Ron Watkins, the alleged mastermind behind the QAnon conspiracy, has shut down his campaign for an Arizona congressional seat. Watkins was running as a Republican and announced the termination of his campaign to the Federal Election Commission on Tuesday.
QAnon is as much a part of Republican politics as logical fallacies are, but the conspiracy theory’s stranglehold on democracy appears to have withered away just a teensy bit. Ron Watkins, who some speculate is the “Q” in QAnon, has announced the closure of his Arizona congressional campaign following his defeat in his district’s primary in August. Q is the anonymous figure leaving cryptic messages on online forums that point to a shadowy cohort of Satanists within our government who are allegedly sexually abusing children. Watkins has previously claimed that he is not the man behind Q, which is exactly something Q might say.
“I am not Q,” Watkins said to the New York Times earlier this year. The outlet alleges that Watkins began writing as Q in 2018 in their analysis with forensic linguists.
Watkins’ congressional campaign ends with a whimper, not with a scream as he secured a mere 3.8% of votes (2,999 out of 79,116) during the Republican primary election for Arizona’s U.S. House District 2 this past summer. This is not completely a surprise, as Watkins opted to do some major campaigning on the instant messaging platform Telegram given his failure to raise any substantial amount of campaign finances.
Likewise, the campaign faced a bumpy road in its brief life as Watkins’ team failed to disclose where a whopping $20,626.15 of his campaign finances came from, as written in a March letter from the Federal Election Commission. Forbes, however, reports that Watkins’ campaign remained active though this week, despite running out of money as of September 30.