Don’t Tell Me Pizzagate Is Real…

I’ve never bought the full-blown “Pizzagate” story. 

To be honest, I intuitively believe (I can provide no proof beyond my intuition) that the more complicated version with high-level people visiting an actual pizza parlour to engage in pedophilic sex was a PsyOp, to make the whole idea of an elite pedophile ring seem absurd. It is too outlandish, and more importantly, too complicated to believe. 

What politician or billionaire would have to go to a pizzeria instead of using a pied-à-terre for their clandestine affairs? 

That didn’t happen. 

But I also never dismissed that there was a kernel of truth among all the ridiculous speculation/disinformation. The history of powerful people abusing their positions to take advantage of young girls for sex is extensive and very recent. I’ve written about it before, and about the tolerance for it among the elites that continues to this day. 

Normies might not believe it because it is so evil, and doesn’t bear thinking. But then again, who would have believed the British Rape Gang scandals if there weren’t so much evidence? We are talking about a class of people who love Roman Polanski, for God’s sake, and defended him. 

#TBThursday “It wasn’t rape-rape.” Whoopi Goldberg’s odd defense of Roman Polanski providing quaaludes and champagne to a 13-year-old child he had sex with.

THIS IS @TheView. pic.twitter.com/1cBO8tom33

— ForAmerica (@ForAmerica) November 7, 2019

Well, as people comb through the Epstein files, lots of discussions of pizza and grape soda keep coming up, including references to the use of sexual performance drugs. 

The @NYTimes today notes that in one Epstein email there is “peculiar combination” of “pizza” and “grape soda.”

In truth, on at least five occasions, Epstein’s urologist, Harry Fisch, uses the words “pizza” and “grape soda” in strange ways.

In making this observation, I am… https://t.co/39ad020SaW pic.twitter.com/5sGyABFcnk

— Michael Shellenberger (@shellenberger) February 13, 2026

The @NYTimes today notes that in one Epstein email there is “peculiar combination” of “pizza” and “grape soda.” 

In truth, on at least five occasions, Epstein’s urologist, Harry Fisch, uses the words “pizza” and “grape soda” in strange ways. 

In making this observation, I am not endorsing any theory about what the words mean.

However, I think the author @DraperRobert should have noted that there are at least five and more likely at least six mentions of pizza and grape soda, and that in one case, the words appear to be about sex, since they come after discussion of erectile dysfunction pills. 

Here the cases:

1. “After you use them, wash your hands and let’s go get pizza and grape soda.” 

Their text messaging exchange begins with Epstein emailing Fisch to request Stendra, a fast-acting, second generation erectile dysfunction drug that was designed for “greater spontaneity.”

The “them” Fisch is referring to are clearly the pills. 

Then, in separate messages, Fisch writes:

2. “What time do you want to get pizza and grape soda tomorrow?”  

3. “Pizza and grape soda… Nough said” 

4. “Pizza and grape soda tomorrow for lunch?” 

5. “First we get a slide of pizza with grape soda… Then the pop tart” to which Epstein replies, “Wow.”

6. And someone whose name is redacted, but is almost certainly Fisch, as he is sending an attached document from “Veru-Equity” which is Fisch’s company, appears to make clear that he is using a coded phrase when he writes, in an email to Epstein,” Let’s go for pizza and grape soda again. No one else can understand.”

I encourage people to read the messages themselves. In no case did I get the feeling that they were actually talking about pizza and grape soda.

Of course, it is easy to see things that aren’t there, and so there is some non-zero possibility they are really into pizza and grape soda.

But if it’s all a terrible misunderstanding then, given that the story is now in the New York Times, Fisch should be glad to clear up what they were talking about.

I emailed Fisch at several of his email addresses on Wednesday and did not heard back. The Times says it did too.

I believe it is reasonable that authorities should ask to interview Fisch to understand what it was that they were discussing.

Epstein sure liked pizza and grape soda, and apparently liked enjoying them while erect.

I mean, come on, man. What sane person thinks that Epstein and his buddy go out for pizza and grape soda, and find the idea so exciting? 

Epstein moved in the most elite circles imaginable. He was best buds with Larry Summers, and his legal advisor was also Barack Obama’s. Bill Gates got hooked up with, it turns out, hookers with STDs, and Epstein helped him get antibiotics to surreptitiously slip to Melinda. 

Journalists and researchers will spend the next months ferreting through the Epstein files in search of further criminal conduct or a new conspiratorial wrinkle. But one truth has already emerged.

In unsparing detail, the documents lay bare the once-furtive activities of an unaccountable elite, largely made up of rich and powerful men from business, politics, academia and show business. The pages tell a story of a heinous criminal given a free ride by the ruling class in which he dwelled, all because he had things to offer them: money, connections, sumptuous dinner parties, a private plane, a secluded island and, in some cases, sex.

That story of impunity is all the more outrageous now in the midst of rising populist anger and ever-growing inequality. The Caligula-like antics of Jeffrey Epstein and friends occurred over two decades that saw the decline of America’s manufacturing sector and the subprime mortgage crisis, in which millions of Americans lost their homes.

And all this happened as everybody KNEW he was a convicted sex offender, using young girls. 

Mr. Epstein wrote to another undisclosed recipient in 2009, who was identified on Wednesday in a House hearing as Sultan Ahmed bin Sulayem, a powerful Emirati businessman: “where are you? are you ok, I loved the torture video.”

Lacking context, such messages are subject to speculation about their meaning and provide fresh opportunities for those intent on drawing attention to themselves and their views.

An assistant to Mr. Epstein wrote to him in 2011: “I ordered sweet young coconuts from Thailand for you and they just arrived … just so you don’t have to drink juices from old hairy things.”

Underscoring how even the apparently mundane can be stretched into the potentially conspiratorial, frequent references to pizza have given fresh life to the discredited 2016 “Pizzagate” conspiracy theory, in which prominent Democrats were said to be torturing and raping children in the basement of a Washington restaurant. That the places and characters in Pizzagate are almost entirely different from the ones appearing in the Epstein files has not stopped some from insisting that there is a connection.

I suppose it is correct to say that Pizzagate, as described in Reddit, is “discredited.” But can any sane person think that these discussions of young coconuts from Thailand or going out for pizza and grape soda are innocent?

Oh, come on. 

In an email exchange in 2018, Mr. Epstein’s urologist, Dr. Harry Fisch, informed him that “You have refills available” and that “after you use them, wash your hands and lets go get pizza and grape soda” — a peculiar combination used in several emails between the two men that, Dr. Fisch wrote, “No one else can understand.” (Dr. Fisch did not respond to an email request for comment.)

“It was this exchange,” the right wing podcaster Tucker Carlson said on his show on Friday, “that made us think, ‘Whoa, wait a second. Maybe the long-debunked conspiracy about Pizzagate wasn’t actually debunked, and maybe someone should take a closer look at this.’”

Ms. Hemmer, the Vanderbilt professor, said that the shadowy nature of Mr. Epstein’s life, coupled with the Trump administration’s haphazard production of the documents, was “bound to beef up a ton of conspiracy theories.”

Newly released video logs of the prison wing where Mr. Epstein was found dead, for example, suggest that a human figure not previously accounted for in the records was moving in the general direction of Mr. Epstein’s cell late that evening.

This has led some internet sleuths to conclude that Mr. Epstein, whose death in federal custody in 2019 was ruled a suicide, might have been killed. Others have speculated that he might not be dead at all, given that Mr. Epstein testified in a deposition in 2017 that he had a barbed-wire tattoo on his left biceps, but no such tattoo is visible in the recently released photo of his body.

Some conspiracy theories are genuinely bonkers, but I also believe that some of the more outlandish ones are clever cover-ups, making implausible wild accusations easy to debunk to hide the underlying truth of allegations that need hiding. 

“Oh, that was debunked.” Sure, the pizza parlour part was, but why the references to pizza and grape soda?

Tying together the truth with the impossible is a brilliant strategy, if you can pull it off. Who wants to be associated with Q-Anon? That is how the left attacked Sound of Freedom, based on a true story that made people in positions of power look bad. “Debunk” the real by associating it with the false. 

As Michael Shellenberger admits, we have no proof here to go with. But man, I doubt that Epstein and his buds were THAT into grape soda. 

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