(2021-03-30) Who Is Q? Maker Of HBO Docuseries Q Into The Storm Believes He Has The Answer

Who is Q? Maker of HBO docuseries 'Q: Into the Storm' believes he has the answer. The new HBO docuseries, “Q: Into the Storm,” attempts to answer one of the most urgent questions of our time: Who controls QAnon.

filmmaker Cullen Hoback

The six-part series focuses less on the many Americans sucked into the QAnon vortex, or even the theory’s destabilizing impact on democracy, than the digital cesspool from which it emerged. Hoback gained unique access to Fred Brennan, the founder of 8chan.

Hoback ultimately determines that Q is not a high-ranking member of the military nor even a shadowy political operative but Ron Watkins, a porn-loving bro with a flat affect, a nervous blinking habit and a disturbing lack of empathy.

You have been following the issue of digital privacy for years. What is your take on it now? The situation on the internet has gotten far worse since I made [“Terms and Conditions May Apply”] back in 2013. Privacy is all but dead on the internet, and privacy needs to be dead for Silicon Valley’s business model to thrive.

It’s also worth noting that the algorithms drive us toward increasingly sensational content. QAnon wouldn’t have been successful without those algorithms.

YouTube didn’t really start restricting QAnon-related content until October of 2020. And [YouTube and others] didn’t describe the problem as the algorithms having driven people to this content. They just described the content as the problem.

A lot of the people who follow QAnon feel like a lot of things in society have failed them. They’ve stopped trusting expertise. They’ve turned away from institutions. (CultureWar)

I think a big part of it is that people feel like there’s something wrong in the world.

It puts things in very black and white, super concrete — completely false, but concrete — terms that make it easier for people to understand, as opposed to looking at the nuanced complexities that lead to something like the banking crisis or the war in Iraq

So much of Q’s power is derived from anonymity. Q doesn’t come with any of the baggage that a normal person would come with. If you take off the mask, it reveals all of the ugliness and it’s all connected to a person

You can never tell if Jim Watkins is being sincere or joking. He uses humor to mask something more sinister. But when he’s there, screaming [to encourage people who’d penetrated the Capitol], “Out the window!” I think you see what his desires were.

When it finally clicked for me is that segment in Episode 4, where Ron is talking about Diogenes. He sees this pseudo-Socrates-gone-mad character as a role model: cynicism as an ideology.

They also see the world as a game. There’s a nihilism to it.

I think we made a very strong case in the series for Ron being the linchpin in QAnon, and having been that linchpin since late 2017 or early 2018.