Pizzagate. Is there anything there?

At Counter-Currents Aedon Cassiel explores Pizzagate. Did you know that there are symbols used by pedophiles to indicate sexual preferences? Here is a bulletin produced by the FBI in 2007.

Here is the logo for Besta Pizza.


Besta Pizza, the business whose logo so closely resembled the “little boy lover” logo, is owned by Andrew Kline [17], who was one of four attorneys in the Human Trafficking Prosecution Unit of the Department of Justice. Isn’t it just a little unusual that someone that high up in a human trafficking division would fail to notice the symbolism?

...The question is whether there is enough here to justify thinking there should be a proper investigation.

...And the parallel with Rotherham is that the relatively small number of people asking for that are mostly the loathsome kinds of people who run “racist far-right websites.” So, since the claims are inherently conspiratorial, and the mainstream doesn’t want to be associated with those people who are talking about it, it is once again all too easy to just dismiss the claims out of hand as paranoia run wild.

Again, the evolution of the Rotherham child sexual exploitation scandal was an extremely painful lesson that the mainstream can be wrong and the “paranoid racist far-right” can be right. And that lesson was far too expensive to simply let go to waste.

The name of this scandal is Pizzagate.

It gets the name for two reasons: first, because at the center of the scandal are high-level Washington insiders who own a handful of businesses in the DC area, including a couple pizzerias (Comet Ping Pong and Besta Pizza), who have fallen under suspicion for involvement in a child sex abuse ring. Second, because the first questions arose in peoples’ minds as a result of some very bizarre emails revealed by Wikileaks in The Podesta Emails [6] that, quite simply, just sound strange (and usually involve weird references to pizza). One of the strangest emails involves Joe Podesta being asked this question: “The realtor found a handkerchief (I think it has a map that seems pizza-related). Is it yours?”

In one email [9], Podesta is among those being invited to a farm and the host says, “Bonnie will be Uber Service to transport Ruby, Emerson, and Maeve Luzzatto (11, 9, and almost 7) so you’ll have some further entertainment, and they will be in [the] pool for sure.”

Could that have an innocent explanation? Sure, maybe. But inviting a group of adult men to a gathering and calling young children “further entertainment” while listing their ages is weird, whether it ends up having an explanation or not.

...and there were instagram photos coming out of kids (“jokingly?”) taped to the tables


Besta Pizza, the business whose logo so closely resembled the “little boy lover” logo, is owned by Andrew Kline [17], who was one of four attorneys in the Human Trafficking Prosecution Unit of the Department of Justice. Isn’t it just a little unusual that someone that high up in a human trafficking division would fail to notice the symbolism?

For yet another coincidence, Lauren Silsby-Gayler [18] is the former director of The New Life Children’s Refuge in Haiti. It is a matter of public record that she was caught, prosecuted, and sent to jail while in that role for trying to abduct dozens of children, most of whom had homes and families. The main lawyer [19] paid to represent Silsby-Gayler, “President of the Sephardic Jewish community in the Dominican Republic,” was himself suspected of involvement in human trafficking.

For yet another coincidence, Lauren Silsby-Gayler [18] is the former director of The New Life Children’s Refuge in Haiti. It is a matter of public record that she was caught, prosecuted, and sent to jail while in that role for trying to abduct dozens of children, most of whom had homes and families. The main lawyer [19] paid to represent Silsby-Gayler, “President of the Sephardic Jewish community in the Dominican Republic,” was himself suspected of involvement in human trafficking.

When the Clintons gained influence in the region, one of their first acts was to work to get Silsby-Gayler off the hook [20]. Among the Podesta Wikileaks are State Department emails [21] discussing their case. Meanwhile, she now works on the executive board of AlertSense [22] . . . which collaborates with IPAWS to send out nation-wide Amber Alerts.

While some of the supposed “codewords” people have claimed to have identified in Pizzagate appear to be made up, there is at least one unambiguous instance: here is an Instagrammed photo posted by James Alefantis, the owner of Comet Ping Pong that appears innocent enough: a man carrying a young child with a beaded necklace draped around both of their necks.



[23]The disturbing bit is that the photo uses the tag “#chickenlovers,” and “chicken lover” is in fact an established term to refer to a pedophile — someone who loves “chicken,” which is also unambiguously an established term to refer to underage children (you can see this in the gay slang dictionary subset of the Online Dictionary of Playground Slang [24]).

Complain all you want about the “speculative” and “paranoid” online discussions of Pizzagate, but when you have clearer-cut cases like this one where James Alefantis absolutely, unquestionably did in fact post a photo of a man holding an infant and the one and only hashtag he used for the photo involved a term that unquestionably is a reference to pedophilia, in a context where it is clear that there is nothing else here that “chicken” could possibly have been referring to, the likelihood that more speculative claims might have truth to them is increased.

So here are a few more things we do know. We know that Bill Clinton has taken dozens of international flights on a plane colloquially known as the “Lolita Express [27]” with Jeffrey Epstein, a man who spent 13 months in jail after being convicted of soliciting a 13-year-old prostitute [28]. We know that Hillary Clinton’s staff knew that Anthony Weiner was sexting underage girls all the way back in 2011 [29] — and covered it up. Guess whose laptop revealed evidence that Hillary Clinton went on flights on Jeffrey Epstein’s “Lolita Express [30]” along with Bill? That’s right: Anthony Weiner’s.

...John Podesta’s bedroom contains multiple images from a photographer “known for documentary-style pictures of naked teenagers in their parents’ suburban homes.”)

...Could all of this turn out to be nothing?

Of course it could.

But that’s not the question here. The question is how we should respond to the possibility.

Do we take the possibility seriously? History clearly indicates that we should. Even if it did turn out to be nothing at all, I would still be more proud to belong to a community willing to take the possibility seriously and call for investigation than I would to belong to a community that dismissed the possibility far too hastily and luckily turned out to be right — even as it did this and turned out to be wrong in so many cases like Rotherham before.

The real horror here would be to live in a society that responded as Reddit has — by shutting down the whole conversation entirely, banning r/pizzagate [42] even while keeping subreddits like r/pedofriends, “a place for (non-offending) pedophiles and allies to make friends with each other!” alive.

But which is worse? If all the evidence coming out of Pizzagate is entirely false, what have we lost by spending time on it? On the other hand, if even five percent of the allegations that have been made surrounding the topic are true, what have we lost by ignoring them? Which is worse: spending too much time pursuing and thoroughly vetting false leads, or looking the other way while any amount of child abuse goes on?

In 2013, Canada busted a ring involving more than 300 adults [46], who had teachers, doctors, and nurses heavily represented among them. A pedophile ring has just been identified in the highest levels of UK football [47] (Americans know the sport as soccer). Norwegian police also just uncovered a ring of 50 organized pedophiles mostly working in the tech sector [48], once again including elected officials, teachers, and lawyers. The Vatican scandals can practically go without mention — institutional involvement in child sex exploitation is nearly an a priori given.

...If Pizzagate turns out to have even a single-digit fraction of truth behind it, it may not just bring down the Clinton machine and Democratic Party, it may sound the death knell for the mainstream media as well.

Do read the whole Cassiel piece here. There are some pieces of art owned by Podesta's brother that will totally creep you out.