STRAUBINICAL NEWS DIGEST Eight.

Just as "fake news" has itself become news, the rumor of a story has become, through the alchemy of social media, the story of a rumor.
  An ugly and false allegation about local pizza restaurant Comet Ping Pong circulated on social media before the election. The bizarre claim was that a pedophilia ring operated inside this business, and both underground tunnels and Hillary Clinton were involved. (Why Hillary Clinton, a person who we've been told endlessly has enriched herself in numerous legal ways, would diversify her portfolio by expanding into this market, I couldn't say. It would seem that the "lock her up!" crowd is willing to believe virtually anything about Clinton, while accepting virtually no criticism of Donald Trump.)
  For a while, the restaurant has been receiving a  disturbing amount of death threats, due to the wildfire-like rumor-spreading possibilities available on sites like Reddit. Reddit had to actually ban the topic of "pizzagate," as the horseshit "scandal" was imaginatively dubbed. After enough credulous Americans started adding two and two and getting seven, they apparently decided
that such evil couldn't all be the work of just one restaurant, and neighboring businesses have been receiving threats also. So now Politics and Prose, a bookstore already threatened by the gleeful American slide into a new Dark Age of illiteracy and ignorance, has to deal with this new wrinkle. And, in a frightening twist that seems normal in this "media is evil" climate, Washington Post reporters have been threatened online just for reporting this story.
  Yesterday a man from North Carolina walked into Comet's kitchen with an assault rifle, the kind of nut-empowering weapon that our founding fathers were thinking about when they crafted the second amendment. In his mind, he was investigating the allegations. Here in the real world, a bunch of Americans had their lives endangered by fact-free crazy talk.
  No-one got hurt, fortunately. But this ought to worry all of us fact-loving partisans who live in the reality-based community. I get why many of my friends angrily condemn all Trump voters, but when I'm allowing myself to cook up some broad-brush rage, it's more likely to be toward people who spread nasty lies. Of course, the Clinton connection suggests there's presumably some overlap between the two groups.
  It's interesting to me that large numbers of people believe that "the media" is evil and not to be trusted, while rumors and conspiracy theories get clicked on and linked to countless times by the intermittently skeptical. This implies a popular narrative where the truth is being suppressed by Anderson Cooper, the Post, etc., but a bunch of armchair Paul Reveres are helpfully picking up the slack, posting real names and real phone numbers online for the convenience of people who like to make anonymous death threats.
  Years ago, I was the "victim" of a very mild rumor. Through dumb luck, I was able to pin down the person who'd been telling everyone the misinformation, and when I confronted him, he didn't see that he had done anything wrong. It was just a misunderstanding. And more recently, after a spate of unexplained homicides in our city, a parent at my son's school told me he'd heard from a person close to one of the victims that the victim's housekeeper was having a sexual relationship with the murderer. Later the alleged killer was caught and this small example of malicious bullshit was forgotten. Not by me, though.
  So, I'm not really capable of applying my calm, benefit-of-the-doubt approach to people who spread rumors. Not that I haven't done it-- hypocritically, I love gossip and it's probably just rationalization that allows me to feel that I'm not one of the people I'm railing against.
  The main difference between me and the other rumormongers is that I'm skeptical. Like most humans, I'm fascinated by sleazy revelations and apocalyptic backroom deals. But I don't let my love for this kind of dot-connecting sway me from my knee-jerk assumption that people are innocent until proven guilty, and that an unsubstantiated allegation is horseshit until I see some evidence. (At least, that's my self-serving perception.)
  This scary incident, with its blending of first and second amendment issues, would appear to be convincing evidence, if more is needed, that fake-news alarmists are right to be worried about an America where rumors are lovingly nurtured and patriotically overfed, like a baby monster who starts growing and overnight gets big enough, and hungry enough, to bust out of the lab and run amok.