A QAnon influencer claimed to be managing the campaign of Jerone Davison, a Republican running for Congress in Arizona, in a video he recently sent to supporters. The influencer also said that the campaign was working to push QAnon in a “very mainstream” way and that he wants to ultimately get to Washington and “set our own narrative.”

Austin Steinbart, who is known online as “Baby Q,” has previously claimed that QAnon “is a military intelligence operation, the first of its kind, one that uses space age quantum technology to post messages from the future to internet forums in the present,” and that “the main characters in this story are President Trump, Adm. Rogers, Gen. Flynn, the DIA, myself, and Q+.” (“Q+” is how QAnon supporters sometimes refer to Trump.) 

Steinbart has served time in prison for hacking the medical records of celebrities, and, as noted by The Daily Beast, got in legal trouble for using a “synthetic penis, in an apparent attempt to evade drug tests for marijuana while out on bail.”

In a video he shared on Discord with his supporters in early June, Steinbart said that Davison, who is running for Arizona’s 4th Congressional District, “made me his campaign manager last week, like officially.” He said he had originally been “working with” the campaign, “doing, like, primarily video work, and they had other people doing other things,” but that “over the course of the last few months, we’ve established really good rapport with this guy and he really loves the quantum message” -- potentially a reference to Steinbart’s theory about QAnon and time travel.

Steinbart added of his new position: “Some other people on the campaign were upset about that,” and he said at least one person who had been on Davison’s campaign claimed that Davison was now “Austin’s puppet.”

Steinbart said that he created a campaign site for Davison, which he showed on screen, and said that he was using Davison “to do like a Republican AOC sort of a thing” -- referring to Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) -- “not in the, like, retarded communist sense, but more in, like, the media sensation sense.” He added: “We are going to be turning him into like a Martin Luther King sort of a, sort of a figure for the internet bill of rights, for the civil rights issues of our day.” 

Additionally, Steinbart said that Davison’s campaign was “much more than just a campaign … cause if we are a part of it, if I’m a part of it, we can go to Washington with him, take a camera crew, and essentially, like, pull stunts every day, and just set our own narrative in -- from the Capitol.” He said that “when Jerone gets into hearings, I can be sitting in that chair behind him and we can just call out his intelligence officials to their face, put -- like, blow up their spot.” 

Steinbart also said that his involvement from the campaign gave him “extra cover from the FBI” and that he used the campaign site he said he created for Davison to go “really hard” on the “Q stuff,” but that he “packaged it in a very mainstream” way. He also said that Davison would be a “nuclear-grade red pill for, like, the entire country.” (On Discord, Steinbart called Davison the “perfect person to cast in this role.”)

Later in the video, after seeming to show the content management system of the campaign site, Steinbart claimed that the campaign site would be somewhat like “the Q [message] boards” with a “set of drops” and that Davison had gone “full quantum.” Then Steinbart urged “digital soldiers” -- a term used to describe QAnon supporters -- to help “creat[e] artificial momentum for Jerone right now” on social media by sharing Davison’s campaign videos (which Steinbart said were created by “our team”) and commenting on them, including by using ban evasion Twitter accounts if needed, in violation of Twitter rules.

Davison also has other QAnon connections that would signal support for the conspiracy theory. In one of his campaign launch videos, Davison said that he needed “bakers, meme lords, and content creators” to help with his campaign; the term “bakers” has been used to describe QAnon supporters who try to interpret posts from “Q,” QAnon’s central figure. And another campaign site for Davison (which he has also promoted on his social media) also has the QAnon slogan -- “where we go one, we go all,” or “WWG1WGA” -- in its metadata, listed next to “breadcrumb” (another QAnon term).

As for Steinbart, this would not be his first venture into Arizona politics. He was previously listed as a staffer of the firm running the supposed “audit” of ballots cast in Maricopa County for the 2020 presidential election, and he spoke at the premiere of an election conspiracy theory movie that focused on the supposed audit. And Steinbart’s claim of involvement in Davison’s campaign comes as another QAnon influencer, Wayne Willott (known online as “Juan O. Savin”), has been involved in an effort to recruit and elect secretary of state candidates around the country.