Pizzagate believers decoded innocent words as sexual-abuse code.

Evidence

The day of the rally it had been five months since John Podesta, Clinton’s campaign chairman, had his email hacked. Soon after, a few motivated and suspicious individuals combing through Podesta’s missives decided that references to pizza and hot dogs were in fact code words for sexually abusing children: “cheese” for a little girl, “pasta” for a little boy, “map” for semen, and “sauce” for an orgy. (“Cheese pizza,” the theorists reasoned, does start with the same letters as “child porn.”) — Anna Merlan, Republic of Lies, 216

Categorization

• XREF: Code-decoding of innocuous text parallels vault claims about the shared epistemic style connecting conspiracy belief to authoritarian/prejudice cognition. — connects to: Pizzagate belief is passed down to children as righteous family mission — Anna Merlan, Republic of Lies, 281; People exploit narrow semantic definitions to reframe their wrongdoing as innocent — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement: How People Do Harm…, 240; Conspiracy worldviews build their plausibility on real, verified forms of abuse — Anna Merlan, Republic of Lies, 248

Broader Connections

• People exploit narrow semantic definitions to reframe their wrongdoing as innocent #exemplifies (0.80) — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 240
• Pizzagate belief is passed down to children as righteous family mission #complicates (0.75) — Anna Merlan, Republic of Lies, 281
• Conspiracy worldviews build their plausibility on real, verified forms of abuse #complicates (0.72) — Anna Merlan, Republic of Lies, 248