If you’re unfamiliar with the “pizzagate” conspiracy theory, let me give you a quick rundown: unhinged conservatives saw multiple references to pizza (the food) in emails released by Wikileaks from Hillary Clinton‘s campaign, naturally they assumed this was a cryptic code for a secret pedophile ring that involved various high-ranking members of the Democratic Party. Of course.
After also finding references to a specific pizza restaurant (Comet Ping Pong in Washington, D.C.), said conspiracy theorists then somehow latched onto the Instagram account of the owner, believing that his taste in modern art and the fact that he has friends who have children were concrete proof that the restaurant was the epicentre of the supposed ring.
While this might seem too insane for more than a handful of people to believe, it turns out more than a handful of people believed it, and at least one of those people believed it enough to take matters into his own hands, taking an AR-15 rifle into the restaurant to see if the basement had any children in it, firing a few shots off in the process. As the gun-wielding Edgar Maddison Welch found out, Comet Ping Pong does not even have a basement.
It turns out old mate Edgar is just a little bit sheepish about his cowboy-esque antics, telling ‘The New Yorker‘ that he “[regretted] how [he] handled the situation.” You don’t bloody say, mate.
According to Welch, the “intel on this wasn’t 100 percent,” which is a fun and nifty way of saying that he had bought into some extremely flimsy conjecture that had roundly been discredited by the police, Snopes, end even the right-wing-to-the-point-of-satirical Fox News.
Apparently, he’d heard about it originally through word of mouth but just recently got internet connected to his house and was then “really able to look into it.” Not enough to find out it was a complete crock of shit, though, it seems.
Welch says his heart was in the right place and he was motivated by feeling his “heart breaking over the thought of innocent people suffering“, that he “just wanted to do some good and went about it the wrong way“. I’d say so, buddy. Tip for the future: probably don’t try and solve problems by firing a gun in a family restaurant.
Source: The New Yorker.
