You certainly can trace the GOP’s descent into delusion to before the Bushies, but the Dubya Administration is where it came to maturation. There was a willful rejection in powerful conservative circles of the “reality based community.” As one aide told Ron Suskind in “Faith, Certainty and the Presidency of George W. Bush,” his great 2004 New York Times Magazine article, ”We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality.”

That disdain for facts on the Right has only hardened in the past decade, with conspiracy theories now treated by the alt-right media as all the news that’s fit to print. It’s become a contest to out-crazy one another, and only those most amenable to madness, kooks like Alex Jones and Stephen Bannon, deemed acceptable. This impulse ran headlong into the decentralization of media, with legacy news organizations beholden by basic journalistic principles suddenly struggling to keep pace. The gatekeepers were going and gone and more information did not lead to better information. Bushes and talk-radio hosts who formerly flourished in these circles became this election season targets of the vitriol themselves for not being “pure” enough, for pushing back against Donald Trump attempting to make the party of Lincoln into the party of George Lincoln Rockwell.

From “Donald Trump Broke the Conservative Media,” Oliver Darcy’s Business Insider piece about an extreme right turn that took the party over the edge:

Some conservatives tried to fight back against Trump, pleading with their audiences to see what they contended to be the rational point of view, but their arguments seemed to go unheard.

One of the chief problems, [talk-radio host Charlie] Sykes said, was that it had become impossible to prove to listeners that Trump was telling falsehoods because over the past several decades, the conservative news media had “basically eliminated any of the referees, the gatekeepers.”

“There’s nobody,” he lamented. “Let’s say that Donald Trump basically makes whatever you want to say, whatever claim he wants to make. And everybody knows it’s a falsehood. The big question of my audience, it is impossible for me to say that, ‘By the way, you know it’s false.’ And they’ll say, ‘Why? I saw it on Allen B. West.’ Or they’ll say, ‘I saw it on a Facebook page.’ And I’ll say, ‘The New York Times did a fact check.’ And they’ll say, ‘Oh, that’s The New York Times. That’s bulls—.’ There’s nobody — you can’t go to anybody and say, ‘Look, here are the facts.'”

“And I have to say that’s one of the disorienting realities of this political year. You can be in this alternative media reality and there’s no way to break through it,” Sykes continued. “And I swim upstream because if I don’t say these things from some of these websites, then suddenly I have sold out. Then they’ll ask what’s wrong with me for not repeating these stories that I know not to be true.”

{Talk-radio host John] Ziegler said he faced much of the same problem.

“If you are a conservative talk show host, which I am, if you don’t accept that it’s likely Hillary Clinton has taken part in multiple murders, or that Barack Obama is a Muslim extremist sympathizer who was probably born outside this country — if you don’t accept those two things, it’s almost as if you’re a sellout. You’re a RINO. You’re somehow part of the liberal elite. It’s nuts. It’s making my own show very difficult to do. It’s almost where to the point where we are not able to function.”

He continued: “It’s almost like it’s a disease, and it’s taken over people. I don’t remember this being the case four years ago. But something has happened. Something snapped. But now all of a sudden, if a story comes out, and it’s not on Breitbart or endorsed by Drudge, it can’t be true. Especially if it’s about Donald Trump. Which is flat-out ludicrous.”

Asked why none of his criticism of Trump seemed to put a crack in the real-estate mogul’s armor, Beck paused.

“I think that people are very lost, and they don’t know what to do at this point.”•