Pizzagate adherents break down into a number of subgroups. Among them are survivors of child sexual abuse who know firsthand the pain of that kind of violence. There’s also what I think of as the chaos arm: people like Mike Cernovich, brought in by the alt-right and prone to pushing anti-Democratic conspiracies (and who saw the lack of coverage by the mainstream media as evidence of their having been bought off by the Democrats). And then there are deeply religious Christians, often evangelicals, to whom Pizzagate is proof that the Devil is real and working hard on Earth.

If all this is beginning to sound unpleasantly familiar, it should. Medieval historian Michael Barbezat pointed out that Pizzagate looks a lot like the “nocturnal ritual fantasy,” a phrase coined by Norm Cohn, another historian: a belief that shadowy groups are gathering at night to plot the overthrow of society while participating in the ritual abuse, torture, and/or murder of innocents, usually children. Throughout the Middle Ages, it was popular to charge supposed heretical groups with meeting at night to solidify their bonds of friendship with orgies, black masses, and baby murder. Medieval Jews, Barbezat writes, were persistently accused of conducting rituals involving the abuse of children, beginning in England in the early 1150s.

“The belief that Jews tortured Christian children, which has come to be known as the blood libel, often featured a sexual component as well,” he explains. “In some versions of the blood libel accusation, kidnapped Christian boys were reportedly circumcised against their wills as depicted in a woodcut of the martyrdom of Simon of Trent in 1475. The Jews supposedly used the blood from this circumcision and other tortures to make the matzos for Passover.”

In all such accounts, the nocturnal ritual fantasy is used as justification for violence against the suspected group, Cohn and Barbezat write, a way of quantifying its wickedness in terms that justify any means to stop it. Writer and activist Chip Berlet calls the fantasy “coded rhetoric” meant to incite “scripted violence.” Accordingly, accusations of ritually killing Christian and Muslim children have been used to justify mass executions of Jews across Europe and the Middle East.

Claims of blood libel persisted throughout the twentieth century, intensifying with the 1903 publication of the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion (the forgery of minutes of a secret meeting of hand-rubbing Jews plotting world domination). The Protocols and the idea of ritual killings or blood libel are cited even now. In 2013, to pluck one disturbing example out of dozens, Khaled Al-Zaafrani, founder of the Egyptian Justice and Progress Party, declared, “It’s well known that during the Passover, they make matzos called the ‘Blood of Zion.’ They take a Christian child, slit his throat, and slaughter him. Then they take his blood and make their matzos. This is a very important rite for the Jews, which they never forgo.… They slice it and fight over who gets to eat Christian blood.” At the Pizzagate rally, then, the neo-Nazi yelling about “Jewish ritual murder” was making a connection between Pizzagate and the blood libel, although he might not have known the historical and cultural roots of what he was doing.

Pizzagate also looks chillingly like a revival of a more local paranoid fantasy, the Satanic Panic of the 1980s and early 1990s, when dozens of childcare workers, teachers, and parents were accused of engaging in the ritual abuse of children. The panic was partially set off by the publication in 1980 of a book called Michelle Remembers, cowritten by Canadian psychiatrist Lawrence Pazder and Michelle Smith, his patient and eventual wife. The book purported to be a chronicle of Smith’s recovered memories of horrific Satanic ritual abuse in the 1950s, and it initiated some two decades of procedures in which self-proclaimed experts guided vulnerable patients through “recovering” similar memories.

Satanic Panic was an irresistible blend of sex, black magic, and crime, and stories about it soon pervaded the culture: huge media outlets from Oprah to 20/20 ran straight-faced stories on Satanic ritual abuse. (Angel had referred to the Oprah episode in our conversation, remembering it as the story of a woman abused by a Satanic cult for generations. I later figured out that the specific episode she was likely referring to recounted the case of a woman named Laurel Rose Wilson, who under the name “Lauren Stratford” claimed to have been used as a “breeder” in a Satanic cult, producing babies for sacrificial rites. Her stories were deemed unfounded by police, investigative journalists, and the Christian magazine Cornerstone, and her books on the subject were pulled from print.)

Heavy metal was also seen as a culprit and a signifier of Satanic activity, as was the game Dungeons & Dragons. Three teenage boys in Arkansas, the so-called West Memphis Three, were convicted on the flimsiest of evidence of the ritual murder of three little boys; one of the teens, Damien Echols, was sentenced to death, and all three would have died in prison had their case not been covered by a popular documentary series, which attracted intense celebrity support. The West Memphis Three were eventually released from prison after close to twenty years, as were several other people—daycare workers, babysitters, teachers—falsely accused of child abuse.

In the case of Pizzagate, the demonic aspect of the plot was enhanced by an additional thread discovered in John Podesta’s hacked emails: “spirit cooking.” Podesta and his brother, Tony, were purportedly attending Satanic rituals conducted by the artist Marina Abramović where guests dined on semen and blood consumed on “earthquake nights.” “WIKI WICCAN: PODESTA PRACTICES OCCULT MAGIC,” yelled the far-right aggregation site Drudge Report when the telling emails came to light. Alex Jones dubbed spirit cooking “black magic,” and Mike Cernovich weighed in with “sick stuff” and “sex cult.” Abramović’s repeated rebuttals that “Spirit Cooking”—the title of an art installation—was just that, art, and that nobody ate semen, blood, or anything else unsavory, had no impact. Those who bought into spirit cooking as a real demonic activity are certain that Abramović and the Podestas and everyone else involved in this Satanic sex-and-death cult will face their judgment, sooner or later.

These outbreaks of religious hysteria recur so persistently in American life for a reason: they are, like so many conspiracy theories, a response to moments of social change and perceived societal fracture. Satanic Panic allegations first arose during a moment in the 1980s of intense concern over the number of women in the workforce and a subsequent rise in “latchkey kids” and paid caregivers. Pizzagate emerged during the 2016 elections, a time when Americans were relitigating, to an exhausting degree, our beliefs, our vision of America, and our sexual ethics. The paranoid idea of sexual predators hiding in the highest echelons of power was not so paranoid; Pizzagate, though, spun it through a nexus of faux black magic, imagined ritual, and nonsensical accusations that were somehow both unbelievable and yet, for a lot of people, unbelievably powerful.

I had all this in mind during one of the saddest moments of the DC rally, when I spotted a child holding a sign: IF YOU SEE ME WITH JOHN PODESTA, CALL THE POLICE. The little boy carrying the placard was beaming, bouncing up and down on his heels.

“You have the best sign,” a woman told him, leaning down for a high five. His father was next to him in a wheelchair and an InfoWars shirt, glowing as one person after another came up to take photos of his son.

I walked over. The man was Michael White from Pennsylvania; he retired from the Air Force after a workplace injury on a base in Kosovo.

“Tell the lady why you’re here,” he instructed the boy.

“I want to stop child murder once and for all,” he said, carefully.

“And abuse?” his father prompted.

“Yeah,” the boy murmured. “I’m eager to help everyone and stop the kidnapping of teenagers.” He batted impossibly long eyelashes at me. I asked his name, wrote it down, and decided not to use it. I suddenly felt desperately sad.

“What else do you like to do?” I asked him. He looked up at me, confused, then at his father.

“She’s asking what you do for fun,” White explained.

“I like to write and draw and read,” he said triumphantly. We talked for a while about a superhero series he’s working on.

“He’s so great at writing dialogue,” White told me. He seemed so calm and good-tempered that I felt comfortable asking him about what was weighing on me.

“Don’t you worry this is disturbing for him?”

“Well, he’s not really paying attention,” White said. “And I don’t tell him specifics, you know. When we talk about this, I explain everything in a way he can understand.”

White, like everyone else here, is out for the truth, he said. “All we want is an honest public investigation instead of a media blackout and law enforcement refusing to investigate.”

A few minutes later, I was listening to a guy onstage reading from a woman’s account of child abuse he found on the Internet. She described being “sold to ten men” a day, chained up in an attic, forced to drink from a dog bowl. I turned to look at White’s son. He was still holding his sign—gripping it, really—his mouth slightly open, his eyes laser-locked on the stage.

Seaman was turning journalists away, several in a row. Figuring it was a lost cause, I still walked over and gave him my card. An hour or two after the rally, I was glumly eating a salad in some dim, charmless chain restaurant and trying to recover from the ordeal when he texted me on Signal, a secure messaging app.

“I want to befriend you,” the text read. “You seem sincere.”

An hour later, we met at a Starbucks. He came with two women in tow: one, in her early twenties, who was introduced as an intern for his one-man news organization, and an older woman, Liz, who lived in the DC suburbs and helped organize the rally. She said her husband works in government and declined to give her last name. She got into Pizzagate after learning about spirit cooking from a “credible, savvy study group” that she was part of, which used to meet regularly to talk about the election.

“I just froze,” she said, when she heard about spirit cooking. “That kind of thing, you can’t unsee.” She’s visited Comet, she added. “I found it disturbing, and I definitely thought there was something going on.”

Seaman, meanwhile, claimed that the Department of Homeland Security is investigating Podesta. “I have a background source,” he told me, “who’s currently employed at DHS and who’s in a position to know.”

“Is there anything that could convince you this isn’t real?” I asked.

Seaman replied that he’d like to see DHS and the FBI issue statements to that effect. “If DHS calls me and says there’s no trafficking, that’s it.”

“Have you seen the art in John Podesta’s house?” Liz interjected. She was referring to a couple of weird paintings belonging to Tony and John that the Pizzagate people seized on: some nudes and an oil painting in John’s office of a guy on a table in a suit with two men looming over him bearing forks and knives.

There was a heavy, loaded pause.

“It’s not really my taste,” I told her. “But I wouldn’t necessarily interpret it as evil.”

All three of them looked at me, appalled, as though I’d vomited bile on the table.

The conversation never really recovered. I could see Seaman deciding that I’m one of them, the dishonest mainstream press who meant to paint him as crazy. He corrected me, stiffly, when I referred to Pizzagate as a “belief.”

“They’re not beliefs,” he said pointedly. “I didn’t join a church.”

“Millions of us are talking about this online,” he told me before taking his leave. “It’s not going to go away.”

Seaman’s certainty seemed noteworthy: like a lot of people firmly enmeshed in a conspiracy community, Seaman dwelled in an echo chamber so complete, so hermetically sealed, that he seemed incapable of processing anything that might change his mind or believing that anyone who disagreed with him could be anything other than a child-abuse apologist or a pedophile. I doubt that a statement from the FBI or DHS would make a difference to him; instead, he would find a way to explain their roles in the conspiracy. Although there might not have been millions of Pizzagate adherents, the movement could not be totally ignored: it was a crystalline example of an Internet creation that leaked into the real world in ways that were, by turns, startling, comic, alarming, and violent.

Pizzagate shared other traits that are typical of conspiracy communities: it’s both startlingly cohesive—thousands of people are willing to believe in the idea of a global elite sex-trafficking ring headquartered in a pizza parlor—and quick to fracture, breaking into pieces under the weight of mutual suspicion and internecine feuds. That happens in every corner of the world of the deeply suspicious. Conspiracy theorists’ lives can be extremely lonely: the mythology of the lone hero on the hunt for truth, against a mountain of enemies and lies, almost demands it.

Nathan Stolpman, the phone videographer of Lift the Veil and enemy of David Seaman, was pretty sure most of the people at the Lafayette Park rally were plants and bad actors. A former actor and then a used-car salesman, Stolpman was living with his dad at the time of the rally and making Pizzagate videos out of his bedroom. “It’s a suspicious community because there are so many infiltrators trying to make people look bad,” he told me. “And then we make ourselves look bad.” (He meant the yelling, the near fistfights, the online feuding, the dueling videos.)

LaLa, the woman Stolpman accused of being controlled opposition, was disappointed by the depth of the suspicion. She seemed to have come to the rally hoping to find a real-life community to complement the ones she’d found online. “It seems that the core element from everyone in this ‘movement’ is distrust for everyone around them,” she wrote in an email. “Nobody knows who’s on whose side, or what the truth is. And we have a circular firing squad of everyone telling everyone else they are the ‘opposition.’”

Later in the evening, after the rally ended, I pulled together a group of friends—all reporters, for some reason—and headed to dinner at Comet Ping Pong. When I arrived, some of the rallygoers were standing outside, holding INVESTIGATE PIZZAGATE signs.

“Are you going in?” I asked a woman from Fredericksburg.

“I want to take a look around,” she said. She was particularly eager to see the art on the walls, which struck Pizzagaters as Satanic. “I’ve done enough research to know this is real.”

“It seemed to happen more on concert nights,” another demonstrator said, of the sexual abuse. “I’ve seen some of the band names. We believe there’s a whole underlying music scene that’s related.”

After Comet was pinpointed by Reddit detectives as the center of a global sex ring, things got very bad for the staff. Even before Edgar Welch showed up, people posted Facebook videos with graphic threats. The general manager, Bryce Reh, received several: “I’m going to chainsaw you in your sleep,” one read. “I’m looking at your house,” read another. Reh was sent photos of his home. Gay staff members had it worse. “There was definitely a homophobic element to some of it,” Reh says.

The afternoon of the Welch incident, Reh was driving to the restaurant when he got a call that a man with a gun had come barreling through the doors. In a panic, he called his wife, a concert violinist who moonlights as a waitress there, and told her to stay away. Then he called every other employee in his phone. He got to Connecticut Avenue, where Comet is located, only to find the police had roped it off. He parked on a random street corner and sprinted toward the restaurant, pausing to have a shouting match with a police officer who didn’t want to let him through.

In the meantime, after the staff got everyone out the door to safety, they “went down the block to other businesses to warn them,” Reh recounted. He still sounded proud.

In the weeks that followed, Comet brought in trauma counselors for the staff. They assured anyone who wanted to quit that it would be all right, that they’d get severance and no hard feelings. Only a couple of people took them up on the offer. The rest stayed and tried to adjust to their new reality, one where they had to walk past demonstrators and use the stockroom that Welch had shot his way into.

“I didn’t sleep for three days,” Reh told me. One night, he woke up to a loud noise, and was convinced that someone was trying to take a belt sander to the lock on his door. It was only the belt on his neighbor’s air-conditioning unit malfunctioning.

Alefantis had stopped to sneer at the Pizzagate rally, Reh told me, speeding through its outskirts on his bike, but Reh himself was unable to. The most infamous of the Pizzagate photos—of a little girl with her hands taped to a table—bothers him the most. It’s a staff member’s child, and Reh knows that the picture was taken at a school hobby day when the girl’s older sister taped her hands to the table as a joke. She’s grinning into the camera in the photo, her eyes bright.

“They put this photo of her on YouTube videos,” Reh said quietly. “To monetize it. They’re profiting off children in a real way. She will grow up with that photo of her associated with the word ‘pedophilia.’ I can’t see that and not get upset.”

Reh said he and the rest of the staff have worked on adjusting to the threats, the social-media deluge, and the knowledge that someone like Welch could visit again.

“The world is more chaos than we like to imagine,” he said stoically. “The faster we come to terms with that, the more fluidly you can deal with it.” Anyway, he added, “What’s the choice? Lay down and cry?”

We talked until my pizza got cold; eventually Reh stepped away, greeting a staff member and her toddler son with a big hug. I had a beer and then, as a result, a little woozy trouble locating the bathroom, whose door was part of what looks like a solid wood wall. In Pizzagate world, they would find something like that suspicious.

The Comet Ping Pong gunman Edgar Welch pleaded guilty to state and federal weapons charges in March 2017. In June, in an imposing courtroom in DC, he entered in leg shackles and an orange jumpsuit to be sentenced, looking exhausted and pale, with short-buzzed blond hair and a neat goatee. His family and fiancée watched him from a front row, all of them looking exhausted, too. His sister, a tall blond woman, cried intermittently, silently holding a tissue to her mouth.

Welch’s court-appointed defense attorney argued to Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson that Welch deserved just eighteen months in prison. She pointed out that in 2010 he’d gone to Haiti for three weeks with his church to work with children orphaned by the hurricane. She described him as a devoutly religious man, devoted to his children, who’d already been deeply damaged by six months of not speaking to them and five weeks in solitary confinement. She also suggested that he was a little naive.

“He’s not as sophisticated as the people who reside in the District of Columbia and are aware of politics,” she told the judge.

Several Comet employees had a chance to read victim impact statements, although none of them used their names in court, to protect their privacy.

“I’m trying to be as sympathetic and empathetic with you as possible,” one, a tall, skinny guy with dark hair and a maroon collared shirt, told Welch. He had been pacing the halls of the courthouse before the hearing began, looking miserable.

“I’m almost sorry you were duped,” he continued, telling Welch he’d “fallen into a trap” set by Pizzagate peddlers like Alex Jones. “And they now believe you’re a hired actor,” he added, not looking at Welch. “That’s how misinformation works, and how the game is played.”

He paused.

“I hope the God who inspired all your tattoos is as forgiving as I am,” he concluded.

Comet’s owner, James Alefantis, a stocky guy with dark curly hair and a blue blazer, spoke, too. He didn’t glance at Welch, either, as he told the judge how proud he was of his staff for their bravery.

“So many of us have suffered because of the defendant’s actions,” he said. “For me, the only good thing that has come of this ordeal is that I now know that I am a member of a community that comes together and raises up any member who has fallen. I know that all the families who experienced such pain by this one man’s decision will not allow their lives to be defined by fear. And I say this with no vengeance and an open heart—I hope that one day, in a more truthful world, every single one of us can remember this as an aberration, a symptom of a time of sickness, when some parts of our world went mad, when news was fake and lies were seen as real and our social fabric frayed.”

Welch himself spoke only for a moment and—as the prosecution pointed out—he never exactly said that he’d been mistaken.

“I wish there was more that I could offer than an apology,” he told the judge quietly, his hands behind his back. “I want to make sure the victims understand I’m sorry for anything I’ve caused.”

“Yours is not an average case,” Judge Jackson told Welch, before she pronounced his sentence. “I’ve never heard anything like the conduct that brings us here today.” She sentenced him to four years in prison and thirty-six months of supervised release, plus $5,744 in restitution to Comet. Welch’s fiancée, very young-looking, with long, silky brown hair and an orange dress with bell sleeves, bent over at the waist as the sentence was pronounced.

As Welch ground through the gears of the penal system, the Pizzagate movement rushed swiftly on without him. By May 2017, “detectives” on the message-board website Voat had found suspicious behaviors in the bearded indie rocker Father John Misty, and the bleach-dipped celebrity chef Guy Fieri, and at a chain of children’s dental offices in Alaska. (They didn’t like the look of photos of the dentist’s office: there were toys in there and cheerful drawings hanging in front of the dental chairs. Most people would argue those were an effort to distract kids having their teeth drilled, but the Pizzagaters saw something a lot more sinister.)

Meanwhile, out in objective reality, a true and ongoing revelation was taking place. Investigative reporting in the New York Times and the New Yorker published in October 2017 revealed that Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein was accused of serial rape, while his alleged crimes had been covered up for years. Weinstein’s story broke a dam, and the #MeToo movement came flooding through, in which dozens of powerful abusers in politics, media, and entertainment were outed by the brave survivors of their abuse. It was a world-shaking blow to a patriarchal system of sexual violence that was, inevitably, fed into the Pedogate machine.

“Is Pizzagate all still fake?” David Seaman, the Pizzagate researcher, exulted in a video soon after the Weinstein story broke.

Pizzagate never really ended, then, and none of its prominent members ever admitted that they might have been mistaken. The momentum created out of real people, bots, religion, scapegoating, the alt-right, and the evangelical right was strangely, uniquely, disturbingly unstoppable. Once again, as Americans, we lapsed into an occult hysteria, a persistent need to seek out new witches among us and burn them, one by one, even when they refused to be found.

But the movement was also one that was firmly tied to the chaotic, prismatic tides and ripples of the Internet, and it was as malleable as any other rumor you’d find there. Pizzagate repeatedly changed its form, absorbing, jellyfish-like, the most alluring conspiracy theories of the moment. Over the next year, as the US government’s pedophile core stubbornly refused to collapse, the movement’s truest believers started to believe the deception was even bigger than they’d ever thought possible.