I’ve been following Barrett Brown’s recent activity on X (@ProjPM), and it’s getting harder to see it as anything other than a man who has completely lost his mind.
His mid-May 2026 Substack essay — grandly titled “Epstein & Thiel’s White Supremacist Child Porn Spy Army” — is a masterclass in conspiratorial collapse. Brown attempts to connect Peter Thiel, Jeffrey Epstein, Andrew “Weev” Auernheimer, Milo Yiannopoulos, 8chan/4chan scenes, Aubrey “Kirtaner” Cottle, and scattered Anonymous figures into one vast transnational fascist intelligence operation centered on child porn honeypots and memetic warfare.
Tearing Apart the Article
Brown starts with a 2016 NATO StratCom paper on “memetic warfare” involving Jeff Giesea and Charles Johnson, then leaps to claim these tactics mirror Palantir’s supposed plots and Thiel’s “neo-fascist racialism.” This is classic Brown: take real concepts like influence operations (which exist across the political spectrum), inflate them, and declare they prove a singular right-wing master plan. Real memetic tactics are used by governments, corporations, and activists of all stripes — not evidence of one “White Supremacist Child Porn Spy Army.”
He then drags in Weev’s alleged ties to Thiel and Epstein via hedge fund rumors and old emails. Some documented overlaps exist between tech figures (Thiel-Epstein connections have been reported elsewhere), but Brown turns loose associations, private chats, and Weev’s self-aggrandizing boasts into proof of a grand psyop. Weev is a provocateur and troll with a long history of edgelord behavior — turning him into the central architect of Thiel’s empire is pure fan fiction.
The Anonymous history section is especially off-base. Brown recounts Op PayPal and the Stratfor hack (real events) but uses them to paint Weev as a key opposing force in some grand narrative. In reality, Weev was never core to the leftist/anti-authoritarian AnonOps strain that coordinated those actions. This is Brown retrofitting history to fit his current grudges.
The most unhinged section targets Aubrey “Kirtaner” Cottle. Brown cites old quotes where Cottle allegedly admitted to running “child porn honeypots” for feds, then weaves in Distributed Denial of Secrets co-founders, Tor Ekeland, Emma Best, Neal Rauhauser, and others into one CSIS/FBI/Thiel/neo-Nazi nexus. These are serious allegations that require serious evidence — Brown offers leaked chats, old associations, and guilt by proximity instead. Real infiltration and honeypots have existed in hacking scenes for decades (we all knew that risk even in 2010–2011), but collapsing every rival or ex-associate into one “CSAM spy army” is textbook paranoid delusion.
Finally, the piece name-drops Seth Rich in the opener (“There’s a safe to my left. Seth Rich’s phone and laptop are in it”) for maximum conspiracy clickbait, then ends with vague omertà claims about people not commenting. This isn’t journalism — it’s a self-mythologizing rant where every loose thread proves the same villainous cabal, with Barrett as the lone truth-teller.
Some Context from the Old Days
Back during the early ChatNPlay and AnonOps period around the PayPal operations, things weren’t the chaotic mess the media often portrayed. A lot of people were simply fed up and trying to make a difference with whatever skills they had. There were coordinated channels for LOIC bots and other tools. I knew Trivette at the time — he ended up charged as part of the PayPal 14 even though he wasn’t home during the attacks they attributed to him.
I met Barrett through mutual friends like Spyco and Blvd. I missed the live TinyChat FBI raid because I was at work, but I saw plenty of those streams where he would be sitting in a bathtub doing heroin while lecturing everyone. Even then, his ego stood out as unusually large. He presented himself as the key researcher and public face for Project PM, but to many he came across more as hype than substance.
We all knew, even back in 2010–2011, that logging and informants were a constant risk. That kind of paranoia was normal. But what Barrett is doing now goes far beyond that. It’s full conspiratorial collapse — every personal rival and old grudge gets folded into the same grand master narrative with him at the heroic center.
Bottom Line
There are still legitimate issues worth looking into: intelligence infiltration, elite networks, honeypots, and compromised scenes. Many people from those early days understand that terrain. Barrett isn’t really examining them anymore. He seems to have lost his sanity and replaced it with a self-reinforcing fantasy where reality is bent around his obsessions and grudges.
I’m just an old observer from that era watching Barrett completely lose his shit these days. I’ve got the popcorn because it’s entertaining in a sad, slow-motion trainwreck kind of way — but there’s not much left that looks like clear-eyed analysis.
If you want some late-night reading, check his feed or the new Substack. Just don’t mistake it for journalism. It’s the unraveling of someone who once had a voice and has since disappeared deep down the rabbit hole.
