Thanks, that is a bit more than I expected. However, there’s a lot of caveats here, not just that 450.000 followers out of roughly 500-700 million Europeans (depending of whether one talks about the continent or the EU) is not exactly a lot, especially when you take into account that a “follower” is just somebody who clicked on “subscribe”, and in many cases, a bot or someone who has multiple accounts to to make the alt-right more prominent than they actually are.
What you will also find in the articles you quoted:
the gunman made no direct references to Qanon
The theory remains on the fringes of European discourse
At the end of the day, that’s what QAnon is: an online community.
Even in German media who are watching the alt-right closely, Qanon influence of Europe is not a major topic, and it’s also not a frequent topic on the known alt right sites (Tichy, Epoch-Times etc.).
Also, Qanon builds on ideas that were already part of the Alt-Right storybook in Europe and elsewhere, so anyone who parrots these can be sure to at least briefly get the attention of some of the nutcases here (e.g. the infamous dope fiend Xavier Naidoo), especially when they sit at home and have nothing better to do. However, that does not mean people over here believe in the Qanon conspiracy explicitly. FWIW I have literally never encountered an example where one of the German weirdos who defend Trump bring up the Qanon conspiracy theory in an online (or offline) discussion, and I’ve seen my fair share of that.
I’m all for watching QAnon more closely, but at the moment the European Alt-Right is not made more dangerous by believing in QAnon than it already is: they clearly didn’t need Qanon for their previous acts of terrorism.
Can you elaborate on that, what do you think Qanon is, and who designed it for what purpose?
To counter that, targeting Qanon is the wrong vector. One must change the capitalist system that allows this to flourish.
