The Comet neon sign adorns the Comet Ping Pong restaurant in Northwest Washington. (Michael S. Williamson/The Washington Post)
He slipped out of bed before sunrise and started driving, spurred by the baseless claims he would soon help make famous. As he sped the 350 miles from his hometown in North Carolina to the nation’s capital, Edgar Maddison Welch tilted his cellphone camera toward himself and pressed record.
“I can’t let you grow up in a world that’s so corrupt by evil,” he told the two young daughters he had left sleeping back in Salisbury, “without at least standing up for you and for other children just like you.”
So on he drove, to the supposed center of that corruption: Comet Ping Pong, a popular pizzeria in Northwest Washington where, according to the false claims known as Pizzagate, powerful Democrats were abusing children. And Welch, a struggling 28-year-old warehouse worker, intended to rescue them.
Four years later, thousands of people would follow Welch’s fevered path to Washington, drawn from across the country by an ever more toxic stew of disinformation and extremism, including Pizzagate’ssuccessor: QAnon.
This time, instead of a pizzeria, they would target the U.S. Capitol.
The Jan. 6 siege would lead to five deaths, more than 200arrests and the second impeachment of President Donald Trump. Its brazenness would shake faith in American democracy.
Above all, it would reveal how baseless claims had spread under a president who often promoted them, growing from Welch’s trip to Washington shortly after the 2016 election to the hundreds who stormed the Capitol to keep Trump in office, some proudly wearing T-shirts with the QAnon motto: “Where we go one, we go all.”
Pizzagate was an early warning of how misinformation can lead to violence, said Joan Donovan, a scholar of media manipulation, social movements and extremism.
“The big difference between 2016 and Pizzagate and QAnon [now] isn’t the themes … it’s the scale,” said Donovan, research director of the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School. “Four years later it has reached so many more people.”
That fellow is out of jail now. And a whole bunch of new conspiracy nuts are facing charges. During the Trump years, this conspiracy mongering metastasized and now we have tens of millions of people who believe them. Many probably haven’t bought into QAnon, but a vast number believe the election was stolen despite all the evidence saying otherwise.
76% of self-identified Republicans in a new national Quinnipiac University poll. That’s the number of Republicans who said they believe there was “widespread fraud in the 2020 election.”Yes, you read that right. Three in every four Republicans in the poll agreed with the idea that there was “widespread” wrongdoing in last November’s election.
And it’s not just Republicans. More than one in three political independents said the same in the Quinnipiac poll. Overall, 36% said there was widespread fraud in the election while 59% said there was not.
That is a conspiracy theory and it’s a big one because it doesn’t come from some shadowy internet message board. It was spread by the president and his henchmen and it was debunked in real time by various officials, judges, analysts, and media. The results are not in dispute. Yet, more than 50 million people believe it.
This means that these people will believe anything. I don’t know about you, but that seems like a very big problem.