Reply All - #166 Country of Liars

Episode Date: September 18, 2020

Who is Q-Anon? PJ tells the surprising origin story of the Q scam, and the man who now seems to be in control of it. Dale Beran (@DaleBeran) and Mike Rothschild (@rothschildmd) Apply to the Reply All internship here Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

From Gimmett, this is Rapai-L. I'm PJ Vote. Two weeks ago, I talked to a man named Frederick Brennan for the first time. Hello? Hey, how's it going? Yeah, it's going okay. Sorry, we had a little trouble connecting this morning. That's okay. Are you, you're in Los Angeles? Yeah, it's still morning, technically, for another half hour.

It takes about three seconds of small talk with Frederick to understand his point of view, which is that the world is a shitty place, and the consolation you get is just being relentless. I'm relentlessly candid about that. Where in L.A. are you? Van Nuys. I've never, I've been to L.A. a bit, but I've never been to Van Nuys. Is it nice? No, it's the shitty area.

That's why I've never been there. Why? How come you're there? I'm poor. Okay, anyway. Nice to meet you. I really didn't know what to expect from Frederick, because he's known for having done two really extreme, but opposite things. He started the image word eight-chan,

notorious Internet suspect. defended it for years, but then very publicly repudiated it. Like, he actually fought to get it taken off the internet. What do you do with that, though? Like, how do you, like, this was this thing that you spent a ton of time working on that you built. How do you look back at that now? Oh, I was just wrong, you know.

And obviously, I think that those of us who are kind of at the beginning of internet history, I guess we can call it, are going to. to make a lot of mistakes, and obviously unbridled free speech does not work. It does not make a positive community in any sense of the word. Frederick left Aitchan when he was 22. But the reason he's talking about it now, four years later, is that he believes he's uncovered a secret, the identity of QAnon, Aitchan's most infamous account. QAnon, obviously, is the internet troll who pretends to be a highly placed government leaker,

whose posts have sparked a massive, paranoid, occasionally violent movement. If A-chan is the biggest mistake Frederick's ever made, QAnon is like that mistake's malevolent, idiot, child, and he wants Q stopped. Frederick is saying that as the creator of A-chan, the person who originally wrote the code for the site, he can see all sorts of clues pointing him to the identity of QAnon. Frederick's story is a journey through multiple circles of Internet hell.

These are places I usually try to avoid. I think most people do. But listening to Frederick, I realized that the problem with doing that, it means that the people who run those hells remain much less accountable than they would otherwise. So today, that's where we're going. Frederick's story starts in 2013. At the time, nobody in the world had heard of age hand. Frederick was just a very broke young man living alone with a disability.

My name is Frederick Brennan. I'm 19 years old. I am a computer programmer, and I live. live in Brooklyn, New York. This is from a 2014 documentary. I have osteogenesis imperfecta, which is a bone condition. It's commonly known as brittle bone disease. Frederick says by this point he's already broken his bones 120 times.

He sits in his wheelchair. He looks very small, a lot younger than his age. Spend a lot of time, you know, doing somewhat dangerous things. Like cooking is not really safe for me because, you know, a pan of boiling water is about as big as I am. So I have to be really careful when I'm cooking. I've got to fill it on myself. Frederick did not like this documentary.

He felt like the producers were just trying to gawk at how difficult his daily life was, how he had to use a special tool to press the elevator buttons, how he struggled to open the front door of the building. The only reason he'd agreed to do it was because he says that they'd promised to mention his new image board. I tried to get them to include it in their piece and they didn't. Oh, I was so pissed when they didn't. Because they promised that they would and when they didn't, it didn't even get one second. I was really mad.

But were you just participating in that documentary to promote A Chance? Yes, correct. Yes, that's why I guess. Back then, Frederick's whole goal in life was to make the best, most popular image board that had ever existed. After all, he'd spent half his life in these places. I talked to journalist Dale Baran. He's known Frederick for years. He was one of the first in-cells.

He was deep into the insult community. Oh, I didn't know that. He ran an in-cell board. And the philosophy there is that we're doomed to be on Fort Chan and Hitchin forever. that we're, this is our like, we're born this way and we're never going to escape. That's the philosophy. He, like, found every available hell on the internet. Yeah, I mean, that's the hell of fortune, where you're kind of doomed.

It's called the black pill, the nihilist pill, where you say, you know, I'm not even a conservative. I'm not even a fascist. I'm just a nihilist. Frederick was very angry about the circumstances of his life. He was angry that his mom, who had the same condition he did, had chosen to have him in the first place. He was angry that his parents had split up and he'd been left in a foster care system. Ford Chan was the place where he'd found people as angry as he was, but now he wanted A. Chan, his website, to surpass it.

In 2014, he gets his chance. Ford Chan decides they've had enough at Gamergate, they shut down their board. And the Gamergate audience travels to Chans, looking for someone willing to set up a new board for them. Most everybody turns them down, except Frederick. Overnight, A.C. goes for maybe 100 posts a day to over 10,000 an hour. Traffic is surging so much so that Frederick actually can't afford to pay for the bandwidth.

And he announces, unless someone can step into help, his board's going to go down. It would have been over. Like, I could not get a loan. Are you joking? They don't give loans to people in wheelchairs. So who would you even give a loan to A-chan anyway? But then, he gets this message that'll change his life, almost entirely for the worse. It's from a man named Ron Watkins.

An 8-chan user based in the Philippines. He tells Frederick that he and his father, they can help. His father owned 2-channel. This is the original Chan, Japan's biggest image board, a website Frederick had always looked up to. That was the reason I had so much stress in him, because I knew that's basically a very powerful brand in this space of anonymous communities.

And I figured, well, if he's running 2-channel, certainly he can handle this site. What Frederick did not know at the time was that the creator of Two-Channel was claiming online in Japanese, a language Frederick had not yet speak, that this man, Jim Watkins, had actually stolen Two-Channel from him. Jim and Ron Watkins did not agree to be interviewed for this story, so you won't be hearing from them. But Jim Watkins has disputed the characterization that he stole Two-Channel. Of all the mistakes that Frederick had made, besides maybe starting A-chan, trusting this father-son duo, Jim and Ron Watkins,

this is the one that plagues him. Frederick agrees to Jim Watkins' offer. Jim will host and eventually own A. Chan. Frederick will run the site as his employee. In the years to come, Watkins' A.C.N. It will morph into essentially a compound for the paranoid political cult of its most famous poster, QAnon. But back in 2016, all Frederick knew was that these two seemed like its saviors.

Plus, they told him one additional thing. It actually helped clinch the deal. They'd seen that documentary about him. And he said, We live in the Philippines. Nursing care is really cheap here. You know, medical care in general is really cheap here. They offered to hire a nurse, hire this,

because they know that they can pay somebody $100, $200 a month to stay with me all the time. You know what I mean? So they knew that physical access to somebody like me was control. I serve a risen savior. He's in the world today. I know that he's. Even in the world of Chanport operators, Jim Watkins is unusual.

He's 56 years old, former helicopter repairman for the U.S. Army who moved to the Philippines in 2001. There, he ran NT Technology, a company which these days he claims hosted websites with photos of Asian women in bikinis, which isn't true. It hosted porn. There are a few profiles of him. They always sort of hit the same wacky beats. the weird videos he posts of himself singing hymns or unboxing expensive fountain pens they usually mention his pig farm

it's kind of frustrating because you start to feel like these eccentricities they're like a smokescreen that stops you from ever actually seeing what his motives are Frederick didn't do much homework on Jim Watkins he checked some stuff on Wikipedia and then he packed two suitcases

and flew to the Philippines to begin his new life do they like pick you up at the airport like when's the first time you actually meet that yes Jim did that too yeah So I flew to Manila via Hong Kong and Jim flew from Manila to Hong Kong to pick me up in Hong Kong and then bring me to Manila. What was he like in person? Yeah, I mean, when I first met him the first time, I was like, wow, this guy is really a stereotypical pornographer guy. Wait, what do you mean?

The first day I met him, he is like waddling up to me, chain smoking this cigarette, hitting on all the flight attendants. In between going like from the airport to our gate, right, we stopped to eat something. And he's hitting on the lady behind the counter. Hey, gorgeous. Hey, beautiful. Most of them are Chinese and don't even know what the hell he's saying. You know, but I mean, it was just creepy. They arrived in Manila and there he meets Jim Watkins's son Ron, the guy who'd originally message him. And the two of them get along way better.

He and Ron, it turns out, have the same excitement and affinity for just nerding out about image boards. What did he actually just look like? Like, what did Ron look like? Yeah, back then, he's very good looking, honestly. He could be a model. His hair was very, you know, well kept. He just looked like the guy who would. be in charge of two-channel, you know.

So he just looked like a handsome tech guy? Yeah. Online there are countless, countless hours of videos of Jim Watkins. But there is very little on his son Ron. You see the same two photographs over and over. Frederick said there was actually an internal rule. He was told that Ron did not ever want to be recorded. And even just talking to him in person, he was cagey.

Like basic facts about his childhood were very hard to come by. So he just wouldn't talk about his youth with you. He wouldn't or he would tell you outrageous lies that just sounded so dumb. Like, he told me after high school he went to become a monk and studied in a monastery. And I never believed that. It would be that story one day. And then it would be a story about being a playboy in China the next. Both of the Watkins came across as very unreliable narrators.

But Frederick was getting what he wanted. Jim Watkins had set him up with an apartment to live in. He had a health aide. He had steady work. And for a couple years, things were good. Here's Dale, the journalist. And he likes his life in the Philippines. He finds a wife there.

He gets a little more religious and goes to church and finds a community. Oh, wow. Yeah. And during this time, he's working over there for Watkins, and he realizes the chans are toxic. So he says, just put me, I'll run two-channel. And I want nothing to do with A-Cham. And he leaves A-Chan to Tehran.

So April 2016, Frederick has quit A-Chan. He doesn't work there. He doesn't post there. But he's still working for the Watkins family. He's in the office with them. He's in the same slack. And he says at the time, he tries to get Jim Watkins to shut the site down. But it doesn't work.

And it's starting to become more clear to him what Jim Watkins actually wants out of A-Chann. It's not money, because this website continues to repulse advertisers. Is A-Channel supposed to be a money-making endeavor? Like, do they care if they run it at a loss? They don't care. What they want? out of A. Chan is power. And they don't care if it runs at a loss as long as they kind of get the same level of power in the West that they've managed in Japan.

That's what they want. In 2016, A. Chan went very hard on MAGA. And when Trump won, Jim Watkins tried to convince people that his site had been a part of it. He told BuzzFeed News, quote, I think the users of 8 Channel helped get Trump elected. You've got a million people a day looking at 8 Channel on a good day. It's huge. After Trump won, Jim Watkins essentially tried to get into the Breitbart business.

He figured that on A-chan, he had this audience of Trump-loving conspiracy theorists. Why not build them their own news site? So he tried. He made this far-right conspiracy news website called the Goldwater. Filled it with stories about stuff like the Clinton body count, Trump's secret war on pedophiles. It's no surprise to find out that FBI agents have discovered evidence of the Clinton Foundation sending wire transfers to organization affiliated to the terror group ISIS. In the site's videos, Jim Watkins has hired local women from the Philippines to read scripts written by freelancers. In others, Jim Watkins has cast himself as the broadcaster.

Good morning. I'm Jim Churney, and this is Hardline. I don't know why he calls himself Jim Churny and these. But he's in front of a bookcase wearing an ill-fitting suit. How about the Clinton Foundation pay for play debacle? The FBI actually deleted that when they gave immunity to the aides of Clinton and agreed to destroy the laptops that the deletion took place on. The Goldwater failed. It turned out the young internet trolls of A-Chin did not want to hear conspiracy theories

from the site's 50-something-year-old owner. Mainly, the Goldwater just became a punchline. But what would happen later would convince Frederick that everybody, including him, had underestimated Jim Watkins and his ambitions. You see his power as almost like a dark, twisted internet version of, like, Rupert Murdoch or, like, succession or something that. Yeah. But he's like a Rupert Murdoch. No one's ever heard of.

And when people write about him, they're just like, oh, he's a weirdo. He's a weird guy. I hate when they do that because it's like they miss the entire story. And it's easy to just focus on the wacky guy running 8chan out of loss. Oh, the wacky business dude, and he looks so silly. He reads hymns and plays with his pens. But, you know, if you really peel back the layers of what this is and where he wants it to go, because in Japan, you know, the far right is ascendant and very powerful there.

And that's what he wants for the U.S. too. Frederick said that in the office, Jim Watkins would plot about this stuff with Ron. I really thought sometimes that they were diluted when they would talk about, like, their kind of strategies to, like, use H. Chan to seek power. Because, you know, I just never thought it could come through. Like, Q totally came out of left field and surprised me. Q, of course, is QAnon. The whole reason Frederick and I were talking in the first place. The most successful, damaging political host.

of this century. Frederick believes that Jim Watkins would see the rise of Q on A. Chan and then hijack control the account for himself. And the story of how that may have happened, it took us back to the scene of something I never thought I'd see, to the room where a bunch of liars and trolls had first invented Q, the room where Q took his baby steps. After the break, the birth of a lie. I need to tell you a story about what things were like on H.N. during the very first days of Q. We're going to go back even before Frederick believes Jim would have taken over the account. I'm telling you about this for a couple of reasons.

First, because the most compelling evidence for who started Q, all of it lies in the mechanics of just how this message board works. Once you can read A. Chan, you can watch the Q show and see all the special effects. You can watch as the stagehands accidentally get the shot sometimes. The people behind this are going to make mistakes, and some of those mistakes are frankly very funny. But also because before I got this, I would have told you that something like Q&N was inevitable.

Every year, just like the flu, some new conspiracy would sweep through America involving pedophiles or Hillary Clinton. What is the point of understanding the mechanics of something that's inevitable? But once you really get the story of Q, you understand that it involves a bunch of people who, while they are completely bumbling when it comes to telling the lie, they're very savvy when it comes to spreading it. And knowing that people did this on purpose and how they did it, that feels important. important to me in a way that goes beyond Jim Watkins or anybody else. Okay. So in the very beginning, Q and on sounded unremarkable.

It was just one more lie being told by an anonymous liar on a message board that was full of them. Frederick did not take it seriously. Yeah. I mean, so when I first, like, heard about Q, I just thought that it was a troll, basically, and that it was just somebody having a laugh and kind of tricking people. You know what I mean? And posting vague Nostradamus-like messages,

I didn't take it as seriously as I should have in the beginning. I don't think a lot of people did, you know what I mean? Back then, a lot of people on A-chan were actually already doing a similar stunt. When I talked to that journalist, Dale Baran, he told me he'd spent a lot of time on A-H-N. He wrote a book about it. The way he explained to me, back in 2016, this was a game that people on the boards would play together. One person would larp. They'd pretend to be some highly-placed government.

official leaking secrets. Like one guy claimed that Thomas Jefferson had actually been a foreign spy, and that, well, it was true that he'd written the Declaration of Independence, quote, he was brought into the process by American intelligence that knew he was a traitor and were working him all along. There was high level anon, FBI anon, CIA anon. There was White House insider anon. Like, they all had goofy names, and they were all doing the exact same roleplay. It's like they were having a costume party, but it sounds like in those early days everyone

knew it was a costume party or no? Yeah, everyone knew. I mean, very few people I think were true believers. In October 2017, a user calling themselves QAnon, Q, referring to their Q-level security clearance, posted their first message. It was a response to a different bullshit message someone else had posted, where they'd claimed that Hillary Clinton would be arrested the following Monday. Actually, Q informed everybody. Her extradition had already begun. According to Q's post, HRC extradition already in motion effective yesterday with several countries in case of cross-border run. Passport approved to be flagged effective 1030 at 12.01 a.m. Not only that. Q also said that anyone who didn't believe him should locate a local National Guard's member

and ask to see their deployment orders because the National Guard, obviously, had been tasked with bringing Clinton to justice. I talked to a guy named Mike Rothschild. He's an author who studies conspiracy theories. And he says that when the first Q-Drop appeared, you could tell the audience on the board wasn't actually buying it. But within 10 to 15 posts, It was just like the mood in the room had already started to change. You know, they're starting to get into the idea of Hillary Clinton being arrested and of like of John Podesta getting arrested. And, you know, you're never quite clear if they're just sort of like, here's a new game, we're going to start playing it. Or if they really think, yeah, he's going down.

You're never 100% sure what's real and what's a goof in a place like this. Right, because you have no context and the difference between someone who is playing the character of credulous interviewer versus someone. who's just like being duped, there's no way to tell. Right. After a month on the site, in November 2017, Q announces that 4chan has been, quote, infiltrated and then moved the whole operation to what would become their permanent home, 8chan. The way I think of it, it's like 4chan was where Q piloted the show. But A-chan, A-chan is where season one really starts.

And on A-chan, Q posted exclusively on this one subboard called CBTS, Com Before the Storm, owned by a middle-aged man from Johannesburg named Paul Ferber. So I was the board owner there, and then Q actually then started posting there on like the second or the third of December. Paul Ferber seemed to take Q completely seriously. He wouldn't talk to us, but this is from an interview he gave to another Q believer. We had spectacular predictions by Q on the board. He told us all sorts of things about how the world works. It was amazing.

It was the most incredible intelligence leak in history. So who is Paul Ferber? This man whose board was home to the greatest intelligence leak in history. According to his Twitter bio, he is, quote, a journal, programmer, artist, musician, pilot, teacher, Luthier, biker, Christian, medicine seller. The Q who lived on Paul Ferber's board was becoming a hit. He was gaining a small following of believers.

But there was a problem. A-chan was not designed for the government super spy. Most people on the site didn't have usernames. They posted completely anonymously. And if, like, Q, you wanted to post as yourself every time, the problem was that cracking passwords on A-chan was notoriously easy. Q's first password, I can tell you, because it was cracked, was Matlock. And once it was cracked, anybody could post his Q, on A-chan or on 4-chan.

It worked in both places. Dale Brand, the journalist, he told me about it. Even today, I could put in Q at Matlock, and then if I wanted to put a post on 4chan, it would appear exactly under QZil Trip Code, which I did to test it while I was writing in the article. Whoa, so you've also posted this queue. Yeah, yeah.

I mean, who hasn't really at the way at this point? I haven't. What did you say? I mean, you got to, I don't like looking at 4chan because it's full of gross stuff. So there's Pol, which is the fascist board. And then there's PO, the Papercraft and Orgami Board. I went to Pio, and as someone posted a nice piece of origami, and I posted as Q, I said, looks good.

But now I definitely know one person who has been Q, which is you. Sure. Well, you know, who hasn't indulged. A lot of people indulged. On A-chan, once you have a username and password, you can't change the password. So when Q got cracked, they had to make a new account. And it was Paul Ferber's job to verify that the person posting his queue today was the same person who had been posting the day before. And the reason he could do that is because as board owner, he had access to user login information. He could see scrambled versions of their IP addresses.

According to Paul, it was a lot of work, but it was something he'd been called to do. This has been like a full-time job for me, but it hasn't paid anything. I'm doing it for personal reasons because I want to do the right thing. and also because I've researched child trafficking and ritual abuse and the elites for many years now. So when this all started happening, I thought, oh, yeah, you know, you need to get involved here because you have knowledge that can help the cause.

Paul Ferber, a man who had been marinating in conspiracy theories since the 1990s, he seemed like an ideal super spreader for Q nonsense. The world's most credulous disciple had fallen in love with a perfect charlatan. And Q actually loved Paul Ferber right back. He shouted him out personally in Q-Drop 393. Quote, board owners, that's Paul, mods and other patriots, sincere thanks for all you do,

your true heroes, there will be a day within the next few months that a scary but safe, personalized message finds its way to you on multiple platforms recognizing your contributions. This drop is the equivalent

of Q telling Paul Ferber he's going to send him his own fruit basket. Frederick Brennan has a slightly different take on this very cozy relationship. Did you have theories or instincts about who the actual person might have been, assuming there was an original cue? I think it's Paul Ferber, yeah. Oh. I think Ferber is most likely Q, the original cue.

Frederick believes that the man writing the original Q drops was Paul Ferber himself. Paul Ferber has denied this, and I will say this is the part of Frederick's theory that he has the least amount of evidence for. There's a ring of disciples around early Q could have been any or all of them. them. Part of the reason I relay it is because it is extremely fun to imagine the pickle that Paul Ferber may have ended up in, if he was Q. Because in Frederick's telling, once Q started to take off, Paul Ferber would have had a problem, his own ego. He would have wanted to take credit, but he wouldn't have been able to because Q was supposed to be a secret government super spy, not some Lutherer in Johannesburg. And Frederick believes that that explains why Paul

starts to constantly emphasize how he really gets Q. It was like Bruce Wayne running around Gotham talking about how Batman always did sleepovers at his house. The Anans didn't really like him very much because he was getting, the way my mother would put it, is too big for his bridges. So he was posting things like, I serve at the pleasure of the president. You know, I serve at the pleasure of Q. You're, you know, people were feeling jealous, basically. Yes, they were jealous because he was saying that he was having private communication with. Q and that he was filtering it basically out to them.

And one of the big things, especially in early Q, was that it's a research movement and nobody is higher than anybody else. So by Ferber saying that he was having private contact with Q, which might have been true, nobody knows, right? He was violating the spirit of their thing. Yes. So there's a growing perception that Paul Ferber is using Q to promote himself. And then Paul goes on TV.

Defending the Republic from. enemies foreign and domestic. Okay, it's not TV, actually, Info Wars. And not with Alex Jones. This was their spin-off show with a different host, their dinky TLDR version. But still, December of 2017, there's Paul Ferber, and he's doing the thing he usually does,

which is he's acting as cues interpreter, talmudically decoding cue drops on air. Like, there's this one that mentions the Lord's Prayer. Why don't you break that down? Why do you think it's important? As we were going to break, you were kind of getting into that, why it was so important that he go into the Lord's Prayer? at the end of this.

Yeah, Rob, so, yeah, you're absolutely right. So some good questions from Q to make us think, go do research, and then he types out the Lord's prayer. And, yeah, I didn't get it. I thought, okay, Q is a Christian, maybe the Catholic. But then Paul explains, a month later, the Pope, made a completely mild tweak to the Lord's Prayer and how it was translated from Latin to English.

To Paul, this is proved to anyone with eyes to see that Q was beyond legit. So here's a person, here's an individual who has somehow inside knowledge of the most secret inner working of one of the most closely guarded places in the world,

which is the vassageant. That was very, very impressive. That was amazing. That was the most spectacular proof I've ever seen. You get the idea. No, I'm sorry, I have to do one more.

Okay, so the host has another question for Q's foremost global scholar. He mentioned Snow White. let's see, I don't know, maybe 20 times in his posts. He also mentions the Godfather 3. What does that represent in these? He mentions the Godfather 3 almost as many times as Snow White. So go ahead.

What does that represent? These are the lovely little cryptic clues that we love to spend hours and hours trying to unravel. So Snow White is the CIA supercomputer called Hammer, H-A-M-R. and it's hosted at Amazon's data center, and Snow White and the Seven Dwarves is the CIA, we believe, again, this is not confirmed, we believe that it's their supercomputer infrastructure that they use to conduct domestic surveillance.

The reason I'm making you listen to this lunacy is because actually, this info-war segment will have enormous consequences. Personally, for Paul Ferber, for reasons we will get into later, but much more importantly, this is, actually at the moment that Q is going to break out and reach a much older, more mainstream audience, which is not an accident. This was the explicit goal of Paul Ferber's InfoWor's appearance to draw in the boomers. On the show, Paul's fellow disciple actually makes the pitch. There are a lot of people out there that just cannot work on, they just cannot function on the

chance the way these people can, but they're a massive untapped resource themselves. They have all sorts of connections. I mean, a lot of them could be retired, uh, intel or military, there's so many people out there from older generations that are not involved in this fight. And the good news, Paul Ferber explains, is that they've made it super easy to get involved. They're inviting older Americans to come visit the new user-friendly QAnon subreddit that they've built especially for them. The story behind Q&ONN is so big that we need to get it out to as many people as possible,

which is why we're going wider. We're talking to YouTubers. We're talking to info wars. We're talking to all the independent media. We're not talking to the mainstream media. We don't care about them. This call to action, it works. Here's conspiracy theory researcher Mike Rothschild.

When it crosses over into Reddit, it's like the firebreak has been jumped. And it's like this inferno has gone from contained to out in the real world. And when it goes out into the real world, it could really hurt somebody. Like, this internet's conspiracy stuff wasn't ever given. toward that, especially the mean culture. Like, people who are older than like 25 or not, I don't, just aren't supposed to get that stuff. But it's, it dovetailed with this big new audience of people who just really weren't great at discerning fact from fiction. That's what Q wants us to do is to dig, find out the information, make it our own.

Please keep the faith. Pretty soon, these new mainstream Q followers, they will spread the message themselves. They'll tell their friends. This is the beginning of Q season two. In today's video, I'm going to give you a brief overview of how to find posts by Q on the internet and a little bit about reading... Q uses a lot of abbreviation. H.C. means Hillary Clinton.

You know what I mean? So there's a lot of those going on. Snow White, whenever he's talking about Snowden, and Snow White in the seven dwarves. which are the CIA's secret massive computer system. And I feel like, I mean, I know we've discussed it a lot of times and we're like, I'm not really sure I believe that part of it, but yet it just, I don't think she's lying to us, whoever he is. Trust, there are words that I never freaking heard of before this whole world.

I am 100% behind Q. He's working for the president. He's working for our country. There's things that have been going on since the assassination of JFK. Q is the best thing that has ever happened to you. So remember, remember this moment. People look at this as a story that they get to be part of.

It's not just a relentless drumbeat of the bad people are going to do things to you and you can't do anything about it. It's stay tuned to what happens next. And it's like every so often there's a cliffhanger. Like if it wasn't so horrible, and isolating and terrible for the people who believe in it, it would be kind of an interesting example of 21st century storytelling. For most of 2018, Q is growing in popularity, but quietly.

Non-believers weren't yet noticing. But Frederick says he knew one person who caught it very early. His boss, Jim Watkins. Owner of Ait Chan, a man with very recently dashed dreams of running a right-wing conspiracy news site, of course, Jim took notice. Jim was very interested in Q, I know, very interested. We had this private slack thing, and it had all these different channels on it. I could see what he was saying, and I could see that he really understood how powerful Q could be for him.

And that he told his son, Ron, you need to make sure these people stay. you know, and I'm sure that Ron would understand what he meant by that. You know, what does that mean? You need to make sure Q can't leave, right? Right. According to Frederick, this exchange, it would have happened around the same time that Paul Ferber went on Info Wars. Ferber was seeking his own fame, in the opinion of many of the users of his board,

and Ron was afraid that the Q people were going to leave. There had been, you know, ideas floated of a Q-chan. and he wanted to stop those out. To be clear, Frederick does not have screenshots of these private slack conversations. All we have to go on here is Frederick's word. But we do know what happened next because it happened out in the open on the board. So remember how people were always breaking into the queue account, claiming to be queue, and then Paul Ferber would have to sort out who was the real one?

On January 5th, about a week after Info Wars, that happens again. Somebody logs in his queue and they post what seems like a pretty normal drop. quote, follow the money, loop capital markets, happy hunting, big next week, Q. But Paul Ferber pipes up and says, that guy's Fugazi, quote, not Q, Q's second trip, his password, has been cracked as I thought it might be. But then, this Q doubles down. Drop 471, false. Do they get to you? Board compromised. And then he calls for backup, quote, test, code monkey, please log in. and confirm IDEN. CodeMungy is Ron Watkins.

As H-H-H-HNs administrator, he is the only person other than Paul Ferber who can look up Q's login info. He's never done it before, but he does it now. And he tells everybody, Paul Ferber is wrong. This Q is the real deal. Here's journalist Dale Baran.

And then the next thing that happens is Q says, I'm leaving Paul Ferber's board. I don't like it here anymore. Ron Watkins helped me set up a new board and you can you and me it'll just be you and me oh my god you help me um it must have if you're paul and you did invent cue it would hurt my feelings so much for someone to take my invisible friend from me and have my invisible friend tell everyone they didn't like me anymore yeah that would be pretty devastating and you can't say anything about it like you can't

you can't be like no i made up this lie whether paul ferber was q whether he was just a very enthusiastic disciple, this is the point where he loses Q for good. Because now that Q has left Paul's board, Paul no longer has the ability to verify their identity. The only person who can do that from now on is Ron Watkins, which means that Q is now under the control of the Watkins family. And what Frederick believes is that what that really means

is that Q belongs to Jim Watkins. I'm making a very specific claim. Basically, the way I put it very succinctly, He's not a maker. He's a taker. He took 2channel. He took 8chan and now he's taken Q. It's a pattern with him.

If you look at the Wikipedia article on 2 Channel, you'll see he appropriated it. My PIN tweet is all about it too. Frederick has spent the last few months desperately campaigning to Wikipedia editors, screaming from the rooftops on Twitter, trying to make people understand that Jim Watkins is behind Q. He's not saying for sure that Jim Watkins actually writes the posts himself. What can never be proven is that he has actually logged on and posted a cue drop. That cannot be proven. But it is known that he has control over the Q account.

And Frederick is the first to tell you he's not unbiased regarding Jim Watkins. His whole reason for telling the story is motivated by anger at Jim Watkins. And, as far as I can tell, a sincere belief that the only thing more dangerous for the world than a hoax like Q is a hoax like Q is a hoax like Q that has Jim Watkins in the drive. seat. I've talked to a number of journalists who cover Q about this theory. Some of them think it's likely. Everyone agrees it's more than plausible. And Frederick says if you just pay attention to Q's public posts, you'll see a bunch of points where the Watkins had the ability to grab the account. The first one, obviously, is that moment where Paul Ferber loses it. Ron Watkins, for his part, denies that anything untoward happened that day. Dale Baran has DM'd with Ron at length,

and he says that Ron made it abundantly clear that he's just not interested in Q. Not only that, Ron Warkins, is just not an interesting person. He's not political. He's just a simple guy running a website, taking orders from his dad. In fact, he barely even works on the website. He spends most of his time on his real passion, professionally translating Chinese literature. No, you can't look it up. He does it under a different name.

Anyway, Dale did get to ask Ron about that moment where he anointed a new Ques. queue. And Ron's answer was very interesting. So at first, Ron Watkins told me, oh, yeah, this moment with Paul Ferber and the fake queue. Well, you know what? I promise another journalist an exclusive. And I'm like, what are you talking about? He's like, there was a film crew there filming all my events when this occurred. And I'm 100% sure I got it right. I chose the right queue. but I can't talk details because I promised an exclusive to this other film crew. That's what he told me. So he claimed there's a full documentary film crew just filming him moderating 8chan in 2018.

Yes. Did he was able to put you in touch with the? No. No, he did not. He said it was a small production. I was like, did you sign a contract? They paid you? And he's like, no, no, just a favor.

He lies like a person who is used to people believing him. It's entirely possible that I'm wrong. In 2021, a film crew could show up and publish their exclusive footage showing that Ron Watkins did exactly what he said he did. But, look, I know that there's a madness to all this. To trying to fact-check these Baroque lies. Lies made by people who are used to talking to gullible audiences, you can go in thinking that you're going to really get to understand something,

and pretty soon you feel like, oh, you just have a slightly more rarefied version of the disease that every Q follower has. You're obsessed with a bunch of bullshit. But the thing is, I genuinely believe that once you know that someone reliably doesn't tell the truth, at that point, you can actually start to learn from their lies. They will give themselves away. The things that they choose to lie about, it tells you what they think is important. It tells you how they want the world to see them. After Ron Watkins identifies a new Q, Q's writing style changes noticeably.

More caps lock, fewer coherent sentences. This Q is the one that will amass real power over already distressed people, and his posts will compel them to do things. Here's Mike Rothschild, the conspiracy researcher. The Q crimes started really before anybody was paying attention. This guy blockaded. Hoover Dam holding up a sign with Q&N hashtags on it. Man in FBI custody tonight after blocking traffic on the Hoover Dam bypass bridge with an armored truck.

Thank you for joining us. Yeah. There's a man on the bridge with a gun. The Hoover Dam resulted in an armed standoff with law enforcement. He had a sign that said release the OIG report. A month later, Q was in the national news after his followers swamped a Trump rally in Florida. They wore shirts and signs and blazoned with only the letter Q. It was before the Secret Service had stopped letting Q paraphernalia into Trump rallies.

So it was just, it was like everywhere. Do you think there are a lot of other Q&N supporters here at this rally? Incredible amount. We just walked out. Yeah. This is the cue that some Republicans will run for office in support of, that Eric Trump will make winking gestures of support towards. Mike has interviewed a lot of people whose families have been wrecked by this stuff. So, I mean, yeah, it's a lot of, I don't talk to my mom anymore, I don't talk to my sister, and my friend won't stop harassing me. but it's also like deluges of death threats and actual crimes.

This is the cue we all have to deal with, the one that doesn't seem to go away. Jim Watkins is clearly reveling in being the man whose website this queue lives on. Later, when Congress subpoenas him over A. Chan, he'll fly to D.C. wearing a Q-pin. He tells people his favorite drop, like it's a scripture verse. back on the board though throughout all this the Q and 9 account is still getting perpetually broken into it wasn't even just hackers cracking the password there were times where Q would just screw up and accidentally post their own password onto the board he he just instead of in the name field it's his special trip code it's his trip code with his password and was what did he change it

the first one was Matlock what was the second one matlock You change it to M ampersand lock and then exclamation point. Oh, my God. And so in August of 2018, this highly trained matlock-loak-loving super spy finally takes advantage of a Ron Watkins innovation that will make Q's account more secure. Q will now have a more secure trip code. It'll be unhackable. but the trade-off is that unlike the one that they've been using,

which would have let Q log in not just to 8chan, but also to 4-chan, any other image board. This one will only work on 8-chan. Q agrees. For the next year, both Q and 8-chan are thriving. Thriving, that is, until Frederick Brennan enters the story. By this point, he'd fully quit working with the Watkins family, but he was still living in the Philippines.

And now, after a series of mass shootings, by 8-chan users who announced their plans, on the board before they happened, and then were cheered on by board members, Frederick felt like now even Jim and Ron would have to see that the site had gone too far. You know, I was willing to give them the benefit of the doubt, and I sat there, and I, you know, watched intently to see what changes they were going to make to make sure that that didn't happen again. And they completely blew it.

They did not handle it well at all. I mean, they didn't even delete the original Chrysler's Tudor's thread. It got to the maximum number of posts and fell off the board by itself. And they tried to call that a deletion. That's not a deletion. The software did that. It got to 750 posts, the maximum. So, which is crazy to think about.

Frederick decided he was tired of asking Jim Watkins to shut the site down. And to this time, he publicly calls for A. Chan to be taken offline. And afterwards, their web security company actually drops them. Then, Frederick calls everyone else sweet things might offer them service and talks them out of it. Frederick says his whole campaign, it was just about A-chan. But he says that what happened next is what fully convinced him that the Watkins family had taken over Q. A-chan went down for three months. And during those three months, all the other communities left.

Because it was such a long time. You know, in internet terms, three months is a long-ass time. No neo-Nazi is sitting around for three months thinking, oh, well, I guess I can't talk to my friends today. Maybe, maybe tomorrow. You know, it's not how it goes. You know, they are already using 4chan again. And the video game guys, they all left too. The only people that couldn't leave and that needed Jim were the QAnon people.

Because as long as 8chan was down, Q&N could not post and give them another place to find Q-drops. But there were a lot of people trying to do that when it was down. A lot of people were posting on 4-chan. I'm Q, you know, and here's a drop. But nobody could believe them because Q had locked himself into A-Champ, where the only person that could validate a Q-drop became Jim Watkins. Which meant that if Q was independent of the Watkins family, the moment the site came back online,

obviously the first thing they would do is post a backup. Some new place where people could reach them, since it wasn't clear A-Cham was even going to be around anymore. So, fall 2019, Ron Watkins is able to get a very ramshackle version of his site to flicker to life. He's calling it 8Coon now. In the first couple weeks, it'll go up for an hour here or there and then immediately go back down. And when it is up, Frederick is obsessively, over and over just trying to get a single post through. I couldn't get anything through, but Q could.

And that's how I know they're not a third party. just because I know, since I wrote 8chan software, that if you have an admin account, your posts are prioritized. They go through a special way, and they appear when nothing else will go through. So, I mean, I know they took over Q just because of that. I know it.

Here's Dale. This is to me as one of the fisciest moments in the whole Sug, where one of the early things Q does is Q says, Ron, I'm looking at your Twitter, and you're saying you're going to rotate the salt on the trip codes, which means that all of the trip codes, my trip code include, every single trip code on H-hand is going to be defunct.

So there's no way to verify Q. So just to translate this, Ron is resetting everyone's logins on the site. He's changing all the locks. even Q will lose his verification. Ron tweets an announcement about it, and very conveniently, Q is able to post on the broken website and chime in saying basically,

how will people know it's me? And then Ron immediately responds, he says, like, he says, well, go to a new board, make your own special Q board, and I will again personally verify your again. And that's what Q does. Q's happy.

You know, I ask Frederick, and he's like, that's a piece of theater, right? Like, that's Ron saying, I need to do this technical thing, right? Like, I can't bring the site back up without hitting the reset button on all the trip codes. But then there's no Q. So how convenient with, you know, I asked Ron about this. I'm like, isn't it weird, Ron, that, you know, you have to do this thing. And if you had just done it, there would be no Q forever.

But conveniently, out of the wilderness, Q appears on your site, one of the first people to post. and it asks you to help him verify his identity again. Yeah. And set yourself up on that website. And he's like, look, Q is one of our most popular users. I know it's a little weird. I don't reach out. I don't help that often, but he's very popular.

So I thought I would help as the site admin. God. It really reminds me, and I know this is like a metaphor that people use for things that are fake, but it reminds me of parents talking about Santa Claus. Like there's something, do you know what I mean? Like, it's just a thin veil laid over the lies that's like not, it just has to be there. But it doesn't have to conceal.

So that is all of Frederick's evidence. And while Frederick does not have proof that Jim and Ron write the post themselves, could be them. It could be someone working under them. It does seem clear that at minimum, QAnon serves at their pleasure. Jim and Ron Watkins have denied that they've taken over Q. But this spring, Jim Watkins announced that he is running a new super pack for QAnon. The people who want to support Q should donate money to Jim said he can educate more Americans about this brave patriot.

So far, he's used the money to buy ads on Aikun. Meanwhile, the fight between Jim Watkins and Frederick Brennan rages on. Earlier this year, Frederick called Jim Watkins senile on Twitter because Frederick thinks that's what Jim is. And despite Jim's passionate love of free speech, he made an exception in this case. He invoked a criminal cyber libel law against Frederick. And according to Frederick, that meant that

he would immediately go to jail and if he goes to jail he dies. He goes from notorious Philippine jail that's in Manila. Oh, God. I knew about the cyber level thing. I hadn't put together because of his, like,

condition, how much even bigger a deal that is. Yeah, right. So, you know, Rod told me, well, he could have paid bail and gotten out. But, you know, I don't think he could have. I think he couldn't have been in custody.

for three days. That would have killed him. So he had to leave. He had to leave within three days in the middle of the night. He said he barely escaped. The authorities actually were like checking for him and he had to like go to another terminal and take a different flight. God, no wonder he's so mad. At this point, Frederick lives in a place he hates, man dies. He's alone, separated from his wife, banished from the country he wanted to live in. Lately, the place on the internet that feels kind of okay to him is Wikipedia. He spends a lot of time there just trying to clean up

one of the Jim Watkins' lives that he feels like he could do something about. This has become an obsession, to be honest. You know, I worked in the Wikipedia system to get it on the homepage under, did you know, did you know that Hiroyuki Yoshimura,

owner of 4chan, claims 2 Channel was stolen from him. And that was so much work to get that. It took me, like, weeks and weeks of research, mostly in Japanese, to write the article to the level where it would get approved to go on their homepage. And why, why was it important, why did you want to get the record set straight on Wikipedia? Um, you know, I, obviously you should never look at Wikipedia and trust what's there,

but, you know, the way that it was laid out, with the references that were there was kind of what convinced me to work with Jim Watkins. Frederick's not stupid. He's not optimistic. He knows that what he's doing is like picking up one piece of litter while an open garbage truck flies down the street drunkenly. But you take your constellations where you can find them.

Things may be shitty, but at least you can call them what they are. Repilis hosted by me, PJ Vote, and Alex Goldman. Our show is produced this week by Truthy Pinnamennamini, Damiana Marquetti, Anna Foley, Jessica Young, Emmanuel Jochi, and Lisa Wang. Our senior producer is Fiatheed Benin. Our executive producer is Tim Howard.

We were mixed by Rick Kwan. Backshaking by Michelle Harris. Additional music production by Mario Romano. We could not have done this week's story without the excellent reporting of Dale Baran. He has a book about the history of image board culture called It Came From Something Awful. You should check it out.

You can also find more by our conspiracy theory author and researcher Mike Rothschild on Twitter. He's working on a book about QAnon. And more special thanks this week to Brendan Klingerberg. Our theme song is by mysterious breakmaster cylinder. Matt Lieber is hoodie and shorts weather. Also, we are currently looking for spring and summer 2021 interns. The position is open now. Go to our website, reply all show.com to apply. Applications are due October 5th. If you have any questions,

ask Alex Goldman on Twitter. You can listen to our show on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks for listening. We'll see you in two weeks.