From the political fringe and nut cases come entirely predictable and shameless conflations. Brutal and incompetent Donald Trump is the biblical King Cyrus to millions of US evangelicals and a “stable genius” to his white-supremacist supporters. Vladimir Putin, an unabashed thug, is Russia’s savior to the biker gangs that adore him. Xi Jinping, the unapologetic autocrat, is a paragon of efficiency to his sycophants. But these easy categorizations are not from those without civic virtue. Remember the time the people of Wuhan rejected the efforts of the Xi apparatchiks to give Xi credit for the recovery of Wuhan from the virus. Doctors, a young dead doctor in particular, are the ones deeply revered in Wuhan. The mainstream almost always deals with the fictional fringe.

The conflations are so incredulous and easy to spot that you even wonder why they are there in the first place. And they unravel at first examination.