The hallucinatory echo chamber of the far-right media universe gained an unexpected entrant last week when it emerged that Devin Nunes, the Republican congressman of Memo-gate fame, had moved from consumer to purveyor of what one might call, for lack of a better term, fake news. Facing a surprisingly robust (if still somewhat quixotic) midterm challenge in California’s 22nd District, Nunes quietly launched The California Republican, a campaign Web site masquerading as a news organization, peddling aggregated content about “the best of US, California, and Central Valley news, sports, and analysis.” A paroxysm of pearl-clutching ensued.

Within hours of a Politico report on its unlikely existence, the site had crashed, citing “heavy traffic and an attack on our servers.” Andrew Janz, Nunes’s aforementioned challenger, complained that the site was spreading “misinformation” and “fake news.” To Nunes’s far-right supporters, however, The California Republican was something bolder, and more heroic: a digital bulwark on the front lines of the information war. “Everyone should have a Web site they own and that people visit daily!” Mike Cernovich, a popular right-wing conspiracy theorist who runs his own fledging media organization, told me, calling it a “smart” move on Nunes’s part that allowed him to craft a narrative independent of media interference. “It creates a personal relationship as well.”

Ever since Roger Ailes pioneered the format at Fox News, right-wing news outlets, generally speaking, have filtered their output through the singular editorial vision of one outsize personality. Matt Drudge, adapted the Murdoch sensibility for the digital age with his vicious Drudge Report; Laura Ingraham founded the strident LifeZette; Glenn Beck, the bathos-dripping Web site The Blaze. Tucker Carlson’s Daily Caller took potshots at liberal institutions from anywhere else on the political spectrum. (There was perhaps no greater conservative-media-personality cult than Andrew Breitbart’s namesake Web behemoth, which Steve Bannon eventually transformed into his own personal “war machine,” before his excommunication by Donald Trump.) So it is not surprising, in a way, that the ego-driven conservative-news business—which long ago adopted the notion that the mainstream media is the enemy and that facts are less important than activism—would eventually meld with the conservative political establishment entirely.

Some on the right rolled their eyes at the hysterical reaction on the left: “I’m finding it hard to get worked up about Devin Nunes having a personal blog,” an editor at a conservative-leaning news outlet remarked to me wryly, before adding that it was “probably the end of democracy as we know it.” Other publications like The Blaze and Newsmax highlighted the site, without alarmism, helping The California Republican gain 2,000 new Facebook followers in the process.

“It seems like a natural evolution to me that they would do this,” said media consultant Howard Polskin, who tracks traffic to conservative sites via his project TheRighting. Trump, he noted, practically pioneered the model: his Twitter account served as a “wire service,” pushing the stories he wanted his audience to see and short-circuiting the traditional media conduit. Nunes had simply followed suit, albeit in a format deliberately designed to mimic a local-news blog. “I thought it was interesting that they mentioned sports,” Polskin added, pointing out the section of the site dedicated to tracking Fresno State’s Division I teams. “It will attract a male audience, and it gives it the appearance of being a full-fledged news site.”

If Nunes himself had remained under the radar, his little side project may never have gone beyond the 22nd District. But the site’s emphasis on Nunes’s hobbyhorses (i.e. everything related to the Trump-Russia investigation) suddenly drew the notice of people outside his constituency. “Once you put something on a digital platform, you suddenly have global ambition. It’s not like you’re a print publisher and you have trucks going out that can only hit a 30-mile radius. You’re in a world without boundaries,” said Polskin.