Hillary Clinton has acknowledged that the Pizzagate conspiracy theory that circulated during her 2016 presidential campaign was “really effective” in influencing voters.
While appearing on the “On with Kara Swisher” podcast Wednesday, Clinton was asked about a political ad from Vivek Ramaswamy’s campaign featuring his opponent, Amy Acton’s, estranged mother, Donna Arthur, calling her daughter a liar and urging voters not to elect her governor. Acton has said she was removed from her mother’s custody at age 12 after her stepfather was indicted on charges of raping her. Clinton decried the ad, adding her voice to bipartisan criticism, and warned that political spots, internet hoaxes and myths can derail a campaign. She then reflected on the false claims spread about her during her 2016 presidential run against Donald Trump, singling out the Pizzagate conspiracy theory as particularly effective.
“I think Pizzagate was really effective when people, you know, when these ads against me, these really terrible, horrible, false claims about me were running all over the internet, some with Russian money for heaven’s sakes,” Clinton said. “The people who were campaigning for me, they were on the phones, they were knocking on doors, they would have voters say, “You know what? I can’t vote for her because she kills people or she trafficks children or whatever they were told and that they believed.”
She added: “And when, you know, my supporters would say, ‘Where did you hear that? It’s not true.’ They’d say, ‘Oh, I saw it on the internet.’ And you know, the naïveté and the susceptibility of people seeing a video or seeing something in print that looked legitimate was so powerful and that’s why you can’t count out all of the money that is being spent against our candidates to lie about them again.”
For those who haven’t committed the crackpot lies to memory over the past decade, the Pizzagate conspiracy theory falsely claimed that Clinton was running a pedophile ring out of the basement of Comet Ping Pong, a pizza shop in Washington, D.C. The rumor spread widely across the internet and into the national conversation, apparently having a real impact on her campaign.
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