One of the more outlandish, but widely shared conspiracy theories that emerged from the Wikileaks release of emails from a top aide to Hillary Clinton, surrounded pizza, what some claimed was a child sex trafficking operation that was linked to the Democratic nominee and her allies, based out of a Washington, D.C. neighborhood pizza restaurant.
On Sunday afternoon, a man walked into that restaurant, Comet Ping Pong, armed with a gun - in a neighborhood that sees very little in the way of violence.
It set off concerns about those conspiracy theory stories.
Luckily, no one was injured. But it quickly brought to the fore an ongoing parade of accusations being made against the restaurant.
While early reports did not seem to indicate there was a link - that changed after a little while.
The incident was unsettling for a variety of obvious reasons, but also because of the online fervor of critics of Hillary Clinton, who pestered me for weeks during the campaign about pizza and Clinton aide John Podesta, with absolutely no evidence to back up their charges of child sex trafficking at the restaurant.
The restaurant that is nothing more than a local pizza joint.
But even when police moved in on what otherwise should have been an unremarkable Sunday afternoon at a pizza joint in D.C., it wasn't hard to find conspiracy theories that were not going away.
Go to the hacked emails to and from John Podesta, and you can find one from September of 2008, where Podesta is invited to the Comet Ping Pong restaurant to watch an Obama-McCain debate:
Credit: Jamie Dupree
Credit: Jamie Dupree
Alefantis is the owner of Comet Ping Pong, who has labeled the charges leveled against him as an "insane, fabricated conspiracy theory."
And even if the guy with the gun wasn't connected to the "pizzagate" conspiracy theory, it hit home even more this weekend.
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