d.c. pizzeria. the false claim had been simmering on sites like 4chan and reddit for weeks. when did you first hear of pizzagate? it started on november 14th. the pizza restaurant owner is unaware of what is brewing. i got a call from a reporter if i had heard of this online conspiracy theory that involved comet. and i sort of thought, i don t know what this means, i m sure it s nothing. but it became something big. hundreds of thousands of people watched youtube videos on pizzagate made by alex jones. mike gottlieb is the pizzeria owner s attorney. we can trace a meaningful spike when it went from a fringe
thing to a mainstream thing when infowars started covering it in december. pizzagate or related hashtags were shared more than a million times on twitter in just five weeks. that s all going on and then all of a sudden soon the pizzeria owner was faced with a frightening reality. thousands of people online believed the false claims. they were calling me a pedophile, calling hillary clinton a pedophile, then more outrageous things, calling us satanic, thinking we had tunnels in our basement. welch is one of those people who believed the false claim. on december 2nd, he sends out another text, raiding a pedo ring, possibly sacrificing the lives of a few for the lives of many. two days later, welch takes off to washington, d.c.