I'm an obsessive and skeptical person, both by instinct and training. I find the proposition "Pizzagate is real" to be utterly incredible. Perhaps that is partly because it is so very disturbing. Hence nothing would please me more than to see its veracity methodically dismantled. I have derived little comfort, however, from the refutations in the Washington Post, the New York Times and, more recently, the BBC. The fact that these noble mastheads have covered the story renders the deafening silence in the rest of the respectable media quite perplexing.

Snopes' attempt to dispose of the controversy was a feeble, dismal failure. A search for "pizzagate" on Verifact, Fact Checker, Politifact, Truth or Fiction, and RationalWiki offered zero hits. Given the modern-day fervour for debunking of scandalous rumours and "fake news", this seems quite a peculiar result.

I will be most grateful to anyone who contacts our most serious fact-checking websites to request a check of the various facts that seem least implausible thus far in the "pizzagate" theory of conspiracy.