Comet Ping Pong – Agenda 21-2030 / DUAL STATE / PARALLEL STATE / DEEP STATE / TOTAL TYRANNY / MODERN COMMUNISM & TECHNOCRACY (1984) / BRAVE NEW WORLD

Alt Right Conspiracy Theorists Obsess Over Comet Ping Pong – Washington City Paper

Home to a Child Abuse Ring Led by Hillary Clinton?

The Consequences of ‘Pizza Gate’ are Real at Comet Ping Pong
James Alefantis accuses conspiracy theorists of lifting photos of children from his Instagram feed.

by LAURA HAYES
NOVEMBER 15TH, 2016

Yelp
Yelp
Washington City Paper publishes local stories you won’t find anywhere else. Get them in your inbox.

Enter your email

Sign up now
Say you have a great meal at Comet Ping Pong and want to leave the Upper Northwest restaurant a four- or five-star review. Before you can write that review you’ll have to review Yelp’s “Active Cleanup Alert” pop-up informing Yelp users when an establishment is battling a controversial news story.

That news story is that alt right conspiracy theorists have pegged the 10-year-old neighborhood pizza restaurant as both a pedophiliac sex ring and the meeting ground of a satanic cult—all based on an email exchange between Comet Ping Pong owner James Alefantis and Hillary Clinton campaign chair John Podesta that surfaced in the latest Wikileaks dump. For confusing reasons, conspiracy theorists are especially concerned with the fact that Podesta owns a hanky with an image of a “pizza-related” map on it.

The story surfaced days before the Nov. 8 presidential election. If you want to go down the wormhole, here you go.

Despite the fact that the election is over, the alt right internet trash talk hasn’t ceased. Comet Ping Pong now has 84 one-star reviews on Facebook, which doesn’t have the same sort of pop-up alert.

These reviews are small potatoes compared to a much more troublesome problem, according to Alefantis.

“The most sickening part of this vicious attack has been the stealing of Instagram images, Facebook images of children, minors, aged 5, 7, and 8 years old that are then slapped across their chat boards as nothing but pawns,” Alefantis says. “Yes, it’s scary to be attacked, it’s dangerous for business, but it’s disgusting and filthy of these people to be posting photos on these websites. … Someone should be prosecuting these people.”

Alefantis says the photos have been lifted from his personal social media accounts, and those of his friends and employees—not from the restaurant. “Kids in the restaurant are completely safe, none of these people are going there, they’re cowards,” he says, emphasizing that this scandal only exists on the internet. Inside the restaurant it’s business as usual.

Alefantis says he’s even received intimidating direct messages on Facebook and so have others associated with the restaurant, including its purveyors. He calls the attackers “conspiracy theorist, white nationalists made up largely of racists, homophobic individuals who loosely tie together theories and do not attempt to find the truth, and when they do find truth that dispels their theories, they ignore it.”

While Alefantis says he can weather the storm, he’s concerned about others who may not have as much community backing as he does. “I personally worry for the individuals who are being attacked and smeared and slandered and maligned and for other independent businesses or restaurants who are less established than Comet.”

He says that now includes other places in the neighborhood as well as pizza joints across the country. “They’ve moved on to people in my block like Politics & Prose, TERASOL across the street,” Alefantis says. “Apparently there are networks of satanic tunnels built under the entire block. Across the street is an office that contains an NGO that works to save Haitian orphans, so they’re implicated.”

The election may be over, but Pizza Gate is still churning.

Alt Right Conspiracy Theorists Obsess Over Comet Ping Pong – Washington City Paper

Alt Right Conspiracy Theorists Obsess Over Comet Ping Pong
Unlikely theory pulls in Chevy Chase pizzeria.

by WILL SOMMER
NOVEMBER 6TH, 2016

Credit: Creative Commons photo from Flickr user Jess J
Washington City Paper publishes local stories you won’t find anywhere else. Get them in your inbox.

Enter your email

Sign up now
In Chevy Chase, Comet Ping Pong is known for its pizzas, concerts, and ping pong tables. On the grimiest corners of the rightwing internet, though, the restaurant has earned another reputation this election cycle: as the potential home base of a global Democratic sex ring.

In what might be one of the strangest stories of the 2016 election, alt right Donald Trump supporters have become obsessed with a purported connection between the pizzeria and the Hillary Clinton campaign, with forum posters obsessing over everything from the restaurant’s decor to its owners.

“There are many strange coincidences surrounding it,” one prominent Trump supporter, Twitter personality “Pizza Party Ben,” tells Washington City Paper about the pizzeria on Twitter.

For Comet owner James Alefantis, the conspiracy theories about his restaurant are just another symptom of 2016.

“The whole election has really just been insane,” Alefantis says.

Trump supporters on sites like Reddit and 4chan have long been looking for a stronger connection between Clinton and Jeffrey Epstein, a financial tycoon and sex offender whose plane Bill Clinton sometimes used. The Wikileaks release of Clinton campaign chair John Podesta‘s hacked emails inspired a feverish, and mostly hapless, search for salacious scandal evidence, while PolitiFact calls the evidence for a Clinton sex network “ridiculously thin.”

Late this week, Trump supporters on 4chan and Reddit began to focus on “Pizzagate”— innocuous connections between Podesta and emails mentioning pizza that they claimed were far more sinister than they initially appeared.

Why, they wondered, did Podesta have a handkerchief with a “pizza-related” map on it? And why did Podesta get so many emails about eating pizza?

The answer to any reasonable person would be that Podesta eats pizza sometimes. Indeed, Alefantis says, “pizza’s always a big thing in politics.”

To the alt right, though, “pizza” became a suspected code word for illegal sex trafficking. Pizza Party Ben, an associate of Breitbart provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos, writes in a Twitter message to WCP that Podesta’s use of “pizza” is in “weird cryptic language.”

In one 2008 email released by Wikileaks, Alefantis thanked Podesta for attending a fundraiser at the restaurant but regretted not making him a pizza. That drew amateur theorists’ attention to the restaurant’s murals, which they declared “creepy,” and the sliding doors in front of the restaurant’s bathrooms, dubbed “hidden rooms.”

Pizza Party Ben posted a lengthy Twitter thread urging readers to “investigate” the restaurant for themselves. One person even made a “crazy wall” map of the conspiracy, with Comet at its center.

The conspiracies were fueled by the fact that Alefantis is the former romantic partner of David Brock, the longtime Democratic operative behind Media Matters and Correct the Record, a rapid-response outfit created to counter anti-Clinton theories on the internet. Given the nature of its operation, Correct the Record takes up an outsized space in the minds of righty conspiracy theorists.

“Does anyone want to run surveillance on Comet Ping Pong?” asked one Reddit user in a popular post on the Trump section of the site. “Who the fuck do we tell in DC Police that would be competent?”

It’s not clear how much of the speculation is serious, how much is joking, and how much is just a desperate attempt to slime Clinton’s campaign a few days before the election. But a Twitter user with a handle too vile to publish apparently went so far as to visit the restaurant, posting a picture he took from its interior and claiming that he had gone there and tried to open a locked door. “Spooked,” the user posted that he fled the restaurant.

The conspiracy theorists weren’t deterred by compatriots familiar with the pizzeria, who insisted that it’s just a restaurant. “Nothing satanic about it,” wrote one 4chan user.

For his part, Alefantis blames the bizarre theories around his restaurant on the presidential campaign.

“It has everyone on edge and just doing bizarre things,” he says.