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QAnon: Donald Trump’s Personal Conspiracists
Why this election is actually close
On December 4, 2016, the then 29-year-old North Carolinian Edgar Maddison Welch drove from Salisbury, NC to Washington DC and opened fire with a military-style assault rifle inside the Comet Ping Pong restaurant. His rationale was that he had heard online that the restaurant was a known front for a child-trafficking and sex abuse ring lead by Hillary Clinton and that children were being held in the restaurant’s basement. The restaurant does not have a basement and it should go without saying that Hillary Clinton does not operate a child sex-trafficking ring.
Welch — on being shown his mistake — immediately surrendered. And the reason I bring this up is because as insane as his actions were and as crazy as the notion of a widely known child sex-trafficking ring being lead by a prominent political figure and operated openly out of a basement of a popular restaurant is, Welch is not crazy. And this will become important later.
I’m not an expert on the entirety of the QAnon conspiracy theory so I couldn’t give you an exact timeline for when it started. It clearly existed before Trump took office and many of its elements date back to medieval anti-Semitic tropes some of which we’ll touch on, but so called “Pizzagate,” was the mainstream introduction to it. QAnon…
