This is the key, I think. These people are mad about the way the world is and they're mad about their place in it. They see themselves and others being treated unfairly (by their own lights). They want to do something about it, and GME has given them an outlet for that frustration and desire for action. Is it the most useful thing they could be doing, or the most productive outlet for those feelings? Fuck no, but it is an outlet, and it's one that's being made obviously available to them. The same thing is true for a lot of the alt-rightists, I think: they're mad about their place in the world, looking for something to do about it, and someone came along and channeled that impulse with a narrative. They told them a story about immigrants and trans people and antifa--a story that offered an explanation for why they're feeling what they're feeling, as well as an opportunity to do something about it. This narrative is obviously bad and wrong in all sorts of ways, but right now it's the one that's being dangled in front of their faces, and the one that offers them a sense of control and agency in their own lives; most importantly, it's one that's unified and centered on them. That's an incredibly powerful motivator to action and belief.

QAnon did exactly the same thing. There were a bunch of people stumbling around with the vague (and correct) sense that something isn't right with the world, and that there ought to be someone to blame--something to do about that. QAnon took that vague and undirected dissatisfaction and sharpened it, made it precise, and aimed it like an arrow right in a particular direction. It told them a story, and offered them the opportunity to be the heroes of that story. This is why conspiracy theories (and conspiracism generally) are attractive: they take the shitty chaotic world that we live in, draw a line between the dots, and present people with a picture that they can understand. Once you understand (or think you understand) what's going on, and where your problems are coming from, you can do something about those problems.

I think the Left (especially the contemporary left) vastly, vastly underestimates the power and importance of stories and narratives in shaping peoples' beliefs, and thus in guiding them to action. This is partially due to the fact that many people who have actually thought about this stuff realize that simple narratives like this are almost never right. The world really is big and messy and chaotic, and though we can make some sense of it sometimes and shape history by acting, the kind of Grand Narrative that QAnon, or Trumpism, or even Marxism offers to people is almost always an oversimplification of what's actually going on. This stance has probably trickled down from academia, since this kind of skepticism about Grand Narratives driving history just is post-modernism. The world is complex, with lots of interlocking parts and interacting forces, and peoples' lives are the result of the interplay between lots of different patterns and agents operating at many different levels of influence and abstraction. That kind of skepticism about narratives might be true (I think it is), but it sucks as a story. It asks people to analyze their lives and conditions as a series of edge cases, with little in the way of general laws or villains and heroes. Most people have neither the time nor the inclination to do that--in fact, being able to undertake that kind of analysis is itself a kind of class privilege.

If we really want to hook people and draw them into the movement, we need to get over our aversion to simplification and our aversion to telling stories. This is hard and complicated, because it also involves setting aside (at least for the moment) a lot of the internal purity struggles that tend to define leftist organizations about how exactly to correctly analyze the interlocking material conditions and ideological forces at work in any given situation. The right--especially the far right--has no such aversion, because they're not interested in actually ascertaining the truth about what causes social ills or produces a well-functioning society: they're interested in power. We need to figure out a way to craft a narrative that's simple, appealing, and attractive in a way that doesn't also do great violence to our moral and ideological senses. That's really, really hard work, but it's going to be essential in the long run if we want to survive.

They also defended apartheid. It was terrible