My Time With The Founder of 8Chan

Fred Brennan taught me why to bother with humor in my writing.

“You can't have free speech if Nazis are in the room. Once Nazis start talking, everyone else stops.”

Frederick Brennan is a physically small man. This is not by accident, and it is remarkable visually. He has an illness called osteogenesis imperfecta. Which means his bones break frequently. He was raised in foster care and, like many kids, was bullied, and believed nobody would like him. One of the things he came to believe early on is that when people were kind, they were actually lying to him. There was something about the politeness that didn't feel real. He didn't trust it. Fred is wheelchair-bound for the most part, but on the early Internet, he did pretty well for himself. One of the things he noticed on some of the darker corners of the Internet, like the 4Chan image board community, is that people are brutal. He interpreted this brutal back and forth as honest. This was something he found trustworthy.

I met Frederick Brennan—in the manner of all things happening in 2020—on the …