Who are QAnon believers and what do they believe?

In June of 2020, Wired magazine discussed a poll of QAnon supporters to try to figure out what they know and believe. The poll was small, about 350 people with an error margin of 1.7%. Wired writes:

Q FEVER, WE’RE told, is sweeping the nation. Polls show that some 7 percent of Americans believe in or support QAnon, the cultish conspiracy theory and community that originated in online message boards in late 2017. Other fringe ideas draw wider support, but few are as bizarre or alarming. QAnon defies easy summary, but its core premise is that Donald Trump is waging a secret war against a cabal of celebrities and Democratic politicians who abuse children in Satanic rituals. In one lurid variation, Hollywood stars harvest the chemical adrenochrome from children’s bodies. According to Q, the anonymous poster who started the movement, the Mueller investigation was a false-flag operation, ordered by Trump, to investigate these sex criminals. In a prophesied event called “the storm,” Trump will strike against them with mass arrests and possibly executions.

The rise of a community committed to such outré notions has drawn extensive media coverage, much of which seems animated by a simple question: How can so many people believe such crazy stuff?

New research provides a partial answer: They don’t. Until now, polling on QAnon has generally gone no further than asking people how they feel about the movement. This left unexplored what it actually means when someone says they believe in QAnon. Brian Schaffner, a political scientist at Tufts University, recently sought to find out. In September, he conducted a nationally representative online poll asking respondents not just whether they support QAnon, but also whether they believe in eight specific false claims, including four that are central to the QAnon worldview. The poll was funded by Luminate and published by the Institute for Strategic Dialogue. The results suggest that most “QAnon supporters” have never even heard of, let alone believe, some of the most outrageous claims associated with it.

As you’d expect, QAnon supporters are much likelier to believe false conspiracy theories than everyone else, whether Q-specific or not. But while you might also expect the overwhelming majority of the QAnon group to uniformly embrace its core theories, the results were far more mixed. The highest-polling statement was “Democratic politicians and Hollywood stars are part of a global network that tortures and sexually abuses children in Satanic rituals”—62 percent of QAnon supporters rated it as definitely or probably true. The other three QAnon theories polled—Trump is preparing mass arrests, Mueller was secretly ordered by Trump to investigate pedophiles, and celebrities harvest adrenochrome from children—registered between 44 and 54 percent.

Those numbers, however, heavily overstate the level of belief. Toward the end of the poll, Schaffner asked respondents which statements they had heard of before taking the survey. A large number of Qanon supporters, it turned out, were rating as “true” statements that they were encountering for the first time. The “global network” statement only polled at 38 percent when discounting people who had never heard it. For the “Trump is preparing mass arrests” claim, which is generally described as the foundational QAnon belief, only 26 percent both had heard of it and said it was true. Recall that these are percentages of a percent. Thirty-eight percent of 7 percent [23.1 million people] translates to only 2.6 percent [8.6 million] of the overall population [330 million].

Indeed, QAnon may have less to do with politics, or with Trump, than is generally assumed. Among survey takers who said they approve of it, 28 percent said they plan to vote for Joe Biden. Compare that to 17 percent of white Evangelicals who say the same.

A few weeks ago, after a scurrilous attack ad falsely accused US representative Tom Malinowski (D-New Jersey) of protecting sex offenders, Malinowski said he received several death threats from QAnon supporters. (In response, last week the House of Representatives voted 371-18 to condemn QAnon.)

Forty percent of poll respondents who said they trusted QAnon to provide accurate information also said that their belief had negatively affected their relationships with friends and family. That’s real human suffering.

According to Joseph Uscinski, a political scientist at the University of Miami who studies conspiracy theories, conspiracy beliefs don’t spread so easily anyway. “People are generally resistant to ideas that don’t fit their existing worldviews, so simply asking a question isn’t going to turn them into QAnon people,” he said. Rather, there is a stable subset of the population that is drawn to conspiratorial ideas. “When you say ‘They’ve come to believe this’—well, maybe, maybe not. The basic idea of QAnon that there’s a pedophile ‘deep state’ working against the president—as wacky as it sounds, that’s not new at all. That’s the plot of Oliver Stone’s JFK.”

QAnon has been persuasively compared both to a religion, for the fact-resistant faith of its adherents, and to a multiplayer role-playing game, for the collaborative, participatory dynamic by which the theory develops online. It’s important, however, to keep in mind the other implications of those comparisons. People who belong to a religion don’t necessarily believe all or even most of its teachings. And most people understand that a game is just a game.

This is too bizarre

If that poll is reasonably accurate, it seems to suggest that most QAnon supporters do not believe, or have even heard of, most of the core QAnon conspiracies. QAnon believers claimed to support Biden more than Evangelicals. What's up with that? Is this mostly a matter of some people who know the whole thing is a farce but like playing games or owning the libs for the sheer fun of upsetting them or pissing them off? 

I suspect that, regardless of what is in the minds of most QAnon people, they really do not understand the full scope of ramifications of what their beliefs are or the consequences of playing their game. The republican party cannot come out and loudly reject QAnon, notwithstanding the feeble GOP House squeak of condemnation. Electoral politics are too close for the GOP to simply reject QAnon out of hand as it should it if was an honest, moral political party concerned about the public interest, which it isn't. And maybe that is the key source of QAnon political influence. The GOP is too weak to truly reject and ostracize it. So the beast keeps spewing its poison into minds susceptible to crackpottery and/or minds that like playing troll games, even if it causes damage to the poor innocents in families who have to live with with such awful lies- and hate-driven bullshit. 

Assuming the poll is reasonably accurate, what other ways are there to characterize or explain this bizarre mindset?