Page 94, the Private Eye Podcast.

Hello and welcome to page 94.

My name is Andrew Hunter Murray and this is a very different kind of episode from the usual one.

This is going to be a U.S US election special on fake news. This election a

staggering number of people have been reading about and even more worryingly

believing a conspiracy theory called QAnon which in a nutshell alleges that there is a

ring of devil worshiping pedophiles running the US government business and pretty much

everything else it grew in part out of a very similar conspiracy

theory which took root during the last election. This was the so-called Pizza Gate Conspiracy

Theory, which alleged that a particular pizza restaurant in downtown Washington, called Comet ping-pong, was host to a ring of pedophile politicians who were using the restaurant to abduct, abuse and sell children.

Now, years after it first started, Pizza Gate has re-emerged as one of the main pillars of

QAnon, and despite being being very obviously untrue it has had serious real consequences offline too

Earlier this year as part of a TV documentary about fake news the I's editor Ian Hislop went to America to comic ping pong to interview the owner, a man called James Alefantis.

As a supporter of the Democrats, before the last election, Aleantis had exchanged some emails with

John Pedesta one of Hillary Clinton senior aides about the idea of cooking for

some fundraisers but when Pedesta's emails were leaked online, conspiracy theorists started drawing much darker conclusions about their correspondence.

Only a small portion of Ian's original interview with Mr. Alefantis actually aired on the original documentary, so for this

edition of page 94 we are giving you the whole thing. First of all I spoke briefly

to Ian about what he found when he went to Washington to the restaurant.

Here's Ian. The experience was very surreal. I'd read a great deal

about Pizza Gate. I'd read some of the stuff online. I'd read accounts of it. I'd read

debunking of it, which never seems to do much good and then suddenly there I was in a you know

...