TIL the "pizza gate" conspiracy actually started from a typo in an old email chain

I was digging through some archived emails from 2016 for a debate with my cousin and found the original thread where someone mistyped "pizza gate" for "pizza grate" referring to a broken oven rack across town, and now I can't unsee how one misplaced letter blew up into a whole national thing has anyone else traced a big conspiracy back to something this silly?

2 comments

2 Comments

uma_reed263d ago

Holy crap, a single typo about a broken oven rack turning into that whole mess? I can't believe something so dumb actually snowballed into people showing up with guns at a pizza place. It's wild how a misplaced letter basically gave us one of the weirdest conspiracy spirals of the decade.

valwest2d ago

And it just shows how once people get that little spark of something that confirms what they already want to believe, they'll run with it no matter how flimsy it is. I see this all the time at my local community board meetings where someone misreads a flyer about a zoning change and suddenly half the neighborhood is convinced the town is building a toxic waste dump. It's like a game of telephone where the first person had a typo and by the tenth person they're swearing the whole thing is a government plot. The internet just gives that game a million players instead of a dozen, so a broken oven grate becomes a national scandal overnight.