• Ongoing relevance/likely persistence of QAnon in the US, particularly in the 2022 and 2024 election years: new reporting continues to indicate that QAnon supporters are remaining politically active and adapting the core ideology to new aims (see, for example, The Atlantic's latest piece).
• While the first major book on the topic, The Storm is Upon Us (Melville House, June 2021) functioned as an authoritative explainer of QAnon's communications, activities, and scope, Operation Mindfuck is an irreverent but urgent call to intellectual action, offering mastery in the analysis of the movement's largely-borrowed source material and cult-mentality triggers. Guffey says: "Perhaps the most intriguing aspect of the QAnon psyop is not the identity of its architects, but the mere fact that it worked . . . and worked so damn well."
• Operation Mindfuck contextualizes QAnon not only within existing conspiracy theory formulas and satanic panics, but also traces its bizarre lineage in the American collective unconscious, from Cold War paranoia to the midcentury counterculture—Guffey's particularly effective in highlighting QAnon's exploiting of political performance tactics pioneered by 1960s radical leftists. Untangling this web of influence and pointing to its far-from-supernatural sources, Guffey argues, is key to breaking QAnon's mesmeric spell.
• The book's uniquely freewheeling style is marked by Guffey's gonzo-journalistic plunges into the subculture himself, including pursuing an email correspondence with a recent QAnon convert, clicking on YouTube links at his own risk, and joining the mailing list of a QAnon talk show, using the pseudonym Edgar Allan Poe.