Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire: A 500-Year History

by Kurt Andersen

Consider the experience of one prominent Republican congressman from California’s Central Valley. When he arrived in 2003, at twenty-nine, he was among the most conservative elected officials in Washington. The right-wing Heritage Foundation now ranks him in the most “liberal” third of House Republicans. “I used to spend 90 percent of my constituent response time on people who call, e-mail, or send a letter” about some real issue, he told The New Yorker. His typical constituent back in the 2000s had an opinion about “actual legislation. Ten percent were about ‘Chemtrails from airplanes are poisoning me’ to every other conspiracy theory that’s out there. And that has essentially flipped on its head,” he said, during the last dozen years or so. Now only a small fraction of the messages from constituents are “based on something that is mostly true. It’s dramatically changed politics and politicians, and what they’re doing.” The congressman who sounded so sensible in 2015 was Devin Nunes, who chairs the House Intelligence Committee. By 2017, he was a stalwart defender of a president whose specialty is passing along untrue conspiracy theories, such as the one about having been wiretapped in Trump Tower.