[Flash Walken]

Is brainwashed too harsh of a term for what has happened to hardcore conservative voters in recent years, thanks in part to the far-right press?

There’s little doubt that Trump, a bullying bigoted nativist, has emerged as the mirror image of the Obama-hating far-right press. He’s clearly won over the demagoguery wing of the Republican Party, which for years obsessed over every Fox News Benghazi report, cheered every Rush Limbaugh I.R.S. condemnation, and watched Trump’s birther campaign with great fascination.

What’s inescapable today about the mounting Trump carnage is that it’s all self-inflicted. Trump’s flourishing on the fertile playing field of bigotry and resentment that the conservative media helped cultivate for years. Anti-intellectualism became a hallmark of the conservative press under Obama. Today, that’s what is powering Trump’s run.

Look no further than Breitbart. This is from an item I wrote in 2010, cataloging the site’s already-rich history of getting everything wrong:

This, from the site that can’t read WH visitor’s logs, doesn’t understand pop culture, can’t read polling data, doesn’t know what a hate crime is, is clueless about the law, openly mocks Christmas, has trouble reading English, and launched one of the most incompetent smear campaigns in internet history.

And yet appearing on Fox News recently, Breitbart’s former publicist Kurt Bardella, who resigned in protest last week, attributed Trump’s rise to the fact that “facts no longer have their place in the political conversation and discourse in this country.” Trust me, conservative sites like Breitbart have been dismantling “facts” for many, many years.

“All movements are vulnerable to populist excesses and the self-destructive impulses of their core supporters,” wrote Conor Friedersdorf at The Atlantic, as he castigated the conservative press for Trump’s rise. “Good leaders can help to mitigate those pathologies. Bad leaders magnify them.”

Leaders of the Republican Party chose to magnify them, as they deputized the right-wing media in their pursuit of Obama. The move represented a complete abdication of leadership. But after the Obama landslide in 2008, the strategy was easy, it was cheap and it produced short-term excitement, bordering on hysteria, within a conservative movement.

So off came all the mechanical governors and the right-wing media engine was revved for seven years. Obviously, we’re now watching the colossal — and predictable — malfunction.

http://www.salon.com/2016/03/17/the_...alism_partner/