I felt badly Edgar Maddison Welch of North Carolina when I found out what he had done. Completely suckered into believing a bogus conspiracy theory promoted by foreign intelligence agencies and domestic right-wing agitators, Welsh traveled on December 4, 2016 from his home state to the Comet Ping-Pong pizzeria in Washington DC and committed some felonies. Specifically, he showed up at the restaurant convinced that it was harboring child sex slaves linked in some way to Hillary Clinton and proceeded to fire three shots from an AR-15-style rifle. You’re not allowed to do that.

He was sentenced by future Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson and did hard time from 2017 t0 2020. Things went from bad to worse from there. This past January, his sad life came to an end.

Police Chief Terry L. Spry of Kannapolis, North Carolina, near Charlotte, said in a news release Thursday that police shot Welch on Saturday [January 4, 2025] during a traffic stop and that a police officer “recognized the front seat passenger as the person with the outstanding warrant for arrest.”

Welch had an outstanding arrest warrant for violating probation, according to the police department.

When an officer opened the passenger door to arrest Welch, Spry said, Welch “pulled a handgun from his jacket and pointed it in the direction of the officer” and did not put the gun down when officers ordered him to.

“After the passenger failed to comply with their repeated requests, both officers fired their duty weapon at the passenger, striking him,” Spry said.

Welsh died two days later. I consider Welsh a metaphor for the MAGA movement and the country, both of which are still ticking but definitely convicted and on parole.

We’re all victims of the people who poisoned Edgar Maddison Welsh’s troubled mind. One of the chief proponents of the Comet Ping-Pong conspiracy theory (also known as “Pizzagate”) was right-wing influencer Jack Posobiec.

Posobiec spreads a lot of conspiracy theories. One of his favorites is voter fraud.

Posobiec was part of extensive efforts to spread conspiracies about the results of the 2020 presidential election, posting often to Twitter (now X) with the movement’s catchphrase, “Stop the Steal,” as early as September of that year. He spoke at the “Stop the Steal” rally in Washington on Jan. 5, 2021, the prelude to the insurrection at the U.S. Capitol.

In the run-up to the 2024 election, Posobiec was again pushing voting fraud claims along with other prominent Trump supporters—particularly in Pennsylvania. His claims about fraudulent registrations in the state went viral throughout that fall, as Pennsylvania became ground zero of the closely contested election. He accused Gov. Josh Shapiro of “disenfranchising” voters by not posting about extended early voting days in Bucks County and claimed: “Thousands of fraudulent registrations have already been reported in multiple counties across PA and we all saw Josh Shapiro sit silent as officers blocked people from early voting yesterday.” Here he was, echoing Trump’s assertion in the days before the election that “Pennsylvania is cheating, and getting caught, at large scale levels rarely seen before.” State officials repeatedly denied Trump’s and Posobiec’s allegations.

Posobiec zeroed in on his parents’ Democratic-leaning county, falsely accusing a Montgomery County commissioner of voting illegally. The RNC sued the county with related allegations four days after Posobiec’s post but withdrew the suit weeks later. The judge opined that “the Petitioners have failed to produce any evidence that Montgomery County has violated any federal or state law … [or] that the testing procedures employed by Montgomery County are unlawful or inaccurate.”

Slate reporters Jacqueline Sweet and Marisa Kabas have established that Posobiec lives in Maryland with his wife but has been using his parents’ address in Montgomery County, Pennsylvania to vote in every election since 2018. This is voter fraud. The obvious motive is that statewide elections, particularly on the federal level, are more likely to be competitive in Pennsylvania than in Maryland.

[On a personal note, I was ACORN’s county coordinator for Montgomery County, Pennsylvania in 2004.]

Voter fraud is actually quite rare, but this is probably the most common type: an otherwise eligible voter chooses to vote in the wrong state or precinct using a previous address. It’s rare that an election is decided by a single vote, but it does happen, and the hope that it might happen is really the only reason to risk being prosecuted for voter fraud.

The kind of voter fraud that Donald Trump and Posobiec accuse the Democrats of routinely and pervasively committing is different. They allege that ineligible voters are casting votes by impersonating eligible voters or by using false documents to register. But try as the Republicans might, they can find only tiniest sampling of examples of this happening anywhere. The chance of being caught is too high and the likelihood of it making a difference so small that almost no one ever attempts this kind of crime. Sometimes we’ll see someone vote twice, once for themselves and perhaps once for a deceased parent who is still on the voter rolls. It’s an extraordinarily dumb thing to do, and there are no systematic and pervasive efforts of this activity recorded in an American election in our lifetimes. We used to see ballot stuffing from time to time, but that was before modern registration systems were in place.

Nonetheless, Posobiec has spent considerable energy falsely accusing the Democrats of stealing elections through voter fraud, while he himself was committing voter fraud. As with his baseless allegations about Comet Ping-Pong, many people believe his allegations against the Democrats. Many of them showed up on January 6, 2001 and committed serious felonies and were arrested. Some even did prison time, although most were eventually pardoned by Trump, including many who committed acts of violence.

And Posobiec isn’t some nobody.

Despite—or perhaps because of—his role promoting voting fraud conspiracies, Posobiec has become a high-profile figure on the right. He was invited to join Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth on his first trip to Europe in February, a decision that sparked alarm among defense officials concerned about the optics of a divisive political figure attending a trip to meet U.S. allies. Last month, CNN drew criticism for platforming the conspiracy theorist to speak about slain colleague Charlie Kirk, describing him simply as “a friend” of Kirk’s and a “conservative commentator.”

This past April, Posobiec was a panelist at the Pennsylvania Leadership Conference, where the state’s Republican attorney general, Dave Sunday, was a speaker. The conference focused in part on election integrity.

There is a real sense in which Posobiec shares responsibility for getting Edgar Maddison Welch imprisoned and killed by playing on his gullibility. But we’re all Edgar Maddison Welsh. Our country is Edgar Maddison Welsh. We’re all victims of malicious nonsense that is leading us to our doom.