Very Online (Part 2)
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Very Online is an ongoing series about the before, during, and after of when I was targeted as part of the Pizzagate conspiracy theory (fun!). You can read more in Very Online Part 1. Part 3 emails out this fall, and Low Swank will be back at it on Friday, 8.1.
It was a month into lockdown, late April 2020, and my apartment’s resident bartender was working overtime. Pleasantly fuzzy and with the end credits of a movie rolling, I opened Instagram to a small flood of Pizzagate-related comments and DMs. Over the previous four years I’d get a couple of these a month, so it wasn’t a total shock—but why were they arriving in bulk? I blocked and deleted, had another glass of wine, and went to bed. And then my husband found the video.
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From 2008 until 2014 I ran an online art magazine. It was really very cute—and also cool and sometimes weird, because is that not what an online art magazine should be? It featured original photography and illustration and music; for one issue we climbed in through the window of the abandoned Wonderbread factory at 7th & S and shot a fashion spread; a few years later we took a small group of people camping and made a spooky, 1970s cult-inspired video of ourselves chanting the Golden Girls theme song around a campfire.
re: “we," I worked with a few close creative collaborators to put the whole thing together, on the content production side and also on getting it online and making it look beautiful. One of those collaborators worked at Comet Ping Pong—the neighborhood pizza place at the center of the Pizzagate conspiracy theory—and by extension the owner (a stalwart champion of the city’s art and artists) was just so incredibly generous and supportive of the project. We hosted a dinner there, had launch parties and photo shoots, and for years the magazine was listed and linked on their site, alongside maybe 20-or-so other DC entities, as a “Friend of Comet.”
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I won’t get into the details of how Pizzagate exploded in 2016, because (a) it’s almost too stupid to talk about and (b) there are a lot of really well-researched, completely credible resources out there, but suffice it to say that it was an election year. People glommed onto it, fueled by the fantasy that they were saving the children. It thundered through Comet’s staff and closest neighbors, reverberating down through the smallest cracks. Social media allowed the stalking of geotags and follower lists; there were message boards dedicated to fringe theories and “suspects.” If you’d been listed as a “Friend of Comet,” this crept its way into your Google alerts, and sure—a couple times a month someone would message that they were coming to arrest you, but you learned to ignore it.
In 2020—another election year, naturally—there was a resurgence. Lockdown-crazed conspiracy theorists who’d exhausted old threads followed new ones, and the content machine went into overdrive. By that point I had nine years worth of Instagram posts, six issues of the online magazine, and personal blog archives stretching back fourteen years. So when the chaos agents who shaped these sorts of narratives went looking for “evidence,” there was a lot of material to work with.
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I woke up the next morning only slightly worse for wear, but to an onslaught of new Instagram notifications. I was still in bed when my husband handed me his laptop. “There’s a video,” he told me, and he sounded scared. It was at that moment I started to feel like I was outside of my body.
It had over a hundred thousand views. It purported to be a documentary. And most upsettingly, it was really, really well done. “This is a photo of Morgan’s front door,” said the narrator, and I thought I was going to be sick.
“Very Online (Part 2)” emailed out 7.18.2025. Subscribe here.