![\"\"](\"https:\/\/wp-media.patheos.com\/blogs\/sites\/52\/2021\/04\/QIntoTheStorm.jpg\")
<\/a><\/p>\nBut again, that\u2019s not the main focus of this weird, twisted story of weird, twisted people and the disturbing, destructive influence they\u2019ve had on American politics and millions of American lives. That\u2019s why a constellation of QAnon fans and \u201ccelebrities\u201d appear throughout the series, but they\u2019re never center stage. The stars of this story \u2014 the main characters as well as the villains \u2014 are the father-son duo who took ownership and control of the 8chan boards and exploited that platform for their own ends and their own perverse (in every sense) reasons.<\/p>\n
Jim Watkins, Ron\u2019s father, is a pornographer. Think Larry Flynt, but with less subtlety and wit. He got into the internet pornography business early enough to carve out a niche and make a fortune at it as one of the first website owners to figure out how to base sites in countries with the most permissive laws. He hosted and ran a wide array of porn sites from the Philippines, mostly catering to an audience in Japan.<\/p>\n
Watkins is make-you-shudder creepy. He has the vibe of Humbert Humbert mixed with Joseph Goebbels mixed with the Comic Book Guy from The Simpsons<\/em>. His interactions with everybody come across as simultaneously contemptuous, condescending, disingenuous, and salacious \u2014 even on the rare occasions when he\u2019s not doing anything overtly or deliberately icky. He seems, at all times, to imagine himself to be playing a secret game with secret rules. The nature of the game, or the fact that the game is even being played, is unknown to everyone else, but that doesn\u2019t reduce the smug delight Watkins takes from outwitting them all to win this imaginary game in his head. To Watkins, this proves that he\u2019s smarter and better than they are.<\/p>\nHe is, in other words, a troll.\u00a0Jim Watkins is so skin-crawlingly horrifying that viewers can\u2019t help but feel pangs of sympathy for his son.\u00a0But sympathy for Ron Watkins is difficult to sustain because he consistently proves himself to be just as smugly creepy as his dad. Ron was raised to play Jim Watkins\u2019 imaginary game and he, too, seems to be playing it \u2014 and congratulating himself for beating others at it \u2014 all the time.<\/p>\n
What of Ron\u2019s mother? Is there or was there a Mrs.<\/em> Watkins? Hoback never shows or tells us anything about that. But she\u2019s a tangible absence in this story about a father and son uninfluenced by love and respect from or for any woman. Jim and Ron Watkins don\u2019t seem to want or need the company or influence of women. They have porn for that. They don\u2019t like women, but they really like porn.<\/p>\nA lot<\/em> of porn. It\u2019s everywhere, constantly for these guys. Hoback mostly keeps it on the periphery, but it\u2019s always there. And that might be the most telling characterization of this series\u2019 main figures: These are men who want and need the constant presence of porn while avoiding the presence of actual women.<\/p>\nThe other major character in this story is more complicated. Frederick Brennan is much younger and far more sympathetic. He\u2019s a tragic figure \u2014 not because of his severe disability, but because he recognizes the consequences of the choices he has made. Brennan was born with \u201cbrittle-bone syndrome.\u201d His bones betrayed him \u2014 some growing, some not growing, and all leaving him fragile and dependent on others for his care and mobility.<\/p>\n
Unable to move about in the world, he was raised by the internet \u2014 and largely by the parts of the internet that should never, ever have anything to do with the raising of children. He initially fell under the sway of GamerGate and incel culture, spending most of his time on 4chan and the more appalling corners of Reddit. That\u2019s what gave him his Big Idea: combining the anonymous posting system of the former with the structure of the latter to create 8chan, which he imagined would be a bastion of unfettered free speech.<\/p>\n
Fred Brennan soon realized that the promise of unfettered free speech on the internet doesn\u2019t so much create a noble marketplace of ideas as it does create a haven for Nazis and porn. He didn\u2019t mind the porn, but the Nazis troubled him \u2014 quickly making it clear what Nazis think should be done with people like him. He seems, for a while, to have tried to commit to an ACLU-in-Skokie principle of free speech even for the most repugnant ideas, but as the creator and operator of 8chan and its ghastly array of Nazi boards, he also recognized that \u201cideas\u201d was an inappropriately grandiose term for the toxic hate he was hosting.<\/p>\n
But while Brennan had some slowly developing moral qualms about his creation, it was also proving lucrative. And it could be even more so if he could find the capital and tech-ability to scale up its servers and software. That\u2019s what the Watkins offered\u00a0 him, so he sold 8chan to Jim and Ron, becoming their employee and, in a way, their abused pet. The Watkins, unlike Brennan, didn\u2019t have any qualms about the Nazi boards.<\/p>\n
That\u2019s the central story of Hoback\u2019s documentary \u2014 the creation of 8chan, it\u2019s takeover by Jim and Ron Watkins, and its creator\u2019s eventual, literal escape from their clutches. QAnon \u2014 the conspiracy theory\/religious cult that enthralled millions of Americans, reshaping our laws and government and culminating (so far) in the lethal insurgency that seized the Capitol and the Republican Party on January 6 \u2014 is just a subplot that plays out in the background of that story.<\/p>\n
That might seem like criticism, but I think it\u2019s a great strength of this documentary. By focusing more on the internal struggle among the founders and operators of 8chan than on the massively consequential political phenomenon of QAnon it might seem like Hoback has taken his eye off the ball. But 8chan is<\/em> the ball. It is the center of this story \u2014 two indescribably creepy, porn-obsessed men seeking to wring all the money and lulz they can from an internet cesspool so that they can win the imaginary game in their heads.<\/p>\nAll the rest of it \u2014 the Big Lie, insurrection, impeachment, the toxic enchantment of millions of willingly gullible \u201cnormies,\u201d the divisive destruction of families and religious congregations \u2014 really is, in one sense, a side-effect of the nasty games being played by a handful of creepy men.<\/p>\n
In the final episode of the series, we see Fred Brennan fleeing the Philippines to avoid arrest on legal charges manipulated against him by Jim Watkins. As he escapes aboard the last pre-pandemic flight out of Manila, \u201cQ\u201d posts a message on 8chan that reads \u201cGame over.\u201d Around the world, millions of Q devotees set about \u201cresearching\u201d the occult meaning of that \u201cQ-drop,\u201d certain that it conveyed some deep insider knowledge about the imaginary war between Donald Trump and an alleged deep-state cabal of cannibalistic Satanists. None of those QAnons had any idea of the only thing signified by that Q-drop was Ron Watkins\u2019 taunting celebration of his defeat of his former friend.<\/p>\n
Did Cullen Hoback \u201cprove\u201d that Ron Watkins wrote all of those \u201cQ\u201d posts? Not with empirical certainty. But otherwise yes, yes he did. And abiding by their unspoken arrangement developed over years of filming, he allows Watkins to take credit for and gloat over his grand hoax while simultaneously and unconvincingly denying his role in it. Anybody who finds that denial credible wasn\u2019t paying attention to the previous six hours of the documentary.<\/p>\n
The Watkins are not solely<\/em> responsible for QAnon. The hoax was originally created, apparently, by a right-wing Apartheid-dead-ender Afrikaaner, a man still furious that his creation was stolen and embellished by Ron. And it was exploited and amplified by a host of sleazy political ratfuckers like Roger Stone and Jerome Corsi, and by ghoulish ex-military-turned-paramilitary thugs like Michael Flynn and Paul Vallely (the kinds of people who think ratfucking \u2014 disinformation, lying, and anti-democracy dirty tricks \u2014 sounds more sophisticated and less fascist if you call it \u201cpsy-ops\u201d).<\/p>\nBut if you want to know where QAnon comes from and why it exists, the bottom line is a couple of skeevy, porn-obsessed, Nazi-coddling assholes who enjoy deceiving other people because they think that means they\u2019re winning the game they play in their heads.<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Cullen Hoback’s HBO documentary miniseries\u00a0“Q: Into the Storm” is less about QAnon than it is about 8chan — the fringe image board curating the very worst of the internet. But that is the story of QAnon too.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":141,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[10,29],"class_list":["post-54353","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-class-warfare","tag-agnotology","tag-satanic-baby-killers"],"yoast_head":"\n
Meet the creepy men behind the QAnon hoax<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Cullen Hoback's HBO documentary miniseries\u00a0"Q: Into the Storm" is less about QAnon than it is about 8chan -- the fringe image board curating the very worst of the internet. But that is the story of QAnon too.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/2021\/04\/06\/meet-the-creepy-men-behind-the-qanon-hoax\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Meet the creepy men behind the QAnon hoax\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Cullen Hoback's HBO documentary miniseries\u00a0"Q: Into the Storm" is less about QAnon than it is about 8chan -- the fringe image board curating the very worst of the internet. 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A former managing editor of Prism magazine, Fred worked in the parachurch nonprofit world for a decade and then for a decade in the newspaper biz. He began blogging in 2002. In 2003 he began writing a review of the best-selling Left Behind series. Eight years later he still hasn\u2019t finished reviewing the second book of that series and the experience has left him a broken shell of a man. Fred knows the difference between the possessive \u201cits\u201d and the contraction \u201cit\u2019s,\u201d and he is acutely bothered when others mistakenly confuse the two, yet he himself just kind of instinctively types the apostrophe whether or not it belongs there. Some feel this is his greatest hypocrisy, but those who know him better know better. He\u2019s guilty of much greater hypocrisies. Jesus loves Fred far more than Fred loves Jesus, but he at least has the decency to recognize the unfairness of that lopsided relationship and he has long wished that he were better at maybe kind of sort of doing something more to correct that some day. A Baptist, an amateur, a Gen-Xer, a Gemini and a Mets fan, Fred lives in Southeastern Pennsylvania with his wife and two teenage daughters. You can reach him via email at slacktivist at hotmail dot com.","url":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/author\/fredclark1\/"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54353","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/141"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=54353"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54353\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=54353"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=54353"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=54353"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}