That said, your experience with Q is not universal. There are many people who take it much, much more seriously than you do and have alienated friends and family members and lost jobs as a result. And, of course, fired a gun in a pizza shop, shot and killed protestors, etc.

You don't have to be gung ho to let someone ELSE do something horrible. You just have to be just on-board enough to let them sit in the driver's seat.

If you go into a thread on Reddit where the topic of conversation is related to anti-maskers/lockdowners, not only is there plentiful evidence of people enthusiastically confessing what it is they believe about people who do not wear masks (stated as what these people actually(!) believe, as opposed to an estimate of* what they believe), if one was to compile stats, one would often find that the majority of participants think this way (if you take their words literally - if one asks for confirmation or reasoning, post-hoc rationalization will typically ride to the rescue).

The memeplex/matrix that is The Internet seems to be having extremely interesting cognitive effects on broad swaths of the public. And while most people have no problem seeing this behavior in their outgroup (say, conspiracy theorists), awareness of this (mainstream, well studied) cognitive phenomenon* in oneself is extremely rare. As is people who are willing to discuss it from an abstract perspective, using sound logic and epistemology (aka: actual critical thinking).