The late Edgar Maddison Welch (1988-2025) was the poster boy of rightwing vigilantes.
On December 4, 2016, Welch (photo, left) barged into the Comet Ping Pong Pizzeria (photo below) in Washington, D.C., with an AR-16 and a handgun, and fired several shots. No one was hurt, but incident traumatized employees and customers, and earned Welch a prison sentence. (See details here.)
Welch, a “manic” individual with a troubled life (read story here), was motivated by a false conspiracy theory promoted by rightwing provocateurs like Alex Jones that Comet Pizza harbored a pedophile ring run by Hillary Clinton. He went there thinking he was saving endangered children.
It’s not clear what Welch was thinking in the moments before his life ended from police gunfire. On January 4, 2025, he was a passenger in a car pulled over by a cop who was looking for him because he had an active warrant for an unspecified “felony probation violation” (see story here). Two backup cops soon arrived.
Welch, a convicted felon banned from having guns, pulled a handgun and pointed it at arrest cop trying to arrest him. The cops opened fire and he died in a hospital two days later.
This story is bigger than Welch, and doesn’t end with him, because he was merely a bit player in the vast rightwing ecosphere of false conspiracy theories and crazy people. He wasn’t a product of QAnon, because “Pizzagate,” as the incident is called, predated the emergence of that vast web of conspiracy believers.
But Welch perhaps typified the kind of people who fall into those black holes. He was a drug user, had been traumatized by tragic events in his life, and struggled to hold a job and in his personal relationships. He was from a southern town with Confederate divisions and deep racial divisions, and didn’t have a fancy education or — as is obvious from his actions — very good thinking skills.
On the internet, anyone can post anything, and Welch fell for internet lies. But the claim that Hillary Clinton was running a pedophile ring in a pizza restaurant was so preposterous on its face that no one needs a college degree to question it. And if Welch believed children were in danger, he should have called the police, instead of taking things into his own hands.
But Welch, typical of the deranged and obsessive folks who populate far-right conspiracy websites and media, didn’t trust the police. He did take things into his own hands, as the Jan. 6 rioters did. And like them, he was violent, and willing to attack cops.
To this day, the owner and employees of Comet Pizza still get threats. Believing wild conspiracy theories isn’t harmless. And neither are people who embrace rightwing lies without fact-checking, and decide to take things into their own hands. Their behavior isn’t only self-destructive, it’s tearing our society apart. And no one is at fault for that except them. The inoffensive pizza restaurant had nothing to do with it.
