QAnon has become an almost inevitable part of politics. The conspiracy is organized around an anonymous figure named Q, who allegedly operated within the Trump administration. Using anonymous online messaging, Q sent a series of cryptic messages about a plan to mass-arrest Democratic politicians and celebrities, who are reportedly kidnapping and murdering large numbers of children. (They are not.) Q has now spent three years promising imminent arrests, while the QAnon group has become a kind of super-conspiracy theory attracting people from around the world, built around the crowd for mass executions and martial law.
On paper, then, unmasking the person (or people) behind Q sounds like big business. And that is the goal of P: Into the Storm, a series of HBO documentaries by director Cullen Hoback. Hoback tracked down some of the people who supported and popularized QAnon, looking for what HBO calls a “mentor” behind the theory.
Unfortunately, In the storm it is not so much a deconstruction of QAnon as a grimy mirror of it. The six-hour series obsessively and tediously maps a supposed inner circle of the movement, while covering up the myriad reasons why Q messages attract people, as well as QAnon’s effect on believers and those around them. It incorporates all the ways in which idealistic journalistic values - a devotion to humanize affairs, an aim to expose powerful wrongdoers and a belief that exposing the truth will liberate people – fail in the face of extremist movements.
Earlier this month, a teaser trailer for the Hoback series drew criticism from anti-disinformation researchers, who feared it could become a QAnon recruiting tool. The bad news is that In the storm breaks several best practices for reporting on extremism. The good news (I think?) Is that it’s almost so boring you can’t watch it. Instead of an overview of QAnon or a meticulous argument for Q’s identity, the series focuses on a handful of rival message board operators and YouTube influencers (or “QTube”), documenting them with a combination of formal interviews and endless slices-scenes from life. imagine Tiger King, but about the forum trolls checking each other’s Twitter feeds.
In the storm it is largely about the operators of 8chan (later re-released as “8kun”), the message board of anything where “Q drops” are posted. Hoback spent years visiting the Philippines to speak with the creator of 8chan, Fredrick Brennan; its current owner Jim Watkins; and Watkins’ son Ron, the former site administrator. Brennan publicly – and quite credibly – accused the Watkins family of potentially being behind Q, and Hoback had what appears to be unprecedented access to all of them. For people studying QAnon, collecting new details from their interviews will be the main attraction of the program.
But In the storm it is very aimless to make that access attractive. After the first episode, it mainly becomes a documentary about 8chan in general, including a bitter feud between Brennan and the Watkins family fueled by the role of 8chan in several far-right shootings. Although some of his subjects claim to be apolitical, they are enmeshed in right-wing politics, prone to supposedly ironic intolerance and extremely arrogant towards racist violence.
The series indifferently shows how these events relate to broader right-wing policies, including Watkins’ interactions with QTubers. But large parts are devoted to Hoback just hanging out with the trio – covering his interpersonal drama step by step, raising softball questions about 8chan’s many controversies and letting them pontificate about freedom of speech and their favorite hobbies. The series could be shorter hours if it cut out supposedly fun scenes like Jim Watkins making a fart noise with his hands or explaining how to fill a fountain pen.
In the storm is apparently trying to make the best known QAnon players look absurd. Taking this result for granted, Hoback is hardly concerned with refuting his statements or offering an external context, a tactic that researchers have spent years discouraging. What some viewers may see as rudeness or a bad argument, others can easily buy as charming weaknesses or rhetorical triumph. And compared to documentaries of extremism like Alt-Right: Age of Rage, In the storm he barely acknowledges that there are forces taking QAnon seriously and trying to counter it – or at least providing support for people who are harmed.
The approach also makes Hoback’s search for Q seem bizarrely ineffective. In the storm implies that if you just talk to a bunch of Internet trolls long enough, they will slip up and reveal their secrets. Therefore, the visible research in the series basically involves training a camera on people who like to cheat and manipulate journalists and then ask if they are Q.
In the storm touches on a convincing thesis: QAnon is, in essence, a grift. Jim and Ron Watkins admit that QAnon is the only thing that keeps 8kun afloat, and they have a great incentive to keep Q on the platform. QTubers do seem to believe some of Q’s claims, but they also describe how they were attracted by the way QAnon increased their traffic. Hoback describes how the theory spread from an obscure forum post through a right-wing influence machine, including former Trump officials like Michael Flynn and prominent media figures like Alex Jones.
But in addition to being filled with hours of 8chan drama, all of this is involved in an unnecessary conspiratorial framework. The series ominously emphasizes officers’ military ties or their links to “psyop” research, when all that often seems necessary is good control over viral marketing. It seems incredibly willing to buy stories of self-aggrandizement from the subjects, so when a detail does it seems strange and alarming, it is difficult to separate it from exaggeration.
Hoback proclaims a major revelation about Q’s identity, or at least the name of a person who allegedly operated the account. His statement echoes a well-known theory about QAnon and is based on the analysis of some cautious and evasive statements by an interviewee. For the reasons mentioned above, In the storm it makes it incredibly difficult to assess this great revelation – because there is little to indicate that, say, the subject is not just playing with it.
In the storm also solve a major problem: exposing Q would probably not stop QAnon. The movement calls for long-standing mistrust in powerful institutions and is notoriously resistant to fact-checking or unmasking. Since Q’s original posts, he has crept into Christian churches, campaigns against sex trafficking, New Age welfare and spiritual communities, sometimes in ways that don’t even refer to Q as a person. The people who promote QAnon’s ideas are not hidden in the shadows; they’ve been talking on Fox News and other right-wing networks, while Q goes months without posting. The series makes reference to all of this – but only as a quick recap of the work of other reporters.
Attachment to a master manipulator seems like a convincing idea. But if In the storm is any indication, it is much less interesting than the worldly structures that made QAnon so popular. (Also a six hour series there should be room to delve into both.) As a documentary on pro-Trump online extremism, Hoback’s work is adjacent to last year’s film Feels good, man, who used the cartoon frog meme Pepe to give an incisive chronicle of the chaotic oddities of modern politics. By contrast, In the storm it simply tries to respond to a false conspiracy by finding a real one – subjecting viewers to some of the world’s most boring political crusades along the way.
P: Into the Storm debuts on March 21 on HBO and HBO Max.