Qanon, of course, pushes ideas that are batshit crazy. My point is more moderate people dress them up a bit and push the same concepts.
If you look up the author of that op-ed piece, she's a lawyer and devoted anti-sex-trafficking advocate, so it is most logical to just view it as an op-ed representing her personal interests and point of view, not representative of The Times, or The Democrats, or The Mainstream.
Absolutely no idea what you're even talking about.
Anyway comparing this to "some guy on 4chan is pretending to be a high ranking official with highly classified insider knowledge without offering a single proof" is just a stupid way of deflecting. It's not remotely on the same level.
QAnon is at the tier of flat-earth conspiracy theories, not Watergate. It's been debunked countless time, none of the predictions have come true and the official account has been caught multiple photoshoping pictures to make people believe he had access to the president himself. It all started with a LARPer on 4chan, the most trustworthy of online forums.
People believing that crap are either roleplaying or prefer to live in a made up world than face the truth, it's as simple as that. The problem as always is that a tiny minority of these people eventually become radicalized enough to actually try to act on this fantasy.