(...) While Sinclair may look like a mechanism of the Trump administration—and indeed he has tweeted his support for Sinclair—it's not as though Americans are any less skeptical of the president's own reliability. Monmouth's data shows Trump is even less trusted than cable news targets like CNN (35 percent of respondents versus 48 percent). Besides, Americans have come to loathe traditional institutions with such intensity that even Trump's well-worn outsider status can't protect him from the ire of the aggrieved citizen.

Given the growing furor of an American populace abused and misused for decades, Trump's brand of chaos was a logical conclusion of the 2016 election. But Trump's assault on the media has been built on an assault on reality, a national gaslighting that has wrought epistemic chaos among what was supposed to be an informed citizenry.

And this is a fundamentally deleterious blow to democracy. No society works if people don't speak the same moral and ethical language, if they can't find a way to communicate—and, more importantly, if they don't trust each other. (...)

Bolton wears many hats. He serves as a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and a contributor to Fox News, and controls a Super PAC that used money from the billionaire Mercer family to help elect congressional Republicans.

But one role that has received relatively little scrutiny is his work as chair of the Gatestone Institute, a nonprofit that focuses largely on publishing original commentary and news related to the supposed threat that Islam poses to Western society. He has served in that role since 2013. (Bolton did not respond to an email seeking comment.) (...)

Many of the fake stories have percolated into mainstream U.S. politics. Gatestone was largely responsible for the false claim that there are “no-go zones” through Belgium, the Netherlands, France, Sweden, and other European states where Muslim immigrants have set up a parallel society in which local police no longer enforce the law.

The idea infiltrated the 2016 Republican primary, as Bobby Jindal, Ted Cruz, and Donald Trump repeated the uninformed “no-go zone” claim (to the later great embarrassment of U.S. Ambassador to the Netherlands Pete Hoekstra). While many conservative outlets eventually parroted the myth, Gatestone had pushed the idea since 2012 and has published dozens of pieces on the claim since.

As The Intercept previously reported, Gatestone is largely funded by Nina Rosenwald, the heir to the Sears, Rosebuck & Company department store fortune. Though the Rosenwald family was once a champion of Jewish refugees during World War II, Rosenwald has financed a number of efforts to vilify Muslims attempting to escape bloodshed in Africa and the Middle East.

Billionaire heiress Rebekah Mercer, a donor to various far-right causes as well as the Trump campaign, was listed as a Gatestone board member in April 2017, according to the foreign policy-focused website LobeLog. After LobeLog inquired about Mercer joining the board, Gatestone scrubbed any information about her from the site. Donor rolls obtained by LobeLog showed that the Mercer Family Foundation gave $150,000 total to Gatestone in 2014 and 2015.

Bolton has made no effort to conceal his close ties to the forces of Islamophobia. As reporter Eli Clifton noted, Bolton wrote the foreward to a book authored by Robert Spencer and Pamella Geller, two American activists that have led the charge in protesting mosques and spreading conspiracy theories about the threat posed by Islam.

The hate has in someways been a lucrative career path. Bolton, for his efforts, has collected at least $310,000 from the Gatestone Institute in payments, according to publicly available tax disclosures.

The Gatestone website has not only influenced U.S. politics, but also attempted to influence recent European elections in France, the Netherlands, Austria, and Germany. The site has promoted far-right, anti-Muslim populists running for office across the continent. In Germany, politicians from Alternative for Germany, or AfD, the rabidly anti-immigrant far-right party, regularly shared Gatestone articles on Facebook and Twitter during the election last year. Geert Wilders, the Dutch anti-Muslim firebrand, is a guest author on the site.

And now its chair will be the national security adviser to the president of the United States.

Four in 10 (or 42 percent of) Republicans consider accurate news stories that cast a politician or political group in a negative light to always be “fake news.” (The corresponding figure for Democrats is 17 percent.)

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