Comet Ping Pong, a Washington DC pizzeria, has been the central obsession of some of the Internet’s most, well, creative conspiracy theorists for several months now.
“Pizzagate” theorists have convinced themselves, on the basis of weird conjectures and bizarre leaps of illogic, that the pizzeria is the front for an international pedophile ring involving Hillary Clinton, John Podesta, and other political bigwigs. The owners and staff of Comet Ping Pong and several nearby businesses have been harassed and threatened by Pizzagate true believers since the theory first took form on 4chan.
On Sunday, one of these true believers showed up at the restaurant with an assault rifle, firing off several rounds before being taken into custody by police, who said he told them he was there to “self-investigate” Pizzagate. (Why his “investigation” required a rifle I don’t know.) No one, thankfully, was hurt — most or all of those in the building apparently fled before the shots were fired — but the incident is a troubling reminder of the ways in which fake news can have real-life consequences. Sometimes involving guns.
The Pizzagate theory seems to be an almost pure product of “apophenia,” the tendency of human beings to find seemingly meaningful patterns in random data. In this particular case, Pizzagaters have convinced themselves that references to “pizza” and “hot dogs” in the giant pile of Podesta emails leaked by Wikileaks are actually coded references to child sex trafficking. The more baroque versions of the theory, harking back to the “Satanic Panic” of decades past, posit that there are Satanic rituals involving human blood and child rape taking place in secret tunnels beneath Comet Ping Pong.
But this is a Satanic Panic with a decidedly Trumpian alt-right twist. The theory has been pushed hard by a motley crew of alt-rightists and fellow travelers — from Infowars to the Daily Stormer, from Mike Cernovich to Theodore “Vox Day” Beale.
Somehow I doubt this will be the last time someone with a gun goes after an enemy of the alt-right.
Canada is trying not to join the US, but it’s hard work:
http://www.ctvnews.ca/mobile/politics/chris-alexander-distances-himself-from-lock-her-up-chant-but-says-anger-is-real-1.3190140?autoPlay=true
http://www.cbc.ca/beta/news/canada/montreal/quebec-far-right-la-meute-1.3876225
The CBC just like any other mainstream news wants to paint the far right as sympathetically as possible.
numerobis: Won’t help them when it’s their turn against the wall:
http://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/leitch-conservative-cbc-scrap-1.3866219
I’m surprised Harper wasn’t quite able to completely kill the CBC. But the CEO sticks around several more years, so even under Trudeau Harper will continue sabotaging it.
Leitch presumably wants Ezra Klein’s news to have more space in the market.
Ughhhh. Poor Rachel Notley. The NDP here are not doing badly! Their policies are okay! The jobs plan is reasonable! They’re frankly bending over backwards to try to get the economy rolling again. But they can’t make jobs out of thin air, and there are things beyond the economy that they have to be concerned with, too. They’re being punished for things that literally haven’t happened. All I can hope for is that the economy turns around before the next election. Last thing we need is the alt-right assholes thinking they’ve got a chance here.
Rona Ambrose is my MP. I should call her up and ask her what she’s doing to ensure that Trump style ‘politics’ isn’t gaining a foothold in her party.
The CBC comments started blaming Notley for the fall in oil prices *immediately* once she won. Even though oil prices had started plunging six months prior.
And of course they still blame PET and his son for oil prices stagnating in the 1980s and falling through the 90s. And in the same “breath” claim that Alberta has always been propping up the rest of Canada through equalization payments (so, did your economy suck or not? pick one).
But that’s impossible, numerobis! The CBC is the liberal media! They can’t possibly be biased towards the corporate status quo! Liberal socialist propaganda!
Siiigh. I’m gonna go hide under my bed again I think.
There’s a good article in the Guardian about this:
Pizzagate is a lie. But what it says about our society is real
The argument being made is that the majority of idiots promulgating these rumours do not believe them – while some do, and act, the majority are using the rumours consciously as a tool:
Not to mention that the idea that gullible people believe in Pizzagate would be preferable to:
It looks heavily as if the people doing this kind of thing are specifically weaponising those who are inclined to believe conspiracy theories. The real conspiracy theorists who WILL act, because they HONESTLY believe these things and SOMETHING MUST BE DONE are rare. But the group happy to make use of them is much larger.
Expect to see more of this.
Wait, Donald Trump has had an actual lawsuit filed against him for raping a 13 year old girl and he has associated with wealthy pedophile Jeffrey Epstein, but these nimrods want to believe Hillary Clinton is the one involved in child trafficking?
@Steampunked,
I was just about to post and saw your link; I think this article is related in several ways (also from the Guardian). It’s about ongoing research into Google search results and algorithms that are not exactly innocent.
From a previous piece by the same author:
And this tidbit:
Cambridge Analytica mines online data and targets users accordingly. Guess who’s on the board? Steve Bannon.
But hey, pizzagate is far more convincing… 😐
@Ginormica
The “logic” is that any allegations against trump are invented by some vast conspiracy (probably involving da juice) but even if it is true so what?
So its basically the same old party line on rape.
Scildfreja: by “CBC comments” I mean the comments on the website, not the opinion commentary. Many of them complain about the extreme left liberal bias of the CBC.
The opinion pages and the “energy” and “economy” reporters (aka oil, In both cases) are also rather retrograde, but at least they’re polite about it.
@Scildfreja
I know right? Albertans are all too happy to ignore the fact that Notley has been trying to have pipelines approved since she came into power. The carbon tax heavily influenced the approval of Trans Mountain and Line 3; I’m sure if Notley refused to introduce one and the pipelines were subsequently scrapped, they’d complain that she isn’t doing enough to create jobs. (They also like to forget that our economy was in decline long before the election, and that Jim Prentice had said we had no one but ourselves to blame, the fallout from which was the entire reason for the 2015 election in the first goddamn place.) It frustrates me to no end how people in this province want to believe that oil will last forever and has zero negative impact on the environment, and if we just drill baby drilled all our problems would be solved.
@Mish of the Catlady Ascendancy
My visceral reaction to that news is:
SCREEEEEEEE!
It’s still fascinating, despite my response. I’m old. Old enough to remember newsgroups and netiquette, and while there were certainly bad as hell places, a lot of trolls were focused on things like managing to sneak ascii art of a penis onto a group. And even then, it was usually responded to by eye rolling and people trash-talking that specific person. Newsgroups could, and would be, heavily edited. Even if people had no clear idea of ‘who’ was in charge, the idea was that someone was and that they might be watching. And since less people were on it, your reputation did matter, and it mattered in a wider social context.
Sometimes Things Done on the Interwebs were absolutely dodgy from ethical and legal perspectives, and I used to support the whole Internet Must Be Free thing that the EFF held close to their hearts as a result. Censorship seemed to be the biggest enemy to us then, because in our bubble it never occurred to us that people would gang up to try to compel someone to suicide, or to call for the murder of women, etc.
We were all fairly naive. We hadn’t adapted to that world – we’d grown up in another where some cultural boundaries were thought to be immutable truths. And a lot of us are operating still from that mindset. Editorial control is BAD, freedom of speech is GOOD. The context for ‘we should leave Stormfront alone’ was ‘they’re fucking idiots no one will pay attention to’ because ‘knew’ the Fourth Estate would be around forever to educate the populace. And the Fourth Estate was seen as conservative, it was a threat to free speech, in some ways, but it was never going to widely publish that Nazis are a-ok. Also hacking Stormfront and similar groups was seen as a great and hilarious thing that the anti-EFF would likely look down on more than anything else.
The idea that in the end internet news and rumours, unmoderated and carefully adjusted, could take over normal news was unthinkable. Like taking the Fortean Times seriously. Even if a lot of us denegrated normal news, we still assumed it would continue to exist.
I’m probably talking to the choir…or I’m incoherent. I keep thinking about all this stuff!
@Ginormica:
I wonder if there’s a vague ‘well if a dude is guilty then someone lied/made it up/it wasn’t that bad’ kinda thing going on, whereas that protection does not extend to women?
@Ginormica:
Right. They’re glossing over an actual pedophile scandal because it involves one of their own, while picking on an innocent pizza parlor because it got mentioned repeatedly in some e-mails from some private server. The mind, it boggleth. Yea, verily.
@Peep
Wonder how they’d feel if they knew how much work some of the big oil companies are doing into mitigating the effects of peak oil – aka pushing research into blue sky innovation in batteries, etc. The big guys are under no illusions about how long their power base is going to last, and are looking at leveraging people like that to help them move with zero loss of income.
Most of the big guys are going to survive the transition just fine, they are already diversifying. All they have to do is calculate the best time to cut off from oil related investments and then paint themselves over with a pretty green wash. Whatever they leave in their wake? Is going to be rubble as far as primary industry is concerned.
When they can use it as a bludgeon against people they hate because they know the majority of people don’t like child molesters.
Also when they can define child molestation so narrowly that the assault of a 12 year old girl doesn’t qualify.
losername says:
But that’s how it works in the movies.
The sad part of me reading this article is that I’m not surprised at all. The unacceptable is now the norm in America.
Samantha Bee’s show has a segment on fake news mentioning pizzagate and shit.
https://youtu.be/gXQyaUkg6eA
This fuck had is lying so hard. Just say you do it for the money, man, you slimy fuck.
And no one should overlook the kind of gullible conspiracy believer is likely to do when acting on that belief.
He said he was investigating. O reely? Where’s the kitbag full of teensy tiny cameras to instal in light fittings? And the voice activated sound recorders. And the night cameras (like the wildlife researchers use) to instal around the stairs, carparks, back alleys and entrances/exits to record the miscreants furtively skulking in and out of their secret gathering places.
Pffft. Who needs to investigate or gather evidence when you’re so thoroughly convinced by nothing at all?
I still remember the fake news about Iraq being involved with 9/11 and Saddam having WMDs. Tens of thousands of innocent people died because of that conspiracy theory.
@Steampunked,
Bloody hell, that was a brilliant post – thank you. I wasn’t involved with the Net in those days (I’m old enough, but was too taken up with shite going on elsewhere). The issues you raised are fascinating, especially re free speech, Fourth Estate, etc. – very, very topical.
I got a little over-excited… 🙂 this stuff resonates so much with my own research and some of the classes I teach.
@proudfootz,
I can’t believe I hadn’t even thought of that in the present context. Thanks for the reminder.
Victorious Parasol:
“I attack the darkness!”
That takes me back. Thinking about it, it was actually Stackpole’s Pulling Report that was my first brush with political/social engagement. It opened my eyes to how some people are very active in peddling harmful nonsense with real world consequences, and how organisations you hope would be sceptical of nonsense (police, social services) are all too easily suckered in.
It came to my attention because of RPGs. Imagine that, politics got spilled all over one of my hobbies and I managed to avoid becoming a knee-jerk evidence-immune harasser.
@ Queex
Yay, somebody got the reference!