On a stuffy, windless March day in 2017, I headed to Lafayette Park in Washington, DC, to join a bunch of people attentively facing a tiny outdoor stage, where a self-proclaimed child-abuse investigator named Neil Wolfe was urging the hidden, unrepentant molesters in government to grovel for their lives.
“This is my message to you,” Wolfe boomed. “If you want to be shown mercy by humanity when all this goes full fold, I strongly suggest that you beg for forgiveness!” Wolfe had on a pinstripe shirt, saggy navy pants, beat-up loafers, and wraparound black shades that he never removed. Over the course of the afternoon, his neck reddened, both from sunburn and from agitation.
“Only when those terms of surrender are met do I feel that it’s even reasonable for some of us to ask humanity to please try to muster some forgiveness in your heart for these people,” he roared, a little confusingly. His point was clarified by banners fluttering onstage around him, decorated with solemn black-and-white images of terrified children and further instructions.
TERMS OF SURRENDER, one read. RELEASE ALL CHILDREN, SURRENDER AND CONFESS TO AUTHORITIES, BEG FOR FORGIVENESS. The begging seemed to be key.
Lafayette Square is just across the street from the White House, and the people in the crowd were die-hard believers in Pizzagate, the theory (I would get in trouble several times that day for calling it one) that Comet Ping Pong, a pizza place in northwest DC, was the site of a child-sex-trafficking ring—one with ties to Hillary Clinton.
The day of the rally it had been five months since John Podesta, Clinton’s campaign chairman, had his email hacked. Soon after, a few motivated and suspicious individuals combing through Podesta’s missives decided that references to pizza and hot dogs were in fact code words for sexually abusing children: “cheese” for a little girl, “pasta” for a little boy, “map” for semen, and “sauce” for an orgy. (“Cheese pizza,” the theorists reasoned, does start with the same letters as “child porn.”)
Pizzagate, as investigative reporter Amanda Robb outlined in a story in Rolling Stone, is a roaring and impossibly strange conspiracy theory, born from the faint embers of a Facebook post written in October 2016 by a sixty-year-old Missouri attorney named Cynthia Campbell. The day before before Campbell wrote her post, FBI director James Comey had announced that he was reopening an investigation into Clinton’s private email server. Data from that server had been found on a laptop used by Anthony Weiner, an ex-Congressman disgraced for sending sexually explicit texts to a fifteen-year-old. At the time, Weiner was married to Clinton’s top aide, Huma Abedin, which explained the data’s appearance on the laptop.
But according to Cynthia Campbell, the real scandal, and the actual target, was far bigger and worse than private servers and underage sexting.
“My NYPD source said it’s much more vile and serious than classified material on Weiner’s device,” Campbell wrote on Facebook under the name Carmen Katz. She accused both Clintons, husband and wife, of traveling with billionaire pedophile Jeffrey Epstein on his private plane. Further, Campbell claimed that on these trips Hillary had participated in sexual crimes against children. “The email sic DETAIL the trips made by Weiner, Bill and Hillary on … the Lolita Express. Yup, Hillary has a well-documented predilection for underage girls.… We’re talking an international child enslavement and sex ring.”
Campbell wasn’t the original source for the various pieces of her story, however. The Rolling Stone report shows that aspects of it had appeared all over the Internet, seeded on message boards and Twitter. (And, for what it’s worth, one piece of it was sort of true: Bill Clinton had, in fact, traveled on Epstein’s plane, according to flight logs published by several media outlets; Hillary had not.) Campbell had likely picked up the different strands from posts on 4Chan and THEE Rant, a forum for NYPD officers that is also, at times, fertile ground for right-leaning conspiracy theories. One post on the Weiner investigation traveled from THEE Rant to a law-enforcement Facebook group and then to Twitter, where it was energetically shared by a group of users that experts believe were bots: accounts tweeting too frequently and too widely to be real people.
Campbell was the first actual, inarguably real human to weave all the threads together into a tale of sex trafficking, cover-ups, and Hillary Clinton’s inextricable involvement in it all. After she shared her story, another probable bot account picked it up, adding, “I have been hearing the same thing from my NYPD buddies too. Next couple days will be interesting!”
They were indeed. Four days after Campbell put up her post, it started to spread across the Internet. Douglas Hagmann, a self-proclaimed private investigator and the host of a conspiracy-leaning podcast, took up the story. Hagmann came on conspiracy’s biggest megaphone, InfoWars, to tell Alex Jones about the scandal. “The most disgusting aspect of this is the sexual angle,” Hagmann said. “I don’t want to be graphic or gross here.… Based on my source, Hillary did in fact participate on some of the junkets on the Lolita Express.”
Google searches for “Hillary” and “pedophile” skyrocketed and the story stampeded forward at terminal speed. Online sleuths returned to Podesta’s hacked emails, which had been made public on WikiLeaks, and after decoding the references to “cheese” and “sauce,” they arrived at the conclusion that Clinton and Podesta were part of a global child-sex-abuse ring. Reddit detectives determined that its physical center was the Comet Ping Pong pizza parlor, owned by James Alefantis, a restaurateur who once dated Democratic fundraiser and author David Brock and a friend of Podesta’s mentioned in the emails. (Reddit’s Pizzagate board was eventually shut down by the site for posting people’s personal information—phone numbers, addresses—and soon migrated to Voat, another message board site, with even less oversight.)
Within the space of five weeks, Rolling Stone reported, Pizzagate “was shared roughly 1.4 million times by more than a quarter of a million accounts,” a potent and bizarre mix of human actors and possible bots, until it had become an exceedingly volatile global phenomenon. And at the end of that time, one Edgar Maddison Welch, a twenty-eight-year-old from North Carolina, arrived at Comet’s doors.
According to a federal indictment, on December 1, 2016, Welch was at home in Salisbury, North Carolina, when he texted his girlfriend, telling her he’d been watching YouTube videos about Pizzagate and that it was making him “sick.” Later that night and the next day, he texted with a friend, identified in court documents as C.
At one point, Welch asked C whether he had any “Army buddies” nearby. When C said yes, Welch asked, “He down for the cause?”
It depended on the cause, C said. “Raiding a pedo ring,” Welch responded, “possibly sacraficing sic the lives of a few for the lives of many. Standing up against a corrupt system that kidnaps, tortures and rapes babies and children in our own backyard … defending the next generation of kids, our kids, from ever having to experience this kind of evil themselves. I’m sorry bro, but I’m tired of turning the channel and hoping someone does something and being thankful it’s not my family. One day it will be our families. The world is too afraid to act and I’m too stubborn not to.”
Over the next few days, according to text messages and affidavits, Welch fought with his girlfriend and his best friend; the girlfriend implored him not to do anything “stupid” and the best friend, C, told Welch to go in with a camera instead of a gun, if he insisted on visiting Comet at all.
In the end, for reasons that aren’t fully clear, Welch went alone. On December 4 he began a grim solo mission, a three-hundred-fifty-mile drive from Salisbury to Washington, DC, which he later told police he’d made straight through. At 9:00 a.m. that day, his girlfriend, who is not the mother of his children, woke to discover that Welch had left them sleeping with her in her house. “I can’t believe you left me here alone with them the first day I’m fully detoxing,” she texted him. She called what he was doing “your selfish adventure.”
At 11:00 a.m., Welch made a video while driving, balancing his cell phone against the dashboard. He wore a black beanie and a black jacket, looking solemn, two tree-shaped car fresheners bouncing as he spoke into the phone. He told his family he loved them, he hoped he’d showed that love, and he hoped he would be able to tell them again in person someday. “And if not,” he added, staring into the camera, “don’t ever forget it.”
Welch covered the journey in about six hours. He later told a New York Times reporter in a jailhouse interview that he merely wanted to give the restaurant “a closer look” and “shine some light on it.” But as he drove closer to Washington, his mood darkened. He felt his heart breaking, he said to the Times, “over the thought of innocent people suffering.”
Welch entered Comet Ping Pong a little before 3:00 p.m. He had two guns with him, one an AR-15, which he pointed at an employee, who fled. As Comet’s staff gathered the patrons from their tables and quickly led everyone outside, Welch stalked the restaurant with his guns. He tried to get into a locked room, and when that failed, fired a shot through the lock, hitting a computer tower inside.
Welch searched the restaurant, but when he found no children there—indeed, Comet doesn’t even have a basement, where they were rumored to be held—he put down his guns in two separate locations, stripped off his sweatshirt, walked outside in a T-shirt and jeans, and surrendered to the police.
“The intel on this wasn’t 100 percent,” he later told the Times. He refused to dismiss the stories entirely, the paper wrote, pointing out that “child slavery is a worldwide phenomenon.”
For most people, Pizzagate was an odd headline, a bit of late-night joke fodder that quickly receded, plowed under by the chaotic daily tide of the Trump presidency. As a movement of believers, it’s small. But it is important if we want to understand the spread and reach of even the most far-fetched conspiratorial ideas.
We suspect the rumor that became Pizzagate—Cynthia Campbell’s Facebook post—had sophisticated help to spread it across the country and the globe. But disinformation doesn’t grow from a few smoldering embers into a bonfire only because of Twitter bots—or even through the encouragement of online conspiracy celebrities. Pizzagate represents a type of story to which Americans are particularly susceptible, a religiously based hysteria and conspiracism featuring the Devil and children and sexual horror. Different versions of the same scenario have dogged us from the Salem witch trials through the Satanic Panic of the 1980s and ’90s.
This specific variant landed in fertile ground, and then mushroomed into something that, according to believers, had global implications. By the time of the gathering in Lafayette Park, Pizzagaters had taken to calling the scandal “Pedogate” and saw it not as a localized case of sexual abuse, or even a high-level cover-up among rapacious American politicians, but as a vast global conspiracy of child molesters embedded in government, the police, the armed forces, and the United Nations, with some ritual abuse thrown in to make it even more horrific. They wanted action from President Trump, and they wanted it fast. Their suspicions had spread far: in my travels through the conspiracy-leaning world, I heard over and over that the government was full of secret pedophiles; the rumor became an article of faith for those who considered themselves truly in the know.
If you heard about any of this beyond the saga of Edgar Welch, it might have been thanks to the tireless vlogging of David Seaman, a young independent journalist. Seaman used to write mostly about Bitcoin, but in the months before the DC rally he developed a large and rabidly devoted following as the king of Pizzagate. He was, once upon a time, an Internet-marketing expert—he wrote a book called Dirty Little Secrets of Buzz: How to Attract Massive Attention for Your Business, Your Product, or Yourself. He subsequently became a reporter for The Street, a financial publication, and then a contributor to the Huffington Post, a time he now refers to, a little derisively, as his stint in “corporate media.” (Curiously, he was also briefly an intern at Jezebel, the feminist site where I also worked, though our time there didn’t overlap.)
Seaman gets very angry if you mention any of that; he sees it as an attempt to discredit him and distract from his intense crusade to take down pedophiles. He made YouTube videos proclaiming that Podesta and a myriad of other public figures were child abusers, and set up a website called FULCRUM, which, as best I could tell, was a news service consisting solely of himself, with content composed of links to his YouTube videos. In the videos, which were fascinating to watch, Seaman alternates between calm, almost monotonal delivery and barely concealed rage, denouncing his targets as “baby rapists,” “sick people,” and—referring to the media and anyone who argues with him online—“hysterical paid trolls.”
In terms of Pizzagate’s spread across the web, though, no one had bigger influence than Alex Jones, who promoted the theory right up until the moment it threatened to get him in legal and financial trouble. “The notion of members of the elite being connected to child pedophile rings,” wrote Paul Joseph Watson of InfoWars, “is a manifestly provable fact.”
Provable or not, Jones, facing the threat of litigation, eventually retracted his story about Comet Ping Pong’s connection to Pizzagate. “I want our viewers and listeners to know that we regret any negative impact our commentaries may have had on Mr. Alefantis, Comet Ping Pong, or its employees,” he said on air, in an uncharacteristically sober tone. Jones also deleted several Pizzagate-related videos from InfoWars, including one in which he encouraged people to “personally investigate” Comet Ping Pong. (This was one of two retractions he was forced to make in the space of two months: in May 2017, he apologized for his false claim about Chobani importing Syrian rapists to Idaho.) Jones’s separation from the Pizzagate faithful came just one day before the DC rally, but the event showed no sign of demoralization.
The attendees in Lafayette Park were abuzz with the news that Seaman would be there to deliver a speech. His fans recognized the urgency of his quest.
“We need an investigation,” a woman named Angel told me patiently. A casino worker in her midforties, she’d driven all the way to DC to hold a neat hand-lettered sign featuring a picture of a Comet staff member’s toddler daughter, her hands taped to a table with heavy white masking tape. “We can’t call people innocent without an investigation.”
Given that she believes the federal government is involved in the sex-ring cover-up, who should do the investigating? I asked her.
“We need an unbiased investigator,” she said, just as patiently.
Like a lot of people I spoke to, Angel was fairly certain there are no longer any children in the basement or back rooms of Comet Ping Pong.
“I’m sure they’ve cleaned themselves up to the point where if you look, there’s nothing there,” she told me.
“They use the word ‘conspiracy’ as a catchall to delegitimize any questions about anything,” complained a woman standing next to Angel wearing a black BENGHAZI MATTERS T-shirt and an NRA hat. Refusing to tell me her name—I was instructed to call her “LaLa”—the woman went on, vacillating between rage at the press and a slightly irritable but basically kind desire to set me on the right path.
“This is why Trump has emerged as someone people trust,” she said. “He calls things out as he sees them. And maybe these conspiracies aren’t just theories, they’re actually truths? That have been going on since the beginning of time?”
“Amen,” Angel responded forcefully. “Having sex with babies and children, they say it gives them power.” She shook her head. “They get what they want in life.”
She produced a list of primary sources: an Oprah episode from the 1990s about a woman who was sexually abused by a cult virtually her whole life, a Dr. Phil episode from earlier in the week, and the “pedo rings” in England, by which I think she meant the very real sex abuse scandal uncovered a few years ago implicating some of the most famed presenters at the BBC. There’s absolutely no denying that sex trafficking is real, we agreed, that child abuse is sadly common, that rape and sexual violence are constant, daily realities for a lot of people, especially women and children.
It was at that point that I noticed a man in his late thirties hovering very close to us, filming us with his phone and talking quietly to himself; I realized after a moment that he was livestreaming, telling his viewers what he was seeing. When LaLa mentioned Trump, he laughed out loud, a short, sharp bark.
“Controlled opposition,” he said loudly, pointing the phone at LaLa. “Controlled. Opposition.”
“What?” I said.
“What?” LaLa and Angel asked.
“Controlled by what?” LaLa inquired.
“Nothing,” he said. And then, to me: “I’ll talk to you about it later.”
He couldn’t quite help himself, though. “You love Trump,” he told LaLa. “You love David Seaman.” The crisp NRA hat, the BENGHAZI shirt—it all looked to him as if she was a plant, sent to the rally to discredit the movement. (Later, in an online video dissecting the event, he zoomed in on her purse, which looked barely used. A sign that it was freshly bought and contains a hidden camera, he speculated.)
“Why follow David Seaman?” he said to her.
“I don’t know who that is,” LaLa responded. “I’m some kind of plant? That’s insane. I don’t even know her.” She pointed at Angel.
“I came with my friend over there,” Angel said. They looked at him together, baffled and offended.
“All right.” The man’s hands were shaking so violently I was concerned he was going to drop the phone. Then, to his viewers, “They’re telling me I’m wrong, guys.” He didn’t sound convinced. He drifted away.
David Seaman took the stage to cheers. He was tall and thin and mild-looking, with sandy brown hair and big glasses and a blue hoodie, like a Facebook employee or your company’s quietest IT guy. “According to Newsweek, I’m a mentally unstable con man,” he told the crowd. They booed sympathetically.
“There’s a man here who’s been recording me all morning, who attacks me on YouTube,” Seaman said next. “I can’t think of anything lower.” He pointed dramatically at the man who was filming LaLa, Angel, and me. His name, it turned out, is Nathan Stolpman, and he ran a conspiracy-oriented podcast called Lift the Veil. He and Seaman were mortal enemies, each of them accusing the other of being plants, sent by God knows who.
With a rush, much of the crowd surrounded Stolpman.
“What’s your endgame?” someone yelled in his face.
“You’re protecting child molesters, bro!” screamed a tattooed, heavily muscled man with the sides of his head shaved.
“Asshole!” an older woman cried. They were filming and photographing Stolpman, pressing in on him from all sides. The potential for violence seemed high; I could almost feel the air thicken.
Then, as if responding to a signal I couldn’t hear, they stepped away. The tension dissipated. The rally continued. Stolpman was smiling slightly, looking calm, still holding his phone aloft. Onstage, Seaman dropped to his knees and led a prayer for the abused, captive children. (Like me, Seaman is Jewish; I briefly wondered where he got into the Christian habit of kneeling in prayer.)
After Seaman and Wolfe finished their exhortations to arrest the unnamed molesters, anyone was free to speak. A winding and sometimes ragged group of people took the stage, one after another, for hours. There were impassioned pleas against child abuse, rants against CIA mind control, heartrending personal tales of sexual assault and child neglect, a guy who talked about the family court system being biased against dads.
“The American Bar Association is behind all this child theft!” a man yelled at one point, to considerable applause.
For many of the people in attendance, the only hope in this morass of baby-abusing corruption lay in the New York Police Department, who they believed wasn’t beholden to the same pedophilic interests as the feds. They trusted that the NYPD was investigating Weiner, whose sexts with that fifteen-year-old girl could be the key to bringing the entire child-molesting house of cards crashing down.
I wandered the crowd, getting a sunburn in the crisscross pattern of the shirt I was wearing, sweating through my coat, trying to figure out what I was hearing. As chaotic and bizarre as the rally was, the common thread was clear enough: abuse, secrecy, and cover-ups, a government rife with pedophiles, and a media that refused to take a word of it seriously. A minor-league neo-Nazi podcaster was roaming the crowd, yelling intermittently at the stage about “Jewish ritual murder,” but he was there alone and nobody was taking him seriously. LaLa pulled me aside and assured me the Nazi, too, was a plant to discredit the Pizzagaters.