If you asked me this loaded question in a sufficiently consequence-free environment, after filling me with enough hard liquor, I might fire back with one of the obviously false narratives that has polluted our discourse: the idea that Russian president Vladimir Putin secretly controls Donald Trump, or that Robert Mueller's methodical investigation will save America from Trumpism or that billionaire political donor George Soros is an illuminati Pizzagate wizard who loves to rape children and controls the media and the Democratic Party with his Jew gold. Too many zealots on either side of the spectrum believe a version of one of these, and it'd be great to see Americans move on from screaming them at one another.

Welcome back to a special year-end edition of Can't Handle the Truth, our column looking at the fake news and hoaxes that have spread thanks to the internet.

But sadly, even if I were armed with the combined fact-checking power of Snopes, Politifact, 10 billion Washington Post Pinocchios, and a pair of magical They Live Ray-Bans, I still don't think I could somehow shake the country into some moment of factual clarity.

That's because "fake news" is not the disease. Whatever's eating the United States alive, it's something much more insidious than lies, and I'm certainly not the sociopolitical Dr. House that's going to figure out how to diagnose and cure it. I am, however, something of an expert on the symptoms. So without further ado, here's a countdown of the ten hoaxes that caused or revealed the greatest amount of ugliness in 2017.

10. Melania Trump has a body double

In October, a cynical, social media-loving "cannapreneur" named Joe Vargas struck internet gold by theorizing on Twitter that First Lady Melania Trump had been replaced—temporarily or otherwise—by, um, someone. An actor? A robot? A shapeshifting alien? Draw your own idiotic conclusion.

It's not clear at all that Vargas actually believed the hoax he had created, but he defended it to the bitter end. This, to me, exemplified one thing that makes political fake news both annoying and pervasive in the Trump era: Oftentimes it's just spam, created for reasons of pure, apolitical profit-seeking (or old-fashioned lulz), not because of ideology.

But inevitably, gullible people buy into it, spreading more confusion throughout the world, and regardless of motive, filling an already lie-filled landscape with more lies is a fucked-up way to make a living.

9. Hurricane Harvey brought a shark ashore in Houston

On August 27, with Hurricane Harvey dropping more water on the Houston area than a single rain event has ever dropped in the US, some Scottish guy named Jason Michael posted a photoshopped tweet about a shark swimming over the flooded freeways of Houston. Garden variety internet horseshit, right?

Mostly yes, but it came with one extra, ugly wrinkle: Twitter is a useful tool for rapidly spreading information during emergencies, and the fake shark post was gumming up the works a bit. When someone brought this to the attention of Michael, he was dismissive. "So twitter is part of the emergency response now Adam? Hold on while I go and bang my head against a wall," Michael tweeted. As of this writing, Michael's original hoax had earned 87,494 retweets.

8. The DNC murdered Seth Rich

At this point, the less is said about Seth Rich the better. Rich was a DNC staffer whose life was cut short by an attacker last year on a sidewalk near his Washington, DC, home. Back in May, the right-wing media, including most notably FOX News host Sean Hannity, worked itself into a frenzy trying to sell America on a far-reaching conspiracy theory. Let me sum it up: Democratic Party operatives supposedly had Rich killed for leaking the DNC emails. It was a narrative that exculpated Trump of any Russian shenanigans and vilified Hillary Clinton's team, making it a tidy, if nonsensical, narrative.

Still, the rumor ballooned out of control for a few days. Rich's family publicly begged for the conspiracy theorists to cut it out. Hannity didn't stop for a while, then finally relented. But the whole affair was incredibly ugly.

7. Kid Rock Is Running for Senate

Kid Rock was never running for Senate. In fact, Kid Rock thinks you're pretty dumb for ever believing he might be running for Senate. It was always completely transparent that this was just a marketing stunt for his tour and album, right?

No. There were two lies here. 1) Kid Rock created a dumb hoax for marketing purposes. 2) When the initial story seemed fake, he fully denied that it was a hoax, and claimed that reports about it being a hoax were "fake news." Talking shit is fine—wonderful even—but the unspoken rule of good-time jokin' around for fun and profit is this: When the jig is up, you admit it. Hoaxes can be a legitimate (if lame) form of marketing, but pointing at your hoax and saying "this is not a hoax" is the bad kind of lying.

6. Global warming has stopped

This year, Trump pulled the US out of the Paris Climate Accords, a deliberate middle finger to the international community, sure to please people who love Trump's "America First" doctrine (fuzzy though it may be in its specifics). It was also a colossally boneheaded thing to do to the planet, and it was based on years of bad intel.