Comet Ping Pong

Sandy Hook: An American Tragedy and the Battle for Truth

by Elizabeth Williamson  · 8 Mar 2022  · 574pp  · 148,233 words

into Pizzagate, a nutty web of total nonsense claiming that Hillary Clinton and top Democrats operated a child sex slavery ring from the basement of Comet Ping Pong, a pizzeria in Washington, D.C. Although the Sandy Hook families had already suffered for years, Pizzagate jolted people awake to the real-world consequences

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they were serious, Jones delivered a careful, legalistic statement on his March 24, 2017, broadcast. “To my knowledge today, neither Mr. Alefantis, nor his restaurant Comet Ping Pong, were involved in any human trafficking, as was part of the theories about Pizzagate that were being written about in many media outlets and which

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.nytimes.com/2016/11/21/technology/fact-check-this-pizzeria-is-not-a-child-trafficking-site.html. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 9 Adam Goldman, “The Comet Ping Pong Gunman Answers Our Reporter’s Questions,” New York Times, December 7, 2016, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/07/us/edgar-welch-comet-pizza-fake

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-news.html. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 10 Peter Hermann, “Man Who Set Fire at Comet Ping Pong Pizza Shop Sentenced to Four Years in Prison,” Washington Post, April 23, 2020, https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/public-safety/man-who-set-fire-at

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-comet-ping-pong-pizza-shop-sentenced-to-four-years-in-prison/2020/04/23/2e107676-8496-11ea-a3eb-e9fc93160703_story.html. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 11 Kevin Roose, “

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Z A Alba, Nouel, 50–51 Aldenberg, William, 330 Alefantis, James, 242, 243, 245, 246–48, 249–50, 251–56, 277, 278, 320. See also Comet Ping Pong Alexander, Keith, 276 Allcott, Hunt, 241 Allen, Gary, 76, 294 “alternative facts,” 86, 315 alt-right, 262–65 Amazon, 202, 277 Anglin, Andrew, 346–47

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–17, 96, 98, 118–20 Cohn, James, 221 college professors as conspiracy theorists, 104–16. See also Fetzer, James; Tracy, James Columbine massacre (1999), 83 Comet Ping Pong: aftermath of attack, 246–48, 251–54; arson attempt at, 250, 251; gunman at, 244, 245–47; and Infowars’ video, 243, 249–50, 254–56

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, Steve, 104–5 Pinto, Jack, 65 Pizzagate, 240–56; and Infowars’ video, 243, 249–50, 254–56, 277, 320; and QAnon, 242–43. See also Comet Ping Pong Podesta, John, 241–42 Pomeroy, Frank, 326–27 Potts, Neil, 385, 386, 387, 389 Powell, Joshua L., 88, 89 Powell, Sidney, 433 Pozner, Arielle, 4

Other Pandemic: How QAnon Contaminated the World

by James Ball  · 19 Jul 2023  · 317pp  · 87,048 words

long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.’ – Friedrich Nietzsche, 1886 Contents Introduction PART ONE: EMERGENCE 1. Ask the Q 2. Comet Ping Pong 3. Breadcrumbs PART TWO: INFECTION 4. Patriot Research 5. Follow The White Rabbit 6. The Storm PART THREE: TRANSMISSION 7. #SaveTheChildren 8. Enough Is Enough

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vendetta against his ex, fuelled by our bizarre online ecosystem, arguably gave rise to much of Trumpism. It’s this we turn to next. 2 Comet Ping Pong ‘It is early on a Monday morning. You are a mid-twenties human being.’1 It all started with a video game about depression. To

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pizza parlours with connections to the Clintons or the Washington elite. For those searching for such a venue, there could be few more perfect than Comet Ping Pong, a pizza parlour located in Northwest DC, where many of the Beltway elite reside, just a few doors down from Politics and Prose, a bookshop

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now convinced itself not only that there was a child abuse conspiracy underway, but that they knew where it was happening – in the basement of Comet Ping Pong. Inevitably, someone took things into their own hands. In the middle of the afternoon on 4 December 2016, Edgar Maddison Welch walked into

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Comet Ping Pong with an AR-15 rifle (the civilian version of the US military’s M16 automatic rifle) and a Colt .38 pistol, and fired three shots

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within.48 By some miracle no one was injured, and before he was detained – alive – by law enforcement, Welch was shown a simple fact about Comet Ping Pong he could probably have discovered without heavy weaponry: the restaurant did not have a basement. Welch was eventually sentenced to four years in prison.49

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actually privately owned, mostly by the Rothschilds, whose actual net worth is in excess of $500 billion (where to begin with this) • James Alefantis (of Comet Ping Pong) is related to the Rothschilds, and was indeed running a child sex ring out of his restaurant (which is, of course, untrue) ‘Worldwide, children are

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her, then call the cops. I just wanted to share the pics before they find me.’3 As the Pizzagate-connected raid on Washington’s Comet Ping Pong showed, QAnon’s direct antecedents had an ability to mobilise and radicalise people into real-world violence. But as QAnon stepped up both in scale

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to do that.’10 Wright closed his video address with QAnon’s most famous slogan: ‘Where We Go One, We Go All’.11 Like the Comet Ping Pong incident, Wright’s intervention served more as a warning than as the start of deadly action. After a stand-off of around ninety minutes, Wright

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://qposts.online/post/2. 45. Mark Landler, ‘Trump Calls Meeting with Military Leaders the Calm Before the Storm’, www.nytimes.com, 6 October 2017. 2 COMET PING PONG 1. The game is at www.depressionquest.com/dqfinal.html#2n.1e. 2. There is a good chronology of the early stages of this sorry

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, here Cohen, Michael, here Coleman, Gabriella, here, here, here Coleman, John, here Coleman, Matthew Taylor, here, here Collins, Ben, here, here, here Comello, Anthony, here Comet Ping Pong, here, here, here, here Conservative Party, here, here Conway, Kellyanne, here Corbyn, Piers, here, here Covid-19 pandemic, here, here, here, here, here, here, here

Off the Edge: Flat Earthers, Conspiracy Culture, and Why People Will Believe Anything

by Kelly Weill  · 22 Feb 2022

crowd are adherents of QAnon and Pizzagate (a sort of QAnon predecessor that specifically accuses Trump’s foes of participating in child sex trafficking under Comet Ping Pong, a Washington, DC, pizzeria and ping-pong arcade). On December 4, 2016, a man named Edgar Maddison Welch drove six hours from his home in

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Salisbury, North Carolina, to Comet Ping Pong. He recorded himself during the interstate journey. “I can’t let you grow up in a world that’s so corrupt by evil. Gotta at

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and children in our own backyard.” More than three hundred miles later, Welch parked his car outside Comet Ping Pong and retrieved a military-style assault rifle from the back. Then he entered the restaurant. Inside, Comet Ping Pong was packed with its Sunday lunch rush. Parents and children, the very people Welch had vowed to

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,” because they’d found a web page for an amateur actor of the same name. And not even Welch, who had seen the inside of Comet Ping Pong firsthand, was fully dissuaded from the conspiracy theory. “The intel on this wasn’t 100 percent,” he told the New York Times. A judge called

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of its momentum to QAnon, which borrows many of its foundational claims. In January 2019, twenty-two-year-old Ryan Jaselskis doused a curtain in Comet Ping Pong with lighter fluid and set it on fire while customers—some of them children—were eating dinner. An hour before the arson, according to NBC

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News, Jaselskis uploaded a YouTube video about QAnon. Though he managed to escape Comet Ping Pong undetected, his act of arson was captured on the now-wary restaurant’s security footage, which managers turned over to police. Days later, police arrested

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. 158 “in our own backyard” Merlan, Republic of Lies, 60. 158 actor of the same name Nathan Francis, “Edgar Maddison Welch PizzaGate Theory: Was the Comet Ping Pong Shooter a Crisis Actor? New Conspiracy Theory Takes Hold [Debunked],” Inquisitr, December 6, 2016, https://www.inquisitr.com/3772621/edgar-maddison-welch-pizzagate-theory-was

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-the-comet-ping-pong-shooter-a-crisis-actor-new-conspiracy-theory-takes-hold-debunked/. 159 “wasn’t 100 percent” Adam Goldman, “The Comet Ping Pong Gunman Answers Our Reporter’s Questions, New York Times, December 7, 2016, https://www.nytimes.com

Likewar: The Weaponization of Social Media

by Peter Warren Singer and Emerson T. Brooking  · 15 Mar 2018

Welch hardly noticed. After all, he was a man on a mission. The 28-year-old part-time firefighter knew for a fact that the Comet Ping Pong pizza restaurant was just a cover for Hillary Clinton’s secret pedophilia ring, and, as a father of two young girls, he was going to

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are not corporate owned.” Then he switched stories, informing his followers that the DC police chief had concluded, “Nothing to suggest man w/gun at Comet Ping Pong had anything to do with #pizzagate.” It was, like the rest of the conspiracy, a fabrication. The only thing real was the mortal peril and

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/news/rampage/wp/2016/12/28/americans-especially-but-not-exclusively-trump-voters-believe-crazy-wrong-things/. 128 “the intel on this”: Adam Goldman, “The Comet Ping Pong Gunman Answers Our Reporter’s Questions,” New York Times, December 7, 2016, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/07/us/edgar-welch-comet-pizza-fake

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-11e6-94ac-3d324840106c_story.html?utm_term=.7ecbd9f78337. 129 “Nothing to suggest”: Jack Posobiec (@JackPosobiec), “DC Police Chief: ‘Nothing to suggest man w/gun at Comet Ping Pong had anything to do with #pizzagate’” (tweet deleted), available at Scoopnest, https://www.scoopnest.com/user/JackPosobiec/805559273426141184-dc-police-chief-nothing-to-suggest-man

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-w-gun-at-comet-ping-pong-had-anything-to-do-with-pizzagate. 129 livestreaming from the White House: Jared Holt and Brendan Karet, “Meet Jack Posobiec: The ‘Alt-Right’ Troll with

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, Jared, 152 Cohen, Roger, 86 Cold War, 61, 78, 79, 103–4, 109, 205, 259, 263 Cole, August, 193 Coler, Jestin, 132 Collins, Lauren, 227 Comet Ping Pong pizza, 127 communication between computers, 35–42 control of, 88, 221. see also censorship future of, 261–73 history of, 27–35 speed of, 29

The Chaos Machine: The Inside Story of How Social Media Rewired Our Minds and Our World

by Max Fisher  · 5 Sep 2022  · 439pp  · 131,081 words

, Clinton’s campaign manager, which Russian hackers had stolen and published through WikiLeaks. A Washington DC pizza place that Podesta had mentioned in his emails, Comet Ping Pong, was, the conspiracists insisted, the headquarters of a vast, elite conspiracy to ritualistically cannibalize children. “Half or more of the people I have met online

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started in user groups. Even on apolitical pages, users posted screenshots of 4chan threads detailing the conspiracy, asking, “Is this real?” Scouring for information on Comet Ping Pong, the DC pizza place, Facebookers found the owner’s Instagram account. They recontextualized benign images—kids playing at the restaurant, jokey cartoons of pizza slices

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concluded, had to act. He grabbed his AR-15 rifle, a shotgun, and a revolver, and drove to Washington DC. Bursting in the door of Comet Ping Pong, he pointed the rifle at an employee, who fled, with customers streaming out behind him. Welch turned to a locked side door, which he recognized

Rationality: What It Is, Why It Seems Scarce, Why It Matters

by Steven Pinker  · 14 Oct 2021  · 533pp  · 125,495 words

their convictions.40 Though millions of people endorsed the rumor that Hillary Clinton ran a child sex trafficking ring out of the basement of the Comet Ping Pong pizzeria in Washington (the Pizzagate conspiracy theory, a predecessor of QAnon), virtually none took steps commensurate with such an atrocity, such as calling the police

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centuries, when Christian belief fell into the reality zone, many Crusaders, Inquisitors, conquistadors, and soldiers in the Wars of Religion did exactly that. Like the Comet Ping Pong redeemer, they treated their beliefs as literally true. For that matter, though many people profess to believe in an afterlife, they seem to be in

The Four: How Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google Divided and Conquered the World

by Scott Galloway  · 2 Oct 2017  · 305pp  · 79,303 words

production to this Facebook machine. They create crazy fake stories that serve as clickbait for the left and the right. Pizza Gate—the story about Comet Ping Pong, a pizza parlor in Washington, D.C.—got a lot of momentum around the 2016 election. It claimed that the brother of John Podesta, Hillary

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://www.journalism.org/2016/05/26/news-use-across-social-media-platforms-2016/. 34. Briener, Andrew. “Pizzagate, explained: Everything you want to know about the Comet Ping Pong pizzeria conspiracy theory but are too afraid to search for on Reddit.” Salon. December 10, 2016. http://www.salon.com/2016/12/10/pizzagate-explained

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-everything-you-want-to-know-about-the-comet-ping-pong-pizzeria-conspiracy-theory-but-are-too-afraid-to-search-for-on-reddit/. 35. Williams, Rhiannon. “Facebook: ‘We cannot become arbiters of truth—it’s not

Stories Are Weapons: Psychological Warfare and the American Mind

by Annalee Newitz  · 3 Jun 2024  · 251pp  · 68,713 words

believed they had uncovered an international conspiracy to kidnap children and rape them in the basement of Comet Ping Pong, a DC pizza joint popular with DNC workers. Late in 2016, a #Pizzagate believer drove to Comet Ping Pong with an AR-15 semiautomatic rifle. He threatened customers with it, searching the premises because he believed

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,” a term that has become increasingly popular in the last decade to explain random violence inspired by online media. The gunman who showed up at Comet Ping Pong with an AR-15, inspired by #Pizzagate, is a stochastic terrorist, as are members of the January 6 mob at the US Capitol and many

Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion

by Jia Tolentino  · 5 Aug 2019  · 305pp  · 101,743 words

shop associated with Hillary Clinton’s campaign. This theory was disseminated all over the far-right internet, leading to an extended attack on DC’s Comet Ping Pong pizzeria and everyone associated with the restaurant—all in the name of combating pedophilia—that culminated in a man walking into

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Comet Ping Pong and firing a gun. (Later on, the same faction would jump to the defense of Roy Moore, the Republican nominee for the Senate who was

Blank Space: A Cultural History of the Twenty-First Century

by W. David Marx  · 18 Nov 2025  · 642pp  · 142,332 words

right-wing provocateurs. The theory alleged that high-ranking Democrats were running a child sex-trafficking ring out of the basement of Washington, DC’s Comet Ping Pong pizzeria. In December 2016, Edgar M. Welch, a twenty-eight-year-old North Carolina volunteer firefighter, stormed the restaurant armed with an AR-15 rifle

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Trump into the White House.” Attendees included Gavin McInnes and Cassandra Fairbanks of the Russian-funded media outlet Sputnik, who wore Pepe the Frog and Comet Ping Pong pins as accessories. But the movement’s darker side came into full view on August 11, 2017, at the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville

Your Face Belongs to Us: A Secretive Startup's Quest to End Privacy as We Know It

by Kashmir Hill  · 19 Sep 2023  · 487pp  · 124,008 words

The Undertow: Scenes From a Slow Civil War

by Jeff Sharlet  · 21 Mar 2023  · 308pp  · 97,480 words

The Controlled Demolition of the American Empire

by Jeff Berwick and Charlie Robinson  · 14 Apr 2020  · 491pp  · 141,690 words

Going Dark: The Secret Social Lives of Extremists

by Julia Ebner  · 20 Feb 2020  · 309pp  · 79,414 words

The Twittering Machine

by Richard Seymour  · 20 Aug 2019  · 297pp  · 83,651 words

How Medicine Works and When It Doesn't: Learning Who to Trust to Get and Stay Healthy

by F. Perry Wilson  · 24 Jan 2023  · 286pp  · 92,521 words