4chan Is Working Overtime To Solve The Seth Rich Murder
Author: William Hicks
For better or worse, 4chan’s /pol/ has mobilized their army of internet diggers to solve the murder of Seth Rich, the DNC staffer who was mysteriously murdered late at night in D.C. in the middle of the 2016 election season.
While police claim the July killing was a robbery gone wrong (his wallet and watch were not stolen), many conspiracy theorists online believe Rich was the one who leaked the John Podesta emails to Wikileaks and that his murder was retaliation by the Clinton campaign.
DC police have been incredibly opaque about the murder investigation, which has yet to yield any publicly announced leads. Lacking any official information, the Internet has run wild with conspiracies.
The 4chan investigation began after a private investigator claimed Seth Rich had been sending information on his computer to Wikileaks. This claim was later discredited due to the fact the investigator never actually saw Rich’s computer.
Then, conservative activist Ali Akbar asked /pol/ on Twitter to start looking into the DNC staffers who worked with Rich. Akbar is an interesting gadfly in the “New Right” movement who hangs around the likes of Milo Yiannopoulos and Lucian Wintrich. He has been convicted of felony theft and credit card fraud.
Akbar’s request prompted 4chan to compile a list and begin digging into the staffer’s history. They found that many of Rich’s coworkers had moved on to work at Correct the Record, David Brock’s pro-Clinton nonprofit. Correct the Record is despised by many 4channers, due to the organization’s plan to spend money during the election paying people to argue in favor of Clinton on social media and message boards. Pro-Trump corners of 4chan and Reddit were paranoid during the election that Correct the Record shills were trying derail their discussions.
An image showing the LinkedIn pages of these employees is circulating around the Internet.
Then 4channers began looking into the employees at the hospital where Rich, who was shot twice in the back, was taken and later died. The conspiracy theorists began to think maybe someone in the hospital may have helped kill him.
An anonymous poster on /pol/ made wild claims that he was a surgery resident at that hospital, Washington Hospital Center, and had seen that Rich had three gunshot wounds despite only being shot twice. The anon also claimed law enforcement was acting suspiciously about who was allowed to attend and visit Rich throughout his hospital stay.
4chan’s Seth Rich investigation has many parallels to Pizzagate, the conspiracy that a massive child sex ring was run out of a Washington D.C. pizzeria. Both conspiracies implicate various D.C. figures into a web of scandal based on loose, circumstantial evidence. The list of publicly identifiable figures only grows as 4chan furthers their investigation.
Apparently connective thread of the conspiracy theory is the Service Employees International Union (SEIU). Some of the doctors and other hospital staff named by 4chan were part of the union. With Pizzagate, the theorists claim SEIU was under the thumb of John Podesta and was used as pawns for his “dirty work.”
SEIU is closely affiliated with the Democratic Party and its former president Andy Stern had close ties to George Soros.
/pol/ even identified the security cameras located around the site of Rich’s murder.
This got some, including millionaire MegaUploads founder Kim Dotcom, to start asking questions about why this footage has not been used to identify the murderer.
In the last few days 4chan went down a few times and the site was unavailable. This, of course, led many on the message board to believe it was an attempt by saboteurs to hinder their Seth Rich investigation.
Beyond their massive of list of possible conspirators, 4channers have yet to make any substantial breakthroughs that advance the idea that the Clinton campaign had anything to do with Seth’s murder.
Solving Seth Rich’s murder has become an obsession for many outside Internet message boards. Two privately funded investigators are researching the murder. Aaron Rich, Seth’s brother, even raised over $22,000 on GoFundMe to hire a private investigator for his family. The alt right crowdfunding site WeSearchr raised another $20,000 for information about the murder.
The interest is extremely high but the case is as cold as ever.
