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The fake news we should really fear
The conspiracy theories with the most deleterious political consequences typically come, not from the moronic street preachers, but from the heart of the Establishment itself, argue MATTHEW ALFORD, STEPHEN HARPER and TOM SYKES

WE LIVE in an era where paranoid political fantasies are not just commonplace but consequential. 

In the US, Donald Trump swept into the Oval Office on a wave of outlandish narratives — demonising Hillary “lock her up” Clinton and Barack “born in Kenya” Obama. 

The latest iteration, spilling out unmasked onto British and US streets, is a conspiracy theory called Qanon in which a cabal of Satanic paedophiles is said to control the economy through the manufacture of a bogus virus.

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