Mr. Shapiro and The Daily Wire aren’t alone in pandering to their readers. Over at the website The Federalist, the editors took the opportunity of Columbus Day not to examine its complicated legacy or illuminate some overlooked aspect of history but to publish an article titled “Why ‘Indigenous Peoples’ Day’ Is Far Worse Than Columbus Day,” which makes the case that the historical violence of some Native American peoples wash Columbus clean of his genocidal sins. “The only reason,” it says, that anti-Columbus activists “ideological idiocy has free rein today is because Europeans showed up in 1492.” That same publication had a “black crime” tag on its website until two weeks ago, which included an article titled “If You Don’t Want Police to Shoot You, Don’t Resist Arrest.” The subheading: “Every time I hear of a black man getting killed by the cops, he’s almost always a criminal thug I have no desire to defend.”

As they feed their audience the reddest of red meat, Federalist editors like Mollie Hemingway and Ben Domenech insist that they are being besieged by the forces of the left. In a postelection panel on CNN’s “Reliable Sources,” Ms. Hemingway said that conservatives “are sick of being bullied” by a liberal media elite that is “deciding to quadruple down on everything they got wrong, disparaging people who they don’t understand, don’t even seek to understand.” Mr. Domenech wrote in 2014 that President Barack Obama’s “failed” administration wasn’t because of “universal intolerance for other points of view, but intolerance on one side of the debate” — in short, closed-minded liberals. That’s a trope that The Federalist often echoes. Just Tuesday, the site published a piece entitled “The Left’s Sirens Are Already Hinting Our Culture Wars Will End in Another Civil War,” which ends with the author writing, “The radicalization of Democrats is something qualitatively different, and much more dangerous, than the radicalization of Republicans.” Because to a conservative audience, of course it is.

These publications and commentators aren’t embracing the kind of real debate that they pay lip service to on campuses; they are spoon-feeding screeds to their right-wing readers. They are telling them that their most deeply felt beliefs about the world and about their fellow Americans are not only factually correct, but also morally righteous. Often, that means reinforcing ideas about race and gender shaped by bias more than fact, while simultaneously claiming to be the last redoubt of objective journalism.

To begin, many white conservatives are already largely dismissive of concerns regarding police brutality. According to the General Social Survey conducted by the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago, 55 percent of white Republicans believe that African-Americans “just don’t have the motivation or willpower to pull themselves up out of poverty.” In that same study, a quarter of white Republicans said they also viewed African-Americans as less intelligent. No wonder that when the former N.F.L. player Burgess Owens told Tucker Carlson on Monday that “70 percent of black men do not stay around” their families because of “liberalism,” his audience was primed to believe him — even more so because Mr. Owens himself is African-American.