‘Pizzagate’ is back: Why Epstein files have fuelled this conspiracy theory again
Months before the 2020 US presidential elections, the conspiracy crawled its way back to social media. This time, it was being driven by a younger generation on TikTok.
In June that year, a video on Instagram showed Justin Bieber leaning into the camera and adjusting the front of his black knit beanie. Someone had posted a comment asking the pop star to touch his hat if he had been a victim of Pizzagate.
Thousands of comments flooded in, but there was no evidence that Bieber had seen that message. However, his innocuous gesture set off a commotion on the internet, as per New York Times (NYT).
The conspiracy group QAnon also fuelled the Pizzagate theory in private Facebook groups, creating easy-to-share memes on it.
In November 2023, Elon Musk fanned the conspiracy when an X user tried to link the founder of Media Matters, the progressive media watchdog that found ads for major brands running alongside pro-Nazi content on X, to the owner of the “Pizzagate restaurant.”
Musk replied: “Weird.” His response drew the attention of his millions of followers on X.
The theory has resurfaced after more details from the Epstein files were made public by the US Department of Justice (DOJ) last week.
Some of the documents connected with Epstein show a “headcount for pizza”. Lines such as “who wants pizza in Austin?” spread rapidly online. Some even claimed that pizza was a code word.
“So, Pizzagate is 100% real. All roads lead back to that little pizza parlor in DC and the man named James Alefantis,” a person claimed.
“Pizzagate is all over the new Epstein Documents . There is a group text in data set 9 that explicitly ties pizza to sexual acts. (And we all know what Pizza is code for)," another chimed.
While it has been debunked, the ghost of the conspiracy theory keeps haunting.
“PizzaGate never went away because it encompasses very potent forces,” including children’s safety and the power of elites, Alice Marwick, a disinformation expert at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, said to NYT in 2020. “But now there is so much scaffolding from people who have researched it, it wasn’t hard for others to pick up from there.”
https://www.firstpost.com/explainers/piz...75797.html
Months before the 2020 US presidential elections, the conspiracy crawled its way back to social media. This time, it was being driven by a younger generation on TikTok.
In June that year, a video on Instagram showed Justin Bieber leaning into the camera and adjusting the front of his black knit beanie. Someone had posted a comment asking the pop star to touch his hat if he had been a victim of Pizzagate.
Thousands of comments flooded in, but there was no evidence that Bieber had seen that message. However, his innocuous gesture set off a commotion on the internet, as per New York Times (NYT).
The conspiracy group QAnon also fuelled the Pizzagate theory in private Facebook groups, creating easy-to-share memes on it.
In November 2023, Elon Musk fanned the conspiracy when an X user tried to link the founder of Media Matters, the progressive media watchdog that found ads for major brands running alongside pro-Nazi content on X, to the owner of the “Pizzagate restaurant.”
Musk replied: “Weird.” His response drew the attention of his millions of followers on X.
The theory has resurfaced after more details from the Epstein files were made public by the US Department of Justice (DOJ) last week.
Some of the documents connected with Epstein show a “headcount for pizza”. Lines such as “who wants pizza in Austin?” spread rapidly online. Some even claimed that pizza was a code word.
“So, Pizzagate is 100% real. All roads lead back to that little pizza parlor in DC and the man named James Alefantis,” a person claimed.
“Pizzagate is all over the new Epstein Documents . There is a group text in data set 9 that explicitly ties pizza to sexual acts. (And we all know what Pizza is code for)," another chimed.
While it has been debunked, the ghost of the conspiracy theory keeps haunting.
“PizzaGate never went away because it encompasses very potent forces,” including children’s safety and the power of elites, Alice Marwick, a disinformation expert at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, said to NYT in 2020. “But now there is so much scaffolding from people who have researched it, it wasn’t hard for others to pick up from there.”
https://www.firstpost.com/explainers/piz...75797.html
teachings of the Bible are so muddled and self-contradictory that it was possible for Christians to happily burn heretics alive for five long centuries. It was even possible for the most venerated patriarchs of the Church, like St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, to conclude that heretics should be tortured (Augustine) or killed outright (Aquinas). Martin Luther and John Calvin advocated the wholesale murder of heretics, apostates, Jews, and witches. - Sam Harris, "Letter To A Christian Nation"
