White Rural Rage by Tom Schaller & Paul Waldman

Author:Tom Schaller & Paul Waldman [Schaller, Tom & Waldman, Paul]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2024-02-27T00:00:00+00:00

The Second Threat: Belief in Conspiracies

On Sunday, December 4, 2016, Edgar Maddison Welch was driving northbound on Interstate 95 from North Carolina to Washington, D.C. He pulled out his cell phone, stared into its camera, and hit the Record button, to save for posterity and his daughters some final thoughts in case a fatal martyrdom awaited him. “I can’t let you grow up in a world that’s so corrupted by evil,” a bearded Welch, in a black winter cap, promised his daughters in that recorded message. “I have to at least stand up for you and for other children just like you.”

Welch was on a mission. From his hometown in Salisbury, North Carolina—he called it “Smallsbury”—the twenty-eight-year-old father of two young daughters was determined to investigate what he believed was a dungeon where Hillary Clinton, her longtime Democratic adviser John Podesta, and their satanic network of allies molested children they had kidnapped. With his trunk full of firearms, Welch intended to save those helpless kids.

Welch was a walking contradiction. A divorced but devoted father and volunteer firefighter, he worked twelve-hour shifts at the local Food Lion supermarket to provide for his daughters. He had two Bible verses tattooed on his back and had traveled with his church group to Haiti to help earthquake victims. That was Welch’s public persona.

Privately, he was unraveling. Painful memories of losing his older brother twenty years earlier in a fatal car accident may have been revived by a more recent tragedy: Two months prior to his messianic mission, Welch accidentally hit with his car and wounded a thirteen-year-old boy. (The boy survived.) Welch’s parents, who live in the rural outskirts of Salisbury, had no idea their son had fallen down an online rabbit hole where he listened to conspiracy theorist Alex Jones and read QAnon articles about a child abduction ring that top Democrats allegedly ran out of the basement of a Washington pizza parlor called Comet Ping Pong.[44]

That afternoon, Welch learned the truth about the “Pizzagate” conspiracy he had read so much about online. He brought a loaded AR-15 assault rifle and a revolver into the pizza parlor. As traumatized customers cowered in fear, Welch ordered an employee to show him Comet Ping Pong’s basement. He fired his gun into the lock of a closet door. A few minutes later, a confused Welch surrendered to police upon realizing the building had no basement. He was convicted of transporting a firearm and assault with a dangerous weapon and sentenced to four years in prison.[45]

Conspiracy theories attract women and men, people of every race and religion, and the young and old alike. Although those who espouse either far-left or far-right views tend to be more conspiratorial, there’s scant evidence that conspiracists fall along one side of the ideological divide or the other.[46] However, conspiracy scholars have identified a few demographic and psychological traits that make people more inclined to believe conspiracies. Conspiracists tend to be less educated. They often feel a loss of control in their lives.

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