Konstantin Kisin

She's had two kids.

What do you mean?

On August 12, 2017, a neo-Nazi deliberately drove his car into a crowd of left-wing protesters in Charlottesville, Virginia, killing a 32-year-old woman called Heather Heyer and injuring 35 others.

America and the rest of the world were on a knife edge.

The victims were assembled to counter the Unite the Right rally, a demonstration against the proposed removal of a statue of Robert E. Lee, a Confederate general.

And the attack acted as a climax to the nation's increasing polarization and paranoia about President Trump's links with the so-called alt-right.

At a press conference in the immediate aftermath, President Trump made a series of incendiary comments, including saying that there were very fine people on both sides.

Like many, I was horrified and outraged by the fact that instead of trying to bring calm, Trump chose to further inflame a highly volatile situation.

But not nearly as horrified and outraged as I was when I later discovered that this was all an elaborate orchestrated media hoax.

In actual fact, at that very press conference, President Trump made it clear that his comments were describing peaceful protesters who opposed the removal of the statue, saying, I'm not talking about the neo-Nazis and white nationalists because they should be condemned totally.

But the media cut his comments out of context and ran headline after headline claiming he was defending the very people he'd just condemned.

To this day, millions of people believe this lie.

Last week, I saw it again here in Britain when the Labour Party clipped comments by Matt Goodwin, Reform's candidate in the upcoming Gorton and Denton by-election, out of context to claim he'd criticised Manchester when he was in fact criticising the Conservative Party conference

which had been held in Manchester.

This time, the media didn't have to lie.

Our politicians did it for them.

These dirty tricks are sadly part of the ugly game of politics.

More troublingly, they are now increasingly spreading to the arena of public debate more broadly.

During my appearance on Question Time last week,

The usually decent Labour minister, Douglas Alexander, tried to pull a similar move on me.