Nearly a decade ago, a 28-year-old man named Edgar Welch walked into Comet Ping Pong, a popular pizza restaurant in Washington, DC, carrying an AR-15 rifle and a revolver. He fired several shots, damaging a door, a closet lock, and the restaurant’s computer equipment. Welch had driven from North Carolina on a mission: to rescue children he believed were being held in the restaurant’s basement as part of a child sex trafficking ring run by members of the Democratic Party.
There were no children, nor was there a basement.
The episode marked the violent real-world culmination of Pizzagate, a pro-Trump conspiracy theory that had metastasized online in the final weeks before the 2016 election. Born on 4chan’s anonymous political message board, /pol/—short for “politically incorrect”—the theory alleged that Hillary Clinton, her 2016 campaign chairman, John Podesta, and other Democratic elites were running a pedophilia ring out of Comet. Digital sleuths pored over prominent Democrats’ correspondence made public by Wikileaks that fall, and certain phrases—mentions of pizza and hot dogs—were isolated, screenshotted, annotated. “Cheese pizza,” or “c.p.,” users insisted, was code for “child pornography.” A theory snowballed through Reddit, YouTube, and Rumble. Donald Trump, believers argued, would enter office and expose the network.
This phenomenon had all the hallmarks of conspiratorial thinking: patternmaking run amok, irony-poisoned message boards taken literally, paranoia weaponized for politics.
Then on Friday, the Department of Justice released roughly 3 million new documents related to accused sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein. Buried in all the email correspondence was a detail complicating the cultural archaeology of Pizzagate: The word pizza appeared 911 times as of February 2, though 60 references have since been removed.
The references span years—from long before Pizzagate existed to long after it was broadly considered debunked.
“What time do you want to get pizza and grape soda tomorrow?” one associate asks Epstein in 2018.
A 2015 subject line reads: “Your Pizza Is YUMMY YUMMY!!”
“This is better than a Chinese cookie!… lets go for pizza and grape soda again. No one else can understand,” a redacted sender writes to Epstein in 2018.
But it’s the sheer amount of repetition that has reopened the conspiracy box online across X, TikTok, and Reddit. Google queries for “Pizzagate” spiked over the weekend, and a TikTok video focused on the strange use of “pizza” in the files, with the caption “The elites sure love a pizza party,” has received more than 1 million views and been spammed with comments like, “We already knew this years ago and were called crazy.”
“QAnon was an op to hide this shit in plain sight and make anyone who said anything about it sound like a lunatic. They masked it in a far-right ‘it’s only the dems’ cover,’” argued one Reddit user. “Gloating about projection people fell for. The pizza basement was Epstein island all along,” wrote another.