He described the thinking like this: “There’s no way for me to know what is objectively true, so we’ll stick to our guns and our own evidence. We’ll ignore the facts because nobody knows what’s really true anyway.”

News that is fake or only marginally real has lurked online — and in supermarket tabloids — for years, but never before has it played such a prominent role in an American election and its aftermath. Narrowly defined, “fake news” means a made-up story with an intention to deceive, often geared toward getting clicks. But the issue has become a political battering ram, with the left accusing the right of trafficking in disinformation, and the right accusing the left of tarring conservatives as a way to try to censor websites. In the process, the definition of fake news has blurred.

“Fake news is subjective,” Mr. Laughlin said. “It depends on who’s defining it. One man’s trash is another man’s treasure.”

For Mr. Laughlin, conservative sites are a balm for the soul in a liberal world whose narrative of America, he says, seems to diminish him and all that he has accomplished. He was his own legal guardian at 16, after his mother fled his alcoholic father. He built his metal finishing business from scratch after earning an associate degree from a community college. The company he owned employs about 17 people. He and his wife adopted three mixed-race children.

“My struggles in life are just dismissed,” he said, recalling being lectured by one of his children’s liberal friends at a party in his large home. “‘You have a nice house and got it made because you are a white guy.’ There are all of these preconceived notions that I’m a racist, idiot, a bigot, and oh, uneducated.”

He feels alienated from the conventional news media for some of the same reasons. “It’s like an inside joke for people on the left, and we are the butt of the joke,” he said of one left-leaning website. “At some point, we stopped listening.”