Conspiracy theory nation

0:01Astead Herndon:More and more of Jeffrey Epstein's elite circle are finally suffering consequences. This week, former U.S. Treasury Secretary Larry Summers resigned from his position at Harvard. And Hillary and Bill Clinton are testifying on The Hill today and tomorrow about their relationships with Epstein. They're going to have due process, but we have a lot of questions. But one unexpected side effect of the release of the Epstein files that no one saw coming? The return of the Pizzagate conspiracy. QAnon was an op to hide this shit in plain sight and make anyone who said anything about it sound like a lunatic.

0:38Astead Herndon:Isn't it weird having your suspicions proven right? With the Epstein files, conspiracy theorists who believed in Pizzagate or QAnon see evidence that they were right all along. But were they? On Today Explained from Vox, separating Epstein facts and fiction and how American political life is built on conspiracy. As AI reshapes professional services, law firms and in-house teams are rethinking how complex work gets done. Harvey AI is an AI platform built specifically for legal practice, helping teams analyze documents, draft with precision, and collaborate securely across matters. Today, more than half of the AMLA 100 use Harvey.

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2:05You're listening to Today Explained. I'm Dan Brooks. I'm a freelance writer. I try to never write about anything important. I mostly write about culture and the experience of culture, what it feels like to read the news and get scared.

2:22Astead Herndon:One of the latest things that's been scaring Dan Brooks is how the latest release of the Epstein files is giving new online life to the Pizzagate conspiracy, which is literally from a decade ago. Pizza appears in those files close to 900 times. By comparison, the word hamburger appears 100 and some times, and the phrase sex with children only appears about 20 times. So the speculation is that pizza is some sort of code word for Jeffrey Epstein's various illegal and immoral activities. And the pizza thing is especially resonant because of the 2016 Pizzagate conspiracy theory. A bogus news story suggesting that Bill and Hillary Clinton were running a sex ring out of a Washington, D.C.

3:13pizza parlor. The hashtag Pizzagate was born. And by November 16th, people started showing up at the restaurant to investigate for themselves. The original Pizzagate conspiracy was based on emails from John Podesta and other people in the Hillary for America campaign leaked by WikiLeaks. And people poured over those emails and sort of convinced one another that references to pizza and cheese pizza were actually references to children who were being trafficked for sex by Hillary Clinton and other powerful Democrats. The online world out of whole cloth make up this story that John Podesta and I are running a child trafficking ring in the basement of the Comet pizza parlor.

4:06Astead Herndon:Yeah, I remember Pizzagate as, you know, one of the big kind of conspiracies of the time. And obviously it culminated with a person coming to a pizza shop here in Washington, D.C. And if I remember correctly, like weapon gun, right? Yeah, he brought a rifle to see the children whom he believed were held in the basement. Comet Pizza has no basement. The man fired a couple of shots into a supply closet and then surrendered to police. And the person actually going to Comet Pizza and finding no children was at the time seen as like a final refutation of this conspiracy theory. And we all laughed at the people who believed it, but we also all kind of took a lesson from that.

4:57Like, you should go with simple explanations of what you know and not spit out these wild theories.

5:04Astead Herndon:Using that kind of premise, can you walk me through some of these pizza references in the Epstein files? Yes. One of the most striking are communications between Epstein and his urologist. One of which is an exchange where they appear to be talking about Epstein's attempts to refill a prescription. Context suggests that it may be a prescription for erectile dysfunction medication. And once that is resolved, his urologist texts him, after you take them, wash your hands and let's go get pizza and grape soda. Interesting. Yeah. So references to pizza and grape soda are like a recurring motif in Jeffrey Epstein's conversations with his urologist.

5:50Pizza and grape soda. Pizza and grape soda. You kind of wonder, like, why do these two guys like this one specific combination of food and talk about it so much?

6:01Astead Herndon:Let's put you on the spot. What do you think all this pizza and grape soda and the Epstein files mean? You know, are you on the side of the conspiracists, or do you think that the simple explanation might be the right one? I think the simple explanation is most likely the right one. They just love pizza and grape soda like this? I admit that that is weird, particularly the grape soda part, because Epstein's urologist, when he mentions grape soda, will also consistently send the African-American judge emoji. Hmm. Yeah. Yeah. So like here we get into something that I refer to as niche racism, like racism for people who are either like from a culture that I don't have access to or just like really into racism and so are collecting like obscure stereotypes.

6:55But one of these obscure stereotypes is that black people like grape drinks.

6:59Astead Herndon:You know, as a Black person, I do think, I have heard the grape soda, like, trope before. And so it is one that I am not unfamiliar with. But you're right. It's not as if in the classics of racism, that's necessarily at the top of the list. Yeah, absolutely. And it also seems like this is like a joke to them. Like, isn't it funny that we also like grape soda? This thing that elderly Jewish men are not associated with. I want to ask because Tucker Carlson, who isn't exactly QAnon but has done his fair share of conspiracy theory spreading, said on a recent episode of his podcast. Maybe the long debunked conspiracy theory about Pizzagate wasn't actually debunked.

7:44And maybe someone should take a closer look at this.

7:47Astead Herndon:That the Epstein files has proven that Pizzagate is basically real. I wanted you to respond to that. Is it? Uh, with the respect that Tucker Carlson deserves, he is a liar and he attained his position by being wealthy and personally connected. I don't think Tucker Carlson is a reliable narrator of what's going on in the news. And I don't think Pizzagate has been proven to be correct. When he made the transition from cable news and legacy media to running his own shop on the internet, he needed to grow his audience rapidly. And I think that does explain some of his, what I'm going to call his heel turn, his willingness to embrace like things that journalists would not accept, behaviors journalists would not accept.

8:35Astead Herndon:I mean, I think you're landing on a super important point, too, here, because it's not just Tucker Carlson who's made that transition from legacy or mainstream media to independent voices. That's been happening in the industry broadly. And it's been many of those voices who have pushed this on our, you know, TikTok timelines and digging into it on Instagram. And it's really been those kind of outside the mainstream voices that have kept this story afloat. I wanted to ask, like, how should we think of that? Like, can't you argue that, you know, that group across the board has an incentive to keep, you know, the Epstein conspiracy alive?

9:12Absolutely. On one end, you've got guys on Reddit who are making wild claims that they genuinely believe. I believe Epstein's Island is a sacrificial site for harvesting blood from innocent victims in sacrifices as an exchange for power. And then there are influencers, like people in the internet space, who can tell themselves accurately, I'm not a journalist, I'm an entertainer or an infotainer. And I think that sort of, that merger, I think you can do journalism in the absence of ethics, as long as you are willing to accept that you're going to say a lot of stuff that turns out not to be true.

9:50Astead Herndon:Can I just post something I'm thinking about as you're talking here, though? Because I have seen some people and the way they talk about this make me a little factually or journalistically uncomfortable. Like, you know, they'll use terms like Jeffrey Epstein was a spy. And I'm like, do we know that? Or that people in top levels of government have been blackmailed? And I'm like, do we know that? You know, when you hear kind of the ways people are talking about it, at what point do you think it crosses the line into conspiracy? Like, can we call it a cover-up, for example? Or do you think that's too far?

10:24I think I would hesitate, you can hear me hesitating, to call it a cover-up. Why? Because a cover-up, to me, there are two important elements of a cover-up. One, conscious intent, and two, coordination. And perhaps a third element, knowledge of what is being covered up. And I think you could see this as the sum of individual actors who know they're probably going to be in the Epstein files and are calling in whatever favors they can at an individual level without communicating with one another. That, to me, would be an effect, but not a cover-up. I believe that the Epstein story is like a vampire story.

11:11Listen to them. The children of the night, what music they make. In the same way that Dracula, who lives in a castle, sleeps during the day and is doing stuff at night. Your girls that you all love are mine already. And through them, you and others shall yet be mine. Preys on peasants, particularly women, particularly virgins. and is also exempt from the normal rules that govern human life, for example, death, as well as rules of morality. I think all that stuff is a very robust metaphor for the role of the aristocracy in Eastern Europe during the Middle Ages. They were like a predatory, parasitic class, and Dracula was a symbol of them.

12:04My revenge is just begun. Epstein is a similarly robust metaphor for the role of elites in the United States in the 21st century. And I think, like, conspiracy theories are the same way. They express something that people feel that is real and then attach it to a bunch of facts that are made up. But I think the Epstein story, as well as conspiracies based on the Epstein story, have caught on in part because they reflect a legitimate concern about the kind of people Epstein knew, wealthy, politically connected, and or famous people who are commonly referred to as elites.

12:55I don't believe that Epstein changed everyone's perspective on elites, but I do think this story has crystallized a change in ordinary Americans' perspectives on the people who rule them.

13:17Astead Herndon:Coming up, how American political culture is built on conspiracies.

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17:20This is Today Explained.

17:45Astead Herndon:thought was peak conspiracy theory. And in this book, he looked back much further and saw that conspiracies have long been a part of American history. It's always a conspiratorial time in the United States. It's just a matter of what the flavor of the year is. So one thing that's changed since then is that it's not purely something that's reserved for the fringe now, because especially in the age of Trump, it's been something that different members of sort of the ruling circles, the politicians, pundits, and so on, will kind of hurl at each other much more frequently. It's much more common for, I mean, for one thing, we have Trump regularly saying conspiracy theories that are, in fact, called conspiracy theories by his critics.

18:30Then Trump and his supporters will throw the phrase conspiracy theories back during Russiagate, for example. So it's become a more mainstream tag to get. But that's still because people like to use it as a pejorative. That much hasn't changed.

18:48Astead Herndon:How long has this stuff been around? Were they conspiracies back in the American Revolution? Yes, absolutely. I mean, long before that. It's because human beings are pattern-seeking, storytelling creatures who turn everything into narratives, because that's how we make sense of the world. And because we are afraid of things, as we should be, I mean, we shouldn't be afraid of everything, but there are reasons to be fearful. Those two inclinations always keep colliding. You seek patterns, you're fearful, where there's gaps in the data, sometimes you will fill it in with a cabal or something like that.

19:24So, you know, from the beginning of the colonial settlement, and no doubt before, we just don't have written records of what the Native Americans believed, there were conspiracy theories. So yes, in the American Revolution, on one side of it, the patriot side, the American side were fearful not just of the British abuses that led to the revolution, but feared that there's a direct quote in the Declaration of Independence. They call it, quote, a design, unquote, to bring us under despotism. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object, evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism.

20:05This is an age-old American idea. And on the flip side, the British, or many of the British, were convinced that the hidden hand of the French were behind the American revolutionaries. So very prominent Americans. I mean, I could quote every founding father pretty much, but even since then, John Quincy Adams was very fearful of the Masonic Freemasons. He joined the anti-Masonic movement, and in 1832, he wrote that bringing down the Masons was more important than whether Andrew Jackson or Henry Clay is elected president. Yeah, early Illuminati vibes. Well, actually, there was an Illuminati scare in the U.S.

20:45in the 1790s. Wow. And a lot of people thought Thomas Jefferson, there was like this whole Jacobin, Illuminist, Jeffersonian plot against common decency. So in one version, they were allegedly the Illuminati was allegedly going to liberate the slaves of Haiti. They wouldn't have used the word liberate and bring them up to the mainland to burn and loot. So it was it's always been fearful here.

21:14Astead Herndon:OK, so conspiracies have been with us since the American beginning. How did it find its way into our politics? How did it is there a way that these conspiracies just weren't things that individuals believed? but that they acted on in their work? Political groups are always afraid of other political groups. Political groups, people in general, are often afraid of outsiders. I mean, conspiracy theories are always circulating during the lead up to different wars. It's constantly in politics, I guess, in two ways, both because there are the fears people naturally have that can then be channeled into this, And then there's people deliberately working up fears in order to direct them at whoever their political enemies are.

21:59And in the 20th century, certainly there's just been these alternating red scares and brown scares. Brown scare is like a red scare, but aimed at the right instead of the left, which constantly have repercussions for civil liberties and privacy and things like that.