Edgar Maddison Welch did not serve in the Trump administration; he did not consult with the Russians during the 2016 Presidential Election; and he did not storm the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, in an attempt to overturn the 2020 Presidential Election.
He did not profit – as so many others did — from his contacts with the Trump Administration.
Trump did not pardon Welch for his crime as he did mass murderers, traitors, grifters, con artists, campaign contributors, his son-in-law’s father, and other ne’re-do-wells.
Welch, however, is the poster child of what can happen when a demagogue like Trump spreads outrageously false disinformation on an unregulated social media.
In early December 2017, Welch read on social media about a sex-trafficking ring run by former presidential candidate Hillary Clinton and her cronies in the basement of Comet Ping Pong, a pizzeria in Washington D.C.
Welch, armed with an AK-47 and other weapons, drove from his home in Salisbury, N.C., to the capital to “rescue,” as Welch put it, those nonexistent children.
Welch, who was described in a Fox News story as an “aimless” and a well-meaning father of two daughters who admitted to an internet addiction, wanted to be a hero.
When Welch got to the restaurant, he fired his gun multiple times without hitting anyone.
There was no sex-trafficking ring in the basement of the pizzeria.
There was not even a basement in the pizzeria.
The New York Times reported that Welch quickly surrendered to police and apologized for an “incredibly ill-advised decision” to try to save endangered children who were not there and did not exist.
“The intel on this wasn’t 100 percent,” Welch told The Times.
No, the intel “wasn’t 100 percent.”
In fact, the intel wasn’t even 1 percent.
It was zero percent.
The intel had no intel.
In June 2017, federal judge – and now U.S. Supreme Court associate justice — Ketanji Brown Jackson sentenced Welch to four years in prison. It was “sheer luck,” she said that Welch did not injure anyone. “The extent of the recklessness in this case is breathtaking.”
The story of Maddison Welch driving hundreds of miles to break up a child sex-trafficking ring in the basement of a Washington D.C. pizzeria has its origins in the emails WikiLeaks hacked from Clinton’s campaign chairman, John Podesta.
Eight years earlier, the restaurant’s owner James Alefantis asked Podesta about having a fundraiser for Clinton at the restaurant. Podesta, in an email, referred to “cheese pizza.”
According to a newspaper story, anonymous users on internet message boards falsely claimed that “cheese pizza” is code for “child pornography,” and that Comet was the site of a vast Democratic child sex ring.
This conspiracy then spread on alt-right social media outlets, including 4chan, Reddit, and Twitter, and by far-right conservative provocateurs such as InfoWars founder Alex Jones.
https://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-trending-38156985
And people believed it.
Someone mentions “cheese pizza” in an email — and after it circulates through the right-wing media and blogosphere, readers of a website think that a pizzeria is a front for a child sex-trafficking ring. An impressionable dupe in North Carolina decides to confront this evil and drives hundreds of miles and shoots up a pizzeria in Washington, D.C.
Tens of thousands of protestors showed up in Washington D.C. on January 6, 2021, because they believed that the election had been stolen from President Trump.
And why?
Because an email that mentioned that someone wanted “anchovies” on his “cheese pizza,” and on right-wing media outlets “anchovies” is code for “government insurrection.”
I made up the last paragraph.
I did not make it anything else.
Trump has embraced and endorsed conspiracy theories and used alt-right social media and QAnon conspiracy practitioners to perpetuate his own lies, including those about voter fraud in the 2020 Presidential Election, which resulted in the January 6, 2021, insurrection at the White House.
There is no evidence of a child sex-trafficking ring operating out of Comet Pizza and no evidence of pedophiles working for Hillary Clinton.
But there is a connection between pedophiles and Donald Trump.
Here is a list of reported pedophiles who were either close friends of Trump’s, Trump supporters, pro-Trump politicians, or people who worked for the Trump campaign, who
either admitted to being pedophiles, were convicted of being pedophiles, or were credibly accused of pedophilia.
Jeffrey Epstein
Roy Moore
Milo Yiannopoulos
George Nader
Ruben Verastigui
Matt Gaetz
Ali Alexander
Tim Nolan
Ralph Shortey
