Nearly half of all Donald Trump voters believe a widely debunked conspiracy theory claiming that Hillary Clinton is involved in a child sex ring run out of a popular Washington, D.C. pizzeria, a recent poll suggests.
The Economist/YouGov poll released Tuesday shows that a staggering 46% of Trump voters believe the so-called “Pizzagate” conspiracy, which began circulating on obscure sites like 4chan and Reddit ahead of Election Day before spurring controversy on Twitter and Facebook.
Concerns over the dangerous impact of fake news were heightened after Edgar Welch, 28, of Salisbury, N.C., stormed into the Italian restaurant at the center of the baseless conspiracy with a loaded assault rifle on Dec. 4 in order to “self-investigative.”
Welch fired several shots inside the pizzeria, but didn’t strike anyone and was subsequently arrested without incident. He later claimed he regretted the way he handled the situation, noting that his “intel on this wasn’t 100%.”
But not even that dissuaded a large block of Trump voters from believing the unsubstantiated conspiracy.
“Even afterwards only 29% are sure the allegation is ‘definitely’ not true,” the public opinion experts behind Tuesday’s poll said in a statement.
The poll, which was conducted between Dec. 17 and 20, also showed that Trump voters were far less likely than Clinton voters to believe a joint report from the CIA and the FBI concluding that Russia meddled in the election through cyberattacks in order to help get Trump elected. A whopping 80% of Trump voters claimed that the intelligence community’s conclusion was simply “not true.”
Further, the poll showed that 60% of Trump voters believe the President-elect’s false claim that “millions” of people “voted illegally” in this election, while half think it’s “at least probably true” that President Obama was born in Kenya — a claim originated by the notorious “birther” conspiracy, which attempted to delegitimize the first African-American President.
“Sometimes it seems that Americans will believe anything,” the poll takers stated. “And what we know as true or not true can depend on our political point of view.”