Very much agree with your assessment. The outlandish is deliberately seeded in to sow discord, and to characterize all of us in the eyes of the outside normie population as immediately dismiss-able.

A partial list. To start with the big one: that the Apollo moon landing(s) were faked. This has the more extreme version that outer space itself is fake, i.e. unreal. This goes along with biblical cosmology that we live under a dome firmament, which is fellow-traveler to Flat Earth/Antarctic Ice Wall. There is also the hollow Earth/moon-is-hollow theory, which of course does not mix well space being fake. In another area I'd point to the Judy Wood's claim that DEWs took down the twin towers on 9/11. JFK Jr. is Alive was pushed pretty heavily into Q discussion groups; not impossible, but unlikely. Let's not forget that during the Covid era medical freedom groups were flooded by the "there is no such thing as viruses" army.

To the extent I pay attention to the above it is to study how they think and argue. There are a few distinctive traits. They operate as anomaly hunters, constantly search for the hidden guy wires. They construct miniature imaginary models of how reality "should" work, such as how moon dust "should" kick up, point out how it does not do so in the NASA videos, and say see, this proves it was all faked. They direct your attention on dubious and very narrow points while asking you to forget the wealth of counter-evidence.

Excessively narrowed focus is one trick. In the other direction is obstinate over-generalization. The deductive syllogism goes like this. NASA/the government/the media lies about everything. NASA/the government/the media is telling us X. Therefore X must be false. See TewaPatriot for illustration. Toss in a dose of condescension for good measure.

I've watched a few Bart Sibrel interviews. Not to examine his folly per se. Rather, to look for psychological insight. My takeaway is that he suffers from Crusader's Syndrome. He appears convinced that the government is pushing one lie on us after another - an understandable point of view - and is infuriated by that. In an attempt take them down he is taking on the biggest lie of them all (in his mind): the Apollo moon landings. That is his crusade.

For the more ordinary citizens that get taken in I believe a different dynamic is at play. It is, ironically, the fear of being fooled. People who are midway in their journey of waking up are especially prone to this tendency. When you are strong enough to realize and admit that you have been fooled in the past there is, in the reverse direction, strong psychological pressure to not be fooled again. The easiest way to not be fooled is to not believe anything anymore.

Then there are the professional iconoclasts. Those who have made their name and career bucking the mainstream narratives. It is impossible, for example, on thoroughly ideological grounds, for James Corbett to entertain the possibility of so-called White Hats in high positions of power in the U.S. government. Oh you silly Q-tards, he chuckles.

I'll end with a different thought, a conspiracy theory on manufactured conspiracy theories, if you will. It is the idea that the intelligence agencies who push Flat Earth and etcetera are not intending or expecting to gain huge traction on that particular narrative. They have a related goal. What they are doing is seeing who bites, on what platforms, measuring how quickly the memes travel and to where. They are constructing and mapping an information network. For what purpose? For later in time using it to deploy their ultimate information payload, e.g. that Trump is bad.

It's a fascinating theory. Similar to the Saul Alinky principle that "the issue is never the issue" - the Marxist Revolution is - here the (extreme) conspiracy theory is not the conspiracy theory. The influence network is the weapon.