Ron Watkins

Black Pill: How I Witnessed the Darkest Corners of the Internet Come to Life, Poison Society, and Capture American Politics

by Elle Reeve  · 9 Jul 2024

popular so quickly that Fred was having trouble keeping the site online. A month into the Gamergate frenzy, he got an email from Ron Watkins offering to host it. Ron Watkins lived in the Philippines with his father, Jim. They had a family internet business that included the Japanese site 2channel, the original inspiration

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still too scared to say he didn’t want to be associated with nazis and creeps. He knew they could decide to ruin his life. Ron Watkins took over as admin. Fred thought the Watkinses found a glamour in being hated. He didn’t know what they actually believed in, if they

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month, Q moved to 8chan, where he was welcomed with open arms. Fred, who had resigned as admin but was still working for Jim and Ron Watkins, thought it was a stupid troll, and he was annoyed that it used his favorite letter of the alphabet. Jim and Ron convinced him to

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of all of Jim’s shell companies, how they relate, where the money comes from, how it gets to 8chan, how it keeps 8chan going.” Ron Watkins rebranded 8chan as 8kun. With his knowledge of the complicated unseen infrastructure of the internet, Fred went after companies whose services Ron needed to keep

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America. But naming the real Q mattered, because it could create real consequences for the person behind the mask. Fred had suspected that Jim and Ron Watkins controlled Q when 8kun was struggling to stay online. Most people couldn’t use the site, but Q was able to post. Fred believed that

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post appeared on 8chan, and Furber declared that it was an imposter. But that Q, the supposed fake, insisted he was real, and appealed to Ron Watkins: “please log in and confirm.” Ron did, and he sided with the new Q. Fred thought this was the moment the Watkinses gained total control

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of forensic linguists, one Swiss and one French, found that Furber was likely the first Q, and Ron Watkins was the second. Their analyses suggested Ron took over in early 2018. (Both Furber and Ron Watkins deny they were Q.) If Q’s followers noticed Fred’s work, it did not matter to most

Other Pandemic: How QAnon Contaminated the World

by James Ball  · 19 Jul 2023  · 317pp  · 87,048 words

was no longer the owner and operator of 8chan, since he had sold the site in 2014 to a father-and-son team, Jim and Ron Watkins.29 Jim was a former US army helicopter pilot who at the time operated a strange and sprawling set of businesses out of the Philippines

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very subtly tried to get Woolf to it: Me: ‘So … who’s Q?’ Woolf: ‘It’s Ron Watkins.’ If guilt requires means, motive and opportunity, Watkins Junior meets two of the three criteria almost by default. Ron Watkins had been working as the administrator of 8chan and his father’s other sites since Brennan

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for three years, until Woolf and his crew got a little too close. Woolf was not the only person to come to the conclusion that Ron Watkins was behind Q, by far,41 but he has a stronger claim than most to be the reason that Q stopped posting for good – which

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back – saying after all these tumultuous times, I’m resigning as 8chan administrator. “Today I bring the ship to dock.” ’ When it comes to why Ron Watkins might have wanted to spend several years of his life as Q, though, Woolf draws a blank, saying that he ‘grew up sort of like

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with his mom in Seattle, Washington. We talked to his best friend growing up, he used to sing barbershop … he’s just some dude.’ If Ron Watkins was indeed Q, and most people who have looked into the mystery believes he was, then there is little to go on as to why

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eye. Perhaps it was just a game. But the man himself is giving nothing away. When Woolf’s production company sent a detailed letter to Ron Watkins asking for comment, they didn’t receive the written response they expected. They got a video. ‘It is the most profoundly haunted piece of media

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to allow this), and was lionised by the movement at the time. The affair culminated in an event hosted by Lindell where none other than Ron Watkins himself presented electoral records he claimed had been hacked from Mesa County, Colorado – a key district watched by followers.31 Unsurprisingly, the records turned out

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. These claims were then shared more widely across the internet by none other than 8chan founder – and leading contender to be the man behind ‘Q’ – Ron Watkins himself. Despite their claims to have evidence which pointed to anthrax – which is easy to test for – none, of course, was offered.75 The consequences

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even experienced online conspiracy reporters and commentators thought the movement might be facing a reckoning,17 or even at its end – not least because even Ron Watkins himself, in his role as 8chan administrator rather than an avowed operator of the Q trip code, said it was time to move on.18

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Sister’s ‘We’re Not Gonna Take It’ showing Trump being sworn in as president43 – caused little consternation all round, passing almost unnoticed. Jim and Ron Watkins had both told the filmmakers behind HBO’s Q: Into the Storm that Q would disappear after the election, and (shockingly) they were proved right

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theories as foolish or mad. That is something we might need to reconsider. Unnervingly, this is an issue Jim Watkins – the father of Q suspect Ron Watkins, and the owner of 8chan – raised himself on the eve of Joe Biden’s inauguration: ‘The reality of it is the people that are involved

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) of someone malign: Xi Jinping, Bill Gates, Anthony Fauci or all three in concert. Similarly, it’s easier to imagine QAnon as the product of Ron Watkins, or even Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Twitter founder Jack Dorsey. While all three men helped QAnon spread and helped create the conditions in which

The Chaos Machine: The Inside Story of How Social Media Rewired Our Minds and Our World

by Max Fisher  · 5 Sep 2022  · 439pp  · 131,081 words

researchers would long speculate that many or all of Q’s posts—four thousand in all, unspooled over three years—were actually the work of Ron Watkins, a thirty-year-old programmer who had recently taken over running 8chan, the 4chan spinoff forum. Watkins even seemed to hint as much in a

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collapsed. “We gave it our all. Now we need to keep our chins up and go back to our lives as best we are able,” Ron Watkins, the administrator of 8chan (now rebranded as “8kun”) widely suspected to have written Q’s material, posted the morning of Biden’s inauguration. On Telegram

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. malinowski.house.gov/sites/malinowski.house.gov/files/Letter%20to%20YouTube%20—%20Malinowski_Eshoo_final_0.pdf 113 “We gave it our all”: Post by Ron Watkins (@codemonkeyz), Telegram, January 20, 2021. 114 “As we enter into the”: Ibid. 115 An 8kun moderator purged: Post by Pillow, 8kun, January 20, 2021. archive

Character Limit: How Elon Musk Destroyed Twitter

by Kate Conger and Ryan Mac  · 17 Sep 2024

. Ali Alexander, an organizer of the Stop the Steal election denial movement who was banned in the aftermath of January 6, came back, as did Ron Watkins, the suspected creator behind QAnon. Musk also welcomed back Nick Fuentes, a white supremacist and incel whose hateful ideologies found a following among a group

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To.” Daily Dot, January 10, 2023. dailydot.com/debug/ali-alexander-twitter-capitol-riot. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT Ron Watkins, the suspected creator behind QAnon: Sommer, Will. “Alleged QAnon creator Ron Watkins has returned from Twitter, after receiving a lifetime ban in the pre-Elon era.” Twitter, January 10, 2023. twitter.com

The Quiet Damage: QAnon and the Destruction of the American Family

by Jesselyn Cook  · 22 Jul 2024  · 321pp  · 95,778 words

, filmmaker Cullen Hoback had gained unprecedented access to the public-facing figures with known ties to the movement. Among them was thirty-four-year-old Ron Watkins, an odd, slow-speaking man in Japan with dark-rimmed glasses, shaggy black hair, a sparse goatee, and an affinity for cowboy hats. One scene