This is what I have been saying for years. Q (and Trump) made people fall in love with themselves, and those people loved them for it. There is a scary amount of power in making people feel special and important. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/29/us/leaving-qanon-conspiracy.html?smid=tw-share

People who say things like "Oh, what kind of cult tells people to think for themselves and not to be sheep!"

LITERALLY ALL OF THE CULTS TELL PEOPLE THEY ARE DOING THAT, PARTICULARLY THE MOST DANGEROUS ONES.

Scientology. NXIVM. Heaven's Gate.

At the end of the day, as weird as this is to say, it's "charm." Charm isn't how you present yourself to the world, it's how you make other people feel when they are around you.

The reason it's so hard for these people to give this shit up is because it makes them feel incredibly good about themselves — giving it up means not having that feeling anymore and in fact feeling *worse.*

The main thing I notice when I read through these message boards is an unbelievable smugness. Even when the predictions fall through — they are smart and everyone else is stupid.

As someone who was once a very pretentious teenager, I get it. When you feel badly about yourself in other ways, you start collecting things and surrounding yourself with people who make you feel like you are actually better than the people who make you feel bad.

I wasn't conspiracies, but I absolutely did collect affectations that made me feel special and smarter than everyone else, and some of the ways they act are embarrassingly familiar to me. They talk about "normies" like we talked about jocks.

I'm not saying this like "Oh, being a weirdo in high school is like thinking celebs eat babies" — what I'm saying is that they're not actually that special. Their bullshit is a fairly common human behavioral tendency brought to an extreme degree.