Ajit Pai Wants The Internet To Know You Can Still Harlem Shake After Net Neutrality Is Gone

Ajit Pai, the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, appeared Wednesday in a video promoting the end of net neutrality regulations with a woman who has been accused of pushing the false "Pizzagate" conspiracy theory.

The accompanying article was written by Benny Johnson, who was previously fired from BuzzFeed for plagiarism.

To promote his plan, Pai filmed a video with the Daily Caller that many have called cringeworthy. In it, he says users will still be able to upload selfies to Instagram and run memes into the ground. He also does the Harlem Shake with some of the Daily Caller's staff. (Baauer, who recorded the song, seems interested in net neutrality. He didn't return a request for comment, but later tweeted , "I'm taking action. Whatever I can do to stop this loser.")

Repealing net neutrality — which the FCC voted to do on Thursday — is widely seen as good for corporations and bad for consumers, who could be asked to pay for higher internet speeds. Abolishing net neutrality also allows service providers to block access to certain websites, for example torrenting sites that allow users to download content illegally .

Pai campaigned to repeal the Obama-era policy on net neutrality, which prevents internet service providers from controlling the speed at which some websites load.

One of the people doing the Harlem Shake with Pai is Martina Markota, a video producer for the Daily Caller. In February, she uploaded a video to YouTube titled "some thoughts on Pizzagate," which has since been delisted.

Markota's video focused on the term "cheese pizza," which is one of the "code words" conspiracists point to when justifying the conspiracy theory.



"My family didn't know what Pizzagate was, but a lot of our viewers do and are well-informed on the subject," Markota says in the video. She then talks about knowing what the term "cheese pizza" meant "independently of the campaign." There are also humorous shots of Markota eating some cheese pizza.

The video itself was produced by the Proud Boys, a right-wing group headed by Gavin McInnes, the Canadian cofounder of Vice. The Proud Boys were present during the white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, when a driver plowed into the crowd of counterprotesters and killed Heather Heyer. A member of the group, which later distanced itself from the violence, was one of the rally organizers.



The debunked Pizzagate theory started after Democratic National Committee chairman John Podesta's emails were leaked following a 2016 hack. Some conspiracy theorists extrapolated bogus meanings from pizza orders in the emails to say orders like "cheese pizza" were codewords that proved Democrats were running a pedophilia operation in the basement of the Comet Ping Pong pizza parlor in Washington, DC.

The theory burst into the mainstream after a gunman entered the pizza joint and fired his weapon while "investigating" the conspiracy, which he said he'd read about online. Nobody was hurt and he has since been sentenced to four years in prison.

When BuzzFeed News reached out to Markota for comment Thursday, she said the video was about "cheese pizza" being a codeword for pedophilia. She gave an example of reports that a New Jersey man was charged for child pornography after posting about "cheese pizza" on Craigslist — an action that came 8 months after her video was posted.

When asked whether Markota believes in the Pizzagate theory, she did not deny it. "Embrace the mystery," she wrote in a Twitter direct message.

After this article was published, Markota sent a statement to BuzzFeed News requesting a retraction and a public apology from several publications for portraying her as someone who believed in the Pizzagate conspiracy theory.

"I do not believe in the Pizzagate conspiracy theory," the statement says, "I have never believed in the Pizzagate conspiracy theory, and I have never said in any online video that I am a believer in the conspiracy theory."