“From a pure strategy standpoint that is logically where you would go,” Brabender said. “That is the only way you could survive this.”

Charlie Sykes, a former conservative talk radio host, said Republican voters have been conditioned over years of right-wing media consumption to reflexively reject any news that challenges their worldview. “These alternative-reality silos—not only do they reinforce an ideological message, but they can be impenetrable,” he said.

Sykes admits that he was once part of the problem. When he hosted his popular Milwaukee-based radio show, he routinely devoted airtime to bashing the press—calling out perceived partisanship, and telling listeners that they couldn't get the full story by reading the papers. While Sykes stands by many of his critiques, he eventually grew alarmed by the hyper-skepticism his audience began to exhibit. By the middle of last year’s election, he said, he couldn’t even cite stories from The New York Times or The Washington Post on the air without listeners dismissing them as untrustworthy.

In Alabama, Sykes said, a “nightmare scenario” is unfolding. “You have credible journalism being attacked and ignored amid a flood of misinformation and bizarre propaganda,” he said, adding that his compatriots in the conservative media who are horrified by Moore need to grapple with their own culpability. “I think we should be horrified by the monster we helped create.”

Of course, conservatives have been complaining about bias in the news media for decades. "You have to remember the 1964 GOP convention—Goldwater delegates screaming at the media—to get a little sense of how deep and how long the hostility legacy exists," said Newt Gingrich. "It has just gotten steadily worse and can be seen as a deepening chasm."

But in recent years, conservatives’ culture war on the press has escalated dramatically—culminating in 2016 with Trump winning the nomination while ridiculing journalists by name from the stump. "The war between Trump and the news media, and his willingness to take them head on more than anyone since Goldwater, has solidified his base while making it harder to reach moderates who are fed a daily diet of hostility by the media,” Gingrich said.

Trump’s rise brought right-wing mistrust of the media to new heights, as Trump first mocked the media on the stump as a candidate, then kept the reporters covering his campaign in press pens at rallies, and now calls any story he doesn’t like “fake news.” There has been a shift—once, the media was just biased; now, many Republican base voters believe it is actually fabricating stories. A Politico/Morning Consult poll last month showed that 46 percent of all voters believe the media make up stories about Trump, including 76 percent of Republicans.

“The trust in the media was already at a low point and by Trump constantly going after the media, it’s further eroded faith in the media and has actually activated people to be against it,” said the Republican strategist and former RNC spokesman Doug Heye. “That’s part of the tribalism we see in our politics, the erosion in all capital-I institutions.” Heye recalled being at a George H.W. Bush rally in 1992 and seeing a bumper sticker that said “Annoy the media, vote Bush”—a message that seems almost quaint now.