Forgive me, but I'm reading through r/qanoncasualties, I've been watching the QAnon documentary on HBO, and I've listened to QAnon Anonymous for at least a year. I find the subject totally fascinating. QAnon is like this twisted mirror image of socialism.
Basically it looks like this creepy fucking boomer named Jim Watkins and his weird shitposter son Ron created QAnon to bring more traffic to 8chan, which they own but which has never made any money for them. (I'm far from an expert on QAnon but the documentary makes a compelling case, let's say.)
I've seen the first three episodes of the documentary, where people are starting to literally kill each other over QAnon, and the Watkins' boys just don't fucking care. This may even go beyond CIA-level psychopathy, or is at least at a similar level. Meanwhile, r/qanoncasualties has story after story of friends and relatives losing their fucking minds, their jobs, all their relationships, and often killing themselves because of QAnon. It's just absolutely insane.
I've also spent maybe about two years "studying" (listening to podcasts on) Zizek and started drifting toward Marxism at around the same time a lot of these people were turning to QAnon. I haven't lost any close friends or family because of this, but it's definitely strained some relationships. (All of my close friends and relatives are either liberals, Berners, social democrats, or even beyond.)
When normies or liberals talk to QAnon people, they clearly think that the QAnon people are insane (although to some extent the average American believes in at least some parts of QAnon—including me, if Jeffrey Epstein counts as being part of QAnon, although I can't recall ever hearing a QAnon person mention him).
When normies or liberals talk to Marxists, does the same reaction take place? Do they just deploy horseshoe theory on us? Would they prefer to talk to QAnon folks over Marxists? Do they think that Marxists, who point to systems as the main issue, are really the same as QAnon folks, who blame all the woes of the world on a shadowy cabal of Satanic pedophiles?
To sum up: how do your non-Marxist / non-anarchist friends and family treat you when you talk about politics?
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I'm not even talking about people with self-identified coherent ideological positions. The average person I've met will either consider communism some distant, outlier dead thing from the past or some nebulously defined, extreme, horrifying thing that has something to do with things being taken from you. They're people who would refer to modern day Russia as communist, since they just use the word as a synonym for bad.
Someone who would claim to be a neoliberal or libertarian would probably be a bit more on the ball I'm guessing, since that would imply some level of research into various ideological stances.