9 Ways MAGA’s Leaders Grifted Their Audience This Year

The 8chan guy

Members of the National Guard remain deployed in Washington, DC in March following deadly riots involving scores of QAnon conspiracy theorists at the Capitol on Jan. 6.

The 8chan guy

Ron Watkins is the former administrator of 8chan, a knockoff of Japanese imageboard 4chan notorious for playing host to boards filled with hardcore neo-Nazis and white supremacists, several of whom posted manifestos to the site before going on shooting rampages that killed dozens of people. He’s also widely suspected to be the individual who operated the Q account as it was surging on the conspiracy web.

QAnon exploded on mainstream social networks like Facebook and Twitter, growing to the point where its adherents hold considerable sway within the Republican Party. However, when the election and Biden’s inauguration came and went without Trump launching a prophesied coup d’etat known to Q aficionados as “The Storm,” many of his followers lost faith. Watkins was also the subject of an HBO documentary in which he appeared to screw up and admit he was Q.

Watkins has since tried to rebrand as an election security expert, as well as a… leading authority on UFOs. In May, he launched a site called “AlienLeaks,” telling his considerable number of followers that it would be a repository of never-before-seen documents and disclosures around extraterrestrial life. In what could only euphemistically be deemed a press release, Watkins announced the site would be focused on “collecting, curating, and publishing leaked documents regarding extraterrestrial technology, biology, and communications” and urged any scientists or researchers in contact with or having access to information on aliens to reach out.

While the U.S. government has made several major disclosures in the last year more or less admitting that UFOs (or as it calls them, “unidentified aerial phenomena”) are real—at least in the sense that military pilots and naval crews have encountered unidentified objects in the skies—Watkins has not, beyond a blurry video he conveniently claims depicts such a craft he personally witnessed. As the Daily Dot noted, many of his followers on messaging app Telegram accused him of trying to distract from his past support of election conspiracy theories.