Editorial: Restaurant shooting shows danger of fake news

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The dangerous power of vicious fake news was clearly demonstrated Sunday when a gunman walked into a Washington, D.C., restaurant that has been the target of a phony pedophilia conspiracy theory and fired an assault weapon. Saner elements of our society cannot allow this kind of activity to flourish.

In the run-up to the presidential election, some right-wingers with no evidence or facts propagated a loony theory that top Democrats, including Hillary Clinton and her campaign manager, operated a child sex ring out of Washington’s Comet Ping Pong restaurant. The alt-right echo chamber rushed the falsehood to hundreds of thousands of followers online. One stoker of the bogus hoax showed up to shoot video from inside the restaurant. Predictably — although the debunked fabrication was a blatant lie — the restaurant’s owner and employees soon were showered with online abuse, including many death threats. Even Washington Post reporters were targeted by online threats Sunday after they posted an account of the incident at Comet Ping Pong.

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Police said Edgar Maddison Welch, 28, of Sailsbury, N.C., walked into the restaurant on Sunday with an AR-15 assault-style rifle. Police also seized other weapons from Welch inside the restaurant and from his car. Welch allegedly said he had come to the restaurant to “self-investigate” the pedophilia conspiracy theory. He allegedly pointed the rifle at an employee, who fled and called police. Police said he also fired the weapon, although no one was injured.

This fake news scandal and its aftermath would be alarming enough as it stands. But it reaches high into the incoming Trump administration. President-elect Donald Trump’s pick for national security adviser, Lt. Gen. Michael T. Flynn, in early November tweeted a fake news story claiming authorities had linked Clinton and some of her top campaign aides to felonies, including pedophilia. Flynn’s son, Michael Flynn Jr., who has a Trump transition team email address and served as his father’s chief of staff, posted online messages in support of the restaurant conspiracy theory and retweeted Twitter users who said the mainstream media was trying to cover up pedophilia.

The effect of malicious fake news is not hard to foresee. The owner of a market and coffee shop near Comet Ping Pong told the Washington Post, “This was our worst fear, that someone would read all this and come to the block with a gun. And today it happened.”

What occurred at the Comet Ping Pong is part of a larger issue of people trading in lies, knowing that they are false, yet using them for their own gain. Conspiracy theories have been around forever, but they now are gaining far wider traction and many more adherents. Trump himself helped set the tone by falsely tweeting that millions had voted illegally in the Nov. 8 election. This is a dangerous moment. This sort of activity — and the silent acquiescence by too many who should be shouting their denunciations from the rooftops — is playing with fire, especially in a nation where citizens have easy access to powerful firearms. It will be too late to say something if things get out of control.

This is a time when Americans must take their roles as citizens seriously by becoming wise consumers of information and shunning sources known to traffic in falsehoods. As President Barack Obama said before the Comet Ping Pong incident, “If we are not serious about facts and what’s true and what’s not … if we can’t discriminate between serious arguments and propaganda, then we have problems.”

On Monday afternoon White House press secretary Josh Earnest said, “I think there’s no denying the corrosive effect that some of these false reports have had on our political debate and that’s concerning in a political context. It’s deeply troubling that some of those false reports could lead to violence.”

The nasty web of fake news, sinister conspiracy theories, online trolls and outright lies has been building for a long time. It will take a long time to shift our nation’s discourse back to one more based on facts, truth and mutual respect. But the time to start down that road is now.

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