This is a good place to start if you haven’t seen it:
One can’t look at just Qanon, because it is just a chapter in a story that started back with Whitewater, Vince Foster, etc., etc. I wish that Frontline went back a little farther to Rush Limbaugh, honestly, he should get some credit for this.
You’re correct, completely, in that the “true believers” who are posting to social media aren’t very intimidating in numbers, but they aren’t the goal.
For every one of the die-hards, there will be a thousand people who say “all that worshiping Satan stuff is silly, BUT…”, or “I don’t believe all the child abuse is real, BUT…” and go on embrace a segment of the beliefs. They are the real target for this effort. You have people who might only latch onto anti-vaxxer material, or the 5g hysteria, or the human trafficking. The recent Boing Boing article about the “artist” cited 9/11 Truther material as the gateway drug.
You are correct when you say the German shooter didn’t cite Q directly. He did, though, cite specific Q beliefs, folded in with what was probably his own pre-existing, racist, far-right material. Conversely, those who go delving into the more unaligned, benign aspects of Q will be wooed by the far-right material. Conspiracy theory is just the bait.
The point isn’t to make everyone believe everything. The goal is bringing all the conspiracy theory under one big tent, weaponizing it, and giving them all a common far-Right alignment. They all come to you, so you control the narrative.
QAnon as a title is a label for the underlying effort. I expect it to shift to another persona soon, it has become too obvious. If you are judging the overall effect of this, you won’t find it by looking for the term QAnon. You’ll find it by watching the overall shift of conspiracy theory, world-wide, toward the far-right.
