ArcaMax

Imagine that you have owned a family-friendly pizza restaurant for about a decade in an upscale northwest Washington, D.C., neighborhood. Suddenly, without warning, you're getting slimed by sickos on the Internet with death threats and obscenities.

What would you do?

There's wasn't much James Alefantis, owner of Comet Ping Pong, could do when threatening messages began to appear on his Instagram feed in late October and grew into hundreds through texts, Facebook, Twitter and telephone calls.

The furor was based on a lie, a breathtakingly false allegation of a child sex abuse ring supposedly led by Hillary Clinton and her campaign chief, John Podesta.

There was, you may recall, a presidential election coming up.

Conspiracy theories have percolated constantly against the Clintons, among other famous and powerful people. The longer they're around, the more bizarre the narratives have become, particularly in the Internet's busy hives of fake news.

But this particular yarn took on a new seriousness Sunday. Edgar M. Welch, 28, a father of two from Salisbury, N.C., and fired up by Internet rumor mills, brought his AR-15 rifle and a handgun to Comet Ping Pong on a busy afternoon, according to the criminal complaint against him. He wanted to "self-investigate" the charges, police said, and presumably help rescue children Rambo-style.

He surrendered peacefully after finding no evidence that "children were being harbored in the restaurant," said law enforcement authorities, who have denounced the so-called #Pizzagate as a "fictitious online conspiracy theory."

Of course, as you may recall from such other viral myths as the "birther" theory of which President-elect Donald Trump was so reluctant to let go until recently, conspiracy fanatics are not about to let inconvenient facts get in the way of a juicy fable.

As one who makes a living out of checking things out, I am sobered by the degree to which people really love fake news.

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(c) 2016 CLARENCE PAGE DISTRIBUTED BY TRIBUNE MEDIA SERVICES, INC.