Coral reefs are dying; the ice steadily melts; global temperatures creep up, awarding Chicago repeatedly record-breaking days of winter warmth. And a good portion of humanity is absorbed by a ludicrous and unverified claim that the former president of the United States, Barack Obama, unlawfully ordered the wiretapping of Donald Trump, which is based on a slightly less extravagant but also unverified claim.

When all is said and done, news like this is just so much goddamn noise, and if humanity contrives somehow to see its way through to the 22nd century, it will surely not be because we have been concentrating on the survival of the planet. It certainly won’t be due to President Trump, or for that matter Louise Mensch, the former British M.P. who wrote the original story on which the president’s latest paranoid fit is apparently based.

Mensch has followed an unusual career path that has led her from a turn as a popular fiction author to stints in politics and conservative journalism. She ran the incipient libertarian site, Heat Street, through the election, before moving on in January to develop subsequent sites for the News Corp. empire. But Mensch is not entirely to blame for the way that her story has been distorted by Trump. She simply alleged that the F.B.I. was granted a FISA court warrant that allowed counter-intelligence officers “to examine the activities of ‘U.S. persons’ in Donald Trump’s campaign with ties to Russia.” She said nothing about Obama; nor did her sources, and she has repeatedly rejected Trump’s elaboration on Twitter.

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Mensch’s story appeared on Heat Street on November 7, after all, just before the election. It hung around like roadkill, with no one wanting to touch it or look too closely. Then the leftish Guardian and BBC—two British organizations that are hardly Mensch’s natural allies—seemed to confirm the story, and suddenly the roadkill was cantering down the highway for all to see and Trump to claim as his pet. As The Guardian’s Julian Borger wrote, “The Guardian separately confirmed the original request for a FISA warrant, which had been turned down earlier in the summer, and former officials said they believed that the Mensch and BBC account of the FISA warrants was correct.”