What’s Worth Watching: Diving ‘Into the Storm’ that is Q

Has one of your relatives – perhaps one who has only recently been introduced to the internet – become disconcertingly obsessed with the 17th letter of the English alphabet? If so, HBO’s “Q: Into the Storm” may shed some light on the subject. Viewer discretion is very much advised.

On March 8, 2018, an anonymous user, 8chan, posted the following: “Everything has meaning. This is not a game. Learn to play the game. – Q.” The average person probably hasn’t heard much about “Q” or “QAnon,” but those who have and believe the things this anonymous source claims to be true, it seems, can hardly think about anything else.

Before I started watching the documentary, I thought “Ah. QAnon. A bunch of ‘red-pilled,’ basement-dwellers convinced that a former president was our only chance of defeating an international cabal of child-eating rapists and witches.”

There are plenty of those, but, the thing is, as the documentary shows, QAnon believers are, for the most part, regular, everyday people. People who own businesses, people who “voted Democrat until Trump,” people who identify as “patriots,” people who like the sound of revolution and “do their own research,” people like your grandparents.

And that, as the documentary suggests, is another issue entirely. QAnon supporters are waiting for an informational apocalypse in which “the elites” are “finally” shown to be driven by a world-spanning conspiracy entirely centered around sex trafficking – usually that of children. They believe, I kid you not, that Hillary Clinton eats babies.

And they know how crazy it all sounds, the documentary explains. But instead of thinking, “OK, this is too ridiculous to be true,” they use its craziness to justify silence on the subject from those they see as leaders. As “QTuber” and former gossip columnist Liz Crokin claims, “President Trump can’t just come out and say, ‘Hey, guess what? The world’s being run by satanic pedophiles.’ ”

There’s almost no arguing with it, the documentary says, because everything in the QAnon orthodoxy is infinitely re-interpretable. Because “everything has meaning,” and it’s all part of “The Plan.”

At one point in the first episode, while explaining her experience diving into the world of QAnon, Crokin says, “There is literally nothing that would surprise me. If you told me aliens were real and the earth’s flat.” “Wait,” the filmmaker asks in the background, “‘the earth’s flat’ wouldn’t surprise you?” “No,” she says, doubling down. Ultimately, “it was estimated that tens of millions of people believed in Q.”

When director Cullen Hoback began researching Q, his goal was to unmask the anonymous source. But as episode one suggests, the documentary will likely teach us more about the believers than about Q.

QAnonn supporters Jamie and Jenn Buteau believe that Q is a group of “military people.” But Q can also “be whoever you want it to be,” 8chan creator Fredrick Brennan says. One day it might be Steve Bannon, and the next it could be former national security advisor Michael Flynn or former deputy chief of staff Dan Scavino or even Brennan himself.

“I think Q is something that could only happen in our current day,” Brennan says. “Where there are just so many people distrusting of all of the mainstream sources … the holes in the system are so clear that it only takes a five-minute YouTube video to get people on your side. That’s the real problem.”

“Q: Into the Storm” is available on HBO Max.