit of a burnout case. Tucker Carlson Tonight represented the end of a weeklong experiment. Every day, from the morning to my final waking hour, I would be restricted to take in only right-wing media—Fox News, sure, but also Web sites ranging from VDARE, named for the first English child reportedly born in the New World, which the Southern Poverty Law Center has described as a haven for “articles by prominent white nationalists, race scientists, and anti-Semites,” to The National Review, the progeny of William F. Buckley, which became the last foxhole of the Never Trumpers; in the meantime, I would listen to conservative talk-radio hosts such as Mark Levin and Sean Hannity. My goal was to better understand their world.

I began my experiment on Election Day without fully understanding that the conservative media ecosystem was soon going to become, increasingly, the world for all of us. Rush Limbaugh has long hosted the most popular commercial radio show in the country, and, during the course of the week, Breitbart would announce that it had broken its previous traffic records, and achieved some 45 million unique visitors during a 31-day period. Its former chairman, Stephen Bannon, whom a former employee of Breitbart recently described to me as “Donald Trump but more intelligent,” and who once told The New Yorker that he liked “to call someone a raving cunt every now and then,” was now the right hand of our president-elect.

Day 1

It’s hard to remember what life looked like before Trump became president-elect, but from the perspective of the right-wing media machine, it was a scary place in which fraudulent Democrats threatened to steal the election. On Election Day, for some reason, a number of conservative outlets were all focused on Philadelphia, which was allegedly ground zero for electioneering concerns. On his radio show, Levin warned darkly of ill things afoot in the city. A couple hours later, I heard the exact same thing from Pat Caddell, the Democratic pollster turned conservative gadfly, who has a regular gig on Breitbart radio.

As far as I could tell, the only reason that they were both focused on Philadelphia pertains to a single incident that occurred eight years ago with the New Black Panther Party, a billy club, and a charge of voter intimidation. But after being nourished by conservative media for nearly a decade, that single incident appeared to have blossomed into a full-fledged conspiracy to throw the election for Hillary Clinton. Neither Levin nor Caddell were expecting anyone to rush out to the Philadelphia polls to ensure a fair voting process; rather, they seemed to be laying the foundation to later claim foul if and when Trump lost Pennsylvania. And the audience was primed. Late in the day, Breitbart would run a short piece noting voting-machine breakdowns in Utah. By my count, it generated more than 33,000 comments in a couple hours. (It would eventually reach 83,000.)