Reading a Reddit AMA with a former Q believer and he had a really insightful thing to say: “Conspiracy theory thinking hooks the brain because it feels like critical thinking.”

That seems very true from what I’ve observed. The thread is here if you’re interested:

I also thought it was interesting what shook him out of it: a post from Q containing obviously false information about the field he worked in, computers. He realized the technobabble made no sense, so what else was wrong?

As for what got him in in the first place? He grew up a fundamentalist Christian and so was primed with stories about how only they knew THE TRUTH about things like evolution, the end times, etc, and the rest of the culture was just full of powerful lies. Perfect breeding ground

If you want to see a really good in-depth exploration of how someone falls down an internet rabbit hole into extremism (not Q, but related to it in that it’s about white supremacy and far right politics), I’d recommend the podcast Rabbit Hole, from Kevin Roose at the NYT