How did we get here? Why is America a country where, in just one week, two African-American senior citizens were gunned down in Kentucky, pipe bombs arrived in the mailboxes of over a dozen prominent liberals, and 11 members of a Pittsburgh synagogue were slaughtered at a bris?

Our current reality only makes sense if we comprehend Fox News and its origin story, revealed in a startling 1970 memo from the Nixon White House.

President Donald Trump and the White House have strongly denied that he bears any responsibility for this streak of atrocities. In a sense, they’re right. If there’s popcorn on the stove and you turn up the heat, there’s no way to say you made any individual kernel explode. It might have happened without you. It’s easy to imagine the three recent perpetrators doing exactly the same things under a President Hillary Clinton.

On the other hand, it’s nearly impossible to conceive of all the politicized violence happening without Fox News. In the popcorn analogy, Fox may not have turned on the stove, but it has lovingly provided steady supplies of gas every day since its founding in 1996. It’s tough to miss how Cesar Sayoc’s vehicle looked like Fox News in van form.

Fox is America’s central clearinghouse for hateful conspiracism, including the violent delusions that animated Sayoc and Robert Bowers. A rich cosmopolitan Jew is scheming to help dangerous foreigners invade and despoil the homeland. Barack Obama, Tom Steyer, and Robert DeNiro are trying to destroy America for reasons known only to themselves. Black people want to steal everything for which you’ve worked so hard.

The problem with Fox isn’t just what it puts on its airwaves, but the impact it has on others. It pressures the corporate media to give credibility to its lurid fairy tales. It provides oxygen to the even more paranoid fantasists to its right, turning individuals into stars and other outlets into sustainable projects. And amazingly, Fox has nonetheless managed to present itself as a normal news outlet, like a cuckoo’s egg in a dunnock nest, mimicking the form with radically different content.

The fact that Fox has pulled this off is especially remarkable because we know how it was created, and why.

In 2011, Gawker obtained the 1970 White House memo from the Nixon presidential library, titled “A Plan for Putting the GOP on TV News.” (The original Gawker article about it is still online, but thanks to technologist Peter Thiel’s successful attempt to destroy Gawker, the memo itself disappeared from the internet. The Intercept today is republishing it.)

When the memo was published by Gawker, historian Rick Perlstein said he believed it was written by Chuck Colson, a special counsel to the president during the Nixon administration who pleaded guilty to obstruction of justice during Watergate. The memo makes the case that Republicans needed to avoid the “prejudices of network news selectors” and get the GOP perspective on TV. Why? Because Americans are stupid, and they could take advantage of that:

“Today television news is watched more often than people read newspapers, than people listen to the radio, than people read or gather any other form of communication,” the memo states. “The reason: People are lazy. With television you just sit — watch — listen. The thinking is done for you.” [emphasis in original]

At the time, there was no such thing as cable television, just the networks and local news. The memo said that the operation could “provide pro-Administration, videotape, hard news actualities to the major cities of the United States.” That is, they would shoot and edit video segments that looked like news and provide them for free to local stations, which would hopefully run them without revealing their origins.