This book depends on the various individuals and organizations who passed on details or leaked sensitive information that helped provide background and context.

The list of sources includes but is not limited to Cryptome, Crazy Days and Nights, Seth Rich, Julian Assange and Wikileaks, FBIAnon, Anonymous5, MegaAnon, HIVAnon, Brenden Dilley, Q and Big Dick Anon, originally known as GhostAnon. Without them, this book would not exist and millions of people would still be ignorant of the horrible plans the ruling elites had for us and our planet. To them my profound thanks.

To my parents, Reg and Amanda, who taught me the importance of history, geography and proper research, and who introduced me to the United States, her politics and her history at an impressionable age: thank you and much love.

To my long suffering family who have had to put up with Q decodes and red pills from me morning, noon and night for the past four years: thank you and much love.

Finally, to the rag-tag bunch of patriots around the world who I got to know on this journey, my profound indebtedness to all your hard work, insight and encouragement that made the journey so exhilarating.

This book is an examination of a unique event in history: a massive secret war between good and evil at the very highest level of geopolitics, mostly under our very noses. On the one side: President Trump, key people in his administration and loyal patriots in the US Military. On the other: a small group of very powerful people who have been bringing a centuries-long plan to conquer the West to completion. Some of the skirmishes and battles in this conflict have been visible, many have not.

The West was founded on Christianity, the European nations and the Greco-Roman tradition. It values justice, social order, heroism, chivalry and empiricism. So in order to destroy the West, all of these have been almost completely subverted over the last century by enemies from within. The decline has been observed and commented upon in many quarters but perhaps nowhere stranger than among a group of online users who started out by sharing pictures of anime characters on an anonymous Internet discussion board. Free from censorship and any kind of imaginary social approval, the users on this board forged their own ruthless and complex subculture characterized by truth, empiricism and almost limitless energy devoted to complex investigative work. As the Internet's power and pervasiveness has increased, so has this board's influence, so much so that the forces for good saw fit to employ its help to report to the world some of the details of the ongoing war.

In the past, it was next to impossible for any ordinary citizen to understand the real thoughts of their leaders. Nor could they comprehend the truth behind any secret operations. About the best that could be hoped for was the occasional declassification of operations from a generation ago or perhaps the published efforts of a particularly good - or lucky - investigative journalist. The age of electronic communications has changed that forever. The inmost thoughts of many powerful people as well as the details of some very secret contemporary operations are now freely available to browse and study by anyone with an Internet-connected device because of some or other lapse in online security. And the discussion board is always ready to get involved: digging, joining dots, creating memes and sometimes disrupting other helpless online communities because it's fun.

What the other side had planned for the world wasn't much fun though. To truly appreciate the horrifying truth of it, I now invite you to go on the same journey as I did. You be the judge of whether, like Jeremiah's scribe Baruch, I was a faithful transcriber of these cataclysmic events.

On July 2nd, 2016, an anonymous user created a new discussion thread on the 4chan Politically Incorrect message board, /pol/, and claimed he was intimately familiar with the inner workings of the Clinton case. The ever-skeptical users of the board - called anons - were dubious at first and rightly so. 4chan is anonymous: anyone can post from anywhere in the world and claim anything. And naturally, people do. It's a common game on the board to Live Action Role Play or LARP, that is pretend you're someone you're not just to yank the chains of other anons or lead them down the garden path with incredible inside information that turns out to be entirely made up. Sometimes this caution can backfire: real leaks can and do happen on 4chan although they are somewhat rare. A leaker from the Australian intelligence services had dumped highly sensitive information onto 4chan in 2015 only to have it dismissed by the hostile hivemind as 'fake and gay.' The initial reaction to the supposed Clinton insider was little different, at least at first.

replied the as yet unverified investigator. He got right to the point: he was sitting at home browsing 4chan because he had been sent home as a result of the huge firestorm caused by the US Attorney General, Loretta Lynch. A week before, she had been spotted conversing with former President Bill Clinton on the tarmac at a regional airport in Arizona. When the story broke and serious questions were asked about the discussion, she had
claimed that the two of them had discussed various innocuous topics such as their grandchildren. Few believed this - it was far more likely that Bill was putting some kind of pressure on Lynch to drop the issue of Hillary Clinton's email server, a topic that was causing some embarrassment to the Democratic presidential candidate with the November 8 election day just over four months away. Exactly what the FBI and the DoJ were planning to do about Hillary's indiscretions was as yet unclear.

The entire US government could be brought down? From some Clinton emails that Wikileaks had released? From the private email server she ran at home? No, said the insider. His concern was elsewhere.

This accusation would set the tone for the rest of the discussion. It rapidly became clear to most onlookers that this was no LARPer but a real insider and that he worked for the FBI as a high level analyst. If he was on 4chan exposing incredibly deep and wide levels of corruption within the US Government, then clearly things had got so out of control that he felt there was no other choice but to enlist the help of /pol/. The Special Access Programs he referred to are above top secret classified operations by the US government and include such information as missile silo locations and the identities of covert agents around the world. They are strictly allocated on a need to know basis and merely possessing them without permission is treason. What had Hillary been doing with them? Selling them to overseas donors claimed the FBI insider. She had already been under the spotlight about her use of the email server, most recently by the State Department Inspector General's office which had issued a report the week before. The FBI would go on to question her on the subject that very Saturday, mere hours after one of their employees was claiming off the record that the email server was actually not the real problem. If Clinton had been peddling US secrets to foreign donors, he had a point.

One of the immediate pushbacks from the audience was why the FBI was even considering *not* prosecuting Hillary Clinton. "In order to not cause an upheaval by cutting out the cancer, you are discussing letting the US die quietly," accused one anon and there were a couple of others who agreed in rather more strongly worded fashion. FBIAnon - as we quickly dubbed him - laid out the unpalatable options the agency had. First, it could turn over everything to the DoJ and make a public recommendation. Immediately, the rest of the world would find out just how much the US had been meddling in their affairs and a war would start. At the same time, the American people would realize just how much foreign money influences their own government and a civil war would start. The second option was to choose to reveal only a small amount of the information in order to implicate certain individuals, allowing a limited form of justice but without crashing the entire system. Option three was to do nothing and gauge the political climate to determine an appropriate response. In response to a frustrated suggestion to burn it all down, FBIAnon explained the difficulty.

The anons prodded further and were rewarded with more bombshells. President Obama was impeachment-level implicated. The Clintons use their foundation to deal in weapons, favors, intelligence and people. Hungarian billionaire George Soros was the kingpin, influencing every layer of the US government right down to the tax code. The Mossad did 9/11. He was 100% certain the Russians had hacked Hillary Clinton's personal email server and that President Putin had the information and would almost certainly leak it to mitigate any Clinton warmongering should she be elected. The Orlando bar attacks were an inside job by the CIA. Pedophiles and sex traffickers are everywhere, with many politicians trading girls like cattle.

Also the FBI was quite fond of /pol/. Really?

Some asked the obvious question: wasn't FBIAnon risking his life by coming on to /pol/? Yes he was but he hoped that a few of his more ridiculous-seeming claims were enough to keep him under the radar.

Suddenly being exposed to this appalling corruption and evil at the highest levels of world government can be very shocking. But /pol/ took it in its stride. What could the common-or-garden anon do to help fight it?

Enough anons were convinced and /pol/ got to work digging on the deals and connections of the Clinton Foundation. 4chan can be quite frightening in its efficiency when it puts its collective mind to something, and this was something. By Sunday a series of dedicated threads titled CFG, for Clinton Foundation General discussion had been kicked off and volunteers started contributing. One recalled that some anons on /pol/ had already been digging into the Foundation six months previously but that the trail had gone cold and the effort had been derailed by saboteurs, either directly by flooding the discussion with nonsense or disgusting images, or more subtly by shifting the discussion in the wrong direction. Standard 4chan shilling tactics. More disturbingly, back then one anon had been making connections between the Clinton campaign and some shady individual and had been contacted by an agent from the Department Of Homeland Security out of the blue. The agent suggested meeting at a Starbucks, prompting serious concern from his fellow researchers, including one who recalled that former White House intern Mary Mahoney had been murdered at a Starbucks in 1997, just before she was due to testify that she had been sexually harassed. Just one more entry on the already lengthy Clinton Body Count list. Did this anon end up the same way? I don't know. But bad people do watch these message boards and some can call on powerful resources. Stories of hackers and researchers being 'vanned' - detained and thrown into the back of the legendary Black Van Used By The Feds and taken away for interrogation - are legendary. Some are even true.

But the scale of the subversion of the US Government at all levels outlined by the FBI leaker was a strong motivation to get started again and the new threads started filling up with useful information. Despite the general perception, one that is deliberately spread by the mainstream media, that 4chan users are anime-worshipping neckbeards sitting in their parents' basements, there is a large variety of users with every kind of conceivable background that frequent the chans. Everyone's an expert on something and investigation threads bring out people who are adept with financial records, others with private investigation experience and still others with expertise in hunting down obscure information that might help the cause. The tone is completely uncensored: no-one cares if you're offended by words on 4chan or the almost pathological hatred of Jews or anything Jewish. All that matters is whether your information is good or not and whether you can back it up. Without any social niceties or any of the usual popularity overheads that clutter more mainstream social media, 4chan can move very fast, especially because the easily offended exclude themselves and the somewhat primitive interface and complex subculture is intimidating to new users, even if they do have thick skins.

The real FBIanon reappeared on Sunday 3rd soon after a couple of fakers had tried LARPing before being outed. The man himself noted the fledgling digging efforts and made himself available for more questions.
By this time, word had got around that FBIAnon was in all likelihood a real insider and new anons were joining the discussion. I had missed the first two Q&As but I was there for this one and watched it live, uneasy at what was being told to us but with the usual buzz of seeing a genuine source dropping genuine intelligence in real time.

The revelation that one of the most powerful intelligence agencies in the world was completely hamstrung by bad actors who knew how to use issues of national security to their own ends was not all that surprising but it was very concerning to hear it in an election year straight from an insider who clearly knew what he was talking about. And the election race was about to get real. Just a few weeks earlier Donald Trump had clinched the Republican nomination,
confounding the Republican Party and the media, both of which had tried their very best to prevent it. FBIAnon revealed the true GOP plan for the 2016 election: the unusually large field of candidates - 17 of them - was a distraction ploy to sneak Jeb Bush in so that he could then be crushed by Hillary Clinton. It's an old trick by the GOP with plenty of history he said: a few front runners jostle around before the candidate the party really wants is finally chosen. But Trump comprehensively destroyed Jeb! during the campaign debates before disposing of the other challengers on his way to the required 1237 delegates. Not even Mitt Romney's last minute intervention was enough to stave off the nomination. With Trump about to embark on the next phase of his campaign for the Presidency, FBIAnon's advice to the watching anons was to step up their game.

He gave out plenty more ammunition: the government manipulates the weather and the Clinton Foundation was involved. The Foundation leaks linked drug and human trafficking profits and activities to black ops funding. Hollywood is a hotbed of sexual exploitation and child trafficking, 'more than you could imagine.' The end goal of all globalist movements is for some form of world government. Rothschild funding of George Soros needed to be traced.

He also advised personal preparation for a possible civil war: staying out of cities, staying close to a water supply, and buying guns and ammunition. Just how a modern US civil war would play out has been carefully explained by another anonymous insider known as the Red Team Planner who claimed to be a high level strategist inside an intelligence agency. This famous (at least among anons) post says the US authorities would have absolutely no chance against their own heavily armed and dangerous citizenry. Helped by mass defections among the military and with control of the food-producing areas of the continental USA, the rebels would win easily, although the conflict would be far longer and bloodier than most supposed. FBIAnon endorsed the Red Team Planner post by name a couple of times in reply to questions about a potential civil war.

And then he was gone. The CFG threads continued apace although anons still argued back and forth about the veracity of the drops, particularly the more spectacular accusations. Plausible deniability meant that at least some of the information given was either disinformation or designed to camouflage the real identity of FBIAnon but it was difficult to decide which was real and which was the insurance policy.

A week later on July 10th, a young Democratic Party staffer was murdered in Washington D.C. in what police would say was a botched robbery. His name was Seth Rich.

FBIAnon returned to /pol/ on the 15th of July saying that in light of recent events, he would be taking more questions about international events, the Clinton Case, and the Foundation. The day before, Bastille Day, a truck had ploughed through celebrating crowds in Nice, France, and had killed scores of people. On the local front, there were strong rumors circulating that Black Lives Matter would be organizing a Day of Rage protest the next day. He was impressed with the work to date of the meme division of /cfg/ which had been enthusiastically churning out a variety of vicious parodies of official Clinton campaign material, paying careful attention to typography and layout. 4chan has always been particularly good at fake ad campaigns with which to troll the unsuspecting; its various knockoffs of Apple's promotional material for example have induced people to microwave their new iPhones to charge them or put them underwater because the new software upgrade will 'automatically keep the electronics safe.' The Hillary ads, some of them sporting inconvenient truths about the real finances and business of the Clinton Foundation, had already been spreading.

But there was bad news as well.

FBIAnon strongly advised avoiding certain areas which might be targets of the next day's BLM protests saying he had been briefed to be secure for a large-scale riot, with potential for extreme violence. When asked for his opinion on November, he said he expected Trump to win even though, as he claimed, the vote would be rigged as always.

And if Hillary won?

As it turned out, the predicted Day of Rage never materialized, with some anons grumbling they had stayed at home for nothing. At the Republican National Convention in Cleveland the following week, the GOP formally confirmed Trump as its 2016 candidate, with Mike Pence from Indiana as his VP. On the final day of the Democratic National Convention, July 28th, FBIAnon reappeared on 4chan with an urgent task for /pol/.

And so war was declared. It would have been fun to watch if the stakes hadn't been quite so high. While mainstream media commentators like Nina M. Lozano-Reich, Ph.D. were gushing in the Huffington Post how 'Hillary just won the White House' thanks to the 'powerful images' of her forty five years as a public servant and a 'skillful narrative' that proved she could indeed be trusted, a few anonymous volunteers from all over the world started fighting back with what they had been told, and were painstakingly confirming for themselves, was the awful truth: Hillary was an evil and corrupt warmonger at the center of a vast web of pay-for-play, high treason and possibly even human trafficking. They loaded up their meme cannons and commenced the initial bombardment.

"Repeat something often enough and it becomes the truth," FBIAnon had advised before signing off. "Repeat after me: Hillary is evil and will destroy the planet. /cfg/ threads and the PsyOps threads are of extreme importance. You are having an impact. Remember, not a single mind should go into the voting booths for HRC without remembering one of your photos. Anywhere and everywhere the message can be spread, it should be. And above all, Follow the Foundation."

The use of memes, along with 4chan's adopted cartoon mascot Pepe The Frog, would prove so effective that mainstream media was forced to try to counter them, before realizing that coverage was just bringing more awareness to the message. TV stations that warned their viewers of an alt-right frog cult that used a secret code of racist, sexist and homophobic words merely provided more willing volunteers for /cfg/.  In retrospect, the mainstream media were badly outgunned and out-maneuvered by 4chan: it's been raiding websites and spreading memes for fun since at least as far back as 2006. In those days, the raids focused on innocent online communities such as Habbo Hotel, a virtual hotel simulator with chat facilities. Acting on reports that the virtual pools were infected with AIDS, 4chan /b/ users logged in to Habbo en masse, using black dark-suited characters with afro hairstyles, and prevented other players from entering the pool. It was a selfless act of public service that would continue off and on for more than a decade, hilarious to insiders and completely inscrutable to everyone else. Other raids had /b/ spamming Tumblr with gory images and pictures of its users photoshopped into pornography. Sometimes the raids crossed over into real life such as when /b/ repeatedly called up GameSpot stores asking for Battletoads on the Nintendo Wii, a game that didn't exist, or when the pool raiders, ejected from Habbo Hotel by the obviously racist moderators, started shutting down real public swimming pools to prevent the spread of AIDS. Pool's closed.

Ten years later, 4chan's memes and raids were to assist the most spectacular bit of real life trolling in history: getting Donald Trump into the White House. The effort was being given some help by Wikileaks. As well as the Clinton emails leaked back in March, the ones that FBIAnon had been telling us were not as important as the Foundation, the whistleblower organization had released thousands of internal emails from the governing body of the party, the Democratic National Committee, just before the Convention. The leak included emails from seven key DNC staff members, and dated from January 2015 to May 2016. The leaks' contents, which suggested the party's leadership had worked to sabotage Bernie Sanders' presidential campaign, prompted the resignation of DNC chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz on the eve of the event.

And there was yet more to come. In an interview on ITV in the UK on June 12th, Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, still holed up in the Ecuadorean embassy in London, had said there were more upcoming leaks in relation to Hillary Clinton.

How had Wikileaks got all this information? The organization never reveals its sources but there had already been an on-the-record claim by Kim Dotcom, owner of the file sharing site MegaUpload, that he had been given the information directly by murdered staffer Seth Rich. Had Rich been killed because he was the source of the leak? The DNC was already pushing the narrative that its information was stolen by a hacker. It had hired Crowdstrike, a security specialist from California to confirm it. Crowdstrike had quickly suggested that Russian hackers were responsible and lo and behold, a hacker calling himself Guccifer 2.0 had appeared a few days later to release some documents that were conveniently tainted with Russian digital fingerprints. The original Guccifer, a Romanian hacker who had targeted celebrity email accounts and private documents, had been extradited to the US and indicted in May. His hacks were authentic: I had snagged them from a regular haunt of mine - cryptome.org - when they were released and spent a long weekend reading through George W. Bush's personal emails and catching up with the social life of Ariana Rockefeller (it's complicated). In September, Guccifer would write to Fox News from prison in Virginia, saying his goal had been to fully expose the Illuminati/The Council but he had failed.

But this revealing and prophetic note that could have been addressed directly to CFG had yet to be penned when Guccifer 2.0 started riding on the Guccifer name in July. A compliant media accepted Guccifer 2.0's assertions that he had hacked the DNC servers and spread the message. On August 10th Wikileaks added its voice to the growing chorus about the death of Rich exactly a month prior by offering a $20 000 reward for information leading to the arrest of his killers. Other factions of /pol/ as well as users on Reddit were finding huge holes in the official account of Seth Rich's murder and FBIAnon himself had hinted that there was something way off about the incident. There were serious problems with the story, beginning with the fact that armed robberies do not typically result in the victim dead and nothing stolen - as had been the case with Rich. There were also serious problems with the Russian hacker theory of how the DNC's information was exfiltrated. The FBI were never allowed access to the DNC servers, despite multiple requests to do so according to the director James Comey. Only Crowdstrike saw them. Forensic analysis of the Guccifer 2.0 dump showed that the documents were copied at a speed incompatible with remote access - it was far more likely that they had been copied to a local drive. The Guccifer 2.0 persona looked suspiciously like DNC damage control to divert attention away from the fact that it was almost certainly Seth Rich who had accessed the files and made them available to Wikileaks using MegaUpload. He had been a DNC IT staffer and supporter of Bernie Sanders. Had he discovered the attempts to sabotage Sanders' campaign and gone to Wikileaks in disgust?

In September, there were crude attempts to smear Julian Assange, first as a spy who had received one million dollars from the Russian Government and then as a child molester. Both claims would be dismissed by Wikileaks as entirely fabricated but it was clear that very powerful people were extremely concerned with exactly what was about to be leaked. On October 3rd, Wikileaks' official account tweeted a link to a document that had Hillary Clinton privately stating she wanted to 'drone' Julian Assange. The next day, the organization held a press conference for its 10th anniversary and hinted that the long-awaited October Surprise for Hillary Clinton was imminent. That same day Guccifer 2.0 said he had hacked the Clinton Foundation. I downloaded this leaked archive but found nothing that wasn't already in the previous leaks or available from public sources. Neither did anybody else. His claims were looking more and more questionable.

October 7th finally saw the new leaks from Wikileaks: an initial batch of private emails from Hillary Clinton's campaign manager John Podesta. It was the beginning of what would turn out to be an eventful month.

On October 7th, a mere hour after a 2005 recording surfaced of Donald Trump engaging in some locker room banter, Wikileaks dropped its first batch of the Podesta emails. The Democrats' October Surprise would be more than matched by this dump.

Journalists, investigators and autists from the chans pounced on this leak and started digging. It's always fascinating to see the difference between the private thoughts and public statements of someone powerful and I spent some time looking through them. I didn't notice anything too out of the ordinary, except that Podesta seemed to receive a lot of spam with attached PowerPoints from Taiwanese senders. I opened a couple and they were harmless slideshows of pictures from Antartica and other nature scenes.

On October 14th, John Podesta tweeted a photograph of himself in his kitchen with the comment "I bet the lobster risotto is better than the food at the Ecuadorian Embassy." It was a definite swipe at Assange.

The next day, the 15th, Wikileaks released the transcripts of a private function Hillary Clinton had held with Goldman Sachs, causing her campaign further embarrassment. At lunchtime, model and actress Pamela Anderson visited Assange in the embassy in London. When she emerged, she said she had brought him a vegan sandwich. That afternoon at 5pm, Assange's Internet connection was severed by the Embassy. It was clear that something big was about to go down. The mood of various communities watching was very tense: on Reddit's /r/the_donald subreddit, a pro-Trump discussion forum, a number of people speculated that Assange was about to be kidnapped from the Embassy so as to stop this flow of anti-Clinton material. That suspicion was reinforced when John Kerry, then Secretary of State, arrived in London on the 16th. Wikileaks greeted him with three tweets containing cryptographic hashes, one addressed to Kerry, one to Ecuador and one to the UK's Foreign and Commonwealth Office. Hashes look like long strings of letters and numbers, and are the output of mathematical operations that are easy to perform but almost impossible to reverse. Here's a hash using the SHA256 method, a standard in cryptography:

    8a84420e56426f1e9e495b3d962fc1c26538f03acdc3e9eb129252facf481d1b

It is easy to generate this sequence using a small utility but effectively impossible to find out what phrase I used to generate it. But if I tell you the phrase was "the cat sat in the hat" then it's easy to verify I am telling the truth for yourself by running a SHA256 program with that phrase as input. This method is not limited to phrases but can be used to checksum digital files of any kind. If a single byte is different in the input, the output is completely
different, making it a useful way to check the integrity of files down to the last byte. So Assange either had a message or a file of significance for John Kerry and the other two parties and was either proving to them he had them or he was confirming knowledge of something ahead of time. This was confirmed by an anon on 8chan who claimed that he was a low level intelligence officer.

A LARP? If it was it was a very good one. On Monday 17th, early in the morning, Wikileaks confirmed that Assange's Internet had been cut off and said "we have activated the appropriate contingency plans”. An interview with Swedish prosecutors scheduled for that day was cancelled and members of the Wikileaks Task Force reported they were having Internet and phone connection issues.

FBIAnon appeared on /pol/ for the seventh and final time that day and was immediately asked whether Assange was dead yet.

On a brighter note, he said the results of his internal polls showed a runaway Trump victory was less than a month away.


One anon asked whether to focus on the latest Wikileaks releases or go back to Clinton Foundation work.

Another asked what the Clinton camp was most worried about.


One anon had been figuring out an email to Podesta that read like a pitch for a movie contract but didn't quite ring true. "I have the script, the budget and a producer for this 2016 political, game changing film project - funding is needed. You would be in charge of the content and selecting a producer." A map link in the email resolved directly to a ranch in West Texas where Supreme Court Judge Antonin Scalia had died in mysterious circumstances that January. Was
this perhaps some other kind of contract? A hit on Scalia?


He briefly answered a few more questions and was gone. That would be the last confirmed drop /pol/ would get from FBIAnon.^[[His complete archive is here](https://paulfurber.net/pdf/fbianon.pdf)]

Carl Jung once wrote that keeping secrets "acts like a psychic poison which alienates the possessor from the community." For the first time, I truly understood the meaning of this quote. While the chattering skulls on mainstream media were still asking themselves whether Trump's remarks would kill his campaign, a patriot deep within the FBI had given a glimpse of what really happens behind the scenes. It was horrifying, exhilarating and impossible to share with friends or at work. Merely mentioning Trump's name at my workplace got back replies with the words 'racist', 'sexist' and 'narcissist' used as hissed punctuation. Nevertheless I made a bet with half a dozen colleagues that there would be a Trumpslide and lunch would be on me if Hillary won.

On Endchan, another chan server I was hanging out on in the hope of getting any more information about the happenings, a screenshot of an email was posted. The source and recipient were blacked out but the message wasn't.

There were a couple of decryption keys and then a list of files with highly suggestive names: under a NINEONEONE directory were the files call1.wav, call2.wav, transcript1.tct, thermite.txt, thermite.wav and thermite.avi. Was this Wikileaks dropping a tactical nuke because Assange was about to get vanned? It seemed very likely.

The next day, the 18th, the fears of the watching Assange supporters were realized. Heavily armed police took up station around the embassy. Fox News reported that Assange would be arrested within the next few hours. Just after lunchtime, the Wikileaks Twitter account said that multiple US sources were telling them John Kerry had asked Ecuador to stop Assange from publishing Clinton documents when he was in the country doing peace negotiations between the government and the rebel group FARC. Anons watching the Wikileaks website noticed that the URL http://wikileaks.org/file/ had been made visible and every timestamp of every file changed to 1:01 1/1/1984 in reference to the notorious interrogation Room 101 in George Orwell's *1984*. At the same time, Ecuador officially admitted it had cut off Assange's Internet. A statement from the foreign ministry noted while Ecuador stood by its decision to grant Assange asylum, it didn't interfere in foreign elections as a matter of policy. The President said he was doing this of his own accord and not as a result of foreign pressure, convincing no-one.

Anons were already trying to make sense of the events. One theory that seemed plausible was that Pamela Anderson's sandwich contained a sedative to knock Assange out and keep him from killing himself so he could be easily taken alive. The next day, Craig Murray, a former British diplomat and known whistleblower claimed that he had 'had a whisky' with Assange at midnight and left him 'in good spirits.' The information clearing site cryptome.org weighed in with a strange tweet: "Wrong building for Assange's bolt hole. Orator perch still waving flag. 51 degrees 29 minutes 56.62 seconds N, 0 degrees, 9 minutes 40.51 seconds W." I had a quick look on Google Maps and these coordinates resolved to the city block in London that housed the Ecuadorean embassy. It seemed a pretty pointless observation by Cryptome. Over the next couple of days, Wikileaks' tweeted several messages with misspelled words. The incorrect letters spelled out HILP HIM although the initial claims on Reddit said the words were HELP HIM and that Wikileaks never made spelling mistakes like this. This was quickly corrected: they do and the words were HILP HIM. The message was the same though.

By now questions were being asked as to whether Wikileaks itself was compromised, at least its social media accounts. On the 21st, with still no word from Assange or sign of him at the window, there was a massive distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack on large parts of the US Internet. The DDoS targeted domain name and cloud service provider Dyn and caused severe disruption for millions of users. Wikileaks asked its supporters to 'stop taking down the US Internet. You proved your point.' This comment made some observers even more suspicious that Wikileaks itself had been compromised by a three-letter agency: the source of the DDoS was as yet unknown and exactly no-one in the underground communities I frequented had even been suggesting a DDoS. It was a stupid idea anyway because it was long suspected that Assange had an electronic 'dead man's switch'. If he didn't check in every week before a certain time, then scripts would automatically release his remaining material somewhere, or so the popular rumors said. If Assange was dead or captured, we wanted the rest of his dumps, therefore the DDoS must have come from a party that was trying to prevent Assange's servers from switching to autopilot and leaking whatever he had left. There were other attacks going during this confusing period: Bitcoin would experience a massive flood of expensive transactions that clogged up its payment clearing mechanism on the 26th.

On the afternoon of the 21st, the same day John Podesta arrived in London, London Airport was evacuated because of an unspecified chemical scare. The consensus among the anxious supporters looking on helplessly was that this was cover for Julian Assange to be flown out of the country, probably direct to the US. At around this time the Reddit discussion forum /r/WhereIsAssange was set up for like-minded people to share theories and whatever information they had. Over the next two weeks, Assange would appear in various media but in ways that made most of us even more convinced he had been taken. A telephonic interview was conducted that didn't sound quite like him. A video interview with journalist John Pilger never showed them on screen together at once. The Wikileaks Twitter said Assange was fine and busy analyzing emails and even Kim Dotcom said that he wasn't dead. The same couldn't be said of Gavin MacFadyen, the third person connected to Wikileaks to die that year. He died of lung cancer aged 76 on the 22nd. It had been a bloody year for the organization: Assange's lawyer John Jones had been killed by a train in April in the UK (no foul play said the authorities), and Michael Ratner, US-based lawyer for Wikileaks, had died in May. It was quite reasonable to conclude that Assange himself was next on the hit list. After all, his information, supplemented by the drops from FBIAnon and disseminated by the chans, was having an undeniable impact on the campaign for the Presidency.

The simplest proof of life for Assange - a wave from the window of the upstairs room where he had been incarcerated for the last four years - was not forthcoming. Neither was there any sign of the dead man's switch activating. I resigned myself to the fact that he was probably being tortured by Hillary's goons, said a prayer for his safety and went back to work on the Podesta emails and FBIAnon's statements. If the US administration was prepared to ignore the sovereignty of a foreign embassy in another country just to silence a whistleblower, then perhaps there was something else in the leaks we had missed.

On October 28th, FBI Director James Comey dropped a bomb on the Democrats' campaign: he announced in a letter to Congress's Select Committee on Intelligence that the FBI would be reopening the investigation into Hillary Clinton's email server.

The 'unrelated case' had something to do with the seizing of Anthony Weiner's laptop by the NYPD in September. The former Democratic congressman was being investigated for sexting a minor and the NYPD had scooped up his laptop as part of the investigation. Hillary Clinton and her staff reacted to the reopening with predictable fury. A photograph of her glowering at an upset Huma Abedin, trusted member of Clinton's inner circle and of course Weiner's wife, went quickly viral. What was on the laptop that had caused the FBI's change of heart? On November 4, Erik Prince, former Navy SEAL and founder of private military contractor Blackwater went public with what he knew of the contents.

Prince said his source in the NYPD had told him there was massive pushback by the Department of Justice at this suggestion, including retaliatory action if they went ahead. Had the FBI really caved to the demands of the NYPD despite these threats? As usual, an anon on 4chan would claim to know exactly what was going on behind the scenes.

The anon said the NYPD had raided Weiner and Abedin in September in conjunction with the FBI and had confiscated the laptop, two cellphones and a router. Then the digital forensics team at the NYPD had gone to work and they had retrieved over one and a half terabytes of data, including 650 000 emails and archives of images and videos. A quarter of the emails were tied to Clinton and were classified.

So far, this was correlating exactly with what FBIAnon had told us: follow the Foundation, pay for play, Hillary's email server tying in to Foundation business and high treason. Were they all pedos as well? Did the 'disgusting delights' he had mentioned refer to that? Pedophile rings have often been connected with the very highest levels of government around the world. The Dutroux scandal in Belgium in the 1990s nearly brought down the government there. The UK had seemed to experience a never-ending series of them since the 1960s. In Nebraska in the 1980s, a pedophile ring connected to the famous Boys Town was rumored to be connected to the highest levels of the ruling party before the investigation fizzled out in the face of intense pressure on the witnesses by the FBI. Journalist Dave McGowan wrote a series of essays in the early 2000s called The Pedophocracy in which he claimed that the authorities facilitated child trafficking across most of the United States.

The anon's drop was confirming Prince's information as well. The insider said that Weiner and Abedin were taken in for questioning after the incriminating material was discovered. Weiner cooperated and Huma didn't. But the situation was fluid and complex because of the various players involved.

"Following Friday’s announcements, the President of the United States was briefed and warned that his interference into these investigations can and will lead to his arrest. Namely on the charges of treason (for stopping the investigation into a suspect accused of espionage) & obstruction of justice. He was placed under a gag order and was told if he speaks about the investigation, he will immediately be arrested."

That was grimly amusing. It certainly explained why President Obama was illegally campaigning on behalf of Clinton and why he would implore illegal aliens to vote on November 8th: a Hillary victory would be the only chance to bury all of this. The other major players were in a Mexican standoff: the FBI were threatening the DoJ that they would go public if Loretta Lynch got involved.

I hopped across to YouTube and looked up Pieczenik. A short video by him, The Hillary Clinton Takeover Of the United States, uploaded just a couple of days before, agreed with what this anon was implying: that the Clintons together with the current administration were effectively initiating a silent coup but were being actively resisted.

Pieczenik said that the Weiner case was the entree for his group to say to the administration that not only did the group have their number but they were going to stop them making Hillary president. They were also going to arrest and indict both the President and Loretta Lynch for the coverup of the massive corruption that occurred in the Clinton Foundation. The 4chan insider explained how this counter-coup was working.

This information was very encouraging. Patriots deep inside the military and the intelligence community, sick of the Clintons and their corrupt ways were finally fighting back. I reread it a few times and couldn't detect the LARP anywhere, although that often just means it was an extremely good one. But Stephen Pieczenik had put his name to a video which said pretty much the same thing as the anon and he was clearly extremely experienced and well-connected. The same applied to Erik Prince. On November 4, General Michael Flynn would tweet a link to the Breitbart story with Prince's interview, a clear endorsement from someone at the heart of the counter-coup. And this intel did explain the FBI's mysterious about face. The members of this group of rebels had obviously threatened Comey with exposure if he didn't re-open the Clinton email case, thereby making Hillary's success at the polls even more unlikely. FBIAnon's information was being confirmed in spades and so was what was being unearthed in the Clinton Foundation General threads. On the other hand, I had a very reliable source with contacts in the NYPD who made a strong case to me personally that there was simply no way that the department had access to Wiener's laptop. If what he said was correct, then this was clearly a clever disinformation campaign to keep the DOJ uncertain as to who really was keeping the contents. If so, then at a minimum General Flynn, Erik Prince and Steve Pieczenik were coordinating behind the scenes to spread this whisper for the counter-coup's own purposes. Moves and counter moves.

I noticed confirmation of FBIAnon's predictions when catching up with what /r/the_donald on Reddit had been doing. An anon had posted on /pol/ on October 30 that by Tuesday at 11am, it would be all over.

This post might have gone unnoticed but for the fact that on Tuesday the 1st at exactly 11am EST, the FBI's official Records Vault Twitter account, not exactly known for its garrulousness up til then, had posted a link to the FBI's files on the William J. Clinton Foundation.

I was convinced and saved a copy of the page in case it was deleted or worse, the whole subreddit deleted. This is a habit that has served me very well over the years. The whole situation was like nothing I'd seen before. Senior people in the FBI were enlisting the help of ordinary citzens to expose and spread the word on what was probably the largest scandal in recorded history because they were muzzled by their own oaths of secrecy and perhaps also because the nature of the crimes committed by the Foundation were too sickening to be just dropped on an unsuspecting public. It would take a grassroots awareness campaign to shift public opinion and judging by the spread of memes originating in /cfg/, we were already doing well.

I went over to 4chan. I had heard word that some anon had found pedophile codewords in the John Podesta emails and wanted to see if he had really been that careless.

As October was coming to an end and the Presidential campaign reaching its zenith, hundreds of thousands of eyes on 4chan, 8chan, Twitter and Reddit were scrutinizing the Podesta emails as they trickled out of Wikileaks in batches, looking for something - anything - incriminating on the person who would in all likelihood be the next Secretary of State if Hillary Clinton triumphed. One of the first emails to raise suspicions was from Susan Sandler at the Sandler Foundation who mailed John Podesta on Sept. 2 2014 with this strange message:

Podesta replied that yes, it was his but wasn't worth worrying about. Someone noticed that financier and Democrat insider Herbert Sandler had sent a similarly coded email to Mary and John Podesta, ending off with the question: "Ps. Do you think I’ll do better playing dominos on cheese than on pasta?". These incomprehensible exchanges prompted a search for 'pizza' mentions in the rest of the emails. There were lots. In the first batch alone there were nearly 150. There were also dozens of mentions of 'cheese', 'pasta', 'sauce', 'ice cream' and 'walnut'. A self-professed pedophile hunter on 8chan proclaimed that this was pedophile code and gave the explanation:

This explanation made an awful lot of sense. The terms in the emails were almost all used in ways that seemed very out of place when talking about food but made perfect, if horrifying, sense if Podesta and his associates were child molesters. FBIanon had explicitly said that there were terms in the emails with usage that were 'much more nefarious' than we suspected. There were other confirmations: Podesta's brother Tony reported being 'wired' because he was sitting next to children on a trip. He was also unable to attend something because he was 'still in the torture chamber.' Anons checked and found an article with Tony Podesta lovingly describing a subterranean vault in his home that he would use to display 'complex works of art.' John Podesta emailed his brother on June 2, 2015, complaining that the 'traffic was really warm and really weird in the light of Hastert. Boy That's Sad.' This referred to Dennis Hastert, the former speaker of the House of Representatives, who had been indicted the month before for financial irregularities and some other unspecified charges that later would be revealed as sexually abusing teenage boys. The 'Boy That's Sad' comment also had a rage-inducing double meaning. Anons started cross-checking other leaks and found a mention of pizza in the Global Intelligence Files, a 2012 dump from Wikileaks of the Texas-based intelligence consultancy Stratfor.

No food is ever allowed into the White House for obvious reasons - it must be prepared on site from strictly vetted raw ingredients by strictly vetted staff. So this email seemed to imply that the President of the United States was flying in underaged boys and girls to the White House for a private sex party. It was jaw-dropping. But the more people dug, the more they found confirmation that there was something seriously off about the social habits of these elites. Tony Podesta had forwarded John an invitation from Marina Abramovic to a Spirit Cooking dinner. The hivemind immediately scoured the Internet for mentions of Abramovic and discovered she was a self-styled performance artist with very strong connections to the global upper class. Spirit Cooking is an occult ceremony involving menstrual blood, semen and mutilation of the middle finger of the left hand. The participant then 'eats the pain', a concept that also can be found in Luciferian literature about the Left Hand Path. John Podesta had sent a photo of himself to some friends showing him grinning like a madman possessed, holding up his deeply scarred hands with a bandaid on the middle finger of the left hand. Had he just eaten the pain? Photos of President Obama with a bandaid on the same finger were quickly located. Did he also participate in this strange cult?

Because cult-like references were everywhere. An email from senior policy advisor Jacob Sullivan to Hillary Clinton when she was Secretary of State had a mention of the 'Owl-Minerva rule'. Georg Hegel wrote in 1820 in his Philosophy of Right that 'the Owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of the dusk', meaning that true understanding of a historical condition or age only happens just as it is passing away, a philosophical reference to the Roman goddess of wisdom and strategy who is often accompanied by an owl. FBIAnon had said the Owl-Minerva rule was an important gesture in upper circles that referred to open declarations of regime change and Sullivan was indeed querying the final paragraph of a statement from Clinton that was openly calling for Muhammar Qaddafi to go.

"Minerva agrees," replied Clinton. An anon on 4chan put out an  infographic calling attention to the utter insanity of US foreign policy being decided by people who speak and think like this. I remember seeing it the time and being very unsettled at its implications. Hillary had also offered to 'do penance' for Lynn de Rothschild, the powerful member of the famous family, upon failing to organize a meeting between her and former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair. Penance. That means some sort of self-abasement or humiliation in response to a personal failure. Lifestyles of the rich and powerful clearly wasn't all yachts, champagne and caviar as we imagined but involved cult rituals and a hidden hierarchy that punished failure ... somehow. I wondered what penance to a Rothschild would involve.

Clinton had written to her chief of staff Heather Mills in August 2009 that "with fingers crossed, the old rabbit's foot out of the box in the attic, I will be sacrificing a chicken in the backyard to Moloch." Was she being serious? Was the Secretary of State literally talking about sacrificing to an old Caananite god? And did she mean a literal chicken or did she mean a child, as the code had it? Journalist Alex Jones had secretly filmed Republican elites participating in a sacrificial ceremony to Moloch in the Bohemian Grove in the early 1990s so this wasn't the first time the elites had been exposed as being uncomfortably deep into the child-sacrificing side of the occult.

Other researchers were finding out that the Podesta brothers had a very strange taste in art. Most of it had to with cannibalism, death and abused children. In Tony Podesta's home, a large sculpture of one of serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer's victims hung from the ceiling. He also enjoyed art depicting traumatized children in empty tiled swimming pools. Not much digging was required: this information was freely available in mainstream media profiles of them and on their own social media accounts. Armed with their suspicions, citizen researchers were combing the Internet for any and all mentions of pizza and seeing if it could be connected to the Podestas, Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama. They got a hit immediately in the Podesta emails: both Podestas seemed to have a close relationship with one James Alefantis, the owner and proprietor of a Washington D.C pizza restaurant named Comet Ping Pong. Alefantis was clearly a part of these circles: he had been named the 49th most powerful person in Washington D.C in a GQ article and his social media showed a thank you note from Hillary Clinton for hosting a fundraiser.

Comet Ping Pong's Instagram account in particular, had a lot of pizza and child references, many of them disquieting. Alefantis called infants 'retarded whores', posted pictures of a young girl taped to a ping-pong table in a sexual position and had dozens of pictures implying pizza and underaged sex were intertwined or perhaps even interchangeable in his world. Anons archived these pictures and also explored the accounts of the friends who had commented, finding similar references. Comet Ping Pong's regular events were examined and one band, Heavy Breathing, was put under the pizza microscope. Heavy Breathing had put on some live performances at Comet and I watched two of these videos which were still available on Vimeo. In one of them, a young woman in a red mask speaking through a voice changer that made her sound like a demon spoke to the audience about the 'special pizza here tonight' before launching into a story about how she carried a baby to full term before 'putting that shit down.' This repulsive tale somehow reminded me of an unusual back and forth about abortion that Donald Trump had had in the third debate with Hillary Clinton, so I watched it again.

If these pedophiles were going to hide in plain sight, then so was Trump in implying he knew all about their practices. At the Alfred E Smith Memorial Dinner, Trump had roasted the high level audience, including teasing his opponent about Haiti.

It was obvious Donald Trump was very well aware of the disgusting delights of the elites he was challenging and his supporters were rapidly educating themselves too. Journalist William Craddick did excellent work on Reddit exposing how Hillary's emails showed that she had taken great interest in the case of Laura Silsby, a woman who had been arrested in Haiti after the authorities accused her of kidnapping children in the wake of the 2010 earthquake[^yiff]. And all of this evidence, despite the circumstantial nature of it, was confirming what the various leakers had said about the Clinton Foundation, the elites and child trafficking in general. Comet Ping Pong was a natural target in the last week before the election but by no means the only one. There were other organizations in that same city block that seemed strongly connected. The Clinton-affiliated charitable organization for Haiti, Beyond Borders, was across the street and there were a couple of other pizza shops next door. One anon on 4chan noticed that a lot of the logos these other pizza shops used were very similar to pedophile logos from a declassified FBI document. Besta Pizza next door to Comet Ping Pong had almost an exact replica of the FBI pedo logo but changed it within a few days of this being pointed out. Other anons pointed out that most of that block seemed to be owned and controlled by Saudi princes.

The citizen research effort was exploding. Ordinary people were archiving pictures, searching emails, doing explanatory videos on YouTube and producing information graphics on every conceivable angle of Pizzagate. Users on Reddit formed the subreddit /r/pizzagate to take specific discussion out of /r/the_donald/ which had been somewhat overwhelmed by all of the pizza submissions there. As Clinton supporters looked forward to their historic triumph, tens of thousands of people around the world were working day and night to prove that she and most of the current administration were at the center of an occult ring that trafficked children. Because these people had been hiding in plain sight for so long with their symbols and codewords, it was impossible for them to hide again. They had left too many tracks behind. One interesting piece of evidence about Comet Ping Pong came from a complaint nearly ten years before by a D.C. resident, Frank Winstead, who had made the startling claim that allowing outside tables at the pizza place would encourage more rape and murder. Pizzagaters jumped on this red flag as the sign of someone who knew years ago what was really going on and looked at his claims. I downloaded a video of his taken outside Comet at night and played with the audio. After removing as much of the traffic noise as I could with digital filters, it became clear what Winstead was exposing. Drowned out by the sounds of vehicles were the screams of children in agony, with one possibly crying "James!". Winstead had been standing across the street and the sounds were probably coming from the basement Alefantis had casually mentioned for storing tomatoes in a previous interview although he would subsequently deny its very existence to the BBC later. The isolated audio I managed to extract was spine-chilling but as with all of the other hundreds of pieces of evidence gathered so far, it would not stand on its own as a smoking gun.

Trump's shock election victory on the 8th, at least shocking to those who were unaware of FBIAnon's deadly accurate predictions, seemed almost like a strange interruption to the ongoing investigation. But anons were elated and looked forward to a quick resolution of Pizzagate. Surely the outgoing administration would be quickly rounded up and executed for the sickening crimes we had proved they were committing? On the 10th of November, an anon posted on 8chan with a reality check.

The Latin phrase at the end can be translated as "so the young man is the gateway to life." Was this a giant conspiracy of Luciferian elites trafficking children to use in some sort of life-enhancing ceremony? It seemed very likely. But Trump was not in power yet and the pushback from those who were started. /r/pizzagate was banned by Reddit and shut down on the 21st of November. The reason given was posting of personal information but moderator logs released later showed that Reddit admins themselves were doing the posting in order to provide the excuse. I backed it all up the day before so that none of the research there was lost. The users moved across to Voat, a Reddit clone without the censorship and carried on digging. Meanwhile there were more and more mentions of the term 'fake news' in the mainstream media. On the same day that /r/pizzagate met its demise, the New York Times published an interview with Alefantis where he denied the allegations and complained of being harassed. At the time of writing, Google Trends shows that the term 'fake news' exploded in January 2017. But this is not what it showed back then: there was a clear rise towards the end of October and a very large rise in November, assisted by President Obama's mention of it at a meeting with Angela Merkel and President-elect Trump's hijacking of it to refer to the mainstream media. The powers behind the scenes were pushing this term in preparation for something.

That something happened on December 4. A 28 year old man from North Carolina, Edgar Maddison Welch, stormed into Comet Ping Pong and fired a rifle. When arrested he told police that he was there to investigate Pizzagate. Mainstream news and opinion filled up with coverage, pointing out how 'fake news has real-world consequences.' Anons were not impressed however and went hunting for more information. Someone discovered that the security cameras pointing at the pizza house were mysteriously turned away on the day of the shooting and then turned back again. So conveniently there was no surveillance footage. There were discrepancies between accounts of what Welch was carrying and at what he fired. Most damningly of all, anons found that Welch was an actor with an Internet Movie Database profile that showed his filmography included the 2005 short film 'Something About Pizza', an entry that was edited out only minutes after I got a screenshot of it. Too late you bastards. The whole thing smelled like another short film to reinforce Pizzagate as a crazy conspiracy theory that would prompt maniacs to shoot people, with Welch as best supporting actor. An anon noticed a serious time discrepancy in Google's cached pages of news organizations reporting on the Comet Ping Pong incident which provided yet more evidence that this was a false flag. Although it occurred on Dec 4 just before 3pm EST, there were a number of stories that appeared on the Web well before this time with details of the shooter, what he was carrying and what had happened^[[http://archive.is/KHiJT](http://archive.is/KHiJT)]. How could they have known if it hadn't even happened yet? Was it planned ahead of time?

James Alefantis appeared on Fox with Megyn Kelly ten days later in a soft-ball interview. She never asked him about his vomit-inducing comments on his own Instagram nor about anything else that would have shed any light on the questions we had. Stephen Colbert would mock Pizzagate on his show but somehow forget to mention his close ties to John Podesta, something 8chan discovered within half an hour of the broadcast. It didn't matter: Pizzagate was relegated to crackpot conspiracy theory status by the mainstream media and all further research was seriously hampered both by the label and by active crackdowns on mentioning it on social media. Since Wikipedia only referenced sources that said it was false, the Wikipedia entry for Pizzagate was - and still is - entirely useless. Vox Day's Wikipedia alternative Infogalactic has a far more useful overview^[[https://infogalactic.com/info/Pizzagate](https://infogalactic.com/info/Pizzagate)].

But on 4chan, 8chan and Voat, the research continued with impressive pace. We had the ultimate confirmation: a tweet from the official NSA Twitter account, @NSAGov on Dec 4 at 11:48 EST, not coincidentally a couple of hours before the incident at Comet Ping-Pong:

This amazing tweet told us three things: Pizzagate was real, the NSA had proof John Podesta was involved, and we were to continue digging despite the opposition.

In November of 2016, I accepted a couple of invitations to join like-minded people in forums in the Discord chat and instant messaging service. Discord is like the old Internet Relay Chat service but with easy file-sharing, picture uploading and an excellent voice-over-IP capability so people could talk to each other if needed. One forum was named WhereIsAssange and another one was dedicated to Pizzagate. The Assange one was already buzzing when I got there; some users were claiming that Assange's dead man's switch had been hidden in the Bitcoin blockchain. Assange had hidden leaks in the blockchain before, incurring the ire of the original designers who preferred that their innovative distributed general ledger not be used as a dumping ground for data files. CableGate, a collection of top secret diplomatic cables to the US State Department from 1966 to February 2010, was dumped by Wikileaks on its web site in 2010. But Assange had also cleverly exploited a capability of the Bitcoin protocol that allowed small slices of arbitrary data to be attached to any transaction. If you could follow a set of his transactions in the correct order, you could assemble the complete archive of CableGate that he had hidden in there. Because there were so many machines on the Bitcoin network each with their own copy of the blockchain, Assange was ensuring that CableGate could never be deleted.

The October 26th attacks on the Bitcoin network suddenly made sense. Wikileaks had spent a considerable amount on transactions just before. Was this the dead man's switch kicking in? If so, the DDoS a few days previously was probably to prevent the transactions from being made in the first place and the October 26th attack was to clog up Bitcoin's payment clearing mechanism to prevent them from going through. As part of any Bitcoin payment, you can specify a fee. If it's high enough, the individual nodes on the network will process your payment quicker because they want the fee. The transaction fees at the end of October got ridiculously high - up to $10 each instead of the usual fractional amounts - slowing transaction throughput to a crawl. This was even more evidence that there was a concerted effort to stop Bitcoin working properly during this period - and sadly, that Assange was indeed likely dead or rendered. I rented a capable Linux server in Europe and set it up as a Bitcoin miner, not because I wanted to mine for bitcoins but because I wanted a copy of the blockchain. It is a set of very large data files that takes a long time to download and after a day or two I was ready to start exploring. The first exercise was to find some hidden files. Using freely available source code, I managed to coax my own mining rig to spit out both the CableGate archive and the original white paper done by Bitcoin's founder Satoshi Nakamoto in PDF format.

But finding Assange's final leaks would prove very difficult. A first group of anons on Endchan, another chan server, figured out how to do it and were promptly 'xkeyscored' - detected and tracked by the NSA's secret surveillance software and shut down. Instead of trying to release the data directly, a second group started posting instructions for recreating the steps for yourself because posting the data anywhere got instant floods of child pornography, slides and the inevitable shutdown. By November 25, so many Endchan threads had been flooded and deleted that everyone decided to spare the admins and move somewhere else. I hung around on a 'bunker' only accessible through the TOR network to discuss the latest happenings as well as the WhereIsAssange Discord server I had been on. In December, various groups began coordinating for the 19th which was going to be D-Day for a release.

On the Pizzagate Discord server, there were a number of different channels for specific areas that people were researching. One of them was #Steganography, a term that means concealing a piece of information inside something else such as hiding a secret text message inside an image file or a sound file. A couple of researchers were going though the Powerpoint files in John Podesta's emails and discovering that they weren't so innocent as they appeared. Encoded in the pictures of Antarctica and the other nature scenes were short black and white movies of young children. It was slow progress and the subject matter was awful but eventually we did manage to satisfy ourselves that this was probably child pornography hiding in plain sight, maybe some sort of catalog of trafficked children emailed to him from Thailand. The actual clips were both hidden and encrypted but by overlaying the pictures on top of each other with different transparency settings and flipping through them like a flipbook, we could just make out some poor little mites in situations I never want to see again.

I took a break from Pizzagate and went back to WhereIsAssange. It was hard to see what was happening because I wasn't in any inner circles and neither did I have the advanced cryptography experience to help out. I wrote a simple blockchain search tool^[[The source code is here](https://paulfurber.net/software/carvingknife-0.2.tar.gz)] in a very fast programming language that helped extract some encrypted files from the blockchain but I had no luck in decrypting any of them. 'Everything you need to know is in that blockchain,' had said one poster on Endchan but I had no luck extracting useful information and it was maddening not to be able to progress further. There were also a considerable number of LARPs during this time that wasted everybody's time: fake decryption keys, reports of Assange alive and well, source code that didn't work properly and reports that the leader of South Korea belonged to some weird cult, had been impeached for selling state secrets and that she'd run away to be comforted by Angela Merkel. Wait, that last one was actually true. It did add to the general air of uncertainty though.

On December 19th, everyone I spoke to reported huge problems with their Internet. An anon on 8chan said it was the biggest worldwide outage he had ever seen but that it went unreported in the media. The powers that be were clearly attempting to suppress Wikileaks' last hurrah. And there was still no sign of Assange at the embassy window. Yes, Donald Trump's inauguration was just weeks away but this final leak was clearly so incendiary that the outgoing administration were going all out to prevent it. Over the New Year's break I spent quite a bit of time on another tack: trying to decrypt the encrypted insurance files Wikileaks had released. They had been encrypted with OpenSSL, a freely available set of security tools, and there was a rumor going around that OpenSSL was hopelessly broken, with back doors sneakily introduced by military contractors. After looking at the relevant portion of the source code, I had to agree. There were even comments on exactly what weaknesses were being introduced into the encrypted output. But I didn't know enough crypto to make any progress. It felt like the entire Deep State was against us and we were failing to fight back effectively. I began dialling back my involvement in the Discords but still kept an eye on 4chan, 8chan and Voat for any progress on Wikileaks or Pizzagate.

In early January, an anon spoke up on 4chan about the Pizzagate saga.

Wait, hang on. MY shop? Yeah, hello James. Browsing 4chan to see how much we've figured out? Most of it actually. This isn't GQ Magazine or some other rag where you can pose with a ping pong table and a baby in the corner, communicating your disgusting secret code to your friends in high places. It's /pol/ and you have no power here. Get lost.

In February, just less than a month after the inauguration of President Trump, an anon claiming to be a friendly operator called 4chan to battle.

At least some of this information was confirmed by the FBIVault Twitter account, including the existence of the 7th Floor Group, a high-ranking group of State officials who met every Wednesday afternoon to discuss FOIA, Congressional records and everything Clinton-related. According to the declassified document this group was known as "The Shadow Government."

In March, Wikileaks released the first batch of source code obtained from the CIA. Also named Vault 7, this was a collection of software tools and back doors that allowed the agency to spy on just about anything and anyone. In May, Julian Assange himself appeared on the balcony outside his room at the Ecuadorean embassy and said Wikileaks would continue its CIA releases despite the threats against him.

He was alive. There were some weak attempts to prove that it wasn't him, it was a hologram or a projection or a body double but they didn't get very far because it was clearly the man himself in the flesh, surrounded by appreciative supporters and the world's media just feet away on the street below. How on earth had he done it? I went back to my notes from October and took a long look at what had happened. He was indubitably alive and so hadn't been rendered and yet the intention was to render him. Had he been spirited away just before the kidnap attempt? I looked again at the Cryptome tweet with the coordinates and noticed for the first time that they pointed at the Colombian embassy next door and not the Ecuadorean embassy. Had Assange been sneaked out by the good guys just in time? Had he then been taken to a safe house? And had he then trolled everyone by not giving proof of life? It was as good a theory as any I'd heard. It was possible that the explosive list of files including the NINEONEONE directory was a LARP by Julian himself. The bad guys couldn't say a word of course. What were they going to do back then: come out and say, Truman Show-style, that "he's gone!" and embarrass themselves in front of the world? Not a chance. And this appearance was simplicity itself to engineer: merely sneak him back into the room so he could wave hello and when it was done, extract him again. Or perhaps he could stay there now, unmolested by Podesta, Kerry and Clinton.

That month I got hooked on two new sources of information: George Webb's channel on YouTube and a crazy lady on 4chan who was defending Kim Dotcom's claim that murdered DNC staffer Seth Rich was the leaker and that it had nothing to do with Russia. Webb, apparently a citizen researcher, dropped information that was very addictive: he would post daily, sometimes more than once and reel off incredible facts about human trafficking, organ harvesting, what really went on in Haiti, who was corrupt in the US administration and why, the CIA's methodologies throughout its history as well as loads of other snippets. He would also cover the death of Seth Rich and the strange case of the Awan brothers, Pakistani nationals who had worked as Congressional IT staff for various powerful players in Washington D.C. and who were now in deep trouble for spying and money laundering.

The crazy lady on 4chan was quickly named MegaAnon for her endless and verbose defence of Megaupload's Kim Dotcom. She also seemed to know a lot about Seth Rich and the leaks. She pointed out that Kim's statement the previous May had to be true.

Megs also said it was vital that the anons who were investigating the murder of Seth Rich use the existing body of research compiled by Pizzagate research. Why?

Webb wasn't going near Pizzagate except for the odd oblique mention so it was nice to hear another source confirming that what we were doing (on Voat in particular) was worth something. She would also confirm parts of my speculative theory about Julian Assange.

This was gratifying to read but didn't do much for what I felt was the lack of progress on all of these investigations. Webb then offended me - and many other followers - when he suggested that child trafficking could just be dialled back to acceptable levels.

Whether this was code to some watching intellience agency or not, I objected to the sentiment and instead started helping out with Human Trafficking General, /htg/, on 4chan. We were getting help from a notorious anon who calls himself Anonymous5. His information is regularly dispensed in the form of Knowledge Bomb threads on 4chan and is almost always vague, unsubstantiated and outrageous. For example, he claims to be 120 years old thanks to life-enhancing technology that isn't available to the general public. There are two major things in his favor however: FBIAnon confirmed at least one piece of his information as being legitimate and whenever he posts, armies of trolls attempt to derail him. This was particularly evident before the 2017 meeting of the Bilderberg Group, an annual think tank for members of the global superclass. If powerful people really don't like what he has to say, that's enough for me to at least pay some attention. Anonymous5 claimed that there was a major distribution center for child trafficking in Los Angeles and pointed us in the direction of downtown, going eastward towards the railway lines. The anons in the threads, myself included, got really good at using Google Street View to go on virtual foot patrols to see if we could find telltale symbols nearby empty warehouses next to railway lines. But A5 was frustratingly vague. Instead of actually telling us where to look, he gave cryptic clues instead which rapidly became annoying. After the efforts floundered on 4chan, some of us moved across to a hidden board on 8chan to continue the work. I wrote a small software utility to load vehicle traffic monitoring web pages inside an embedded browser and take a screenshot of the results every few seconds. By playing these captures back, it was possible to see whether there were any areas that had sudden high traffic at suggestive times of the day. I used up a lot of disk space but didn't find any human trafficking centers. Another dead end.

I reflected on FBIAnon's words: the truth comes out and we go to war. This was surely what was taking so long. But President Trump seemed frighteningly isolated in the midst of his battle to drain the swamp, an impression that the terrifying and confusing events at Las Vegas on October 1 did little to dispel. In early October, after a meeting with military leaders in the White House, he posed with them for photographs with the press.

On October 29 while browsing a thread on 4chan /pol/ titled The Theory, which was a discussion about who special counsel Robert Mueller was going to indict on Monday (hopefully Podesta), I noticed an interesting post towards the bottom.

Although I didn't know it at the time, this would be the first post
from Q I ever read.