Comet Ping Pong

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Other Pandemic: How QAnon Contaminated the World by James Ball

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, 4chan, Abraham Wald, algorithmic bias, Bellingcat, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Boris Johnson, Charles Babbage, cognitive dissonance, Comet Ping Pong, coronavirus, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, deepfake, deplatforming, disinformation, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, fake news, false flag, Gabriella Coleman, global pandemic, green transition, housing justice, informal economy, Jeffrey Epstein, Jeremy Corbyn, John Perry Barlow, Jon Ronson, Julian Assange, lab leak, lockdown, lolcat, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, Minecraft, nuclear winter, paperclip maximiser, Peter Thiel, Piers Corbyn, post-truth, pre–internet, QAnon, real-name policy, Russell Brand, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Snapchat, social contagion, Steve Bannon, survivorship bias, TikTok, trade route, We are Anonymous. We are Legion, WikiLeaks

Comet (as it is known to locals) was co-founded by James Alefantis, a connected member of DC’s elite once named on GQ’s list of the fifty most powerful people in Washington,46 who had dated senior figures in the not-for-profit world (including the CEO of left-wing media watchdog Media Matters for America).47 The dark corner of the internet that was Pizzagate had now convinced itself not only that there was a child abuse conspiracy underway, but that they knew where it was happening – in the basement of Comet Ping Pong. Inevitably, someone took things into their own hands. In the middle of the afternoon on 4 December 2016, Edgar Maddison Welch walked into Comet Ping Pong with an AR-15 rifle (the civilian version of the US military’s M16 automatic rifle) and a Colt .38 pistol, and fired three shots into the air, demanding to be allowed to investigate the pizzeria’s basement and the crimes within.48 By some miracle no one was injured, and before he was detained – alive – by law enforcement, Welch was shown a simple fact about Comet Ping Pong he could probably have discovered without heavy weaponry: the restaurant did not have a basement.

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THE OTHER PANDEMIC ‘Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.’ – Friedrich Nietzsche, 1886 Contents Introduction PART ONE: EMERGENCE 1. Ask the Q 2. Comet Ping Pong 3. Breadcrumbs PART TWO: INFECTION 4. Patriot Research 5. Follow The White Rabbit 6. The Storm PART THREE: TRANSMISSION 7. #SaveTheChildren 8. Enough Is Enough 9. Nothing Can Stop What’s Coming PART FOUR: CONVALESCENCE 10. Trust the Plan 11. The Great Awakening 12.

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There are other movements born from 4chan that have more claim to serve as direct forebears to QAnon: Gamergate and the alt-right. This is a story of the ripple effect, and how one man’s bitter vendetta against his ex, fuelled by our bizarre online ecosystem, arguably gave rise to much of Trumpism. It’s this we turn to next. 2 Comet Ping Pong ‘It is early on a Monday morning. You are a mid-twenties human being.’1 It all started with a video game about depression. To those who haven’t played video games from independent studios, the game – called Depression Quest, and released in 2013 – might not even seem like a game at all. Depression Quest takes place entirely inside a normal web browser window, and is text-based.

Off the Edge: Flat Earthers, Conspiracy Culture, and Why People Will Believe Anything by Kelly Weill

4chan, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, algorithmic bias, anti-communist, Apollo 11, Big Tech, bitcoin, Comet Ping Pong, coronavirus, COVID-19, crisis actor, cryptocurrency, disinformation, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, fake news, false flag, income inequality, Internet Archive, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, Mars Society, mass immigration, medical malpractice, moral panic, off-the-grid, QAnon, recommendation engine, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, tech worker, Tesla Model S, TikTok, Timothy McVeigh, Wayback Machine, Y2K

They would have joined the growing ranks of conspiracy theorists committing real-world harm in an effort to prove their beliefs. 158 OFF THE EDGE Chief among this dangerous crowd are adherents of QAnon and Pizzagate (a sort of QAnon predecessor that specifically accuses Trump’s foes of participating in child sex trafficking under Comet Ping Pong, a Washington, DC, pizzeria and ping-pong arcade). On December 4, 2016, a man named Edgar Maddison Welch drove six hours from his home in Salisbury, North Carolina, to Comet Ping Pong. He recorded himself during the interstate journey. “I can’t let you grow up in a world that’s so corrupt by evil. Gotta at least stand up for you. And for other children just like you,” Welch said in a video addressed to his two young children.

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“Raiding a pedo ring,” he texted a friend about his journey to DC, “possibly sacraficing [sic] the lives of a few for the lives of many. Standing up against a corrupt system that kidnaps, tortures and rapes babies and children in our own backyard.” More than three hundred miles later, Welch parked his car outside Comet Ping Pong and retrieved a military-style assault rifle from the back. Then he entered the restaurant. Inside, Comet Ping Pong was Mike 159 packed with its Sunday lunch rush. Parents and children, the very people Welch had vowed to protect in his video, crowded the booths. Their afternoon turned to panic when he started shooting. Families and employees scrambled for the exits as Welch fired multiple shots, including at the lock on a closet door.

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After the shooting, Pizzagate’s highest-profile advocates denounced Welch as “controlled opposition,” because they’d found a web page for an amateur actor of the same name. And not even Welch, who had seen the inside of Comet Ping Pong firsthand, was fully dissuaded from the conspiracy theory. “The intel on this wasn’t 100 percent,” he told the New York Times. A judge called it “sheer luck” he didn’t hurt anyone. Unchastened and unchecked, Pizzagate carried on, eventually transferring much of its momentum to QAnon, which borrows many of its foundational claims. In January 2019, twenty-two-year-old Ryan Jaselskis doused a curtain in Comet Ping Pong with lighter fluid and set it on fire while customers—some of them children—were eating dinner.

Sandy Hook: An American Tragedy and the Battle for Truth by Elizabeth Williamson

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, 4chan, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, anti-communist, anti-globalists, Asperger Syndrome, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Cambridge Analytica, citizen journalism, Columbine, Comet Ping Pong, coronavirus, COVID-19, crisis actor, critical race theory, crowdsourcing, dark triade / dark tetrad, deplatforming, disinformation, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, estate planning, fake news, false flag, Ferguson, Missouri, fulfillment center, illegal immigration, index card, Internet Archive, Jon Ronson, Jones Act, Kevin Roose, Mark Zuckerberg, medical malpractice, messenger bag, multilevel marketing, obamacare, Oklahoma City bombing, Parler "social media", post-truth, QAnon, Robert Mercer, Russian election interference, Saturday Night Live, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, source of truth, Steve Bannon, Susan Wojcicki, TED Talk, TikTok, Timothy McVeigh, traveling salesman, Twitter Arab Spring, We are Anonymous. We are Legion, WikiLeaks, work culture , Works Progress Administration, yellow journalism

BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 8 Cecilia Kang, “Fake News Onslaught Targets Pizzeria as Nest of Child-Trafficking,” New York Times, November 11, 2016, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/21/technology/fact-check-this-pizzeria-is-not-a-child-trafficking-site.html. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 9 Adam Goldman, “The Comet Ping Pong Gunman Answers Our Reporter’s Questions,” New York Times, December 7, 2016, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/07/us/edgar-welch-comet-pizza-fake-news.html. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 10 Peter Hermann, “Man Who Set Fire at Comet Ping Pong Pizza Shop Sentenced to Four Years in Prison,” Washington Post, April 23, 2020, https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/public-safety/man-who-set-fire-at-comet-ping-pong-pizza-shop-sentenced-to-four-years-in-prison/2020/04/23/2e107676-8496-11ea-a3eb-e9fc93160703_story.html.

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“Bill and Hillary love foreign donors so much,” FBIAnon wrote. “They get paid in children as well as money.” That and similar bizarre posts constituted the early traces of what grew into Pizzagate, a nutty web of total nonsense claiming that Hillary Clinton and top Democrats operated a child sex slavery ring from the basement of Comet Ping Pong, a pizzeria in Washington, D.C. Although the Sandy Hook families had already suffered for years, Pizzagate jolted people awake to the real-world consequences of “fake news.” The term, defined by Hunt Allcott of New York University and Matthew Gentzkow of Stanford University, referred to “news articles that are intentionally and verifiably false, and could mislead readers.”[2] At least that was its original meaning, before President Trump repurposed it to discredit reports critical of him, and authoritarians around the world followed suit.

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* * * — Alefantis’s lawyers sent Jones a letter demanding that he retract multiple statements he made on Infowars between late November and early December 2016, spreading the Pizzagate theory and telling his audience, “It’s up to you to research it for yourself,” comments they said inspired Welch to bring his high-powered rifle into Comet. After Alefantis’s lawyers made it clear they were serious, Jones delivered a careful, legalistic statement on his March 24, 2017, broadcast. “To my knowledge today, neither Mr. Alefantis, nor his restaurant Comet Ping Pong, were involved in any human trafficking, as was part of the theories about Pizzagate that were being written about in many media outlets and which we commented upon,” he said. “In our commentary about what had become known as Pizzagate, I made comments about Mr. Alefantis that in hindsight I regret, and for which I apologize to him.

Likewar: The Weaponization of Social Media by Peter Warren Singer, Emerson T. Brooking

4chan, active measures, Airbnb, augmented reality, barriers to entry, battle of ideas, Bellingcat, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, British Empire, Cambridge Analytica, Cass Sunstein, citizen journalism, Citizen Lab, Comet Ping Pong, content marketing, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, data science, deep learning, digital rights, disinformation, disintermediation, Donald Trump, drone strike, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, false flag, Filter Bubble, global reserve currency, Google Glasses, Hacker Conference 1984, Hacker News, illegal immigration, information security, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invention of movable type, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, Jacob Silverman, John Gilmore, John Markoff, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, lateral thinking, lolcat, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Mohammed Bouazizi, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, moral panic, new economy, offshore financial centre, packet switching, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Parag Khanna, pattern recognition, Plato's cave, post-materialism, Potemkin village, power law, pre–internet, profit motive, RAND corporation, reserve currency, sentiment analysis, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Snapchat, social web, South China Sea, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, too big to fail, trade route, Twitter Arab Spring, UNCLOS, UNCLOS, Upton Sinclair, Valery Gerasimov, We are Anonymous. We are Legion, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, Y Combinator, yellow journalism, Yochai Benkler

It’s Just One More Conspiracy to Digest,” Washington Post, December 5, 2016, https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/false-flag-planted-at-a-pizza-place-its-just-one-more-conspiracy-to-digest/2016/12/05/fc154b1e-bb09-11e6-94ac-3d324840106c_story.html?utm_term=.7ecbd9f78337. 129 “Nothing to suggest”: Jack Posobiec (@JackPosobiec), “DC Police Chief: ‘Nothing to suggest man w/gun at Comet Ping Pong had anything to do with #pizzagate’” (tweet deleted), available at Scoopnest, https://www.scoopnest.com/user/JackPosobiec/805559273426141184-dc-police-chief-nothing-to-suggest-man-w-gun-at-comet-ping-pong-had-anything-to-do-with-pizzagate. 129 livestreaming from the White House: Jared Holt and Brendan Karet, “Meet Jack Posobiec: The ‘Alt-Right’ Troll with Press Pass in White House,” Slate, August 16, 2017, https://www.salon.com/2017/08/16/meet-jack-posobiec-the-alt-right-troll-with-a-press-pass-in-white-house_partner/; Jack Posobiec (@JackPosobiec), “Free our people,” Twitter, May 9, 2017, 10:28 A.M., https://twitter.com/jackposobiec/status/861996422920536064. 129 retweeted multiple times: Colleen Shalby, “Trump Retweets Alt-Right Media Figure Who Published ‘Pizzagate’ and Seth Rich Conspiracy Theories,” Los Angeles Times, August 14, 2017, http://www.latimes.com/politics/la-pol-updates-everything-president-trump-retweets-alt-right-blogger-who-1502769297-htmlstory.html; Maya Oppenheim, “Donald Trump Retweets Far-Right Conspiracy Theorist Jack Posobiec Who Took ‘Rape Melania’ Sign to Rally,” Independent, January 15, 2018, https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/donald-trump-jack-posobiec-pizzagate-rape-melania-sign-twitter-conspiracy-theory-far-right-a8159661.html. 129 “power law”: Emma Pierson, “Twitter Data Show That a Few Powerful Users Can Control the Conversation,” Quartz, May 5, 2015, https://qz.com/396107/twitter-data-show-that-a-few-powerful-users-can-control-the-conversation/. 130 study of 330 million: Xu Wei, “Influential Bloggers Set Topics Online,” China Daily Asia, December 27, 2013, https://www.chinadailyasia.com/news/2013-12/27/content_15108347.html. 130 a mere 300 accounts: Ibid. 130 susceptibility to further falsehoods: Sander van der Linden, “The Conspiracy-Effect: Exposure to Conspiracy Theories (About Global Warming) Decreases Pro-Social Behavior and Science Acceptance,” Personality and Individual Differences 87 (December 2015): 171–73. 130 more supportive of “extremism”: Sander van der Linden, “The Surprising Power of Conspiracy Theories,” Psychology Today, August 24, 2015, https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/socially-relevant/201508/the-surprising-power-conspiracy-theories. 130 spread about six times faster: Brian Dowling, “MIT Scientist Charts Fake News Reach,” Boston Herald, March 11, 2018, http://www.bostonherald.com/news/local_coverage/2018/03/mit_scientist_charts_fake_news_reach. 130 “Falsehood diffused”: Soroush Vosoughi, Deb Roy, and Sinan Aral, “The Spread of True and False News Online,” Science 359, no. 6380 (March 9, 2018): 1146–51. 131 fake political headlines: Silverman, “This Analysis Shows.” 131 study of 22 million tweets: Philip N.

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THE SUPER SPREAD OF LIES The families were just sitting down for lunch on December 4, 2016, when the man with the scraggly beard burst through the restaurant door. Seeing him carrying a Colt AR-15 assault rifle, with a Colt .38 revolver strapped to his belt, parents shielded their terrified children. But Edgar Welch hardly noticed. After all, he was a man on a mission. The 28-year-old part-time firefighter knew for a fact that the Comet Ping Pong pizza restaurant was just a cover for Hillary Clinton’s secret pedophilia ring, and, as a father of two young girls, he was going to do something about it. As the customers made a run for it (and, of course, started posting on social media about it), Welch headed to the back of the pizza place.

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“False flag,” Posobiec tweeted as he heard of Welch’s arrest. “Planted Comet Pizza Gunman will be used to push for censorship of independent news sources that are not corporate owned.” Then he switched stories, informing his followers that the DC police chief had concluded, “Nothing to suggest man w/gun at Comet Ping Pong had anything to do with #pizzagate.” It was, like the rest of the conspiracy, a fabrication. The only thing real was the mortal peril and psychological harm that opportunists like Posobiec had inflicted on the workers of the pizza place and the families dining there. Yet Posobiec suffered little for his falsehoods.

The Four: How Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google Divided and Conquered the World by Scott Galloway

"Susan Fowler" uber, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, additive manufacturing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Amazon Robotics, Amazon Web Services, Apple II, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Ben Horowitz, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, Bob Noyce, Brewster Kahle, business intelligence, California gold rush, Cambridge Analytica, cloud computing, Comet Ping Pong, commoditize, cuban missile crisis, David Brooks, Didi Chuxing, digital divide, disintermediation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, fake news, follow your passion, fulfillment center, future of journalism, future of work, global supply chain, Google Earth, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Hacker Conference 1984, Internet Archive, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Jony Ive, Khan Academy, Kiva Systems, longitudinal study, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, Network effects, new economy, obamacare, Oculus Rift, offshore financial centre, passive income, Peter Thiel, profit motive, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Robert Mercer, Robert Shiller, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, software is eating the world, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, supercomputer in your pocket, Tesla Model S, the long tail, Tim Cook: Apple, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, undersea cable, vertical integration, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Wayback Machine, Whole Earth Catalog, winner-take-all economy, working poor, you are the product, young professional

Pew Research Center. May 26, 2016. http://www.journalism.org/2016/05/26/news-use-across-social-media-platforms-2016/. 34. Briener, Andrew. “Pizzagate, explained: Everything you want to know about the Comet Ping Pong pizzeria conspiracy theory but are too afraid to search for on Reddit.” Salon. December 10, 2016. http://www.salon.com/2016/12/10/pizzagate-explained-everything-you-want-to-know-about-the-comet-ping-pong-pizzeria-conspiracy-theory-but-are-too-afraid-to-search-for-on-reddit/. 35. Williams, Rhiannon. “Facebook: ‘We cannot become arbiters of truth—it’s not our role.’” iNews. April 6, 2017. https://inews.co.uk/essentials/news/technology/facebook-looks-choke-fake-news-cutting-off-financial-lifeline/. 36.

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Just hire a few “media watchdog” firms to give you cover. As far as the machine sees it, one click = one click. So, entire editorial operations hatch all over the world to optimize production to this Facebook machine. They create crazy fake stories that serve as clickbait for the left and the right. Pizza Gate—the story about Comet Ping Pong, a pizza parlor in Washington, D.C.—got a lot of momentum around the 2016 election. It claimed that the brother of John Podesta, Hillary Clinton’s campaign manager, was running a child prostitution ring in the back rooms, hidden from where the customers eat. Lots of people believed it. One guy drove up from North Carolina with an assault rifle, with vague ideas of freeing the imprisoned and abused children he’d read about.

The Chaos Machine: The Inside Story of How Social Media Rewired Our Minds and Our World by Max Fisher

2021 United States Capitol attack, 4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Airbnb, Bellingcat, Ben Horowitz, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, call centre, centre right, cloud computing, Comet Ping Pong, Computer Lib, coronavirus, COVID-19, crisis actor, crowdsourcing, dark pattern, data science, deep learning, deliberate practice, desegregation, disinformation, domesticated silver fox, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, end-to-end encryption, fake news, Filter Bubble, Future Shock, game design, gamification, George Floyd, growth hacking, Hacker Conference 1984, Hacker News, hive mind, illegal immigration, Jeff Bezos, John Perry Barlow, Jon Ronson, Joseph Schumpeter, Julian Assange, Kevin Roose, lockdown, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, military-industrial complex, Oklahoma City bombing, Parler "social media", pattern recognition, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, profit maximization, public intellectual, QAnon, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rutger Bregman, Saturday Night Live, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, Snapchat, social distancing, Social Justice Warrior, social web, Startup school, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Susan Wojcicki, tech billionaire, tech worker, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, TikTok, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, Y Combinator

They claimed that the police investigation of Anthony Weiner, a former Democratic congressman caught sexting a fifteen-year-old girl, had discovered evidence that Weiner, along with his wife, Huma Abedin, and his wife’s boss, Hillary Clinton, were all involved in a child sex ring. As evidence, they cited the emails of John Podesta, Clinton’s campaign manager, which Russian hackers had stolen and published through WikiLeaks. A Washington DC pizza place that Podesta had mentioned in his emails, Comet Ping Pong, was, the conspiracists insisted, the headquarters of a vast, elite conspiracy to ritualistically cannibalize children. “Half or more of the people I have met online believe in it fully,” Adam, the longtime 4channer, told me. One day the conspiracy was “everywhere,” he said, especially on Facebook, where after years of inactivity, some pages reemerged simply to repeat the phrase “Pizzagate is real.”

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One post exhorted users to spread word of the “world-wide Pedo-Ring connected to the CLINTON FOUNDATION, that just so happens to also be taking over the USA for good.” The jump to Facebook started in user groups. Even on apolitical pages, users posted screenshots of 4chan threads detailing the conspiracy, asking, “Is this real?” Scouring for information on Comet Ping Pong, the DC pizza place, Facebookers found the owner’s Instagram account. They recontextualized benign images—kids playing at the restaurant, jokey cartoons of pizza slices covering peoples’ genitals, Comet’s star-and-moon logo—into evidence of an occult pedophilia ring. Within a few days, prominent Gamergaters and white nationalists on Twitter broadcast the claims, attaching screenshots of Facebook or 4chan threads.

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A few weeks after the election, Edgar Maddison Welch, a scraggly-bearded twenty-eight-year-old from North Carolina, texted a friend: Raiding a pedo ring, possibly sacraficing the lives of a few for the lives of many. He had been bingeing YouTube videos on Pizzagate. Someone, he’d concluded, had to act. He grabbed his AR-15 rifle, a shotgun, and a revolver, and drove to Washington DC. Bursting in the door of Comet Ping Pong, he pointed the rifle at an employee, who fled, with customers streaming out behind him. Welch turned to a locked side door, which he recognized from Pizzagate videos as the entrance to the basement where Democratic conspirators locked up their child victims. He fired several shots through the door, then kicked it open.

Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion by Jia Tolentino

4chan, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Alexander Shulgin, big-box store, Black Lives Matter, cloud computing, Comet Ping Pong, crowdsourcing, Donald Trump, financial independence, game design, Jeff Bezos, Jon Ronson, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, late capitalism, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, Mason jar, Norman Mailer, obamacare, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, public intellectual, QR code, rent control, Saturday Night Live, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, TED Talk, TikTok, uber lyft, upwardly mobile, wage slave, white picket fence

In 2016, a similar fiasco made national news in Pizzagate, after a few rabid internet denizens decided they’d found coded messages about child sex slavery in the advertising of a pizza shop associated with Hillary Clinton’s campaign. This theory was disseminated all over the far-right internet, leading to an extended attack on DC’s Comet Ping Pong pizzeria and everyone associated with the restaurant—all in the name of combating pedophilia—that culminated in a man walking into Comet Ping Pong and firing a gun. (Later on, the same faction would jump to the defense of Roy Moore, the Republican nominee for the Senate who was accused of sexually assaulting teenagers.) The over-woke left could only dream of this ability to weaponize a sense of righteousness.

Rationality: What It Is, Why It Seems Scarce, Why It Matters by Steven Pinker

affirmative action, Albert Einstein, autonomous vehicles, availability heuristic, Ayatollah Khomeini, backpropagation, basic income, behavioural economics, belling the cat, Black Lives Matter, butterfly effect, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, classic study, clean water, Comet Ping Pong, coronavirus, correlation coefficient, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, critical race theory, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, David Attenborough, deep learning, defund the police, delayed gratification, disinformation, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, Easter island, effective altruism, en.wikipedia.org, Erdős number, Estimating the Reproducibility of Psychological Science, fake news, feminist movement, framing effect, George Akerlof, George Floyd, germ theory of disease, high batting average, if you see hoof prints, think horses—not zebras, index card, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, libertarian paternalism, Linda problem, longitudinal study, loss aversion, Mahatma Gandhi, meta-analysis, microaggression, Monty Hall problem, Nash equilibrium, New Journalism, Paul Erdős, Paul Samuelson, Peter Singer: altruism, Pierre-Simon Laplace, placebo effect, post-truth, power law, QAnon, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Waldo Emerson, randomized controlled trial, replication crisis, Richard Thaler, scientific worldview, selection bias, social discount rate, social distancing, Social Justice Warrior, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Bannon, Steven Pinker, sunk-cost fallacy, TED Talk, the scientific method, Thomas Bayes, Tragedy of the Commons, trolley problem, twin studies, universal basic income, Upton Sinclair, urban planning, Walter Mischel, yellow journalism, zero-sum game

Why doesn’t reality push back and inhibit people from believing absurdities or from rewarding those who assert and share them? The answer is that it depends what you mean by “believe.” Mercier notes that holders of weird beliefs often don’t have the courage of their convictions.40 Though millions of people endorsed the rumor that Hillary Clinton ran a child sex trafficking ring out of the basement of the Comet Ping Pong pizzeria in Washington (the Pizzagate conspiracy theory, a predecessor of QAnon), virtually none took steps commensurate with such an atrocity, such as calling the police. The righteous response of one of them was to leave a one-star review on Google. (“The pizza was incredibly undercooked. Suspicious professionally dressed men by the bar area that looked like regulars kept staring at my son and other kids in the place.”)

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Fortunately, they don’t take the next logical step and try to convert people to Christianity at swordpoint for their own good, or torture heretics who might lure others into damnation. Yet in past centuries, when Christian belief fell into the reality zone, many Crusaders, Inquisitors, conquistadors, and soldiers in the Wars of Religion did exactly that. Like the Comet Ping Pong redeemer, they treated their beliefs as literally true. For that matter, though many people profess to believe in an afterlife, they seem to be in no hurry to leave this vale of tears for eternal bliss in paradise. Thankfully, Western religious belief is safely parked in the mythology zone, where many people are protective of its sovereignty.

The Twittering Machine by Richard Seymour

4chan, anti-communist, augmented reality, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Cal Newport, Californian Ideology, Cass Sunstein, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, classic study, colonial rule, Comet Ping Pong, correlation does not imply causation, credit crunch, crisis actor, crowdsourcing, dark triade / dark tetrad, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, false flag, Filter Bubble, Gabriella Coleman, gamification, Google Chrome, Google Earth, hive mind, informal economy, Internet of things, invention of movable type, invention of writing, James Bridle, Jaron Lanier, Jeremy Corbyn, Jon Ronson, Jony Ive, Kevin Kelly, Kevin Roose, knowledge economy, late capitalism, Lewis Mumford, liberal capitalism, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, meta-analysis, Mohammed Bouazizi, moral panic, move fast and break things, Network effects, new economy, packet switching, patent troll, Philip Mirowski, post scarcity, post-industrial society, post-truth, RAND corporation, Rat Park, rent-seeking, replication crisis, sentiment analysis, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Skinner box, smart cities, Snapchat, Social Justice Warrior, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, Stuxnet, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, technological determinism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, the scientific method, Tim Cook: Apple, Timothy McVeigh, Twitter Arab Spring, undersea cable, upwardly mobile, white flight, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks

A young man with dirty fair hair and a scraggly beard, he is a small-time screenwriter and bit-part actor with minor credits in a string of slasher horror movies. He has come, dressed in light blue jeans and t-shirt, to ‘self-investigate’ rumours of an elite paedophile ring. Internet stories say that Hillary Clinton and top-level Democrats are trafficking child sex slaves out of the Comet Ping Pong restaurant in Washington DC: the infamous ‘Pizzagate’. Staff and diners at the pizzeria are faced with an agitated, gun-toting man who may be about to kill them. They flee, in hectic panic. He fires some shots into the floor and begins stalking the restaurant looking for the tunnels through which the children are allegedly being hustled.

Going Dark: The Secret Social Lives of Extremists by Julia Ebner

23andMe, 4chan, Airbnb, anti-communist, anti-globalists, augmented reality, Ayatollah Khomeini, Bellingcat, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Boris Johnson, Cambridge Analytica, citizen journalism, cognitive dissonance, Comet Ping Pong, crisis actor, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, deepfake, disinformation, Donald Trump, Dunning–Kruger effect, Elon Musk, fake news, false flag, feminist movement, game design, gamification, glass ceiling, Google Earth, Greta Thunberg, information security, job satisfaction, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, Network effects, off grid, OpenAI, Overton Window, pattern recognition, pre–internet, QAnon, RAND corporation, ransomware, rising living standards, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, social intelligence, Social Justice Warrior, SQL injection, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Transnistria, WikiLeaks, zero day

Wright, who blocked off a highway close to the Hoover Dam in an armoured vehicle in June 2018, had subscribed to the QAnon motto: ‘For where we go one, we go all’.17 Two years earlier, Edgar Welsh, firefighter and father from South Carolina and firm believer in Pizzagate – the QAnon predecessor conspiracy theory which claimed that Democrats were running a massive child-abuse network from their alleged headquarters at Comet Ping Pong, a DC pizza restaurant – opened fire in the pizzeria to free nonexistent children.18 In January 2019, a QAnon supporter killed his brother with a sword because he believed that he was a lizard.19 ‘Military, we need a plan and must expose evil to light,’ Max writes in late 2018. ‘Can me and my pals Raid MI6 DVD & GO2 Offices in London ourselves please?’

How Medicine Works and When It Doesn't: Learning Who to Trust to Get and Stay Healthy by F. Perry Wilson

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, barriers to entry, Barry Marshall: ulcers, cognitive bias, Comet Ping Pong, confounding variable, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, data science, Donald Trump, fake news, Helicobacter pylori, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, Louis Pasteur, medical malpractice, meta-analysis, multilevel marketing, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, p-value, personalized medicine, profit motive, randomized controlled trial, risk tolerance, selection bias, statistical model, stem cell, sugar pill, the scientific method, Thomas Bayes

Social media bombards us with illusory truth because social media algorithms are more likely to surface information similar to information you have interacted with before. Prior to social media, the claim that a pizza place in Washington, DC, was the epicenter of a child sex-trafficking ring would have found little purchase. Social media, by surfacing the same false statement about Comet Ping Pong pizzeria over and over again (to people inclined to interact with those statements) made people believe it was true—the sheer repetition lent it credibility. This phenomenon is a corruption of brain circuitry that served us well for the majority of human history. If you are part of a small community or tribe—as our ancestors were—believing what you heard multiple times made sense.

The Undertow: Scenes From a Slow Civil War by Jeff Sharlet

2021 United States Capitol attack, Airbnb, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, cognitive dissonance, Colonization of Mars, Columbine, Comet Ping Pong, coronavirus, COVID-19, critical race theory, disinformation, drone strike, Elon Musk, fake it until you make it, fake news, false flag, gentrification, George Floyd, Howard Zinn, intentional community, Jeffrey Epstein, lockdown, Occupy movement, operation paperclip, Parler "social media", prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, QAnon, sensible shoes, social distancing, Upton Sinclair, W. E. B. Du Bois, We are the 99%, white flight, white picket fence, young professional

Jones had tried. “I made a mistake,” he said. “I called them up.” He was not just a believer in the Trumpocene’s conspiracy theories, he was a soldier on their behalf, convicted in a deep-state court of law. On December 4, 2016, a man traveled from North Carolina to a Washington, DC, pizzeria called Comet Ping Pong, the basement of which, according to the Pizzagate conspiracy theory, was the heart of a Democratic child-sex-trafficking ring. The man was there to save the children, which he attempted to do by opening fire with an AR-15. Inspired, Jones decided to do his part. Three days after the assault, according to testimony he later gave, Jones called another pizzeria down the street.

The Controlled Demolition of the American Empire by Jeff Berwick, Charlie Robinson

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, airport security, Alan Greenspan, American Legislative Exchange Council, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, bank run, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, bread and circuses, Bretton Woods, British Empire, call centre, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, Chelsea Manning, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, Comet Ping Pong, coronavirus, Corrections Corporation of America, COVID-19, crack epidemic, crisis actor, crony capitalism, cryptocurrency, dark matter, deplatforming, disinformation, Donald Trump, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, energy transition, epigenetics, failed state, fake news, false flag, Ferguson, Missouri, fiat currency, financial independence, George Floyd, global pandemic, global supply chain, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, illegal immigration, Indoor air pollution, information security, interest rate swap, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, lockdown, Mahatma Gandhi, mandatory minimum, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, megacity, microapartment, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, new economy, no-fly zone, offshore financial centre, Oklahoma City bombing, open borders, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, pill mill, planetary scale, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, power law, pre–internet, private military company, Project for a New American Century, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, reserve currency, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Saturday Night Live, security theater, self-driving car, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, smart cities, smart grid, smart meter, Snapchat, social distancing, Social Justice Warrior, South China Sea, stock buybacks, surveillance capitalism, too big to fail, unpaid internship, urban decay, WikiLeaks, working poor

They do not want the public to know the truth which is why they are so desperate to label it as fake news. If it was so fake, then why worry about it? If it was such an obvious lie, then why the panic and the need to bring down the whole social media establishment. Shakespeare said it best, and this can be directed at David Brock and his boyfriend, James Alefantis, owner of Comet Ping Pong and the 49th most powerful person in Washington D.C. (for some unusual reason): “The lady doth protest too much, methinks”.241 It is worth noting that Facebook also brought in a think tank called The Atlantic Council to assist them in determining what was fake news, but what they failed to mention is that The Atlantic Council is funded by NATO and the Military- Information-Terror complex, so any news that was critical of the globalist agenda was clearly going to be labeled as fake news.