The Epstein-Pizzagate Connection
The seminal conspiracy theory of the Trump era gets a facelift 10 years later.
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Earlier this year, on his very popular podcast, Tucker Carlson brought up a “semi-forgotten story” that he had once found absurd. “I didn’t take Pizzagate as seriously, maybe, as I guess I should have at the time,” he said.
The time he was referring to is the late fall of 2016, just before and after the first election of Donald Trump, when the details of an imagined pedophilia ring that was organized by powerful Democrats began to spread online. The Pizzagate conspiracy theory was drawn from a batch of hacked emails from Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman, John Podesta, who had corresponded with the owner of a Washington, D.C., pizza restaurant called Comet Ping Pong. Podesta had sent a bunch of emails about pizza. It’s not worth your time for me to explain why some people became convinced that these were full of coded references to child sex slaves.
The important thing to know or remember is that, by early December, the theory was spilling over into practice. Edgar Welch, a 28-year-old North Carolina man, arrived at Comet one Sunday afternoon with a revolver and an AR-15, under the assumption that he would find and free the children being kept there. Now everyone could see that the aspersion-casting had gone too far. One of the leading Pizzagate influencers, Alex Jones, publicly apologized to Comet’s owner, presumably to avoid a lawsuit, and one of Trump’s favored far-right influencers, Jack Posobiec—a guy who had once barged into the restaurant himself, with a camera rolling—backed off too, eventually insisting that he had never even claimed the conspiracy was real. Pizzagate had become embarrassing, even to its early promoters.
But any trace of shame is now a distant memory. Ten years after its inception, Carlson is interested in Pizzagate—and regretful that he wasn’t interested before. In this, he’s not alone. Last January, when the government released millions of pages of files related to the crimes of Jeffrey Epstein, one subset of internet sleuths began by searching them for mentions of “pizza.” They found many. On his podcast, Carlson said he was intrigued by several in which Epstein and his urologist discussed going out for “pizza and grape soda,” a combination that Carlson found so absurd as to be suspicious. “Maybe this is code,” he said.
Carlson’s guest, an up-and-coming conspiracy-theory YouTuber named Ian Carroll, encouraged him to keep thinking. What if Welch’s storming of the pizzeria was not, after all, a sad example of the internet’s power to mislead, but rather something else: a cover-up? Sure, Welch had burst into Comet and terrorized the customers and employees within, but not a single person had been physically harmed (convenient). Welch’s bullets did end up damaging a computer (convenient), which may have contained who knows what kind of information (convenient). After Welch was arrested, he gave (convenient) quotes to reporters about how he’d been misled by online sources. That neat story, Carroll implied, had been designed to make it seem like any question-asking along the lines of Pizzagate was dangerous and wrong.
Carlson seemed convinced. When the interview went up on YouTube (where it currently has 2.7 million views), the video description read, “It looks like Pizzagate is basically real.” The same conclusion has in recent years been percolating throughout mainstream social-media platforms, where moderation rules once restricted discussion of Pizzagate. Following the Welch incident, nearly all of them made some effort to block Pizzagate-related hashtags or at least add warning labels to Pizzagate-related content—but these measures are no longer in place. “It’s become en vogue to revisit this theory,” Samuel Woolley, an associate professor and chair in disinformation studies at the University of Pittsburgh, told me.
Back in 2016, Pizzagate was interpreted as a close call and taken as a warning. It was a sign that any of the turbid fantasies that swirl around in online spaces might lap across the boundary with real life. But the shocking power of that revelation—drawn from an episode in which nobody got hurt and the shooter apologized—is hard to fathom now. More thorough bendings of reality have long since become the norm, and the barrier between the online and offline worlds is all but gone.
When government prosecutors asked that Edgar Welch be given 54 months in prison for his pizza-joint invasion, they cited the need to “deter other would-be vigilantes from attempting similar crimes against innocent subjects of the next internet-inspired conspiracy theory.” They said they thought it was important to make sure that such a weird thing never happened again.
Demian Ahn, who served as one of those prosecutors, told me that the sum total of all of the evidence in the case—what was on Welch’s phone, what his friends and family had said in interviews—indicated that Welch’s motivations were sincere. He really thought that he was going to be saving children from the basement of a pizza place. “He seemed to be a well-meaning person,” Ahn said. “He believed that Washington, D.C., as a city, was so corrupt that you could have a child-exploitation ring openly operated by prominent people at a regular restaurant.”
How exactly Welch had come to this belief would be the subject of various postmortems in the years that followed. These did not agree on where and how the Pizzagate story gained its crucial momentum: Some experts said that anonymous posters on 4chan drove the theory’s spread; others claimed that ordinary Facebook users played the most important role. Russian propagandists certainly were involved, eagerly reposting #Pizzagate content, but so were right-wing influencers in the United States.
However it emerged, Pizzagate did fade for a while after Welch’s arrest, before returning in expanded form with QAnon. That sprawling belief system took hold near the end of Trump’s first term, and imagined the president as an avenging angel, bringing violent justice to a network of Satanic Democrats who were after children’s blood. When social platforms cracked down on QAnon in 2020 and 2021, on account of its connection to the storming of the Capitol, the Pizzagate theory got tamped down once again. But it never really went away. Trump campaigned for his second term in part by incorporating QAnon slogans and themes into his messaging.
Today’s Pizzagate believers take a broader view than Welch did. As Samuel Woolley put it, they may not claim that all of the details of the theory were right on target—that there really was a basement full of trafficked children in a pizza place in D.C.—“but that the general thrust of the argument was correct.” (When Carlson and Carroll riffed on the theory, this is how they talked.) Many people now assert that Epstein started Pizzagate himself, to draw attention away from his own child-sex-related crimes, Woolley told me. They point suggestively to evidence that Epstein once met with 4chan’s founder.
Carlson, too, seems preoccupied with Epstein’s connection to Pizzagate. I reached out to him this fall, and when we spoke by phone, he kept returning to the same text-message exchange that he’d cited on his podcast, between Epstein and the billionaire’s urologist. “No rich white person drinks grape soda, period,” Carlson said. “Grape soda is probably more unfashionable than cigarettes among rich people. I just want to say that unequivocally. Where do you even buy grape soda?” Any reference to it in the texts was obviously code for something, he insisted. He just didn’t know for what.
Today’s conspiracy theories are ornate. They animate online communities of all different political bents and cultural referents, and they overlap in surprising and strange ways.
Take Ian Carroll, the guest on Carlson’s podcast, who is better known for filling in as the host of Candace Owens’s show while she was on maternity leave. He has launched an interactive tool called the “Webb,” which allows evidence from disparate public sources to be pieced together. Anyone can use his string-board engine to connect documents from the Epstein files to those concerning, among other things, UFOs, 9/11, the Zodiac Killer, and the murder of Charlie Kirk. (Carroll did not respond to requests for an interview.)
A site like that may still be somewhat of a niche concern, but a paranoid attitude has clearly become more widespread in our culture since 2016. An attempted assassination at the White House Correspondent’s Dinner, a flood in Texas, or a football team’s failure—none are necessarily accepted as what they seem. The facts themselves may not always matter so much as the thrill of riffing and guessing. At one point in the Pizzagate episode of his podcast, Carlson told Carroll that he thought he’d heard that the shooter ended up getting killed right before the Epstein files came out. “Is that true?” he asked.
“I heard the same reporting,” Carroll said. “Obviously, at this point, I don’t really know what’s true. The whole world feels a little bit like The Matrix.” In fact, the timeline is unambiguous: Edgar Welch was shot and killed by police in January 2025 after pointing a gun at an officer during a traffic stop; the Epstein files were released in December of that year.
Later, when I spoke with Carlson on the phone, he explained that he’d disregarded Pizzagate originally because he’d been too close to it. Literally, he’d lived near Comet and taken his children there for pizza. He knew John Podesta, his brother, and his brother’s wife personally, and he knew the pizza-shop owner too. “It seemed so far-out, I don’t think I spent 10 minutes thinking about it.”
Now he lives in Maine and eats gas-station pizza, he told me. And he is very confused as to why the Epstein files’ references to pizza and grape soda haven’t gotten more attention from media and law enforcement. “Everyone is effectively covering for Epstein—why?” he said. “I don’t know the answer.”
After we hung up, I reasoned that it was fair to ask a journalist to look into this matter, so I did. Epstein and his urologist talked about pizza and grape soda at least five times in 2018, the year before Epstein’s death. I couldn’t reach the urologist by phone to ask why. But on one occasion, he’d accompanied his text with a photo. He was in a pizza shop, having a cheese slice with a bottle of Crush grape soda.
*Illustration source: Mugshot Zone
