...riding on the backs of QAnon believers

QAnon has sprouted a following since late October of last year, now delivering millions of views on YouTube.

For those unbaptized in the way of Q – the far right heralds President Trump as a heroic figure fighting the “deep state”, and its dastardly deeds of starting wars, trafficking drugs and humans for money.

 “Q” originally emerged on the message board 4chan, in a thread called “Calm Before the Storm”, and took hold of followers establishing his legend as a government insider with top security clearance.

In early September of 2018, Reddit banned r/greatawakening, the main QAnon subreddit, and then it banned /r/The_GreatAwakening, the backup subreddit where users gathered for the latest Q clues around the next rabbit hole of information drops and messages.

A Reddit spokesperson confirmed that r/greatawakening was banned for violating Reddit’s policy against “inciting violence, harassment, and the dissemination of personal information,” while r/The_GreatAwakening was taken down for inciting harassment.

A key topic ventured into with QAnons is the sealed indictments and the miraculous numbers generated by the Trump Administration to make the world a better place, putting the evil doers where they belong.

The Daily Dot explains the definition of an indictment. “An indictment is simply a formal accusation of serious wrongdoing, sought by a federal prosecutor, voted on by a grand jury, which usually leads to an arrest.

The Fifth Amendment requires the federal government to obtain an indictment from a grand jury in order to prosecute someone for a felony, and it’s important to remember that only grand juries hand down indictments. Judges can’t do it, nor can federal agencies. Or the president. 

An indictment is unsealed when made public, typically when a suspect is arrested.”

Mike Rothschild of The Daily Dot adds in his column, “But we do know, at the very least, that the massive numbers of “sealed indictments” being thrown around by #QAnon believers is inaccurate, and isn’t being compared to previous years correctly.

Meanwhile, sealed indictment mania is a conspiracy theory that feeds itself, and will continue to, by adding more numbers to an essentially meaningless tally, and pretending it’s a portend of things to come.”

Recently on Reddit, an investigation into debunking the claims about ‘40,000 sealed indictments’ was published in detail, which you can see below.

Additionally, debunkers have noted that apart from several ‘predictions’ being incorrect over the distance of time, the trip codes for the Q site were hacked and released publically about two months ago. This means anyone, could be pretending to be Q.

Debunking the claims about "40,000 sealed indictments"

If you’ve paid any attention to Q Anon, you’ve probably heard the claim that there’s currently an unprecedented number of sealed indictments (25,000? 40,000?? 60,000??? a million bazillion?!?!?) building up. just waiting for Trump to unleash The Storm. This obviously sounds ridiculous, but I’m not sure if anyone has actually sat down and debunked it yet — so that’s what I’m here to do!

Let’s start with the most recent version of that claim, which purports to list the number of sealed indictments that have built up in US district courts since 10/30/17 — their official count is at 45,468. Furthermore, they claim that in all of 2006, there were only 1,077 sealed indictments filed in all US district courts. Does this mean The Storm is gathering??? Before we jump to conclusions, we’d better check their work.

As it turns out, that’s not hard to do, because the Q crew has actually been keeping pretty good records. The URL listed for “backup files” leads to this Google Drive folder, which contains folders with data for each month as well as a guide to where it’s coming from. If you don’t want to download files from a random Google Drive account, here’s an imgur album containing their instruction manual. As you can see, they are using the PACER (Public Access to Electronic Court Records) database, which is open to the public (although, if you make an account yourself, you have to pay $0.10 per page for search results). PACER.gov lists individual sites for each district court; for each one, they’re running a search for reports associated with pending criminal cases filed in a given month, counting how many are associated with a sealed case (these cases are designated as “Sealed v. Sealed” instead of naming the plaintiff and defendant), and adding that number to the monthly count.

So what’s the problem? First, those search results showing up on PACER aren’t just indictments, they’re court proceedings. That certainly includes indictments, but it also includes search warrants, records of petty offenses (like speeding tickets), wiretap and pen register applications, etc. For example, here’s the search page for criminal case reports from the Colorado district court, where you can see that “case types” includes “petty offenses,” “search warrant,” and “wire tap.” (There are other options as well if you scroll — although I didn’t take a second screenshot — like “pen registers,” “magistrate judge,” and finally “criminal.”) In the Q crew's instructions for conducting these searches (linked above), they specifically mention leaving all default settings except for the date, which means their search results will include speeding tickets and search warrants and everything else.

Second, the number 45,468 comes from adding up all the sealed court proceedings that are submitted every month. It doesn’t account for proceedings that have since been unsealed and/or carried out. In other words, that number is literally meaningless. It’s always going to get higher and higher, because they’re not keeping track of the number of court proceedings that are currently sealed, they’re just adding up the new proceedings that are filed every month. So how many are still sealed? Frankly, I have no idea, because I have zero desire to go through all 50+ district court websites (most states have more than one) and count them all up.

However, I did use Colorado as a test case. According to their running list, a total of 1,087 sealed court proceedings have been filed in the Colorado district court between 10/30/17 and 7/31/18. I ran my own search for pending reports filed between 10/30/17 and today (8/7/18), limiting “case type” to “criminal” (to avoid getting results for search warrants and speeding tickets), filtered for cases flagged as “sealed,” and got… a grand total of 41 sealed criminal proceedings. In other words, of the 1,087 “sealed indictments” they’re claiming have built up in Colorado, only 41 — or 3.8% — are actually criminal proceedings that are still sealed.

So... it’s not looking too good for the Q crew so far. I think one example is sufficient for my purposes, but if you have a PACER account, and you’d like to run similar searches in other district courts, feel free to share your results!

Finally, I want to talk about how many sealed “indictments” (court proceedings) are typical. Like I mentioned earlier, the Q crew is claiming that the total number was 1,077 in 2006, based on this paper from the Federal Judicial Center called “Sealed Cases in Federal Courts”. Here’s the thing… they’re wrong. This paper was written in 2008 and published in 2009; it makes it very clear that it is examining sealed cases filed in 2006 *that were still sealed as of 2008.*In other words, it doesn’t count documents that were sealed in 2006 but subsequently unsealed.

Additionally, while there were indeed 1,077 criminal proceedings from 2006 that remained sealed in 2008 (p. 17), there were also 15,177 sealed magistrate judge proceedings (p. 21) and 8,121 sealed miscellaneous proceedings (p. 23) — these include search warrant applications, wiretap requests, etc. Like I discussed previously, the searches that the Q crew is conducting are not filtering those out. So, if they had been conducting the same searches as these researchers, they’d be concluding that, as of 2008, there were still 24,375 “indictments” from 2006 waiting to be unsealed.

So, final conclusion? It's bullshit. Sorry, Q crew. Anyway, if any of my explanations are unclear, you have information to add, or there's anything I got wrong -- please let me know!

reddit

For additional background material, please see from January 8, 2018.

JOSEPH FARRELL: Q ANON: DEEP STATE WIZARD OF? DARK JOURNALIST

Deep State Trial Balloon/Marketing Op Aimed at Alternative Media?

In this fascinating episode Dark Journalist Daniel Liszt welcomes back Oxford Scholar Dr. Joseph P. Farrell the author of the popular Giza Death Star Book Series.

Farrell delves deeply into the online group posts of Q Anon and its rapid spread through the Alternative Media under the guise of an anonymous insider. Farrell Poses the question: Is the Q Anon material just the latest wave of sophisticated disinformation that Catherine Austin Fitts calls "Hope Porn"?

Disinformation Campaign

Farrell sees a sophisticated disinformation campaign aimed at the independent research community to create an Imitation Wikileaks style vehicle that will act as an All-knowing Oracle Insider for a variety of important Geopolitical situations. It is apparently designed to propagate the promise of Cabal Arrests and Elites being tried at Gitmo as a kind of Soma to pacify the growing online audience that are raising questions about the actions of the Deep State on a global scale!