dChan - Q Origins Project Archive

WASHINGTON, DC — In 2010, artist and musician Arrington de Dionyso painted a mural at Comet Ping Pong, a local pizza restaurant and music venue. Comet’s owner, James Alefantis, is a fixture of the DC art scene — both as a collector and as the head of the board of local arts nonprofit Transformer — and the restaurant’s walls feature a rotating selection of artwork. Despite being painted over nearly six years ago, the mural has now pulled de Dionyso into one of the most surreal and, for Comet Ping Pong and its staff, frightening news stories of this thoroughly bizarre year.

Since early November, dozens of individuals connected to Comet Ping Pong, as well as the owners and staff of nearby businesses, have received countless death threats and a barrage of online harassment, all inspired by a ludicrous and entirely unfounded conspiracy theory known as Pizzagate. Originating from 4chan messageboards frequented by far right extremist trolls and white supremacists, the conspiracy claims that Hillary Clinton and her former campaign chair, John Podesta, run a child trafficking ring based at the restaurant. (In a related delusion, the same message boards claimed that Clinton and Podesta participated in Satanic rituals with Marina Abramović.) On December 4, a gunman entered Comet Ping-Pong with an assault rifle and fired several shots. Thankfully, no one was injured. He told police he had driven from North Carolina to DC to “self-investigate” the conspiracy.

Arrington de Dionyso (photo by Lena Shkoda)

Pizzagate has been cited as a prime example of fake news, but a more useful comparison might be Gamergate. While it may look, at first, like another fanatical anti-Clinton conspiracy, Pizzagate has become a queerphobic witch hunt, targeting artists, musicians, and their supporters. Outraged by the harassment to which he’s been subjected, de Dionyso — who now lives in Washington state — recently wrote about this strange saga on Medium. I spoke with him recently about his experience as a Pizzagate target.

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Blair Murphy: You’re an artist and a musician, and it seems that many of the people who have been targeted by the right wing extremist trolls and paranoid conspiracy theorists who latched onto Pizzagate are artists. Does it seem like that’s an accident?

Arrington de Dionyso: I think it’s a very deliberate assault, which will eventually be a coordinated assault on all forms of free expression. But I think they’re starting with artists who might be exploring themes of queerness or resisting dominant paradigms in their work or artists who, there may be aspects of their work that might already be inviting a certain kind of controversy. And they’re definitely running that really hard through this very fictitious link to these occult themes and reading quite a lot into it.

https:// hyperallergic.com/347458/artist-targeted-by-pizzagate-conspiracy-theory-speaks/