Hi there—and happy Friday.
It’s James West here, Mother Jones executive editor.
When 3.5 million pages of the Epstein files were released, the public could finally see the extent of what I've come to think of as the conspiracy of silence that enabled his abuse—how, even after his first imprisonment in 2008, Epstein revived his social and financial power, catering to a wide circle of powerful people right up until his second arrest in 2019. That conspiracy of silence, now out in the open, is toppling royals, politicians, and business leaders around the world.
So why are Tucker Carlson, Joe Rogan, and Rep. Lauren Boebert—and so, so many on social media—all talking about a pizza conspiracy? Why is Hillary Clinton being grilled about...Pizzagate?
For the uninitiated (I'm jealous), I'll be brief: The conspiracy theory holds that Democrats ran a sex-trafficking ring in the basement of a DC pizzeria, and that clues about it—in the word "pizza" and other supposed codes—were hidden in emails WikiLeaks released during the 2016 presidential campaign. Now, some readers of the Epstein files think Pizzagate was true all along, and that Epstein was part of it.
So I went hunting myself. The timing of the release coincided with powerful new AI models that make analyzing a massive trove like this more achievable. Using one such tool, Claude, I compiled nearly 1,500 mentions of "pizza" into a spreadsheet, then spent weeks refining the dataset and reading the underlying documents—emails, receipts, bank statements, FBI text logs—to get a clearer picture of what "pizza" actually meant in the files.
I published what I found today. It features an exchange between Steve Bannon and Epstein that lands on a Holocaust joke about pizza. Another series of emails between Epstein and comedian Bobby Slayton details the stand-up comic's obsession with New York slices: "I'm really talking about fucking pizza, goddamn it," Slayton told me. There are petty-cash logs and Lean Cuisine receipts. Don’t miss the scolding email from Soon-Yi Previn about the proper sequence of service for a pizza course at a dinner party.
In all, I hope it's a revealing, surprising, and distinctly non-conspiratorial look at the role of pizza in Epstein's world.
—James West
