Premium Episode 102: Jim Watkins, Wet Bandit (Sample)
Voyage to the melted core of QAnon's enabler. Jim Watkins is the owner of 8chan / 8kun, the imageboard where Q makes their drops. Plus we have a story by Jake Rockatansky! Witness wet bandits Jim & Ron Watkins attempt to steal a USB key from the President-elect.
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Welcome, listener, to the 102nd premium chapter of the QAnon Anonymous podcast, the Jim Watkins Wet Bandit episode.
As always, we are your hosts, Jake Rakitansky, Julian Fields, and Travis View.
We've been studying Jim Watkins for a while in an attempt to understand the man's role in enabling QAnon.
And every time we do, as we're getting the information needed, I can feel this kind of dark pull.
Like a massive center of gravity hidden just outside my sight.
So today I figured I'd let the tractor beam just do its work.
Let it pull me into Jim's maze of stooges, shell companies, endless content production, and raw tragedy.
This will not be an exhaustive exploration of the man's enterprises, there's plenty of that in our previous episodes and the media has now covered him quite a bit, but instead an exploration of his melted inner world and how it made him into what he is today.
A QAnon promoter overseeing multiple image boards, sputtering his way through incomprehensible live streams as his empire in the Philippines lies outside his reach.
Up until 2020, Jim Watkins had split his time between a pig farm on the outskirts of Manila and a downtown condo.
In January, the Investigations Division of the Philippines Bureau of Immigration designated the man a, quote, undesirable alien.
Instead of granting him the citizenship he was seeking, they instead noted that Jim, quote, is the owner and operator of 8chan, a hate-filled forum slash website which hosts trolling and serves as a go-to resource for violent extremists and white supremacists.
By August 2020, Jim had sold his pig farm and returned to the United States.
It remains to be seen whether Watkins will return to the Philippines.
I mean, he's going to be denied re-entry if he doesn't represent himself in court there before January 31st of 2021.
And that would be to eventually appeal the court's designation.
Jim Watkins.
Wet Sandwich.
Jim Watkins is the owner of the 8chan image board, now renamed 8kun, and he recently hit the news for his role in enabling the anonymous poster known as QAnon, but also because one of his companies, NT Technology, was found to have hosted child pornography domains in the 2010s.
Including references to children as young as 10.
In the wake of the extra attention, it looked for a moment like Jim Watkins would grow an online following, something he'd been attempting to do since 2017, even before the arrival of QAnon.
That was the year that he launched a far-right propaganda outlet called The Goldwater, and coined the slogan, Banned.
Biased.
Honest.
The first iteration of Jim's public persona was Jim Cherney, who dressed in full suits, wore black-rimmed glasses, and combed his hair over like a 60s spook.
He also looked about 20 years younger than he currently does just three years later.
Here he is welcoming people to the site in a YouTube video.
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, can you describe what you just saw?
Yeah, I saw a Jim Watkins who was more put together than I've ever seen him in his life.
His hair is combed, his face is shaved, he's sitting up straight in a nice suit, and then he's delivering this weird, unnerving deadpan message in what looks like a sort of a study, a library or something.
Before we get into Jim's forays into the world of image boards, red pills, and propaganda, let's begin by giving you a bit of background on the man.
Watkins was born an hour north of Seattle in the town of Mukilteo, Washington.
His mother was employed by Boeing, his father by the local phone company.
He joined the U.S.
Army at the age of 18 and was employed as a helicopter mechanic and recruiter until 1987.
That's when the military sent him to Virginia to learn about computing, which honestly sounds like the origin story of the I'm Sorry Boy.
It really does.
They gave him access to the internet.
Armed with tech knowledge by the military, Watkins co-founded a porn website called The Asian Bikini Bar in the 90s, which specialized in circumventing Japanese laws requiring genitals to be pixelated by uncensoring the porn and hosting it in the United States.
Because he came in on the ground floor, Jim had soon built a profitable online porn empire.
In 1998, he even quit the military to focus full-time on his new endeavors.
But the dot-com bubble burst in the early noughts, and this left Jim in a lurch.
So in 2004, he moved the entire operation to the Philippines, where the cost of running his porn websites would be much lower.
Jim continued to develop a Byzantine maze of companies while in the Philippines.
He's a landlord, a pig farmer, and a boss to many employees, most of them Filipinos.
He divorced his first wife and remarried a Filipino woman in 2001.
His eldest son was born at some point in the 90s to Jim and his first wife, and they decided to name him Ronald.
He would have a huge impact on his father's life.
One of the other profitable endeavors that Jim Watkins engaged in was providing web hosting, often to embattled websites catering to alienated online denizens.
This included hosting 2chan or 2chan, one of the original Japanese message boards run by a man called Hiroki Nakamura.
To give you an idea of how influential it has been, 2chan was the inspiration for 4chan, which was started by American 15-year-old Christopher Poole in 2003, and we know how that went.
It's alleged that Watkins stole 2Channel from Nakamura after a dispute between the two.
Nakamura then purchased 4Chan from the embattled Christopher Poole after the image board grew infamous, so it's really, you know, very incestuous.
Before long, Watkins had acquired several image boards, including another Japanese mainstay called 5Channel.
In the process of his expansion in the Philippines, Jim created new companies.
These included Loki Technology, Race Queen Inc., which eventually became NT Technology, and a host of other boring names.
Do note that in the past we thought Race Queen was some sort of like weird racist joke, but it's actually more of a misogynist joke.
It references the Japanese scantily clad women that stand by the F1 racetrack and kind of like wave signs and just broadly entertain the audience.
Oh, okay.
Fascinating.
Not much better, but whatever.
Then, one fateful day in 2015, Jim Watkins was introduced by his son Ron to 8chan, which at the time was owned and run by a young man named Frederick Brennan.
If you're a listener of the podcast, you probably know Fred's story already, but basically he was a Chan user who, after a psychedelic mushroom trip, decided to create what he called Infinite Chan.
It would allow users to create their own boards, which for the layman is like a subreddit, and this was not a feature of any of the previous popular image boards.
Now if you turn that infinity symbol, it becomes an 8.
8chan attracted the most nihilistic and hateful users on the internet, due to its loose to non-existent moderation policies.
It experienced its main population growth when 4chan cracked down on users organizing harassment campaigns against women in the video game industry, causing those users to migrate to Brennan's platform.
Boards were created and communities formed around far-right politics, neo-nazism, misogyny, and child pornography.
What's more, on certain boards, real-life violence was encouraged and celebrated.
Soon, Brennan faced rising costs, deplatforming, and legal problems.
And that's when Jim and Ron Watkins contacted Brennan and offered to help him with the website.
In October of 2014, Brennan got together with other users of 8chan at a strip club in Queens, New York, where he celebrated his deal with the Watkinses and imminent move to the Philippines.
A dancer presented the group with a cake emblazoned with, Happy First Birthday 8chan.
At the time, Brennan was deeply embroiled in the so-called anti-social justice warrior culture and openly supported Gamergate.
He also waved away worries about the child pornography boards by saying that they were the inconvenient result of free speech.
Soon Fred was living in a condo owned by Jim Watkins in Manila.
Less than a year later, in September 2015, Jim Watkins held what he called a press conference with Brennan, addressing 8chan users directly.
Now, the video they recorded opens with this bombastic music, which you'll be hearing, and then the two seem focused on promoting the launch of SoftServe, which was a system that allowed users to purchase advertising on 8chan.
I'm not sure if it still runs the same now.
We talk with our fingers.
Basically, we have no intention or plans or are currently keeping user data, selling big data, or whatever.
We don't track that.
We don't have enough computers to do that.
So we're just not doing that, okay?
So there's no reason for a conspiracy.
But we can talk about what we are doing now.
And it's Fred's turn to talk.
So what we are doing now.
Well, SoftServe just got done.
Please buy ads.
They're really fun.
I saw a lot of the ads that were put up.
Some of them were really funny.
A lot of people linked to their own boards.
You know, it was all cool.
Yeah, please buy ads.
Yeah.
My ads, we need the shiny shekels.
Well, in a way, yes.
Yeah.
So, uh, but anyway, I was mostly working, you know, on getting soft serve done.
Yeah, Fred is visibly already uncomfortable with Jim.
You can tell.
Already he's like, did he make an anti-Semitic joke, actually?
Yeah, just on the thing.
Huh, well.
I'm looking at a lot of the stats and it's like 30,000 page views, 3,000 click-throughs is a normal.
That's unheard of in advertising.
Indeed.
Try softserve.ach.net.
You'll be happy.
So, we're pretty much just showing SoftServe in this video.
Like I said, we don't really know how to do a press conference about the lawsuit stuff.
As far as it goes, I'm gonna say a Tagalog phrase.
Gawahindi Salita.
Deeds, not words.
I'm not a thief.
I've been helping people out.
It's like old-style internet here where, hey, pass me a Cat5 cord and let's hook up a peering session.
That's the kind of people we are.
The video then gives way to an increasingly awkward silence between Brennan and Watkins.
The latter brings up what he calls helmet children.
Towards the end, you'll hear Jim singing, which he does as he puts his arm around Brennan, the young man once again is visibly uncomfortable.
Well, when I'm my old school, we only had a few, and it was because of seizures.
We had a lot of helmet children when I was a kid.
And I really feel bad because we used to tease them.
I'm sorry.
I'm really sorry.
He's apologizing on behalf of everyone who has ever teased a helmet child.
So if you are now an adult helmet child, we are apologizing to you.
