Transcription
The latest batch of Epstein files released by the Department of Justice hints at an interesting connection between Jeffrey Epstein and the social media platform 4chan, including its extremely controversial, divisive politics board. So to talk about that today, I have with me journalist Ryan Brick. He is behind the newsletter Garbage Day. He has spent years reporting on 4chan, the alt-right online, and all sorts of people who appeared in the Epstein files. And just this weekend, he spent a lot of time digging through the newly released batch of Epstein files. Ryan, how's your mental health doing?
>> Yeah. Um, I, you know, if it's, it's really hard not to say stuff right now that makes me sound like a complete and total maniac. Um, but it does seem like a nefarious cabal of pedophiles and oligarchs uh trashed the internet and democracy in the 2010s so that we wouldn't pay attention to what they were doing. That that is sort of the broadest uh view I have right now.
Okay. So for those who did not spend time on the internet at the height of 4chan's popularity, Ryan, could you just sort of explain like what is this social media platform and how does it tie into the alt-right and like global politics more generally?
>> Yeah, so it's long been accepted that the uh the base of the global farright movement in the 2010s was this anonymous message board called 4chan. And 4chan has different sections. And one of the sections of 4chan that was most active with things like Gamergate and then the 2016 Trump campaign and then the kind of global takeover uh of politics, you know, after that was the politically incorrect board or Poll. Poll was launched in 2011. Um, and it's always been sort of a mystery as to why because there were two boards before that that tried to do the same thing. basically give people on 4chan a place to talk about politics. And the founder of 4chan, Christopher Pool, who also known as Moot, his username, um had banned or or kind of gotten rid of the two previous boards. And then a year later, he turns around and he creates Pole. And Pole goes on to take over the world. And so, we've never totally known why. Uh in fact, the two boards that were banned before Pole were banned for being racist. So, like, why would you ban those and then just make a new board to be super racist in? It doesn't make any sense,
>> right?
>> And now, thanks to the Department of Justice's release of uh, you know, thousands and thousands of Epstein emails, we have possibly a hint as to why Christopher Pool brought Paul back,
>> right? And so, I first saw people talking about this on X and it was literally like almost like a conspiracy board where it was screenshots of emails, lines going in every which direction like timeline of 4chan. But basically, Epstein had a meeting set up with this guy on the day before he launched Paul.
>> Yeah. So, I I I want to be really careful and like not overstate things because there's a lot we don't know. But what we can say is that in October of 2011, Epstein received an email from one of his associates, Boris Nicolik, who is a venture capitalist, was a former adviser for Bill Gates, sort of part of his larger network of people. And it was just they do this a lot in the emails. They'll just send each other Wikipedia articles. And so he sent him the Wikipedia article for Christopher Pool and said, "You got to check this kid out." They then set up a meeting and it based on emails four days later, it does appear like Epstein met with Christopher Pool
>> and then they spend like the next four months trying to meet with him again and he keeps flaking on them and there's like hundreds of emails of them like begging him to answer his email. So, it seems like he ghosted them or flaked on them or he he's he's not known as being a particularly um uh easy person to deal with. So, like even the Epstein network had issues, I guess. But right after, like a day after he meets with Epstein, he launches the politically incorrect board. Now, we can't definitively say that Epstein told him, "Hey, you should make this like giant community for the international far right." And we can't say that Epstein was an active 4chan user. What we can say though is that Epstein was sending 4chan links around, including a link to uh pornography based on the video game Five Nights at Freddy's.
Yes.
>> Which he sent to a girlfriend of his in 2017. So we can say, here's what we can say. We can say that Epstein met with Christopher P, the founder of 4chan. A day after they met, Christopher P created the message board that would inspire Gamergate and the far-right takeover of the planet. And we can also say that Epstein was at least reading 4chan up until 2017.
>> The detail in your piece about this about Five Nights at Freddy's. As soon as I read it, I was like, great, I'm going to be thinking about this for the rest of my life. I like screenshotted that was sending it to people. I was like, "This is so disturbing." In part because it's just so like it's such a banal thing that you could come across on the internet. The fact that it is something that Jeffrey Epstein was looking at and sending to someone just again it's just like this very surreal, deeply internet lore associated guy. And another thing that I thought was interesting is, and you mentioned this in your piece, is with his correspondences with Peter Teal, we see Epstein fantasizing about this like far right takeover as well as collapse of the current global order. Like Brexit is just the beginning is something that he said to him. I'm curious how you see like 4chan aligning with this broader vision for the future that he that he seemed to have.
So, I think the really important piece here is that like Ebstein was very interested in video games. And he was very interested in video games for a couple reasons. One, he was interested in uh like in-game purchases and the ability to trade video game assets. I sort of see this as a precursor to his interest in Bitcoin for the same reason. Also, I I think I've read the argument and I sort of buy it that like him making an account on World of Warcraft in 2010 was probably like a really easy way to communicate with people,
>> you know, an untraceable way maybe to communicate, but he was very interested in digital assets. And so, he is exploring different video games. He's he's clearly in the sort of video game subcultures to some degree. This is how he starts to have run-ins very early with Steve Bannon's gold farming operation, which people don't really remember that Steve Bannon got his start running a company that uh farmed gold in World of Warcraft. So, Epste is like part of this world.
>> Um, when he meets Peter Teal in the middle of the 2010s, they are very interested in these ideas. How do you dismantle democracy? How do you influence politicians with untraceable, you know, uh, forms of finance? Um, and I could see 4chan being very valuable to him. We don't have, you know, we don't have evidence that Epstein was like running a, you know, operations on 4chan. We can't really say that he I've seen people go so far as to be like, Epstein did Gamergate, and it's like, no. Like I I'm fairly certain Gamergate would have happened with or without
>> Epstein,
>> but there was interest in that world in using these online spaces to manipulate discourse. And so, you know, very interestingly, I think this is one of the most interesting pieces, you know, in the Epstein email cache is that so the New York Times writes about the Harvey Weinstein allegations. And so the next day, his longtime accountant, Richard Khan, sends Epstein a wired article about Steve Bannon's beginnings on World of Warcraft as a gold farmer. So you you can you can very clearly see the dots connecting here of like, oh, this guy is sort of interested in the same stuff you're interested in. You two should talk about the Me Too movement, which at the time they are calling the Times Up movement. So, it's it's all kind of related to like how do you control online discourse and how do you send money over the internet without anybody knowing?
>> It makes a lot of sense and it's like at the end of the day obviously their ideological interests, their self-preservation interests in Epstein's case. Obviously, they align with the backlash to the Me Too movement and fermenting that backlash. And I remember like Steve Bannon at the time when Trump was first elected um was already really concerned about this because he viewed backlash through me too as like a genuine threat to the patriarchal world order and he was super open about that with reporters like in his writing and his speaking. So, it's no surprise that these guys would be like sharing in this sort of idea of despair. Like, what are we going to do if women start making these credible allegations against powerful figures and people start taking them seriously? And that aligns very clearly with those reactionary backlash movements against me, too.
>> Yeah. There's a really fascinating thread of emails in February 2018 between Bannon and Epstein. I want to read them because I think it's it's it's kind of it's possible it's like as close as we're going to get to like a kind of a smoking gun here.
>> Um so, uh Epstein writes to Bannon coin issues, receive coins. He Oh, I should say uh Epstein writes like a maniac and it's just full of typos and and insane, but
>> he writes coin issues, receive coins, distribute coins, pay in coins, coin cooperative, prohibitions, foreign donor question mark. I need to understand the flow of funds, donor to campaigns. Does it have to go through the campaign first? Does it have to go there at all? Bannon replies, should it have a Christian component? If you form a church, maybe you can tell Mueller, Robert Mueller, that you have a confession privilege.
>> Wow.
>> And then Bannon replies, populist nationalist first, conservative Christians, reverse Alabama. This coalition staves off the times up for the next decade plus. And then they continue sort of talking about this idea of okay, we can build a far-right coalition. We can fund them with cryptocurrency and they can fight the Times Up movement. And what's really interesting is
>> there's there's like a million stories in these emails, but one of the the more interesting ones for me was watching Epstein's mind change about cryptocurrency.
>> He he would tell people often like, "Don't invest in it. I don't really think about it." I he he has this insane line that he thinks it's inherently trans
>> because it it
>> he says that it's both property and currency at the same time and is as confusing as trans people are. He's like very transphobic.
>> And so he he he doesn't really know what to do with it. But then in the middle of the 2010s, he slowly starts to realize that he can use it to back channel money to in particular farright politicians across Europe. And so once Bannon gets on his team, they just go to work and they're talking to the ADF. They're talking to the AFD in Germany, the Front National in France, Orban in uh Hungary, like every farright politician you can imagine. There's stuff you in here about Bolsinaro in Brazil. Like they are very active with this idea and is very much based on crushing the Me Too movement.
>> Fascinating. And I want to kind of get to the legacy of what they're doing at this point in 2018. But before that, we had Gamergate and I want to ask you to like describe Gamergate to people who have no idea what it is.
>> I am so jealous of anyone who doesn't know what it is. So, Gamergate uh starts in 2014, in the spring of 2014, when a man shares a blog post about his ex-girlfriend, Zoe Quinn, and he basically makes a bunch of allegations that Zoe Quinn was uh trading sexual favors with video game journalists for positive coverage of her video game Depression Quest. That's sort of the simplest version of of what happened here. That blog post gets shared on 4chan and it's kind of kicking around 4chan and gamer circles and and and not really getting a lot of attention. At this point, Steve Bannon has become the editor-inchief of Breitbart News. And he hires Milo Yiannopoulos to be his video game correspondent, his sort of first attempt at a tech writer. And Milo was very smart
>> in taking things he was seeing on 4chan and Reddit and putting them in articles which at the time was a very uh easy way to get Facebook traffic. Facebook was really emphasizing the Facebook article. This is like peak upworthy curiosity gap days. And so Breitbart hijacks that. And so what they do is that they're taking the most deranged stuff you're seeing on the corner of the internet that you would, you know, forget about in a couple days and they're packaging it into what looks like real news articles and they're going viral on Facebook. And so this supercharges Gamergate and it becomes the the earliest conspiratorial framework for the larger farright movement. So G without Gamergate, you don't get Pizzaggate. Without Pizzagate, you don't get QAnon. you don't get the Trump campaign probably being able to sort of talk about uh you know Hillary Clinton's emails. There's a lot of different um right-wing and far-right uh parties trying to manipulate online discourse and we know that Epste was interested in this stuff. So basically Epstein was aware of Gamergate but he wasn't aware of Gamergate until 2018 um when it starts to like bubble up to to sort I think by 2018 people are sort of saying like oh Gamergate was important we should have we should have treated this with more you know uh journalistic heft and so um but he was not you know from what we can see he was not directly part of it.
That makes sense because it seems to me that particularly when you get to 2018, we've now seen the the hashtagmeto movement really ferment a lot of backlash. We've seen the allegation against Harvey Weinstein. We've seen the allegations of a lot against a lot of like powerful men in Hollywood against a lot of politicians. Like a lot of these allegations have now breached the public consciousness. And I think at this point in time, a lot of these powerful men who oppose the Me Too movement, often for self-preservation reasons are trying to come up with ways to best combat these allegations. And what we saw happen through these like online channels also like at the political level over the following years is like how do we create backlashes that blame the women, you know, isolate and target the accusers, label them as sort of the bad guys, and how do we rely on the internet and our sort of like pseudojournalistic network of alt-right agitators to do that. And that is what we then see happen in Deb be heard. That is what we then see happen right now with the Blake Lively case. And interestingly enough, a lot of the same people who were involved in this, Steve Bannon is one of them. Like they have left long legacies of just like personnel that extend into all these other areas. And that strategy of using spaces like 4chan, integrating it into like mainstream news articles and pushing them on people through algorithms, that strategy is very much still in effect today. So it's like there's a whole you can draw a straight line between like some of what was happening in these emails and then some of the strategies that are in effect right now.
>> Yeah. I I I think that's exactly right. Like Gamergate is a test drive for everything that happens later. I also think like Gamergate in a lot of ways. Me too probably happens the same way without Gamergate, but it definitely shaped I think the the way Me Too was processed. And it's not like the the the complicated thing about about Epstein's operation is like he had a a hand in a million cookie jars. So, not only is he trying to break up the Me Too movement politically, there's all there's a whole other trench of emails uh between him and Peggy Seagull,
>> uh the Hollywood publicist. So, we and we don't really know, we're only seeing the tip of the iceberg. We're seeing like emails from like his texts and like his vacation email. We don't really know the the the extent of his influence network, but we know that he was very singularly focused in the last years of his life on making sure that uh women could not speak up about sexual abuse. That was like a that was because uh the Weinstein uh article in the Times seemed to really scare them. Like his his whole demeanor kind of shifts actually in a way. I might be kind of putting a too much editorial slant on how much I read, but to me it the he he's he's writing and he's acting very differently.
>> Yeah, that's super super interesting. And like the Hollywood publicist component of this is actually so fascinating to me because another person who shows up in here is Matthew Hiltick. And Matthew Hiltick is still a Hollywood publicist representing tons of people like even Mr. Beast to this day. and he previously represented Weinstein. He represented Weinstein in sort of the back and forth leading up to the bombshell New York Times article. He has his own PR firm, Hiltsick Strategies, where some other people who show up in the Epstein files like sort of become like learn the ropes of publicity. And there's a particular exchange with Nam Chosky, the famous linguist and philosopher where he's outlining like how he would defend Epstein and he's sending this to Matthew Hiltzick. And interestingly enough, um, a publicist by the name of Melissa Nathan worked at Hiltsick Strategies and went on to create her own publicity firm, The Agency Group. She's the one who represents Justin Baldon in the Blake Lively. And Julie Gl is also suing Melissa. And today, [laughter] or like today or yesterday, within the past couple of days, uh, Melissa Nathan, she's she's in the Epstein files, like her name is on one of these chains. She denied having involvement through a statement that was given exclusively to anti-Blake Lively YouTubers who live streamed that yesterday. So, it's like you can see how all of the same minations and strategies that were employed during Gamergate, that were employed during, you know, Deb Herd, it's all kind of like the same playbook being utilized over and over and over again. And this is something that while Epstein didn't come up with, he's not like the progenitor of all of these strategies, he's just someone who had a lot of vested interest in seeing this kind of stuff come to fruition and ultimately seeing it work um to like silence women. And there's obviously we know why Epstein wanted to silence women.
>> Yeah. I mean, one of the useful documents I found for sort of understanding Epstein's operation was a diary from one of his victims that was included. And it's extremely heavy reading. Um, it's it's it's one of the most upsetting things I've read in my entire life, but it has a line in there that I I can't really shake and and I do think it offers a useful framework for understanding how this all worked. And the line I just pulled it up here is unlike drugs, a child's body can be sold over and over. And I think that there is something it's one of those things that that really oriented me in in this world which is like they are they are using the the the the trafficking of young girls as a currency as a as a product as a service and that is built uh with uh you know a machinery of PR people and consultants and politicians. that are allowing this to happen. And me too was extremely dangerous for this. Like it was um if if abusers, you know, can feel comfortable speaking out, the whole thing crumbles. And so, you know, Epstein at the heart of it is this prolific pedophile who has been able to build this massive network with the world's most powerful and influential people. the whole thing comes crumbling down if these girls can speak out.
>> And it does require just like a a truly unfathomable amount of cooperation between law firms and PR agencies and and and every other facet of society you can imagine.
>> Yeah, absolutely. I think that's exactly it. And you even see this happening with the release of the Epstein files right now where it's like you look at who is being protected by the Department of Justice. They have redacted so many of the names of people who are being emailed by Epstein, who are emailing Epstein back, but they disclose so many of the victim's names to the point where lawyers for the some of these victims have like begged the DOJ to shut down the website, retract a ton of the documents because they're exposing not just their names, but also addresses, bank account information, all of these details that put them in very real danger. And at the same time, the DOJ has also released like tons of unredacted photos that are sexually explicit in nature. Some featuring young women, some of them featuring girls. So, it's like even in the handling of the Epstein files now, you see how the perpetrators are protected and how like the victims are ultimately being systemically punished for coming forward for working so hard to demand the release of these files.
Yeah, it's very clear that they decided that they were willing to sacrifice some of his network.
>> Yeah.
>> Um or they believe that those men could like withstand the storm. Like you know, Peter Teal hasn't made a statement yet. I don't think he'll ever make a statement, but he is like heavily featured in those emails. Elon Musk, uh they don't seem to like Elon Musk. The only person they seem to like less than Elon Musk is Trump, but like he's in there a bunch too. And so they are yeah they they I I have also read the theory and I'm I'd be curious like what you think about this that the way that they're releasing these files is in a way like a kind of a a galaxy brain way of of discrediting the survivors as well by sort of like overloading the internet with all of this stuff. I'm I'm not totally sure about that. I mean, I think it has had that effect, but that
>> I don't know. Maybe I should just start assuming conspiracies all over the place at this point. I don't know.
>> My guess is that it's not intentional necessarily. It does remind me of Steve Bannon's famous flood the zone strategy of just like overwhelm people with so much negative information that none of it can be like singularly focused on or taken care of. And you do see that happening with the Epstein files with like this gradual release of these massive dumps of information. That is kind of happening, but I don't think that they're necessarily smart enough for that to have been the plan. It's just like, oh, conveniently it works out for them that way. Um, the last thing I wanted to ask you, Ryan, before I let you go is in terms of looking at what comes next. I've seen a lot of chatter of like, oh, now people who were on 4chan can finally recognize that they were bamboozled this whole time or like all of these QAnon people have been useful idiots essentially um for the very like pedophile sex traffickers who they you know wanted to expose. Do you think but what I'm seeing is a lot of Q anon people are actually feasting on these documents. So I'm curious if you think we're going to see any shifts of like awareness around the alt-right online or if it's just going to continue like sort of moving ahead.
>> Epstein did not invent 4chan culture. 4chan had existed for almost a decade before Epstein even knew about it. and he certainly didn't invent being like racist online. What we can say is that the international coalition of, you know, white nationalists and men's rights activists and all the bad men on the internet have spent the better part of a decade working for, you know, in some capacity the political interests and economic interests of a shadowy cabal of pedophiles. Um, I imagine that that is just too much for any of them to ever really reckon with. I I can't. The only one who seems to be like, "Oh, my bad," is Marjorie Taylor Green, who seems to be quite genuine about the fact that like
>> she she got duped.
>> Um, but everyone else is, I think, not really willing to admit that. I don't know what happens next with this because the scope and scale of it is so massive and we still have only ever seen, you know, a a tiny iota of what's of, you know, we're only seeing his vacation email and like a few other sources.
>> So, I'm hoping, you know, I I just did an interview with Representative Roana and I and I I asked him, you know, like, you know, are you going to keep pushing on this? and they they claim they are and I hope there's more coming, but the DOJ is going to do everything in its power to sort of obuscate what's in there. But um at a certain point in a just world uh there would be riots in the streets over what's in these emails. Uh the the entire global order would collapse for good reasons, which is none of these people have our interests at heart and they are all colluded with each other. And I'm trying not to sound like a maniac when I talk about this stuff, but it it it is really it's really mind-blowing what's in there and what's already been released. And so you have to imagine that what hasn't been released is like even more damning. And so if we ever see it, um I don't know. Like I don't know what that does to to the global order. I really don't.
>> Yeah. Yeah. Well, thank you for doing the work to dig through these documents, Ryan, and thanks for joining us today.
>> Thanks for having me.