The Gatekeeper Files: Operation Pizzagate

Part One: The Gatekeeper Files: Rise of the Alt-Right
Part Two: The Gatekeeper Files: How Trump Sold You On Fascism

“An insane and ridiculous conspiracy theory coming out of places like reddit and 4chan, claiming that Hillary Clinton and her associates are running a child trafficking ring responsible for abducting, raping and sacrificing children in satanic rituals inside of the Comet Ping Pong pizzeria in Washington DC.” — Urban Dictionary

Some might argue that the most successful operation conducted against Hillary Clinton during the 2016 election was “Pizzagate,” a far-right conspiracy theory that the Clintons’ were involved in a global pedophile and torture ring, fueled by information found in John Podesta’s published emails. However, there were multiple coordinated campaigns that took place prior to the Comet Ping Pong story going viral in early November 2016, that shaped virtually the entire narrative of Pizzgate, some of which had no ties to Podesta’s emails whatsoever.

By no means should Pizzagate be defined solely by the story that a pedophilia ring was being run out of the non-existent basement of a Clinton-linked D.C. pizza shop. Rather, it was the embodiment of alt-right hysteria, psyops, and viral news stories pushed across social media to protect Donald Trump that made the pizzeria story so successful. And what we’ll see is that some of the lead actors who pushed the “Pizzagate” conspiracies not only landed as figure heads in independent media, they went on to make an indelible mark on the community to free Julian Assange after trusted WikiLeaks associates invited them into the hen house.

Trump Allegations

Virtually all of the conspiracies spread about Hillary Clinton that were later integrated into the entire “Pizzagate” narrative, happened at a time when Trump himself was facing allegations of sexual abuse, harassment, and even rape. On October 3, 2016, “Jane Doe” refiled a complaint against Trump and now-deceased Jeffrey Epstein, accusing them of raping her when she was only fourteen years old. In what appears to be an effort to bury the shocking allegations, far-right online troll, Charles C. Johnson, and Proud Boys’ bestie, Roger Stone, organized a press conference one week later, on the evening of the second Presidential debate, with Trump and three women who had previously accused Hillary Clinton’s husband, Bill, of sexual assault and misconduct.

The presser backfired and within two weeks more alleged victims of Trump came forward such as Jessica Ledds, Mindy McGillivray, Temple Taggert McDowell, Cathy Heller, and Jessica Drake who held her own press conference on October 22, 2016.  Additionally, on October 7, 2016, the infamous tape of Trump saying “grab ‘em by the pussy” was leaked followed by the less remembered CNN tapes where Trump essentially discussed how hot his own daughter is and the Miss Universe pageant (among other things): 

“Well, I’ll tell you the funniest is that before a show, I’ll go backstage and everyone’s getting dressed, and everything else, and you know, no men are anywhere, and I’m allowed to go in because I’m the owner of the pageant and therefore I’m inspecting it…You know, I’m inspecting because I want to make sure that everything is good.”

“You know, the dresses. ‘Is everyone okay?’ You know, they’re standing there with no clothes. ‘Is everybody okay?’ And you see these incredible looking women, and so, I sort of get away with things like that.”

And this according to Rolling Stone,

“On the heels of the damaging videotape on which Trump and former Access Hollywood host Billy Bush salivated over Days of Our Live actress Arianne Zucker, and joked about sexually assaulting women, came allegations that Trump entered the Miss Teen USA changing room where girls as young as 15 were in various states of undress…Mariah Billado, Miss Teen Vermont 1997 told BuzzFeed, “I remember putting on my dress really quick because I was like, ‘Oh my god, there’s a man in here.’”

By the end of October 2016, Trump was already employing Republican donor, Sheldon Adelson’s pro-WikiLeaks strategy on the campaign trail (“I love Wikileaks!”) but the campaign’s numbers were still behind Hillary Clinton’s. Sheldon was Trump’s second largest campaign donor, he had a direct line to Trump, and he’s the same guy who was using his security staff at his Las Vegas casino to move illegally obtained surveillance data on Julian Assange from the Ecuadorian embassy in London to the CIA.

With Trump facing serious allegations of sexual abuse, harassment, and misogyny, and the campaign likely losing hope that the tranche of emails that Barbara Ledeen and Peter Smith obtained from unknown sources (see Part two) would turn out to be Hillary’s 30,000 missing emails, the first of what looked to be like a handful of operations to bury the allegations against Trump, some of which had nothing to do with “Pizzagate” in the context of Comet Ping Pong, were set into motion.

Anthony Weiner’s Laptop

The day after former FBI Director James Comey announced that he was reopening the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s private server after her emails were found on Anthony Weiner’s laptop, a major effort to disseminate far and wide alleged information found in those emails, was undertaken by far-right politics.

According to Rolling Stone, the seeds of this operation were planted via a Facebook post on October 29, 2016:

“My NYPD source said its much more vile and serious than classified material on Weiner’s device. The email DETAIL the trips made by Weiner, Bill and Hillary on their pedophile billionaire friend’s plane, the Lolita Express. Yup, Hillary has a well documented predilection for underage girls…We’re talking an international child enslavement and sex ring.”

Later that same day, this post appeared on the website tapatalk.com:

“[T]he feds were forced to reopen the hillary email case [because] apparently the NYPD sex crimes unit was involved in the weiner case…On his laptop they saw emails. [T]hey notified the FBI. Feds were afraid that NYPD would go public so they had to reopen or be accused of a coverup.”

Then, a suspected bot account on Twitter using the handle @DavidGoldbergNY, retweeted the initial Facebook post and the rest, as they say, is history. Buzzfeed reported that within hours of @DavidGoldbergNY’s retweet, a member of Godlike Productions claimed that sources had confirmed six members of Congress were implicated in a massive child trafficking and pedophile ring, and that the Clinton Foundation was acting as its front. “This will be breaking in the next few days, leaks are coming,” they added. The alt-right circuit went crazy.

On November 2, 2016, TruePundit.com published an article entitled, “NYPD Blows Whistle on Hillary Emails: Money Laundering, Sex Crimes with Children, Child Exploitation, Pay to Play, Perjury,” which was followed by a tweet from former Lt. General Michael Flynn, at the time tapped to become Trump’s national security advisor, who wrote, “U decide—NYPD Blows Whistle on New Hillary Emails…”

Two days later, WND.com, a conspiracy website that touts Roger Stone’s pal, Jerome Corsi, as a staff writer, headlined the story with “Source: FBI Has Evidence Hillary Visited ‘Orgy Island’: Huma Abedin Said to Be Cooperating…”

And although Cambridge Analytica co-founder, Steven Bannon, had already stepped down from Breitbart News approximately two months earlier to take over as Trump’s campaign manager, Erik Prince, a reported shadow advisor to the campaign with long-standing ties to the CIA and intelligence community, used the alt-right platform not only to blow up the story but to legitimize it further:

“Because of Weinergate and the sexting scandal, the NYPD started investigating it…They found State Department emails. They found a lot of other really damning criminal information, including money laundering, including the fact that Hillary went to this sex island with convicted pedophile Jeffrey Epstein. Bill Clinton went there more than 20 times. Hillary Clinton went there at least six times…”

“There is all kinds of criminal culpability through all the emails they’ve seen of that 650,000, including money laundering, underage sex, pay-for-play, and, of course, plenty of proof of inappropriate handling, sending/receiving of classified information, up to SAP level Special Access Programs”.

What many people might not remember is that “Jane Doe” aka “Katie Johnson,” filed her initial complaint against Trump and Epstein in late April 2016, and the narrative Prince later pushed through alt-right media like Breitbart were stories that had already been promoted by conservative media directly after “Jane Doe” filed the initial lawsuit. “Pizzagate,” in all likelihood, was an ongoing far-right operation.

In May 2016, Fox News reported on flight logs that showed Bill Clinton had flown on Epstein’s “Lola Express,” more times than was previously believed. According to “The Fox Diet,” by Yochai Benkler, Robert Faris, and Hal Roberts, that story “remained the most widely shared Fox News story on Facebook throughout the entire campaign out of nearly 6,500 Fox News stories in our set.”  Additionally, Breitbart, Daily Mail, The Daily Caller, and Washington Times all ran stories on the Clinton/Epstein story throughout the entire month.

And on July 3, 2016, an anonymous alt-right poster who gained the nickname “FBI anon” after describing themself as an FBI analyst (see Part two), arrived on the 4chan boards claiming to have inside information about the Clinton investigation. Virtually everything quoted from Prince above in that last paragraph, that he told Breibart, was posted by FBI anon almost four months previously:

“I am a person with intimate knowledge of the inner workings of the Clinton case.”

“The problem is with the Clinton Foundation as I mentioned, which you should just imagine as a massive spider web of connections and money laundering implicating hundreds of high-level people.”

“She had SAP level programs on her server…”

“All I can tell you about the SAP’s is HRC had them, and she did not have proper authority to have any of them. They were leaked to her by someone and she did sell them to overseas donors. Possessing them alone makes her guilty of treason.”

“Pedophiles and sex traffickers everywhere. Many politicians trade girls like cattle…Bill and Hillary love foreign donors so much. They get paid in children as well as money.”

Does Hillary have sex with kidnapped girls? “Yes”

Also note that as was reported in Part two of this series, “How Trump Sold You on Fascism,” FBI anon also promoted the idea that if Trump was elected, Hillary would be locked up.

“If Trump wins, HRC will be prosecuted.”

“I am confident if Trump wins she will be going to jail.”

Three days after FBI anon showed up, Fox News published another story, “Billionaire sex offender Epstein claimed he co-founded Clinton Foundation,” written by Malia Zimmerman, the same Fox News reporter who would play an integral role in popularizing the conspiracy theory that Seth Rich was gunned down by goons hired by the DNC, a year later. The Pizzagate narrative was slowly coming together.

The Laura Silsby Story

While the NYPD story that the Clintons were involved in an “international child enslavement and sex ring” burned through the internet faster than chardonnay on a post-election weekend with Hillary, thanks to Trump campaign insiders and associates, the second conspiracy that helped shape the Pizzagate narrative appeared on Reddit less than a week later.

Using the online handle, “PleadingTheYiff,” on November 3, 2016, William Craddick, the co-founder of Disobedient Media, submitted a post to Reddit via the subreddit r/The_Donald entitled, ““BREAKING: I believe I have connected a convicted child abductor who was caught stealing children in Haiti with the Clintons.” The post detailed how Laura Silsby, a former director for The New Life Children’s Refuge, was allegedly “caught trying to steal 33 children” from Haiti and how most of those them were not orphans and had families.

Like the NYPD story, not one link he included in his story came from the John Podesta emails. Rather, most of the links he included were from Hillary Clinton’s State emails that had been published by WikiLeaks over six months prior. What seems odd about Craddick’s post is how it came about, meaning does he normally investigate child trafficking and decided to check out Hillary’s State emails one day? At the time of his posting, everyone was concentrating on the Podesta emails, or even the DNC emails, not Hillary’s State emails. Was Craddick’s post actually organic in nature, spurred on by the recent NYPD/Weiner story? It doesn’t appear that child trafficking is his primary area of interest:

Regardless of how Craddick found the story (why didn’t anyone ever ask him?), his post went viral. Alt-right social media figure and political commentator Mike Cernovich along with alt-right activist Britt Pettibone appear to be one of the first ones to tweet about it. Notice what Cernovich does here: He starts to piece together multiple narratives i.e. Epstein, Haiti, corruption, sex trafficking:

“Were 33 children for Bill Clinton and Jeffrey Epstein’s ‘use’? Forget corruption, these emails expose connections to child sex trafficking.”

Surprisingly, WikiLeaks also retweeted Craddick’s post stating, “Significant, if partisan, find showing how the Clintons supported child stealer Laura Silsby.” Meanwhile, as Craddick’s post started to go viral, another storm was brewing for Hillary and her campaign manager, John Podesta. That same day, Cernovich and white supremacist, Jared Wyand, started tweeting about code words for pedophilia allegedly used in Podesta’s emails after someone posted this on 4chan:

Alt-right journalist Cassandra Fairbanks also published an article on the story, “The Internet is On Fire With Speculation That Podesta Emails Contain Code for Child Sex,” which drew on Cernovich’s tweets, a summary of Craddick’s Silsby/Haiti post, and the code words found in Podesta’s emails to weave what was becoming a spectacular story about the Clintons. Hillary’s nightmare was just getting started.

Spirit Cooking

Besides the day that Hillary Clinton lost the election, November 3, 2016, may have been the best day ever for all things anti-Hillary because the hits just kept on coming. As Craddick’s post and the story about cryptic words for pedophilia allegedly peppered throughout Podesta’s emails gained momentum, a forwarded email from Tony Podesta to his brother, John, was found in a new batch of Podesta emails released by Wikileaks. The email was an invitation to a “Spirit Cooking” dinner held by performance artist Marina Abramovic.

According to Twitter Advanced Search, only four tweets mentioning “spirit cooking” remain live from November 3, 2016 (it’s unknown if there were more from that day but have since been deleted). The earliest one was sent out by a MoMA bot account promoting Abramovic’s 1996 work “Untitled” from “Spirit Cooking,” a tweet that can only be described as the worst PR timing ever in the history of all things that have ever been promoted.

Spirit Cooking is a bizarre cookbook filled with recipes and etchings that “serve as evocative instructions for actions or thoughts.” One recipe calls for “fresh breast milk” and “fresh sperm,” making it beyond questionable why Hillary Clinton’s campaign manager was getting an invitation to attend one of these “spirit dinners.” Hence the reason why the story, which showed up on the evening of November 3rd, went viral. By 7:30 p.m. EST, someone had already posted a write-up about it on Reddit via the r/The_Donald, linking to the webpage that had been originally posted by the MoMA bot account on Twitter earlier that day.

Late that evening, Cernovich, once again on top of all things conspiracy, published “Podesta Emails Reveal Clinton’s Inner Circle as Sex Cult with Connections to Human Trafficking,” to his Danger and Play blog, that discussed spirit cooking, Laura Silsby and Haiti, and Jeffrey Epstein’s “pedophile island.”

Cernovich excitedly wrote that Julian Assange “claimed that WikiLeaks would send Hillary Clinton to prison,” a reference to the June 2016 interview Assange did with ITV, as well as the Podesta emails. But Assange wasn’t referring to WikiLeaks’ upcoming publications when he made that comment (see Part two). Regardless, Cernovich’s statement did two things: It drove home the idea that Hillary would be locked up under a Trump administration and that Trump would do it with the help of Julian Assange.

Fairbanks followed in Cernovich’s footsteps shortly thereafter, publishing a story that focused solely on Marina Abramovic’s “art,” spirit cooking, and the Podesta brothers; WikiLeaks promptly retweeted it. It should be noted that at the time WikiLeaks retweeted her story, the Ecuadorian government had shut off Assange’s access to the internet at the embassy in London, making it unclear who exactly was behind the retweets of both Craddick and Fairbank’s stories.

The following day, November 4, 2016, the same day Erik Prince was giving an interview to Breitbart News about the Clintons’ pay for play schemes and child trafficking networks, Lifezette.com published a story from Fox News’ Edmund Kozak entitled, “WikiLeaks: Clinton Campaign Chair Participated in Occult Magic.” Kozak was mentioned in Part two of this series for pushing the story that Russia had 20,000 of Hillary’s missing emails back in May 2016. He also works for the PR firm, Proactive Communications, which was founded by Mark Serrano, another Fox commentator and PR guy whose firm was paid thousands of dollars by Trump’s reelection team this spring. He’s now senior advisor to the Trump 2020 campaign.

Going back to the Spirit Cooking story, Sean Hannity reported on it on November 4th with, “Leaked Email Appears To Link Clinton Campaign Chairman To Bizarre…,” citing Kozak’s story, as did InfoWars, adding to the already viral story that the Clintons’ were involved with international child trafficking and satanic rituals through their friend, Jeffrey Epstein—accusations that were going to send Hillary to prison if Trump had anything to do with it.

Comet Ping Pong

The conspiracy theory that a pedophile ring was being run out of the basement of a Hillary-linked pizza shop called Comet Ping Pong which is owned by James Alefantis, was the last conspiracy theory about Clinton and child trafficking to go viral before the 2016 Presidential election. The story actually appeared earlier than Craddick’s story about Laura Silsby, Spirit Cooking, or codes words for pedophilia in Podesta’s emails.

On November 2, 2016, an account currently using the handle @WandaMiller5102 wrote, “Breaking soon Comet Ping Pong Pizza, ‘concerts’ in ‘their back room”, Owner is: James Alefantis.” The story, however, did not go viral until the following day when it hit 4chan’s boards while Spirit Cooking was trending on Twitter.

By early November, it appeared that the Trump campaign had successfully buried at least half a dozen sexual assault/harassment accusations that had been lodged against him throughout the previous month. It’s hardly surprising that on November 3, 2016, when stories about Anthony Weiner’s laptop, Haiti kidnappings, spirit cooking, and Comet Ping Pong were hitting all-time ratings, “Jane Doe” cancelled a press conference citing fear over threats she had received.

According to Rolling Stone, what made Pizzagate different from other conspiracies is that it was “retweeted and picked up by some of the most powerful faces in American politics.” Powerful faces that wanted to protect an unhinged, sexist, fascist candidate from his accusers and usher him into the White House.

Reddit

Although not all of the conspiracies surrounding John Podesta and the Clintons started on 4chan or Reddit, both platforms were essential to spreading the message across social media. As mentioned earlier, Craddick posted his Silsby story on the subreddit r/The_Donald, and by November 7, 2016, Pizzagate had become such a national hit that a The_Donald member, using the handle “Pizzathrowaway777,” created a new subreddit called r/Pizzagate. While staying busy managing the “But I was certain Comet Ping Pong had a basement” subreddit, Pizzathrowaway, who goes by a myriad of other handles such as willreddittomorrow, redditfuckingsucksyo, TruthHasNoBias, and HISNAMEWASSETHRICH, was also managing a Steemit account under the name “FuckCensorship.”

PizzaThrowaway’s Steemit account currently only displays four posts, one of which was written by them entitled, “The Truth Has No Bias: The Real Origins of /r/Pizzagate & the Pizzagate/Pedogate Movement.” In it, they claimed to have been participated “heavily” in the subreddit r/DNCLeaks, and after Hillary Clinton won the Democratic nomination they moved over to the pro-Trump camp after deciding “he was not the bogeyman the Legacy Media’s propaganda had tried to convince me he was.”

Throwaway’s post also mentions Fairbank’s article on spirit cooking, Craddick’s post on Haiti, and the Comet Ping Pong investigation, leaving out entirely the NYPD/Weiner laptop story, although they briefly alluded to FBI anon. They also seem genuinely miffed by the fact that an anonymous post entitled, “Comet Ping Pong – Pizzagate Summary,” in the r/The_Donald subreddit was credited by the “legacy media” as the source for the Pizzagate investigation. They believe that Craddick should have been credited with it, again, ignoring the NYPD/Weinergate story but, interestingly enough, pushing the idea that “Pizzagate” was indeed about more than just the Comet Ping Pong story.

The three other posts on Pizzathrowaway’s Steemit page were all written by the same author, Whitedeer9217, whose Steemit account is brimming with articles about child abuse, torture, and satanic rituals. The interesting thing about the Whitedeer account is that it appears to belong to either William Craddick or Elizabeth Lea Vos, a co-founder of Disobedient Media who now works for Consortium News. Like Pizzathrowaway, the Whitedeer account used an array of other handles, especially on Twitter, such as:

@deer9217
@whitehart9217
@whit3deer9
@dove27272727

It also appears that Vos was using the handle @LeaVos at one point but virtually all of these accounts have been shut down. In an undated post via a website forum called “hollaforums,” Whitedeer wrote:

And one of the images they linked to in the post takes you to this:

As you can see from the bio, they’re a self-proclaimed writer for Disobedient Media and sure, at the time that this screenshot was posted there were two other people working for the indie news outlet besides William Craddick: Evan Lyle and “Cassandra Hasenstein,” however:

According to archive.org, there was a second co-founder of Disobedient Media, a German by the name of “Cassandra Hasenstein,” although it’s questionable if this is a real person since nothing really exists about them outside of Disobedient Media’s website, GAB, and Twitter. Disobedient Media stopped listing Hasenstein on their website sometime between March – May 2017, during which time Elizabeth Vos was added despite the fact she had been writing articles for Disobedient since January 2017.

As for Evan Lyle, during high school he traveled to Haiti on several occasions to teach English and it’s possible that he was the researcher behind Craddick’s post about Laura Silsby. However, although it appears that Lyle has been involved in journalism since as early as college, there’s no record of him reporting on child abuse, trafficking, satanic rituals, or torture. Meanwhile, Vos has continued reporting on such topics since Pizzagate.

Additionally, Disobedient Media’s tagline is “Truth has no bias,” the exact handle name used by Pizzathrowaway777. Regardless of whether or not Craddick, Vos, or Lyle were behind the Pizzathrowaway acccount, what appears to be the case is that both William Craddick and Elizabeth Lea Vos played an extensively large role in promoting Pizzagate and then went on to become figure heads in independent journalism; Disobedient Media and the much-heralded Robert Parry’s outlet, Consortium News.

You Can’t Stump the Trump

Craddick and Vos may very well disagree that they’re avid Trump supporters, but at the time when they were pushing Pizzagate, they were involved in multiple pro-Trump subreddits. Craddick was involved with r/The_Donald, one of the largest, if not the largest, online support communities for Trump while moderating other subreddits such as: r/Operation_Berenstain, whose objective was “to aid the FBI in releasing incriminating info regarding the Clintons and their accomplices; r/TheNewRight, with fellow moderator Mike Cernovich; and r/Pedogate, a subreddit that replaced r/Pizzagate after Reddit shut down the community.

One of the moderators for /Pedogate later stated that they felt the subreddit r/Pizzagate had been professionally backed, and was relieved they had prevented r/Pedogate from falling into the “wrong hands.” Craddick is no longer a moderator for it.

Craddick and Whitedeer were also both listed as moderators for r/DrainTheSwamp, a subreddit dedicated to protecting Donald Trump:

“This subreddit is to aggregate serious topics on how to best defend against the manufactured smear campaigns against the Trump administration only meant to divide the people even further, deflect, cover up crimes and attempt to re-take control through undemocratic means while causing damage and harm to its populace and the very foundations of democracy.”

It’s possible that Vos was never behind the account Whitedeer or Pizzathrowaway777, but if she is or was, she would be hard-pressed to explain today how she was never a loyal Trump supporter while moderating a subreddit dedicated to defending him.

Reddit AMA With Assange

Shockingly, after creating Disobedient Media in January 2017, 28-year-old Craddick, who appears to have virtually no online presence prior to appearing online under the handle “PleadingTheYiff” in October 2016 (besides this 2006 news article about how he was given an HS award by then-US deputy director of operations for U.S. Central Command for Craddick’s “humanitarian aid trips to Cuba and the Philippines”), was made a moderator for r/WLResearchCommunity, a subreddit that claims WikiLeaks both created and maintains the account.

What’s startling is that at least one trusted member of the WikiLeaks community (at least on some level) appeared to be working directly with Trump supporters disseminating conspiracy theories about Hillary Clinton in the fall-winter of 2016. That, and fascism was welcomed directly into the WikiLeaks community via Reddit.

As previously mentioned, the Ecuadorian government had cut off Julian Assange’s access to the internet on behalf of the U.S. government from approximately October 18, 2016 to what can only be assumed was at least until after the election on November 8, 2016. Additionally, in January 2017, Assange took part in a Reddit AMA (“Ask Me Anything”) during which he was asked about WikiLeaks’ moderators:

“Shortly after your internet access was cut, the head moderator of r/Wikileaks added 6 new users to the moderation team who he stated were the first to send him a him private messages volunteering their help. Outside of a single sanctioned thread, the new team banned anyone who questioned the sensibility of this action given reddit’s long history of having its moderation teams infiltrated by certain interest groups. Censorship of this, and any topic relating to your safety or wellbeing forced the creation of alternative subreddits such as r/WhereIsAssange  and  r/BannedFromWikileaks…”

Assange’s response was simple:

“I have not been in contact with any Reddit moderators nor am I aware of our people having being in contact, but it is theoretically possible that someone in WikiLeaks has but did not think it significant enough to bring to my attention.”

So were members of Wikileaks (whatever that means exactly) behind the Reddit account r/WLResearchCommunity or not? Or were WikiLeaks supporters overstating their ties with them?

How much, if anything, did Assange know about Trump supporters being brought into the fold via Reddit while being retweeted on Twitter—supporters who may have been involved with online intelligence operations and possibly in contact with other supporters of Trump who had a direct line to him via individuals like Steve Bannon, Erik Prince, or Roger Stone? For example, Cassandra Fairbanks, who was eventually granted access to r/WikiLeaks in January 2018, another subreddit that WikiLeaks allegedly runs.

Perhaps a better question to ask is whether or not Julian Assange was fully aware of how long Trump-supporting, alt-right, Pizzagaters would manage to stick around the WikiLeaks community and who, exactly, they would bring with them.

Which STD Do You Prefer?

This ongoing investigation is not about proving whether or not Hillary Clinton was a better candidate than Trump or that the conspiracies were false based on the fact Clinton was never prosecuted. On the contrary, as Julian Assange put it, the 2016 Presidential election was a choice between “cholera or gonorrhea.” Rather, this is about how far individuals tied to the intelligence community, the Trump campaign, and the alt-right were willing to go to push unproven accusations and false statements in order to convince Americans to vote for Trump.

In the eyes of voters disgusted by Hillary Clinton, surely the notion of her being prosecuted under a Trump administration played on the psyche of undecided voters, Bernie supporters, and those who were less than thrilled at the prospect of Trump as their Republican nominee. And Pizzagate, a largely staged event that played out from early-mid 2016 until the election through a series of news stories and social media posts, likely helped them decide. Nobody wants the head of a pedophile ring in the White House. Fascism on the other hand…

What this investigation will continue to build on is the fact that the “Free Assange” community, in almost ten years, has failed to build a powerful, working class movement to free the Australian publisher, and that the movement has become malignant and sharply divided, a good indication that it might be infiltrated.

And what’s interesting is that some of the leading actors who promoted Pizzagate, a well-oiled propaganda machine involving the Trump campaign; individuals tied to U.S. intelligence and psyops; and the alt-right, became leading figures in the movement to free Assange after WikiLeaks legitimized and then welcomed them into the fold.

This, despite the fact that some of them had direct ties to people within the Trump campaign or Trump himself, now the third U.S. president to be impeached and the first to prosecute a publisher for practicing journalism. With a free press and Julian Assange’s life at stake, we’re going to continue investigating what’s really behind the curtain of the support community and why efforts to build a strong pro-Assange movement in defiance of fascism has been largely ignored, derailed, or sabotaged.

Part Four: The Gatekeeper Files: How One Conspiracy Brought Together a Consortium of Actors