BLACKMAIL: THE KEY TO UNLOCKING PIZZAGATE?

Note: this passage is taken from a longer work I am in the process of composing, on the meta-significance of #Pizzagate.

James Alefantis, owner of "family friendly" Comet Pizza.

by Andy Nowicki

It is important to acknowledge, first and foremost, that #Pizzagate is about many things. It is "relevant," that is to say, in numerous ways. It could even be said to "contain multitudes," none of them pretty or pleasant.

Those who dismiss #Pizzagate as "fake news" and disparage online researchers as ideologically-driven fanatics tend to reflexively reject this many-tiered approach to the subject. They prefer to portray this sinister scandal with a silly-sounding name as something forthrightly simple and patently ridiculous: “OMG, these clods actually believe that Hillary Clinton is running a child prostitution ring from the non-existent basement of a DC pizza restaurant!!!” But such a rhetorical approach badly fails even at its ostensible purpose, because it treats a deeply-rooted, heavily-precedented phenomenon as something merely incidental and random.

Some #Pizzagate investigators do indeed suspect that nefarious and unsavory things have been happening at James Alefantis’s Comet Ping-Pong Pizza restaurant on Connecticut Avenue, a stone’s throw from the White House. And anyone who has seen Alefantis’s Instagram pictures and scrutinized the comments thereon will have a difficult time concluding that he and his friends are people with healthy moral or aesthetic sensibilities.

A picture of a man with a child, hashtagged 
with the pedo-slang "chickenlovers"

Of course, there is nothing illegal about possessing a tasteless Instagram page full of disgusting images, or engaging in online banter which makes light of child sexual abuse, though it is… well, tasteless, disgusting, and morally repugnant. But observing that this appalling page actually officially represents Alefantis's very public and supposedly "family friendly" DC pizzeria is yet another reason to look askance at this man once quite inexplicably judged by GQ to be one of the “50 most powerful people in Washington DC.”

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The very fact that Alefantis, a humble restaurant owner by trade, has managed to forge such crucial DC connections in spite of having done very little in the way of politics qua politics, is in itself a kind of riddle wrapped in an enigma. But a case like Alefantis's is not without precedent. Those who have done their homework and are cognizant of patterns may specifically recall Lawrence King, a once-rising star of the GOP who dwelt in Omaha, Nebraska back in the roaring-Reagan 80s.

Lawrence King

King, like Alefantis, also managed,  via unknown means, to obtain a remarkable degree of leverage in elite circles. He used this clout to twist arms and grease palms, eventually working his way into a top management position with a prominent local savings and loan institution, a job he was offered in spite of having little to no background with banking operations; this same King rose with remarkable ease through the ranks of the national Republican establishment, despite being an unknown with a murky past who was reputed to have engaged in certain unsavory activities with young boys.  

Those with the stomach to plumb the hideous depths of the story known as the “Franklin Scandal” are aware of the role that King wound up playing in a series of unthinkable crimes which implicated the highest echelons of the United States government, crimes which were promptly covered up by the agencies ostensibly designed to protect the innocent, but whose forces were instead marshaled to shield the powerful and put their victims in prison for telling the truth.

  

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Blackmail, it seems, is the primary currency by which power is pedaled and influence purchased in politics. If you’ve got the goods on people, you can have them dancing to your tune. It would appear that Alefantis has had these said “goods” (which should more properly be called “bads,” since one is seldom blackmailed over good behavior) on many important people, including but not limited to his ex-lover David Brock, a high-ranking Clinton flunky. Perhaps his means of obtaining access to the highest office in the land was in part accomplished through the same means employed by Lawrence King three decades ago?

It is useful to give close examination to such people as King and Alefantis; that is to say, to the kind of ruthlessly insidious “middle-ranking” men whose hidden power rests precisely in the fact of its concealment. The sort of man who engages in such high-stakes blackmail schemes is of necessity cunning, yet the source and scope of his ambition remain elusive, because he is generally content to work behind the scenes and is scrupulously careful never to draw too much attention to himself. 

Such a man does not aspire to be a "household name." He is happy to let his supposed superiors have the glory of recognition and fame. For his part, he has no interest in the kind of overt power and control that comes of being "known." Instead, he is one whose strength can best be described as parasitical in nature, because he grows in might—albeit invisibly—precisely by feasting on the forbidden knowledge of the shameful things that others, namely those with household names, have done. Knowledge of these deeds enables his continued security, which in turn enables him to commit his own shameful deeds with impunity.

Thus we witness an apparent lack of care, or even what seems like an utter, thoroughgoing carelessness of demeanor on display, as with Alefantis’s “Jimmy Comet” page, which not only contains sickening child molestation innuendo and disquieting references to murder and “kill rooms,” but also features a bust of Antinous, the boy lover of Roman emperor Hadrian, as an avatar.

Again, none of these images or online utterances were in any way kept hidden from the general public. Indeed, it is worth noting that the “Jimmy Comet” page wasn’t even made “private” until well after being discovered by intrepid Wikileaks researchers hot on the heels of the Podestas’ mysterious and prolific interests in so-called “pizza."

This nonchalance may seem incautious, even reckless, on the part of Alefantis, but it actually shouldn’t shock us too much. It even makes a kind of sense. We must, after all, assume that our intrepid "Jimmy Comet" has always been aware—no doubt quite accurately—of the patent untouchability of the status he has achieved amongst the political “elect,” a status no doubt won through a long and careful campaign of underhanded connivance amongst the power brokers of that infamously "wretched hive of scum and villainy," Washington D.C.

Alefantis must in fact now feel quite annoyed at the attention he is getting from those pesky Internet sleuths attempting to unlock the secrets of #Pizzagate. He never expected that such as these could be so insufferably persistent, since in his mind they barely exist at all, not even as things to be manipulated and molded to his will. Because they have no power, they are, to him, insignificant but irritating, like a plague of gnats invading his before now untouched, and ever artfully-manicured existence. 

Andy Nowicki, assistant editor of Alternative Right, is the author of six books, including Lost Violent Souls, Heart Killer and The Columbine Pilgrim. Visit his Soundcloud page.