HBO’s Unmasking of QAnon Reaches the Wrong Conclusion

QAnon is here to stay. That’s clearly not the intended message of Q: Into The Storm, the six-part HBO docuseries focused on the fringe conspiracy theorists and their favorite hypotheses, but it is one you should remember all the same.

It’s tempting to view director Cullen Hoback’s project as a sort of epitaph for the defining kookery of the Trump years. QAnon’s spiraling, contradictory, crowdsourced-seeming claims about the president of the United States battling a shadowy cabal of elite pedophiles were, to put it mildly, not credible. Since Joe Biden became president, Q—the mysterious persona at the center of the theorizing—has been quiet, and adherents have been more subdued. Even so, the internet still brims with QAnon influences, for those who know where to look.