interviews
Fredrick Brennan, Creator Of 8chan, Shares The Chaotic Origins Of The Infamous Imageboard, How He Got Caught Up In The QAnon Conspiracy Theory, And Who He Thinks Is Behind It
hen Fredrick Brennan created 8chan back in 2013, the imageboard started out with a small user base, joining the long list of relatively insignificant alternatives to 4chan. By 2014, GamerGate resulted in an influx of users to the site, transforming it from an unknown corner of the internet to an infamous venue for some of the internet’s most contemptuous outcasts. That same year, Brennan moved to the Philippines and began working for Jim Watkins in what would become some of the most chaotic years of his life. Years later, after relinquishing ownership to Watkins, the conspiracy theory QAnon hit 8chan and soon became its primary base of operations, home to the notorious “Q drops” where devotees could get the latest information from the pseudonymous persona claiming to be a deep state insider.
Brennan ultimately left Watkins’ company in 2018, setting off a series of cataclysmic events that saw him embroiled in a legal battle while seeking to destroy the once modest imageboard that had transformed into a monster of extremist ideologies and conspiracy theories. After fleeing from the Philippines and narrowly escaping a life-threatening situation, Brennan has been at the center of exposing the people perpetuating QAnon and profiting off its followers. We sat down with him to retrace the origins of 8chan, how he got caught up in QAnon, and why he thinks Jim Watkins is currently the man behind the ill-famed "Q" to unravel the mystery behind this year's most prominent conspiracy.
Q: Welcome, Fred. Thanks for being with us and agreeing to the interview. So to begin, would you mind introducing yourself and letting us know what you’ve been up to lately?
A: My name is Fredrick Brennan. I made 8chan in 2013, quit in 2016, and then left Jim's company in 2018. Lately, I've been not really working on imageboards at all. I've pretty much taken up an entirely different career. I've been working on a font editor, different fonts and stuff. I've even gotten paid to do a few of them.
Q: So the last time we spoke to you was six years ago now, which seems like forever, but before we discuss more recent things, I’d like to jump back to a bit of your backstory to provide some context. Could you recap how you got your start online and what places you used to frequent during your earliest days on the internet?
A: I grew up in Upstate New York, and I first started using the internet really young. I think my dad got a computer when I was like 6 — especially by the time I was eight — I was online all the time. As far as communities go, pretty much the first one I used was Neopets. You remember that site?
Q: Yeah, that's funny. I remember being on there way back in the day when I was a kid. My Neopets probably all starved to death.
A: Yeah, mine are probably all dead too. So by the time I was 12 or 13, I was just on 4chan all the time. That was the main community I was on. How I found out about it was because they raided a video game board that was advertised in Sonic Adventure 2. In the game, if you look at one of the message boards in the Chao Garden, it tells you to go to a certain link and there was like a BBS [bulletin board system] there. So they raided that, and that's how I heard about it. I started using it, and I used it pretty much every day until I was 19.
Origins of 8chan
Q: The origin of 8chan is a captivating story. During your interview with us back then, you discussed a bit of 8chan’s bizarre history, which included your involvement with the incel community Wizardchan and your relationship with a woman who gave you a potent dose of psychedelic mushrooms that inspired you to create the imageboard. Would you elaborate on this tale for us to explain how the site came about?
A: When I got a little older, let's say after I was like 19, I started using the alternatives to 4chan — mostly the really small ones that only have like a few hundred posts every hour or whatever. So I was using all these smaller sites, and on one of them, this guy posted that he was starting a new website for the users of the /r9k/ board on that site. This was something really common on these small imageboards. It happened all the time. So yeah, it was called "Wizardchan." I used it for a while, and then, because it was such a tiny site and nobody really cared about it, I came to own it when the owner got involved in a gay relationship.
Q: Can you explain the concept of the whole "wizard" thing too?
A: It comes from a Japanese saying — now obviously not like a traditional Japanese thing, a Japanese meme really — on imageboards and stuff, the [saying is] that if you go to the age of 30 without having sex, you become a wizard. So that's where the name of the site came from.
So from what I understand, he couldn't own it anymore [after being in a relationship], so then I got to own it. Then, basically, the same thing happened to me except it was a straight relationship. So I had to give it to somebody else. Wizardchan has a very weird history of transferring between young people who think, "Oh, this is it. I'm never going to have sex. I'm going to be a wizard." And then boom, they end up getting into a relationship and giving up the site.
Q: So then you got into a relationship with the woman who gave you mushrooms that sort of kicked off the inspiration for the site?
A: So then I had her living with me, and she's drinking all the time, smoking weed all the time. Then she came into the mushrooms and we used them. It's funny because I thought that 8chan was an original idea, but actually, there was already one like it that had closed a long time before called "imageboard4free." So I thought when I was tripping, "Oh, this idea of combining Reddit and 4chan is very novel." So I worked on the software and I never really expected it to become that big. It was just because I had a business at the time, and I knew everybody in that community of alternatives to 4chan. They would often hire me to write a feature for them and would pay me like $100 or $200, not much at all, but it was enough.
So I had that sort of business, and I figured if I make this site where users can create the boards, that would really level up my "street cred" among people who work on imageboards. Even if it doesn't become a big community, it's still kind of an impressive technical feat and would have helped my business. I thought it was a long shot that it could become a big community, but even if it doesn't, there's still a practical portfolio reason for me to do it.
GamerGate Era
Q: About a year later, 8chan was popularized due to the ban of GamerGate discussions on 4chan despite being around before this movement. What was your reaction to seeing this influx of new users surrounding it, what was your opinion on GamerGate back then, and has this changed since then?
A: 8chan was basically a very tiny website for an entire year. It was around the size of Wizardchan. Before GamerGate, the average number of 8chan posts was a hundred in a day. So, it really transformed the community a lot. It went from being mostly in foreign languages that I couldn't read, being tiny, comfy, "we all sort of know each other" thing, and everyone was really nice. Sometimes they would say, "Hi Fred," and they'd be real nice to me. "Oh, can you make this feature? We'd like it for our board, blah, blah, blah." And then, after that [when GamerGate moved from 4chan to 8chan] it was all transformed. "Hi cripple kike, fix your fucking website," like that.
So there was a transformation there, and people started to try to take it [8chan] down. The thing about GamerGate was, cause 8chan was self-service and not like these other imageboards, what they basically did when they got banned from 4chan is they just googled alternatives. 8chan was very low in the Google ranking, so they were going to like every alternative to 4chan, and they're all asking like, "Hey, can you make us a board? We just got banned from 4chan, please it's blah, blah, blah," and they would explain themselves. These other imageboard admins were basically given the choice, "Am I gonna lease to these nerds?" But on 8chan, the choice was more, "Am I going to evict them?" Because they already had set up shop by the time I knew what was going on. I probably should have, but I didn't, and now here we are. I didn't really understand the issue [behind GamerGate] at all or what they were talking about, but it was more just an ideological free speech basis that I let them stay.
It was really crazy. We went from a hundred posts in a day to like 7,000 in an hour right after Gamergate. 4chan itself, at that time, was only getting like 20,000 posts in an hour, so we were already comparable. 8chan was the number two imageboard in the world for a long time.
Q: Back during that initial period, 8chan was founded on the basis of being a medium for free speech on the internet, which you also discussed in our previous interview. Has your stance or mindset on this changed since then? What are your thoughts on the role of imageboards like these and how has that changed over time?
A: Just based on all we've seen from imageboards, I guess the biggest realization I've had is that groups of anonymous users are not good at finding the truth about things — which is something that I've kind of had to accept because when I was using 8chan and 4chan all the time, I would think that a big group of anonymous users will find more truth than falsehoods. I think we've seen that this is not, at all, the case. QAnon is a great example of that, where it's like, this is so obviously bullshit, but they're researching it all the time and yet they can't see that. So, that would have very much shocked me when I was running Wizardchan and then starting 8chan because I thought, at the time, that imageboard users were smarter than that, that they were good researchers. I figured back then that it was good to kind of have this place where people could research things about the world.
Running 8chan kind of showed me that. I would always try to think of a justification for banning a community, and you can really write yourself into a corner of doing that. Sometimes it's just gotta be subjective. This community is toxic. I don't need to come up with a rulebook and a reason, like this doesn't need to be a codified set of laws — just this community is toxic. We don't want them in our community.
Q: Yeah. Some of the bans that happen I disagree with and others I understand. I’ve always been a big proponent of free speech and having places online for that, but as you said, it tends to create communities that can be terrible sometimes.
A: It really creates kind of like "hivemind communities" too, where everything is just self-reinforcing. We can think about the incel communities for example. What they believe is such BS. Like, it is so ridiculous, but it's such a self-contained community, and everything that's being posted there is like cherry-picked to support what everybody already believes. If you try to post something that's not, maybe nobody will reply, or maybe you'll get banned. So, yeah, it's a very self-contained kind of community. Another example we can think about is that imageboard users are very good at integrating new events into their already-existing worldview.
I really discovered that from Wizardchan because when I got into a relationship, the theory was that all men are on a scale from 0 to 10 in attractiveness. Those who are below, let's say a 6, so like 0 to 5, will never have any mate at all. Those who are like 6 or 7 will be paired with the lowest females, so 0 to 5 on female attractiveness. Then, the top of the men, 8, 9 and 10, will basically screw all the women, and this is the theory. With Mr. Pacific's experience [former owner of Wizardchan before Brennan], he got into a gay relationship, which they don't even consider as really like "legitimate." So when I actually got into a straight relationship, they just immediately amended their worldview to make things continue to make sense. What they said was, "Well, people like Fred are actually negative on the scale." So, because I'm negative on the scale, women will fuck me for pity or for a fetish or whatever. So they came up with a new reason and it's like, I became a part of their evolving doctrine of what they would call the "red pill."
Introduction to Jim Watkins
Q: So then in 2014, you were first introduced to Jim Watkins who eventually took over ownership of 8chan years later. Could you sum up how you met him and began working together?
A: I got to work with him because his son actually emailed me and they knew that 8chan was having hosting problems. They knew that I was not going to be able to get a bank loan. Without a third party coming in, 8chan would have been over very quickly after it got popular. I don't think that 8chan would have seen 2015, it would've just been over because it got de-platformed from Patreon and I was getting sick of it too. I'm not really a "community manager" type, I'm a programmer type, and this was not really even fun for me. I wrote 8chan to impress people technically, like "Isn't this a cool technology?" 8chan's software was open source too. I always thought that maybe somebody else would start an imageboard based on my code.
So yeah, I was kind of sick of it, and Watkins basically turned on the charm and was like, "Hey, we made 2channel. Here, let me prove that to you by putting a link to 8chan on 2channel." He knew that I knew what 2channel was, of course, and that I even spoke some Japanese, so he knew that he could easily impress me with his link. Basically, his argument to me was that he was actually the one who kinda came up with 2channel and Hiroyuki [who founded it] was just a figurehead, and Hiroyuki was basically lying when he said that he was actually the one who started 2channel.
Q: What were your first impressions of him at the time?
A: Well, starstruck, you know? Like the only bigger star in the imageboard world other than 4chan would be 2channel. In this small, insular world, there's no bigger celebrity than 2channel. It was a very compelling narrative that we were going to team up to kind of take back the Western imageboard from 4chan, who had misinterpreted what it should be, and kind of make it a more open, free speech thing like 2channel.
Q: Also during this timeframe, you moved to the Philippines to work on 8chan full-time and fully dedicated yourself to the site. What led you to this decision, and what was it like to uproot your life in the U.S. and move to a different country like that?
A: Basically the entire reason that convinced me is just that they controlled 2channel. I mean, they were such huge, huge stars to me. That's why I felt so betrayed when I found out it was stolen. But that was really the reason. Back at this time, 2014, there was really no contradictory information in English [about the true creator of 2channel], and again, imageboard users are not good at doing research. Jim was easily able to convince them by making certain websites that contained lies about Hiroyuki to convince everybody that 2channel was theirs and Hiroyuki was a liar. This was even before Hiroyuki bought 4chan. The story started to fall apart when that happened because their argument was that Hiroyuki was a broke loser, drug addict, meth head. They just hated him so much and really demonized him to me.
Q: In 2016 you resigned from 8chan but continued living in the Philippines and worked for Watkins, who became the site’s new owner. Could you tell us more about what led you to retreat more from 8chan after you’d been so heavily involved since it started?
A: So 2channel was the reason I came to work for them, and when I wanted to resign from 8chan, that was a natural thing that they could have me work on. They knew that was the only reason I was impressed with them. What happened was that I wanted to replace 8chan's software because when we look at the software, I was not the only person that worked on it while on drugs. The original guy who came up with 4chon.net that basically took over /r9k/ and /n/ [the precursor to /pol/] when they got banned from 4chan, he made this imageboard software called "Tinyboard" and admitted to us regularly that he wrote this software while on cocaine. So he writes it on cocaine, then I hack the board creation into it as a portfolio piece not really even thinking that this [8chan] is going to be something that will need to take any amount of load. So the software worked, but it was really slow. It was breaking down — real crap.
It needed to be replaced, but I was super busy because I was working on answering all the emails, fielding user requests, making sure things get deleted that needed to be deleted, figuring out who's going to be global moderators and stuff. It was this huge job, and I can't just do the software, which is the most interesting part for me anyway. I wasn't really being supported, and I started to understand that the reason that they're doing this is that they want to take over. They are not helping me because they want me to breakdown and give them total control and resign. So I just did. I decided, "Hey, fuck this site. I don't even think it's a good idea anymore. Like these people are shitheads." I was so done with the 8chan users at that point, like "fuck these Nazis." I even wished that I'd had different rules in place, but I felt like I couldn't change them at this point cause Jim would be pissed. So yeah, it was just too much for me. I burnt out big time.
There was a meeting that really sealed the deal because I figured out a way that this software could get rewritten and we wouldn't need more resources. Joshua Moon, owner of Kiwi Farms, started a crowdfunding campaign and he made this other software called "Infinity Next," and he moved to the Philippines to do that. All he needed from Jim Watkins was $6,000 to keep things going because he only got $12,000 and he worked for like eight months. That is a very good deal. His idea for Watkins was that Watkins pay him $6,000, give him some resources from his side, some of his Filipino developers and other developers to help patch this into 8chan … and Watkins was basically like, "Fuck you. I'm not paying you. I'm not doing that. In fact, I'm going to shut down 8chan." So he stormed out. Then it was later determined that actually when he posted into the private Slack "shut down 8chan" and showed that to me and Moon that he had actually sent it to me, but because he did it so fast, we thought that he sent it to the data center, which is what he said he was doing. So it was like this whole fucked situation.
I still regret taking Watkins' side in that and not Moon's side because I think Moon was the one that really got fucked over there. After that happened, Infinity Next failed and there was no new software, that was really what sealed the deal. I had a lot of reasons. I was tired of the site in general. So yeah, I resigned in 2016, and due to that, I think they really felt like, "Holy shit, this guy knows too much. We can't let him quit." So they moved me to the 2channel part of the company, totally different, all my coworkers were suddenly Japanese and I became just a pure programmer.
The Birth of QAnon
Q: So obviously the whole QAnon thing has been perhaps the biggest event revolved around you as of late, but I’d like to step back to the earliest moments of the conspiracy theory in 2017 first. QAnon emerged online after posts began surfacing on both 4chan and 8chan late that year. Were you familiar with this back then or involved in any moderation or discussion of it at the time?
A: Nope. I did not hear about it until it came to 8chan and Watkins was super excited about it. That's when I first started to hear about it. It would have been late 2017 or early 2018. It kind of confirmed a lot of what I had already started to believe: that imageboard users suck at doing research. I mean, I never believed in Q and never thought there was any legitimacy to any of the Q narrative. I could immediately see that all of this Q stuff was bullshit. Even though there were very few debunkers at the time, their information was very good, and it was not hard to debunk Q back then. I started to realize that these people just want to believe this because they want to come up with excuses for why they still support Donald Trump — even though he's not doing the things that they want. So, obviously, they need a conspiracy theory to come up with "why isn't Trump doing what we want him to do?" and that's Q. It is the idea that Trump is not actually in charge. He is, on paper, in charge of the government, but there's actually a real deep state, which is tying Trump's hands. That's what they believe.
Q: This brings us up to late 2018 and 2019 when you split entirely from Watkins and 8chan. In an interview with the NY Times, you called for 8chan to be taken offline, so could you recap some of those events and explain your change of heart regarding the site?
A: I totally resigned from Jim's company cause I found out 2channel was stolen. So it wasn't really about 8chan why I quit. I secretly had a court decision translated on a third party website, and I confronted Ronald and Jim Watkins with the translation and accused them of lying to me and to everyone about how they got in control of 2channel. Their answer to me was, essentially, A) we have stolen this so well, Fred, that you don't need to worry at all, your job is secure, and that was not what I was concerned about. They came at it like, "We've taken such good control and we've done this clever legal maneuver that don't worry, he'll never get it back. We renamed it to 5ch.net. We are five, 10 steps ahead of Hiroyuki, fuck him." My concern was like, "No. You people said that you had this much involvement in it when literally you stole it, and actually, he had the money to buy 4chan. So you're lying about him not paying the bills." The court decision that I had translated even said in there that Hiroyuki paid the bills and there is no proof that he didn't. That was a big area of contention, like, was this a legal repossession? And it was "no," that Hiroyuki paid the bills and continued to try to pay the bills even after it got stolen. So, yeah, I was pissed.
And then, there was a whole "B" area to it, where it was like, "Well, there's nothing better available to you anyway. You shouldn't quit because there's nothing else that you can do. Nobody in the outside world will ever accept you back in." Not only that, but I'd gotten really lazy living in the Philippines. I got really fat too. I've actually lost weight since then, but yeah, I was technically morbidly obese. I couldn't even necessarily take care of myself the same way as before. So they kind of tried to fuck with my head, essentially, and be like, "Okay, you can't quit because of that." 2channel was why I trusted them, that's why we worked together. That's why I accepted anything that they said, it was all based on 2channel. So them not telling the truth about that, it would be like you find out that your kid is not your kid, you know?
Q: This is also when the Christchurch and El Paso Shootings hit the site and created perhaps the biggest controversy that garnered international attention. Did your decision also have anything to do with those events?
A: It did, of course. I quit Jim's company in December 2018, but I wasn't calling for 8chan to be shut down then, I was really just trying to distance myself from them. I decided that I was going to kind of do freelance open-source development, continue living in the Philippines because my expenses were so low, and try to get my life back on track and separate myself from these people. I had just quit and I didn't want to make a big deal out of it because I just felt like they were so powerful. I was scared to even post online that 2channel was stolen. I figured 8chan was going to die, so just let them have their fun. But then the shootings happened, the media knocked on my door and there was no hiding or running from them anymore.
Q: Stepping back to QAnon, did you always suspect Watkins’ involvement in the conspiracy and its perpetuation, or did this only come about more recently? Why do you think he began spreading it and involving himself in QAnon?
A: So here's what I think happened. I think that originally, on 4chan, Q was basically just started by a troll. But because Q was an anonymous poster who did not put a tripcode, somebody else started using a tripcode and that's when it started to become like this thing that you could own. In the beginning, Q was not really something any one person could own, but then it became something that could be owned when a tripcode got involved. When the tripcode got leaked and it moved to 8chan, the reason that happened was because 4chan does not allow any trolling of an outside target. Yes, they are famous for that, but their rules technically don't allow it and they will ban you. What people outside don't tend to know is that 4chan banned GamerGate, and they were about to ban Q. So basically, I believe that whatever troll was managing it, probably Paul Ferber, moved it to 8chan and started posting the "Q drops" on 8chan.
I don't think the Watkins were necessarily involved at that time. I think that there are two big times that they could have gotten involved. The first big time is when Paul Ferber claims that Q was stolen from him. In 8chan terms, a board owner is just somebody who creates a board and gets the password for it because it was a self-serve system. Ferber was the board owner of the board called /cbts/, which means "calm before the storm," and that's where Q started posting with his tripcode. Paul Ferber lost control of Q, and his claim is that Ron Watkins stole it, essentially. I believe that. But even if Ferber is wrong and somebody else stole it, when 8chan went down in 2019, that is when I no longer had any doubt that the Watkins were behind it because a third-party Q would have moved to another imageboard — but this "Q" did not, and this "Q" locked himself into 8chan by using what they call a "secure tripcode," which is a total misnomer that is ridiculous. It's secure for somebody. It's secure for the server admin because he's in total control and there's no way to move the tripcode to another website. It's like a user account. It is not anything to do with cryptography. It's really a user account at that point.
Q is using this, essentially, "user account" on 8chan and "only Q posts on 8chan can be trusted." Every aggregator is just copying from 8chan. When 8chan went down for those three months due to me because I started contacting hosting companies to get it pulled down (I didn't want there to be another terror attack posted there), it finally started to come back online in November 2019. I was sitting at my computer trying to post, trying to make any post on 8chan just to see if it was possible, and I couldn't. But you know who could? Q could. I know the reason Q could because in the software that I wrote, if you make a post through the admin panel, it is prioritized above every other post. So that's why I fully, fully believe that they took over Q just because of when it went down for those three months in 2019. For me, that sealed the deal — the Watkins’s are Q. A third-party Q would never tie themselves to 8chan.
Q: So back to Paul Ferber for a second, why do you think he was involved in perpetuating Q? What was he getting out of all this?
A: I think Paul wanted to be famous because right before he claims that Ron stole Q from him, Paul got to go on InfoWars and he got to talk to Alex Jones. So yeah, I think Paul really wanted to be famous. When you look at the boards and you see the power struggle during those times, you can really see Paul Ferber pissing off the users because he's doing what they call "fame fagging." He's making it about himself and not about Q or about the research movement. I think what Paul was getting ready to do was to claim that he was Q, and I think he wanted to be famous because of that. But because Ron stole it, or whoever did, he was not able to ever prove that he was Q because the only way to prove you're Q is to post with the tripcode. If Ron controls the tripcode, he can make it so that when you put the right password, the wrong trip appears, so there's no way for you to prove that you’re Q unless Ron is helping you.
Just got out of court. Jim Watkins' naturalization hearing. I learned about it last minute. The judge graciously allowed me to submit a written and oral statement. He didn't show up. The next hearing is scheduled for February 2020. I got a delay!! 😄 No one else opposed. pic.twitter.com/pEJQdftbYK
— Fredrick Brennan (@fr_brennan) October 14, 2019
Fleeing the Philippines and the Fight Against QAnon
Q: After you began speaking out against both 8chan and Watkins, he refused to take down the site and responded with a “cyber libel” complaint that eventually forced you to flee the Philippines where you narrowly escaped and had to leave your now ex-wife behind. What was that experience like, why do you think he went after you in such a manner, and what’s the current situation with this?
A: I believed, at the time when I was trying to get 8chan taken down, that eventually, they would come to their senses. I know that's crazy, but I thought "these guys own 2channel, they're really not profiting much from 8chan, all they're getting is all this bad PR and media attention and 4chan is eating their lunch at every opportunity." So I just figured they were going to come to their senses and realize that 8chan is not serving anybody … and I was super wrong about that. When Watkins was trying to become a citizen of the Philippines, I saw that as huge hypocrisy because he's claiming to be this big Patriot for the Q people. So, I did something pretty dumb and went to the hearing for his citizenship and lodged an opposition, which anybody can do in the Filipino legal system. If you're trying to become a citizen, anybody is allowed to go to your hearing and oppose to say "this person should not be a citizen," and you can give legal reasons for that, which I did. My legal reasons were pretty good, apparently. For example, he lied about the number of children he has. He claims to have one child, Sam Watkins, so what the fuck happened to Ron? So yeah, I testified to certain things that I knew about Jim and fucked up his citizenship with them big time. Oh man, was his lawyer pissed. Then, of course, that was the same lawyer that filed the cyber libel, so I guess I was just stupid to do that. But I was just trying to get 8chan taken down, trying to be a thorn in their side. I don't know. I did ruin my marriage and everything … it's totally over this point.
I was not trying to get him kicked out of the Philippines, and even if he's not a citizen, he could still live there. He had a permanent residency, like the Filipino version of a Green Card, so he did not need to leave the country. I just didn't want him to become a citizen because I thought that there were going to be legal consequences for 8chan, so I didn't want him to basically abscond from the U.S. Congress. I felt like it was really justified to oppose his citizenship and get that delayed. I think that's the main reason he went after me, and I kind of get it, but at the same time, I also think it was really shitty what he did. At one point, I felt like he also ruined my life because I lost everything. I lost my relationship, the car that I had, the nurse that I had, I lost pretty much everything that I had, even my dog.
I escaped with hours to spare. If I had not escaped in time, I would have been put in indefinite immigration detention until the case was done, and that could have lasted years as a foreigner in the Philippines. If you're accused of what they consider to be a serious crime, they are not going to let you out of immigration detention because they're afraid you're going to flee. So I would have needed to be in immigration detention for the entire period of my case, and I probably would have died in immigration detention because it is just one big room. It doesn't have a ceiling. It's just a tarpaulin that's full of rats. They call it the "Bureau of Immigration Bicutan Detention Center." It is a really fucked place. It's 400 percent overcrowded. I had to basically flee for my life.
Q: So how exactly did you escape in the end and manage to get on a flight out?
A: I can't say who helped me escape because he might want to go back to the Philippines someday, but what I can say is I booked an original flight and I kinda got caught out a bit by immigration. They didn't know the whole story, but they were super suspicious of me because I had a pending marriage visa. They knew if I left, that would just be totally given up on. And because I didn't have this single paper, they rejected my exit because I'd been staying there for so long. I think Jim might have tipped off immigration not to let me out.
So luckily, I had this awesome, "sort of corrupt," "sort of not corrupt" lawyer, and he worked it out. He got the paper from immigration and ran it over. So they brought this paper to me outside of the airport. This guy in his motorcycle comes in, hands me the paper and the card and runs off. My lawyer says, "Hey, you need to go to a different terminal because those same immigration agents are not going to let you through, but they don't talk to each other between terminals, so go to terminal three." So we went from terminal one to terminal three, and it was a totally different experience at the other terminal. They definitely didn't know who the fuck I was. "Oh, hello sir, did you have a good time in our country?" They just let me off, and the flight left the Philippines on Monday at 10 a.m. and my warrant was filed at noon. Five minutes later, my ex-wife said that they were at my apartment, the police and a ton of people were there looking for me. They were pissed off that I got out.
Q: Since then, you’ve been back in the U.S. but have continued fighting Watkins presence online and attempted to prove his involvement in the QAnon theory. What are some of the biggest revelations or discoveries you’ve found since beginning all this for those unfamiliar?
A: So the biggest one is that Q was able to post and nobody else was, and I wrote 8chan's software. But besides that, I believe that there are many, many other reasons to think that they're behind Q. For one thing, Q never cared about yoga until recently. Now Q is sharing videos of like yoga stuff. Binaural beats are also something that Jim is really into. If you listen to his livestreams, he's always all about those binaural beats, and now Q is into that too. Q was [recently] sitting there reading his — sorry — Jim was sitting there reading his "pocket Constitution," and Jim did not even want to be American. He wanted to be Filipino, but he doesn't have any respect for the Constitution or for the United States.
Unmasking QAnon
Q: So in your opinion, based on what you’ve learned during all this, who do you think “Q” is, and what is Watkins’ role in the conspiracy? Additionally, why is it that he’s become so embroiled in all this? How is he profiting from it and what does he get out of it?
A: I think Q is somebody that Jim has an NDA with. It could be his own son. It could be Kevin Lauf, who used to be the editor-in-chief of The Goldwater (Jim's old fake news website, which used to traffic in conspiracy theories like the Clinton Body Count). So the main way he's profiting is the super PAC. He's also profiting through merchandise and that kind of thing. But basically, he came up with this scheme where he started a super PAC called "
Disarm the Deep State." That PAC would never make the financial decisions that it makes if it were a third party because the only way that it advertises is by buying ads on 8chan, and nobody else will. So it's "self-dealing." All the money that that PAC is getting, it puts into these 8chan ads, which are just garbage, ridiculous ads. One of the people he's targeted is Bennie Thompson, the congressman who called him in front of Congress — calling him a "deep state operative."
Jim likes Q because he's flexing his political muscles, and Q is something that certain congresspeople are even believing. So, he sees it as a way for him to kind of get mainstream, American political control. He sees it as something very influential to him, and he doesn't want to be back in front of Congress. He's really scared of the evidence that I've put out and how I've linked him to the shootings in 2019 and Q now. He kind of sees it as, if he gives up his power over Q, now he's going to be held responsible. And if there's anything he doesn't want, it's being held responsible. I'm sure he's really mad that I stopped him from being a citizen in the Philippines because now if this government ever decides to hold him accountable, they can. Part of the law in the Philippines is that if you're a foreigner and you become a citizen of the Philippines, you have to give up your other country's citizenship, so he wouldn't have been able to be [extradited], in my nonlawyer's opinion.
Via
— Fredrick Brennan (fr_brennan) August 27, 2020b_wolgastpic.twitter.com/H1htOgsJTm
Q: With the sheer amount of attention that this whole conspiracy has drawn, do you think that either the Philippines or the U.S. will eventually try to do something?
A: I think what should be done against this is to view it as a federal conspiracy to impersonate a federal official. I think that's the best kind of way to bring legal consequences. If the law is not written in such a way that that's possible, it should be amended. This is definitely something that should be illegal. Of course, the FBIAnons of the world are probably not ever going to be prosecuted, but when it is at this level, the government needs to have the ability to shut them down. So that's what I'd like to see. I have had some positive contact with different congresspeople, and fingers crossed that that brings me somewhere because that's really what I'm looking to do in 2021, to have an investigation started here about the impersonation and how it is an actual conspiracy. I mean, it's really ruining people's lives. Tons of elderly people are disconnected from their loved ones because they just believe that their loved ones are involved in a satanic conspiracy.
Q: Given your knowledge of QAnon, why do you think it’s become so prevalent and seen widespread adoption, particularly this year? Why do conspiracies like this appeal to so many despite their highly questionable origins?
A: It excuses Trump's behavior. That's what it does. It allows people who would be natural Trump allies to be able to explain why he's not locking Hillary up, essentially, that he is not actually in control, and we need this "QAnon" to put all of the people who are traitors to the Republic in Gitmo before any of that can happen. If we all just "trust the plan," as they call it, then eventually, the promise of Donald Trump will be realized, which it was not through an election. That is entirely why it appeals to people. It appeals to our biases.
Obviously, there's a certain type of person who is very predisposed to believe in conspiracy theories because you never see them believe in just one, it's like they believe in every conspiracy or a lot of them at least. Maybe they'll have one or two where they'll be like, "That's crazy." For the QAnon people, it's usually the Flat Earth [theory]. They'll be like, "Yes, there are deep state pedophiles eating the brains of children, but the Flat Earth? That's crazy." I think that a certain subclass of our population is predisposed to believing in conspiracy theories, and YouTube, etc, have not really done a good job of "demoting" those kinds of videos.
What we see then is, in the pandemic, people didn't have to go to work and they could just sit at home. There was a lot of real pain that people experienced not being able to have funerals, or not being able to do things that they liked. There were legitimate problems in people's lives that led them to do so-called "research" online to figure out the truth about COVID. So they are going on and they have all this time, they are unemployed, collecting unemployment, watching these videos and falling for bullshit.
Q: As we draw ever closer to the 2020 presidential election, what do you think the impact of QAnon will be on the outcome, whether Trump or Biden win in the end? Will it be forgotten, or do you think it’ll continue to circulate in the future?
A: No matter what happens in the election, it is going to be a huge part of our public discourse for the next few years. The thing about it is that this election could be closer than we think. And with QAnon, studies already show that a considerable number of Republicans believe it. For example, the QAnon resolution that was just in the House, 17 Republicans voted against that. That is crazy because that is something that should be unanimous. Even though it's only 17, that's still something that really makes me do a double-take.
I really see two circumstances, and both are bad. Trump now has COVID, which makes this even worse. If Trump dies of COVID or Trump loses, Q is going to view it this way: Our Messiah has been defeated. The deep state, Satan, has won, and we need to take up arms and start assassinating Democrats. I think we'll see more domestic terror than ever. Even if only 1 percent of QAnon believers believe in that, that's thousands of people. The thing about it that I really fear — I think about the Vegas Shooting. Those are the kinds of people who believe in Q: former military, older people who are able to plan a shooting like the Vegas Shooting. So I'm really scared if Trump loses, but I'm really scared if he wins too. If he wins, General Flynn is going to be in the administration, and we might even see a fascist United States, and they will be cheering that on. I'm scared both ways, and this is not going away.
Q: Before we conclude, can you share a bit of your current work or any projects you’re working on outside of fighting against QAnon? What are you up to these days?
A: I'm actually working on a new font editor. That's the main thing I've been doing outside of Q these days. So basically, after I resigned from Watkins' company, the jobs I started taking were kind of patches to FontForge and patches to my different fonts that I worked on. So that's kind of how I was supporting myself while I was doing that. I became a co-maintainer, there's a lot of us, but I was helping maintain FontForge for a year and a half. While I was doing that, I kind of started to think, "Hmm. It would be really cool to make a new kind of font editor." So I'm calling it "MFEQ" and you can see it on GitHub. I'm pretty excited about it. Github.com/MFEQ/QGLIF, that's the main project.
I think that I can make the best open-source font editor because right now, just like how video editing is really controlled by Adobe, font editing is really controlled by Apple, and I'm basically the only one that uses solely open-source software to make my fonts. I feel like if that was a lot more user-friendly, we could try to break a lot of Apple's control over it. There are a lot of languages in the world where there are not enough fonts for that language. For example, the font that I was commissioned by Google to do was not an English language font, it was Tagalog (Baybayin). So, yeah. That's why I'm trying to break font editing out of the hands of proprietary software and put it in free software terms.
Q: Alright. To wrap this up, I’d like to hear your thoughts on the future of conspiracy theories such as QAnon. Based on your experiences with them, what do you think conspiracy theorists and the concepts they perpetuate will look like in the future? Do you think they’ll only continue to spread and achieve mainstream attention, or are some of the ongoing attempts by tech companies and social media platforms going to help stem this tide in the years to come?
A: What I would say about this is, I'm quite pessimistic. I think that those conspiracy theories are going to keep spreading and going to get worse. But I do see a bit of a ray of hope. I do see a way that we can figure out how to get past all this. My idea is that what we really need to do at this point is put more say into the people who are actually working at these platforms and less into the people that own them because the whole fiduciary duty thing is what's causing a lot of issues. They feel like they can't massively ban users like they need to. I think that more unionization in tech is what we need. More tech workers, the people who are actually running these platforms, having a say in the administration of these platforms is really what's needed because even at the micro-level, my situation, I wrote all of 8chan's software, but I don't have any say in how it's run. At the macro level, Facebook, Twitter, I definitely think a "Facebook workers union," a "Twitter workers union," that's what we need, and that is, ultimately, how we're going to see some kind of success with this. If you watch the recent documentary The Social Dilemma, you see those tech workers that are really educated on this issue who have no say. Wouldn't it be great if they were still in those companies, unionized and working on the problem instead of the people who are working on it, just wanting to increase numbers all the time? So that's my answer to how we can fight it.
Fredrick Brennan is the original creator of 8chan who currently works as a freelance programmer developing an open-source font editor called MFEQ. You can find more of his work on GitHub or stay up-to-date on his latest happenings by checking out his Twitter.
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