On Sunday afternoon, police were called to Comet Ping Pong, a D.C. pizza restaurant, after a man carrying an assault rifle walked into the building. Employees and patrons fled; the neighborhood was placed in lockdown. The man would later tell police he was there to "self-investigate" one of the most stupid and malevolent hoax news stories of the campaign, the notion that somehow, because Reasons, the restaurant was involved in child trafficking on behalf of Hillary Clinton. It is completely made up, based on wild extrapolations from WikiLeaked emails that mention not even a sliver of anything that would support such a lunacy, and one of America's most stupid and proactive members of the hoax news demographic came to the restaurant with his rifle to prove the hoax story right.
Police said 28-year-old Edgar Maddison Welch, of Salisbury, N.C., walked in the front door of Comet Ping Pong and pointed a firearm in the direction of a restaurant employee. The employee was able to flee and notify police. Police said Welch proceeded to discharge the rifle inside the restaurant; they think that all other occupants had fled when Welch began shooting.
Edgar Maddison Welch has exactly the biography and online presence you would expect for an American gunman. Pictures of himself with his weapons; links to far-right anti-Muslim and End-of-Times propaganda; a father whose career revolved around weapons. His Facebook page "likes" Alex Jones, one of the conspiracy peddlers who helped peddle this particular hoax theory.
Jones is not the only one. The so-called "pizzagate" hoax, an all-encompassing theory of worldwide child trafficking something something Hillary Clinton something something pizza, is perhaps most associated with Donald Trump supporters on Reddit. Reddit banned the subcommunity devoted to the hoax theory before the Thanksgiving holiday, but the hoaxers have lived on in communities like /r/The_Donald, the site's toxic pro-Trump and alt-right wasteland. The theory also has been propagated by a core member of Donald Trump's inside team. Lt. General Michael Flynn, whose history of credulous belief in conspiracies has already been a cause for alarm, himself broadcast the swelling hoax to his Twitter followers just prior to the election as a "must read" and to a Breitbart (of course) story promoting the claims.
All of this has led to weeks of unceasing harassment and threats from hoax news readers not just to the restaurant targeted but to neighborhood restaurants as well. There have been threats to burn the building down; photographs have been distributed of the owners' children; there have been past visitors to the restaurant demanding to see the supposed secret rooms. Now the restaurant and neighborhood have been targeted by an armed gunman seeking to "investigate" the hoax as well.
Here's what should happen right now. First, Alex Jones should pay for security for the restaurant out of his own pocket. Indefinitely. Also, just for fun, he should light himself on fire to "prove" whether or not it's as dangerous as people make it out to be.
Second, Lt. Gen. Flynn should apologize directly for his own role in promoting a blatant hoax. Oh, and he should step aside from his would-be role as national security adviser due to being too Incredibly Fucking Stupid to possibly even be considered for such a role, and I can’t believe anyone is seriously even fucking discussing this.
Third, if Comet Ping Pong doesn't sue each of the prime promoters of the hoaxes against them they are doing not just themselves, but the rest of us a great disservice. The promoters of fake news do it to gain attention and money. Strip them of at least that money.
We'll go from there. But what we can say for certain, in this era when objectively fake news is peddled by the president elect himself and from the top members of his team, is that this will not be the first gunman to "self-investigate" the hoaxes while waving his weapon at people who, prior to Trump supporters burping out each new theory, have no earthly idea what the addled lunatic is going on about. As prior hoaxes and demonization efforts by Fox News hosts Glenn Beck and Bill O’Reilly have amply demonstrated, this will not, by a long stretch, be the first gunman to act on fake news shouted loudly.
And that is just about all we can calmly say about that.