Rudy Giuliani's National Goodwill Squandering Tour has been in full effect recently. Having backed up Donald Trump's claim that both Hillary Clinton and President Obama are "founding member[s] of ISIS," he's now hopping on TV to peddle conspiracy theories about Clinton's health. As Stephen Colbert said in his Late Show monologue last night, however, Giuliani's strategy for this is essentially telling people to go Google it.

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Of course, trusting something just because you saw it on the Internet has its pitfalls. If you Google "Donald Trump Rudy Giuliani Drag Queen Motorboat," Colbert suggests, you could pull up the fairly disturbing skit that Giuliani and Trump did together back in the day. (You should. Or maybe you shouldn't. OK, why not?) If you saw it on 'net, it must be true.

A fascinating New York Times feature today on the role of Facebook in the 2016 election references a hypothetical "video of Bernie Sanders speaking, overlaid with text, shared from a source you've never seen before, viewed 15 million times." You know the post: a loud-and-proud headline from a source like "The Conservative Tribune," making the rounds in a serious way while claiming to have broken open this election in favor of one of the candidates.

But who created this? What kind of fact-checking was involved? What kind of agenda do they have? Is any of this true?

Ordinary people who have lives and jobs of their own to worry about have never had a ton of time to devote to this kind of thing, but there used to be a few sources for news. Now there are tens of thousands, at least. Most people don't stop to worry about any of the questions above when they see a post—particularly when it reinforces their existing worldview. That includes, of course, Donald Trump: "All I know," he once told Chuck Todd in defense of an unfounded theory, "is what's on the Internet."

You can assume Giuliani has the time and the expertise to tell one source from another. It's more likely he's looking to take advantage of the people who don't.

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Jack Holmes
Senior Staff Writer

Jack Holmes is a senior staff writer at Esquire, where he covers politics and sports. He also hosts Unapocalypse, a show about solutions to the climate crisis.