Pizzagate: Podesta Emails, Comet Ping Pong and Media Coverage

I mean, look, there's so much here,

and everybody who's even paying a little bit of attention is getting text after

text or pulling up X and seeing all this wild stuff and you know,

I- I- I want to be as responsible as I can and- and just be very honest,

like, I have no idea what a lot of this stuff is. And of course, partisanship

and actual partisan battles are distorting the way people look at this.

But I just wanted to pick one narrow sli- no pun intended,

one slice of it, and try to figure out what we're looking at here.

So... do you mind?

I know that- and I am a bad source

for this 'cause I- I didn't take Pizzagate as seriously, maybe, I guess,

as I should have at the time.

Can you- would you mind just giving a- a recap,

a basic recap of what this Pizzagate theory

was and what we actually know about that story?

Yeah, it's- it's another one of those stories that was

distorted by

the apparent cover-up,

or at least distorted by the media's response to it,

which was very much a straw man style response. In that these

emails get dumped online,

full of everything that was in John Podesta's life.

And John Podesta is a very powerful and connected man.

And there was lots of stuff in those emails that was overtly concerning,

politically concerning,

geo- like geopolitically concerning.

But people on the internet then started to notice these strange pizza messages.

Messages about, you know,

$40,000 worth of hot dogs or something like that being flown to DC for parties.

Um, things that are just like, wait, wait a minute.

You- you think about it for just a moment and you realize that that does

not make sense.

And overt references to children too.

Like, they're- the ch- these kids, ages like seven,

eight, and nine, or I- I forget the exact ages, will be in the pool and it'll

be heated and they will be there for sh- it's- it's like, wait,

what are we talking about? So, people started to dig into

what these weird emails were.

And then they started to dig into the fact that there's certain pizza places

referenced a lot.

Um, places where these people are going and hosting parties.

They start to notice that this one pizza place in particular, Comet Ping Pong, um,

which was a pizza place right in the heart of DC that was run by a very politically

connected DC insider, boyfriend to the founder or owner of Media Matters.

Um, bunch of strange coincidences.

They start to notice all these strange coincidences around this pizza shop.

And they notice that that- the Instagram of this pizza shop

is full of very disturbing images of children. Um, things like children

taped to tables, things like uh, commenters talking about,

uh, rape and sexual abuse, things like comments about kill rooms and, um,

just- just so much disturbing imagery on

a public Instagram account for a public pizza place that has photos of like

Obama having pizza at it.

That has- that in these emails Podesta is talking about going and having, you know,

lunch at this pizza place with all these

very high-level political people.

And it started to get very strange. And- and so

Pizzagate itself spiraled out into a lot

of questions and concerns and genuine investigation. Um, but then

it got distorted by the media- the media response,

which felt a lot like an immune response to a

dangerous virus. And the media response

then packaged up

all of these very legitimate questions that never got answered, um,

and it repackaged it as:

these crazy people on the internet think that Hillary Clinton

personally is running- she's the top, she's the head of a satanic

pedophile cabal and it's- the whole thing is being run out of the basement

of this pizza place.

That- you see like the absurdity of the sort of wrapper they put around this,

which no one was claiming that.

No one was claiming that Hillary was running it.

No one was claiming that it was all out of the basement of this piz- they were just

asking a lot of questions about very legitimate strange things.

And then a very weird event

happened where as the media is running this big

uh, kind of smear campaign on these questions,

a guy conveniently walks into that pizza place with an AR gun

and shoots the place up. Um, doesn't hit anybody, but manages to shoot

a bullet straight through the hard drive that's in the back room somehow.

And gets arrested by police very publicly. They have a big photo shoot.

And he gives a

couple of sound bites as they're hauling him off

that are something to the effect of 'I was so convinced that it

was all real and that it was all here and it's just not'

or something. And- and so it's like,

wow, that is sure convenient that,

um, good thing that Hillary Clinton's not personally

running a giant satanic pedophile ring out of the basement of this pizzeria,

which no one was alleging.

And- and that was sort of became the wrap-up smear, um, as, you know, Nancy Pelosi

has described to us in the past how a wrap-up smear works.