It’s Not Surprising That “Q” of QAnon Is an Average Guy Living in a Dark Room with a Computer as he Trolls American Democracy
I went “Into the Storm” for six hours and couldn’t wait to get out — now you don’t have to.
Spoiler alert: If you haven’t watched the HBO docuseries Q: Into the Storm and want to, you may want to stop reading this. It contains spoilers.
I just finished filmmaker Cullen Hoback’s six-part HBO docuseries “Q: Into the Storm” about the bizarre QAnon conspiracy. Now you don’t have to. Its believers are convinced Tom Hanks and other prominent liberals are kidnapping children and drinking their blood minus any actual evidence.
I attempted a second viewing for this article but couldn’t stomach spending one more minute with the characters that make up this docuseries. I felt like I needed a shower after each episode.
Several nights I woke from nightmares just from being exposed to glimpses of the dark content the docuseries reveals on imageboard sites — online forums on which users post and communicate via photos and memes — on sites like 4chan.
When 4chan was banned, it turned into 8chan, the conspiratorial movement’s online home where Q dropped his first anonymous post.
The platform most know for hate speech — 8chan/8kun
The malcontents featured in the docuseries are a father and son duo, owners and operators of 8kun, formerly 8chan, formerly 4chan, Jim and Ron Watkins. These platforms are the Petri dishes of white supremacy, misogyny, Gamergate, and Pizzagate. Allowing users to post anonymous content with impunity.
The El Paso massacre, where a gunman went into a Walmart shooting and killing 23 people and injuring 23 others, the attacks at a mosque in New Zealand, and a San Diego-area synagogue attack all began with a racist manifesto and announcement of the attacks on the anonymous message boards of 8chan.
The attacks were then celebrated by the anonymous users of the site.
After the El Paso shootings, one of the most active threads on 8chan early that Sunday urged people to create memes and original content, or OC, that could make it easier to distribute and “celebrate the [gunman’s] heroic action.”
Here are some of the messages:
“You know what to do!!! Make OC, Spread OC, Share OC, Inspire OC,” an anonymous poster wrote. “Make the world a better place.”
Q’s origin
The Hollywood Reporter explains the genesis of Q:
In 2017, a user initially named “Q Clearance Patriot” (he later became simply “Q”) took to 4chan to relay a comment Donald Trump had made at a military event about American being in “the calm before the storm.” That prompted a sea of cryptic riddles, catchphrases, and references to the movie White Squall (don’t ask) that somehow came to be interpreted as wisdom passed down from the highest reaches of government. A belief spread among these imageboard users that the only thing standing between the world and a cabal of Satan-worshipping pedophilic Democrats and Hollywood elites was … Donald Trump.
Yes. Trump. A man who can’t even get a wall built.
People have way too much time on their hands or are so bored with their mundane lives they look for conspiracies in everything. You have to have an absence of critic thinking skills and/or common sense if you believe Trump is the good guy and will save the world from pedophilia.
This “wisdom passed down from the highest reaches of government” turns out to be Ron Watkins, son of the owner of 8chan, Jim Watkins. Ron is a porn-loving 30-something dude with a dull personality and a shocking lack of empathy. Like his father, only younger.
In the final episode of “Q: Into the Storm,” Ron slips up and reveals he was acting as “Q” hiding in the web’s dark corners. Ron is the most plausible choice due to the fact he was the acting administrator of the site 8chan (8kun), under the name “CodeMonkeyZ.” It seems obvious in retrospect.
In one scene when 8kun (formerly known as 8chan) went offline, “Q,” somehow, was the only account able to post content. Ron made the false claim that even he, as the site’s administrator, could not get online access.
He was the site’s administrator.
Jim Watkins, Ron’s father, whose business experience ranges from pig farming to porn, is a sleazy man obsessed with expensive pens. Jim and Ron hide out and run 8kun from a decrepit office in the Philippines because if you want to live in America, “you have to have a job, you have to work,” Jim points out in one scene.
Ron and Jim Watkins hide behind the First Amendment and argue free speech, that anyone can say whatever they want, even if that hate speech posted on their site leads to mass shootings because, Hey, we live in America, well, the Watkins don’t.
If this is the cost of free speech, it’s clearly too high. The law that protects these platforms, Section 230, needs to be repealed or changed to hold these sites accountable for their user’s messages that lead to mass shootings.
Phonies
Father and son contradict themselves so many times in the documentary, it is hard to tell when they are lying from their unsuccessful attempts at wit.
Each swears he isn’t into politics while professing they don’t know much about Q’s posts. Jim Watkins is just downright creepy. I’m not a doctor, but he is clearly lacking in the mental health department. That this duo is behind or linked to the conspiracy theory QAnon is not surprising.
Most of the Q drops don’t say much of anything at all. Q’s posts have never contained substance. Yet these “drops” somehow convinced many Americans (and now people worldwide) with leaky thinking and ruptured reasoning skills to follow and believe there is a liberal sex trafficking cabal drinking the blood of children and getting away with it somehow.
Q has stated many prophecies that never came true. Like, that Trump would be President for a second term, and he would lock up his political enemies — such as Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden.
Joe Biden is the 46th President of the United States, and Hillary Clinton has a successful podcast. Hillary Clinton will never be locked up because she has never done anything illegal, her innocence confirmed by countless investigations into her dealings instigated by the radical right.
It’s still a mystery to me how this ridiculous conspiracy caught the attention of so many people. “Q: Into the Storm” explains it from many angles, for one, Covid. Americans stuck inside for months dodging the pandemic increased internet usage by 70%, but come on, people are this dumb? This miserable? This naïve? This desperate for attention?
Apparently, all yes. They are.
Q is your average guy hiding in a dark room with a computer seeking attention
That a guy with life experience that adds up to coding, gaming, and porn-ing convinced a good percentage of Americans to believe that a “storm is coming” and ultimately helping to spread the biggest lie of all, that the 2020 election was stolen is scary, but not surprising.
That is the power of the internet and anonymous users.
The lies and disinformation spread by QAnons, the former president and his enablers resulted in the culmination of those same conspiratorial-mindedness storming the Capitol on January 6, 2021. The scene is documented in the final episode of the series. Jim Watkins participates in the domestic terror attack on the United States Capitol, the same guy professing in all five previous episodes that he doesn’t “follow politics.”
The series and filmmaker conclude that Ron is Q — this guy, CodemonkeyZ.
Ron is extremely introverted at the beginning of the series until he experiences a wave of notoriety when he becomes one of Trump’s most frequently retweeted sources of election fraud conspiracy prattle. Ron seems to relish his newfound fame, having then-President Trump’s ear. This is the same time in the docuseries where he makes his slip-up and speaks as if he’s been Q the whole time.
The extremist movement’s leader had purported to be a top-secret government operative. By the end of the series, and really, we knew it the whole time from the first shot, that Q is CodeMonkeyZ, a much more fitting leader to a movement spewing nonsense with no evidence to back it up.
As the filmmaker Hoback states in the final scene, and I agree with his assessment, Ron wants some credit for being Q and pulling it off. Maybe hoping his modicum of fame doesn’t vanish as his Twitter account has.
YouTubers who sprang up from the QAnon movement were making bank spreading disinformation in the name of Q. They have been de-platformed by the likes of Facebook and Twitter, cracking down on the lies in a rare, brave act of putting people’s lives and democracy before profit.
QAnon has incited violence, and criminal acts and the FBI has designated it a domestic terrorism threat.
Here is Ron’s slip-up in the final scene of the doc,
“It was basically three years of intelligence training, teaching normies (normal people) how to do intelligence work. It was basically what I was doing anonymously before, but never as Q.”
QAnon is now bigger than one person
QAnon is now bigger than one person. It isn’t going away anytime soon. Since the docuseries aired, the gist on QAnon message boards is they are ignoring the series. Qanon crazies are marching onward despite this recent revelation that Ron Watkins acted as Q from at least early 2018.
Jim and Ron Watkins’ main claim to fame will be a crude website of hate speech, pornography, and extremist memes while the rest of Americans have to deal with the fallout from the movement’s latest topics of interest, “mostly involving false claims about coronavirus vaccines, President Biden and the Suez Canal.”
Unfortunately, we rational thinkers have to live in the same world as people who believe vaccines are dangerous. This absence of reality affects all of our lives, making breathing literally more dangerous because we share the planet with ignorant people who don’t believe in science, look for conspiracies everywhere and choose the selfish act of not getting vaccinated putting all of us at risk from a deadly virus — one that is mutating.
Rita Katz, executive director of SITE Intelligence Group, which monitors online extremism, responds aptly in The Washington Post,
“Even if it was only Ron Watkins, the movement has grown far beyond one person or alias. It is now a global societal virus that has become a vessel for everything from [anti-vaccine] misinformation and coronavirus conspiracy theories to political agendas,” Katz added. But “everything Jim or Ron Watkins say should be taken with skepticism — even if that statement comes in the form of a bizarre ‘slip-up.’”
Jessica is a writer, an online entrepreneur, and a recovering perfectionist. She lives in Los Angeles with her extrovert daughter, two dogs, and two cats.
