I always hated the binary way of reading news. My grandmother experienced the propaganda during the WWII, so she had a simple rule to read news, which she passed to me: "when everything is clear, you got fake news". Which is true: fake news are easy to spot: when everything is clear, when evil and good are easy defined, when there is a sharp edge between evil, good, right, wrong, heroes and villains, then you are being misinformed.
Which meant, on the eyes of my grandma , some kind of propaganda.
I follow the same rule today, and I can see how good it is (which means propaganda methods never changed since the WWII) , so I am thankful to my grandma. Anyhow, also this way to say "propaganda/truth" is too binary. May books were not telling the truth (Romeo and Juliet never existed, by example) , still they had valuable information to share, or at least a message to propagate.
So, now, imagine pizzagate is a fiction book written by anyone. Or a movie , telling a fictional story. Still, what is the message this fiction delivers? Is there a metaphor around it? What the pedophiles, the satanic rituals, are symbols for, in this fiction, by example?
So let's start from the message. If a pizzagate was a romance book written by an author, let's say a chinese guy, Mr. Four Chan, what was the message he wanted to tell to the reader? I would read it like that:
"The elites are abusing the young generations in a disgusting way, to fulfill some horrible appetite, under the inspiration of a evil ideology".
Here the symbols are, more or less , clear:
- The babies being abused are a symbol for the new generations: no future, no real job, less income, unemployment, no more rights at work, and so on. The financial elites make slaves of them (think to people with a bachelor working at McDonald's or Wal Mart, for a few bucks , and still slave of a student loan).
- Satanism in the pizzagate plot represents some horrible ideology, which we could call "globalism" or "turboliberism", which makes all that elites to behave the same and to agree on their plans.
- Pedofilia is a the symbol of some horrible appetite, which could represent by an insatiable greed of money, an insane lust for luxury , power, fame. Which the idea people has of "the elites".
If we go reading the pizzagate in that way, it appears clear why people will not abandon it: is like asking people into romance to abandon Romeo and Juliet. Sure, the story is not reflecting facts, but it reflects their view of facts.
Until people thinks that "The elites are abusing the young generations in a disgusting way, to fulfill some horrible appetite, under the inspiration of a evil ideology" the story behind pizzagate is true, no matters how fake it is: it represents the idea people has of the elites, regardless of the fact is true or not, as much as Romeo&Juliet represented an idea of love, regardless of the fact they never existed.
This is important to understand this kind of fake news and their diffusion: a fake news is working until it reflects the idea people already has. It is just a fictional story, full of symbols, with the aim to explain the truth in simple words.
The most of people which believes the pizzagate was already convinced that "The elites are abusing the young generations in a disgusting way, to fulfill some horrible appetite, under the inspiration of a evil ideology", now this story just confirms in full what they were thinking.
Now, let's go back one step and check: is it true or false that ""The elites are abusing the young generations in a disgusting way, to fulfill some horrible appetite, under the inspiration of a evil ideology"?
As a matter of facts, it is very hard to proof this is false. Young generations are abused. This 1% of people which has everything has "everything their fathers hoped their sons could have". Everything my generation worked for, hoping it was for our sons, is now concentrated in the hands of some "elite". (Which , btw, seems not to have such a talent to deserve the name "elite": the average finance man is often ignorant, dull, gross, and very average in term of IQ, by example.)
So the pizzagate (as like many of the stories we see now) is fake news. The problem is, those fake news are based on a true story:
This is why they are getting popular and popular everyday: they do not need to be true. They only need to be based on a true story, where a true story is just a (social|political|cultural) truth people is persuaded about.
The pizzagate just reflects what people thinks about young people and elites:
The elites are abusing the young generations in a disgusting way, to fulfill some horrible appetite, under the inspiration of a evil ideology"
Until people will keep thinking that, the pizzagate will never end, no matters how many evidence you can put of the table of pizzagate being fake news.