by Darryl Cooper, IM1776:
EVERYTHING IS PERMITTED: WHAT PIZZAGATE REVEALS ABOUT THE JEFFREY EPSTEIN SAGA
Since the end of World War II, government operations have acquired a level of secrecy that would not have been tolerated in previous eras. During the Cold War, strategists on both sides of the Iron Curtain knew that images and words counted as much as deeds and facts, and waged a propaganda battle for the hearts and minds of the Third World. NATO and the Warsaw Pact only engaged in active military conflicts over client states a few times – in places like Korea, Vietnam, and Afghanistan – but information operations to incite, confuse, and demoralize were ongoing. This information war was also waged at home, as both sides worked to manipulate the perceptions and emotions of their own people in order to inoculate them against the propaganda of the enemy. In this kind of information environment, a good conspiracy theory is like a black hole, pulling together disparate facts from all directions. And in this respect, no conspiracy theory compares to the saga of Jeffrey Epstein.
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The Epstein story is unusual in that the conspiracy theory is now the mainstream narrative. According to a recent nationwide poll, a majority of Americans do not believe Epstein committed suicide. Among people who do believe he took his own life, a majority believes he was aided by guards or other prison officials who wanted him dead. Epstein’s wide-ranging elite connections, the mysterious origin of his wealth, the circumstances of his mysterious death, and his ability to avoid consequences for well-known crimes for many years, are enough to make even the most hardened skeptic question their view of the matter.
Questions regarding how, why, and by whom Epstein was killed, and whether he was in the employ of U.S., or foreign intelligence services, will probably never be answered with undeniable hard evidence. But there is another mystery which is even more troubling. How could a prominent man carrying around a very public child prostitution conviction have remained in the good graces of high society? Having loosely followed the Epstein story for nearly a decade before his 2019 arrest, it was a question I’d pondered many times over the years. Until a satisfying answer emerged from, of all things, the PizzaGate conspiracy theory.
For those who do not remember, Pizzagate started with some emails from a Democratic Party operative named John Podesta. Podesta had been a fixture in Washington D.C. for five decades, working for numerous Democratic politicians and committees through the 1970s and ’80s. In 1988 he and his brother Tony started the Podesta Group, which quickly grew into arguably the most powerful Democrat lobbying firm in America. Podesta had met Bill Clinton in 1970, when they both worked for Senator Joseph Duffey; then when Clinton became President, he tapped Podesta to serve in his administration, eventually promoting him to his Chief of Staff in 1998. In 2003, he started the Center for American Progress, one of the Democratic Party’s most important private propaganda outfits. John Podesta is one of those people – there is a whole class of them affiliated with both parties – who never runs for office or heads a government agency, but always seems to be around and in the mix in Washington D.C. When Hillary Clinton needed a loyal old hand to manage her 2016 Presidential campaign, Podesta was the obvious choice.
As the election came down to the wire in Fall 2016, WikiLeaks released an archive of emails that had been lifted from John Podesta’s personal account. The release of the Podesta emails, and, a few months earlier, the email archive of the Democratic National Committee, by WikiLeaks marked the first time the news organization had involved itself directly in a U.S. political race. The Podesta emails fell into the waiting hands of citizen investigators who had already spent the summer working together on thousands of message boards, Discord servers, and chat rooms to comb through the DNC email trove. Before long, they began to find emails to or from Podesta that did not seem to make much sense at face value, including one asking for $60,000 worth of hotdogs to be purchased for a party in honor of Barack Obama. Good hotdogs can be had even at retail prices for under a dollar apiece, so $60,000 seemed to be an excessive amount. Perhaps, thought the researchers, “hotdogs” is a code phrase for something else.
Investigators soon turned up other emails, many of them involving food, and indeed, within the collection of tens of thousands of emails there were a handful that looked pretty bad when the decoder ring was applied to them. Researchers paid special attention to any emails that mentioned pizza, which, according to some, had long been used as a code word by pedophiles and traffickers in child pornography. For example, in one email, someone had written to Podesta to alert him that they’d found a handkerchief with a hand-drawn map “that looks pizza related.” Lacking a better explanation for why someone would draw a pizza-related map on a handkerchief, the sleuths determined that the email was describing something nefarious to do with children.
People trawled through the Podesta emails looking for any mention of “pizza,” and came across several references to a D.C. restaurant called Comet Ping Pong Pizza, and its owner, James Alefantis. Alefantis was a Democratic donor, and the former gay lover of David Brock, founder of Media Matters. Somehow, despite being merely a pizza peddler, Alefantis was listed by GQ Magazine as one of the 50 Most Powerful People in Washington. People wanted to know more about James Alefantis and soon located his Instagram account. For his Instagram avatar, he had used a picture of an old Roman statue of Antinous, boy-lover of the Emperor Hadrian. His Instagram feed included a picture of a child taped to a table, (who Alefantis will later claim was his godchild) and many other images and comments that looked strange, to say the least, without additional context.
