It was the whole point of Fox News and similar outlets, after all: to create a place where conservatism stripped world facts and events of their supposed liberal bias and either presented them in the fashion most flattering to conservatism or simply ignored those facts and events. On Fox News, welfare fraud is forever rampant, weapons of mass destruction were found in Iraq and the state of the economy is whatever it needs to be in order to court a conservative narrative of Obama bad or tax cuts needed or Obama still bad. At Breitbart, the Black Lives Matter movement is not a reaction to the videotaped deaths of black Americans posing no apparent danger to the officers gunning them down but is all a ruse, a war on decent folks by the violence-prone other.

None of this is new, but two decades of it has left the movement uninformed and, well, gullible. The ads on conservative websites or the ever-feverish appeals of conservative mailing list have long been recognized as a scammer's paradise; for conservative radio listeners, the world is forever six months away from collapsing in chaos—so you'd better buy gold, or survival seeds, or both. There's a reason that the creators of fake news sites target conservatives, and it's not because the hoaxers share conservative ideology. It's because conservatives are more prone to believe those hoaxes.

“Over the years, we’ve effectively brainwashed the core of our audience to distrust anything that they disagree with. And now it’s gone too far,” said John Ziegler, a conservative radio host, who has been critical of what he sees as excessive partisanship by pundits. “Because the gatekeepers have lost all credibility in the minds of consumers, I don’t see how you reverse it.”

The current debate over fake news is centered on actual hoaxes, things like the Pizzagate hoax that resulted in a very stupid and very armed man barging into a D.C. restaurant to “self-investigate” whether the Clinton-connected owner was keeping child slaves in a basement that didn’t exist. There should be no question that such hoaxes are deplorable; it should not be the subject of serious debate. But it is, because many big conservative names have dabbled too much on that line themselves—and they know it.

Setting aside those outright hoaxes, how enmeshed are the subtler forms of fake news in the mainstream conservative movement? Enmeshed enough that any average consumer of conservative programs will come away with deeply held opinions about patently untrue things.

Andi Ermes, 39, offered a number of reasons for disliking Obama. She said Obama didn’t attend the Army-Navy football game, even though other presidents had. Obama has actually attended more Army-Navy games than George H.W. Bush. She said that he had taken too many vacations. He has taken fewer vacation days that George W. Bush. She also said that he refused to wear a flag pin on his lapel. While it is true that Obama did not wear a flag on his lapel at points during the 2007 campaign, it was back on his suit by 2008. Ermes told me the news sources she consumes most are Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, and a local conservative radio show hosted by Casey Hendrickson.

Now Rush Limbaugh and other purveyors of those manufactured outrages are very, very peeved at this new public debate over just how much untrue "news" is impacting our democracy and whether anything should be done about it, and they're lashing back with, of course, the declaration that they are the only legitimate ones and it's the rest of you reality-dwellers and fact-checkers that are the ones fouling things up.

Well, yeah. Of course they're going to say that. For two decades, it's what they've done. That is precisely how they built this new conservative movement to begin with.