What exactly was the issue being raised during the 2016 campaign when Pizza gate occurred?
Why do you think people should’ve known about Epstein prior to his most recent arrest?
Thanks for asking.
First, the issue being raised was not that Hillary was running a prostitution ring out of Comet Ping Pong Pizza. Nobody was arguing that. There was no evidence for that. Nobody was suggesting that there was. The way this was portrayed in media was that this was the argument of pizzagate. And yet it wasn’t. I tried to see if I’ve opined on this before, but the earliest time stamp I can find is December 2016 where I’m responding the Colton, who references the idea of a Hillary pedophile ring, and I tell him it’s fake news:
There's a certain element of irony in people bemoaning the spread of fake news (not necessarily you specifically) and then turning around to represent people as believing Hillary is running a child prostitution ring out of a pizza joint.
The bottom line is, if you go anywhere and ask someone what pizzagate was, probably 9/10 times they’ll tell you that people thought Hillary was a child prostitution kingpin, because that’s the popular story being passed around. And I can see why that’s easy to dismiss.
The next thing is that anyone looking into pizzagate would know what everything was predicated on. The background is an idea of child sex abuse happening semi openly and being protected by people of high influence. Less politically, one is
Jimmy Savile, who was a host of a popular English music show for a few decades, and if you do any digging (doesn’t actually require much digging), there’s some pretty horrid stuff going on there and he’s well connected that this was able to persist his entire life (I believe he died before anything ever came out). The next is Jeffrey Epstein. Epstein has been a known pedophile since forever. His “sex slave island” has been known about for quite a while. Absolutely nothing that’s come out about Epstein in the past few months is new. All of this was very easily discoverable online and has been forever. The fact that Bill Clinton palled around with him and ride the Lolita Express 26 times was common knowledge amongst anyone who had questions about pizzagate, as it provided a large part of the theoretical framework upon which pizzagate wrests because of the company surrounding the Clintons. Trump was also connected to Epstein. He even made some very bad comments in relation to Epstein. Hell, he was even a defendant in a case with Epstein of a teenager alleging rape. Not only was Trump never hammered for this, but Trump wasn’t ever asked about this, and nobody ever reported anything on this. Anything.
With that background then came the Podesta emails. I’m not big into conspiracy theory. I acknowledge conspiracy is also fairly loose, but also probably more common than people would realize. However, when it comes to conspiracy theories, they are obviously much, much more
sensitive than they are specific, if only for an infinite plurality of theories and possibilities. That said, I’ve seen plenty of conspiracy theories over the years with Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, etc., that I’m generally more turned off to it just by association. Just like Russia, people can see lots of what they desire to see. So though some things in the emails looked suspicious in a vacuum, if you’re combing through anyone’s emails you could probably make a case for anything. But there were a lot of genuinely weird things that coming up in those emails. Weird things does not equate to conspiracy nor even the suggestion of a sex ring, but the amalgam of them rises to a level where it does bring up some questions that warrants more question. Again, I’m not suggesting anything by this, I’m just suggesting that there was enough there that it would warrant some level of question.
But what was paraded around was the idea that Hillary was running a child prostitution ring. That argument shows a fundamental misunderstanding of what pizzagate “truthers” actually believed. The only response to pizzagate was “its preposterous.” I have no beef with anyone rejecting any premise or question of pizzagate. I do have issue with people rejecting certain premises without actually knowing what those premises are.
The best synopsis of what people believed is in that 20 minute Joe Rogan video of “Joe Rogan what is pizzagate?” Again, I have to keep repeating these things, but I’m not concerned what anyone thinks of pizzagate. The question is to understand what the actual questions were. Reject pizzagate all you want, just don’t claim to know about it because we’ve been able to successfully defeat the strawman.
But to the larger question: what do I think people should have known about Epstein prior to his arrest? Well, tell me what you think people should know about him now? The only difference between him 3 years ago and him in the past couple months is that he’s arrested. If he’s a big story now, why isn’t he a big story then? Is it really because of an arrest? Do we not cover stories like this long before anyone is arrested?
Moreover, what do I think people should have known about pizzagate? Probably not much. However, for people who had enough familiarity with pizzagate to feel the need to come out and reject it or denounce it, I expect those people to know about Jeffrey Epstein. It’s a prerequisite of knowing anything about pizzagate. If one denounced pizzagate but isn’t familiar with Epstein, then they never knew or understood pizzagate. They were just denouncing straw men.
