Changing your mind about "Pizzagate"

I have been wondering for quite some time now about whether to try writing about this topic, how I would approach it, and what the repercussions might be for making the attempt. In recent days, having had some time to reflect on the topic and take some renewed interest in it, I guess I have decided that the best thing to do is just go for it, even though I am not gleefully anticipating the blowback I imagine I’ll take from friends and acquaintances.

The difficulty I’m having here is, I want to change your mind about something, but I don’t really think I can. As you might have noticed from your own forays into using the internet, changing people’s minds about things is notoriously difficult… and that sad situation is only getting worse. There are reasons for this… some of them have to do with basic human psychology, some of them have to do with the increasing deadening of our critical faculties by bombardment from questionable information sources, some of them have to do with our own intellectual laziness and willingness to go along with propaganda.

Of course, it has been noted that ‘literacy’ in the 21st century will be a word used to describe those whose opinions can remain fluid enough to change with new information. But that can and must be a gradual process. Drastic changes of opinion in a short period of time are extremely disorienting.

So with that out of the way, what I’d like to do is pitch a really absurd, far-out, wild-sounding idea that you’ve probably already encountered, and been so offended or short-circuited by that your brain just immediately went ‘nope, not having that’ and switched itself off, allowing you to get on with your life. It’s a shocking idea, a horrendous idea, a heartbreaking idea, and at first glance, a seemingly absurd idea so alien and repulsive that it feels ethically wrong to even contemplate it. And I don’t want you to believe me, or take me at my word. I’m asking you to empathize with me when I tell you the story of how and why I changed my mind.

You see, I am an average middle-aged Joe from Canada. Never married, no kids. I struggle with my weight and my mental health. I like science fiction and I like playing board games with my buddies and I like take-out food. I have been diagnosed with schizo affective disorder, and anyone who cares to do away with my opinions on that basis can doubtlessly do so easily. I’ve had a lot of trouble coming to terms with what I know and with what I think I can prove. It’s hard to keep a sunny perspective about the human species or its prospects sometimes. You see, I have come to be of the opinion that our civilization appears to be run, at the highest level from behind the scenes, by literal Satan-worshipping child molestors. And I sometimes wonder how to live in a world like that.

Yes, I know. Many of you think this is alt-right troll chatter from the bowels of neckbeard 4chan, and I’ve lost my mind, and there’s all sorts of reasons why it just can’t be so. I hear you. I mean, what can I say? I could start by saying I skew politically left-libertarian in terms of my ideology. I think it’s important to falsify the notion that this is a ‘right wing’ talking point. I could then point to examples of UK pop culture icons who were high-ranking Freemasons and friends of the Royal family who are documented to have worn robes, chanted Satanic prayers, and raped children, but what you want is proof. You want to hiss at me that I’m a kooky conspiracy theorist. You want to get on with your life and pretend this is just nonsense.

Well, I mean, I wish you were right. I really do. And man, I really feel for you, because there’s nothing I’d rather be doing right now than smoking a joint and playing a video game and saving the world from imagined alien menaces. I mean, I don’t have kids, so I have no actual personal investment in what kind of world this turns out to be in the long run, it might be argued. I guess I’m thinking about those of you who do have something to live for though. I mean, hypothetically, I guess, I have to say that I find myself wondering, if this kind of, well, let’s call it ‘evil’, is actually, factually, loose in the world, doesn’t our refusal to acknowledge it kind of, like, make us complicit?

I think pondering questions like the one I just posed will give you some indication of why so-called ‘conspiracy theorists’ are so invested in their hobby of trying to get people to think outside of their current abstractions.

Let’s talk, briefly, about that ‘conspiracy theorist’ thing. If you find the words ‘conspiracy theory’ coming to mind as you read this, you kind of need to be honest with yourself that that’s a knee-jerk reaction. Ask yourself this; are you using the term in the pejorative or normative sense? If it’s the pejorative, then please admit to yourself that it’s intellectually dishonest by definition to construct a criticism of another’s position that is founded on pejorative epithets. If you are using the term in the normative sense, intending to allege only that I am supposing that human beings occasionally can be observed to collude in their own best interests in ways which aren’t a matter of public record, then I am in agreement with you. You and I are both conspiracy theorists in the normative sense, and well we should be, for that is the default position of sanity. So now we are just arguing about how far along things have gone downhill.

My perspective on such things shifted gradually over the course of many years, having taken a steep turn into less-familiar territory around the time of 9/11 in 2001. I had always thought of governments as stupid and myopic, but I was initially slow to embrace the idea that the powers that be could be deliberately malevolent. I think many of us hide from facing the idea that things aren’t all on the up-and-up because it becomes an exercise in recognizing evil in oneself. But, for example, if we contemplate war and its nature for very long, it becomes fairly obvious that the people who profit from such activity are deeply unhealthy and malevolent. The question then becomes not “How could anybody think the world works this way?”, but rather, “How could anybody think otherwise?”

“Pizzagate” was a term given to a putatively debunked ‘conspiracy theory’ that a child molestation ring was being run out of a Washington, D.C. Pizza parlour. If you look it up on Wikipedia, you will find a detailed outline of the ‘facts’ surrounding this bizarre controversy and you will be soundly assured in no-nonsense language that it has all been thoroughly discredited by everyone, not least of which by that stalwart defender of reason and right-thinking snopes.com

I don’t believe it has been ‘debunked’ at all, and I am presenting forthwith the facts that changed my mind on the topic.

1.> Wikileaks published John Podesta’s emails. Some allege these publications were falsified. People who say so are ignoring the fact that John Podesta has admitted via Twitter that the emails are in fact his.

2.> The emails contain multiple examples of Podesta and his allies emailing each other strange gibberish involving what appear to be food-related codewords. Stuff like “Do you think I’ll do better playing dominos on cheese than on pasta?” Some folks think these code words relate to some clandestine activity, and some specifically allege they relate to pedophilia. One letter indicates Obama, for one function, spent 65,000 dollars of public funds to fly “hot dogs” in from Chicago.

3.> James Alefantis, a friend of Podesta’s, is mentioned multiple times in those emails. Alefantis runs an ostensibly family-friendly pizza joint in Washington named Comet Ping Pong. He is well-connected politically, considered (by GQ Magazine at least) a Washington power player for some reason, and is the former partner of David Brock (described by Time as “one of the most influential operatives in the Democratic party”) who runs the Democratic “media watchdog group” Media Matters.

4.> People visiting Alefantis’ public profile in Instagram for his restaurant found a great deal of disturbing imagery. You can easily see it for yourself with a cursory search engine lookup. Pictures of babies taped to tables with stacks of cash behind them. Kids wearing shirts emblazoned with the logo “Pizza Slut”. Comments by Alefantis and his employees, including “#hotard”, adorned the pictures. Alefantis’ instagram profile picture was (and still is) an image of Antinous, the greek boy sex slave of Emperor Hadrian from ancient legend. All of this is verifiable by using a search engine to look up images tagged “James Alefantis Instagram”. Though some have alleged that these images are fake and do not originate from his Instagram account, Alefantis has never denied the images’ authenticity, and in fact has confirmed their legitimacy on camera in an interview he did outside his restaurant with several picketing ‘conspiracy theorists’.

5.> Alefantis immediately reached out to the media for support against the defamation of his character by the crazy conspiracy theorists who took issue with the contents of his Instagram page. Major newspapers including the Washington Post ran articles defending Alefantis as the innocent victim of insane kooks run amok. None of the articles made an issue out of the contents of the Instagram account or of Alefantis’ connections with John Podesta. Nobody thought to say, “Gee, Mr. Alefantis, it seems like maybe your family friendly pizza restaurant shouldn’t have a child sex theme if you want people to not get the impression that you’re running a sex shop out if it.”

6.> Not a single newspaper, radio, or television show anywhere in the Western world had a reporter on staff apparently willing to look into the matter critically, by, say, spending 45 seconds doing a search engine lookup on Alefantis’ Instagram. With one exception. Ben Swann of CBS did a five-minute television news segment about Pizzagate where he mentioned this issue. Ben Swann had been an award-winning journalist with a history of doing slightly fringe newscasts. Within a week, his social media accounts were cancelled, and Swann was pulled off the air.

Excitable ‘conspiracy theorists’ are not always well known for their restraint, and some have badly overreached in their attempts to prove that there’s a secret dungeon underneath Comet Ping Pong or what not. This is a tenuous claim, and thus is low-hanging fruit for debunkers who want to sweep all this stuff under the rug and pretend it doesn’t exist. But the fact that tenuous claims have been advanced and falsified around the ‘pizzagate’ narrative should not serve as the straw man that allows one to dismiss the information provided in this article out of hand. The facts presented here are just that, and the only claim I am making is the one they seem to support: that these are weird, disturbing pictures for a politically connected businessman to have associated with his family-friendly pizza restaurant.

So, look. This is a deep rabbit hole. Ted Gunderson was a lauded and accomplished FBI agent who late in life made it a mission to spread the word about satanist child molesters operating through the alphabet agencies of the United States Government. The Jeff Ganon story during the W Bush years hinted at a massive behind-the-scenes sex trade. During the Reagan years a story broke about a White House sex ring… a story which quickly vanished.

I’ve already alluded to the Jimmy Savile case. Every so often a woman will go on a talk show and discuss her background as a victim of ritualistic sex abuse, and then never be heard from again. Usually any mention of “satan worship” brings the bible thumpers out of the woodwork, leaving most modern sophisticates to conclude that this is the delusion of fundie Christian nutbars, and pay it no further mind.

My contention is that the astute observer will have noticed that the persistence of this rumour, and the trail of verifiable cases which appear to have broken through to the surface world, hints at a terrifying truth, most significantly because the breadth and scope of it, were it to be true, should leave us with serious questions about how we could be so blind as to be letting this happen right in plain sight.

I can point to any number of examples in history when the nobility got carried away with satisfying debauched appetites. The French nobility comes to mind. Roman orgies come to mind. What makes anyone think human nature has changed that much? And should we suppose that the war profiteers who bomb other countries as part of their business model have healthy personal interests and appetites?

What I’m trying to do is point out that what may at first seem like an implausible idea is in fact entirely plausible. In all honesty, you shouldn’t need training in critical thinking to put two and two together based solely on the information I’ve just provided to you. When a guy is posting pedo images on social media and then yelling foul when he’s called out on it, you are really on the wrong side of history to be defending his virtue. And of course, Alefantis’ putative guilt in this matter isn’t by itself sufficient evidence of a worldwide conspiracy of evildoers. I want to be very clear on this. But we also need to consider that the deafening silence of the sockpuppet corporatist mainstream “media” sources on this very alarming issue most certainly is indicative of a cover-up of sorts on a large scale. These facts I have presented are, I want to reiterate, not obscure or hard to discern. Everything is right there in plain sight for any journalist worth his or her salt to bring to our attention. So why are major publications like The Washington Post instead intent on defending Alefantis’ honour? These are questions one should ponder at length.

If you just can’t get your head around it, well, ok. I couldn’t either for a long time. There are people who couldn’t come to terms with OJ Simpson being a murderer. They wanted x to be true, so could not be convinced that it wasn’t. Once I realized I was making the same mistake, I began to have second thoughts about this stuff.

The difference, really, is that in the former case, nobody’s affected by our silence or misinformed opinion. In this case, presumably, innocent children are suffering horribly partly because of our collective refusal to see the facts, admit to them, engage with them, and backtrack on our falsified narratives. That means that despite this being a horrible, ugly thing to contemplate, we are morally obligated, it seems to me, to contemplate it.

The good news is that a lot of people are aware that this is taking place, and are involving themselves in the fight to get the word out. I would encourage you to search your own soul, think hard about the issue, and see if there’s anything that you can do. We all want the world to be a better place. I’m not sure myself how to bring that vision to life… but if the world is, as it appears to be, being run by horribly corrupt soulless psychopaths who literally worship the mythological incarnation of evil, maybe getting them out of the way would be an important first step.

What do you think?