In June 2018, an armed QAnon believer was arrested after stopping traffic on a bridge near the Hoover Dam. A month later, QAnon supporters started showing up at rallies for the president wearing Q-branded hats and T-shirts. Unlike fringe internet movements that stay purely online, QAnon was seeping into the offline world, and I realized I was going to have to start keeping closer tabs on it. With QAnon, it became clear to me earlier this year that we’d reached the normie tipping point. I was hearing from readers whose parents, friends and siblings had disappeared into an online QAnon bubble.

Source: New York Times October 03, 2020 12:22 UTC