Kasey watched as her sister, now residing only a few blocks from the place they’d grown up, tried to place a girl-power branding on QAnon. After I talked to Kasey in July 2020, a month after she had first requested me for assist, she was dropping hope that her sister would ever depart Steinbart’s group. Mutual associates who noticed Kiley’s more and more QAnon-focused posts requested Kasey if her sister had misplaced her thoughts.
“She’s extra into it than even earlier than,” she mentioned.
I by no means heard from Kasey once more. After we spoke in July, she stopped responding to my calls and textual content messages. However in movies posted by Steinbart’s group, Kiley addressed her sister’s latest dying. Kasey died of a coronary heart assault at twenty-seven years previous.
With Kasey gone, I misplaced my closest connection to Steinbart’s group, proper as he drew in additional followers and have become a extra vocal determine in QAnon. However internally, Steinbart’s compound had already began to break down.
The Ranch crew projected a cheerful picture on-line, coming off like a season of The Actual World with a time-traveler for a roommate. Steinbart’s movies garnered tens of 1000’s of views, stuffed with responses from QAnon believers satisfied he was Q.
It appeared like there was nothing these closest to Steinbart wouldn’t settle for. They didn’t appear to thoughts that there was no proof that he had billions of {dollars}. At occasions, it appeared like Steinbart had arrange a pressure area outdoors the Ranch that no sense of actuality might penetrate.
The fun-loving portrayal of life on the Ranch belied the truth that Steinbart confronted a mountain of authorized issues that would ship him to jail for years. Steinbart’s bail circumstances prohibited him from ingesting alcohol or utilizing medication, guidelines he freely flouted within the firm of his followers. Tellingly, guests had been required to signal non-disclosure agreements prohibiting them from discussing any such ingesting or smoking “habits” they witnessed on the Ranch. However Steinbart’s drug and alcohol use grew to become a vulnerability as a few of his followers began to change into suspicious about his claims.
A follower named Mike grew to become disaffected. As an alternative of working to hold out “Operation QAnon,” Mike seen, residents on the Ranch simply drank all night time and slept the day away. And whereas Steinbart claimed that he had sufficient cash to fund all the Area Pressure, he requested his followers to pay at any time when he needed a six-pack of beer.
“He by no means paid for a single factor there,” Mike mentioned in a video posted on-line, urging different Steinbart followers to desert their chief.
The Ranch purge started. He started to suspect that his once-loyal aides had put in hidden cameras round the home to catch him breaking his bail circumstances.
By some means, whether or not from one in all Steinbart’s defectors or another means, courtroom officers found that Steinbart had violated his bail restrictions. He was arrested once more in September 2020, and admitted to ingesting alcohol and smoking marijuana. When police searched his home, they discovered a “Whizzinator,” a prosthetic penis meant to cheat drug assessments. A decide dominated him held till trial.
Steinbart’s imprisonment shattered the Ranch. With their charismatic chief now in solely sporadic contact through a jailhouse phone, a few of Steinbart’s remaining followers started to marvel what they had been doing with their lives.
Steinbart was out of jail by the summer season of 2021, after pleading responsible in April 2021 to the extortion cost and being sentenced to eight months time-served. However his path again 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 whereas Steinbart claimed he had gained new adherents in jail, lots of his real followers had returned to their pre-Steinbart lives.
Michael Rae Khoury, a Steinbart follower who had put $40,000 of his personal cash into the group invited me to Phoenix to see Steinbart give a speech on the premiere of an election fraud documentary. Different QAnon believers handled Steinbart’s flock like “lepers,” Khoury complained, however they didn’t know what was actually occurring since Steinbart’s launch. I ought to come see it for myself.
I couldn’t flip down the prospect. Steinbart’s QAnon experiment had burned itself out, nevertheless it was nonetheless one of many strangest ways in which QAnon had performed out in the true world. And I needed to seek out out what had occurred to Kiley Mayer.
Steinbart had one way or the other snagged a talking spot on the premiere of a conspiracy-theory movie about election fraud.
Steinbart helped safe a church on the outskirts of Phoenix for the premiere, and his remaining followers handed out flyers to drum up curiosity. The premiere coincided with the top of Arizona Republicans’ controversial inspection of thousands and thousands of votes—an try to seek out any scrap of proof to dispute the truth that Biden had gained the state—and the premiere doubled as a celebration for the audit workforce. It had drawn some boldface names on the appropriate, together with Michael Flynn’s brother and a few state lawmakers.
Steinbart struggled to get invited to conferences for mainline QAnon believers, who nonetheless noticed him as, at finest, a crank. However he had no drawback getting a sales space on the premiere, the place his roughly dozen remaining supporters marketed a membership service referred to as “Q Meetups”—Steinbart’s newest try and take his model of QAnon nationwide.
