A bizarre story slandering Democrats that began circulating during the presidential campaign has led to nasty real-world repercussions in the capital.
On Sunday, a man fired an assault rifle inside a Washington, D.C., pizza restaurant on the same block as Politics & Prose, causing the area to be shut down for several hours as police searched the block--and put the bookstore on lockdown, the Washington Post reported.
No one was injured in the restaurant incident and 45 minutes after it began, police arrested the heavily armed North Carolina shooter, who said he was there to "self-investigate" what has been called "pizzagate," a right-wing conspiracy theory that claims Hillary Clinton, Clinton campaign manager John Podesta and a friend, the owner of the Comet Ping Pong restaurant, are running a child sex trafficking ring from tunnels underneath the restaurant.
"Pizzagate" has been an online phenomenon and led to many threats against the restaurant, which have continued after the election. In fact, the Post said, after it ran a story about the situation on Sunday, reporters became the target of online threats.
Politics & Prose co-owner Bradley Graham told the Post that the store was in the middle of an author event when police converged on the block. The store was locked down for about an hour, until customers were allowed to leave through a back door. But P&P's main entrance was closed for three hours when the whole block was shut down by police. "The staff behaved professionally and reassuringly during the lockdown," Graham told Shelf Awareness. The store closed early but reopened Monday morning at its regular time, with what Graham called "an enhanced police presence" on the street, which he hopes will last a while.
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| Lissa Muscatine and Bradley Graham, Politics & Prose owners | |
Yesterday, the store fielded lots of media, Graham said, and "received a tremendous outpouring of support from the community. We're heartened by that and the community's continued patronage."
Graham noted that in the past two to three weeks, the "ludicrous" fake news story had led to many threatening phone calls to the store and other area businesses, as well as "hateful messages" on the store's Twitter account. A few people noted co-owner Lissa Muscatine's association with Hillary Clinton, and Graham was mentioned by name, too, and "other businesses with no association were also linked with this." Before the weekend, "it was all just verbal, but we were afraid it would escalate."
He said "it's hard to fight this as a small business or a group of small businesses. In some sense, it's emblematic of the growing problem posed by fake news when such made-up stories take a vicious turn. How the authorities respond and if they can take down and trace threatening phone calls will indicate how other businesses targeted in the future will fare."
The story and situation "defies reason" in several ways, Graham continued. Besides the insanity of the story itself, he stressed, Politics & Prose has "long stood for dialogue, discussion and community values. That suggests the total absurdity of the whole allegation."
Politics & Prose is "still looking forward to a holiday season of strong sales," Graham said, adding that sales so far have been good.