I should have seen the signs.
I was still doing the Centerville Project at the end of October 2017, when some person(s) calling themselves “Q” posted their first “drop” on 4chan. I was close to the end of my 50-state journey, but before I’d even hit the halfway point, I had encountered a (to me) astonishing number of conspiracy theorists. I wrote to Patrons and friends about this disturbing discovery, chronicling them as I came upon their adherents, from Pizzagate to “Hillary did Benghazi” to “the Rothschild family wants to exterminate 90% of the population” to Flat Earth. I formalized these thoughts on my own in February of 2018, after failing to get a greenlight from any of the editors I pitched this idea to.
But QAnon still wasn’t on my radar. It wouldn’t be until months later, if not a full year, that I realized what was happening—that QAnon had become not simply a “big-tent" conspiracy but an actual movement. One that collected larger and larger groups of terrified, mostly white people: anti-government militia men, 9/11 truthers, parents in custody battles, science deniers, religious fanatics, antivaxxers, and finally just conservatives in general. People who are, in the words of video essayist Dan Olson, “in search of a Flat Earth.” Not just Flat Earth—but any belief system that will justify their reactionary worldview. “Many, many people want to believe that things are the way they are because someone has deliberately crafted it to be that way,” he explains. “That there is a natural order to the world, and we need to just ‘trust the plan.’” Believers in these reactionary conspiracy theory movements want someone to make progressive people—people criticizing the fundamental structures of society—shut up. Society’s problems exist because these people want to disrupt the natural order of things, and they won’t “shut up and go away.” It seems obvious, in hindsight.
You won’t get any of this insight from the HBO docuseries Q: Into the Storm, unfortunately. Into the Storm is six entire episodes of television that grow increasingly baffling from one episode to the next, focusing almost entirely on the question, Who is Q?
Maybe this is a marketing issue. If I’d known this series was six hourlong episodes of television devoted to unmasking Q, I would have skipped it, because the identity of Q does not matter and never has. Not knowing much other than that it was about the QAnon movement, I went into this series expecting a chronicle of the movement, an exploration of its spread through “QTubers” and Facebook groups and then Instagram; perhaps even a mapping of influence and money. I wanted someone to delve into the backgrounds of the people serving as vital links from the Q posts on deeply unpopular, extremist image boards to the mainstream. I wanted to know how much those people are making off merch sales and subscriptions, what they did for a living before this, social backgrounds. I wanted to hear from people who work or worked at YouTube or Facebook about how those sites have optimized radicalization. You know… reporting. Journalism. The type of investigation best-suited to long-form documentary.
Instead, Into the Storm spends hour after hour with interview subjects connected to 4chan and 8chan (now 8kun), who uniformly view their interviews as opportunities to cry about forum drama. I am not kidding: documentarian Cullen Hoback seems more invested in explaining how moderation works on 4chan and 8chan than in actually explaining how this sub-Tom Clancy LARP that should have gone nowhere culminated in an attack on the U.S. Capitol by violent insurrectionists. Most of the fifth episode is spent trying to help the creator of 8chan, who fell out with the Watkinses a few years after they entered into a partnership to run the site, flee the Philippines after running afoul of their cyber-libel laws.
Caring about who Q is—and it looks like it is at least Ron Watkins and probably his father or another co-conspirator—indicates a fundamental misunderstanding of what fuels QAnon as a movement.
The primary insight in Into the Storm is that people on the chan boards are creepy and anti-social—and bad liars, to boot. Jim and Ron Watkins, the central figures, are deeply unpleasant people to watch. We don’t hear until the fifth episode or so that the elder Watkins made his money in the early days of the internet by hosting Japanese porn sites and getting a huge sum from Nintendo for the domain “PokeAMan.com”; before this, he’s simply referred to as an “American businessman.” In every interview with Ron, the younger Watkins, he’s clearly lying through his teeth while setting himself up as some kind of messianic Freeze Peach warrior. His every pose reeks of “I have studied the blade”-ism.
What’s so frustrating about Into the Storm is that there are hints of intriguing threads to follow, whenever Hoback deigns to turn his attention to the people primarily responsible for disseminating Q propaganda to the masses; answering the questions of how the early-adopter Q couple or the alcoholic Evangelical QTuber make their money, and whether they are true believers or simply grifters, would make for some compelling material. But these threads are always abandoned in favor of returning to the Watkinses or 8chan creator (and later denouncer) Fredrick Brennan, who all seem to suffer from varying degrees of narcissism and/or sociopathy. Attempts to give historical or academic context to QAnon are halfhearted at best.
It all makes for a rather myopic experience. We learn the (probable) identity of Q, but what does that matter? Q believers will either disbelieve this information or ignore it, and we’re left with no better picture of this movement than when we started, six whole hours earlier.