Original subtitles

Drop 151 (Nov 14 2017)

How do you capture a very dangerous animal?

Do you attack it from the front?

Do you walk through the front door?

Why did POTUS depart Manila 30 min ahead of schedule?

Nothing is as it appears...

NOVEMBER 29th, 2018

On my way to Manila, I had a layover in Hong Kong.

The view from my window was not all that different

from the one in Drop 130.

At this point, Q had been posting for just over a year.

MANILA, PHILIPPINES

Manila was home to the team behind 8chan,

the site where Q posts.

And I was planning to meet with the site's creator, Fred Brennan,

for the first time in person.

I had noticed that social media platforms

were increasingly restricting certain types of speech online,

and I was curious to what extent Q and 8chan,

a site that was unapologetic about allowing almost any type of speech,

played a role in that debate.

I assumed that's why they agreed to meet with me.

It was really a dice roll whether or not this trip was going to pay off.

Fred hadn't provided an address or even an exact time to meet up,

but the morning we were supposed to film together,

Fred dropped his coordinates.

From the beginning, Fred was surprised by how minimalistic my setup was.

Just me and a film school grad I had hired locally.

He lived in a high rise gated community,

and despite all the cloak and dagger...

This way.

...Fred said that he was moving soon.

So, it was okay to film the grounds.

Fred had spent years cultivating some of the wildest content

the Internet had to offer.

I couldn't help but wonder,

had he also played a role in shaping Q.

Q: INTO THE STORM

Para sa akin cheese hamburgers siempre.

Then one extra rice box?

- My chicken nuggets sa table. - Yes.

I don't know if anybody wants it,

but if you're still hungry, you can eat it.

You'd be surprised how many people come all this way to see me.

They just want to meet me.

The image in their heads does not match my reality.

They think that I'm, like, this amazing guy

that made this amazing website and I changed the world.

And I see myself as somebody

who was in the right place at the right time. Yeah.

I think most of them go away disappointed

but at least they get to eat curry rice during their disappointment.

I grew up with just unfettered access to the Internet.

And, I grew up also disabled.

So, I couldn't go run outside and play with the neighborhood kids.

So, throughout my life,

almost all of my friends have been online friends.

Like, since the beginning. Ready?

I have osteogenesis imperfecta.

It's caused by a single mutation in a gene that makes collagen.

So, the bones don't form correctly.

So they become really brittle like glass.

I was always very self conscious about my disability.

I fought a lot with both my parents about why did you have kids.

You knew this would happen. You received genetic counseling.

What's wrong with you?

And it caused a lot of teenage angst also.

My challenges around mobility did make me more intellectually curious

because there wasn't a whole lot else that I could do.

The Internet leveled the playing field,

so Fred spent almost all of his time online,

which meant his digital self matured at a rapid pace.

So much so that by the age of 12,

he had already stumbled across some of the most shocking content

that the Internet had to offer.

When I first found 4chan,

I just saw what a lot of people are saying.

And I felt I finally had discovered what people were really thinking.

Saying things like gas all the crippled people,

I hate downies, throw them off a bridge.

I felt like I was seeing a window into people's hidden thoughts

that they weren't saying because it wasn't socially acceptable.

But this is what everybody's really thinking.

When they look at me, wow, look at this crippled retard.

As a child, I was very impressionable

and I just felt, like, wow,

I've been lied to my whole life by people who are telling me,

oh, it's good to be different.

I figured, like, because the site just seemed so active,

you say, wow, this is a huge number of people

that are just speaking the truth, or what I thought was the truth.

So, I feel like the Internet changed my perspective of the world a lot.

Don't smoke kids, or else you'll become like me.

I'm almost the dead baby. Like, I'm one step after the dead baby.

When Fred was 19, he became the admin of a site called Wizardchan.

The forum was a home for male incels.

That is, virgins who think they'll never have sex

and just generally hate women because of that.

But after Fred did some drugs and slept with a prostitute

who had, well, two fetishes...

She had a fetish for male virgins, and disabled people.

So, I was both.

Fred was no longer a virgin.

So, he resigned as admin of Wizardchan.

While on his digital walk of shame,

Fred began to look for a new edge to lord over.

He was still an active user on 4chan,

but he couldn't create a board without approval from the site's owner.

Meanwhile, Reddit, its more mainstream competitor,

allowed anyone to create boards but wasn't anonymous.

I was just thinking, wow, wouldn't it be amazing

if Reddit and 4chan had a baby,

and everyone could make their own board.

So he merged Reddit's democratized board creation

with 4chan's anonymous posting, and presto, 8chan was born.

Now anyone could create a board and posts could be totally anonymous.

When I wrote 8chan originally in 2013,

I wasn't really planning for success.

I wrote the first part of it

while I was coming off of psychedelic mushrooms.

Like, you know, they call it the come down, I think.

It wasn't meant to scale from 100 posts per day

to, like, 10,000 posts per hour.

This free speech maximalist approach had given Fred an edge.

But he now had a serious moderation problem

because illegal content like child porn would get shared as well.

I had no idea that the hosting was going to be so hard.

I had no idea how my payment processing worked.

I was just on the "hopium" of free speech and all that.

Fred created 8chan in 2013. He was 19-years-old.

But with a mass influx of users, Fred needed help.

It seemed he also wanted to find a partner

who would let him continue to run the site as its admin.

I started to get lots of emails from people

that were interested in running 8chan on their own.

Of all the offers I received, I chose, Jim Watkins and his son, Ron,

because I felt they had the most experience with this.

I would say, overall, Jim is a good owner for 8chan.

I would say that Jim is not tech savvy at all.

Jim is much more the business brain,

and Ron is much more of a technical brain.

I would describe Ron as a tech bro, pretty much.

He's a talented programmer also.

In some ways, more talented than I am.

Jim Watkins is an American businessman

operating out of the Philippines.

Jim served in East Asia while he was in the Army,

and found a dollar went a long way.

He offered for Fred to come join them

along with a handful of perks.

So, it was a no-brainer for me to sell 8chan to them

and move to the Philippines.

Like, they offered me a condo with the rent paid.

When's the last time you went swimming?

- Eight years ago. I was 12. - Wow.

And then a caregiver also.

Let go. It's okay. We know CPR.

Fred had even found a fiance in the Philippines.

He now had plans to get married in just a few months.

So, working with Jim Watkins helped him support this new life.

They kept me on as an employee now, being the administrator, not the owner.

As the administrator,

Fred had to deal with all kinds of in fighting and drama on the boards.

Not to mention, the site itself operated at a loss.

It seems most advertisers didn't want to touch it.

Being 8chan's admin was really difficult.

It was really arduous work.

And then, I decided to quit from being administrator in 2016, April.

Fred stepped out as 8chan's admin,

but he continued to work for Jim Watkins

on other Internet projects that they owned.

I don't believe 8chan can ever be profitable.

What's the point of running it then?

You know how some rich men will have a yacht, like a big boat?

So, that boat is not generating any income.

It's a liability, it's not an asset.

So, I was told to just think of 8chan as a boat.

I'm on a boat. I'm on a boat.

Everybody look at me 'cause I'm sailing on a boat.

- It's a fun toy for Jim. - It's a boat.

It's a boat, yes. The SS 8chan.

Come on, baby.

That one is Jim's house. He might get upset,

so we'll go around the corner, okay?

Man, they have a lot of cars.

Yeah. I don't want to say something that's going to get me in trouble.

So, let me just say nothing.

I don't want to say the words financial insolvency.

But, maybe he has guests. Let's give him the benefit of the doubt.

When I asked him about Jim, Fred was hesitant.

I really like working for him, he's a great boss.

But, yeah, I mean, I have to be careful what I say.

It was the first time I noticed Fred holding his tongue.

In theory I am supposed to meet with Jim tomorrow to film.

Wow.

I really can't wait to see your documentary.

- Now that you got Jim in it. - Okay.

So this is speculation,

but I think he's worried about what I'm going to say.

So, he wants to have a counter to what I'm saying.

I don't think I'm saying anything really bad.

But, he might be worried about it, so he just wants to make sure

his side gets in if you're already here.

At this point, Jim Watkins was relatively unknown.

It seemed that no one had even considered he might possibly be Q.

He owned 8chan and he's self-described as an industrialist.

Lights off.

So, why did you seek out 8chan?

I didn't seek out 8chan. 8chan is an accident.

My son said, this guy needs some help with 8chan.

He can't afford the servers

and said, can we put this in our data center. And I said, okay.

You say, you own 8chan. No, 8chan owns me.

It costs a lot of money to run it.

I don't get much for it either.

They kind of tricked me into it, and then now I have it.

I can't get rid of it because it's important.

Jim seemed nervous.

He'd never given an interview of this type before.

I was hoping to get a better sense of whether or not Jim had the skills,

the knowledge, and the motive to be behind Q.

Why do you think I'm here?

You are here to make a documentary about me.

- Not you. - No. About 8channel. I'm sorry.

While Jim's data center was located in California,

he actually had a variety of businesses

that he operated from the Philippines.

So, coming up is where our office used to be.

Which office are you referring to? The 8chan office?

Nobody works for 8chan.

Really? I was imagining that there is, like, a...

There's nobody that works for 8chan.

There's people who work for me that work on other things

other than 8chan because 8chan doesn't make any money.

How do you keep it up then?

I make money doing other things. I'm well diversified.

It's like a beret.

I have an organic store, and this is one of our means of livelihood.

We bake our own bread.

Fresh harvest. We got some kale in from the farm.

We do serve our own bacon. Even our eggs are organic.

What is the point of 8chan?

To give people a place that they can have freedom of speech

without having to worry about getting in trouble for saying something.

I'm just sick of people being censored

and gender neutraled and all of that.

It makes me angry. It's like, this is not what America's all about.

I grew up watching Archie Bunker, and he was like a pig.

I've been around a lot of places and done a lot of things,

but there's one thing Archie Bunker ain't never gonna do

and that's break bread with no jungle bunnies.

8chan users, they use kikes and waps,

and all of the bad words for everybody.

And it was like, wow.

After we had some time to settle in,

I got around to asking Jim about Q.

What he thought about the biggest banning of QAnon to date

done by his mainstream competitor, Reddit.

So, one of the first things that turned me on to 8chan

was that Reddit banned QAnon.

I don't honestly follow that board.

I don't know what they were talking about.

It's just one of our users.

It wasn't anything that we were getting police reports for or anything.

What are they talking about? Like, revolution now or something?

I'm not a political person myself.

See what's going on in the back.

I really stay out of politics 'cause it's against the law for foreigners

to be involved in politics in the Philippines. So...

But I mean, you can be involved in U.S. politics.

But I live here. I don't really know what's going on.

Chicken soup.

Sorry I don't know more about the Q stuff.

But, from what I understand, the Q is not causing us any trouble.

When Reddit banned QAnon,

people started rallying around this notion

that some ideas are kind of too dangerous.

Dangerous ideas, that's scary.

That's a scary idea to have dangerous ideas.

Okay, let's take some kale. Let's try putting some cream in it.

I've had dangerous ideas like my one idea was

to round up all of the politicians and then machine gun them.

And then their replacements come in

and you round them all up and machine gun them.

And then the third round, you tell them, you be good

or I'm gonna machine gun you.

And then, I was gonna vote Run for President being Machine Gun Jim.

But... Actually, I have no idea if this is going to be good or not.

Actually, that's pretty good.

Yeah, I'm not politically correct at all.

Of course, I was curious about the brewing tension

that seemed to exist between Jim and Fred.

And wondered why Jim had decided to subsidize 8chan in the first place.

I agreed to help

and then Fred agreed to move here.

And, I was nice to him. I treated him well.

And I took his broken website, which was completely broken,

and my engineers fixed his website.

So, is everything okay between you and Fred?

We have a gentleman's agreement on it

that we would split the profits 60-40.

But there hasn't been any profits yet.

Fred was still working with Jim on his other projects,

just not for 8chan.

I wish he would be involved with 8chan. It might be more successful.

Maybe he'll come back. We'll have round two, fight!

It could happen.

So Fred, I know that being 8chan's admin was super taxing,

and I'm guessing if there are any other moral dilemmas

that are preventing you from coming back to run 8chan.

As an American, I grew up in school

and we're taught in school that one of the things that makes America greater

than all the other countries is that we have real free speech

and in other countries they have libel laws and hate speech,

and lots of obscenity laws.

And, so that's something that's just a cherished American value.

And I never really questioned that,

and that was the kind of mentality I opened 8chan with.

But, you can't go three years as 8chan's admin

seeing the reality of total free speech

without having your faith in this sacred concept shaken a little bit.

Even though 8chan was home to Q,

most QAnon followers never actually visited the site.

Instead, they would go to places that collected Q's drops,

like qmap.pub.

These archival sites made Q's messages easy to search,

expanding Q's reach while sanitizing the darker realities of 8chan.

ORANGE COUNTY, CALIFORNIA

I don't really go on the boards. So...

I mean, it's a hard place to be.

Yeah. It's too chaotic.

Do you read Q drops on 8chan,

or one of those sites that collects the drops, like qmap?

Oh, I know. Yeah, exactly. I go to qmap.

Are you on 8chan a lot?

Only if I have to be. That website is a headache, I've got to say.

It's not a place for soft people.

It's not meant to be a place for soft people.

It's not meant to be a place for easily offended people.

It's a place for adults.

How do you deal with being on 8chan as Christians?

Well, thank God my wife is not on 8chan.

I've seen some of the threads.

I've explained to her about that there's pornographic stuff there.

There's gore, violence. Like, literal graphic stuff.

Like, they post� There's child porn on there?

They pull that down.

They pull out anything that's illegal, but it gets posted all the time.

- Really? - Yeah.

I didn't know that. I never heard of that before. That's troublesome.

I just told her basically what was on there and she kind of went, okay.

Yes, I trust you. I don't want to see it, but I trust you.

And that's why I'm so thankful to God he sent a wife

that trusts me when I'm dealing with this kind of evil sickness.

And the person now administrating this so-called evil sickness

was Ron Watkins, Jim's 30-something year-old son,

who had just flown in from Japan.

- This is the elevator power cord. - No, it's not.

Don't run into the elevator power cord.

Welcome to 8chan headquarters.

This is 8chan headquarters. Wheelchair accessible, right there.

Jim's command center for his entrepreneurial efforts

was largely vacant when we arrived.

- Pen 15 club, Frances? - You have to give him a tattoo.

Wait, I think we gotta...

There was a small studio

where they recorded content for a news site called The Goldwater.

- No, we'll make you a badge here. - Tattoo time. Tattoo.

I'm a member of the Pen 15 club too.

- Welcome to the club. - Welcome to the club.

The 8chan's servers were in California,

it's volunteers scattered around the globe.

It's headquarters, essentially wherever Ron carried a laptop.

Though it seems some work did get done here.

We don't have a serious bone in our bodies.

Your documentary won't be picked up by anybody

if we talk the way we usually talk.

How do you differ from your son?

I don't differ from him. We're like out of the same mold.

When he was 10 years-old, he was sitting right next to me

with just a little black Compaq computer he had.

I'm more of an anti-social type person.

I avoid social contact as much as possible.

I prefer to spend my time programming.

I talk mostly with my dogs.

- But your dog talks back. - My dog does talk back.

I agreed to be interviewed for this

because it's very important to get the word out

that, as the years go by,

more and more people are attacking free speech online.

And we need to do all we can to defend it now

while there's still time.

I'm more of like the forgetful professor type.

Like, I'm terrible at adding, subtracting, multiplying, dividing.

But, I'm really good at very high level mathematics,

like Ph.D. level mathematics.

I'm able to use these mathematics

to build things that other people are not able to comprehend.

- You're also known as Codemonkey? - Oh, Codemonkey, correct.

There's a famous song from, I guess, 2005 called Codemonkey,

and there's a music video and you can find that on YouTube.

And, I really liked the name and then one day I was mining trip codes

and came across Odemonkey,

so I added a C in the front, and it became Codemonkey.

People approach me all the time asking who Q is,

and I will say I don't know.

He's just another 8chan user

and he's welcome to post on 8chan as long as he wants.

We don't know who Q is. It's not me.

Might be you, right? But it's not me.

Only Q would do a documentary about himself, like...

You knew way more about it than me. It's like, wow.

So, he posted about six hours ago.

And that does coincide with this flurry of activity.

About six hours ago. Q even attacked me,

and I had to set that straight quickly.

While calling it an attack might be an exaggeration,

Q had told Ron to check his code,

complained about being locked out of the board,

and even asked Ron for more resources.

Yeah, CM, which I assume, I mean, that stands for Codemonkey.

See, it says here he has a team to secure,

so from then I figured Q was a team, right.

I'm pretty sure Q is a spinoff from Star Trek.

The Q is a type of security clearance

called the Q-Level Clearance.

Yeah, I have one, but I'm not Q.

You don't have a Q-Level Clearance.

While Jim didn't have a Q-level clearance,

he did have a military background.

I started out as a mess hall truck driver

and after that I went on to Army recruiting,

and I did that for about 10 years.

And then I got out of that and started my own company.

Jim discovered a niche online

where he could use the laws of one country

to skirt around the laws in another,

which primed the pumps for his next endeavor,

investing in image boards.

The very first image boards actually started in Japan,

but they were heavily censored due to Japanese law.

That would all change in 1999

when a Japanese college student in America

named Hiroyuki Nishimura created 2channel.

2channel was named after the channel that you turned your TV to

when hooking up an old school video game console.

Because the site was hosted on American soil,

2channel was able to bring unfettered free speech to Japan

and it was insanely popular.

That's when Jim got involved.

Hiroyuki came to me and he said, I can't afford to do this anymore.

So we put some servers in my data center

and we put it online.

In 2003, America finally got a taste of the chan culture

that its free speech laws had helped to create.

4chan!

4chan's founder, Christopher Poole, also known as Moot,

got his start at a comedic website called Something Awful.

Something Awful helped shape meme culture as we know it,

and when Moot created 4chan, it preserved something

that made the Internet in the '90s special: anonymity.

4chan had a few knockoffs, including 420chan,

which focused more on drug culture.

It was started by this guy, Aubrey Cottle.

When 420chan started, it was a damn joke.

Like, it was 420, we were fucking high as shit.

And we should register 420chan. That'd be fucking funny.

But Aubrey Cottle had another claim to fame.

He had cultivated the collective of Internet hacktivists,

keyboard warriors known as none other than Anonymous.

Welcome. I am Anonymous 420.

We interrupt your YouTube time to bring you this urgent news story.

Anonymous started as a prankster collective

and users were organizing to pull off

comedic and sometimes offensive stunts.

Contrary to the assumptions of the media,

Anonymous is not simply a group of super hackers.

Anonymous is a collective of individuals united by an awareness

that someone must do the right thing,

that someone must bring light to the darkness, that someone...

But, as Anonymous evolved, it became increasingly political.

At first, they targeted individuals on the wrong side of history,

like talk show host and Holocaust denier, Hal Turner.

Why are you listening to this show?

This is a show for white people. Get out of here spic.

We DDoS'd him, we sent countless pizzas to his house.

We signed him up for escorts on Craigslist,

and basically we destroyed his ability to pay for his radio show.

They went on to target Scientology.

The extent of your malign influence over those who have come to trust you

as leaders has been made clear to us.

Anonymous has therefore decided that your organization should be destroyed.

And even went after the Federal Reserve.

During the hack of the Fed,

Anonymous stole the login credentials of some 4,000 bankers

from across the country.

All I remember is that all of us were fucking terrified

that all of a sudden Anonymous was just this big fucking global thing.

It just dramatically accelerated from there.

They went fully mainstream.

Havoc ensued, and between 2011 and 2012,

dozens of arrests happened around the world

causing Anonymous to splinter.

25 members of Anonymous have been arrested across Europe.

And we're, like, freaking out being oh fuck-oh fuck-oh fuck.

What did we do? Oh, Jesus.

After Anonymous faded from the limelight,

in 2014 a controversy known as GamerGate

exploded from the bowels of 4chan.

This new collective borrowed from the tactics of Anonymous,

but had a very different agenda,

pushing back against the feminist critique of video games.

Yes, I followed GamerGate from the very beginning.

I found it fascinating and I fully supported it.

It was the first time in many-many years

that a culture stood up to feminist takeover and won.

They went after prominent female game developers,

critics, and their associates.

And, using the shield of anonymity,

users coordinated harassment campaigns on 4chan.

Instantly they dived into find where she lives,

find where where all these people live.

What are we gonna do about her? Can we hack her email? Like, instantly.

It's misogyny. It's misogyny. It's in every game in sight.

But collectively, lessons from Anonymous had been learned.

There were no self-declared leaders.

There was no clear objective, just male-driven vengeance

under a collective banner: gamer culture.

Just a matter of sort of the rage

that gamers were having by being abandoned by the industry

that used to cater to them.

Mark Mann was essentially the Godfather of GamerGate.

He oversaw the video game board

where anons would discuss tactics for their harassment campaigns.

Was anyone ever doxed in that process?

Well, yeah. It's the movement. Everyone's gonna get doxxed.

So we have GamerGate.

It started with ethics in games journalism,

and that was co opted by people leaning towards the right,

and then sort of pushing them toward a liberal media is lying to you agenda.

And then that completely transformed from there into the alt-right.

The first thing you lose is all perspective.

It's like you're just constantly surrounded by nothing but hate.

Christopher Poole decided that that flavor of free speech,

too toxic for 4chan.

And in December of 2014,

all mentions of GamerGate were given the axe.

4chan, the bastion of free speech, was banning mentions of GamerGate.

Blame 4chan! Blame 4chan!

Freedom of speech must be dispersed! My sensibilities must come first!

And 4chan users weren't happy, including Fred Brennan.

I think the media just doesn't understand

that 4chan is heavily moderated.

There are rules. Like, activism is banned on 4chan.

You can state your political beliefs and have debates,

but when you start turning it into action

that's what gets banned on 4chan.

Fred was still a heavy 4chan user,

and the censorship of GamerGate seemed to prove

that speech on 4chan really wasn't that free.

So, my philosophy, because I had gone years just getting angrier and angrier

at the 4chan administration,

that anyway that I could hurt 4chan was a good thing.

Fortunately, or unfortunately,

he'd already created a space that welcomed the controversy.

I thought, oh I had this big number of refugees from 4chan.

I'm gonna do everything I can to support them

as an attack on 4chan.

In late 2014, that's when users started flooding over to 8chan,

to the video game board run by Mark Mann.

I think what brought a lot of people to 8chan was the fact

that it was unique. You know, we promised better moderation,

a much more streamlined community than what was on 4chan.

Around the time that Anonymous splintered,

Jim and Hiroyuki splintered as well.

Jim claimed that Hiroyuki had stopped paying the bills.

There would be battles that play out in Japanese court,

and Jim ultimately modifies the name from 2channel to 5chan.

It's pretty crazy what Jim did.

I mean, he basically ran the deeds office

and just crossed off Hiroyuki's name and put his own name.

Of course after this happened, Jim and Hiroyuki became bitter rivals.

That was fun.

It's around this time that Jim extends his support to Frederick Brennan,

as the owner of 8chan, expanding Jim's reach to the U.S.

Now, Hiroyuki, well, he's a celebrity in Japan.

But, his celebrity status didn't help him

in his numerous court cases against Jim.

So, there was only one real way to get back at him,

and the opportunity presented itself when Chris Poole,

clean from the fallout of GamerGate,

decided that he needed to sell 4chan.

And, he sold it to none other than Hiroyuki.

They had a falling out, and Hiroyuki purchased 4chan.

I believe that was partly to spite my father.

These methods of organizing attacks and pranks

first popularized by Anonymous...

That someone must bring light to the darkness.

...then used during GamerGate.

I can map out the entire family tree starting from Something Awful.

There's a direct lineage pointing right back to my shit.

These methods, it seems that they were just preludes

to what would eventually become...

QAnon.

Welcome back my friends.

This is Dustin Nemos of Dustinnemos.com.

I have something interesting that just happened.

And you're not going to believe it.

So I've been talking about how, a couple times,

I'm not bragging or anything, but I mentioned it once or twice

'cause it's interesting. I was invited to speak on QAnon

at the American Priority Conference, in D.C.

The organizer reached out to me and basically said,

I want to do a Q panel. Would you come and participate?

And I was like, sure.

Up until now, QAnons had organized online.

But for the first time ever, key Q-tubers were stepping out

from behind their monitors into the limelight.

AMERICAN PRIORITY Washington, DC Conference

The American Priority Conference was created as an alternative.

So, this was supposed to be this kind of vision of the new right,

this Internet right.

The Clinton Foundation's the next one that's coming up.

That's the next thing that's gonna be the next...

I haven't even caught up on all the drops yet from today.

We're fighting a war against evil and people who eat babies.

Craig James from JustInformedTalk,

Dustin Nemos from The Nemos News Network,

and future congressional candidate, Deanna Lorraine,

were all scheduled to headline.

Not to mention, the infamous political hitman, Roger Stone,

was slated to make an appearance.

Operatives like Roger Stone and General Flynn

understood the power of information warfare.

Both having bolstered rumors

that a child sex dungeon existed in the basement of a D.C. pizzeria

frequented by their political opponents,

even though no such dungeon was ever found.

Now, what do you think? I've heard rumors of restaurants here in D.C.

where you can go down to the basement,

and they're serving kids up to Saudi princes and stuff.

I haven't heard that one, but I know,

it takes me back to the Comet Ping Pong example, where...

That was where I got it from. The Comet Ping Pong.

Do you talk about Q at all in your posts?

Yes, I do. Absolutely, I...

Because Q kind of ties everything together

and Q has people wake up to the fact

that things that people in the media have told us

have been very much indoctrination and lies.

You may understand now the power of thousands and thousands of people

on the Internet directly...

While the earliest promoter of QAnon, Tracy Beanz,

was still allowed to speak,

presumably because she was no longer open to discussing QAnon,

she presented to an empty room.

The other Q-tubers were given the boot.

We were gonna speak on the QAnon issue

as it applies to the overall MAGA movement.

And they uninvited us for that purpose.

Someone's pulling some strings to force him to disinvite us.

I actually wrote an article about that QAnon panel

and how it was planned to happen,

and then highlighted some of the bigger speakers they had at the time.

And after that article came out, the QAnon panel was cancelled.

Q is not popular among a lot of the alt-leftist media people.

A lot of them build about half of their audience on bashing Q.

It doesn't matter if they want to de-platform me,

we're still getting the word out.

Q gives you a great deal of power in a way by using your platform.

- Correct. - Why do you think Q trusts you?

I don't know that Q trusts me. He might not trust me.

Many people are putting a lot of faith and hope into Q,

and hoping that what he's saying is real

and is going to change the course of history.

Do you think Q is seeking infamy?

Evelyn Hall once said, I disapprove of what you're saying,

but I'll defend to the death your right to say it.

I don't agree, and I don't disagree with what Q is saying.

But I really appreciate that he's using 8chan to get his message out.

And do you seek infamy?

I don't seek infamy. But I will embrace it.

What about your dad?

I can't speak for him, but he's a character.

I've been blessed with a really good life

and I have a lot of fun.

This is what I do for fun. I play with pens.

When you put in a cartridge like this,

you want to flick it a little bit

like you're flicking a spitball in class.

And that one'll be able to write shortly. Okay.

Jim mentioned that he has another hobby: pigs.

To visit his farm, we would need to make a lengthy drive

into the jungle on the outskirts of Manila.

The pig farm was a place of legend on 8chan.

Users like to speculate that it was where Jim disposed of his enemies.

The pig farm is an active business.

It's where we get rid of the bad users.

No.

- Did I say that? - No.

Despite all the rumors about Jim's farm,

I still had a hard time imagining

that he was going to feed me to the pigs.

So, why did you end up taking over as admin?

Fredrick was growing irritated and discontent with the site.

It grew too fast, and it outgrew the software.

They weren't able to figure out how to grow it.

And so I devised a way to scale it.

And my method worked,

and we were able to scale 8chan to the size it is now.

I'm so happy that you were able to interview Fred, though.

'Cause that's, like, proof of life

'cause people have accused me of killing him.

And of course I didn't. He's a friend of mine, you know.

Do you think you're their enemy at this point?

I don't think I'm their enemy, no. Not at all.

Definitely there's been some disagreements over the years

and definitely we have our differences.

But, if it was true, I would have already been fed to the pigs.

So, it's not true.

Maybe 25 percent of 8chan is paid for by pigs.

With your weapon in your hand,

I'm gonna be a fighting man.

Sebastian is my stud.

We don't do artificial insemination here.

We do it natural and he's a lover not a fighter.

He's a wonderful lover. And they love him, too.

Over here we got his girlfriends. This is his harem.

71, two, three, four, five. Seventy-five.

I have 75 piglets and weaners.

They're weaning.

I'm gonna build a house up here,

and I'm gonna make this my private yoga studio.

That data center is in here.

Running an image board is not for the faint of heart.

I'm being attacked every day from all different angles,

so you have to have thick skin and not care what they talk about.

I've had a lot of mental training

and I've spent many years meditating.

And I used to stay in a monastery.

I learned a lot about how to try to kill the ego,

or even just work around the ego.

And, because of that, words from other people attacking me

or saying terrible things about me does not bother me at all.

So, I usually avoid drama as much as I can.

It's just high stress, and I don't need all that stress.

Excuse me, Pol. Yan...

So, who do you think brought this Q to your apartment?

How did this arrive? I just found it one day.

I wrote up a report as soon as it happened, but...

Where was it?

It was on... Where was it?

I think it was just on my desk. It was a long time ago.

I don't really remember the details anymore.

And Q had posted at some point that he was going to thank,

I don't know if it was the creators of 8chan or the...

Right, he said he was going to send a message to the 8chan administrators.

I came back. I saw it.

And I thought it was really weird and I just looked at it,

and then I just posted it online.

I wrote, this could be something or this could be nothing.

I thought it would be funny to say, oh, it could be from the real Q.

And, weirdly enough, Q never repudiated that.

I'm one of the Q proofs.

They believe Q put the Q in my room.

But, it's not like bad gift or anything.

It's a good gift for me. I design fonts, so...

The Q is my favorite letter.

And it always has been since I was a kid.

When you're a typographer,

you're always fighting between making sure people can read the letter

and then your own artistic intent.

So, Q gives you the most freedom.

There are so many ways to put the tail of the Q.

You can have it bisecting.

You can have it only inside, so none of this part.

You can have it totally outside.

You can have it touching, or you can write it as a two.

So, it gives a typographer a lot of freedom

when they're designing a font.

And I'm not sure if any other letter does that.

You do have an unbelievable amount of Qs in here.

Thank you.

Yeah, this, it's as if your room is just Qs.

Back when I first got the blue Q,

QAnons, they would send me Qs to be like, thank you.

'Cause, like, they saw the blue Q as a sign.

So, not all of these Qs are actually bought by me.

And, I never acknowledged any of the Qs that came here.

But you didn't get rid of them either.

That's true, yeah.

Do you think it's possible that Frederick Brennan is Q?

I think Frederick Brennan could be Q,

but having an object does not mean

you are the person associated with that object.

Example, here's a MAGA hat, right?

Does that mean I'm Trump? Obviously, I'm not Trump,

even though I have the same hat that Trump wears.

There are a million of those, and I've only seen one...

There are millions of Qs, also.

This is my man cave.

So, what goes down in this room?

This is where it all happens.

I am Jim Watkins and I will dance on command.

I do lap dances for 50 bucks. You want me to turn this off?

That pen cleaner's about the noisiest thing I've ever heard.

You can hear this? I can't hear this at all.

And, so, is this where you log into 8chan usually?

I usually don't go to boards that are not public

'cause you get there,

and you get things you want to unsee.

But you don't have access to the Q board?

What is the URL? What is the...

We can go to the Q board.

The Q research board is hidden,

meaning it wouldn't show up on 8chan's main page.

You had to know where to look.

You could be directed there by a link from another site,

or type Q research into the browser.

Q...

- Research? Q research? - Research, okay.

It's weird that one of the most popular things on 8chan and you're like...

But how would I know it's the most popular thing? It's not listed.

Q has something like 2500 posts at this point.

- Have you read them all? - I read a lot of them.

Tell me about it and I'll tell you what my opinion is.

One of the big ones is that there's all these sealed indictments.

Hilary and John McCain, they're all arrested already

and wearing ankle bracelets.

That's possible. I think they have secret courts in America, don't they?

November 11th was supposed to be this big day.

11-11. That's one, one, one, one.

One more one if you count the one in the 18.

But, everything that Q has said has come true

in some potential future.

And all of those unlimited futures have or are happening.

Just you can only experience one of them.

See, now you are starting to sound like Q.

Obviously, if there's so many people reading this Q research,

I don't think that this is a LARP. It's too big for that.

But who it is and if he's actually an insider at the White House,

that's up in the air.

Do you think it's possible that your dad is part of Q?

It's impossible. Yeah, he would have bragged about it already.

He seems like he would be good at keeping a secret.

It's a big world, you know.

Maybe he's just some overtired, overstressed,

middle GS-5 from the White House

that's like, "I got an idea."

Q's a big fan of General Flynn, so probably someone really...

General Flynn? Yeah, and he got burnt for no reason,

didn't he? Poor guy.

I found out more about it today than I actually knew about it before.

I haven't been keeping up on politics for awhile

'cause I I've been busy working on important things.

He worked in the military for awhile,

so I believe they do stuff that needs to be kept secret.

What is a Q-level clearance?

I was in the Army 16 years and I never had a Q-level clearance.

I don't know what that is.

Q, if he is who he is,

he would surely know a lot about the military.

And my dad knows a lot about the military.

Probably it's they're military talking points, maybe.

When I was in the academy, the commandant said

you're the most civilianized motherfucker I ever let graduate.

It's possible, I guess, that he could be Q. But I doubt it,

'cause he's so busy working on the pig farm now.

Do you think it would be dangerous for Q to reveal themself, or herself?

Probably, yeah. Has he done anything illegal?

You can definitively say then that you are not a part of Q?

I am not a part of Q.

Don't arrest me.

How do you think you differ from your father?

How do I differ?

I don't, I'm not autistic about pens, for one.

After spending several days with Jim, something came to mind.

Pen board usually has one user. Me.

Q uses a pen to confirm its identity.

A 1500-dollar Mont Blanc Starwalker pen

that supposedly belongs to Donald Trump.

Q first introduced the pen on December 12th of 2017,

then Q returns after the power struggle on January 5th.

What does Q use to confirm?

That same pen.

Why does Q choose a pen of all things to confirm its identity?

This is my hobby, yeah. This is what I do for fun.

That is from France.

So, we'll let that sit for a little while.

Are there a lot of pen collectors out there?

There are millions of pen collectors out there.

I love this pen. This is my favorite pen.