"We had some days where we were getting 7,000 posts in an hour."
"Fredwick, you and H-N are being likened to a hate group. How do you answer to that?"
"Someone made a gamergate board on H-N, but it was not founded for the purpose of gamergate,
and it will be around long after gamergate is over."
"The only sources that were taking gamergate seriously were very far-right sources, like right-bar."
"Right-bar news, a bomb-throwing sight favored by the so-called "alt-right,"
a mixture of conservatives and populists, white supremacists, and anti-Semites."
"In my voting and op-lists wrote a whole bunch of articles about gamergate."
"Every community on the internet, for this four-channel Reddit or whatever, has a dog in the fight in gamergate."
"Conservatives have missed the huge cultural opportunity here."
"He knew he was writing this stuff to, like, a fortune audience."
"These gamers were being courted, like, yes, you are disenfranchised, and yes, women are taking your toys away."
"And, you know, that's happening to us at all levels of government as well."
Steve Bannon, the owner and publisher of Breitbart, who later became part of the Trump administration,
now understands this group of young disenfranchised men who are angry, who are unhappy,
and he says, "Well, they come in through gamergate, and then we get them turned on to Trump."
That was his idea.
"I will never let you be the forgotten people again, with the forgotten people."
"I will never let you down, I promise. I will never, ever let you down."
"What would America look like with an ascendant alt-right, with a Trump in the White House,
and a Mr. Bannon as the chief of staff?"
"It would be so much more fun, it might be."
"Well, it might be."
"It might be more spontaneous."
Steve Bannon knew a good thing when he saw it, and by activating what he called the
"rootless white males," in his own words, of 4chan, he turned them into a political force to be reckoned with.
It played out this way in Japan back in 2002, with these politicized two channel users,
known as The Met Right, who felt that their own country wasn't doing enough to make Japan great again.
What our 4chan and 8chan doing to promote Trump, they're doing the same thing anonymous,
was doing mass pranks, spitting misinformation into the news cycle, like rumors that Hillary
Clinton is sick, and they're making memes, which then spread off the chance into the mainstream narrative.
These radicalized young men know that they can poison them well and spread all this stuff
downstream in the culture. That's what 4chan was always doing, but now it was getting more toxic than ever.
While this is happening, what is happening on the rest of the internet? Everyone's experience
on the internet is a monetized corporate form of 4chan. But it's more dangerous than 4chan,
because these newer sites are better at boosting whatever content will make people stay on the site
longer. What drives user base numbers and revenue is anger.
So Facebook or Twitter is making more money as users are getting angrier and becoming glued to the screen.
And so as the internet gets 4chanified, it's easier than ever to make really dark, disgusting,
or screwed up things, and they can let it spawn in that environment until it spreads everywhere.
The Fox News decision desk has pulled the Donald Trump, the 45th President of the United States,
winning the most surreal election we have ever seen.
With moot, I did find it really funny that when we all started to leave and all he was left with
was the Nazis that he quit. Having an angry mob of 25 million people who disagree with everything
you do is never very fun. It's not even that I'm burnt out, it's that I've probably gone through
like five burnouts at this point. He had founded 4chan as this haven for people who loved stuff
from Japan and who loved internet hijinks. He wasn't in it for politics. moot is exasperated,
and he announces that he's leaving the site. His parting advice is that you shouldn't actually
be on the internet that much. He says go out and live your life. There's now a meme for it, touch
grass. For people who are angry on the internet, I really really hope that you one day find the
beauty in not allowing strangers and things outside of your control to rally you up. I'm sure that
you'll add a few issues to your life by keeping your heart right down.
But the user base I think wanted to drag the site in another direction.
After Trump wins the election, the people on 4chan and hchan spreading viral misinformation
feel empowered. It worked, so they keep doing it.
After it happened and Trump came present, I was totally shocked.
I was reading the New York Times. They projected Hillary at like 90 something percent to win.
You know, no one thought this could happen from the very beginning, and it did.
At the time, I was a freshman in New York City. I did swing left, really far left.
They were painting Trump out like he was going to be some second coming of Hitler.
To someone as ignorant as I was at 1819, believing that stuff was was horrifying.
It's on election day. A lot of my friends were like, we're doing this march. We're gonna go to Trump
Tower. It was all out madness. People yelling and screaming.
It was just total rage. Being in that mob, it was so hateful and sort of hit me like a
wrecking ball all at once, realizing like, hey, this isn't what I signed up for.
There was a shift, man. A lot of it had to do with just being extremely curious.
When you're that young, you want to change the world. It's that same thing of like,
this country is corrupt and something needs to be done about it.
With Trump, we have this new guy in charge saying, you know, we're going to drain the swamp.
We're going to drain the swamp of Washington. We're going to have fun doing it. We're all doing it together.
It gave people some sort of hope that the world could change.
A lot of Trump's megathans felt that when he was in the White House,
he would have some kind of clandestine plan to bring all these people to justice.
But that hope of a radical change that had been promised repeatedly never seemed to happen or
commented fruition. That's when one of the early Q Post came up on my radar.
Someone with a name Q put out a post and it would have the same exact exact phrase that Trump
would tweet 10 minutes later. Like, how did they predict President Trump's Twitter?
That's just like nuts. It's like, let's just, you know, show this to people. This is crazy.
This was posted in 4chan. So Q posted the triple plus and Donald Trump, seven minutes later,
tweeted the triple plus. So we know for a fact that Q was real and within, you know, a day or two,
I have 20,000 views of flood of comments that are all positive. And it's just this whirlwind of like,
what did I just do? You know, what have I stumbled on?
The whole idea was like, oh, there's this person on the inside who's sort of leaving us breadcrumbs.
So he's giving us breadcrumbs. Breadcrumbs. I'm giving you all my breadcrumbs the whole
entire way. And it's like, you guys aren't getting the real story. Like, here's what's going on
behind the scenes. Trump wanted people to think that he had a plan. He set people up to feel like
this kind of person would emerge. This is his team here. I'm guessing Q is one of these people.
We have Kushner here. But look at all the thumbs. All the thumbs up. They connect to make an actual
Q. So that was the first hint we got. The YouTube channel was growing like wildfire.
This never happened in the history of the world. And it's all happening because of the internet.
Share the stream, tweet it out, do whatever you want to do. Spread the information. That's
what QAnon asks us to do. Q is a patriot. We know that for sure. Many of the things that he has
given clues about and talked about on 4chan and other forums have really proven to be true.
There was a curious sight at last night's Trump rally in Tampa. The letter Q was everywhere.
What was once a baseless conspiracy theory has become a mainstream online cult. Q is about getting
to the truth. He knows a lot of the secrets that they have. And that's why he's such a threat to them.
The information he's given us has been extraordinary. It was a very diverse group. But ultimately,
they're just normal people. You know, they have jobs, they have kids, they have families. They're
they're working people. When you talk to people who support QAnon, they need some way of expressing
that they got the short end of the stick. You have an elite group of people getting richer
and richer using mainstream media to saying everything's fine. Don't worry about it. I know
life is getting tougher for you. That's the truth. We represent the truth. Well, what happens?
These people begin to hate the truth. And they end up doing the same thing that
4chan people did. They start falling into the internet, falling into fantasy.
Those smart people at the top, they're using the truth to beat me over the head.
So I'll invent my own truth. It doesn't have to be true. It just has to feel right.
And little by little, that quote unquote "truth" to sound it deranged.
If you're not familiar with the conspiracy theory, it goes like this.
They think that President Trump is engaged in a secret war against satanic pedophiles in the
Democratic Party and Hollywood. Hillary Clinton is a Luciferian Satanist and so are the Rothschilds.
So are the rest of the cabal. Open your eyes. So what's really going on? Oprah Winfrey. You
really think we can trust Oprah Winfrey? These people are trying to drink blood. Why did they
do it? Because it's actually a drug. It's called adrenaline crumb. It gives them energy. It makes
them feel a little younger, right? So it's not like they're doing it for no reason.
This myth becomes a meme as it grows in popularity as people begin to believe. But 4chan knows that
what they're doing is they're putting old 4chan jokes in the thing that they're making up.
For example, CP, that's a code for child pornography. So anything that started with those letters,
cheese pizza, Christopher Poole, Captain Picard, these were all old school 4chan memes.
It's, you know, pure adolescent nonsense that was far removed from what they were joking about.
But it grows into this outlandish horror story that a lot of people actually believe.
You are secretly saving the world from this sci-chantic hold of pedophiles and cannibals. Does that sound
like something you are behind? Well, I haven't. I haven't heard that. But is that supposed to be a
bad thing or a good thing? In your city, do not let the normalize criteria. How is it? It starts
on the wrong side of failure. QAnon started trying to absorb the iconography, the lingo,
the messaging tactics of Anonymous. And I took that personally.
You know, I was out of the game a couple of years at that point, and I tried to ignore them as
much as possible. But it became a self-propagating troll. Your great grandma's knitting group was
all of a sudden talking about Q and saving the children. Q was just a whole bunch of trolls
who were like, "Look at all these fools. They believe it. They actually honestly believe this."
And God, ain't this funny everybody? And the only way that you can really get there is if
you're an asshole that wants to make people believe that their thoughts, their interpretations
of reality are not true. And that's harmful. It's harmful to everybody. All of us who had built
the culture started seeing our work being used by people we utterly despised. And because we all
left the Chan culture, there was no one there pushing back. We've all participated in undermining
reality with our silly jokes and the conspiracy theories. But we never wanted things to turn into
a living cartoon. Unfortunately, when you were that far gone, there's nothing really you can do.
All you can do is cross your fingers and hope that eventually they will realize that
I've been caught. I was convinced that it was a real thing, but eventually Q started getting a
couple of things wrong. They were like dates given and then it would never happen. And like I said,
Q and on, right? He said March 9th. It's March 20th guys, okay? Little things like that kept
happening again and again. We know the storm is upon us. What else do you want me to say? These
people are going to get arrested. There was this big kind of powwow live stream with all the Q
influencers, kind of like a sales pitch. It doesn't matter if it's real guys. It's better than Game
of Thrones. It's better than Alex, the cards, it's better than Walking Dead. It is the most
indicated but the content he's discussing is absolutely real. Whether Q himself is real or not,
the content he's discussing is 100% genuine. Eventually, I learned that many of the individuals
in that live stream were actually behind the Q and on posts and they were just, you know,
some dudes in a basement who gained legitimacy by predicting those Trump tweets. Q never predicted
any of Donald Trump's tweets. Trolls simply doctored the timestamps to make it seem that way.
Q and on followers saw what they wanted to see and they just ran with a lie.
I think it really took advantage of people that were looking for answers about themselves,
about the world around them. It just got to a point where I was like, okay, I have to tell these
people this is not real. So today's the day that Q dies. The group behind Q and on is a bunch of
manipulative, 8-chance scammers. They were using me to push the Q narrative and it's not good to
have this false hope and the truth needs to come out. It wasn't well received at all.
You know, it was a mountain of dislikes and hate comments.
It was really like me talking to a wall like that. There's nothing I could have said.
Once you really realize it's phony, nothing's gonna happen. You know, you kind of think like,
what, what is going to happen to these people? Lea Thorys and Nevada say man barricaded himself
in an armored vehicle near the Hoover Dam bridge this afternoon, demanding President Trump release
reports, reports about what he did not say. The man accused of murdering reputed mob boss
Francesco Franky boy Callie appearing in court today. Camilo held up his hand in court. His palm
filled with scribblings, including the reference to a conspiracy theory. Parker police say it's
she believed her child had been taken by a satanic pedophilia ring of Democrats. This is ridiculous.
What this is, folks, this is Douglas County getting caught being a child sex trafficking ring and
trying to go after the person that's outing them. Things were teetering on a precipice
and the 2020 election pushed things over the edge. Joseph R. Biden Jr. is elected the 46th
president of the United States. This is a major fraud in our nation. We were getting ready to
win this election. Frankly, we did win this election. President Trump appeared in public and again
falsely claimed that he won the 2020 election. He is still showing no signs of conceding anytime
soon. It was another denial of reality reconciling Trump's loss with a win by creating a fantasy
that he in fact has won. If we look into the way that voter fraud is being conducted the way people
are throwing away ballots, these people are going down, you guys, because these people are cowards.
They're budget child molesters. Stop the steal has swept across inboxes, Facebook pages and twitter
like an out of control virus. There was this moment that I don't see written about a lot leading up
to January 6th of incredible tension. Like everyone felt it in the air. We didn't know what was going
to happen. Anything could happen.
The most important day right now in modern political history is upon us. The power is in your hands.
It was an internet generated event. What's up people? Where you guys from? Let me know where you're
from. Please tag people. I'm going to walk you guys. I'm going to walk you all the way out to the
crowds. It's people who love Christ, people who love Trump, people who are just conservatives,
conspiracy theorists, people who are totally deranged, and they're all glomming together and
the radical acceptance of all of that. Because they believed in this mass delusion.
It was wild. You know, you've never seen anything like it.
There is no historical parallel to the storming of the West Capitol.
But at the time I wasn't surprised at all.
Then I'm a reporter and I was actually there. I wanted to hear the crowd. Like up the Capitol
Hill to the part where the Capitol begins and it shrouded in tear gas and smoke.
And I go around and I'm like, "Excuse me sir, why are you invading the Capitol?"
We all feel like it was fraud and bad habits and everything. And everyone has a little different
precious deranged internet conspiracy. If you don't know what an oblisk is, do some research.
It's Satan's penis basically. But anyway, look it up and then you've got to ask yourself,
"Why isn't it Washington DC?" Each one is different. The right reset? Yeah. That's when
we go to a digital currency in a one world government. And the next person would be totally different.
Governor Wolf in Pennsylvania shuts my fucking restaurant down. Fuck you, Governor Wolf.
And I would ask them and be like, "Well, what are you reading? Is there a certain place where
you get your information on Trump?" Yeah, Facebook and private. That there had not been
a revolution like this before. It felt new. It felt like a product of the internet. A product of
the social media. Cobra. Over and out.
Once all of these Trump people raid the building and they're all inside,
they don't just walk over the standard or like over the velvet red rope. They walk along. Even
though they have to like go into like a good old line. A lot of them were acting like tourists.
They just, "Whoa, we did it." You know, like, like total just big-eyed, deer-and-head-like
survival. They were surprised themselves. It was as if they were wanderers in a dream.
And to me, that spoke to their deep delusion. They were enacting something
that was a fantasy on the internet. And that it was far removed from the reality of what they were
doing. And they were, of course, filming themselves, putting themselves back on the internet as they
were doing this for this closed loop. "Can I speak for Pelosi? Yeah, we're coming, bitch."
[Music]