It Was All a Lie: How the Republican Party Became Donald Trump

by Stuart Stevens

The dystopian Shangri-La that so many on the right inhabit was years in the making. If it often seems that the Republican Party is living in a world disconnected from reality, that’s because it is. Large elements of the Republican Party have made a collective decision that there is no objective truth. Network Propaganda: Manipulation, Disinformation, and Radicalization in American Politics, published in 2018, is the most extensive comparison of the Democratic and Republican Parties’ relationship to the media and a concept of verifiable truth. Its analysis highlighted the differences between the two parties: We did not come to this work looking for a partisan-skewed explanation. As we began to analyze the millions of online stories, tweets, and Facebook sharing data points, the pattern that emerged was clear. Our own earlier work, which analyzed specific campaigns around intellectual property law and found that right and left online media collaborated, made us skeptical of our initial observations, but these proved highly resilient to a wide range of specifications and robustness checks. Something very different was happening in right-wing media than in centrist, center-left, and left-wing media. We will make the argument throughout this book that the behavior of the right-wing media ecosystem represents a radicalization of roughly a third of the American media system. We use the term “radicalization” advisedly in two senses. First, to speak of “polarization” is to assume s...