How DC Lost Its Fear of Pizzagate-Style Violence
PoliticoWill 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. “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. Michael Flynn, Trump’s first national security advisor, had made a social media post that seemed to support the conspiracy. 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. “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.
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