The Truth About Comet Pizza
We had been in a bit of a rut. Things weren’t going poorly by any stretch, but it had been a tough week. He felt like I was being unnecessarily picky, I felt like he never wanted to do anything out of the ordinary. My work was consuming, with election season picking up and my hours getting longer. He was treading water at a gig with an hour-long commute. By mid-afternoon on that Tuesday, I was texting him, “it’s fine, let’s just watch tv tonight.” But he was insistent.
“I want pizza. We’re going to Comet.”
I sat down, somewhat begrudgingly, at our patio table under colored lights. After a muggy few days in the district, the air had cooled considerably; the checkered tablecloths dewy as a breeze rustled through the bamboo shoots encircling Comet’s kitschy outdoors.
“Do you want to split an appetizer?” My boyfriend asked casually as he perused the drink list. An innocuous question for most, I knew that this was his way of offering me an olive branch. I took it, and soon we were chatting over roasted cauliflower as the idea of being upset with him became a distant memory. We laughed as a sudden bout of rain forced us to rush our pizzas inside. We fed each other dessert. We mused on the patrons around us. Was that couple on a first date? Was the waitress in my world politics class freshman year? I think so. We held hands as we watched the families around us. Kids in soccer uniforms, teenagers chastised for texting at the table. We shared marinara kisses after he roundly beat me in 4 straight ping pong matches. We sprinted home in the thunderstorm and fell asleep on the couch, our arms wrapped around each other, our love for each other refurbished by pizza and hard ciders.
Comet Pizza is many things. It’s a place for couples to get over dumb fights. It’s a place for the parents of Northwest to take kids after school plays or science fair nights just as much as it’s a place for them to share a bottle of wine on the rare night they can get a sitter. It’s a place for American University students to go over-budget on pizza and beer so they can take photos with the “Guy Fieri Ate Here” logo emblazoned on the storefront. It’s 100% not the epicenter of a goddamn sex trafficking ring forged by Hillary Clinton and John Podesta.
Let’s call #Pizzagate for what it is: a tired and damaging trope that conflates homosexuality with pedophilia. Whether they are school teachers or proprietors of a fucking ping pong-themed pizza restaurant, the homophobic right is so desperate to exclude gay men from society that they invoke child protectionism whenever one veers dangerously close to success in his field. It’s a brilliant strategy, really, because who doesn’t want the best for their children? Against gay men, one allegation is all it takes. For an openly-gay man like James Alefantis, any evidence of “deviation” is more than enough to brand him forever as a child predator.
The problem is that the facts just aren’t there. From the Southern Poverty Law Center:
“According to the American Psychological Association, children are not more likely to be molested by LGBT parents or their LGBT friends or acquaintances. Gregory Herek, a professor at the University of California, Davis, who is one of the nation’s leading researchers on prejudice against sexual minorities, reviewed a series of studies and found no evidence that gay men molest children at higher rates than heterosexual men.”
It’s a careful game of confirmation bias. When Donald Trump admitted on-air to sexually assaulting women, followed by at least 13 allegations of rape, his supporters were unconvinced. The timing seemed too coincidental, the victims too opportunistic. Yet in the court of public opinion, which now flies a flag reading “Make America Great Again,” emails about a handkerchief and an eccentric instagram post were more than enough evidence — the jury was set to hang. When more than a dozen women all said that Donald Trump assaulted them, it was obviously fake. The LameStream Media was reaching, trying to see a story that wasn’t there. But when Alefantis posted a photo of him holding a child while wearing a yellow necklace, it was damning. After all, a yellow necklace is SIMILAR to a yellow bracelet, which, according to urbandictionary.com, SOMETIMES refers to a sex act (even though the primary definition refers to “a hug”). “Chicken” also according to the popular website for 13-year olds to look up their friends’ names, can also refer to anal sex with young boys. Certainly the only reason to refer to it in a restaurant setting, if you ask me. When Donald Trump literally said that he liked to grab women’s’ genitals, an act defined by the Department of Justice as rape, it was “locker room talk,” whatever the fuck that means. When Alefantis made a reference to the once-popular and still-hilarious “What What in the Butt” video, it was all the evidence anyone needed to be 100% sure that he was running an INTERNATIONAL SEX TRAFFICKING RING with John Fucking Podesta and Hillary Goddamn Clinton.
It’s the logical culmination of a campaign year in which literally anything can be true if you say it enough times. When the media wasn’t reporting on #PizzaGate, it was OBVIOUSLY because they were trying to protect Clinton and Podesta’s depraved trysts. When the media was reporting on #PizzaGate, it was OBVIOUSLY because they were trying to discount the incontrovertible evidence outlined by reddit user DeplorableLuvr420 in a series of MS Paint decoupages. When a man entered Comet on Sunday and fired his automatic rifle, it was OBVIOUSLY a false flag by the media to paint the totally-rational #Pizzagate “investigators” as violent. When someone inevitably dies at the hands of this insane fucking conspiracy theory, it will OBVIOUSLY be the fault of Alefantis, the “MSM” and those pulling the “invisible levers of power” in Washington (read: the Jews, somehow).
2016 is the year of the Russell’s Teapot. If you have a twitter account and access to rudimentary photo editing software, you can say literally whatever the fuck you want and the burden is on everyone else to prove you wrong. If you decide that there is a secret sex dungeon under Comet Pizza and James Alefantis does not personally let you take a sledgehammer to his restaurant’s foundation to prove otherwise, you’re correct, and he’s lying.
So here’s my teapot. Donald Trump still hasn’t picked a Secretary of State, despite the fact that pretty much the whole GOP establishment wants it to be Senator Bob Corker (R-TN). So why hasn’t he picked Corker yet? OBVIOUSLY it’s because, for years, Senator Corker has been stealing literal jaguars from the Amazon Rain Forest, starving them, and pitting them against kidnapped street urchins in the basement of the Dirksen Senate Building. That’s right, old-style Gladiatorial combat between homeless youths and hungry jungle cats, right here in the nation’s capital. It makes sense. Why haven’t they renovated Dirksen yet? It looks like shit compared to the other Congressional offices. It’s pretty clearly because the terrace level of the building is devoted to a massive, bipartisan cat-fighting scandal perpetrated by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
Look at this picture. Corker shaking hands with the committee’s ranking member, Ben Cardin (D-MD), or the two hedging bets as to who will survive tonight’s feline battle? You decide.
Boom.
You can’t prove me wrong because the assertion I’ve just made is so ridiculous, there’s almost no way to refute it. And I flat-out refuse to be persuaded. It’s brilliant. I’ve invented by own reality, one in which I am free to filter out any sort of information that challenges me. Talk about a bubble, huh.
