Editor’s Note: This story is one in a three-part series commemorating the 10-year anniversary of Pizzagate, a conspiracy theory that led to a shooting at the Washington, D.C., restaurant Comet Ping Pong in 2016. Read Ross Andersen’s story about Comet Ping Pong and Charlie Warzel’s profile of the Pizzagate shooter, Edgar Maddison Welch.

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Earlier this year, on his very popular podcast, Tucker Carlson brought up a “semi-forgotten story” that he had once found absurd. “I didn’t take Pizzagate as seriously, maybe, as I guess I should have at the time,” he said.

The time he was referring to is the late fall of 2016, just before and after the first election of Donald Trump, when the details of an imagined pedophilia ring that was organized by powerful Democrats began to spread online. The Pizzagate conspiracy theory was drawn from a batch of hacked emails from Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman, John Podesta, who had corresponded with the owner of a Washington, D.C., pizza restaurant called Comet Ping Pong. Podesta had sent a bunch of emails about pizza. It’s not worth your time for me to explain why some people became convinced that these were full of coded references to child sex slaves.

The important thing to know or remember is that, by early December, the theory was spilling over into practice. Edgar Welch, a 28-year-old North Carolina man, arrived at Comet one Sunday afternoon with a revolver and an AR-15, under the assumption that he would find and free the children being kept there. Now everyone could see that the aspersion-casting had gone too far. One of the leading Pizzagate influencers, Alex Jones, publicly apologized to Comet’s owner, presumably to avoid a lawsuit, and one of Trump’s favored far-right influencers, Jack Posobiec—a guy who had once barged into the restaurant himself, with a camera rolling—backed off too, eventually insisting that he had never even claimed the conspiracy was real. Pizzagate had become embarrassing, even to its early promoters.

But any trace of shame is now a distant memory. Ten years after its inception, Carlson is interested in Pizzagate—and regretful that he wasn’t interested before. In this, he’s not alone. Last January, when the government released millions of pages of files related to the crimes of Jeffrey Epstein, one subset of internet sleuths began by searching them for mentions of “pizza.” They found many. On his podcast, Carlson said he was intrigued by several in which Epstein and his urologist discussed going out for “pizza and grape soda,” a combination that Carlson found so absurd as to be suspicious. “Maybe this is code,” he said.

Carlson’s guest, an up-and-coming conspiracy-theory YouTuber named Ian Carroll, encouraged him to keep thinking. What if Welch’s storming of the pizzeria was not, after all, a sad example of the internet’s power to mislead, but rather something else: a cover-up? Sure, Welch had burst into Comet and terrorized the customers and employees within, but not a single person had been physically harmed (convenient). Welch’s bullets did end up damaging a computer (convenient), which may have contained who knows what kind of information (convenient). After Welch was arrested, he gave (convenient) quotes to reporters about how he’d been misled by online sources. That neat story, Carroll implied, had been designed to make it seem like any question-asking along the lines of Pizzagate was dangerous and wrong.

Carlson seemed convinced. When the interview went up on YouTube (where it currently has 2.7 million views), the video description read, “It looks like Pizzagate is basically real.” The same conclusion has in recent years been percolating throughout mainstream social-media platforms, where moderation rules once restricted discussion of Pizzagate. Following the Welch incident, nearly all of them made some effort to block Pizzagate-related hashtags or at least add warning labels to Pizzagate-related content—but these measures are no longer in place. “It’s become en vogue to revisit this theory,” Samuel Woolley, an associate professor and chair in disinformation studies at the University of Pittsburgh, told me.

Back in 2016, Pizzagate was interpreted as a close call and taken as a warning. It was a sign that any of the turbid fantasies that swirl around in online spaces might lap across the boundary with real life. But the shocking power of that revelation—drawn from an episode in which nobody got hurt and the shooter apologized—is hard to fathom now. More thorough bendings of reality have long since become the norm, and the barrier between the online and offline worlds is all but gone.

When government prosecutors asked that Edgar Welch be given 54 months in prison for his pizza-joint invasion, they cited the need to “deter other would-be vigilantes from attempting similar crimes against innocent subjects of the next internet-inspired conspiracy theory.” They said they thought it was important to make sure that such a weird thing never happened again.

Demian Ahn, who served as one of those prosecutors, told me that the sum total of all of the evidence in the case—what was on Welch’s phone, what his friends and family had said in interviews—indicated that Welch’s motivations were sincere. He really thought that he was going to be saving children from the basement of a pizza place. “He seemed to be a well-meaning person,” Ahn said. “He believed that Washington, D.C., as a city, was so corrupt that you could have a child-exploitation ring openly operated by prominent people at a regular restaurant.”

How exactly Welch had come to this belief would be the subject of various postmortems in the years that followed. These did not agree on where and how the Pizzagate story gained its crucial momentum: Some experts said that anonymous posters on 4chan drove the theory’s spread; others claimed that ordinary Facebook users played the most important role. Russian propagandists certainly were involved, eagerly reposting #Pizzagate content, but so were right-wing influencers in the United States.

However it emerged, Pizzagate did fade for a while after Welch’s arrest, before returning in expanded form with QAnon. That sprawling belief system took hold near the end of Trump’s first term, and imagined the president as an avenging angel, bringing violent justice to a network of Satanic Democrats who were after children’s blood. When social platforms cracked down on QAnon in 2020 and 2021, on account of its connection to the storming of the Capitol, the Pizzagate theory got tamped down once again. But it never really went away. Trump campaigned for his second term in part by incorporating QAnon slogans and themes into his messaging.

Today’s Pizzagate believers take a broader view than Welch did. As Samuel Woolley put it, they may not claim that all of the details of the theory were right on target—that there really was a basement full of trafficked children in a pizza place in D.C.—“but that the general thrust of the argument was correct.” (When Carlson and Carroll riffed on the theory, this is how they talked.) Many people now assert that Epstein started Pizzagate himself, to draw attention away from his own child-sex-related crimes, Woolley told me. They point suggestively to evidence that Epstein once met with 4chan’s founder.

Carlson, too, seems preoccupied with Epstein’s connection to Pizzagate. I reached out to him this fall, and when we spoke by phone, he kept returning to the same text-message exchange that he’d cited on his podcast, between Epstein and the billionaire’s urologist. “No rich white person drinks grape soda, period,” Carlson said. “Grape soda is probably more unfashionable than cigarettes among rich people. I just want to say that unequivocally. Where do you even buy grape soda?” Any reference to it in the texts was obviously code for something, he insisted. He just didn’t know for what.

Today’s conspiracy theories are ornate. They animate online communities of all different political bents and cultural referents, and they overlap in surprising and strange ways.

Take Ian Carroll, the guest on Carlson’s podcast, who is better known for filling in as the host of Candace Owens’s show while she was on maternity leave. He has launched an interactive tool called the “Webb,” which allows evidence from disparate public sources to be pieced together. Anyone can use his string-board engine to connect documents from the Epstein files to those concerning, among other things, UFOs, 9/11, the Zodiac Killer, and the murder of Charlie Kirk. (Carroll did not respond to requests for an interview.)

A site like that may still be somewhat of a niche concern, but a paranoid attitude has clearly become more widespread in our culture since 2016. An attempted assassination at the White House Correspondent’s Dinner, a flood in Texas, or a football team’s failure—none are necessarily accepted as what they seem. The facts themselves may not always matter so much as the thrill of riffing and guessing. At one point in the Pizzagate episode of his podcast, Carlson told Carroll that he thought he’d heard that the shooter ended up getting killed right before the Epstein files came out. “Is that true?” he asked.

“I heard the same reporting,” Carroll said. “Obviously, at this point, I don’t really know what’s true. The whole world feels a little bit like The Matrix.” In fact, the timeline is unambiguous: Edgar Welch was shot and killed by police in January 2025 after pointing a gun at an officer during a traffic stop; the Epstein files were released in December of that year.

Later, when I spoke with Carlson on the phone, he explained that he’d disregarded Pizzagate originally because he’d been too close to it. Literally, he’d lived near Comet and taken his children there for pizza. He knew John Podesta, his brother, and his brother’s wife personally, and he knew the pizza-shop owner too. “It seemed so far-out, I don’t think I spent 10 minutes thinking about it.”

Now he lives in Maine and eats gas-station pizza, he told me. And he is very confused as to why the Epstein files’ references to pizza and grape soda haven’t gotten more attention from media and law enforcement. “Everyone is effectively covering for Epstein—why?” he said. “I don’t know the answer.”

After we hung up, I reasoned that it was fair to ask a journalist to look into this matter, so I did. Epstein and his urologist talked about pizza and grape soda at least five times in 2018, the year before Epstein’s death. I couldn’t reach the urologist by phone to ask why. But on one occasion, he’d accompanied his text with a photo. He was in a pizza shop, having a cheese slice with a bottle of Crush grape soda.

*Illustration source: Mugshot Zone

The mythical story of the Buffalo Bills could be told like this: Their fans are crazy and live in the snow. They shovel this snow out of their stadium to help their godforsaken football team, which, until recently, was most famous for losing the Super Bowl four times in a row in the early 1990s. According to one theory, those failures fed into Timothy McVeigh’s derangement before he planned and executed the Oklahoma City bombing. The franchise was an utter disaster, for the most part, until the 2018 arrival of an otherworldly quarterback named Josh Allen, who has exhibited many heroics. But he has yet to bring his team to the Super Bowl.

Four of his playoff runs have ended with haunting losses to the quarterback Patrick Mahomes and the Kansas City Chiefs. The others were cut short in unromantic fashion—­most recently by one of the sloppier performances of Allen’s career, against the Denver Broncos.

From the outside, you might ask: “Can he really do it?” But in Buffalo, the words Josh Allen come out like “Good morning.” On a Sunday afternoon in September, I sat down in an ancient tavern near the Buffalo River to eat chicken wings and watch the Bills’ division rivals, the New England Patriots, play the Pittsburgh Steelers. An older man joined me and asked, unprompted, if I liked Josh Allen. “Who doesn’t?” I said. He revealed that he was wearing a Josh Allen shirt under his sweater, said that he would get another one for me out of his car, and then did.

Josh Allen is everywhere in Buffalo. He appears in murals and on billboards; road signs are doctored to feature his name and face. At the grocery store, you can buy Josh Allen Crunch Time cereal and cantaloupes grown on the Allen family’s farm, in Firebaugh, California. There is hardly a business in the city that does not possess at least one life-size cutout of the man. (Shortly after I left, an 11-story banner of him went up downtown.)

In a parking lot near the team’s brand-new Highmark Stadium, I chatted with Jenny Kless, a kind-eyed woman who tailgates out of a refurbished Volkswagen bus. When it came time to talk about Josh Allen, she put her hand over her heart. “What a beautiful person he is,” she said, and assured me that Bills fans believe he can do anything. “I’m gonna spell that for you: B-I-L-L-I-E-V-E.”

I found Andy Dikens and Gary Thomas tailgating by a Tesla Cybertruck. They told me they’d been following the team since the ’80s and now had the same opinion on Josh Allen, which they expressed in tandem:

Dikens: He’s a stud.
Thomas: He’s the best player in the league.
Dikens: Best player in the league by far.
Thomas: Definitely a stud, I agree.

Leo Roth, a longtime sports columnist for the Democrat and Chronicle in Rochester, about 60 miles east, told me that Allen is the best player Buffalo has ever had, and claimed that even Jim Kelly, the first-ballot Hall of Fame quarterback who led the Bills to those four consecutive Super Bowls, would agree. (When I emailed Kelly to confirm, he answered, “Yes, I’m not scared to admit that.”) As many sports people see it, Roth said, Allen may be the team’s best, last hope of redemption. “If you can’t win it with this guy,” they say, “you probably never will.”

To saddle one man with the hopes and dreams of an entire city is a heady gamble with, well, the hopes and dreams of an entire city. But Buffalo’s circumstances may inspire a little shooting-for-the-moon. It’s a highly segregated, economically stagnant, postindustrial city that has been struggling for decades. Buffalo has a fascinating history and many great qualities; it would be unfair and inaccurate to say the people there have nothing but football. Yet football plainly matters far more to its modern-day sense of self than anything else.

Robert Thompson, a professor of television and popular culture at Syracuse University who has lived in the area for 30 years, was the first person I spoke with who directly acknowledged the risks involved in belief. “I suppose I look at Josh Allen like I would look at an economy that was based on one agricultural product,” he said. In that situation, you have to pray.

The Bills’ new, $2 billion stadium, a gigantic silver spaceship plopped among converted mills and manufacturing plants, was partly paid for by Erie County and New York State taxpayers; the state leased the place to the team’s owners, Terry and Kim Pegula (who also own the Buffalo Sabres). The stadium is named—as its predecessor was—for a health-­insurance company. Inside, the design and decor nod to local folkways, most notably in the form of a 20-foot sculpture of a broken folding table—the cheap kind that you would buy for a backyard barbecue or school fund­raiser.

This is a monument to a Buffalo tradition. Sometime in the 2010s, fans began body-slamming foldable tables at tailgates. Although now understood as something people do in good humor, because they are drunk and love the Bills so much, that’s not how the ritual started. “They were doing stuff like that because the team was so bad,” Mike Catalana, the sports director of the ABC affiliate in Rochester, told me. They needed to entertain themselves somehow. My husband’s childhood friend Dan, whose family is from Buffalo, put it differently: The table-breaking habit was a display of dark humor—­half-ironic self-harm carried out by people who were miserable.

I grew up in a small town south of Rochester, which also gets a good deal of lake-effect snow. Still, I remember a general feeling that our neighbor city was full of eccentrics who, for un­fathomable reasons, had chosen to live in a depressed Arctic-like region rather than someplace normal. The Bills were part of their sad lot. We had some true-blue fans in my hometown, but in general our community regarded the Bills with a degree of remove—we wished them well, but we didn’t necessarily want to get involved. My classmates instead concocted reasons to root for better teams: the Steelers, the Patriots, the Colts. Today, many people I grew up with are now Bills Mafia. But I know—and they know—it wasn’t always so.

I don’t begrudge anybody their porch flags or bumper stickers, however they behaved in decades past. The spirit is catching, and what else are you going to do? A couple of Christmases ago, my uncle—a farmer who is known locally for his Bing Crosby eyes and sometimes-mean-­spirited sense of humor—told me that he’d been rooting against the Bills because he didn’t like to see other people getting so excited. But, he said, he’d had to stop. Even he couldn’t root against a guy like Josh Allen.

On paper, the Bills’ chances may be better than they’ve ever been before. (By week four of this season, the Vegas odds were giving them the best shot at winning the Super Bowl.) The Bills’ defense has gotten younger and faster; they traded for the very talented wide receiver DJ Moore. Many of the fans I met in Buffalo suggested that Allen is also getting better—that he’s more mature as a player and a human being, having married the actor Hailee Steinfeld and become a family man. They love her too, and call her the queen of Buffalo.

By the week of my visit, the Bills had already won their first game of the season, in Houston, on a touchdown throw from Allen after the two-­minute warning. Now they were set to play the Detroit Lions, in what would be the first-ever regular-season game in a stadium that all manner of T-shirts call The House That Josh Built. A few controversies about the building had already emerged—fan backlash against the soaring cost of attendance, a confusing sod debacle—but in the tailgate areas on Thursday afternoon, people were simply amped and optimistic.

When I arrived at Hammer’s Lot, a popular site down the street from both the remnants of the old stadium and its gleaming replacement, the first person I saw was shirtless and, frankly, pantsless. He wore a gladiator-style skirt constructed entirely out of Labatt Blue boxes. I’d guess that 80 percent of the men were wearing Josh Allen jerseys. But the crowd was diverse. I saw super-pregnant women in red-and-blue zebra-striped leggings, older women in red-and-blue-bedazzled jeans, and teen girls in sweatshirts with red and blue hearts on the sleeves.

There are some generational divides and hints of factions within the Bills fandom, and you might sketch the boundaries of these groups based on their relationship to this parking lot. The longtime owner, local resident Eric Matwijow, is beloved by a huge crowd of regulars; he claims that some of them have spread their family members’ ashes on his gravel. Matwijow also told me that “woke” or “nose ring” Bills fans do not like him. Nor do the table-slammers, because Hammer’s Lot prohibits that activity (on account of its being dangerous and stupid). He also openly resents the people who call themselves the “Bills Mafia” because he is old enough to remember the actual Mafia in Buffalo, which, as he mentioned to me, was all about murder and torture and stealing and other crimes.

To be fair, Del Reid, a 50-year-old former web developer, coined the term Bills Mafia accidentally, in 2011. It was a tongue-in-cheek response during a Twitter feud with a sports reporter that took on a life of its own. Reid and Matwijow have very different styles and a degree of personal animosity, but they come together on one thing, which is, of course, Josh Allen. Neither was bothered that their hometown quarterback is from California. He’s not from California California, they each separately explained, but from the Central Valley. He’s “not a surfer dude,” Reid told me. “He’s a farm boy,” Matwijow said.

The way they talked about him reminded me of how A. Bartlett Giamatti once described New Yorkers’ feelings toward the great Mets pitcher Tom Seaver, who also came east from California, bringing miracles. “He contrasted completely with the part of the country he was known to come from,” Giamatti, a future baseball commissioner, wrote in 1977. People who had little in common with Seaver loved him because he was “a working guy who got rewarded,” “who went by the rules and made it.”

Although Allen isn’t a Buffalo native, he fits in as though he were, Reid added. “We love him, and he loves us back.”

In the plaza in front of Highmark Stadium, enormous steel bison puffed steam from their nostrils. Inside the stadium, the energy was even more rock-and-roll.

Before the game, an introductory video declared the new Highmark “a beacon of blue-collar football built for Buffalo, by Buffalo.” The crowd’s full-throated celebration was followed by the boom of fireworks. More than 60,000 attendees had been given light-up bracelets that were designed to flash red, white, and blue at dramatic moments, such as when Allen ran onto the field for the first time.

The Bills loped down the field on their opening drive, which ended with Allen running for a touchdown and the Jumbotron instructing everyone to sing “The Bills make me want to SHOUT!” The Bills scored another touchdown on their next drive, and we stood to “SHOUT!” again. When Allen ran it in toward the end of the third quarter, we were on our fifth rendition. The final score was 41–31, and the Bills were 2–0 by midnight. “I can’t wait to watch the highlights,” a woman in front of me said, with a sigh, to a friend as we walked to our cars.

Just before I left Buffalo, I sat with my laptop in the café section of a Wegmans—where customers could impulse-buy a chunk of turf from the old stadium for $99.99—and listened to the old men nearby chat about the game over coffee and doughnuts. It was good news and bad news. Allen looked perfect, but the defense needs to gel, they said. Things were going well, but nobody knows what will happen in a long season. Sports are sick and twisted. Even the hottest start can fizzle out, as Buffalonians know in their bones. (They would lose to the Patriots in week four.)

The Bills curse is vague. The fans feel cursed, but they have never settled on the place to pin this feeling. One theory holds that Buffalo is destined to lose because President William McKinley was assassinated in the city, at the Pan-American Exposition in 1901. Mark Poloncarz, the county executive who helped negotiate the terms for the new stadium, told me that he’d joined Mayor Sean Ryan to lay a wreath at a monument to McKinley in downtown Buffalo this year, and that Ryan had asked McKinley to release the city from his vengeance. Other theories about the Bills’ misfortune involve more classic stuff—for instance, that the old stadium had been placed nearly on top of a small cemetery, and occupied land that once belonged to Native Americans. (The new stadium is at least 1,000 feet from the cemetery and has signage that acknowledges the Seneca Nation.)

Phil Passafiume, a Buffalo fan I spoke with in Hammer’s Lot, suggested one more factor: The old Highmark had featured O. J. Simpson on a wall among the team’s other legends; the new one leaves him off. The city and team have addressed so many of their potential curses this year; if the Bills finally do win, they’ll never know which one was really the source of their troubles.

That their day of triumph will come, this year or sometime soon, feels inevitable to me—if only because it’s too dark to imagine otherwise. The Sunday after my trip, as I sat in a Brooklyn sports bar watching the Bills with my hands pressed to my face, fully converted to the cause, I thought back to what Roth, the newspaper columnist, had said about Josh Allen: “If you can’t win it with this guy, you probably never will.” Knock on wood and God forbid.

*Illustration source images: Kevin Sabitus / Getty; Bryan M. Bennett / Getty; Ric Tapia / Getty; Juan Alejandro Bernal / Shutterstock; Quintin Soloviev / Wikimedia.

This article appears in the December 2026 print edition with the headline “The Most Cursed Team in American Sports.”