Howdy. I'm just gonna slap a response here before reading through ALL of the comments, so there may be some overlap, but I hope my comment is helpful.

Firstly, thank you for posting and congratulations for being up front and open about your sense of not understanding. This is a good post.

Secondly, I would first like to emphasize a perspective that I think is really, really helpful when engaging with Q and the Great Awakening: There is an external great awakening, where we learn about and wake up to the reality of the mechanisms that evil has been using to enslave and suppress the people of the world, and there is a parallel internal great awakening, where we become increasingly aware of the patterns, habits, attitudes, concepts and limiting beliefs we experience internally which evil uses to keep our God-given nature suppressed and limited. The former aspect is an intellectual one, the latter is a spiritual (or 'mental' for some) one.

These two aspects develop best when they go hand in hand. The fact that you can post this post indicates that you are working on both levels, so that's a good sign (imo).

Next, to your questions. Note that on some (some) of these, there is a variation in opinion among different anons. That variation of opinion is a natural thing, as what is really important in advancing the awakening process is learning to think for ourselves and formulate our positions and views consciously. So while there may be some disagreement, ultimately, learning to think for ourselves is the prize, and our different views can enhance and advance the collective progress towards 'truth'.

What follows is my understanding. Hopefully some or all of this will resonate for you, and can aid you in your quest for a better personal understanding of Q.

I know that there is a group of people behind the scenes, referred to as Q or the White Hats, that are working towards the betterment of society worldwide - but with a main focus on America?

"The White hats" generally refers openly to "the good guys". The reference depends on the context: in the worldwide concept, it means, yes, a collective of people working to the betterment if not liberation of society. I would not say its a specific 'group' as there will be many groups and organizations, and not all of them will know each other. So, it's a 'collective'. To me, there are the Earth bound White Hats, working in each nation and cooperating internationally, but they are essentially guided and supported by the 'heavenly' aka spiritual 'white hats', that is, those spiritual forces in pursuit of God's will for humanity.

In terms of the Great Awakening, generally, the White Hats refers to the core collective that facilitated and promoted the election of DJT and organized the Plan that DJT is part of, to recover and restore America and destroy the Cabal and Deep State.

Q is an operation of the White Hats, not the White Hats themselves. The Q team is a specific team organized by the White Hats to execute the "Q Plan", which primarily involved putting information and interaction online in order to mobilize patriots, anons and researchers to a) become aware of the reality of the Deep State and Cabal and b) form a worldwide, interactive collective of patriots, anons and researchers that could advance the information war as foot soldiers and infantry in response to the 'brass' aka the Q team representing the White Hats.

The Q team then is a sub-group of the White Hats: not all white hats are involved in the Q operation, but the Q operation is intended to bring about wide public support for the goals and efforts of the white hats.

Not all white hats are focused on the USA but the USA has THE key role to play in the overall move towards a liberated world, and so yes, there is a strong focus or concentration of White Hats moves in the US.

I know there is Q - and there are Anons - BUT there is NO QAnon. That term was created by MSM to discredit the movement?

Opinions differ, but many will agree with me that the expression "qanon" was NOT created by the MSM. Rather, it naturally evolved out of the chans where Q was posting, where it was common practice for certain anons to be given identifiers: FBIanon, Hollywoodanon, etc. So when Q posted, Q became referred to as Qanon. For the first few years of the Q operation, "qanon" was widely used by patriots and anons to refer to Q and connect with each other.

However, as the operation progressed, ideas and assertions emerged that conflicted with or arose from something other than Q's own activities: you might call them rumors, or plain out psyops. One dude came out saying he was Q and was from the future, and gained a sizable following. Other people began asserting that JFK junior was alive and interacting with the Awakening, and would emerge to blow open the lies of the Cabal and even become Trump's VP! Neither of these sub-movements originated in Q, but rather from 'anons' that developed their own sub-movements.

These are two examples, but there are numerous others. (Some of them may even have been deep state sponsored.) The MSM propaganda machine then used these non-Q theories and ideas and nutty concepts (for example) as ways to attack Q and deceive the public into thinking that what was NOT Q was in fact Q, and they used the "Qanon" label to do this.

So, ultimately, the Deep State hijacked the expression "Qanon" and made it into something it was originally not, and has been using that to tell the public their own distorted and misleading version of what Q and the Great Awakening are.

So by the end of the Q posting period (in October 2020), it became necessary for Q to draw the clear distinction between the Q team "Q"& on one hand and "anons", who had their own ideas and thinking, on the other.

So the term was not created to discredit the movement, but rather, the term was hijacked and a false concept of Q was attached to it to discredit the movement (and Q).

I know there is such a thing as a Q Post -

They are not called "Q posts" but rather "Q drops". As in "Q dropped this information".

My favorite got-to site for checking or reading the Q drops is qanon.pub. You can see all the drops in sequence, either from the lastest down to the first, or (by clicking on an appropriate arrow) from the first down to the last. qanon.pub was created in March of 2018.

I know that a Delta is a post that lines up with the same date

That's not actually true. A 'delta' is the numerical distance between two points, most frequently between two points in time. For example, if Q makes a drop at 2:23 pm and Potus makes a tweet at 2:26 pm the same day, that is a delta of "3 minutes".

The deltas between Q drops and Potus tweets were one of the first means that Q used to show how closely Q and potus (Q+) were cooperating. The one minute deltas (where Q posts first) became a big deal and in one case, "Dan" (who anons believe to refer to Dan Scavino) was blamed by Q for a missed "several seconds" delta. It was a fun remark and brought a lot of smiles to anons.

Later, sometimes correlations between the time or date of certain Q drops and events that happened at similar time or date were seen as 'deltas' and some anons drew significance from these things. For example, if a Q drop was posted on May 5, 2018 and then something that appears to correlate to that happened or was reported on May 5 in 2020, or 2022, etc, the 'delta' was 2 years, or 4 years, etc.

The significance between the two events - The Q drop and its contents & the event or incident that later happened - are speculative, with the level of significance that people assign to the connections varying from no connection to very big connection. But 'delta' refers to the numerical distance between two events.

When someone draws a connection between a Q post that was made at 2:16 on X day and something that happens on 16th of February, that is NOT a delta, but something completely different. It is a numerical correlation, not a delta. It is a numerical similarity that is given significance or which someone asserts is meaningful.

Another similar correlation that someone makes might be "DJT's add was 1 minute and 56 seconds long" and "Q drop number #156 talks about the exact same thing". That's also not a delta, but a numerical similarity.

Since Q stopped posting, all sorts of people assign all sorts of interpretations to these and other correlations, but personally, I think many, if not most of the correlations aren't really important or significant. However, the original "Deltas" between Q drops and Potus tweets were a very important part of creating evidence or "proofs" that showed that Q is legit and bona fide and not just some random larper.

Some one, two, three, four, five year deltas between Q drops and some very significant events seem to indicate that certain future events were predicted or planned by the White hats. But again, a LOT of the conclusions that people draw are speculative, as opposed to proven.

When I see a post with a bunch of lines and circles in different colors, I generally pass it up because I don’t understand what any of it means. I find it quite confusing.

You are not the only one. Some people seem to love these. I generally find a good number of them unconvincing, as I have to ask "What is the purpose?" of the connections. The original connections like deltas had a very important purpose of proving that Q is legit, but I'm not sure how many of the connections people draw in the past few years have a reasonable purpose. Trump has given plenty of indicators over the past several years that he is still Q+ and that anons should hold the line.

I don’t know anything about the Q clock,

I don't know anything either, really. I never felt drawn to it and any time I viewed it, or discussions of it, I didn't feel it resonate, so it's not part of my Q understanding.

If there’s something else I need to know...

Apologies for the length of the replies. I hope it's not too wordy. If you think it is, let me know, and I'll attempt a much briefer, streamline response of the same things.

I think this is a good post and I'm glad the mods stickied it. I'm sure it will bring out a lot of helpful info from the board both for you and for others.