Photos: AP

BY DOUGLAS PERRY

Over the course of two decades, Fox News Channel established a distinctive brand: it was a news-gathering organization that fit the conservative American's worldview. That meant backing old-school, free-enterprise economics, and, on the culture front, taking up the late William F. Buckley Jr.'s famous ambition to stand "athwart history, yelling Stop, at a time when no one is inclined to do so."

That was then. The Fox brand is now deep in the midst of a years-long revamp. The cable-news network, as it grew in power, put traditional conservative principles on the back burner in favor of overt partisan warfare. Most viewers didn't notice any difference, despite Fox jettisoning its slogan, "Fair & Balanced."

But this more combative approach ultimately spun out of control, leading last year to the network embracing Trumpism -- even as Buckley's conservative journal, National Review, was devoting an entire issue to revealing Donald Trump as a conservative fraud. The pivot for Fox News required it to fully commit to pushing conspiracy theories, the sine qua non of the Trumpian mindset.

Below we showcase 10 conspiracy theories that helped turn the Fox News Channel into the Donald Trump Channel. (Needless to say, this is far from a comprehensive list; we’re focusing on some of the channel’s and conservative media's most impactful conspiracy theories.)

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Birtherism

Barack Obama was born in Kenya, not the United States, and therefore was an illegitimate president. (The U.S. Constitution requires that the president be a “natural-born” citizen.) This is the false accusation -- Obama was actually born in Hawaii -- that launched Donald Trump from reality-TV star to political star. Trump pushed birtherism for years on Fox News.

“Why doesn’t he show his birth certificate?” Trump asked over and over on the cable channel. When Obama did release his birth certificate, the charge shifted. In 2012 Trump insisted that “an extremely credible source” had told him that Obama’s official birth certificate had been faked.

Trump "nurtured the conspiracy like a poisonous flower, watering and feeding it with an ardor that still baffles and embarrasses many around him," the New York Times wrote in 2016.

As the presidential campaign headed into the stretch run last year, Trump finally acknowledged that Obama had been born in the U.S. -- but he insisted, falsely, that his opponent, Hillary Clinton, had started the “birther” rumor and he had simply tracked down the truth. “I finished it,’’ he said. “President Obama was born in the United States -- period.’’

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Obama (AP)

Death panels

When President Obama and congressional Democrats were working to pass the Affordable Care Act, Republicans sounded the alarm about what "socialized" medicine would mean for the average American. They claimed that government committees -- death panels -- would decide whether or not you deserved to receive the health care you needed to live. (The term "death panels" appears to have been coined by 2008 GOP vice-presidential candidate and former Fox News contributor Sarah Palin.) Fact-checking website PolitiFact declared the death-panels rumor the 2009 "Lie of the Year."

Fox News, other conservative outlets and Republican politicians pushed the death-panels angle, and it became entrenched in the popular culture. In 2014, a satirical conservative website even reported that an Obamacare "death panel" had "ordered their first execution" -- and enough people took it seriously that PolitiFact felt it had to revisit the conspiracy theory.

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Clinton (AP)

Benghazi

On Sept. 12, 2012, U.S. Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three other Americans were killed when militants attacked the U.S. mission in Benghazi, Libya. Fox News and other conservative outlets charged that Hillary Clinton, then U.S. secretary of state, had refused to provide adequate security at the mission and covered up this and other failures.

"Look at Benghazi, our ambassador," Trump said in 2016. "He wired her 500 or 600 times asking for help."

Another accusation: that “high-level officials on the ground or in Washington told back-up security forces to ‘stand down’ rather than offer support while U.S. personnel were still under fire.”

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Benghazi committee leaders (AP)

The state department’s Accountability and Review Board investigated what happened in Benghazi and determined that security at the mission was “grossly inadequate” and that “systemic failures, and leadership and management deficiencies,” might have contributed to the deaths. “[T]hese are issues of competence, not corruption,” Politico’s Michael Hirsh wrote in 2014. He added that there was no evidence “Clinton or anyone else in the administration engaged in a cover-up of Benghazi.”

A House select committee in 2016 issued an 800-page report on Benghazi. It “contains no bombshell revelations, nor any new evidence of wrongdoing by Clinton,” CNN reported, “but it does fault the Obama administration for security lapses.” It concluded that Clinton had not denied requested security measures at the mission and that during the attack no “stand down” order was given.

The report nevertheless further fueled the Benghazi conspiracy theories. "[I]t's already too late for the truth," Hirsh wrote back in 2014. "Benghazi has taken on a cultural life of its own on the right."

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Clinton (AP)

The Seth Rich murder

Democratic Party staffer Seth Rich was shot to death in Washington, D.C., in July 2016. Police say it most likely was an attempted robbery, but rumors soon circulated that Rich, not Russian hackers, was behind the leaking of emails from the Democratic National Committee.

The rumors outlasted the presidential campaign. In May 2017, Fox News reported that Rich’s murder may have been ordered by powerful Democratic Party insiders. “This blows the whole Russia collusion narrative completely out of the water," Fox News personality Sean Hannity said. A week later, Fox quietly retracted its story, but Hannity kept pushing it. “[A]ll you in the liberal media,” he said on his radio program, “I am not Fox.com or Fox News.com. I retracted nothing.”

In August of this year, former Fox News commentator Rod Wheeler alleged in a lawsuit that Fox News and influential Trump supporter Ed Butowsky "worked in concert under the watchful eye of the White House to concoct [the] story" about Rich's death, NPR reported. It added: "His suit charges that a Fox News reporter created quotations out of thin air and attributed them to him to propel her story." Fox News responded to the lawsuit by insisting there was "no concrete evidence" that Wheeler was misquoted.

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Hannity (AP)

The Deep State

Hannity, described by Pulitzer Prize-winning conservative columnist Bret Stephens as Fox News's "dumbest anchor," has harped on the idea that members of the so-called Deep State -- entrenched liberal bureaucrats in the federal government, especially in the U.S. intelligence services -- are undertaking a "soft coup" against President Donald Trump.

The Washington Post's Erik Wemple suggested last summer that "the Fox News firebrand is flirting with a scenario in which he ends up silencing himself, via pure madness." We're now heading into winter, and Hannity does not appear to be in danger of being silenced, despite increasing signs of madness. (Former Republican Speaker of the House John Boehner this week said Hannity, reading the Tea Party tea leaves a few years ago, went over to the "dark side" and is not coming back.

Hannity, of course, immediately shot back at Boehner on Twitter.

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The Trump-Russia investigation

Donald Trump himself has declared that the alleged collusion between Russian officials and his 2016 presidential campaign is “Fake News.” Fox has taken up that battle cry, calling into question Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s motivations in pursuing his remit and demanding that the investigation be closed. “This is insanity,” Sean Hannity has said of the investigation. Like Trump, he calls the investigation a “witch hunt.”

The president -- and his news channel -- have sought to distract from Mueller’s progress by insisting his opponent in the late election, Hillary Clinton, should be the investigation’s real target.

"It's time, folks," Fox News host Jeanine Pirro said this week. "It's time to shut it down, turn the tables, and lock her up. That's what I said. I actually said it. Lock her up."

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Mueller (AP)

The special counsel’s office this week announced the indictments of former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort and another Trump campaign associate on charges that include “conspiracy against the U.S.,” tax evasion and money laundering. It was also revealed that a low-level Trump campaign staffer pleaded guilty to lying to FBI agents and has been cooperating with the special counsel’s office.

Fox News downplayed the news and attacked Mueller's credibility, leaving some reporters at the network aghast. "I'm watching now and screaming. I want to quit," a Fox staffer wrote in a text message, CNN reported.

Another Fox News staffer reportedly told CNN: "It is another blow to journalists at Fox who come in every day wanting to cover the news in a fair and objective way."

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Hannity (AP)

Charlottesville actors

In August, white supremacists marching in Charlottesville, Va., were met by protesters, and violence ensued. A reported supporter of the white supremacists plowed his car into protesters, killing one of them. President Trump blamed “both sides” for the violence, and both Republican and Democratic leaders condemned his remarks.

Not Fox News’s Hannity, though. He questioned the whole event, passing along a conspiracy theory that there weren’t even actual protesters at the rally -- they were “actors hired by a publicity firm.”

“There's a story out today that raises a question whether or not antifa agitators that showed up in Charlottesville on Saturday were bought and paid for,” Hannity reportedly said on his radio show. “Apparently it was uncovered, and some of the media reported it, that some suspicious activity by an L.A.-based company that calls itself Crowds on Demand.”

Hannity acknowledged that the "story" might not be true, but it sounded true. "We're going to keep an eye on that," he said.

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Clinton (AP)

Uranium One

Uranium One was a Canadian energy company that was sold to a Russian firm in 2013. Trump, Fox News pundits and others have said that the company, which controlled about 20 percent of the U.S.’s uranium supply at the time, bought approval of the sale by making donations to the Clinton Foundation.

Trump recently called the Uranium One deal a “modern-day Watergate.”

Offered a Fox News headline: "Hillary Clinton's ties to Russian uranium deal largely ignored by anti-Trump media, and other media disasters."

The “media-disaster” purveyors did not ignore the deal -- they reported the facts about it. “In fact,” wrote The New Yorker, “nine government departments signed off on the transaction, and the State Department officials involved have said that Clinton played no role.”

MSNBC host Joy Reid on Sunday grilled Jen Kerns of the conservative Washington Examiner about her insistence that Clinton made the deal happen. She summed up her position thusly:

“So what you're talking about is a deal that nine members of [The Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States] approved unanimously. None of them was Hillary Clinton. You have a donor who separately gave Hillary Clinton donations at a time when she was not Secretary of State. The two things cross in the night -- they have no relation to each other. The members of CFIUS have been very clear Hillary Clinton had nothing to do with approving that deal. She would have had to strong-arm eight people in order to get them to unanimously approve the deal .... The CFIUS people say now that if that deal came before them today they would still approve it unanimously. There's actually nothing about the deal that's controversial. The only reason we're talking about it is because per your admission, which I think is very honest, the [Republican National Committee] would like us to be talking about this now.”

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Stone (AP)

This issue is hot again right now, thanks in part to an article in The Hill newspaper that reported the FBI in 2009 had “gathered substantial evidence that Russian nuclear industry officials were engaged in bribery, kickbacks, extortion and money laundering designed to grow Vladimir Putin’s atomic energy business inside the United States.” The FBI director in 2009? Robert Mueller, who is now the special counsel investigating the Trump campaign.

Wildcard political strategist and Trump backer Roger Stone has called for a special prosecutor to be named to investigate the Uranium One deal, and that would mean Mueller would have to be replaced as the head of the Trump-Russia investigation.

"Mueller can't be a special prosecutor when he himself is under investigation," Stone said this week. "Mueller is guilty of obstruction and cover up in Uranium One."

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Gorka (AP)

Lone wolf

Former Trump White House aide and regular Fox News talker Sebastian Gorka has blamed liberals and “fake news” for making terrorist attacks more likely in the U.S.

"[W]e have to jettison this idea of a 'lone wolf,' Gorka said on Fox News. "'Lone wolf' was invented as a phrase, was made popular by the Obama administration, to make Americans disconnect the dots. There has not been a significant jihadi attack since September 11th in the United States where one person acted completely isolated from everybody else."

The Obama administration did not invent, or make popular, "lone wolf" as a phrase. Wrote the Columbia Journalism Review: "The figurative use of 'lone wolf' can be traced to popular fiction. [Wall Street Journal writer Ben Zimmer] noted that a human 'lone wolf' appeared in H.G. Wells's 'The Invisible Man,' published in 1897, as the invisible man is being urged: 'Don't be a lone wolf. Publish your results.' The novelist Steven Crane called war correspondents 'lone wolves' in his 1899 novel, 'Active Service.'"

Examples of figurative and political uses of the phrase “lone wolf” proliferate from there down through the years.

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Political correctness kills

Gorka also blamed the success of non-lone-wolf terrorists on “political correctness,” citing the 2015 terror attack in San Bernardino, Calif.

"No more political correctness," he said on Fox & Friends. "Political correctness can kill people. We know in San Bernardino that the neighbors of the killers saw suspicious activity but refused to report it because they were afraid of being called racist or islamophobes."

PolitiFact last year investigated the claims that the San Bernardino killers’ neighbors saw suspicious activity and did not report it. It called such statements “false.”

"We looked for any reports of the neighbors saying they had an inkling of any plans for an attack," the fact-checking website wrote. "We didn't find any. We did find second-hand reports that weren't well sourced, and these were repeated primarily on right-leaning news websites."

In fact, neighbors described the killers as "quiet, religious people who didn’t attract attention or suspicion."

During the campaign last year, Donald Trump famously said, “I don't frankly have time for total political correctness. And to be honest with you, this country doesn't have time either. This country is in big trouble."

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Why does Fox News see things so differently than other national news organizations?

It doesn’t -- not really, former conservative radio talker (and current Trump critic) Charlie Sykes recently told Vox. It’s about winning, regardless of the cost.

"No matter what happens with Trump, no matter how overwhelming the evidence against him, it's always, 'What about Hillary?' or, 'What about the liberals?' or, 'What about the Dems?'" Sykes said. "They treat this like a battlefield, and it's always about defending their side no matter what. ... The essence of propaganda is not necessarily to convince you of a certain set of facts. It is to overwhelm your critical sensibilities. It's to make you doubt the existence of a knowable truth. The conservative media is a giant fog machine designed to confuse and disorient people."

-- Douglas Perry

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