The controversial free speech website 8Chan has been offline since it was widely blamed by the fake news media of facilitating recent mass shootings. The site’s owner Jim Watkins said in an exclusive interview with the One America News Network that he expects the website to be restored sometime this week.
Watkins explained to journalist Jack Posobiec that he had recently finished a hearing with the House Committee on Homeland Security where the government officials questioned him about his personal finances.
“They asked about my finances. They didn’t seem to get it that 8chan is not a billion-dollar company like the other companies they’ve been talking to. I think they were a little bit shocked at the fact that 8chan grosses about $12,000 per year,” he said.
“They started grilling me over and over again on foreign investment and foreign money. I had to get them to narrow that down a little bit because we do take money online from foreigners. They go to our shopping cart and pay us money,” he added.
Watkins made it clear to the Congressional lawmakers that he has never taken a loan from a foreign government and never worked with any foreign intelligence agency.
“They asked a lot about Russian access to 8chan, and I explained to them that the Russian government has blocked access to 8chan,” he said.
Watkins told Posobiec that he was grilled by lawmakers primarily about the Poway, CA synogague shooting, where the alleged killer posted a manifesto on 8Chan before initiating a rampage that resulted in one dead and three others injured.
Watkins said: “The first I heard about the Powoy shooting was when I saw the Assistant FBI Director being grilled on C-SPAN by Congressman Thompson. This is the first I knew about the Powoy shooting. At that time, I said ‘well, we have to get him some information because he doesn’t know anything about 8Chan.'”
He said he offered Congress a great deal of information about 8Chan and made recommendations about what could be done for authorities to more effectively work with the tech industry to prevent attacks in the future.
Watkins said he has been busy making sure that after 8Chan is restored, it will be on much firmer standing in the future and less vulnerable to attack from tech monopolies that are dedicated to implementing Big Brother censorship.
“I have been spending this time with building my own version of Cloudflare so we don’t have one central place to shut down the websites so easily because basically these giant public companies can just de-platform anybody they want,” Watkins explained.
Cloudflare terminated their agreement to host DNS services with 8Chan last month, even though they provide those same services to pedophile networks.
Watkins said: “I’ve received threats from big public companies. It’s like commercial terrorism. It’s like ‘we’re going to not only shut you down, I’m going to shut down the companies that are two hops above you on the internet.'”
He feels that if he cannot put 8Chan back online, it will be a monumental victory against digital freedom for Big Brother. Watkins feels his battle is emblematic of a much greater war for free speech in the technological age.
“I think we are the first of many, and that if I don’t get back online, then it will be considered a success, and that they’ll go after the next site, and the next site, and the next site. So I feel an obligation to turn [8Chan] back on, and that is super important to me even though it is not like a profitable enterprise. It’s so many people silenced right now,” Watkins said.
Watkins made clear that he doesn’t intend to change 8chan’s free speech policies due to political pressure. He believes that protecting anonymity is more important than ever before, and apart of the American creed.
“Proactively censoring is something they would do in Europe. It’s something they would do in the People’s Republic of China, and that’s okay because that’s their country, but Americans don’t do that,” he said.
Watkins expects 8Chan to be restored to full functionality sometime this week.