(Diane Pappafotis/Flickr)

A popular D.C. pizzeria and a number of surrounding businesses are being inundated with death threats because of a mushrooming online conspiracy theory accusing them of being at the center of an international child trafficking ring tied to Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, satanism, and punk bands. How did this happen? As what’s being called Pizzagate shows, when the right conditions are present, the web can be used to perpetuate wildly irresponsible nonsense that has very real world effects.

The theory of the Pizzagate true believers is a work in progress, but the gist is that close allies of Hillary Clinton are using secret areas of Chevy Chase’s Comet Ping Pong to rape children as part of a broader child trafficking operation in which “pizza” is used as code for kids. It first appeared on the politics message board of 4chan, a hive of internet trolling, metastasized on the biggest pro-Donald Trump subreddit, served as a convenient distraction for institutions loyal to Turkish President Recep Erdogan, and is now percolating on forums across the internet, as self-identified “investigators” comb the web for further clues. In the process, the frenzied pedo-truthers have published the personal information of numerous private citizens and bombarded their social media accounts, homes, and places of business with graphic threats.

There have also been in-person confrontations. Last month, an operative with the group Citizens for Trump was kicked out of the restaurant at the center of the speculation, Comet Ping Pong Pizza, for Periscoping his visit, which he prefaced by asking his companion, “Do you think we’re going to survive? I don’t know.” In a video uploaded several days later, protesters stood out front and owner James Alefantis answered their questions, and offered them coffee and a tour of the business, which has ping pong tables and a family party room in the back.

The stakes escalated dramatically yesterday afternoon, when D.C. police arrested a North Carolina man after he allegedly walked into Comet Pizza with a semi-automatic rifle to “self-investigate” the theory, pointed the gun at an employee, and fired at least one shot. There were no reported injuries.

Pizzagate had garnered some national coverage prior to the shooting, but given that the phenomenon shows no signs of disappearing, we thought it would be useful to offer a primer on what pizza truthers believe.

(Warning: If you find discussions of child rape disturbing or are prone to paranoid thought patterns, it is probably best to steer clear of any and all Pizzagate content.)

Wait, why bother explaining a conspiracy theory? Because the president-elect of the United States gets news from the conspiracy-peddling website Infowars, among other dubious sources. His cabinet picks include others who are wont to push unsubstantiated lies.

Among these is retired general and soon-to-be Trump security advisor Mike Flynn, who shortly before the election tweeted an article from a site called True Pundit claiming that the NYPD had linked “Clinton herself” to child exploitation, an assertion unsupported by the NYPD and all established news organizations.

And now Flynn’s son, who has an official government transition email account, is actively stoking the Pizzagate conspiracy theory:

But wait, the election’s over. Why are Trump supporters still spinning wild conspiracy theories to discredit Hillary Clinton and the Democrats?

As shown by the enduring theory that Bill Clinton aide Vince Foster’s 1993 death was not a suicide, despite five formal investigations into the subject, there is a great appetite for anti-Clinton conspiracy theories. Conservatives and opportunists have set up a cottage industry to help to propagate them.

Also, the ranks of the pizza truthers include some people who seem motivated by the genuine belief that they have uncovered a pedophile ring and must stop it, as opposed to pure dislike of the Clintons.

How did Pizzagate start?

In early November, denizens of the 4chan message board, described by anthropologist Gabriella Coleman in her book Hacker, Hoaxer, Whistleblower, Spy as “both the source of many of the Internet’s beloved cultural artifacts…and one of its most wretched hives of scum and villainy,” laid the groundwork for the Pizzagate theory in a series of threads based with subjects like “PODESTA IS A FUCKING PEDO.” This theorizing was based on appearances of the word “pizza” in hacked emails from Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman John Podesta.

From there, the 316,000-strong Donald Trump Reddit community r/the_Donald picked up the “investigation,” a r/Pizzagate subreddit formed, and the phenomenon snowballed.

What is the evidence?

Hoo boy. Before trying to sum up the information pizza sleuths have fixated on, it’s important to remember that no victims have come forward; no one named has been arrested for any of the alleged crimes; there is nothing to suggest any of the people named are being investigated for any of the alleged crimes; and there is no documented evidence of any crime being committed.

That said, John Podesta, an avowed gourmand, does mention pizza and other food items in some emails, and he does correspond briefly with James Alefantis, who once dated liberal activist David Brock, and owns Comet Pizza, where fundraisers for President Obama and former Secretary of State Clinton have been held.

In one exchange, a consulting client asks Podesta, “The realtor found a handkerchief (I think it has a map that seems pizza-related. Is it yorus? They can send it if you want.”

“It’s mine, but not worth worrying about,” Podesta responds.

In another, U.S. special envoy on climate change Todd Stern writes, “Hope you’re doing ok. I’m dreaming about your hotdog stand in Hawaii…”

A 2009 email from then-Bill Clinton advisor Doug Band holds an attachment named “pizza.jpg” that shows American journalists Euna Lee and Laura Ling along with a young girl, possibly Lee’s daughter Hana. The three are eating pizza after Clinton secured their release from captivity in North Korea.

“As John said, it doesn’t get any better than this,” Band writes to Hillary Clinton aide Huma Abedin, Podesta, and others.

“Nice,” Podesta responds.

Hrmmmm…

From here, the theorizers turned to an FBI document obtained by Wikileaks showing symbols purportedly used by pedophiles to signal their proclivities. Crossed ping-pong paddles on the Comet Pizza menu are supposed to resemble the butterfly meaning “Child love,” and a zoom out on Google Maps shows that nearby Besta Pizza, which is not mentioned in any of the emails, has a triangular spiral in a slice of pizza for its logo, not unlike the triangular spiral that the FBI document says means “Boy love.”

(FBI via Wikileaks)

Hearts within hearts are supposed to indicate an affinity for young girls. They are also extremely common in logos.

Egads! How deep does this go?! (Logos presented as an example of conspiracy theorizing only)

Other “evidence”: photos of children from Alefantis’s Instagram, including one of a girl taped to a table in the restaurant—Alefantis said it is his goddaughter who was playing with another kid—and another of a man holding a toddler with the caption “#chickenlovers.” Also supposedly incriminating: contemporary art once shown in Comet Pizza depicting abstracted nude figures, some bloodied or dismembered, and art owned by Tony Podesta, John Podesta’s brother, and a big art collector. Tony Podesta’s collection with his wife Heather reportedly includes photos by Katy Grannan, known for her images of naked suburban teenagers.

Wait, what?

Also thrown in, among other tangents, are the notion that Breitbart News founder Andrew Breitbart’s death at 43 of heart failure was actually an assassination because he had suggested that John Podesta is involved in child trafficking, and that John and Tony Podesta personally kidnapped 3-year-old Madeleine McCann in 2007, because why not (there is nothing placing them in Portugal or connecting them to McCann, other than two composite sketches of old white guys).

And in a 2009 email hacked by Anonymous activists from the private intelligence firm Stratfor, private spook Fred Burton writes to an investment banker: ” I think Obama spent about $65,000 of the tax-payers money flying in pizza/dogs from Chicago for a private party at the White House not long ago, assume we are using the same channels?” (No such pizza/hotdog flight has been directly documented.)

Kanye West’s recent hospitalization is taken by the pizza truthers as him being silenced for mentioning Pizzagate during the onstage rant that preceded the canceling of the rest of his Saint Pablo tour. The fact that he did not actually mention Pizzagate during the rant is dismissed as a simple matter of all of the footage of the event being “edited.”

Isn’t this all a little “convenient”?

Pedophilia is real, and though the internet trolls behind Pizzagate have not unearthed anything remotely damning, legitimate avenues of inquiry certainly exist in the world. For example, both Donald Trump and Bill Clinton have flown on the private plane of convicted child molester Jeffery Epstein, and Tony Podesta is a college friend of former House speaker and admitted pedophile Dennis Hastert.

It’s unclear how James Alefantis’s last name could be part of this conspiracy. (Voat)

That said, having a creepy art collection and making a creepy Instagram post are not crimes, nor do they come close to supporting the assertion of a massive child-trafficking ring with ties to the Clintons and the White House. A few items in the mountain of Wikileaks documents are not immediately explicable, such as the postscript to an email from Podesta client Herb Sandler to John Podesta reading, “Do you think I’ll do better playing dominos on cheese than on pasta?”

If there was a code being employed, why would pizza, pasta, and hot dogs refer to child rape when they could refer to anything else in the world? The truthers are absolutely certain on this point, but the logical leaps that are required and why one should suspend disbelief and take them are much less clear from the record.

To give you a further idea of the level of sleuthing going on here, an email from Pew Charitable Trusts governmental liaison Tamera Luzzatto to a group including John Podesta, apparently arranging a getaway at a farm in northern Virginia, includes this, which the truthers see as evidence of foul play: “We plan to heat the pool, so a swim is a possibility. Bonnie will be Uber Service to transport [childrens’ names and ages redacted] so you’ll have some further entertainment, and they will be in that pool for sure.”

Even this, now taken as gospel by some pizza sleuths, was an email too far for some early r/the_Donald readers. One responded, “BUT WAS THERE ANY MENTIONS OF PIZZAS?? Christ on a friggin cracker, people ..” Another, “We’re really stretching here….”

Still, the email found a mark in one responder to that thread, who wrote, “Every parent must ask themselves if they would send their 11, 9 and 7 year old daughters to a pool party at night in 29 degree weather in February on an UBER…This is exactly what we all know in our hearts is! These horrible people!!!!” (The email was sent in October and specifically mentioned that the forecast was for the temperature to be in the 60s.)

James Alefantis told the BBC, “Sometimes an innocent picture of a child in a basket is just an innocent picture of a child in a basket and not proof of a child sex trafficking ring.”

Similarly, without a shred of direct evidence to the contrary, we’re inclined to believe that sometimes a lost handkerchief is just a lost handkerchief, a ’90s pizza logo is a ’90s pizza logo, and a heavyset man who reportedly partied hard died of heart failure.

Why do people believe this stuff?

In his book Conspiracy Theories: Secrecy and Power in American Culture, law professor Mark Fenster writes, “Imagine the experience of ‘finding’ evidence of a ‘conspiracy’…It is a moment of cathexis, especially for the individual who ‘desires’ to find such evidence, to find proof of the existence of a secret group that he or she wishes did not exist and therefore wants to expose and destroy, and in order to do so, will join a group that replicates the conspiracy’s exclusivity.”

Some presentations of the Pizzagate conspiracy play into larger political themes. The implication that elites’ appreciation of art with disturbing subject matter makes them secret satanists was at the center of the pre-election “Spirit Cooking” controversy, which made the Drudge Report and led Breitbart and Infowars, but failed to penetrate outside the conservative media bubble. That controversy also came out of the Podesta emails, specifically one in which performance artist Marina Abramovic invited Tony Podesta to “the Spirit Cooking dinner at my place,” and asked if John would be joining them.

Spirit Cooking is a reference to a past series of performances and visual art by Abramovic, including a performance where she painted messages in blood. The dinner, Abramovic told Art News, “was just a normal dinner,” a reward for a Kickstarter campaign, which promised a lesson in making “traditional soups” to people who pledged over $10,000. Alex Jones, Matt Drudge, and others took it as evidence that the Podestas, and probably Hillary Clinton, practice devil worship.

A second strain of argument within the Pizzagate mob is that pedophilia is an extension of homosexuality, and that the fight for gay and transgender rights is a cover for seeking to sanction child rape. In one Pizzagate video analyzing a band performance at Comet Pizza, a faceless narrator says that the new information shows that “LGBT” should have a “P” added to it, for pedophilia.

What effect is all of this having on the people involved?

Prior to yesterday’s shooting, Alefantis said that that he had received “a lot of death threats” and had referred them to the FBI and local police. Matt Carr, owner of the nearby Little Red Fox market and cafe told the Washington Post after the shooting that his business started getting threats last weekend. “One person said he wanted to line us up in front of a firing squad,” he said.

The pizza truthers are doing a number on Comet Pizza’s online reviews.

Politics and Prose, a prominent bookstore that is a frequent stop for politicos, has also been on the receiving end of threats. “We’re all rather shaken,” owner Bradley Graham said. Also targeted are at least two bands that performed at Comet Pizza, each having appeared on show flyers with the supposedly damning signifier “All Ages.”

One band, Sex Stains, is based in Los Angeles and passed through on tour. In the description of one of their music videos on YouTube, which includes a cube with a triangular spiral on it, they wrote a statement that reads in part:

Sex Stains.
A band name we decided on after 100 suggestions by random people on Facebook because every name we could think up was already taken.
We are just a punk rock band from L.A.
We are NOT pedophiles. Just the thought of that is sickening!

What the hell happened here?
A few months ago, we passed through DC on a week long mini tour. We booked a show at Comet. We were told it’s an ok place for bands to play, so we did. That’s about the extent of our involvement with or knowledge of this venue.
[…]
There was absolutely NO PLOT to purposefully use offensive symbols or to mess with peoples heads. There was/is ZERO interest in anything having to do with children. No one in the band had any knowledge of the triangle/spirals horrid symbolism. We’re shocked & disgusted by the theory that we are somehow linked to Pedophelia rings or Satanic cults, and also by the hateful comments & accusations we’ve been receiving. WE ARE NOT pedophiles and do NOT support or promote it. Period. Again, we are just a punk rock band.

The other live show and music videos of the other band, Heavy Breathing from DC, employ gender-bending and sexually provocative imagery, and in one clip of a live show of unclear provenance, the lead singer seemed to make light of pedophilia, saying to a crowd member who shouted about someone else’s purported proclivity for “little boys,” “We all have preferences.” Sex Stains has closed the comments on its videos, but Heavy Breathing’s videos are chockablock with comments like this, from user Sleepwalk No More: “I would just like a few minutes alone with these disgusting fucks. How great would it be to cave their faces in with your bare hands?”

That is one of the nicer, less graphic violent fantasies.

Comments below a video accusing the DC dance-punk band Heavy Breathing of supporting pedophilia. (YouTube)

Can’t someone stop these lies from spreading?

Reddit has gone so far as to ban the Pizzagate subreddit over its doxing of people, and Reddit CEO Steve Huffman pissed off denizens of r/the_Donald when he briefly swapped all mentions of his name on the subreddit with those of its mods, to give them a taste of the abuse he was facing.

Pizzagate truthers seem not to have ever attended an all ages show. In our experience, such shows do not involve ritual child rape. (Twitter)

4chan also seems ambivalent about what it has wrought, with a vocal minority saying things like, “This is thanks to 4chan, just so everyone knows. The admins permitting the /pol/ [the “Politically Incorrect” section of the site] and their cracked out conspiracy led to harassment of the people who worked in there. I have said many times that the /pol/s insanity would spill out in IRL at some point, and be this website’s undoing.”

Reddit’s r/the_Donald is also less than gung ho about promoting Pizzagate these days, and its moderators have deleted some of the old threads. Fox News won’t touch the topic, except to forcefully dismiss it.

Even Infowars, home to vigorous 9/11, Sandy Hook, and other historical denials, as well as wild theorizing about such phenomena as chemicals in tap water turning frogs gay, is reluctant to go all in on Pizzagate, perhaps for legal reasons.

“At the end of the day you have to be very careful when covering something like this, because at the end of the day if there is no connection, and this is all just speculation, because if at the end of the day if you look for something hard enough and you see what you’re looking for, you could be sued,” Infowars’s Joe Biggs said introducing one segment.

Care to buy some supplements that will save you during the apocalypse? (Infowars)

Still, with caveats like that, Infowars has published 10 videos on the subject with headlines such as “Down The #Pizzagate Rabbit Hole – Warning! Soul Sucking Info” and Jones himself has proclaimed, “I don’t see how you see anything else watching this…That’s what all the old legends tell us about evil people, is that they go after our children. And every elite in history, once it became corrupt, set up a priesthood that sacrificed children to dark gods, and that is still going on today.”

Asked if Twitter has a policy about letting Pizzagate trend, a Twitter spokesman referred us to a February statement, which read, “As elections approach in countries around the world we hear conspiracy theories about political trend manipulation, from activists on the left, the center, and right. But the actual reason a topic doesn’t trend is because its popularity isn’t as widespread as supporters believe.” The spokesman did not respond when asked if this meant that Twitter would not interfere with the trend even if it consisted of libel and doxing.

What’s next?

Alex Jones’s premise, that there’s a war on for the minds of the people, is true, but not in the sense that he means it. The battle is between rigorous reporting, media literacy, and critical thinking on one side, and on the other the craven opportunism of Jones, Trump, Roger Stone, Mike Flynn, and their ilk, whose goal seems to be to marshal ignorance and paranoia in service of their own power and wealth.

Trump made his name as a political contender by pushing unfounded rumors with racist and xenophobic subtexts, and has continued to do so since winning the election, so that war for credibility is sure to play out in dramatic ways over the coming years.

In the short-term, for Pizzagaters the meme appears to be as durable as the attention spans of those perpetuating it. So far, the Reddit ban and other sanctions over doxing have only served to convince the true believers that their cause is just and the conspiracy extends further than they had previously suspected. No wonder Pizzagate isn’t trending, they reasoned: Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey tweeted in 2006 about eating pasta while reading The Satanic Verses.

Yesterday’s shooting? Within hours of it being reported, pizza truthers were declaring it a false flag operation, the work of an actor hired by The Powers that Be to legitimize a crackdown on pizza truth and an excuse to confiscate guns.

Meanwhile, hundreds of Washingtonians have pledged their support for Comet.

“We are heartened by the support and loyalty of our customers and our community,” Alefantis said in an emotional statement Sunday night. “We are deeply grateful to the law enforcement officers who responded swiftly to our call. Thanks to their good work, I am confident we will continue and securely, as we have for the past decade.”