Autumn Flagg

Professor Drown

ENG 123

April 4, 2020

Washington DC is the home of a pizza and ping pong joint called Comet Ping Pong. This location was the center of a conspiracy theory called Pizzagate. Pizzagate is a conspiracy theory that the restaurant was the center of a child sex trafficing ring. People who believed in Pizzagate believed that there was a basement and underground tunnels located under the resturaunt that were used for this sex trafficing ring that was ran by John Poesta and Hillary Clinton. Alex Jones, one who has worked with Trump, reported that Hillary “was sexually abusing children in satanic rituals” (Robb para 2). There were facebook pages and reddit posts dedicated to pizzagate and its believers where they could all talk about the conspiracy. In Jan-Willem van Prooijen’s article “Suspicion Makes Us Human”, Prooijen reminds his readers that our society allows us to spread ideas, especially through the internet where it can reach others very quickly, and refers to it as being “an exceptionally fertile soil for them to flourish” (Prooijen para 5). Once these ideas spread and a lot of people are talking about it, there’s bound to be people who believe it and people who don’t. There is a lot of fake news in the world and people will use it, especially around times like the presidential election where Hillary was running and being accused of these accusations . Author Amanda Robb expresses “that fake news has real consequences” (Robb para 2) and one man learned this the hard way. Edgar M. Welch, a father of two himself, was a believer that the reports about Comet Ping Pong were true and decided he needed to put a stop to it. Welch followed through with his plan to free the children and entered the restaurant with a rifle, a handgun, and a knife. He shot his gun and found cooking supplies and an employee working, but found no children. It turns out that there were no children, no underground tunnels, and the basement where this all took place was non-existent. This attempted rescue mission led to the arrest of Welch.

You can see the effect that news and the internet can have on someone’s actions solely based on something they believe. Welch believed that all the reports about Pizzagate were true and therefore tried to take action, which caused him to end up in jail. Samuel Woolley concludes that “it was ‘retweeted and picked up by some of the most powerful faces of American politics’” (Robb 3). I believe that people are easily influenced by someone of higher power. In this case if someone who has this power is talking about this conspiracy and saying that it is true, many people are going to believe it because they don’t think they would lie. I think that these people with power are to blame, along with Welch, for the lethal violence that happened at Comet Ping Pong. researchers found “ordinary people, online activists,bots, foreign agents and domestic political operatives” and that many of them either had ties to Russia or the Trump campaign. Another motive for Edgar M. Welch may have been his own children. This creates more of a personal cause to try to end the alleged crimes going on.