50 Facts About Fredrick Brennan

Fredrick Robert Brennan was born on February 21,1994 and is an American software developer and type designer who founded the imageboard website 8chan in 2013, before going on to repudiate it in 2019.

Fredrick Brennan cut ties with 8chan in 2016 and with Watkins in 2018.

Fredrick Brennan has since become an outspoken critic of both 8chan and Watkins, and has actively battled to try to take 8chan offline.

Fredrick Brennan was born on February 21,1994, in Albany, New York.

Fredrick Brennan was born with osteogenesis imperfecta, commonly known as brittle bone disease, which stunted his growth and requires him to use a wheelchair.

Fredrick Brennan estimates he had broken bones 120 times by the time he was 19.

Fredrick Brennan comes from a multi-generational family with OI, and his mother has the same condition.

Fredrick Brennan's parents divorced when Brennan was five years old.

Fredrick Brennan then lived with his mother until he was 18.

In January 2014, Fredrick Brennan was robbed of almost $5,000 that he was saving up for a new wheelchair.

Fredrick Brennan received a personal apology from New York City Police Commissioner William J Bratton.

Fredrick Brennan wrote an article in 2014 supporting the voluntary sterilization of people with similar severe inheritable genetic conditions.

Fredrick Brennan developed a hatred of his parents for his life of constant pain, stating in an interview for Tortoise Media in 2019, "I don't want to speak for everybody with a disability, but I hate being disabled and I always have".

Fredrick Brennan later became a Christian and ceased to believe in encouraging sterilization.

Fredrick Brennan's disability restricted his play activities during his childhood, so he became "hooked" on his first computer at the age of six.

Fredrick Brennan taught himself to code, and wrote his first independent computer program at the age of 13.

Fredrick Brennan was active in Internet culture from an early age, and was a regular 4chan user since 2006, when he was 12 years old.

Fredrick Brennan began doing freelance work immediately after graduating from high school.

Fredrick Brennan started by doing tasks on Amazon Mechanical Turk, making $5,000 in 2012 through the platform.

Fredrick Brennan later became a "requester" for the service, which earned him enough money to move from his mother's home in Atlantic City, New Jersey, to Brooklyn, New York.

Fredrick Brennan paid the rent for his apartment and he worked a second job, remotely, for a Canadian company to pay for expenses.

Also in 2012, Fredrick Brennan voted for Ron Paul in the 2012 United States presidential election.

In October 2013, Fredrick Brennan launched 8chan, called "Infinitechan" or "Infinitychan", after a month of raising pledges on Patreon.

Fredrick Brennan initially ran the site anonymously, known only as "copypaste", the username he used in IRC chatrooms.

In 2021, Fredrick Brennan told an interviewer for Jacobin that he initially limited 8chan's rules to a prohibition on illegal activity out of laziness rather than ideological conviction.

Fredrick Brennan himself became a prominent Gamergate voice; he went on to be interviewed about 8chan users' involvement in harassment of Brianna Wu on The David Pakman Show, and asked to debate about Gamergate on HuffPost Live and Al Jazeera America.

Fredrick Brennan found it increasingly difficult to keep up with the server costs of the growing site, and the site experienced frequent downtime as multiple internet service providers denied service due to the site's objectionable content.

Fredrick Brennan was criticized for 8chan's pedophilia-related boards; Fredrick Brennan said to The Daily Dot in 2014 that he personally found such content reprehensible, but he stood by his refusal to remove content that did not violate United States law.

Fredrick Brennan agreed to work for Watkins, and in late 2014 he moved to Manila to join him.

Technology, began offering domain name services and hardware to host 8chan in 2014 into 2015, and Fredrick Brennan continued to be responsible for the site's software development and community management.

Fredrick Brennan remained the site administrator until 2016, at which time he relinquished the role.

In 2016, Fredrick Brennan resigned his role as 8chan's site administrator.

Fredrick Brennan continued to work for Watkins but stopped working on and posting at 8chan, continuing instead to work on the 2channel project.

In December 2018, Fredrick Brennan stopped working for Watkins and cut ties with the Watkins family, alleging that Jim Watkins had shown up at his home and berated him for asking to take time off.

Fredrick Brennan became an outspoken critic of 8chan and of Watkins, and actively battled to try to take the site offline.

Watkins responded by filing a lawsuit against Fredrick Brennan, alleging Fredrick Brennan had violated the Philippine Cybercrime Prevention Act of 2012, which makes "cyberlibel" a criminal offense that can be punished with prison time.

Fredrick Brennan has said that Watkins filed the suit to try to intimidate and punish him.

On February 26,2020, a Philippines court issued an arrest warrant for Fredrick Brennan based on the complaint.

Fredrick Brennan has said that because of his medical condition and the notoriously poor conditions in the Bureau of Immigration Bicutan Detention Center, arrest by the Philippine authorities would likely result in his death.

Fredrick Brennan fled the Philippines hours before the warrant was issued, taking a different flight to avoid authorities who were looking for him at the airport.

Fredrick Brennan initially took up residence in Van Nuys, California, in exile from the Philippines, before moving back with family on the East Coast, in late November, 2020.

Fredrick Brennan became a prominent opponent of QAnon, a conspiracy theory and political movement that originated in the far-right political sphere in 2017.

Fredrick Brennan is a central figure in researching the identity of "Q", the anonymous figure behind imageboard posts that originated the conspiracy theory, who claims to be a high level government official with Q clearance and who purports to have access to classified information involving the Trump administration and its opponents in the United States.

Fredrick Brennan believes that Jim and Ron Watkins have controlled the Q account since late 2017 or early 2018, which is when Fredrick Brennan believes Ron Watkins used his access as the owner and operator of 8chan to seize the account from its original operator.

In September 2020, Fredrick Brennan refined his theory by positing that the original "Q" was a South African conspiracy theorist named Paul Furber and that Ron Watkins used his login privileges as 8chan's administrator to seize the Q account away from Furber.

In October 2020, Fredrick Brennan's research revealed that QMap, a popular website disseminating Q posts, was owned by Jim Watkins.

Fredrick Brennan's TT2020 font is a typewriter-style font with many variations on individual glyphs, which attempts to more realistically emulate the inconsistencies in characters that would be produced by a typewriter.

Fredrick Brennan's Chomsky font is a blackletter typeface based on the New York Times logo, with adjustments to make it more suitable for running text rather than mastheads alone.

Fredrick Brennan was commissioned by Google to create a Baybayin font.

Fredrick Brennan was a co-maintainer of the free and open-source software FontForge for a year and a half, starting shortly after he stopped working with Watkins.