WikiLeaks published tens of thousands of leaked emails from the personal account of John Podesta, former President Bill Clinton's chief of staff, in late 2016.

The decentralized army of sleuths that subsequently combed over the leaked emails found not only damning insights into Hillary Clinton and her doomed presidential campaign but odd messages about pizza, hot dogs, ice cream, and other foods.

'842 occurrences of the word pizza, which seems like a lot.'

The recurring references to food in non-culinary contexts prompted some to theorize that they were code words related to pedophilia and human trafficking — a theory that the mainstream media and so-called fact-checkers emphasized was "dangerous," "fake news," and, in essence, a "moral panic."

New York Magazine, one of the publications that strenuously criticized the so-called Pizzagate theory nine years ago, suggested in the wake of the new Jeffrey Epstein documents' release that "pizza" might be a code word, after all.

Dan Brooks, writing for New York Magazine, noted that the latest trove of Epstein files published by the Department of Justice "contains 842 occurrences of the word pizza, which seems like a lot. By comparison, the word hamburger appears only 190 times, while the phrase 'sex with children' appears 20 times."

Brooks admitted that "some of the pizza-related material seems pretty weird."

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Photo by Joe Schildhorn/Patrick McMullan via Getty Images

Not only did Epstein appear to have automated alerts reminding him to deliver a certain individual pizza, but he was asked on more than one occasion if individuals could have a "quick pizza" together in his absence.

One email said, "I wanted to let you know that the crew really enjoyed the pizza today. Thank you for letting us do that."

Another message from a redacted sender stated, “This is better than a Chinese cookie! Let's go for pizza and grape soda again. No one else can understand."

Additional emails carry subject lines such as “The Pizza Monster!” and include more peculiar uses of the word.

“You mean radiating a soft glow with the look of bliss and excitement. Yeah, that's the pizza...” one message reads.

"These recent Epstein materials do make the financier seem strangely interested in pizza and unusually committed to having it delivered to other people," added Brooks.

There are also recurring references to "pizza and grape soda" in the child sex offender's texts and emails.

Despite the strangeness of the exchanges, a photograph in a text conversation between Epstein and his urologist appears to indicate that on at least one occasion, they were actually discussing pizza and grape soda.

While there has been plenty of speculation in recent weeks about the pizza references, particularly because they appear in both the Epstein and Podesta files, the term "cream cheese," which appears 196 times throughout the Epstein messages, has also raised eyebrows.

In one exchange, a participant wrote, "Lol, I don’t know if cream cheese and baby are on the same level," alongside discussions of scheduling activities that some observers say raise further concern. The phrase also appears in other unsettling contexts, including "cream cheese baby."

The use of cheese and pizza imagery in reference to pedophilia and child abuse is not limited to so-called Pizzagate conspiracy theorists.

In 2020, the Telegraph, a U.K.-based newspaper, reported that a parents' group working to curb the dissemination of child sex abuse material online allegedly found that cheese and pizza emojis were being used as stand-ins for "CP," meaning "child porn."

The founder of the group, a London woman identified only as India, indicated that in some cases, individuals using the emojis shared images of children scraped from parents' social media accounts.

"There are pictures of little boys aged 5 or 6 on the beach in their swimming trunks and chances are that picture was taken by their parents on their holiday," said India. "Somehow that picture has gotten into their hands."

Brooks, prickled by recent declarations by Redditors and others that at least one core Pizzagate claim might have been accurate all along, stated, "If Epstein and his friends did use pizza as a code word for sex, that wouldn’t mean that the original Pizzagate conspiracy theory was correct — even if it was also the case that pizza was a sexual code word in the Podesta emails."

After spending the bulk of his article entertaining the possibility that "a syndicate of pedophiliac celebrities, financiers, and their urologists," equipped with code words, committed "unimaginable acts of cruelty," Brooks spends his final paragraphs attacking those who made similar claims nearly a decade ago.

The NY Mag contributor suggested that such "conspiracists" — not the allegedly vampiric cosmopolitan elites who might refer to their preferred victim types with fast-food references — are "one of the most terrifying forces in 21st-century America."

Having turned his ire away from the dead pedophile and his associates to those Americans searching for justice and accountability, Brooks concluded his article by smearing American democracy as a "well-documented conspiracy of morons."

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