A journalist who has covered conspiracy theories for a decade says one of the most notorious hoaxes of the past decade can’t be put to rest while Jeffrey Epstein’s associates go unpunished.
Anna Merlan, a journalist and author who covers conspiracy theories and their consequences, made the argument in a guest essay for The New York Times on Sunday headlined “Why the Pizzagate Lie Won’t Die.”
Merlan opened with a rally she attended near the White House about two months into President Donald Trump’s first term. It was one of the first in-person events for the community forming around the theory.
“I strongly suggest that you beg for forgiveness!” roared rally organizer Neil Wolfe, according to Merlan. He was speaking to the pedophiles he believed would soon be forced to release their child captives. Merlan wrote that he “received ecstatic applause.”
“The mood was an odd mix of rage and celebration,” she wrote. “The attendees seemed sincerely concerned about child abuse and the impunity often granted to offenders in high places but believed the man who would expose these evildoers was finally in power.”
The theory claimed that “powerful Democratic Party operatives were running a sex ring out of the basement of a Washington, D.C., pizzeria called Comet Ping Pong,” Merlan wrote. She said it arrived “at a time when social media platforms were primed to spread paranoia,” and that believers came to see themselves “as heroic crusaders against a force that many believed was literally Satan working on Earth.”
She traced its origins to October 2016, 10 days before the presidential election. That month, a Facebook user going by the name Carmen Katz claimed, citing an “N.Y.P.D. source,” that emails on former Rep. Anthony Weiner’s laptop would prove he and Bill and Hillary Clinton had taken Epstein’s plane. Merlan noted that flight logs have never shown Weiner or Hillary Clinton on Epstein’s jet, and that neither had any documented contact with him.
Merlan argued that the theory has survived because it is built around a real grievance.
“Like all good conspiracy theories, Pizzagate was an accretion of highly charged, lurid and politically valuable distortions arranged around a pearl of truth: Sexual predators, especially powerful ones, are too rarely held accountable,” she wrote. “That truth is why the theory broke into and has remained in the mainstream, minted a class of pundits and politicians and indelibly changed the rules of public discourse.”
She then turned to Epstein, who she noted “once moved in the same circles as Mr. Trump and was a longtime friend of his.”
“There were no children in the basement of Comet that Mr. Trump could have freed,” Merlan wrote. “But in the years since Pizzagate began, we have seen irrefutable evidence of a conspiracy to prey on vulnerable women and children, one that went to the highest levels of power.”
“Until the Trump administration — or the larger political establishment — holds Jeffrey Epstein and his associates to account, Pizzagate can never really die,” she concluded.
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