It doesn't matter. Still, nearly half of Trump voters like, oh, obviously she ran a sex ring out of a pizza store. Oh, my. - Have you no goddamn rationality at all? - No they don't. We get into these debates about whether or not we have hope for the country. And I'm pessimistic because after something like this gets debunked, people [00:00:18] still decide that they want to believe it because it goes toward their narrative. And again, what they want to believe. It reinforces this notion that Hillary is this crazy maniac who's out there running pedophilia rings. It's insane. Wow, I was right. [00:00:34] Because today there's a story in the news about Elon Musk perpetuating this Pizzagate conspiracy theory on his platform X, formerly known as Twitter. So let's get into the details on that, because he posted this meme and then later [00:00:50] took it down, probably after he realized what he was communicating was bunk and was embarrassing. But nonetheless, Musk tweeted and then deleted a meme promoting the Pizzagate conspiracy theory. So it uses the characters from The Office. [00:01:08] You've got Michael Scott saying to Pam, Pizzagate is real. She says, no it isn't. We have experts. Then he says, they trafficked children, she says, but we have experts. And then he says, your expert just went to jail for child porn. [00:01:24] And then she makes like a confused, shocked face, right? Okay, so let's get into what the claim is here. So the meme itself is based on a fabricated headline that suggests that Pizzagate was debunked by one person. So it was James Gordon Meek who actually ended up being a disgraced ABC reporter. [00:01:46] Why was he disgraced? Well, he pleaded guilty last year to possessing child sexual abuse images, and he was sentenced to six years in federal prison as a result of that. Okay, so let's take a look at the fabricated headline that this entire thing is based on. [00:02:01] It's New York Post fabricated headline, award winning ABC journalist who debunked Pizzagate, pleads guilty in horrific child porn case. All right, so the New York Post did coverage of Meek's case, but it never included any mention of Pizzagate. [00:02:17] Never fake. It's fake. It's fabricated. According to an AP report, meek joined the outlet ABC in 2013 as an investigative reporter and covered national issues for the network until he resigned last year. Meek did not publish. [00:02:34] He never published an investigation about or even debunk Pizzagate. Meek appeared to have mentioned Pizzagate only once, in a 2017 report about Russian disinformation, according to a Reuters Fact Check article in August. [00:02:50] And a different James Meek, a British journalist, briefly discussed Pizzagate in a London Review of Books article in 2020. So for those of you who need a refresher, the whole Pizzagate conspiracy theory was that the Clintons and the Democratic Party leaders ran some [00:03:06] secret satanic child sex ring out of a D.C. pizzeria known as Comet Ping Pong. The theory also led to a man literally showing up to this pizzeria with a rifle. This was in 2016. Someone could have gotten hurt. Someone could have gotten killed. Luckily, that didn't happen. [00:03:23] In December of 2016, Edgar Maddison Welch, a 28 year old man from North Carolina, walked into Comet Ping Pong with a loaded AR 15, a revolver and 29 rounds of ammunition across his chest while attempting to self-investigate the Pizzagate theory. [00:03:40] As he later told police, he pointed his rifle at an employee and fired multiple rounds to destroy the lock on a storage cabinet. No one was injured. He surrendered to police after finding no evidence of hidden rooms or child trafficking. [00:03:56] So look, this theory has been debunked forever. Like, the fact that it's even coming up again because of Elon Musk is incredibly frustrating. But Musk last week also responded to an ex user's post alleging that the founder of media matters, a liberal advocacy group, was connected [00:04:13] to the owner of the Pizzagate restaurant, which there's no evidence of that, Musk responded, weird, boosting the message to his 164 million followers. So he later took it down. But before he took that post down, it had already accumulated 15 million views. [00:04:34] So this is how stuff gets, you know, propagated in social media. All this, all this nonsense ends up getting propagated. Yeah. And over the last two weeks in total, he replied to five. Well that was one. So four other tweets having to do with Pizzagate. [00:04:51] This is just a thing that all of a sudden I guess is his whole personality. He's obsessive and he has a lot of time on his hands. And why wouldn't he? He's the CEO of Six company and has a thousand children, and yet he has 18 hours a day to be on his phone responding to people with 12 followers. It's weird how that works out. [00:05:07] I cannot believe that people still think that this guy is intelligent, because he just demonstrated in that two ways that his brain isn't worth a damn, one that he just spreads. He just says weird. Some random person says, hey, here's a connection that I'm not establishing or proving. [00:05:24] And he says, weird. He says weird because he's not checking it. He just accepts it. Okay. And then the meme, which is based on nothing he doesn't check. He doesn't do any research whatsoever. And that is a very common thing for Elon Musk. He just accepts something that comports with what he wants to believe is true, and [00:05:42] doesn't actually look into it because he doesn't have any intellectual curiosity. But that actually isn't the part of it that bothers me the most. It's that even if that was true, what was in the image, that wouldn't matter at all, because that's not how anything works. If, like the guy who debunked unicorns turned out to have molested a horse, [00:06:02] that doesn't mean unicorns exist, you have to prove that it exists. You don't need to debunk Pizzagate. They need to bunk it first. They need to establish that there's something there. They didn't. They just say it. That's it. There's no evidence. The dude literally went in with a gun looking for it and couldn't find anything. [00:06:19] And Elon Musk doesn't understand that. That's how you prove things. It is not on the other person to prove that an insane claim is not true. It is. The onus is on you to prove that your insane claim has something to it. And they have been unable to do that because it's based on nothing. [00:06:35] And he doesn't understand anything that I just explained because he's not a genius, he's not Tony Stark, he's just an idiot who was born with millions of dollars and was able to fall into more. I agree with everything you just said in that rant. I mean, I just I'm so fatigued, though, from being outraged by Elon Musk because [00:06:54] we know who he is at this point, right? Like this is what he does. And honestly, he has taken a platform that was already pretty unbearable and just riddled with bots and misinformation and took all of the negative qualities and put it on overdrive like fed it steroids. [00:07:11] And so whenever I go on Twitter, I know I'm going to get outrageous, you know, specious claims. And so I've just mentally prepare myself for what I think needs to happen is, you know, I really do think there needs to be curriculum in high schools [00:07:28] in regard to media literacy. And I think that curriculum should continue into college as part of like the general ed requirements. So people know how to suss out BS because like, look for the people who actually bought into the Pizzagate conspiracy theory, right? [00:07:44] I know that there's like this, there's part of me that gets frustrated that people would believe that, but then also, okay, accept the fact that they believe it. If you genuinely believe that politicians are running a satanic child sex ring [00:07:59] out of a pizzeria, that's going to make you really angry, right? And that's why one guy felt inspired enough to show up with all those weapons. And he could have he could have killed someone. He could have ended up in prison for the rest of his life. Like it would have been an absolute disaster. [00:08:15] So people who have these massive platforms do have a responsibility. I know they want to pretend like they don't, but they do. And unfortunately, we've seen from Elon Musk time and time again that he doesn't take that responsibility seriously at all. He thinks it's all a joke. He thinks it's all fun and games. [00:08:32] He didn't think it was fun and games when he thought one of his kids was being followed by like, leftists who wanted to harm his child. Right? So why don't you put yourself in the shoes of people who work at that pizzeria and dealt with that kind of massive threat from a heavily armed guy [00:08:47] who thought they were running a child sex ring out of that pizzeria. These are like human lives. So, like, can we just act like adults for a second and not spread BS? That's going to get people hurt. That's all I'm saying. You can be as critical of Democrats as you want. That doesn't upset me. You can be as critical of whoever, even people, that I love deeply. [00:09:04] You can be critical. Who cares? This is America. Free speech, whatever. But when you start spreading claims like this, it's not a joke, it's not funny. And I think he took it down because he realized it was also embarrassing for him to to spread nonsense like that. [00:09:20] If you enjoyed this video, that's because of our members. They make us independent, they make us strong and they make us honest. Become a member today by hitting the join button below.