Behind the Bastards - The Man Trying to Resurrect 8chan (Starring 8chan's Founder)

Episode Date: November 14, 2019

8chan, the website at the center of an epidemic of mass shootings, is on the cusp of resurrection thanks to one man: Jim Watkins. Robert talks with with the site's reformed founder, Fredrick, about a modern bastard.FOOTNOTES: FAQ - 8chan Full transcript: Ars interviews 8chan founder Fredrick Brennan THE MANILA TIMES | FEBRUARY 18, 2019 Absolutely everything you need to know to understand 4chan, the Internet’s own bogeyman Statement from Jim Watkins, owner of 8chan, on the atrocity in New Zealand. The Weird, Dark History of 8chan Committee on Homeland Security 8chan Inquiry Meet the man keeping 8chan, the world's most vile website, alive Sorry for the inconvenience, common sense will prevail Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Alphabet Boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations. In the first season, we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests. It involves a cigar-smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse look like a lot of guns. But are federal agents catching bad guys or creating them? He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science?

And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price? Two death sentences in a life without parole. My youngest? I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Today we have a very special episode. Today we're talking about the man keeping 8chan alive, or at least trying to. A fellow named Jim Watkins. And I should probably summarize for my listeners who have not somehow caught this story, even though I've covered it pretty heavily all of 2019. 8chan was started as a radical free speech bastion on the internet and kind of the image of a site called 4chan. One of its sections, Poll, became a hive of outright Nazism and gradually grew dedicated to inspiring acts of terrorism.

In March of this year, one of the members of Poll livestreamed a video of himself massacring Muslims and mosques in New Zealand. This was the Christchurch massacre. I'm sure everybody heard of that. Since then, 8chan members carried out two more shootings in Poway and El Paso before the site was pulled off the internet. In the week since, there's been one more shooting in Hall, Germany, which was carried out by another poster from Poll. The website is currently down, but its new owner and the subject of today's episode, Jim Watkins, is working tirelessly to bring it back online. But before we get to Jim, we should probably talk about the elephant of the room, which is the fact that my guest today, Frederick Brennan, is the creator of 8chan in the first place back in 2013. Hello, Frederick. Hello.

How are you doing today? I'm doing, you know, as good as could be expected. Yeah, this is an odd episode. I'm sure it's one I didn't expect to record, but you and I have started working together a little bit over the last couple of weeks. We just put out an article in Bellingcat about the state of California's failure to bring 8chan back on, and you've become pretty much an activist against the site's resurrection, I think it'd be fair to say. Sure. Yeah, that would be fair. So, again, I think a lot of our listeners, you've done a lot of interviews before, so I don't want to go too crazy into detail on, you know, your whole backstory, because people can find plenty of that if they want to. But for the sake of making this whole episode internally consistent, could you like kind of walk us through a little bit of your background up to, like, what kind of inspired you to create 8chan in the first place? Right. So, you know, I was an image board user for a very long time, starting in when I was 12 years old on 4chan. So, obviously, that's a great place to spend your teenage years.

Yeah. There is no problem with that at all. So, obviously, you know, it kind of warps how you think about, you know, broader society and yourself and all sorts of things, because you spend all your time in anonymous communication, basically. I, you know, had been involved in 4chan for those years, and in 2010, when 4chan's owner removed the board that would later become the poll board. It used to, it was originally called Ann for News. So, he removed that, and he also removed the R9K board. It just turned out that those were the two boards that I, at that time, at least, was using the most. So. And what was R9K? Uh, Robot9000, I don't know where that name really comes from. I do know that the original intent of R9K was that you couldn't make the same post twice, meaning if anybody had ever posted something, it couldn't be posted again. That was the original intention. Oh, neat. Okay.

Right. It started neat, I suppose, but it quickly just turned into a very sad, very kind of depressing board, to be honest, because people couldn't really repost memes, you know. They would mostly just tell stories about their life, and the images they would post would tend to be, because they wouldn't want to get muted by the auto moderator that will not allow you to post the same thing twice. So, they would tend to post, you know, stories about their life, stories about things that had happened, and given that we were all, you know, image board users, teenagers that were most likely socially awkward, you know, the stories quickly all became depressing. Um, WizardChan grew out of R9K, as did, I would say, a lot of the modern in-cell movement. Right. So, there's four-chan and eight-chan, the sites that I would say that most, I guess, news-conscious Americans would know, right? But there's all these other smaller chans, like the one you just covered earlier today for Bellingcat, you know, dogola-chan in Brazilian, in Brazilian Portuguese. So, there's all these other chans, because especially before they weren't that hard to set up, you know, there weren't really that many people trying to take them down. Um, so, any sysadmin with a little bit of experience could set up one of these chans, and that was how WizardChan started.

I didn't start it, as has been reported by a few. It started, I think, around 2012, and the guy who started it was, um, basically kicked out for being, um, the idea of WizardChan is that all the posters are going to be male virgins. So, the original creator was kicked out for having a homosexual relationship, I guess you could say. That came to light, so he had to retire. Um, I took it over, and then I eventually, you know, would have a relationship with a woman, so I had to give it up. The next person it went to, I think they, um, I think they committed suicide, but nobody's really sure, and now I think it's on its fourth or fifth, or it could even be sixth owner. I haven't really been keeping track. And this is, what we're talking about is very different, it seems, or at least in my understanding, from, like, the in-cell community, because it's not, like, this, um, conspiratorial, like, I haven't gotten laid because women are evil sort of thing, it's more like it was kind of a support system? Like, I guess what you could, yeah, what you could say is that these communities grew into the modern in-cell community, for sure. R9K, WizardChan, all of them grew into what we see today as, like, the modern in-cells, I suppose.

I don't, you know, certainly there were a lot of toxic users when I was, uh, WizardChan's admin for that short period. I didn't even make it a year. Um, certainly there were a lot of toxic users. There were a lot of suicides, at least four in the time that I was admin. And you could see the beginning of toxicity beginning to, um, start because after there were so many suicides, I put up a suicide hotline from multiple countries and that started to become very controversial. And that was one reason that I was very disliked among the users because they said, you know, there's no way that normies can ever understand us. So us calling a suicide hotline is the worst advice you could give, basically. Geez.

That was their whole spiel. Yeah, it was a very dark time. Um, like I said, you know, I didn't create it and I only lasted in its administration for a year. Uh, the skills that I learned, you know, definitely informed 8chan, you know, the skills with, uh, the image board software, the administration, what to do about, you know, certain types of attacks that were kind of in their infancy at that time. Um, yeah. This is getting us a little bit off topic, but I'm really fascinated by the general subject of kind of how the internet went from where it was when, uh, I was younger, a teenager, and like where it was when you were a teenager to like where what we're dealing with right now. Um, and I, like definitely you have some pieces of that puzzle. I think everybody who was extremely online in the late 90s, early 2000 has.

Just for the sake of number one, since you talked about like kind of your background here, I'll give up a little bit of my own. I grew up on, um, something awful on those forums, which kind of gave birth to 4chan in a way because Moot, the guy who founded 4chan, um, I think got pissed off at the moderation of something awful for being too strict. Uh, right. The same story as me, right? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And Christopher Poole thought that the something awful mods were too strict, so he starts 4chan. And I think Christopher Poole is too strict, so I start 8chan. Yeah, there's a lot of that actually later in this story too. Um, it's very circular. Uh, but, you know, one of the things that always struck me, I got banned from something awful when I was younger for, I don't know, I was probably 15 or 16 and I said something racist. I don't even remember what it was, but they would ban you for that and it cost you $10 when you got banned.

And it's one of those things that something awful forums are still around today. There's still not a completely toxic pile of like, uh, uh, radicalism. Um, it really, all you need is a little bit of, of, like, I went back and forth on this myself as a young man because I had this period where I was like kind of very absolutist on the free speech issue. And I'm still not super far from that, but I have come to the conclusion that if you want these communities to not be toxic, you have to draw some lines like you really do. You have to say, okay, well, you can't be a Nazi. We're not going to have that here. I definitely understand that you can actually see a little bit of how, um, something awful kind of informed 4chan. Because a lot of these rules against being racist are actually applied to 90% of 4chan's boards. The thing that Christopher Poole changed is that, okay, he made it so that he created a few boards, you know, B in particular, but then later also the N and then the pool board where you could be a racist.

So it's kind of like he opened the door to that. Yeah, there's a lot of interesting lessons for the future in there if people take them, but we should continue with the story. So around 2013 is when you coded 8chan. I mean, that's a story that involves drugs for one thing, which I know my audience will like and I always like to hear. So if you don't mind, you can give the cliffs notes of that one. Yeah, so, you know, I was on a drug trip at the time. Um, for me, it's like I keep repeating one small part of that drug trip, which, you know, it later turned out to define a big part of my life. But, you know, and I think back to that drug trip, I should say, it was just like one small moment in a bigger experience.

But anyway, I was kind of still really high, but like over the peak, I guess you could say. And I was on the computer and I was screwing around on 4chan, which was normal for me in 2013. You know, I had kind of at that time forgiven Paul because he put R9K and he added a new board, which was at the time called Paul. So even though I wasn't very happy that he didn't add the board back as news and that it was a pink board now and not a blue board. I know that that might be. Basically, it was not safe for work versus safe for work. Right. That's the only difference. Right. So, but anyway, you know, I decided to just let bygones be bygones. And I was using 4chan a lot at the time.

And I just decided or I just started thinking about, you know, my experience as being wizard chance admin in the past at that time. And all these other smaller image board communities. And I just thought, you know, wouldn't it be great if like Reddit, the users of these image boards could decide the boards and not the admin. Right. Like, because I felt like the main problem at that time was the admin of 4chan was unaccountable and he could just add and remove boards. And a board could be requested for years by many users and he won't add it just because he doesn't personally see the appeal or doesn't like it. So that's kind of why I decided to start 8chan. I figured, you know, Reddit works and it works for Reddit. So why couldn't it work for 8chan, I suppose.

So it was essentially like this desire to like hybridize Reddit and 8chan and make a place where the users would have even more control over the structure of the community and what was said there. Right. And one really weird part of this story is that like, there's like the 2013, you know, 8chan, which was very different than what we know in 2014. Or especially, you know, before Gamergate 8chan. Yeah. Yeah. You're getting 10 posts today or something. Yeah. Basically, nothing is really set in stone until Gamergate, you know, there's really no community. And a few months after I started 8chan and nobody was using it, I just figured, you know, this kind of failed, but it's still it's still a cool technical demo. So I'll leave it online. I'll put it on my resume or portfolio or whatever, and that'll be it. You know, I was kind of very surprised by the 2014 Gamergate type thing. I wasn't really expecting it. Yeah. And so Gamergate, for our listeners that don't know, was, one side would say it was about ethics in video game journalism.

The other side would say it was a harassment campaign against primarily female video game journalists. It was this big social movement on the Internet that was fairly reactionary and kind of fed into and was manipulated by guys like Steve Bannon, guys like Milo Yiannopoulos, and kind of metastasized into large chunks of what we started calling the alt-right in 2016. I think that that's kind of a succinct way of describing Gamergate. And, you know, Gamergate is one of its big organizing places initially was on 4chan. And when the harassment of some of these women journalists got too serious, they were kicked off of 4chan and migrated to 8chan. And that's really what grew it into like started the process of it attracting enough people to really grow into a large site. Right. And that's exactly or almost exactly where Jim Watkins comes into the picture. Because, yeah, yeah, that is exactly where and this is where we should get into the actual written article that I have.

Before you start, it's like, I'm not trying to minimize my own involvement, you know. My deciding to allow 8chan to be a place where anybody could post anything that was legal was not smart, you know. I was very young and naive, you could say that, but I it wasn't smart. It was probably wrong. You know, it was wrong to start 8chan when I had basically no experience instead of looking to what had happened in the past, right? But I really feel that the reason it's more about Jim Watkins is because he was an older man who had been doing this for many, many years. And he kind of just, for me, was somebody that represented, it's all OK, because Jim says it's OK. Or it's all OK to do this because Jim is even taking legal liability. You know what I mean? Yeah. I want to, there's a couple of things I want to get into so that we'll make a little more sense is the number one.

How old are you when you start this site? 19. I mean, you're a kid. I think we can all agree, 19 year olds, they're legally adults, but you're a kid at 19. That's a very young person. This site explodes in 2014. It gets expensive to run. It gets to be a gigantic time sink to keep online. And Jim Watkins, a millionaire with a business network overseas, and we'll get into Jim in a little bit here and explain where he comes from. But this millionaire business owner comes in and says, I'll buy the site and I'll keep it online and I will give you a job if you keep it running and are the face of this company. That's essentially the deal. Yes, essentially. And had he not showed up, it would have probably totally disintegrated in 2014.

There is one other thing I want to ask because you mentioned it is sort of like this decision to allow anything as long as it's legal on 8chan. Right. It was there a moment where you were first sort of confronted by the Nazi shit and had to kind of, was that a debate you had with yourself or was it kind of present enough for in the beginning that when you decided to kind of let the community continue, you were deciding to accept that as part of it? You know, the weird thing is 4chan itself kind of evolved, I guess you could say on this. And I felt that because 4chan was a much more popular site, I really felt at the time that I couldn't disallow anything that 4chan allowed because I wouldn't be able to track users that way. I don't know if I was right about that, but that's how I felt. And 4chan at the time, like I said, they deleted the end board for news and then they brought it back as politically incorrect. And I believe that small cues like that to users really matter.

Like they could have called it poll for politics that would have been just as acceptable. Right. But pool decided to call it politically incorrect. So it seemed to me at the time like he wanted to attract all of the real far right Nazi people to that board. Yeah. And the theory is that it would be like a containment board. Like he will contain them in this politics board, this politically incorrect board. So, you know, it wasn't really a debate for me because I would just argue it to myself and others as well.

How can you say that 8chan can't have a poll board when 4chan does, you know? Yeah. It's shitty and it's very much all about practicality, but that would be how I would explain it to you at the time. Yeah. You know, I understand there's probably going to be people listening to this who don't think that I'm grilling you enough on the moral questions on this. And I want to say here that's partly because I've been watching what you've been doing over the last three or four months and how much effort you've put into keeping this site offline. And it's partly because when I was 18, 19 years old, I held a lot of political beliefs and beliefs about the nature of, you know, free speech and stuff like that that I do not currently hold. And I said things that I regret now and that I wouldn't say now.

And I think most people have something like that. We just didn't know how to code image boards and have an idea to make one. Right. So, it's one of those things where I think it is important for you to like take stock of your part in all this and regret making the site. But I also think it'd be unreasonable for someone to expect you to wear a hair shirt, especially since you were out of the picture by the time people started getting shot. Yeah, far out of the picture. Yeah. Yeah.

So we should we should we should get into Jim Watkins' story. Well, before we get into Jim's story, it's actually a time for a really awkward ad pivot. Now, Frederick, sometimes when I do one of these ad pivots, I will let my my guest suggest a random product that they just think people should buy. Do you have any random products you would like people to buy? Or would you like? Concepts work too. You know, concepts or products, you know, I have really been enjoying recently Bluetooth speakers. There's so much more fun than those little headphone things that always fall out of your ears and hurt your ears, at least for me, maybe because my ear canal is not the right shape.

So I have been putting them everywhere. It's becoming a bit of a problem. Oh, I have one in my. Yeah, I have a few in my a few in my condo where I live, a few in my car, you know, I've even been thinking of like putting them like in the bathroom and just playing constant, you know, I don't know, elevator music. I don't know. Yeah, that's my product. I feel the same way. I love sitting outside having a campfire with a Bluetooth speaker listening to rap music.

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We're back. All right. So we've gotten through kind of the background here. And the situation that we've moved up to is like you've built this website. It's big. It's increasingly influential and it's increasingly expensive and a gigantic pain in the ass to keep online. There's clearly a ticking clock on how long eight Chan can last if you alone continue to run it. And into this situation steps a man named Jim. Now, James Arthur Watkins was born in Dayton, Washington on November 20th, 1964. He was raised on a family farm out in Muketeo or Muketeo. Washington people are going to yell at me from getting this wrong.

Muketeo, Washington. So out in the country, he's a farm boy. His mother worked for Boeing and his father worked for the local phone company. Now, growing up in the 60s and 70s, James didn't have a history with computers. Obviously, because it was the 60s and 70s and very few people did. And he joined the U.S. Army when he was 18 in 1982. He was eventually devoted to the rank of Sergeant First Class. And he spent most of his time in the service working as an attack helicopter mechanic and later as a military recruiter. So he's got a pretty long career in the Army, actually.

And we would give James his first experience with computers late in his service in the 1990s. They sent Jim to a tech focused school in Virginia where he got a crash course in the gadgets that would later dominate the world and his life. Now, I can't speak to Jim's overall technical competence, but it seems clear that he at least immediately understood how influential the Internet was quickly going to come to be. Recognize that, yeah, that's what he wanted. That's the business he wanted to be in. I can speak to it. He's not necessarily great with computers. He understands networking very well, though. And he understands like all of the domain registrar.

He understands basically a lot of the stuff that keeps him from being de-platformed. Like he's really good with networking, but he's definitely not a programmer. No. And I think he's more a guy who gains kind of a basic technical understanding of what the Internet is at a stage when the Internet is still pretty young. And I think he realizes that it's going to be huge and that there's going to be a fuckload of money in figuring out how to use it right. And he was one of the first people to really capitalize on a very specific part of the Internet, pornography. In the mid-1990s, while he was still in the military, he launched a website called Asian Bikini Bar, which he would later describe as one of the largest video streaming adult websites in the world. So that's very classy.

But legal, I've never heard any allegations that it involved anything underage or anything like that. Oh, no, but one thing you should be aware of and that all your listeners should be aware of, one thing that Jim was very clever about very early in his career is he realized that the Internet, one of the main ways that you can make money with it is by taking advantage of different jurisdictions. So you can do something legal in one jurisdiction that's illegal in another and market it to the jurisdiction where it's illegal. So that's the main way that these businesses made money. They were in Japanese and but hosted from the United States. So basically they were porn websites in the United States that didn't have to follow Japan's censorship laws around pornography.

Yeah, that was exactly what I was about to get into. Oh, okay, sorry. No, no, no, no, no, you're doing great. Yeah, I think it might surprise people because like Japan's reputation in America, there involves a lot of like lasciviousness pornography and whatnot because that's what gets across the Internet to us. But especially back in the 90s, they had really strict laws. So yeah, exactly like you said, Jim's sites were hosted in the US, but they were in Japanese and the goal was allowing Japanese people to access and share pornography without getting censored. So there's actually a fun quote from Jim's current business partner, a guy named Tom Ridell.

Am I pronouncing it right? Yes, I've met this guy multiple times. We'll be talking about him a number of times in the article, but this is a quote from him talking to Splinter News in 2016. They figured out a loophole in Japanese censorship rules, adult material in Japan has to be censored, but Japanese people could access content that resides outside of Japan. Bingo, the work we did in the following years was really just marketing uncensored Japanese content to users in Japan. So this is a story that I think Jim and the people around him like to tell a lot. It's clearly something he's proud of, like figuring out this loophole and building a business around it.

Yes, they really feel like this makes them sound very clever and they love telling it to everybody who will listen, especially libertarian-minded people. Speaking as a recovering libertarian, there's nothing libertarians like more than a story of getting one over on a government. I'm not all the way over that, but I'm not sure it's entirely a bad thing, but in this case... Certainly not always. We'll call it a neutral thing. Now, Watkins ran his first porn site, like I said, while he was still employed as an army recruiter, which makes him one of the least shady army recruiters in the history of the service.

He told the army... That was a joke for my army friends there. He told the army that he was starting an online business, although he didn't tell them that the business was a porn site, but this doesn't seem to have created any difficulties. The actual first thing that caused Jim a problem with his business was the website's name, Asian Bikini Babes. You had to pay to be a member of the site, and as Jim noted in 2015, that did not go over well with people's wives. This was basically showing up on people's credit card statements as an Asian Bikini website, and people's spouses were like, what are you doing spending money on this shit? Jim changed his company name to something that would look more innocuous on credit card statements.

NT Technology. The acronym stands for nothing. It's just the blandest and safest name that Jim can think of. Yeah. It's a good name for a porn website to have. Nobody's going to think anything shady about it. Now, NT Technology initially made most of its money selling advertising on an expanding network of websites. Jim added more and more adult sites to the network, helping countless horny Japanese people access pornography that would have been illegal.

At a certain point, NT Technology expanded into web hosting, too. In 1997, either one or two years before Jim left the Army, depending on which interview you read, they're not all completely consistent, so I can't say for sure. It was either 98 or 99 that he quit, though. But in 1997, Jim Watkins met Tom Riedel. Now, at the time, Riedel was an art student living in Pittsburgh. Here's how he recalled their meeting. One day, in the summer of 1997, my roommates ran in and told me they met the king of porn in the park walking his poodle.

Watkins apparently hit it off with these teenage boys and told them he was looking for artists to make banner ads for him. And I think Riedel's about 19 years old, too, when this happens. Wow. Can you imagine that? Jim Watkins going to an art school looking for, hello, fellow kids, would you like to make some banner ads for me? Like, what? You know, I actually, I think there might be some logic in the through line of him working with 18, 19-year-old kids who have a talent that he needs, but they're also young enough that they don't know what they're worth for one thing, like they're not going to be good at bargaining.

Yes, and they can be easily manipulated. Exactly, exactly. He's a man who spent 16 years in the military at this point. He's certainly more capable of negotiating. Right, and isn't being an army recruiter all about manipulating the children's voice? Yes, so I feel like there's a repeating pattern here. He definitely is one of the people who's been most successful at building a business from lying to teenagers. He's great at that. So he gives Riedel and his friends some freelance work,

and then Riedel says, quote, after that I started working full time, and the next summer I drove with him and his family across country to Seattle where we set up an office. So Riedel and Jim expand NT Technology and start hosting more sites and a wider variety of sites. And in 1998 or 1999, Jim quits the army after about 16 years. He was at that point less than a presidential term away from a government pension, but he quits before getting the pension because he decides it's a better call to dive headfirst into his internet businesses. And this would prove to have been a pretty wise call. I suspect he made more money in those years than he would have gotten from his pension.

Most likely. Yeah, Jim got in on the ground floor of the online porn business, and he made a huge amount of money doing that at a time when it was still very easy. There was this kind of sweet spot in between about 1996, 97, and like 2001 or two before like the dot-com bubbles started to crack where you could really make... This is also the same time John McAfee made his fortune. There's a number of kind of similar libertarian guys who sees this six, seven-year window in the internet and make fucking bank, and Jim is one of them.

Now in 2000, Jim's hosting company picked up a very significant client, Two Channel. This site had been created in 1999 by Hiroyuki Nishimura. It was a text-only discussion board that wound up becoming a central part of early Japanese internet culture, and it's still very popular today. Yes. Yeah, Two Channel is mostly commonly abbreviated as 2CH, and it quickly grew to become one of the largest sites on the internet. By 2008, it was bringing in 500 million page views a month.

Now, if we view gigantic, barely-regulated web boards as a monarchial line, Two Channel was the progenitor of the dynasty. It inspired the creation of an image board, which is basically the same as a forum, but the discussion focuses around posted images, named in its honor, named Two Channel. I think people can probably figure out where we're going from here. In 2003, a 15-year-old American named Christopher Poole got tired of the modding policies and something awful, and creates 4CHAN, which is patterned off of Two Channel. So Two Channel made great money, and by 2008, Nishimura was bringing in around a million dollars a year in profits.

He told Wired at the time, the only person who gets money from Two Channel is me. Well, I guess I pay for the servers, and of course, those servers were owned by Jim Watkins. And Watkins charged a lot. You can see that in the court filings. Yeah, he made a very good amount of money off of Two Channel. And by the early 2000s, he really needed Nishimura's money, because the dot-com bubble had truly popped, and Internet porn had gone from the Wild West to a very crowded market. NT technology was still profitable, but the money wasn't rolling in as heavily as it had years before.

This seems to have impacted Jim's decision to move to the Philippines, which is a much cheaper place to live, and to operate a business. His main impetus for this seems to have been the fact that he'd vacationed there before. So in that 2016 article by Splinter, Jim claimed he'd moved to the Philippines in 2004, but a Washington Post article from 2019 disputes this timeline. They point to a printed notice in the Mandela Times about Jim's pending naturalization as a Filipino citizen. Jim was required to pay for this as part of the naturalization process, and in the notice, Jim says he moved to the Philippines on October 2, 2001.

He married a Filipino woman less than 20 days later. Now, their child was born a couple of months after that, so it's not as shady as it sounds. These are some facts I did not know. So it's interesting because you hear, okay, he moves to the Philippines, he marries a woman 18 days later. That sounds like, okay, he just found someone to marry for the green card, but they had a kid like three months after that. So clearly the relationship must have existed before that. I don't know where it started.

I don't know if he visited the Philippines before, but it clearly started before he moved to the Philippines because biology. So that's all interesting. That's very interesting because as we'll obviously get to later, I'm opposing his petition. You're telling me some things I didn't know. Well, and even this timeline is not 100% certain. In an interview Watkins told the Washington Post that he first started migrating his life over to the Philippines in 2001, but he didn't really commit to moving there until 2004,

and he didn't finish moving there until 2007. Yeah, like there's some things in that petition that are not true. He claims to be able to speak Filipino, he doesn't. He sure does. And that's one, he definitely does not speak Filipino at all. And you do. That's the local language. Yes, I do actually.

I speak it much better than he does. I lived here much shorter time. So that's one of the things that we're going to be opposing in February, but I don't want to get ahead of ourselves. Yeah, and it's interesting to me too that Tom Rydel, Jim's business partner, told the Washington Post that the court notice Jim had paid for was incorrect, but did not say why or give more detail. That's all they know.

Oh, he really told the Post that it's incorrect. That's great. I'm sure the judge will love that. Now, in any case, Jim moved from the U.S. to the Philippines in the early aughts, and by all accounts, lived there quite contentedly up to the present day. He started a pig farm, which does not appear to be profitable, but he also created a lot of other businesses. We don't know how many he owns or what they all do,

but the Post has a good breakdown of his little empire he built, and I'm going to quote a couple of paragraphs from their write-up. Those include a smattering of manila-based companies focused on computer services and real-world property over the years, including a now-closed organic food restaurant, and in 2005, a business called Race Queen, probably named for the scantily-clad models who pose along the tracks of Japanese car races. Located in the dilapidated manila office tower,

Race Queen calls itself a software development and outsourcing company, according to a torn sign taped to the door. It has also been listed as an employer on work visas for foreign employees of 8chan and Watkins as other message boards, including Brennan, Philippines' immigration record show. That would be you, obviously. That would be me, yes, and that's true. And the reason that it's called Race Queen Inc. is also accurate.

Yeah. Okay, good. I'm always a fan of, you know, you get a very professional publication by The Post, where they really do a pretty good job in their normal articles of boiling out personal bias and opinion, and how much you can say and how much shade you can throw just by adding the word torn to a sentence. Yes, yes, exactly. They can't just say due to a sign.

Yeah, yeah, no, no, no. And the dilapidated office building. Definitely, definitely they do throw shade. Yeah, yeah, it would be hard not to be. So the naturalization court notice said Watkins and his wife had bought several properties across the country, including a condo in Central Manila and farms outside the city, where he said he raised pigs. Philippine business records reveal glimpses of a peculiar assortment of businesses

in Watkins' orbit. The company Emerald Pedestal, which is misspelled, which lists ownership in Manila condo units and calls Watkins chairman of the board. He did that on purpose, by the way, to try to avoid certain suits. That's what he told me at least. Yeah, like I know a lot of the shell companies. He told me that Emerald Pedestal is named wrong on purpose. I don't remember exactly why, but I think he thought that it would make it harder to sue him.

Yeah, John McAfee and this guy would really get along with each other. I suspect they would be good friends. So yeah, for most of the mid aughts, Jim's business is hummed along without having any discernible impact on the broader culture. He made money for himself and his family, and he didn't get into the spotlight in any way that I've ever found evidence of. Things started to change in 2013, because that's the year that you created 8chan, and it's also the year that 2chanel had a massive data breach

that exposed 30,000 people's credit card data. Now, this on its own is bad, but since much of 2chanel's claim to fame was its anonymity, it was seen as a particularly huge fuck-up. The data breach interfered with the site's ability to make money. Now, Tom Riedel claims that this is why in 2014, NT Technology took possession of 2chanel. The website remains huge and a significant source of profit to this day. Now, 2chanel's creator, Nishimura, disputes legitimacy of NT Technology taking possession of his website. He says they basically stole it, and I think the court case is ongoing.

Yes, it is. In an email interview with Splinter News, Nishimura claimed of Watkins, all his businesses have failed, even his hosting service was not good. I have made similar claims. It's a big problem when everything that you're well known for, you're alleged to have stolen or acquired via shady means. I mean, people do get elected to high office with that kind of a resume, too. It kind of depends on how good you are at spinning it.

In 2015, Christopher Poole sold 4chan to Nishimura. I just think that's really interesting. Nishimura creates the site that inspires the site that 4chan is based off of, and then Nishimura winds up buying 4chan like 15 years later. It's just a fun series of events. Now, the year before that purchase, Jim Watkins bought 8chan from Frederick Brennan, making him, I guess, the lord of 50% of the chans, something like that. Sure.

He has two channel and he has 8chan at this point. Frederick, would you walk us through a little bit how he reached out to you and what the deal was and what you had to do in order to take this? Because it's why you're in the Philippines now. 8chan had basically no way to make money. Deplatforming was being used against it all the way back in 2014, not even as hardcore as what's going on right now, but we got kicked off of all the payment processors very quickly.

I was able to find servers who would host us, but I could not afford that. You know what I mean? Without any money coming in. There was no one who would want to advertise on 8chan, even before it was known for what it's known for now. People just don't like to have their ads on sites that host Nazis. I know, big shock, right? It's even hard to find people who want to put their ads, like real big corporations on porn sites.

So porn and Nazis, you basically can't find anybody. So I knew that 8chan's days were numbered. I made this pretty clear, I suppose, on the official 8chan Twitter and through other means, posting on the board. I started to get offers, basically, from people who wanted to acquire 8chan because it had been in the news and it had already this big community. You know, as far as chans go. And there was, at the time, a real sense that it could take over for 4chan,

like that it could unseat 4chan as the main chan. That didn't end up happening, but that's what some people thought, including maybe myself in my more confident moments. But I started looking at these offers and I really could only narrow it down to two. And one of them was from a company that had no experience in this at all. And I really felt like with enough pressure, if I transferred the servers there, they would crack and then that would be it, you know what I mean? So I decided to take Jim's offer.

He very much used the fact that he owned 2chan as a way to convince me, you know, that he is the originator of all the chans and he can help. I didn't really totally understand that when I agreed, the extent to which Hirayuki hated him and the extent to which he most likely stole 2chan. And the agreement is basically, he'll move you to the Philippines, he'll pay you a salary and fund everything, right? Basically, that's correct.

He did not buy 8chan itself. What he did was I transferred this data to his servers and then he moved me to the Philippines and paid me to be its admin, basically. So he took all of the liability by transferring the data to his data center. And eventually in 2015, January, only a few months later, he took over at the end of September, I believe. And then in January of the following year, he took the domain also. Like there was a problem with the domain registrar,

like what they're experiencing right now with 2cows, where 2cows doesn't want to register their domain because it is very bad press. So Jim had his own domain registrar, or at least that's how he explained it to me. He's actually just a 2cows reseller. He doesn't own his own registry with the ICANN. But anyway, that doesn't really matter. So at the time, that was seen as very bulletproof.

So 8chan, he basically said, look, use my domain temporarily, wink, wink, and then we'll transfer it back to your domain after you get your domain back. Well, I got my domain back, 8chan.co, but we just kept it on 8ch.net because basically he had no incentive to transfer it back. So it's kind of a shady way that he got ownership, if you really think about it. There's no contract or anything, it's just domain. Yeah, he doesn't like contracts.

No, he doesn't. It strikes me the situation, I hope we're not getting too personal here, but you have some pretty significant healthcare needs, and part of this deal is he's putting you up in a condo that he owns, and he's paying... And also paying for a nurse. Yeah, paying for a nurse, and there's no contract, which means he could take all of this away from you and leave you homeless.

Whenever he wants, yeah. Yeah, exactly, it's a very unsettling position to be. I can see how you would take it and how it would sound incredibly enticing. I get to move to this wonderful foreign country and live in a condo and get paid to do this thing I was doing for free. It was enticing in October, November, and December, and then when it came time to deal with this domain problem, I had no leverage I could use to keep the domain,

so he got total ownership. Yeah, that's an unsettling and really easily abusable position from his point of view. Yeah, and I mean, there were lots of other easily abused things about my healthcare condition. Like, you know, there's a cue grifter named Neon Revolt, and I guess he somehow got these photos of me in a bar with Jim Watkins and other associates, but they're not in the picture. And, you know, you can cut this if you want, but on that night, I was not really in control of what was happening.

They put me in a wheelchair that I can't even push because it was, first of all, too big for me. Second of all, I don't have the strength to really push a wheelchair anyway. I have to use an electric one. And the place that they brought me to had so many, like, bumps in the road. Now, maybe a 20-year-old would enjoy going to a bar, you know, for a few hours, but they kept me there for like five, six hours, and took lots of photos that I might have preferred not be taken. And, you know, you can cut this, of course,

but there was even a part of that, which, you know, Neon Revolt basically published, you know, without my side, that I could not even go to the bathroom because they wouldn't take me. Like, it quickly became distressing. Yeah, and that's just so people have some context. The QAnon movement moved, Colt, whatever you want to call it, moved to 8chan. Sorry, I'm really doing it out of order.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, this all happens in like 2017. QAnon moves to 8chan and is hosted there. And you were, you know, not running the site at that point, but since in more recent months, since you've become one of the major stumbling blocks to 8chan getting back online, QAnon people, including this guy, Neon Revolt, have targeted you very heavily. Yeah, it's essentially doing. It's the same thing as when there's a case

where like a prominent person sexually assaults a young woman and there's a picture of her like laughing next to him at like a bar or something that will wind up getting plastered. Like, look, that she's smiling. Yeah, that's exactly what they're doing. You know, they're saying, oh, he's smiling, but they're not thinking that obviously I was basically being taken captive by three very drunk men. And if I upset them, who knows what they might do to me?

So if they ask me to smile for a picture, I'll smile. You know what I mean? But that shouldn't be seen as like evidence of happiness or evidence of wanting to be there. Obviously, you know, these days, due to how that experience kind of scarred me, I don't go anywhere without like an electric chair and a phone with the same that, you know, like I've taken precautions just due to how difficult that was, you know, I don't go anywhere here without like somebody who is on my payroll who can like be my advocate, basically.

Now, Frederick, this is maybe in the history of the show the worst time to do an ad pivot that there's ever been, but it's that time. I'm so sorry. Yes. That's no problem at all. No problem. No problem. And I'm sorry if I brought up stuff that's like, you know, not.

I'm grateful to you for sharing like this is important context to the kind of guy he is. Right. That's what this is supposed to be about. Yeah. Is the kind of guy he is. Yeah. But you know what's not important context. These ads.

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How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus? It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. All right, we're back. Now, Frederick, we jumped ahead a little bit. I want to go back to 2016. Now, that's the year that the Splinter News article we've quoted from a few times with

Jim was published. That's the first article that interviews him that I found. And the reason this article was written was because 2016 was kind of the height of what I would call eight chance success at culture jamming. The community there first exploded as a result of Gamergate. And as I talked about a little bit earlier, the movement with Gamergate kind of metastasized into big chunks of the online alt-right. And in the 2016 election, they graduated from like focusing their activism on a pretty niche

area of interest gaming to trying to impact the broader American political and cultural scene. And by this point, especially on eight chance, especially eight chance poll board, there was a very distinct like heavy Nazi influence. So it wasn't Gamergate, there was some very far right and uncomfortable and even some like kind of Nazi-ish anti-Semitic stuff that you would see run in there. But 2016, eight chance poll board is like a fully Nazi gathering place online. And they start trying to meme Donald Trump into office, but also more to the point trying

to meme, trying to push some of their fringe beliefs kind of closer to the American mainstream by creating memes and then seeding them into the rest of the internet to try to make them go viral. And their great success during this period, their biggest success, was getting candidate Donald Trump to retweet an image mac or they made of Hillary Clinton with a star of David next to her head that includes the words, most corrupt candidate ever. That's like the probably the biggest hit that they had during that year. But there were a lot of other memes that they succeeded in like getting other prominent

political and cultural figures to retweet. And this, you know, drew attention down on eight chance and a number of journalists, including myself, wrote their first articles about the site in that period of time. And we all got harassed for doing it. I think the board's most responsible were Poll and Baphomet, which was a board kind of dedicated directly to like doxing people. So this is what sort of first draws mainstream ish media attention. You know, it's not the Washington Post yet, but Splinter is covering it and stuff.

And they talked to John Watkins, Jim Watkins, Jesus. Now, all this drew a lot of press attention, as I said, and the author of that Splinter article, Ethan Chiel, had was pretty heavily harassed when he first started writing about the site. So when he talked to Jim Watkins, and this is the, again, the earliest interview with Jim, he asked Jim about all the death threats and whatnot that originated on 8chan. And Watkins responded, as long as they're not making imminent threats of harm against someone, their speech is protected political speech, no different than Trump or Clinton

or Mr. Smith or anyone else. Now, Jim also addressed allegations that because of the racism on his site, he might be racist now. He said, I obviously am not a white supremacist. I go for days without seeing another white face. I put up with racial problems similar to that of colored people in the 1960s, the black people of the 1970s, the African Americans of the 1980s, the people of color of the 1990s. I am not sure what the politically correct term in the 21st century is.

I have lived here in the same place longer than anywhere else in my adult life. I love my home. He always used to talk like this. Yeah, he compares himself to the civil rights movement. Yes. He would talk like this also in private. He would tell me that white people in the Philippines have no rights, and it's worse to be a white person in the Philippines than to be black in the US.

He would say that constantly. The fact that he said this to the press is just, I guess he just has no filter. That's why he doesn't like to talk to the press anymore. It's astonishing. It's really astonishing. This won't be the last time he does something like this, but it's quite a take. Now, Watkins describes himself as, overall, a very boring person. He claimed that he had bought 8chan because he wanted to protect it.

He said he'd seen all these other sites that have big potential and then they go away. Now, when Ethan from Splinter asked him about the issues he'd had since buying the website in 2014, like what his biggest issue was, his answer was very clear. Social justice warriors. Quote, they call them SJWs. They troll me by email. They try to embarrass you into turning off the channel. It's like, oh, there's a horrible post here.

Well, great, report the post and we'll delete it. Then they send it to ICANN and the FBI and all these people, and it's like, come on. So, Jim Watkins, 2016. Yeah. Now, he claimed that people complaining about death threats and violent racism on 8chan were creating those posts themselves on the forum. Yep, people like Ron always say that. It's always about them.

It's always a conspiracy theory. When I got my death threats that were posted on 8chan after my second article on them. Well, no, I was after my first article, but after it was in a documentary on them. When I got those death threats, everyone on 8chan, when they saw me commenting on them, commented that I must have created the death threats and posted them on there. It's a convenient thing to do. They especially always say that about women. Oh, yeah.

Oh, she just is looking for attention. It's a common line that they take and the fact that Jim Watkins, the admin is taking it, you know, doesn't surprise me. Yeah, it might help set the tone a little bit though. Although, you know, it's hard to say who's learning from who there. They're learning from each other. Yeah, that's probably self-reinforcing cycle. Yeah.

Now, when that article was published, you and Jim were still working together. And in fact, up until that point, when people had questions about 8chan, you generally been like the media point man to answering that. And I'm kind of curious as to when sort of those defenses, you started to believe in them less, if that makes sense as a question. Sure. So, you're right. You're absolutely right.

After 2016, I was still in Jim's company. I was working at 2chanel, which is how I know now what an important part of it, it is for his business money-wise. Like, it's where all his money comes from, even today. So, that's kind of how I know that because he put me, basically when I wanted to quit from it, Jen, he put me on 2chanel. But, yes, I was still one of the only ones that would talk to media because I just felt like I didn't have anything really to hide at the time.

I would usually ask them while I was still at the company, like, should I answer this request? What should I say? And they would kind of help, like, sculpt my answers. But I did really start to believe a lot of the, I guess you can say, rationalizations less. You know, one of the rationalizations I had was that it's all just the American Constitution. And the founding fathers knew that we all have to discuss things, and the best ideas will fall out.

And the answer to wrong speech is more speech. And, you know, that kind of rationalization view of looking at the world. Well, it became hard for me to say that to reporters because I knew as 8chan's admin that I had never seen a single good idea fall out of 8chan's discourse. Like, that just doesn't happen. Everybody's talking. Everybody's making their own, you know, political statement. But there's no resolution.

Nobody's ever, you know, the Nazis never said, oh, you know what? We're convinced. Socialism is the answer. We're closing our board. That doesn't happen, you know, because... Yeah. So, that was the first time I really started to doubt.

But, you know, as long as nobody was really getting hurt, you know, it was kind of hard for me to just go back on everything I'd ever said, right? But, of course, after I saw how little they did after Christchurch and then after Poe, you know, it just started to build on me that I had to say something as somebody who is basically an authority on 8chan. And, you know, yeah, I just couldn't allow Jim Watkins to get away with it. Like, to get away with doing nothing while terrorists use his website. So, especially, you know, after he did nothing, after the first two attacks, you know.

So, yeah. Yeah. Now, the years from about 2016 to 2019 is kind of when 8chan really reached a significant size around 1.7 million visitors a month. I'm guessing that would be its height, but you would know better than I would. Right. That would certainly be its height. Yeah.

And the site was hard to monetize. Jim tried a number of tactics. He had a Suncraft or Cryptocurrency, which users could buy and then pay to elevate their threads on the site. In traditionally vaguely anti-Semitic fashion, he called it the King of the Shekel program, which, if you don't know why using the word Shekel is vaguely anti-Semitic, hang out with some Nazis on the Internet for a day. You'll hear the word a thousand times.

Hmm. Along with convection. Yeah. Oh, boy. Yeah. So Jim also launched Books.Audio, a book narration company that used Jim and a number of his friends and family members as narrators. In 2017, he launched the Gold...

He tried to get me to narrate. I haven't had the heart to listen to any of the books he narrates because he does a number of them. I can't imagine he's good at it, just listening to his voice. He is not. Yeah. It seems like an odd business for him to be in. In 2017, he launched The Goldwater, a bad news website with a slogan, banned, biased,

and honest. Jim Watkin showed up in some of the videos under the pseudonym Jim Cherney, and here's the welcome message he posted when he launched the site. Welcome to The Goldwater, where we provide an informative view on today's alternative news headlines. If you like a video, share it with your friends. Stay up to date by subscribing to our channel and visit TheGoldwater.com for in-depth articles. Yeah, and that's mentioned.

The Goldwater was full of fake news, including an article that said the planet Nibiru would destroy the Earth in 2017. No, did it not? No, as far as I know, I'm still on the planet Earth, and I didn't hear about the planet Nibiru destroying it two years ago. We're going to have our fact checkers look into that before we go to press. Please get the New York Times fact check on this. I really need.

Yeah, so Jim wanted it to be like the news gathering place for 8chan users, which is part of why I think his presentation is so odd. Now, the website's chief journalistic coup was getting two of its reporters' press credentials for the 2018 Singapore Summit between President Trump and Kim Jong-un, which is evidence of how easy it is to get press credentials sometimes. They spent most of the trip failing to get their camera to function properly, because they're not good at it. Yes, and they also wasted a lot of money doing a bungee jump. I don't know if you saw that. Oh my God, what?

Yes, one of the main things they did on. Yeah, you can see Tom Raidell doing a bungee jump. I don't know if he deleted it, but they do a bungee jump off a building in the city. Just as part of their coverage or just for shits? They posted it right around that time, and it was on the trip, but that was the only really actually cool thing that came out of it. Throughout this period 2017 and 2018, Jim posted regular videos on his 8chan blog where he would do yoga. He's way into yoga, read selections from books, and brag about his collection of expensive pens.

He also really likes expensive pens. Now, for the next couple of years, 8chan continued to radicalize itself, and Paul went from mostly ironic Nazi posting and far-right shitposting to unironic neo-Nazi exterminationist rhetoric. I can't pick a point for you when that hit critical mass, but we all know what happened in March 2019, the Christchurch Massacre. Now, by this point, you'd been away from 8chan for a couple of years, and you'd been out of NT technology for what, a year or so? A few months.

Okay, a few months. You'd recently quit. Yes, the Christchurch shooting happened in March 2019, and I had only totally disassociated. And I think November 2018. Okay. So, yeah, you've been out for three or four months, and the Christchurch shooting happens. Do you remember when you heard about it for the first time? Huh. I'm pretty sure that...

Yeah, I don't really remember. I kind of remember, like, I read something about it on my phone, and then my wife told me that on Messenger, somebody had sent her the video. It was really going around. But the 8chan connection didn't really become clear to me until I started reading, like, more articles about it. Okay. I wound up kind of getting onto... I mean, obviously, I wrote an article about it a couple of hours after it happened,

so I was pretty aware of that kind of right away. And it was one of those things, watching the rest of the world react to it. There were a number of reactions. I'm glad that I think most of the media, I think hopefully in part due to the article, I wrote, avoided kind of falling into some of the traps that the guy had put in his manifesto and avoided some of the more kind of sensational shit that might have otherwise surrounded it. There were some bad reactions, obviously, like the Daily Mail posted the entire unedited manifesto on their website.

That was a poor choice. But in terms of tone deaf responses to a massacre, I think the video Jim Watkins published three days after the shooting has to take the cake. Have you seen this, Frederick? I have, yes. I actually recently republished it. He deleted it, didn't he? Yeah, it's on YouTube still, so we've both seen this, Frederick. I'm going to play the first minute of it for our listeners

so they can get an idea of the kind of tactics Jim Watkins is taking. Condolences to the victims of the New Zealand shootings. So many pious folks lost because of psychotic rage. It is a sad thing that the mentally infirm can have access to guns. It is just impossible to tell who will snap until they do. Going postal is such a sad thing. In America, back in 1993, Mark Richard Hilburn went postal. This otherwise normal man became so angry that he shot two of his fellow post office employees,

his mother, and even his dog. After that, the post office took action and put environmental analysts on the scene to help make the workplace a better place so that folks would not become so frustrated with rage that they would commit acts of mayhem and murder. At no time after this terrible tragedy did the United States Postal Service consider censoring the mail in order to stop announcements of terrorist or violent threats.

People have been free to say such things always. However, threats of imminent violence are not protected speech. They are criminal in nature. There is a certain dualism to this, whereas you're free to utter reprehensible and violent speech. Yet you are responsible for the consequences of what you say. And now we're back. So yeah, it's pretty remarkable.

The gall of blaming illegal aliens for the Christchurch shooting because of a legally immigrated Australian in New Zealand is pretty fucking remarkable. Absolutely. It's ridiculous. There is no way to be more pro-Trump than that statement. It's so pro-Trump that maybe even Donald Trump would be afraid to say it. Even his response to the shooting was better than Jim's. Yes.

Watkins was pretty consistent with most of his press responses in the wake of the massacre. He talked about how he deployed violence. He insisted 8chan removed all illegal content and he made commitments, vague commitments, about getting better at policing the site for literal crimes. But while he said all this, he also adopted the slogan embrace infamy

and emblazoned it on the landing page of 8chan. So it's clear there seems to be an aspect of this that he might have enjoyed. He certainly did. I just knowing him and knowing that one of the main reasons he continued to operate 8chan is attention. Because as we've discussed, there's no money reason. It doesn't make any significant money.

The only other reason would be that I guess QAnon is really true and there really is a military operative posting on 8chan. So that's why Jim's doing it. He's a patriot. But in all seriousness, there's no reason to run 8chan. Like monetary, patriotic, whatever. It's just a drain on everyone who has ever come into contact with it. Even its users, it's a drain on them.

Certainly it's a drain on me. It's definitely drained Jim's resources, but he seems to like the attention he gets from it more than like... He's paying for it. More than should be expected. Yeah, he's paying for the attention basically. Exactly, exactly. It is costing him money to operate this site.

Right, because if you think about it, it costed 100,000 pesos, which is like two grand, three grand, to publish that naturalization petition. And that's all out the window now. It's like... And that's not the only way that money has been wasted. Think of all the... He claimed on the Goldwater that he spent $56,000

from the time of the shooting to the time of... to September 2019, just trying to get 8chan back online. Geez. Yeah, so this is... He's clearly getting something out of it that's worth at least $56,000 to him. Yeah.

Yeah, there's a quote he gave about that. The Washington Post, when they got to interview him, asked him about embrace infamy, putting that on 8chan. And this is what he said in response. The newspapers say we're infamous, so we have embraced infamy. It's cute and it's appropriate. Weird to talk about your site. Yes, definitely.

Weird to talk about your site being cute. When people are asking you about all the massacres. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Like, is it really cute for the victims of the shootings to see that Jim is embracing the infamy, that the deaths of their loved ones brought him? I don't think that's cute. I think, I assume, you know, I'm not an old man yet,

but I am starting to experience what it's like when you watch popular culture and stuff pass you by and you don't understand things anymore and you feel less relevant. And I'm sure that's even more of an issue when you're 50, 60 years old. I think most people combat that in healthier ways than paying to operate 8chan.

Yeah, that might be a bad late life crisis there. Certainly, and it's definitely not cute at all. No, no, I wouldn't say so. So, unfortunately for a whole lot of people, the massacres continued. The Poway synagogue shooting happened two months after Christchurch. The El Paso shooting occurred shortly after that. And by the late summer 2019, more than 70 people were dead

as a result of shootings that started out as 8chan posts. The site was finally dropped by most of its supporting companies like Cloudflare, who provided DDoS protection in the wake of the El Paso shooting. And Jim was called before Congress to speak about his wayward, I don't know, stepson. He did, more or less, he did most of his interviews with mainstream news sources

during this period. And he tried to toe the line that he was just standing up for free speech and that allowing hate speech was part of that. But as the post reported, 8chan did a lot more than just passively allow hate speech. Quote, while Watkins has contended there was little he could do to rein in the anonymous user base, 8chan often has appeared to encourage this hateful chatter

on its site. Its official rules, for instance, included special formatting codes. Three parentheses were used in anti-Semitic messages to point to someone's presumed Jewish background, to call them, in parentheses, out, as the rule stated. While a single less than symbol was used to turn text pink, highlighting what the message board called, faggot posting. And on a related note, here's something Jim said

in his prepared statement to Congress. By the way, his son Ronald added both of those. Those were not part of 8chan originally. Yeah, just to be clear. Those were Ronald's additions. And keeping the existence of faggot posting in mind, I want to read something Jim said in his prepared statement to Congress.

Our company has built and maintained a digital form that is the place where opposing viewpoints and those of minorities, such as the LGBTQ, may express themselves free from the fear of their life. Oh, man. He really knows how to lay it on thick, doesn't he? He sure does. He sure does.

Now, his interview with the post came after his four-hour testimony in front of Congress. He told them that the ultimate fate of 8chan was the biggest test for freedom of speech since maybe 1969. And I'd really recommend reading that post interview in full if you're interested in this, because it's got a lot of great moments, particularly this paragraph.

He appeared to grow upset minutes into the call, responding to one question by saying, fuck off, which he later claimed he had intended for his Uber driver. After being asked whether an 8chan advertising program this year called King of the Shekel was anti-Semitic, Watkins hung up. Through his longtime business partner, Tom Raidell,

Watkins declined to answer later calls. So that's how the interview ended. He then mailed a postcard to Drew Harwell, who wrote the article. That said, fuck off on it. That is such a boomer, like shitpost, a fucking postcard. Yes, on a literal postcard.

Okay, Jim. Now, in the immediate wake of 8chan's deplatforming, which happened after the El Paso shooting, he posted a video wherein he promised, sorry for the inconvenience, common sense will prevail. Jim started to make bold and bizarre claims next, like that his son, Ron Watkins,

was building a protective network to defend 8chan from cyber attacks and replace Cloudflare. This network, he said, would be composed of vigilante hackers. As a press time, it does not seem to exist. That is his weirdest grift that he's doing right now, is trying to convince them that he's somehow building a Cloudflare

on a shoestring budget. Cloudflare's network has worked like millions of dollars, literally. The infrastructure that is Cloudflare is millions and millions of dollars. You cannot just replace that with vigilante hackers and some smart software. Yes, some kids' laptops.

There's a reason Cloudflare is basically irreplaceable for 8chan, and it's because it costs millions of dollars to build something that can protect websites, that effectively. It takes more equipment than a bunch of dudes' laptops. Exactly. Watkins hired Benjamin Barr to prepare him for his talk to Congress.

Barr was formerly the lead architect of undercover operations at Project Veritas, James O'Keeffe's operation. I just always like it when different subjects of different episodes of Behind the Bastards intermingle. It's always exciting. Yeah. He didn't know that.

You're teaching me something. He just keeps getting more and more gross. Now, Jim's most ambitious plan in the wake of 8chan's deplatforming was to launch a communication satellite into space, which he believed would be able to beam 8chan around the planet. Now, this seems to have been Ron Watkins' son's idea, and Ron said, quote,

not an expert on space law, but seems like such a setup would have absolutely no jurisdiction and be uncensorable. I remember when that was going around, and I thought he might have even just been saying it to troll the media. Yeah. But his father might have believed it. Yeah, it's kind of impossible to say.

Yeah, because there was a recent livestream where Jim kind of has a little moment where he starts to say, you know, unless Ron's been lying to me. And it seems like he's worried about Ron lying to him like quite a lot. So I'm sure this space plan was part of that. Now, as of right now, 8chan is offline. Earlier this year, really just like a couple of weeks ago,

they started trying to rebrand as 8kun and relaunch, and they really get up for a hot minute, like a day or so spread out between a couple of days of going back up and down. It's currently unavailable, and it's at this point still deplatformed. No way to know if that's going to continue to be the case, but right now it's...

I hope it is. Yeah, I hope it is too. I'm sure Jim will try if he can afford to and find a way to bring it back up. But the latest news that just came out a day or two before this episode was recorded is that you and Jim are going to have you a little bit of a legal throwdown.

Yes, it does seem like it. Yeah, so he's not suing you. What is the... Because it's happening in the Philippines, and it's this... Right. So the legal system here is different than in the United States, obviously.

So I was actually confused when I got the subpoena also, because usually in the United States you don't get served unless you're sued, you know what I mean? And it was marked as subpoena. So I wasn't even sure what I was looking at. A lot of the Q-Grifters were like, oh, this is so great.

He's getting sued criminally. Even Ron Watkins posted, retweeted a few guys that were talking about how I was... that were basically tweeting about how, like, the state had convicted me in the Philippines or had indicted me. Well, it turns out that all that happened

was that Jim Watkins wrote a letter to the... basically he wrote a complaint to the city prosecutor, and it's just a request from the city prosecutor to prosecute me. It's something anyone can do, basically. Like, I could write a letter requesting the prosecutor

indict Jim on a crime. So obviously I'm taking it seriously, but it's not as if the Filipino authorities have decided to, like, throw me in prison. That's not what happened here. Jim Watkins wrote... and the crazy thing about this is, it is a liable allegation.

Like, the king of anonymous libel is threatening me with a libel lawsuit. And not only that, he's using a criminal libel statute to try to intimidate me, basically. And he's threatening me with 12 years in jail, as is his son, you know, for cyber crime criminal libel.

That's what is in the complaint. Obviously, I've lawyer it up. We are going to write, you know, a response to the prosecutor. Hopefully it won't even get passed, you know. Like, hopefully the prosecutor will just look at our response, look at Jim's, like, very feeble complaint.

Like, half of the complaint is just, Jim is upset that I said he might be going senile. And he disputes that he's going senile. So, uh, yeah. But because it's, like, not even a criminal case yet, I can't depose anyone. You know, like, if it would be an actual case. All it is, is the city prosecutor is going to decide

whether or not to indict me. And, you know, my attorney says we have a very good chance of it not getting that far. Like, the city prosecutor most likely will throw it out. Well, and that's where we are right now. And that's all I know about Jim Watkins. Um, now, Frederick, is there anything else you want to, you want to say about the man or talk about him?

Any other particular anecdotes you think are useful for people understanding the guy? I know, obviously, you knew him for years, so. Yeah, yeah. What I would say about, what I would say to that in terms of just particular anecdotes is Jim, if he's claiming he's not a racist, I would very much wonder about that.

Because I have two anecdotes, but I'll just give you one. One time here in the Philippines, Jim Watkins had opened up a new business and opened up a new office for it. And he was planning on transferring most of his local software developers. He has a little team of Filipino developers to that office. So he was building up this office.

He installed, like, four air conditioners. And he was just in the office seeing how the work was going. You know, it was freshly painted. The chandeliers were installed. Yes, he did install chandeliers. And he noticed that he only had three air conditioner remotes, but he was expecting four. So he went around the room

and he's getting himself more and more agitated. Where's the air con remote? Yeah, I find it. And he's like, you know, opening every drawer and like that. And then when he, you know, can't find it, he addresses the room and there's a bunch of local Filipinos there. I'm there. Tom Raidella is there.

There's a bunch of witnesses to this. And he in this speech he gives says, I understand why the Spanish used to cut off the arms of Filipinos. I wouldn't do it myself, but I understand it because you guys just don't follow directions. And I understand why the Spanish used to cut off your arms to teach you a lesson. And he just went on and on and he's ranting and raving about how he is basically wants to be a conquistador.

You know, I don't know how any other way to put it. Wow. Yeah, I mean, my wife was a witness to that. And after that event, many people asked me why he stays here if he hates the Philippines so much. I had to answer that question from a lot of his employees because it was so confusing and it hurt morale in the office a lot because people started to think, do I think that way?

You know what I mean? Yeah. Definitely, it's no way to have a good morale among office workers if everybody is wondering whether or not the boss thinks that they're racially inferior. I mean, what else am I supposed to say? Another thing I would say is if you're just giving me time to say whatever. Right now, in terms of the deep platforming battle that I've been working on for months now,

you know, trying to keep 8chan offline, because I believe that Jim Watkins is an especially bad image board admin. I believe that Hiroyuki at 4chan does a much better job with a much better community and that it's possible to have a site like 4chan or like 8chan that doesn't inspire the violence that 8chan has that Jim failed in his duty after Christchurch to change things to stop further violence. That's basically my argument. You know, go ahead.

What do you think could have been changed about 8chan? Like, do you think once the Christchurch massacre happened there was anything that could have been changed like that would have actually made 8chan itself less toxic or was it kind of passed a point of no return at that state? Well, definitely the toxicity level would be something that I don't necessarily know if it could have been changed. And I'm not saying that 8chan is a good site or that it should be online, not at all.

But I am saying that there are things that Jim could have done to make it so that terrorists would not want to use his website and he didn't do any of those things after Christchurch. For example, he could have closed the pool board momentarily. 4chan has a history of closing boards that bring big problems to the site and that threaten its long-term, you know, existence. So he could have closed the pool board for even a week just as like a form of mass punishment, you know, against the community

for inspiring that kind of attack. He could have made it clear that incitements to violence are not allowed. He could have told his, because he had Filipino employees that were moderating 8chan. He could have told them that they need to start deleting anybody that says they want to kill or shoot or go on a spree or that they think that one should happen, you know, anything that's overtly violent.

I don't know that 8chan ever could have been like a healthy site where normal people go to express their, you know, feelings. I don't know that that's possible. But he certainly 4chan shows that you can have a community that's very far right without terrorist attacks happening constantly. There's a lot of unhealthiness in various parts of 4chan, but there's a reason it didn't spawn what we're dealing with right now. Because the 4chan administrators and moderators take a very hard line on this.

And the few attacks that have happened on 4chan, you know, there has either been mass punishment, or they've done a very good job at scrubbing the manifesto or anything like that. You know, mostly what happens on 4chan is just like a boyfriend will kill his, you know, girlfriend and post a picture of the body. That's disgusting, but it's not, you know, 70 people dead. And, you know, it's also the kind of thing when it's a community of literally millions of people, some of them will be murderers.

It's like that happens on Reddit too. And it's like, yeah, there's tens of million people. 4chan is 10 times the size of 8chan, even at 8chan's peak. So that means there is 10 times the crazies, and yet they kept them under control. Yeah, it's very clear that it doesn't really take a lot to stop things. Like obviously, it takes a lot to stop a community from being toxic, but there's a line between toxic and it creates an international terrorist movement. And it doesn't take that much work to stop the international terrorist movement.

Right. And just as an image board admin for years, I know that there were many things they could have done that they didn't do, and they admit as much in their congressional testimony. Yeah, they do. They talk about how they're taking more steps and stuff, which is like after the third shooting, maybe there's no more steps to take, guy. Yeah. And did you hear that before 8chan went down or 8kun the final time, it was being hosted by a Russian criminal?

Yeah, a Russian criminal two hours north of North Korea. Yes. Maybe they'll make it to North Korea next time. Maybe, yeah. Yeah, it's pretty wild. I wonder kind of closing this out, Frederick. Do you think you'd ever create another online community? Would you ever want to deal with that again?

You know, I don't think so. I recognize from my experience with 8chan that it's tough to run an online community. It's a lot harder than anyone would think. There are so many crazies out there that can turn things bad, and I just don't really have an interest in doing that anymore. I would like as much as possible to live a quiet life without 8chan. You know, I don't understand why Jim is still trying to put 8chan back online, and I'm going to keep pressuring, you know, whoever he works with

just by telling them the truth about him and his company and what happened on 8chan and why you shouldn't allow it to come back. One of the things that I think is interesting, and we don't have to include this, Frederick, if it's a little bit too personal, but you found religion, and it seems like more than, I don't know, at least based on the other interviews I've read, the thing about your faith that was really kind of transformative to your life

was less the anything written in the book and more the community of human beings that you found and interact with on a daily basis now. Would that be accurate? Sure. Yeah, I mean, obviously the things in the book are very valuable, but having a community is as valuable. Sure. Was there a time in your life before this where you had a community of people

in real life that you were spending time around like you are now? Unfortunately, no, only my co-workers, you know, Jim, Tom, people like that, and obviously they are not a good influence on anyone. Yeah, I think that's, as someone who spent a lot of time growing up on internet communities as well, I see value in them. I'm not going to say like there's nothing good about online communities. Wonderful things have been spawned by online communities. Sure, no doubt.

But I do think there's no, I think when I look at the people who fell too far down the rabbit hole and wound up in very dark places, I do think how would it have been different if they had found a group of people in real life who weren't toxic and were supportive that they could, like, I think that would, I think that pulls almost anybody out of that kind of spiral. I really do. Yeah. Yeah.

Do you mind before we close if I just say how people can help with our deplatforming efforts? Absolutely, yeah, yeah, yeah, let's close on that. Okay, good. So, right now, Two Cows is the main one that I'm trying to deal with. They put Aikun.net into client hold. Basically it means that they're not allowing the DNS to resolve, but they haven't released a statement as to why, and NT Technology is still a reseller of Two Cows, as far as I know.

So, I would really like a statement from Two Cows, just why? Why did they decide to do this? And I hope it's for the right reasons. And I hope that they will also not allow NT Technology to be a Two Cows reseller. That they will, because basically NT Technology broke their agreement, because they blocked 8ch.net, Jim moved 8ch.net over to Robmonster's Epic, and then they registered Aikun.net on Two Cows again, via their NT Technology reseller account.

So, that should be a no-go. And I would just encourage people to tell Two Cows that we are all very curious why they put it in client hold, and we would like a statement just that. Basically, they should, number one, not give the domain to Jim Watkins. They should not give him the domain so that he can keep running, or at least trying to run, his 8chan replacement. 8chan is not what the world needs right now. It spawned multiple terrorist attacks as this episode, and we talked about.

So, yeah. Basically, I would encourage people to email Two Cows, and just tell them, you know, don't give Jim back his 8ch.net domain, and don't let him be an NT Technology reseller. Why do you want to work with these people? And, you know, if you want to look up Two Cows, you can find obviously their website if you just Google their name, but you can also find them on Twitter at at2cows. I'm sure if you have feelings to share with them,

I think that would be helpful. And, of course, my Twitter, I'm always keeping track of the latest developments. Who's hosting 8chan? Yeah. So, that's at hw underscore b-e-a-t underscore t-h-a-t. H-w beat that. And I am on Twitter at iRightOK. You can find this website, or the website for this podcast at behindthebastards.com.

You can find us on Twitter and Instagram at atbastardspod. And you can buy shirts if you're naked and need to be covered very quickly at T-public behind the bastards. Frederick, anything else before we roll out into the sunset? No, thank you very much for having me on. Thanks for being on, man. Alphabet Boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations. In the first season, we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests.

It involves a cigar-smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse look like a lot of guns. But are federal agents catching bad guys or creating them? He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price?

Two death sentences in a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast.