The attack on Donald Trump unleashes a flood of misinformation
The left thinks the shooting was just a performance; the right sees an inside job. Will the truth matter?
“American politics has often been an arena for angry minds,” the political scientist Richard Hofstadter wrote 60 years ago in his classic essay, “The Paranoid Style in American Politics”. Yet across many eras, this discourse of “heated exaggeration, suspicion and conspiratorial fantasy” festered largely on the fringe. Then the internet made the fringe accessible to everyone, amplifying dissonance and disinformation.
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