Ronald Watkins (born April 18, 1987), also known by his online pseudonym CodeMonkeyZ, is an American conspiracy theorist and site administrator of the imageboard website 8kun (formerly known as 8chan).

[2] Watkins spent his high school years in Mukilteo, Washington, the city where he lived for the longest period during his childhood.

[2][12] 8kun, which was formerly known as 8chan, is an imageboard website that has been linked to white supremacism, neo-Nazism, the alt-right, child pornography, racism, and antisemitism, hate crimes, and multiple mass shootings.

[13][14][15] It was home to the proponents of the Gamergate controversy beginning in 2014,[16][17] and in 2018 became a central part of the QAnon conspiracy theory when "Q", the anonymous figure claiming to be a high-level government official with Q clearance, began exclusively using 8kun to post their messages.

[10] Watkins was responsible for the creation of a cryptocurrency through which 8kun posters can pay to have their posts listed prominently through a program called "King of the Shekel".

[16] On November 3, 2020, the day of the United States presidential election, Watkins announced on Twitter that he was resigning his position as site administrator.

"[5] QAnon is a discredited far-right conspiracy theory alleging that a cabal of Satan-worshiping pedophiles running a global child sex-trafficking ring is plotting against former President Donald Trump, who is battling them.

"[28] In an interview on a September 2020 episode of the podcast Reply All, Brennan explained that he believes the Q account was originally operated by someone else, but that Watkins and his father took control of the persona, most likely around December 2017.

[27][28] In September 2020, Brennan theorized that the original "Q" was a South African 4chan poster called Paul Furber, and that once Q moved to 8chan, Ron Watkins used his login privileges as the forum's administrator to take control of the account.

[37][38] Watkins and his father were interviewed over several years for Cullen Hoback's six-part HBO docuseries about QAnon and the identity of Q, titled Q: Into the Storm.

[43] After resigning from his 8kun position in November 2020, Watkins worked to build his reputation among those attempting to overturn the results of the presidential election.

[3][44] Watkins was named as an expert witness in a lawsuit filed by Sidney Powell, a lawyer and conspiracy theorist also involved in challenging the election results.

[3] In his affidavit, he claimed that based on his reading of the online user guide for the Dominion software, it is "within the realm of possibility" for a poll worker to manipulate votes.

[7] Watkins was interviewed multiple times about Dominion on the pro-Trump One America News Network (OANN), which introduced him as a "large system technical analyst".

[4] On the night of January 5, 2021, the day before the U.S. Capitol attack, Watkins told his father and filmmaker Cullen Hoback that he was about to "make a claim, it's going to shatter some institutions".

[45] In the early hours of January 6, Watkins posted a tweet accusing Vice President Mike Pence of orchestrating a coup.

"[50][51] QAnon researcher Travis View warned against believing Watkins, pointing to his past claim that he had quit 8kun to focus on his woodworking only to "[fill] the vacuum of Q by spreading conspiracy theories".

Watkins also entered into polemics with Arizona senator Wendy Rogers, whom he accused of botching the Maricopa County election audit.