Austin Tucker Martin, 21, from North Carolina, drove into the resort's secure perimeter early Sunday morning local time armed with a shotgun and a jerry can before being shot and killed
Mandelson arrested on suspicion of misconduct
https://www.lemonde.fr/en/pixels/article/2026/02/23/death-of-fredrick-brennan-creator-of-8chan-forum-where-qanon-emerged_6750792_13.html
Death of Fredrick Brennan, creator of 8chan forum where QAnon emerged
This self-taught programmer ultimately renounced his creation and became a fierce critic of QAnon and unmoderated forums.
A central figure in the English-speaking world of anonymous forums and the creator of 8chan, the site where the QAnon conspiracy theory took root, Fredrick Brennan died on January 10. The announcement was made on Sunday, February 22, by the podcast I'm from the internet, in which he was a regular participant. According to the same source, he died in his sleep. He was 31 years old.
Born in 1994, Brennan suffered from a rare disease, osteogenesis imperfecta – also known as "brittle bone disease" – which makes bones extremely fragile and leads to severe growth delays and significant disability. He spent most of his childhood unable to leave his home and he developed a passion for computers at the age of 6. As a self-taught programmer, he began earning money in his teens by developing software and websites.
At the same time, he frequented highly popular, loosely moderated anonymous forums under the pseudonyms "Copypaste" or "Hotwheels" (a reference to his wheelchair). He spent much of his time on 4chan and also on Wizardchan, a smaller and misogynistic forum for male virgins, where he briefly served as administrator.
Supporter of far-right ideas
Both of these forums had a clear far-right leaning and Brennan shared these views. His parents divorced in 1999. He first lived with his father, then with his mother, after a period in foster care. He harbored deep resentment toward his parents, who knew there was a high risk their children would inherit osteogenesis imperfecta, which his mother also had. In 2014, he published an op-ed on the Daily Stormer, the main English-language neo-Nazi website, where he expressed support for eugenics and voluntary sterilization of people with disabilities.
That same year, a forum he had created a few months earlier, 8chan, suddenly became very popular. This copy of 4chan attracted at the time "refugees" who complained that 4chan had moved toward censorship, even though moderation on 4chan remained almost nonexistent. In particular, the most vocal core of Gamergate, a misogynistic movement that claimed to "defend video games," settled on 8chan with Brennan's blessing.
This success drew the attention of Ron and Jim Watkins, Americans from the pornography industry who also ran, under murky circumstances, the original Japanese anonymous forum 2chan. Brennan was no longer able to pay his website's bills, shunned by advertisers mainly because he also hosted child pornography. He accepted their proposal to join forces and moved to the Philippines, where the Watkins lived.
The partnership did not work out. In July 2016, Brennan handed over control of 8chan to the Watkins. In the following years, the forum became the epicenter of several new forms of extremism. Starting in 2017, activity around "Q," the anonymous account at the heart of the QAnon conspiracy theory, grew on the forum. It was also where the perpetrator of the Christchurch attack (51 people killed in two mosque shootings) posted his manifesto in 2019, as did the perpetrator of the El Paso, Texas, shooting that same year (23 killed).
Political shift
"Shut the site down," declared the creator of 8chan to The New York Times after the El Paso shooting. "It's not doing the world any good." Brennan, who had found religion and married a woman he met in Manila, also became a vehement critic of QAnon. He began working with journalists to try to unmask the person behind "Q." Convinced it was Jim Watkins, Brennan provided many technical elements to support his accusations. Jim Watkins filed a defamation suit and Brennan fled the Philippines to avoid arrest and returned to the United States.
"Fred was one of the most complicated people I’ve ever known," wrote American journalist Cullen Hoback, who spent considerable time with him while filming a documentary series on QAnon, in a post on X after Brennan's death was announced. "He was hilarious, occasionally dangerous and eccentric in all the best ways." "Away from his keyboard, Fred had a capacity for sweetness and introspection," added Arthur Jones, co-director of the documentary The Antisocial Network, in which Brennan appears at length. "His right-leaning politics faded as he navigated a world [in the Philippines] where people like himself – the poor and disabled – were viewed as worthless by society."
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