He slipped out of bed before sunrise and started driving, spurred by the conspiracy theory 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 conspiracy theory known as Pizzagate, powerful Democrats were abusing children. And Welch, a struggling 28-year-old warehouse worker, intended to rescue them.
The Comet neon sign adorns the Comet Ping Pong restaurant in Northwest Washington. (Michael S. Williamson/The Washington Post)
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’s successor: 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 200 arrests and the second impeachment of Donald Trump. Its brazenness would shake faith in American democracy.
Above all, it would reveal how conspiracy theories 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.”
Welch was alone on Dec. 4, 2016, when he parked in front of Comet Ping Pong, where children were playing table tennis while their parents enjoyed a slow Sunday afternoon of pizza and beer.
Then he walked into the restaurant with a loaded assault rifle.
‘Lasting damage’
The email arrived on Nov. 21, 2019, as Comet’s owner, James Alefantis, was preparing for a busy weekend.
“This notice is to inform you that EDGAR WELCH has been approved for placement in a Community Corrections Center (CCC), otherwise known as a halfway house, and will transfer from this institution on March 3, 2020,” said the message from a federal prison in Ohio. “The inmate is scheduled to release on May 28, 2020.”
It had been almost three years since Welch had entered Alefantis’s restaurant and transformed a fake online conspiracy theory into something frighteningly real. The death threats hadn’t stopped since, and one Pizzagate believer had even set a fire inside Comet.
Now Alefantis realized Welch would be getting out in a few months.
What, he wondered, should he tell his still traumatized employees?
Their ordeal began a few days before Trump’s election, when Alefantis’s Instagram account was suddenly deluged with comments calling him a pedophile.
WikiLeaks had released the hacked emails of Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman, John Podesta, a few weeks earlier. In an eight-year-old email, Alefantis had asked Podesta about a fundraiser at Comet. In others, Podesta talked about getting “cheese pizza.” On Internet message boards, anonymous users falsely claimed that “cheese pizza” was code for “child pornography,” and that Comet was the site of a vast Democratic child sex ring.
Promoted by far-right media personalities such as Alex Jones and amplified by automated social media accounts, or bots, Pizzagate went viral.
In Welch, it found a receptive host.
His life had been shaped by the death of a child. When Welch was 8, his 16-year-old brother was killed after losing control of his car and crashing.
The accident devastated his family but underscored their urge to protect the vulnerable. His parents ran a no-kill dog rescue, took in foster kids and sent money to needy children abroad. After the accident, his mother, a nurse, became a volunteer firefighter.
In 2010, Welch — who goes by his middle name, Maddison — went to Haiti with a church group to help orphans after the earthquake.
“The last week his calls were pleas to let him bring three or four of the children home and let them live with us,” his father, Harry, wrote in a letter to the court.
Welch had always been a bit “manic,” said Toni Koontz, a high school friend.
After moving to Wilmington to attend community college, Welch struggled with addiction and emerged from rehab even more devout, Koontz told The Washington Post in 2016.
By the fall of 2016, the once adventurous Welch was back in the hometown he derisively called “Smallsbury.” His marriage had fallen apart. He tried being a firefighter like his mother but gave up, the local fire chief said.
Welch was driving to work at a Food Lion warehouse one night in October when he hit a 13-year-old boy, who had to be airlifted to a hospital with broken bones and a head injury. Welch, who had some emergency medical training, tried to help the teen until paramedics arrived.
Welch wasn’t charged in the incident, but he was badly shaken.
It was a little over a month later when Welch texted his girlfriend to say he had seen something disturbing on the Internet, according to court records of their conversations.
“Looking up on pizza gate and it makes me f----g sick,” he wrote on Dec. 1, 2016.
“Stop it!” she replied.
Instead, Welch dove deeper, spending hours watching Pizzagate videos and visiting Comet Ping Pong’s website, according to records later presented in court.
Welch sent one friend a Pizzagate video made by Alex Jones’s Infowars. He tried to recruit another friend who was an Afghanistan war veteran.
“Raiding a pedo ring, possibly sacraficing [sic] the lives of a few for the lives of many,” Welch described the mission. “Standing up against a corrupt system that kidnaps, tortures and rapes babies and children in our own backyard.”
But when the veteran suggested doing reconnaissance on Comet instead of going in “guns blazing,” Welch decided to go it alone, court records show.
LEFT: The AR-15 assault weapon Edgar Maddison Welch left in Comet Ping Pong in D.C. on Dec. 4, 2016. (Metropolitan Police Department via AP) RIGHT: Edgar Maddison Welch, 28, surrenders to police in D.C. (Sathi Soma via AP)
Two days later, Welch entered Comet Ping Pong with an AR-15 in his hands and a Colt revolver on his hip.
As he walked slowly through the restaurant, startled servers guided customers away from their plates and toward the exits.
Welch wandered the pizzeria, searching for a dungeon that didn’t exist. When he found a door he couldn’t open, he fired at the lock. But beyond it was just a computer closet. He eventually set down his guns, put his hands on his head and walked outside, where dozens of police officers were waiting for him.
“I came to D.C. with the intent of helping people I believed were in dire need of assistance,” Welch wrote later in a letter to the judge in his case. “It was never my intention to harm or frighten innocent lives, but I realize now just how foolish and reckless my decision was.”
The entire incident lasted a matter of minutes. But it would haunt Alefantis and his employees for years.
At a court hearing on June 22, 2017, in which Welch would be sentenced to four years in prison, a Comet employee broke down as he described his struggles with insomnia and depression.
Much more at: https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2021/02/16/pizzagate-qanon-capitol-attack/?arc404=true
“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 conspiracy theory known as Pizzagate, powerful Democrats were abusing children. And Welch, a struggling 28-year-old warehouse worker, intended to rescue them.
The Comet neon sign adorns the Comet Ping Pong restaurant in Northwest Washington. (Michael S. Williamson/The Washington Post)
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’s successor: 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 200 arrests and the second impeachment of Donald Trump. Its brazenness would shake faith in American democracy.
Above all, it would reveal how conspiracy theories 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.”
Welch was alone on Dec. 4, 2016, when he parked in front of Comet Ping Pong, where children were playing table tennis while their parents enjoyed a slow Sunday afternoon of pizza and beer.
Then he walked into the restaurant with a loaded assault rifle.
‘Lasting damage’
The email arrived on Nov. 21, 2019, as Comet’s owner, James Alefantis, was preparing for a busy weekend.
“This notice is to inform you that EDGAR WELCH has been approved for placement in a Community Corrections Center (CCC), otherwise known as a halfway house, and will transfer from this institution on March 3, 2020,” said the message from a federal prison in Ohio. “The inmate is scheduled to release on May 28, 2020.”
It had been almost three years since Welch had entered Alefantis’s restaurant and transformed a fake online conspiracy theory into something frighteningly real. The death threats hadn’t stopped since, and one Pizzagate believer had even set a fire inside Comet.
Now Alefantis realized Welch would be getting out in a few months.
What, he wondered, should he tell his still traumatized employees?
Their ordeal began a few days before Trump’s election, when Alefantis’s Instagram account was suddenly deluged with comments calling him a pedophile.
WikiLeaks had released the hacked emails of Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman, John Podesta, a few weeks earlier. In an eight-year-old email, Alefantis had asked Podesta about a fundraiser at Comet. In others, Podesta talked about getting “cheese pizza.” On Internet message boards, anonymous users falsely claimed that “cheese pizza” was code for “child pornography,” and that Comet was the site of a vast Democratic child sex ring.
Promoted by far-right media personalities such as Alex Jones and amplified by automated social media accounts, or bots, Pizzagate went viral.
In Welch, it found a receptive host.
His life had been shaped by the death of a child. When Welch was 8, his 16-year-old brother was killed after losing control of his car and crashing.
The accident devastated his family but underscored their urge to protect the vulnerable. His parents ran a no-kill dog rescue, took in foster kids and sent money to needy children abroad. After the accident, his mother, a nurse, became a volunteer firefighter.
In 2010, Welch — who goes by his middle name, Maddison — went to Haiti with a church group to help orphans after the earthquake.
“The last week his calls were pleas to let him bring three or four of the children home and let them live with us,” his father, Harry, wrote in a letter to the court.
Welch had always been a bit “manic,” said Toni Koontz, a high school friend.
After moving to Wilmington to attend community college, Welch struggled with addiction and emerged from rehab even more devout, Koontz told The Washington Post in 2016.
By the fall of 2016, the once adventurous Welch was back in the hometown he derisively called “Smallsbury.” His marriage had fallen apart. He tried being a firefighter like his mother but gave up, the local fire chief said.
Welch was driving to work at a Food Lion warehouse one night in October when he hit a 13-year-old boy, who had to be airlifted to a hospital with broken bones and a head injury. Welch, who had some emergency medical training, tried to help the teen until paramedics arrived.
Welch wasn’t charged in the incident, but he was badly shaken.
It was a little over a month later when Welch texted his girlfriend to say he had seen something disturbing on the Internet, according to court records of their conversations.
“Looking up on pizza gate and it makes me f----g sick,” he wrote on Dec. 1, 2016.
“Stop it!” she replied.
Instead, Welch dove deeper, spending hours watching Pizzagate videos and visiting Comet Ping Pong’s website, according to records later presented in court.
Welch sent one friend a Pizzagate video made by Alex Jones’s Infowars. He tried to recruit another friend who was an Afghanistan war veteran.
“Raiding a pedo ring, possibly sacraficing [sic] the lives of a few for the lives of many,” Welch described the mission. “Standing up against a corrupt system that kidnaps, tortures and rapes babies and children in our own backyard.”
But when the veteran suggested doing reconnaissance on Comet instead of going in “guns blazing,” Welch decided to go it alone, court records show.
LEFT: The AR-15 assault weapon Edgar Maddison Welch left in Comet Ping Pong in D.C. on Dec. 4, 2016. (Metropolitan Police Department via AP) RIGHT: Edgar Maddison Welch, 28, surrenders to police in D.C. (Sathi Soma via AP)
Two days later, Welch entered Comet Ping Pong with an AR-15 in his hands and a Colt revolver on his hip.
As he walked slowly through the restaurant, startled servers guided customers away from their plates and toward the exits.
Welch wandered the pizzeria, searching for a dungeon that didn’t exist. When he found a door he couldn’t open, he fired at the lock. But beyond it was just a computer closet. He eventually set down his guns, put his hands on his head and walked outside, where dozens of police officers were waiting for him.
“I came to D.C. with the intent of helping people I believed were in dire need of assistance,” Welch wrote later in a letter to the judge in his case. “It was never my intention to harm or frighten innocent lives, but I realize now just how foolish and reckless my decision was.”
The entire incident lasted a matter of minutes. But it would haunt Alefantis and his employees for years.
At a court hearing on June 22, 2017, in which Welch would be sentenced to four years in prison, a Comet employee broke down as he described his struggles with insomnia and depression.
Much more at: https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2021/02/16/pizzagate-qanon-capitol-attack/?arc404=true
