Divide Et Impera will never not be an effective control method. Keep the Basics arguing amongst themselves, and they'll never have the time to pay attention to the ones pulling the strings in the background.

Edit: this is not to say that the heinous shit espoused by some people is in any way excusable. We may be pitted against each other in this Left/Right divide, but one side is clearly more monstrous than the other, even when accounting for extremists on both.

Remember when they were convinced that JFK Jr was going to rise from the grave to champion their cause?

Definitely unrelated to a typo about RFK Jr for a community of anti-vax morons.

Psy op implies an amount of planning and the involvement of the military or the intelligence community. I think it is better attributed to chance that the cryptic pretentious musings of one person snowballed into a cultish internet movement. Because it garnered strength online, the musing person at the heart of it probably changed due to tiny power struggles.

People like to know there is a plan for everything. People always suspect a secret cabal behind everything. People are also dumb and impressionable. It doesn't take a general or CIA buffin to try to target the Venn diagram of those three groups. I think it had the results you describe, it contributed to what we see in the US today: a weakening of the rule of law and a slide into fascism.

Calling QAnon psy op is giving what basically started as a 4chan meme too much credit. If no one took a gun to find a nonexistent basement in a DC pizza restaurant, society at large may have never discovered this snowballed cult, and jumped on it like a cat does catnip, enlarging its reach. The secret "cabal" behind it is maybe a handful of people. Bored and slightly Machiavellian internet users with odd political views and/or the love of endorphin-inducing likes and reach. Never attribute to conspiracy what you can more likely attribute to stupidity. QAnon is stupid. Stupidity with disastrous cobsequences. But not a planned psy op campaign.

The real psy-op was the billions they made along the way

It's the red-pill movement. Everything since Gamergate. The endless videos of Jordan Peterson coinciding with Joe Rogan's tilt to propaganda. Andrew Tate, certified rapist, Sex Trafficker and disgraced MMA combatant. Pushing the idea of individualism and hyper-masculinity. In order to normalise misogyny in young men. Incels, 8Chan and influencers in that sphere have always been disproportionately shown to men, especially young men. It's part of Curtis Yarvin's "Dark Enlightenment.' Dude writes like a 15 year old on Myspace, but the tech billionaires worship him like a prophet. He directly takes credit for even naming the movement. It's all to spread disinformation and divide the public. Stop us meeting in public and having discussions, just look what Just Eat, Uber, Doordash and all those food apps have done to restaurants as a communal meeting place. Tech, or more precisely those that use tech to damage the social fabric. Want you anxious, alone antisocial and completely dependent on their "services" because they're all on your phone.

Ron Watkins. He slipped up and outed himself in a documentary: https://www.vice.com/en/article/q-accidentally-outed-himself-but-qanon-followers-dont-care/

I highly recommend the documentary: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt14215442/

Hm i though it was common knowledge at this point

it was mostly created by russia, or at least backed by it. they help foment the conspiracies in magat echo chambers and it became mainstream. back a couple years ago, like '23 conservatives were wondering why they were being called magats all the time.

JFC it started on 4chan. How anyone thinks it is anything other than a troll that caught on baffles me.