One might think that police calling the motive a “fictitious conspiracy theory” would put an end to the claim that inspired a gunman from North Carolina to attack a family pizzeria in Washington over the weekend.
Nope.
On Monday, those who share the assailant’s alleged suspicions that Hillary Clinton and her campaign manager operated a child sex ring in the basement of the Washington restaurant took it up a notch.
The gunman, they said in Reddit and other online forums where the original fake news story originated, had a brief film career in a horror movie, so the next logical leap was that he was hired by the Clinton camp to stage a false-flag operation to discredit President-elect Donald Trump. Further “proof”, they claimed, was that a security camera that might’ve captured the incident had been removed just before it happened.
Such claims once were confined to the netherworld of staged moon landings and 9/11 deniers, but now they’re seeping into the mainstream – with dangerous real-world consequences, as Sunday’s incident shows.
Trump has yet to condemn the torrent of fake news that’s accompanied his rise to power, a chilling prospect for civil rights advocates, who fear that the so-called “pizzagate” debacle portends more violence from vigilantes inspired by baseless claims.
“It’s deeply troubling that some of those false reports could lead to violence,” White House spokesman Josh Earnest told reporters at a briefing Monday. Earnest said the proliferation of false reports had a “corrosive effect” on the political climate.
Trump hasn’t addressed the fake news and conspiracy theories that bounce around online communities of his supporters until they’re accepted as fact. Perhaps that’s because several of his advisers and Cabinet picks – soon to be among the most powerful people in the country – regularly traffic in the same hokum. More than half the people Trump has picked so far for top administration posts have long histories of spewing conspiracy theories and making racist or bigoted assertions with no evidence.
When Vice President-elect Mike Pence was in Congress, according to the Los Angeles Times, he asserted without any scientific backup that material in the 2001 anthrax scare had been genetically modified to make it more lethal – possibly by Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein.
Trump’s national security adviser, retired Army Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, has used Twitter to praise white supremacists, malign Muslims and spread baseless claims linking the Clintons to a sex cult.
His son, Michael Flynn Jr., who served as his dad’s chief of staff, has given credence to the so-called “pizzagate” tale and has smeared top Clinton aide Huma Abedin as a Muslim extremist and Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., as a closeted gay cocaine addict. CNN reported that the younger Flynn has an email address affiliated with Trump’s transition team.