Like countless others, I frittered away the better part of Jan. 6 doomscrolling and watching television coverage of the horrifying events unfolding in our nation’s capital, where a mob of President Trump supporters and QAnon conspiracy theorists was incited to lay siege to the U.S. Capitol. For those trying to draw meaning from the experience, might I suggest consulting the literary classic Moby Dick, which simultaneously holds clues about QAnon’s origins and offers an apt allegory about a modern-day Captain Ahab and his ill-fated obsessions.
Many have speculated that Jim Watkins, the administrator of the online message board 8chan (a.k.a. 8kun), and/or his son Ron are in fact “Q,” the anonymous persona behind the QAnon conspiracy theory, which holds that President Trump is secretly working to save the world from a satanic cult of pedophiles and cannibals.
Last year, as I was scrutinizing the computer networks that kept QAnon online, researcher Ron Guilmette pointed out a tantalizing utterance from Watkins the younger which adds tenuous credence to the notion that one or both of them is Q.
We’ll get to how the Great White Whale (the Capitol?) fits into this tale in a moment. But first, a bit of background. A person identified only as “Q” has for years built an impressive following for the far-right conspiracy movement by leaving periodic “Q drops,” cryptic messages that QAnon adherents spend much time and effort trying to decipher and relate to current events.
Researchers who have studied more than 5,000 Q drops are convinced that there are two distinct authors of these coded utterances. The leading theory is that those identities corresponded to the aforementioned father-and-son team responsible for operating 8chan.
Jim Watkins, 56, is the current owner of 8chan, a community perhaps now best known as a forum for violent extremists and mass shooters. Watkins is an American pig farmer based in the Philippines; Ron reportedly resides in Japan.
In the aftermath of back-to-back mass shootings on Aug. 3 and Aug. 4, 2019 in which a manifesto justifying one of the attacks was uploaded to 8chan, Cloudflare stopped providing their content delivery network to 8chan. Several other providers quickly followed suit, leaving 8chan offline for months before it found a haven at a notorious bulletproof hosting facility in Russia.
One reason Q watchers believe Ron and Jim Watkins may share authorship over the Q drops is that while 8chan was offline, the messages from Q ceased. The drops reappeared only months later when 8chan rebranded as 8kun.
CALL ME ISHMAEL
Here’s where the admittedly “Qonspiratorial” clue about the Watkins’ connection to Q comes in. On Aug. 5, 2019, Ron Watkins posted a Twitter message about 8chan’s ostracization which compared the community’s fate to that of the Pequod, the name of the doomed whaling ship in the Herman Melville classic “Moby Dick.”
“If we are still down in a few hours then maybe 8chan will just go clearnet and we can brave DDOS attacks like Ishmael on the Pequod,” Watkins the younger wrote.
Ishmael, the first-person narrator in the novel, is a somewhat disaffected American sailor who decides to try his hand at a whaling ship. Ishmael is a bit of a minor character in the book; very soon into the novel we are introduced to a much more interesting and enigmatic figure — a Polynesian harpooner by the name of Queequeg.
Apart from being a cannibal from the Pacific islands who has devoured many people, Queequeg is a pretty nice guy and shows Ismael the ropes of whaling life. Queequeg is covered head to toe in tattoos, which are described by the narrator as the work of a departed prophet and seer from the cannibal’s home island.
Like so many Q drops, Queequeg’s tattoos tell a mysterious tale, but we never quite learn what that full story is. Indeed, the artist who etched them into Queequeg’s body is long dead, and the cannibal himself can’t seem to explain what it all means.
Ishmael describes Queequeg’s mysterious markings in this passage:
“…a complete theory of the heavens and earth, and a mystical treatise on the art of attaining truth; so that Queequeg in his own proper person was a riddle to unfold; a wondrous work in one volume; but whose mysteries not even himself could read, though his own live heart beat against them; and these mysteries were therefore destined in the end to moulder away with the living parchment whereon they were inscribed, and so be unsolved to the last.” Continue reading