In Stephen Colbert’s epic performance at the 2006 White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner he ironically stated that “Reality has a well-known liberal bias.” During the George W. Bush era, comedians like Colbert and Jon Stewart tackled what Stewart referred to as “bullshit mountain.” Less clearly a partisan project, the satire of Stewart and Colbert was directly aimed at the way that concepts like truth and reality had become politically polarized.

And they had a lot of work to do. Back in 2008, we learned that the Bush administration made 935 false statements in the lead-up to the Iraq war. In a 2006 interview, Colbert explained how important it was for him in the Bush years to defend the concept of truth:

It used to be, everyone was entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts. But that’s not the case anymore. Facts matter not at all. Perception is everything. It’s certainty. People love the president because he’s certain of his choices as a leader, even if the facts that back him up don’t seem to exist. It’s the fact that he’s certain that is very appealing to a certain section of the country. I really feel a dichotomy in the American populace. What is important? What you want to be true, or what is true?

While Colbert imagined his battle as a fight to rescue the truth, such efforts started to be more and more aligned with party politics. Around the turn of the millennium it became increasingly possible to connect fact-aversion to the GOP. Partisanship was no longer driven by political differences on how to deal with reality; it was divided over what constituted reality itself.

Chris Mooney has documented the allergic reaction the Republican brain has to truth. Focusing on attitudes toward science, Mooney points out that “politicized wrongness today is clustered among Republicans, conservatives, and especially Tea Partiers.” Mooney found that Republicans didn’t only deny the scientific facts behind climate change; they also resisted facts connected to economics and American history.

It’s important to remember this recent history, because without it we can’t make sense of the new war on facts. It’s not just that our president lies with impunity, it’s not just that his team refers to “alternative facts,” and it’s not just that he labels any critical news coverage “fake;” it’s that caring about facts is now seen as a political problem.

A recent study by the Duke Reporters’ Lab shows that, in addition to a partisan difference in the frequency of lying, there is a partisan division over the very idea of fact-checking itself.

The researchers logged 792 statements mentioning fact-checkers and coded them as positive, negative or neutral. While a majority of citations (68 percent) were neutral, they found a dramatic divide in the source of negative comments. The study noted 71 accusations of bias against fact-checkers. Conservative websites were responsible for 97 percent of them.

The study shows that conservative sites take a hostile, negative attitude toward the practice of fact-checking. In some cases the tone is hardly subtle. In one example, they cite Jonah Goldberg of National Review Online, who noted that Hillary Clinton’s record with the truth was far from spotless. “Even PolitiFact, the hackiest and most biased of the fact-checking outfits, which bends over like a Bangkok hooker to defend Democrats, has a long list of her more recent lies.”

Goldberg seems pleased that Politifact has a list of Clinton’s lies, but at the same time he feels compelled to denigrate the fact-checking operation that produced the list. In fact, the Duke study shows that even when conservative sites are happy to reference fact-checks that bolster their ideological perspective, they often still find a way to denigrate their sources.

The Daily Caller’s Evan Gahr offers another example of a conservative politicizing and discrediting fact-checking: “WaPo fact checker Glenn Kessler’s initial defense of his incomplete column also proved an interesting testament to the combination of sloth and liberal bias that is common at his paper.” Gahr openly discredits fact-checking as a partisan enterprise.

As Alexios Mantzarlis explains, “conservative pundits have long been critical of fact-checking.” But clearly these new attacks are taking the conflict over the truth to a whole new level.

Are these new attacks on facts a sign of the destruction of our democracy? There seems little doubt. When the party in power is closely tied to a systematic attack on truth the prospects for a healthy democracy are not encouraging.

Hannah Arendt in her famous study of totalitarianism stated that, “The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between true and false no longer exists.”

For Arendt the mark of totalitarianism was the pervasive nature of ideological thinking. Under that scheme the mind is simply closed to correcting information and it holds to an ideologically consistent view of the world — one that is understood as true despite an absence of supporting evidence.