A Tweet from American model Christine Teigen:
It is INCREDIBLY weird to be two (semi) normal, ridiculously boring human beings who literally make food, watch tv and clean up dog barf in any kind of off time and then be suddenly accused of being in Hollywood’s hottest pedo ring. What a year what a year, 2017.
Teigen (var. Chrissy Teigen) has been targeted on social media by Pizzagate cranks after conspiricist pedo-hunter Liz Crokin purported to discern secret meanings in Teigen’s social media postings. In particular, Crokin noted that Teigen had posted images of her toddler daughter “dressed as a hot dog, Alice in Wonderland & a pineapple”, and had used an emoji of a pizza slice. Such supposed codes were the inspiration for the Pizzagate conspiracy, as I discussed here.
Crokin also added three tags to her Tweet: “followthewhiterabbit”; “Qanon”; and the “TheStorm”. These terms refer to the latest incarnation of the conspiracy theory, as recently explained in a New York Times Magazine article by Paris Martineau, under the grim headline “The Storm Is the New Pizzagate — Only Worse”. According to Martineau (links in original):
On October 28, someone calling themselves Q began posting a series of cryptic messages in a /pol/ thread titled “Calm Before the Storm” (assumedly in reference to that creepy Trump quote from early October). Q claimed to be a high-level government insider with Q clearance (hence the name) tasked with posting intel drops — which he, for some reason, called “crumbs” — straight to 4chan in order to covertly inform the public about POTUS’s master plan to stage a countercoup against members of the deep state.
…According to Q, Trump was never really involved with Russia, and isn’t actually under investigation by Mueller & Co. On the contrary, Q insists that it’s actually Clinton and Obama who were corrupted by Putin (and are now actually under investigation by Mueller)
…In this fantasy world, all of the far right’s wildest dreams come true: Q promises that Clinton, Obama, Podesta, Abedin, and even McCain are all either arrested and wearing secret police-issued ankle monitors, or just about to be indicted; that the Steele dossier is a total fabrication personally paid for by Clinton and Obama; and that the Las Vegas massacre was most definitely an inside job connected to the Saudi-Clinton cabal…
It seems to me very likely that the conspiracy theory also draws on a claim made to Alex Jones by one Craig Sawyer in April that Trump had made 3,000 secret arrests of “elite paedophiles”. As I blogged in July, this claim – in essence a millenarian fantasy – has been subsequently disseminated by others, such as the Christian Right’s “firefighter prophet” Mark Taylor.
Crokin believes that commercial flights are being “turned around”, presumably because of alerts from the supposed ankle-tags, and Teigen appears to have come to her attention because she was recently on a flight to Tokyo that was returned to Los Angeles as a security measure after it was realised that an extra person had been allowed to board in error. Teigen’s Tweets on the subject made the incident newsworthy.
In response to threats of legal action from Teigen and her husband John Legend, Crokin has attempted to reel back from her unambiguous and foul insinuation about why Teigen had dressed her daughter in innocent costumes: she has now deleted her Tweet, although she has also RTed a screenshot of it posted by someone else. Further, she is now falsely suggesting that she only ever said that the celebrity couple were “pals” of abusers, and she has posted photos of them at public events with Harvey Weinstein, the Clintons and Kevin Spacey (Teigen is a long-time critic and mocker of Trump, and was even blocked by him on Twitter in July).
As I noted in October, Crokin has previously written for Townhall, Hagmann Report and WND, and she has also appeared as a guest on various fringe media outlets: these include – as noted by Right Wing Watch – “anointed speaker” Meri Crouley’s Now is the Time programme on Joseph Nassralla’s The Cross TV station, and Dave Hodges’ The Common Sense Show. In May, she appeared on the David Icke-affiliated Richie Allen Show, claiming that Townhall had fired her for writing about VIP paedophiles, and she returned in October to explain that paedophilia in Hollywood was being covered up because of Jewish control of the media.
Last month, Right Wing Watch noted that according to Crokin, “the fact that Democratic lobbyist Tony Podesta likes to wear red shoes is a sign that he is a pedophile because the Illuminati uses the movie ‘The Wizard of Oz’ to brainwash child sex slaves.” She made the claim during her “second appearance on a program hosted by one-time ‘Survivor’ contestant Anna Khait that was streamed on Mike Cernovich’s Facebook page“.
Twitter has responded to Teigen’s concerns by removing Crokin’s blue tick verification symbol, but the platform continues to allow her to vilify a young couple who have done nothing wrong – and perhaps to endanger Teigen’s family by riling up gun-toting cranks with saviour complexes, as happened at Comet Ping Pong.
Legend has also drawn attention to a very informative thread on the subject by Alexandra Erin.
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