I live in the Netherlands and the amount of deluded conspiracy theorists has been increasing steadily for several years now. Unfortunately things have really accelerated since COVID-19, people think the virus is fake, they think Bill Gates created the virus to put mind control chips into your brain, they think masks are a form of mind control somehow, these are just a couple of examples.
I always enjoyed reading about Q on r/cth because it's just so ridiculous, I had a good time laughing at those silly Americans, that is, until it came to my own country. Q anon finding it's way to the Netherlands is weird because it is a conspiracy theory about American politics, it has nothing to do with our politics (which also suck, just not as much as US politics). But as with most bad things nowadays the culprit is the profiteering of Facebook and Google, their algorithms work here in the same way they do in the US and have led a huge amount of dutch people into a long and harmful rabbit hole.
The realest consequence is probably the direct action that these groups (most of them formed on facebook) are now doing, they are genuinly harassing politicians on the streets of our capital city. Our Prime Minister almost always cycles to his work or to meetings, no motor parades with cops and secret service agents, just him on his bike. That is now almost certainly a thing of the past because the Qanon groups here keep shouting death threats and such to every politician they see.
The mere numbers of people still surprise me to this day, our most famous Qanon conspiracy theorist is probably Lange Frans, white rapper turned Qanon admirer. His podcast consistantly get close to half a million views in a country of 17 million people, which is like almost 10 million people watching one of these videos in the US.
Sorry for the long rant but just the fact that all of these people are also going to vote next year and the absolute state of the left in the Netherlands is plain sad.
The Netherlands has had its share of right-wing anti-immigrant nutjobs for a while, though right? I'm just going through Wikipedia and the Wilders/PVV/anti-immigration, anti-EU party has polled pretty consistently between 10-20% in the past 10 years. This is true around Europe with far right parties - whether BNP/UKIP, or Front National, or whatever the Austrian one is. Is the concern that it's especially young Dutch people shifting this way (as the metric above is a podcast, as opposed to TV), or that Q has made them somehow worse? Because they were always there, there's more of a Murdoch-ization of EU politics, rather than Q pilling? Maybe I'm wrong.
I last visited some of my Dutch relatives in 2011 and my aunt and uncle were already on what could be called the Q Pipeline, though there was no Q at the time and Facebook was only recently available to non-college students. They had Deutschland Schafft Sich Ab displayed prominently in their living room and really wanted to talk to me about Moroccans - they don't work, they don't learn Dutch, they don't integrate, they should be sent back, etc. I haven't talked with them in years, though I expect they are likely on the Q spectrum at this point, as they are simply getting older.
So I guess my question is like, if there were no Q Anon, would these people be behaving any differently?
They would still vote for the same people but what's worrying is that some of these people are getting so extreme that they might become terrorists. We haven't really had any terrorism like in the US but if the amount of Q anon people keep increasing the chances of some kind of a terrorist attack either on politicians or on innocent people is going to increase too.
Probably not tbh