Dayton, Ohio: I'm not sure the moment I decided I was a conservative, but I do know the moment I decided I wasn't.

For 20 years, the ubiquity of conservative radio and Fox News in most US suburban and rural households, not to mention offices, restaurants and malls, was nearly complete – one of those shows was always on. You go to work, drive home to the radio "news" station with hours of Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, G. Gordon Liddy and come home and Fox News was on in the background.

There were hundreds of these days, but one in particular made me crack.

I can't remember the story. I think it was a kindergarten class that had given condoms away in California (I believe it turned out to be a mistake). If you watched the network, these anecdotal stories burned time between the pundits, talkers and screamers, but served the purpose of feeding rage to an addicted audience. I don't know what happened – maybe I was partially tired, or the lack of respect for the audience and myself finally cut too close. I turned it off and threw the remote out of the family room.

These anecdotal stories also served well in the more intellectual realms of conservative media. The basis for most of conservative political commentator Mark Steyn's "it's the end of the world as I know it, and no, I don't feel fine" columns can be found in random examples of civilisation collapsing between his gifted prose and funny lines, which always end with what actor Bill Paxton would say: "Game over, man."

I first questioned why such a singular, local story was on a major news network. Why did Fox News air this story? To make me angry. That's the sole purpose of Fox, Breitbart, Red State, Hannity and Limbaugh. Selling anger, because it made - and still makes - money.

The complete and total cynical usurpation of the average white voter reached its completion this week. The Russian government attacked an American political party, only for the Republican candidate Donald Trump – with deep ties to the Russians all the way to his campaign manager – to encourage the Russians to keep hacking. "Maybe they'll find those 33,000 lost emails," he quipped.

This is four years after Republican Mitt Romney said on a debate stage that Russia was our greatest foreign policy concern as US President Barack Obama smirked.

Thirty years ago, if a Russian entity stole correspondence from the Democrats, Ronald Reagan and millions of other Republicans would be calling for the bombers. Today, it's greeted with cheers, for Hillary Clinton and the DNC are greater enemies than Putin, Islamic State, North Korea and taxes combined. The average Trump conservative sees it this way because they are trained to see it this way.

One chief educator is Jonah Goldberg, longtime writer at the National Review. His article today, "How the media's history of smearing Republicans now helps Trump", should be worthy of an entire class in political psychology or deflection.

Goldberg's lament is that now the Republican Party has a truly horrid and dangerous candidate, reporting does no good in changing the mind of the conservative audience because of the media's unfair treatment of Republican candidates in the past. It's the assailant blaming the victim.

Conservative media had one mission for the last 25 years – to constantly unfairly criticise and blame the media for everything it could. Why? It made money. Politics wasn't even second in that regard and principle wasn't in the top 10. This is how a Donald Trump happens.

It's why Trump can say nearly anything and not suffer a dent with his base. The formula for conservative media success was simple. Blast the media, push for more rigid conservatives on the ticket. When small things like checks and balances, federal laws and elections get in the way, blame it on a lack of purity and vow to field "real conservatives" at the next election. This and gerrymandering turned Republican primaries into brawls. Ask for the impossible, like halting healthcare reform. And the Limbaughs of this world would paint any victory as a loss - because if the listeners won, they would stop listening.

When the conservative movement couldn't slay the Trump dragon, they blamed the media – the same media that conservatives have vilified as a matter of practice. This is how the day Wednesday, July 27, 2016 became one of the most morale-shattering I've had as an American citizen.

"I think people should focus on what was in these emails, and quit worrying so much about where they came from," is a typical response.

Have they read the emails? No need, Limbaugh will do that for them, or Bill O'Reilly. Or there will be a meme, or a Facebook group.

This is why there were gatekeepers in the first place, why there was a press. Why in the United States, when the framers formed the country's system of government, it considered a free press the Fourth Estate, as important as Congress, the Supreme Court and the White House.

The conservative movement and media have been throwing barbarians at them for years.

When the Republican Party needed those gatekeepers to stop Donald Trump, their base wasn't willing to listen to them, either.

​B.J. Bethel is a journalist living in Ohio. He has written frequently about sports, politics and pop culture and is a specialist in digital media.