今年早些时候，塔克·卡尔森在其极受欢迎的播客节目中提起了一个他曾觉得荒诞的“半被遗忘的故事”。“我想我当时没有像我本该做的那样认真对待‘披萨门’事件，”他说。
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.
他所指的时间是2016年底，就在唐纳德·特朗普首次当选总统前后，关于由有权势的民主党人组织的一个想象中的恋童癖集团的细节开始在网上传播。“披萨门”阴谋论源自一批被黑客窃取的电子邮件，这些邮件来自希拉里·克林顿的竞选主席约翰·波德斯塔，他曾与华盛顿特区一家名为“彗星乒乓”（Comet Ping Pong）的披萨餐厅老板有过通信。波德斯塔发送了大量关于披萨的邮件。我不值得花你的时间来解释为什么有些人会确信这些邮件充满了指代儿童性奴的暗语。
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.
重要的是要知道或记住的是，到12月初，该理论已溢出为实践。北卡罗来纳州28岁的男子埃德加·韦尔奇在一个周日下午带着一把左轮手枪和一把AR-15步枪来到“彗星”餐厅，以为能在那里找到并解救被囚禁的孩子。现在所有人都能看到，这种诽谤指责已经走得太远了。主要“披萨门”影响者之一亚历克斯·琼斯公开向“彗星”老板道歉，推测是为了避免诉讼；特朗普青睐的极右翼影响者之一杰克·波索比克——此人曾闯入餐厅并全程录像——也随后退缩，最终坚称他从未声称过该阴谋论是真实的。“披萨门”已成为连其早期推动者都感到尴尬的事情。
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.
但任何羞耻感的痕迹如今都已成为遥远的记忆。该阴谋论诞生十年后，卡尔森对“披萨门”产生了兴趣——并后悔自己此前并未关注。在这一点上，他并非孤例。去年1月，当政府公布数百万页与杰弗里·爱泼斯坦犯罪相关的文件时，一部分网络侦探首先在这些文件中搜索“披萨”一词。他们找到了许多。在他的播客中，卡尔森表示，他对几处爱泼斯坦与其泌尿科医生讨论外出吃“披萨和葡萄汽水”的内容感到好奇，卡尔森觉得这种组合如此荒谬，以至于可疑。“也许这是暗语，”他说。
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.
卡尔森的嘉宾是一位名叫伊恩·卡罗尔的冉冉升起的阴谋论YouTube博主，他鼓励卡尔森继续思考。韦尔奇冲进披萨店的行为，究竟是不是互联网误导大众的一个悲惨例子，而是否另有隐情：一场掩盖？诚然，韦尔奇冲进彗星乒乓球餐厅，吓坏了店内的顾客和员工，但没有一个人身体受到伤害（这很方便）。韦尔奇的子弹确实损坏了一台电脑（这也很方便），那台电脑可能包含谁知道什么样的信息（同样很方便）。
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).
韦尔奇被捕后，他向记者提供了（同样很方便）的说法，称自己受到网络来源的误导。卡罗尔暗示，这个整洁的故事被设计出来，是为了让任何沿着“披萨门”思路提出质疑的行为都显得危险且错误。
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.
卡尔森似乎深信不疑。当该采访上架到YouTube（目前该视频有270万次观看）时，视频简介写道：“看起来Pizzagate基本上是真的。”近年来，同样的结论在主流社交媒体平台上不断发酵，这些平台的审核规则曾限制对Pizzagate的讨论。在韦尔奇事件之后，几乎所有平台都曾努力屏蔽与Pizzagate相关的标签，或者至少给相关内容添加警告标签——但这些措施已不再存在。“重新审视这个理论已经变得时髦起来，”匹兹堡大学虚假信息研究副教授兼教授塞缪尔·伍利告诉我。
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.
2016年，Pizzagate曾被视为一次惊险之举，并被当作警示。它是一个信号，表明在网络空间中盘旋的任何浑浊幻想都可能跨越现实边界。但这一揭示所带来的震撼力量——源于一起无人受伤且枪手道歉的事件——如今已难以想象。更彻底的现实扭曲早已成为常态，线上与线下世界之间的屏障几乎已不复存在。
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.
当政府检察官要求将入侵披萨店的埃德加·韦尔奇判处54个月监禁时，他们援引了“阻止其他潜在自卫者针对下一个受互联网启发的阴谋论的无辜对象犯下类似罪行”的必要性。他们认为，确保这种奇怪的事情不再发生很重要。
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.
德米安·安（Demian Ahn）曾是其中一名检察官，他告诉我，案件中所有证据的总和——韦尔奇手机上的内容，以及他的朋友和家人在采访中所说的话——都表明韦尔奇的动机是真诚的。他真的以为自己要从一家披萨店的地下室拯救孩子。“他似乎是个出于好意的人，”安说。“他相信华盛顿特区作为一个城市，腐败到可以让知名人士在一家普通餐馆公开经营儿童剥削集团。”
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.”
韦尔奇究竟是如何形成这一信念的，在随后的多年里成为各种事后分析的主题。这些分析对“披萨门”故事在何处以及如何获得关键势头并不一致：一些专家说，4chan上的匿名发帖者推动了该理论的传播；另一些人则声称，普通Facebook用户起了最重要的作用。俄罗斯宣传人员当然参与其中，热衷于转发#披萨门内容，美国的右翼影响者也是如此。
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.
无论它是如何出现的，“披萨门”在韦尔奇被捕后确实消退了一段时间，但随后以扩大形式回归，与QAnon结合。这个庞大的信仰体系在特朗普第一个任期末期兴起，并将总统想象成一位复仇天使，对一群渴望儿童鲜血的撒旦教民主党人实施暴力正义。当社交平台在2020年和2021年因其与国会山骚乱的联系而打击QAnon时，“披萨门”理论再次被压制。但它从未真正消失。特朗普竞选第二个任期，部分原因是将QAnon的口号和主题融入其信息传播中。
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.
如今的Pizzagate信徒持有比韦尔奇更广泛的观点。正如塞缪尔·伍利所说，他们可能不会声称该理论的所有细节都完全正确——即华盛顿特区的一家披萨店里确实有一个充满被贩卖儿童的地下室——“但认为该论点的总体方向是正确的。”（当卡尔森和卡罗尔谈论这个理论时，他们就是这样说的。）伍利告诉我，许多人现在声称，爱泼斯坦本人发起了Pizzagate，目的是将注意力从他自己的与儿童性犯罪相关的罪行上转移开。他们意味深长地指向证据，称爱泼斯坦曾与4chan的创始人会面。
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.
卡尔森似乎也对爱泼斯坦与Pizzagate的联系耿耿于怀。今年秋天，我联系了他，在电话交谈中，他反复提到同一段短信交流，这段交流他曾在自己的播客中引用，内容涉及爱泼斯坦和这位亿万富翁的泌尿科医生。“没有哪个富有的白人喝葡萄汽水，绝对没有，”卡尔森说。“在富人中间，葡萄汽水可能比香烟更不时髦。我只是想明确地说这一点。你在哪里买得到葡萄汽水？”他坚称，短信中任何提及葡萄汽水的内容显然都是某种暗语。他只是不知道暗指什么。
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 , he insisted. He just didn’t know for what.
如今的阴谋论错综复杂。它们活跃于各种不同政治倾向和文化参照的在线社区中，并以令人惊讶和奇怪的方式相互交织。
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.
以卡尔森播客嘉宾伊恩·卡罗尔为例，他因在坎迪斯·欧文斯产假期间代理主持其节目而为人熟知。他推出了一款名为“韦伯”的互动工具，允许将来自不同公开来源的证据拼凑在一起。任何人都可以使用他的“串联板引擎”，将爱泼斯坦档案中的文件与涉及不明飞行物、“9·11”事件、黄道十二宫杀手以及查理·柯克遇害案等内容的文件串联起来。
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.)
（卡罗尔未回应采访请求。）此类网站或许仍属小众关注，但自2016年以来，偏执态度显然已在我们的文化中变得更加普遍。白宫记者协会晚宴发生的未遂刺杀案、德克萨斯州的洪水、或是一支橄榄球队的失利——这些事件都不再必然被视为表面那样。事实本身或许不如拼凑猜测的快感那般重要。在其播客的“披萨门”一集中，卡尔森曾对卡罗尔说，他似乎听说枪手在爱泼斯坦档案公布前夕被击毙了。“是真的吗？”他问道。
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.
“我也听到过同样的报道，”卡罗尔说。“显然，到现在，我真不知道什么是真的。整个世界感觉有点像……”事实上，时间线清晰无误：埃德加·韦尔奇于2025年1月在一次交通拦截中因向警员持枪指向，被警方击毙；而爱泼斯坦档案则于同年12月公布。
“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 .”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.
后来，当我与卡尔森通电话时，他解释说，他最初之所以不理会“比萨门”，是因为他与之关系太近。说真的，他就住在彗星披萨店附近，还曾带孩子去那里吃披萨。他本人认识约翰·波德斯塔、他的兄弟以及他兄弟的妻子，也认识那家披萨店的老板。“这听起来太离谱了，我想我根本没花10分钟去想过这件事。”
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.”
现在他住在缅因州，吃加油站的披萨，他告诉我。他非常困惑，为什么爱泼斯坦档案中关于披萨和葡萄汽水的提及没有得到媒体和执法部门更多关注。“每个人都在实际上为爱泼斯坦掩护——为什么？”他说。“我不知道答案。”挂断电话后，我认为请一名记者调查此事是合理的，于是我这样做了。爱泼斯坦和他的泌尿科医生在2018年——也就是爱泼斯坦去世前一年——至少有五次谈论披萨和葡萄汽水。
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.
我无法通过电话联系到那位泌尿科医生，询问原因。但有一次，他随短信附上了一张照片。照片里，他在一家披萨店，正吃着一片奶酪披萨，旁边放着一瓶可可粉葡萄汽水。
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.