EXCLUSIVE: TheRalph Interviews /gamergatehq/ Board Owner Acid Man About His FBI Claims

If you’ve been following the happenings over on the chan section of GamerGate, then you know shit is crazy as fuck over there right now. Acid Man, the head of /gamergatehq/, has been under scrutiny over a various number of things, including his moderation style and alleged real-life activities. I refrained from covering all that, not out of an allegiance to Acid, but simply because I wanted to stay out of it. So, when he came to me a couple weeks ago with talk of an interview about his latest campaign, I kept an open mind and said I would cover it, if there was enough there. Suffice it to say, there’s a ton here. I can’t verify anything, because these are quotes from Acid, not an FBI agent. But still, there’s a lot of material for people to judge for themselves.

I can tell you that every single quote I give you today is accurate, and if someone tries to say it isn’t, I will be able to prove them wrong. I can also tell you that I take no side in this battle between Acid Man and his adversaries, whether they’re inside or outside of /ggrevolt/. This isn’t a war on anyone. I’m simply reporting what I was told. We also have some quotes from one of the targets, “Zan,” as well as Fredrick “Hotwheels” Brennan (the 8chan admin) about the situation. Look for them after we talk to Acid.

The following quotes were taken directly from my interview with Acid Man (any orange is me)…

One, the SWATing attempt on me was real. The guys who confirmed it for me were the county police department. I sell guns, I’m an 02/07. Which an 02 is a gun manufacture’s license. An 07 is a special privilege’s writ called an SOT that I qualified for that lets me manufacture and sell class 3 weaponry to government agency and law enforcement officers. Basically, when a police department wants to buy a grenade launcher, or they want to buy grenades or M4 carbines and three-round burst weapons for their SWAT teams, I’m the guy who they come to buy the shit from…

I’m enjoying this initial impression that I was a FBI agent, I didn’t intend for that to happen. I was enjoying some the salt that came from it.

The only thing I have to say to that is they involved the FBI, ATF, and the cops fucking first. The county police department were the first to confirm, but the ATF did also.

There’s this strong strain of “Acid Man is snitching” now. At least that’s one of the talking points from adversaries…

On the Denton Leak, which did in KingOfPol during the fall of 2014…

It was Moltar and Drybones that set him up, according to insiders. The problem that I’ve got is I can’t give too much. I can give information to you but I can’t give too much without outing who my sources were because this was a pretty small group.

He also went into some of the things that caused this war in the first place. According to him, this battle is all the result of the original IRC group (Thidran, Drybones, etc) losing their ability to control the flow of information on 8chan after /gamergate/ went up in smoke due to Bladee’s spergout. It’s basically the same clique of people that Neirdan talked about back in January, when they turned the whole triangle thing into a joke. I won’t take sides in the conflicts Acid has, but I will say that I never considered it a joke.

Acid talked a lot about a labyrinth of IRC rooms leading up from #burgersandfries, going through a “VIP” room, a “#Luminatti” chat, all the way up to “#ggmonks” and “Mountain Dew & Doritos,” which were allegedly the top level groups. I was in the VIP level myself last year, but I was bounced from there after the Neirdan post. I’m not a huge fan of IRC anyway, so I didn’t really care. I only say this to let you know that there did seem to be a structure of groups.

I can also say that I did seem to face organized attacks from this sector after Neirdan did his work, which would also be during the time Drybones and Moltar were allegedly the senior figures of the IRC cabal. Does that mean everything is true? I can’t say. Everything Acid said was backed up by another person, who told me he was inside the top level of the IRC clique and their chats. Of note, the source told me that he couldn’t pinpoint the exact person who ordered the Denton leak, only that it came from the Luminati cabal.

More from Acid Man…

They go from ggmonks and Mountain Dew & Doritos, they pass their ideas down to this Luminati chat room, where you had all these movers and shakers from GamerGate hanging out. Then those guys would take it directly out to social media via the accounts they controlled, 

Another thing to note was that Acid told me that almost every mod or infrastructure owner was in the lower levels of the IRC groups (and if they weren’t in already, they would get added in as their accomplishments brought them to the group’s attention). With this, they could hand down ideas from the very top and pump them into Luminati, see how they went over, and then depending on how it went, use the power nodes to push it out. He talked about them using the IRC rooms to manipulate the threads on 8chan and elsewhere, and said there would be at least 10-12 volunteers (average) to go and shill on threads. When he took over /gamergatehq/ and started banning some of the shills, this is allegedly what put him into conflict with Drybones. The old powers they used to have (under /gamergate/, which was controlled by their allies) were now gone, according to Acid Man.

Acid detailed a similar structure on the chans, where info would originate in the /v/ mega-thread, then move to /gg/, before it eventually went to KotakuInAction. The main difference there was that there was no shilling tactics or hidden channels…

We just spread the info. We didn’t do it in a group organized way to manipulate people. They had groups of 8-10 people volunteer to shill their threads on the boards and sage what they didn’t like, with mods in their pocket.

I’m restricted in what he wished me to share about the FBI aspect, but I am allowed to tell you that “Zan” is one of the prime targets. One of the reasons for this is what he said on a livestream that a friend of mine happened to be on (by the way, she has nothing to do with any of this). Many members of the lower lever Luminati groupings still consider the whole thing a joke according to Acid’s account, and I assume he used to think the same thing. Since the doxing and raid originated out of this group (according to him), it caused him and his supporters to start digging, which is what lead us to this point today. There’s one more thing that Acid Man told me in my role as messenger, and was that he wanted to apologize to the general anons on /ggrevolt/ for getting sucked into a war with the board when he should have focused on ecelebs working from the outside instead.

I didn’t really know who was manipulating us until now, and I blamed the wrong people. My heartfelt apology goes to the 8chan anons who left.

To reiterate, I spoke with sources allegedly from the highest levels of the IRC labyrinth, although I cannot confirm that they actually were. They certainly seemed to have a lot of knowledge about things over there, though, so take it for what it’s worth. I imagine people looking to believe Acid will do so and those who aren’t will discard all that. That’s a perfectly fair state of affiars, so I’m not concerned with who believes what. I do want to again stress that I am not taking sides in all this. My only goal is to accurately lay out the claims and counterclaims. If this story requires a follow-up of some sort to lay out more info, I will do that.

As for Zan, one of the people at the center of all this conflict, he had this to say to me a couple nights ago…

I did say [I lead the raids against Acid Man], but it’s not true. I didn’t actually lead it. I was in a couple of the /b/ threads, but beyond that, I didn’t contribute to the dox, I didn’t post the dox, I didn’t actually send whatever they were sending…I guess police reports? I didn’t actually send any and I didn’t SWAT him. If somebody did it wouldn’t surprise me…

I wish I hadn’t done the stream, in retrospect. I didn’t realize somebody was gonna try to pin some shit on me that I didn’t do. He’s coming after anybody who was one of his perceived political opponents, whether they actually were, or not. Anybody that’s in those folders, like he’s claiming he turned all that over, so it’s whatever. Kinda worried about it but I didn’t do anything illegal, so I didn’t do any of the things he’s claiming. If it actually has to go to investigation, they can just pull 8chan’s posting history and then they can find out who was actually doing that shit.

What I am worried about is getting stuck with the charges, and then, oh, it takes like, it takes a year of investigation for them to go in and find out who really did it and then clear me…I didn’t want to go through anything like this, that’s why I left the guy alone. Acid always struck me as too fucking crazy to mess with. So, you know, I’m kinda sad cause I did get kinda roped in. People were, not necessarily from Luminati, but some of the other shitposters were constantly wanting me to come back, and as soon as I got roped back into streams they were like “Why don’t you do this, why don’t you do that,” so, you know. Probably wouldn’t be here otherwise. 

Here are the video clips in question…

Now, I’m gonna close this out with some thoughts from Hotwheels, which he gave out on IRC recently (copypaste is his handle)…

<Janitor01> Volunteer from /ggrevolt/
<copypaste> what kind of comment my friend
<copypaste> this drama is over as far as i’m concerned
<Janitor01> Him threatening to take users’ posting histories and reporting them to the FBI and what not
<Janitor01> even if he was “just pretending to report you guys to the FBI” it’s really fucked up
<Janitor01> There’s still a running sticky on his board with a list of users in the OP who have namefagged on my board
<copypaste> if they didn’t do anything wrong they have nothing to worry about. i was more worried about him impersonating an agent, which is a felony. since he wasn’t i don’t care.
<copypaste> they can’t get IPs without asking me anyway
<Janitor01> https://8ch.net/gamergatehq/res/305006.html
<copypaste> people have reported me to the FBI hundredrs of times by now
<copypaste> no big deal
<copypaste> acid is a snitch and untrustworthy. i don’t know how he thinks this will help his board
<Janitor01> He is breaking the trust of the users of the site by breaking their anonymity. No one knows who they are from thread to thread, yet here he is, saying that he’s collecting their posting history, and reporting it to the FBI. I know nothing would even come of it if he did, still, it’s a reason for concern.
<copypaste> i agree. i think everyone who cars will leave his board
<copypaste> he’s helping GGR not hurting them
<copypaste> no one will go to jail and no one will trust him again
<Janitor01> I disagree. It’s like the reddit system
<Janitor01> “go make your own subreddit”
<Janitor01> that rarely works
<Janitor01> ggrevolt is proof of that not working
<copypaste> he has a right to report whoever SWATed him
<copypaste> i’m not getting involved in this
<Janitor01> the larger board will discredit the smaller board
<copypaste> he didn’t commit a felony
<copypaste> he’s fine by me
<copypaste> even if i think he’s an idot
<Janitor01> I didn’t swat him
<copypaste> and he hopes an investigation will figure out who did
<Janitor01> Look, you don’t tell people “if you don’t like it, make your own board”. That system works in theory, but it is not working.
<Janitor01> You can’t have cancerous BOs that will snitch on the people who post on their board.
<Janitor01> ggrevolt was smeared across the internet from the minute it was created
<copypaste> why not? it’s not against the global rules
<copypaste> reporting people to the FBI isn’t against the law
<copypaste> it’s actually a right of citizens
<Janitor01> abusing the BO privileges you allow on your site isn’t against the law, but it is your site
<copypaste> is it really abuse? he believes someone SWATed him and that person posted on his board
<copypaste> he submitted that as evidence to build ihs case
<Janitor01> I didn’t swat him.
<Janitor01> I wasn’t involved in swatting him
<copypaste> i don’t even know who you are friend
<copypaste> “Janitor 01”
<copypaste> this numbering thing is the pinnacle of GG autism
<Janitor01> And I won’t tell you who I am
<copypaste> i don’t need to, or want to, know
<copypaste> let the feds work it out. what’s done is done
<copypaste> i’m not removing Acid. whoever continues to trust him will do so…(link HERE for those who want to read the rest)

So, that does it for me, ladies and gentlemen. I let you guys make up your minds on all this since I’ve done my part. I may follow this story up, depending on how things go. I’ll also probably do a LIVE show about it tonight. If I do, it will be linked below these words as soon as it’s up.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oyTARfbNw08