I was hyping the podcast in a c/politics thread when someone asked for a link for a pizzagate debunking.

They made the interesting point that most debunkings are merely “there is no basement”. I must confess. I find this argument pretty compelling, but are there any deep-dives into the conspiracy origins from KF. Due to what I confessed, I never really followed the details of this one. It seemed to morph into QAnon conspiracies rather seamlessly. It seemed to be all claims, no known damages.

What immediately came to mind is Episode #39 in which Dan does a deep-dive into Jack Posobiec and analyzes the Comet Ping Periscope video that Owen Shroyer reports about. (No, I didn’t have the episode number off the dome.)

But that is more Jack Posobiec is full of shit because pizzagate is full of shit. I love this episode. But the periscope video is more about two infowariors’ total inability to “act natural”. But it’s not really a pizzagate debunking, I suppose. Still comedy gold in my opinion.

  • Ook the LibrarianOPMEnglish
    1•10 months ago

    I’ll just copy a reply I made there. I’d imagine there are more knowledgeable people here. I’m not really even into qanon stuff.

    In the body of the thread a posted on c/knowledgefight, I bring up that I didn’t care about pizzagate because there really no damages. No victims coming forward. No suspicious activity. Nothing.

    The only thing interesting about pizzagate is how strongly people can hold on to beliefs with zero backing. I’m sure 99% of posts about pizzagate are LARPing really. (I think the same of Flat Earth. At least, way back when.) But we know how seriously some people belief it.

    In fact, I’d go as far as to say, the fact there is no evidence backing it up is precisely why this stuff is so dangerous. If some one is mentally unsteady enough to accept any reason to hate their enemies, they are probably pretty dangerous to be around already. Now use a massive media operation so that person need no other source of news. He (sorry to be sexist, but I’m going to stick with “he” for the easily influenced viewer’s pronoun) knows he’s right. He hears nothing but that he is right. However, out in the dangerous part of the world, no one cares about this. It’s so fucking easy to dismiss this stuff. Why would anyone believe it?

    This feels like persecution, gaslighting, and like “they” are all in on it. That’s fucking powder-keg as we saw in this matter.