I still remember before Pizzagate had coalesced into a single narrative, there was a lot of virtual labor being put into amateur research on child sex trafficking. And maybe I’m misremembering or just wasn’t on the “right” parts of the internet at the time, but that Comet Ping Pong attack happened and suddenly everyone who was following these email leaks and digging through them also seemed to believe this one very specific interpretation of everything. The libs and normies thought that “Pizzagate” meant stochastic terrorist who makes up fake basements. And iirc that movement later coalesced into QAnon, which is definitely an op of some kind.