Pizzagate Has Lost Its Bite

News of the police shooting death of Edgar Maddison Welch, the gunman whose raid on a Washington pizzeria terrorized the capital just before Donald Trump’s first inauguration, is a weird reminder of something that’s gone missing as the city awaits a second Trump term: the once-pervasive sense of physical danger from extremists like Welch and his fellow believers in the pizzagate conspiracy theory.

That marks quite a change.

Eight years ago, Welch’s assault was a sort of cultural inflection point for the capital. A Beltway elite that never spent much time thinking about wild internet rabbit holes suddenly realized its own safety was at risk thanks to a truly deranged online conspiracy theory: According to believers, a Satan-worshipping cabal of cannibalistic Democratic insiders was holding children in a dungeon beneath a beloved Connecticut Avenue eatery.

When pizzagate jumped from the dark fringes of the web to an actual neighborhood thick with politics-and-media insiders, it crystallized an unfamiliar new feeling of lawless, irrational menace that became a permanent aspect of D.C. life during the first Trump term and never really vanished. As recently as November, many locals told me they were thinking of getting out of town ahead of potential election violence.

It’s not that politics is any less consumed by conspiracies as Washington prepares for Trump’s return. It’s just that the falsehoods have moved away from the type of viral lie that targets an individual election worker or implicates the family of a deceased political staffer — or, in this case, smears a longtime favorite birthday party spot in leafy upper Northwest D.C.

According to people involved in the pushback against Welch’s brand of extremism, the decline of this particular kind of conspiracy is no accident.

“We are no longer seeing events like pizzagate or Unite the Right, partially because litigation like the Charlottesville case has helped fracture some of these movements and organizations,” said Amy Spitalnick, who helped win $25 million in legal judgments against the organizers of the infamous Virginia far-right rally that came just months after Welch’s arrest in Washington. “That litigation and accountability has disincentivized specific acts of violent hate.”

At the same time, the vibe has also quieted for a reason that liberals won’t like: Some devotees of conspiracies like QAnon have ascended to new levels of influence that they’re anxious not to lose.

“It’s political expediency,” said Jared Holt, who studies hate and extremist movements at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue and closely follows the plans and politics of online radicals. “At some point they understood that this will get me in more trouble than it’s worth, and moved on to other stuff.”

“If you are an influencer with a conspiratorial brain and you’re trying to figure out what to talk about, you know that beating up on queer people might be really advantageous to you, but talking about lizard people might isolate you,” Holt added, referring to another conspiracy from the first Trump era.

Either way, the reduced air of conspiracy menace is part of why the mood in this particularly vulnerable town feels so different from the last time Trump was on the cusp of power.

Back then, the atmosphere was much more fraught. The shock of Hillary Clinton’s defeat was fresh; reports about viral misinformation’s role in the results was profoundly disorienting to a city that imagines itself as a place of facts and ideas. And then, a month later, Welch showed up, inspired by a truly deranged example of misinformation. It felt like a through-the-looking-glass moment.

In fact, by the time Welch strapped on his weapon and drove to Washington, pizzagate had been around for months. But it was largely ignored in ways that reveal a lot about the pre-Trump order.

Will Sommer, then a writer at the alternative-weekly Washington City Paper, had actually reported on the conspiracy — one of the only journalists to do so. Even working for an outlet that prided itself on covering oddities, he said he’d faced questions about why he was spending time on freak-of-the-week stuff. “People would say it’s trolling or a 4chan prank, why take it seriously?” Sommer told me.

“I remember when I heard” about Welch’s arrest, said Sommer, now a Washington Post reporter. “I was driving back to D.C. and it really hit me in the pit of my stomach like, ‘This is really a thing happening in the world.’”

Plenty of bigger-time Washington players thought of themselves as somehow above having to think about nobodies who post delusional ideas on obscure message boards. They were in for the same shock — especially as it emerged that various champions of the incoming president had embraced the conspiracy. Michael Flynn, Trump’s first national security adviser, had made a social media post that seemed to support the conspiracy.

Already inclined not to like the new administration, many in permanent Washington came to see it as actively importing danger into their neighborhoods — and channeled their disgust in ways that exacerbated the feeling of war between the Trump movement and the seat of government.

The incident at Comet wasn’t the only example of the new fear. Over the next four years, there was a series of frightening incidents that began in the swamps of the online right. The neo-Nazi rally in Charlottesville famously transfixed the country. So did the QAnon conspiracy, another fantastical tale of alleged Washington-insider sex abuse. But there was also a conspiracy around the death in Washington of Seth Rich, the low-level Democratic staffer who online trolls claimed was murdered because he somehow knew too much about misdeeds by bigwigs.

And finally there was the Jan. 6 riot, a violent insurrection spurred by viral falsehoods about the 2020 election.

Even after that, on the very last night of Trump’s first term, far-right protesters were still out front of Comet, which by that point had spent vast sums on security thanks to the ongoing lies. Trolls had also targeted other businesses that simply happened to be located on the same block.

As Trump prepares to retake the Oval Office, there’s a great deal that hasn’t changed about the status of the conspiracy-mongers. QAnon promoters including Marjorie Taylor Greene are in Congress. Trump himself shared social media posts with refrains from the theory during last year’s campaign. He’s likely to pardon significant numbers of Jan. 6 convicts as soon as next week. The whole spectacle has left many denizens of still-blue D.C. deeply depressed.

But there’s less attention to what we aren’t seeing: a glut of new delusional theories to take the place of the ones that now date back nearly a decade.

What happened? Over the past few years, lawsuits over conspiracy-theory falsehoods involving alleged 2020 election theft, the death of Seth Rich and the Sandy Hook massacre have become significant complications in the lives of conservative notables like Rudy Giuliani, Dinesh D’Souza and Alex Jones. Trump himself is on the hook for millions for defaming E. Jean Carroll.

For at least some of the players in the fun-house media that amplified stories like pizzagate, it has changed the equation. “There’s a lot less of an appetite in right-wing media for concocting specific theories about people because of these settlements,” Sommer, who went on to write a book about QAnon, said this week.

It’s those specific theories about specific people, of course, that prompt dangerous gunmen to hunt down those people where they live — a specter that was particularly terrifying in Washington, home to so many neighbors whose jobs can get them cast as some conspirator’s deep-state enemy of the people.

My hunch is that the very fact of Trump’s victory is also a factor in dampening the fires. It’s hard to sustain mythology about a treasonous deep state when said deep state’s supposedly all-powerful agents can’t even keep Republicans from winning an Election Day trifecta.

And of course, that kind of logic may only be temporary. The laws of political gravity state that Trump’s current triumphal moment will eventually be undone by the complications of governance. At that point, inevitably, someone is going to want to blame the troubles on secret string-pullers in Washington.

But for now, we’re in a quiet moment when it comes to real-world violence springing from online fury.

Holt, the student of online extremism, cautions against interpreting this change to mean everything is hunky-dory on the truth front. Though the decline of what he calls “the truly off-the-wall Satanic child-eating conspiracy theory stuff” means fewer specific individuals for would-be vigilantes like Welch to target, it’s still a boom time for falsehoods that could endanger vast populations at large: Conspiracies about things like vaccines, or the “great replacement” theory that maligns immigrants of color, remain rampant.

“I think conspiratorial thinking is as prominent in politics today as it has ever been,” Holt said. “The through line is still that the elites are up to these terrible things.”

As for Welch, a troubled former North Carolina warehouse employee who was shot to death this month after allegedly pulling a gun on police, Holt said he felt a degree of sadness about his story. Welch was ultimately sentenced to four years in prison for his raid on Comet, and was also disowned by fellow pizzagate devotees.

“He was a guy who believed in the pizzagate conspiracy theories, and believed in them so much that he went to a restaurant thinking he was going to rescue children,” Holt said. “He bought the lies full tilt, and his reward for that among the people who were promoting these theories was that they accused him of being part of a deep-state, false-flag operation.”