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?

As a psychiatrist, I diagnose mental illness. Also, I help spot demonic possession.

In the late 1980s, I was introduced to a self-styled Satanic high priestess. She called herself a witch and dressed the part, with flowing dark clothes and black eye shadow around to her temples. In our many discussions, she acknowledged worshipping Satan as his “queen.”

I’m a man of science and a lover of history; after studying the classics at Princeton, I trained in psychiatry at Yale and in psychoanalysis at Columbia. That background is why a Catholic priest had asked my professional opinion, which I offered pro bono, about whether this woman was suffering from a mental disorder. This was at the height of the national panic about Satanism. (In a case that helped induce the hysteria, Virginia McMartin and others had recently been charged with alleged Satanic ritual abuse at a Los Angeles preschool; the charges were later dropped.) So I was inclined to skepticism. But my subject’s behavior exceeded what I could explain with my training. She could tell some people their secret weaknesses, such as undue pride. She knew how individuals she’d never known had died, including my mother and her fatal case of ovarian cancer. Six people later vouched to me that, during her exorcisms, they heard her speaking multiple languages, including Latin, completely unfamiliar to her outside of her trances. This was not psychosis; it was what I can only describe as paranormal ability. I concluded that she was possessed. Much later, she permitted me to tell her story.



The priest who had asked for my opinion of this bizarre case was the most experienced exorcist in the country at the time, an erudite and sensible man. I had told him that, even as a practicing Catholic, I wasn’t likely to go in for a lot of hocus-pocus. “Well,” he replied, “unless we thought you were not easily fooled, we would hardly have wanted you to assist us.”

So began an unlikely partnership. For the past two-and-a-half decades and over several hundred consultations, I’ve helped clergy from multiple denominations and faiths to filter episodes of mental illness — which represent the overwhelming majority of cases — from, literally, the devil’s work. It’s an unlikely role for an academic physician, but I don’t see these two aspects of my career in conflict. The same habits that shape what I do as a professor and psychiatrist — open-mindedness, respect for evidence and compassion for suffering people — led me to aid in the work of discerning attacks by what I believe are evil spirits and, just as critically, differentiating these extremely rare events from medical conditions.

Is it possible to be a sophisticated psychiatrist and believe that evil spirits are, however seldom, assailing humans? Most of my scientific colleagues and friends say no, because of their frequent contact with patients who are deluded about demons, their general skepticism of the supernatural, and their commitment to employ only standard, peer-reviewed treatments that do not potentially mislead (a definite risk) or harm vulnerable patients. But careful observation of the evidence presented to me in my career has led me to believe that certain extremely uncommon cases can be explained no other way.

*          *          *          *          *          *          *

The Vatican does not track global or countrywide exorcism, but in my experience and according to the priests I meet, demand is rising. The United States is home to about 50 “stable” exorcists — those who have been designated by bishops to combat demonic activity on a semi-regular basis — up from just 12 a decade ago, according to the Rev. Vincent Lampert, an Indianapolis-based priest-exorcist who is active in the International Association of Exorcists. (He receives about 20 inquiries per week, double the number from when his bishop appointed him in 2005.) The Catholic Church has responded by offering greater resources for clergy members who wish to address the problem. In 2010, for instance, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops organized a meeting in Baltimore for interested clergy. In 2014, Pope Francis formally recognized the IAE, 400 members of which are to convene in Rome this October. Members believe in such strange cases because they are constantly called upon to help. (I served for a time as a scientific adviser on the group’s governing board.)



Unfortunately, not all clergy involved in this complex field are as cautious as the priest who first approached me. In some circles, there is a tendency to become overly preoccupied with putative demonic explanations and to see the devil everywhere. Fundamentalist misdiagnoses and absurd or even dangerous “treatments,” such as beating victims, have sometimes occurred, especially in developing countries. This is perhaps why exorcism has a negative connotation in some quarters. People with psychological problems should receive psychological treatment.

But I believe I’ve seen the real thing. Assaults upon individuals are classified either as “demonic possessions” or as the slightly more common but less intense attacks usually called “oppressions.” A possessed individual may suddenly, in a type of trance, voice statements of astonishing venom and contempt for religion, while understanding and speaking various foreign languages previously unknown to them. The subject might also exhibit enormous strength or even the extraordinarily rare phenomenon of levitation. (I have not witnessed a levitation myself, but half a dozen people I work with vow that they’ve seen it in the course of their exorcisms.) He or she might demonstrate “hidden knowledge” of all sorts of things — like how a stranger’s loved ones died, what secret sins she has committed, even where people are at a given moment. These are skills that cannot be explained except by special psychic or preternatural ability.

I have personally encountered these rationally inexplicable features, along with other paranormal phenomena. My vantage is unusual: As a consulting doctor, I think I have seen more cases of possession than any other physician in the world.

[I’m a transgender Republican. My party has betrayed me.]

Most of the people I evaluate in this role suffer from the more prosaic problems of a medical disorder. Anyone even faintly familiar with mental illnesses knows that individuals who think they are being attacked by malign spirits are generally experiencing nothing of the sort. Practitioners see psychotic patients all the time who claim to see or hear demons; histrionic or highly suggestible individuals, such as those suffering from dissociative identity syndromes; and patients with personality disorders who are prone to misinterpret destructive feelings, in what exorcists sometimes call a “pseudo-possession,” via the defense mechanism of an externalizing projection. But what am I supposed to make of patients who unexpectedly start speaking perfect Latin?

I approach each situation with an initial skepticism. I technically do not make my own “diagnosis” of possession but inform the clergy that the symptoms in question have no conceivable medical cause.

I am aware of the way many psychiatrists view this sort of work. While the American Psychiatric Association has no official opinion on these affairs, the field (like society at large) is full of unpersuadable skeptics and occasionally doctrinaire materialists who are often oddly vitriolic in their opposition to all things spiritual. My job is to assist people seeking help, not to convince doctors who are not subject to suasion. Yet I’ve been pleasantly surprised by the number of psychiatrists and other mental health practitioners nowadays who are open to entertaining such hypotheses. Many believe exactly what I do, though they may be reluctant to speak out.

*          *          *          *          *          *          *

As a man of reason, I’ve had to rationalize the seemingly irrational. Questions about how a scientifically trained physician can believe “such outdated and unscientific nonsense,” as I’ve been asked, have a simple answer. I honestly weigh the evidence. I have been told simplistically that levitation defies the laws of gravity, and, well, of course it does! We are not dealing here with purely material reality, but with the spiritual realm. One cannot force these creatures to undergo lab studies or submit to scientific manipulation; they will also hardly allow themselves to be easily recorded by video equipment, as skeptics sometimes demand. (The official Catholic Catechism holds that demons are sentient and possess their own wills; as they are fallen angels, they are also craftier than humans. That’s how they sow confusion and seed doubt, after all.) Nor does the church wish to compromise a sufferer’s privacy, any more than doctors want to compromise a patient’s confidentiality.



Ignorance and superstition have often surrounded stories of demonic possession in various cultures, and surely many alleged episodes can be explained by fraud, chicanery or mental pathology. But anthropologists agree that nearly all cultures have believed in spirits, and the vast majority of societies (including our own) have recorded dramatic stories of spirit possession. Despite varying interpretations, multiple depictions of the same phenomena in astonishingly consistent ways offer cumulative evidence of their credibility.

As a psychoanalyst, a blanket rejection of the possibility of demonic attacks seems less logical, and often wishful in nature, than a careful appraisal of the facts. As I see it, the evidence for possession is like the evidence for George Washington’s crossing of the Delaware. In both cases, written historical accounts with numerous sound witnesses testify to their accuracy.

In the end, however, it was not an academic or dogmatic view that propelled me into this line of work. I was asked to consult about people in pain. I have always thought that, if requested to help a tortured person, a physician should not arbitrarily refuse to get involved. Those who dismiss these cases unwittingly prevent patients from receiving the help they desperately require, either by failing to recommend them for psychiatric treatment (which most clearly need) or by not informing their spiritual ministers that something beyond a mental or other illness seems to be the issue. For any person of science or faith, it should be impossible to turn one’s back on a tormented soul.

Richard Gallagher is a board-certified psychiatrist and a professor of clinical psychiatry at New York Medical College. He is at work on a book about demonic possession in the United States.