Pizzagate Montage

The fact that mainstream media has declared that the entire collection of alternative media posts which go under the hash tag "Pizzagate" are "fake news" is perhaps a good reason to actually take it seriously.

In today's show we delve into this topic with an aim to highlight what we definitively know rather than engage in speculation and conjecture. This leads us into a discussion of the imagery which has been advanced as evidence of a pedophile ring from the angle of psychopathology.

We examine the concepts of paraphilia and fetishism and how they relate to the images which were allegaedly pulled from the instagram page of the owner of a pizzeria in Washington DC - an influential Democrat lobbyist and friend of Hillary Clinton and John Podesta.

We suggest an alternate hypothesis to that of most of the "pizzagate research" - namely that the bulk of of these images seem to be related to "gay culture". This hypothesis is not intended as a value judgement and we emphasise that no vilification of homosexual people is intended or imputed.

DEFINITIONS

Paraphilia 
"Paraphilia (also known as sexual perversion and sexual deviation) is the experience of intense sexual arousal to atypical objects, fetishes, situations, fantasies, behaviors, or individuals."

"The American Psychiatric Association, in its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, Fifth Edition, draws a distinction between paraphilias (which it describes as atypical sexual interests) and paraphilic disorders (which additionally require the experience of distress or impairment in functioning)."
- source

Sexual Fetishism
"Sexual fetishism or erotic fetishism is a sexual fixation on a nonliving object or nongenital body part. The object of interest is called the fetish; the person who has a fetish for that object is a fetishist."
- source

Sitophilia
"A form of sexual fetishism in which participants are aroused by erotic situations involving food."
- source

Despite the recent trend to regard fetishes as harmless, studies have shown that "offenders scoring high in psychopathy were significantly more likely to have a sadistic paraphilia than offenders with either low or moderate psychopathy scores". 

Today's show goes into some of these issues and we bring you a short clip from the narcissism expert Sam Vaknin related to the subject matter.

The sexual fantasy life of narcissists and psychopaths - Sam Vaknin:

Related Links

The saga of 'Pizzagate': The fake story that shows how conspiracy theories spread
Pizzagate News: ‘BBC’ Supports James Alefantis But Did They Catch Him In A Lie?
Wikipedia – Food play
Is Homosexuality a Paraphilia? The Evidence For and Against
Relative prevalence of different fetishes
List of paraphilias
Survival of the Fetish
High-risk sexual offenders: an examination of sexual fantasy, sexual paraphilia, psychopathy, and offence characteristics.