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We recently saw the mechanism in action when another baseless conspiracy theory rose to the top of the news: The idea that the murder last year of Seth Rich, a staff member at the Democratic National Committee, was linked, somehow, to the leaking of Clinton campaign emails. The Fox News host Sean Hannity pushed the theory the loudest, but it was groups on Twitter — or, more specifically, bots on Twitter — that were first to the story and helped make it huge.

The people who are subscribing clearly want us to do investigative reporting. They want us to hold powerful individuals and powerful institutions to account, including their government — at the federal level, state level, local level — they want us to do it all. That’s something they are willing to pay for.

Usually, things happen in the world and you go to work and you’ve got your family and you’ve got your friend and you do what you do, but to this day I feel like there’s a cloud, a pall, over the whole country, in a paranoid surreal sort of way that’s got nothing to do with the Democrats losing the election,” said Popovich, 68, who graduated from the Air Force Academy with a bachelor’s degree in Soviet Studies in 1970 and spent active duty time as an intelligence officer in Eastern Europe. “It’s got to do with the way one individual conducts himself. It’s embarrassing. It’s dangerous to our institutions and what we all stand for and what we expect the country to be. But for this individual, he’s at a game show and everything that happens begins and ends with him, not our people or our country.

Truth be told, the incessant lying by this president and the elaborate apparatus he has built in the White House to bend reality to meet those lies means that nothing they say is to be believed anyway, but this is of a different nature. This says to America: I’m going to tell you a lie that is so outrageous that you will want to believe that some part of it is true, to preserve your faith in truth, democracy and mankind.