4Chan: How a Cartoon Frog, a 'Dead' Pedophile, and the CIA Destroyed Western Civilization

A completely serious investigation into the internet's most dangerous website, by someone who was literally stabbed the last time he looked into something like this.

They said a cartoon frog couldn’t break the most powerful country on earth. They were wrong.

There is a website you have almost certainly never visited, and if you have, you are either a journalist, a federal agent, or someone whose browsing history you would prefer we not discuss. It is called 4chan. It has existed since 2003, which makes it one of the oldest anonymous forums on the internet, in the same way that a particular alley in a bad neighborhood might be described as “historic.”

Here is what 4chan actually is, for those of you who missed the cultural moment where a cartoon frog allegedly helped decide a presidential election: it is an imageboard where anyone on earth can post anything they want without revealing who they are. No username. No account. No consequences. You show up, you say whatever is rattling around in your skull, and you vanish. This sounded like a wonderful idea in 2003 and has been an ongoing catastrophe ever since.

What kind of catastrophe? Let us count the ways. 4chan is where roughly half the memes currently occupying real estate in your brain were invented. It is where serious researchers, by which I mean people who spent months studying the site and are now in therapy, say a significant portion of the 2016 presidential election was decided.

And it is where a convicted child sex trafficker named Jeffrey Epstein was, according to Department of Justice documents released this past January, emailing colleagues about the site’s “potential for manipulation.”

The emails are publicly available. You can look them up. I mention this not to be dramatic but because it is genuinely the least dramatic thing in our video, which should tell you something about where this is going.

We just made a video about it.

Now here is the part where I tell you about the YouTube channel this video lives on, and why you specifically should watch it.

A few years ago, a friend of mine from high school and I built a YouTube channel together. We posted videos. People watched them. 40,000 people subscribed. A couple of things went viral. We were, by any honest accounting, doing quite well for two people operating out of sheer stubbornness and an aggressive disregard for their own limitations.

Then we stopped. Not voluntarily.

I was in New Mexico investigating the suspicious death of actor Isaac Kappy when I got stabbed. My friend, who is our staff graphic designer and the person responsible for making everything we produce look intentional rather than accidental, lost his job around the same time and spent the next year and a half living in a tent. The channel went dark. The algorithm forgot us. YouTube moved on, as it does, to creators who were still technically conscious and housed.

The Wise Wolf Substack is the reason I am still here doing this, and I mean that in the most literal sense possible. The readers who subscribed and kept this publication running are the reason I was able to pay my bills while I got back on my feet. And when things stabilized enough that I had something to work with, the first thing I did before figuring out my own housing situation was make sure my friend had an apartment. He will tell you I did not have to do that. He is correct. I did it anyway, which I mention only because it is relevant to understanding why I am now asking you for something.

He has a roof. The channel is alive again. And this video is our first shot out of the starting gate.

It is called The Website That Broke America, and it covers the ten most disturbing conspiracy theories about 4chan itself, not from it, which is a distinction worth making because the conspiracy theories generated BY 4chan users are honestly pretty pedestrian compared to the ones about who built it, who secretly funded it for seven years while holding a Disney licensing deal at the same time (I am not making that up), why a classified Pentagon program was running meme warfare research while 4chan was becoming the most influential meme engine on the internet, and why Jeffrey Epstein was personally interested in its manipulation potential the day after its most consequential board launched. We cover all of it. Every claim is sourced.

YouTube’s algorithm, which governs all things and answers to no one, operates on the principle that channels which have gone dormant are dead and deserve to stay that way. The only argument it will accept to the contrary is views, subscribers, and engagement. So I am asking you to make that argument. Watch the video. Subscribe to the channel. Leave a comment if the spirit moves you.

We are planning live streams once we get the equipment sorted out. I am also working on getting Lily, my editor, on camera with us, for the simple reason that she is significantly more pleasant to look at than two middle-aged men arguing about ancient Egyptian chaos demons, and our subscribers deserve at least one person on screen who does not make them want to adjust their monitor settings. She has not yet agreed to this arrangement. The negotiations are ongoing.

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