Thanks for the thoughtful post. This quoted part reminds me of other people trying to explain the phenomena.
I’ll add these two things that I think fit into this thread:
Frontline’s United States of Conspiracy is a great 1 hour show on how Alex Jones helped propel Trump into the presidency:
Wired had this great article showing how Qanon is like a game - and drawing parallels between game design that draws people into the game’s world and how Qanon works to make people believe what they “discover” is true.
