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A family member of mine is a deeply committed QAnon type. I've heard about it and spoken with her about it extensively. My takeaway:
QAnon isn't a conspiracy theory, it's the conspiracy theory. Q is fully generalized skepticism of the intellectual, moral, and scientific consensus. It started out as something specific and more focused, but now all kooky stuff falls under its umbrella -- I've found myself dragged into conversations on Bigfoot, aliens, mind control, demons under the Vatican, Jesus being fake, child abduction, the inevitable ascendance of humanity to their spiritual forms as we pass through the North Gate (or was it East? I forget)...
Q has embraced all conspiracy theories. It is the platonic embodiment of Conspiracy Theory. And like all conspiracy theories, really, what it means is that the people have decided authority can't be trusted.
So Q's crazy, and wrong, but they're wrong in the right direction, usually. I find them pretty sympathetic.
From what I learned about conspiracy theories and theorists before QAnon was a thing, this seems like something that's just common to all/most conspiracy theories. Conspiracy theories seem to be very highly correlated, so that if someone buys into moon landing fakery, then they're also much more likely than the typical person to believe in Big Foot and/or flat Earthism and/or lizardmen rulers from outer space, etc. and vice versa. As if there's some sort of generic, say, c-factor in humans that predicts their likelihood to buy into conspiracy theories, and the specific conspiracy theory doesn't matter much. Perhaps QAnon is just the current in thing among conspiracy theorists that caught fire due to circumstance.
Once you've learned enough about the world to realize how little you know and how easy it is for power to lie, everything collapses. If you're on the right side of our culture, you have seen, in real-time, how captured institutions propagate falsehoods and immediately sear them into public consciousness; 80 years from now, the official story of Gamergate will be what the journalists said, even though they lied constantly and it was called out constantly.
Now, Gamergate's not really a big deal. But once I realized every respected institution in the country -- if not the world -- was ideologically corrupted and willing to lie in unspoken cooperation, I realized I can't really trust what I know about the world and history. Epistemic learned helplessness is real, and conspiratorial thinking is one of the ways to cope; you can't tell when something is true or false, but you're pretty sure the people telling you are bad, so just assume they're lying.
I'm educated enough that I don't believe most of these things. But the older I get, the less I trust what I used to believe. Who knows. Talk to me again in ten years and maybe I'll have radicalized into a Holocaust denier insisting the Jews faked the moon landing to hide Bigfoot.
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