Pizzagate: We Investigate the (Real) Government Plot to Stuff You with Cheese
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What is the conspiracy theory about government cheese?
I think I should wear a tinfoil hat next time I'm on, considering my subject matter expertise here. I do want to try and summarize for people not familiar with your work, David Gardner. Thank you for being here, by the way. My pleasure. I want to summarize the beat that you have carved out for us here, because without being derogatory in any way, I would say that your beat is strangely irresistible and extremely popular crackpot internet theories.
I mean, the last time I was here, you had me investigating this viral conspiracy about whether there was a movie called Shazam! starring Sinbad, not to be confused with the movie Kazaam! starring Shaquille O'Neal. Right. And we asked him about it because that's how seriously I take these internet conspiracy theories.
Yeah, we brought big J journalism to the big Aristotle. And now, the strangely irresistible and extraordinarily insane internet theory you brought us that you've spent a disturbingly long time investigating, just in time for Super Bowl Sunday, by the way, originates where?
How did TikTok and internet conspiracies fuel this investigation?
Yeah, so this month's long journey that I've been on for you, it started with a 48-second TikTok video that went viral, and you're going to love the username here, Pablo, CupcakeTheDestroyer21. And here's what she had to say.
At one point in time in the United States, the dairy industry was struggling so heavily that they reached out to lobbyists who went to the government, who encouraged them to buy an excess of cheese to make sure the stock market didn't crash surrounding the dairy industry, resulting in what we now know as the cheese case, but also something else. While the government stores the cheese in the cheese caves, they also send out plenty of excess cheese to modern pizza chains in the United States. such as Papa John's and Domino's and Jets and pretty much every pizza chain you know of uses government cheese. Because they had such an excess of cheese and because they were looking for a way to get rid of it to justify the cost of buying so much, the government encouraged a lot of these chain pizza places to use more and more cheese in various products. The government is why we have stuffed crust pizza.
So this video by the aforementioned Cupcake the Destroyer 21 It's been viewed more than 10.5 million times, David Gardner. And she's saying a lot here, right? So just to run through the beats of her case, lobbyists begged the US government to save the dairy industry.
And prevent a stock market crash by buying, with taxpayer money, an insane surplus of cheese. Which the government has stored in underground cheese caves. And what the government ends up doing to justify their purchase of all this cheese is to tell Domino's and various pizza chains to figure out ways to put more of this cheese inside their products.
Right, which means, as Cupcake the Destroyer 21 says,
The government is why we have stuffed crust pizza.
Yeah, and CupcakeTheDestroyer21, although she's a crusader, she's not alone. There are Reddit threads about this. There are posts across social media about this. There are news articles in reputable newspapers and magazines that keep citing this. And it stems back from this front page story in 2010 in the New York Times. This investigative reporter uncovered a memo in which two Pizza Hut officials, they call themselves the Lord of the Cheese and the Lady of the Cheese. Because of course they do. thank their government partners and agree to begin putting more cheese in the pizza, including in the crust. As the Lord and the Lady wrote, quote, let's sell more pizza and more cheese, exclamation mark.
Right. I mean, there was a Netflix documentary series in which this was rather dramatically, I dare say, reenacted.
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