Austin Steinbart's rise as a QAnon leader involved 'guns, bitter internal feuds, and showdowns with federal law enforcement.' In an excerpt from 'Trust the Plan,' willsommer charts the stranger-than-fiction events that brought Steinbart to the forefront.
Kasey watched as her sister, now living just a few blocks from where they had grown up, tried to put a girl-power branding on QAnon. When I talked to Kasey in July 2020, a month after she had first asked me for help, she was losing hope that her sister would ever leave Steinbart’s group. Mutual friends who saw Kiley’s increasingly QAnon-focused posts asked Kasey if her sister had lost her mind.I never heard from Kasey again.
The fun-loving portrayal of life at the Ranch belied the fact that Steinbart faced a mountain of legal problems that could send him to prison for years. Steinbart’s bail conditions prohibited him from drinking alcohol or using drugs, rules he freely flouted in the company of his followers. Tellingly, visitors were required to sign non-disclosure agreements prohibiting them from discussing any such drinking or smoking “habits” they witnessed at the Ranch.
The Ranch purge began. He began to suspect that his once-loyal aides had installed hidden cameras around the house to catch him breaking his bail conditions. Steinbart was out of jail by the summer of 2021, after pleading guilty in April 2021 to the extortion charge and being sentenced to eight months time-served. But his path back to QAnon greatness had vanished. The Ranch collective dissolved in his absence. The post-riot social media crack-down on QAnon followers obliterated his YouTube and Twitter accounts. And while Steinbart claimed he had won new adherents in jail, many of his genuine followers had returned to their pre-Steinbart lives.
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