Time Travel, Brain Scans, and FBI Drop-Ins: The Spectacular Rise and Fall of a QAnon Commune

Kasey Mayer watched in the first months of 2020 as her older sister Kiley’s Instagram posts went from sunsets and brunches to QAnon and Trump. By the summer, Kiley was living with Q—or at least with a man who said he was Q. “I’m worried she’s in serious danger,” Kasey Mayer wrote me in an email.

After I started writing about QAnon, I started to receive a lot of these messages about getting friends or relatives out of the movement. The emails were filled with anguish, and a desire to reconnect with the person they knew before QAnon grabbed hold of them. But I had never received an email like this before.

Kiley had been working as a sales contractor for AT&T when, she claimed, she found proof that the telecom giant was letting intelligence agencies spy on customers’ phone calls. She became convinced the deep state knew about her discovery and was going to punish her for it. Strangers she saw on the street were stalking her. Kiley started to describe herself online as a “targeted individual,” a term used by a thriving internet community of paranoiacs who believe they’re being pursued by shadowy forces. 

Kasey had a simpler explanation, telling me her sister had become “mentally unstable” after becoming obsessed with various online conspiracy theories. The latest iteration of this wormhole started after a friend who knew about Kiley’s interest in conspiracy theories showed her a video by an upstart QAnon promoter named Austin Steinbart, a tall, unnervingly confident twenty-nine-year-old with slicked-back hair. He didn’t just promote QAnon; he claimed to be Q. According to Steinbart, his future self, some twenty or thirty years in the future, was using a time-traveling computer to post messages on 8chan that now appeared as the Q posts.

“Put that in your pipe and smoke it, haters,” Steinbart said in one of his first videos. “I’m not just associated with Q, I am Q. Me, personally. This is my operation. The guy posting on the boards and running point on this operation is actually me in the future.”

Back in our timeline, the fans of the younger, present-day version of Steinbart dubbed him “Baby Q” to distinguish him from his future self. In the summer of 2020, Steinbart started to gather his followers together in a suburban Phoenix house. Informally, Steinbart’s followers called this make-shift headquarters “The Ranch.”

Kiley Mayer and other Steinbart followers often cite one March 2020 video in particular as the moment they realized he was Q. It’s called “Black Ops 101,” but it’s better known as the one where he boasts about burning a man to death.

In the video, Steinbart wears a backward baseball cap and sits in front of the Anonymous hacker logo, looking more like a YouTuber about to dole out video game tips than the globe-trotting spy he claims to be. He sketches out the world according to Steinbart, where the Titanic was deliberately sunk to kill critics of the Federal Reserve. Now, Steinbart proclaims on camera, he is here to put the world right as an agent of the Defense Intelligence Agency.

Steinbart explained to his then-nonexistent audience that he had been recruited into the DIA when he was seventeen years old—an important age for QAnon believers, given the associations between Q and the number 17. Thanks to time-traveling messages from his future self, he’d invested early in bitcoin and was now “rich as hell,” with billions of dollars in cryptocurrencies that he could use to fund Trump’s new branch of the military devoted to outer space, the United States Space Force.

“We are not going to be gangbanging or drug dealing anymore to fund our black ops,” Steinbart said. “I’m actually just going to pay for it myself. Isn’t that fun?”

In the spring of 2020, Kiley moved into the Ranch.

“She picked up her entire life, drove out here, and is living in a compound,” Kasey told me.

Steinbart’s time-travel story was bizarre, even by the standards of a movement where sex dungeons are taken as a given. Kasey watched Steinbart’s videos, where he declared that he would soon run the Space Force or denounced one of his followers for a perceived betrayal. She felt like Kiley had joined a twenty-first-century, internet-enabled version of Charles Manson’s Manson Family—and now her sister was one of the Manson girls. Still, Steinbart had attracted the most visible devotion of any QAnon promoter yet.

Since its launch in 2017, academics and journalists following QAnon have debated whether it’s a cult. But Steinbart seemed intent on resolving that semantic debate by turning his QAnon group into a cult in the classic 1970s sense, complete with a compound, guns, bitter internal feuds, and showdowns with federal law enforcement.

Cult or not, Kasey didn’t want her sister involved with Steinbart’s group. Kasey knew that Kiley was an adult and free to join whatever strange organization she wanted to. But it gnawed at her, watching Kiley opt to live in a fantasy world.

“I don’t want my sister to be part of something like this,” Kasey said.

Steinbart and his followers represented the outer limits of commitment to QAnon, giving up their old lives to work for his vision. He was creating the closest thing QAnon had to a new way of living. A rotating crew of roughly ten people lived at the Ranch, with several other followers living elsewhere in the area and many more online. Now he was trying to take over QAnon right at the height of its pandemic surge, when new recruits flooding into QAnon were looking for direction. 

Kasey had asked me to help get her sister out of QAnon. I had to go to Phoenix to see Steinbart’s world for myself.

After growing up in Texas, Steinbart enrolled at Arizona State University, only to drop out a few years in and become an IT technician.

With the prospect of a stable if mundane life stretching out before him, Steinbart got into QAnon instead. In 2018, he joined a group of armed vigilantes hunting for pedophile sex traffickers in the desert. But Steinbart’s comrades kicked him out of the group almost as soon as he arrived, suspicious that his enthusiasm for their mission meant he was a federal agent provocateur. Steinbart made a more drastic move two years later in March 2020, taking to his obscure YouTube channel with an announcement: he was Q. Refusing to seriously explain what had drawn him back to QAnon, Steinbart cast his return as another mission from his handlers in military intelligence.

QAnon created a community where Steinbart, like other new believers, could remake himself. But Steinbart stood out from the other QAnon boosters by talking endlessly about the crimes he had committed in Q’s name, claiming he had smuggled drugs across the southern border and threatening in a video to kill the queen of Denmark if she didn’t cede Greenland to the United States. For his fans, Steinbart’s gleeful flouting of the law merely demonstrated that he was in fact Q, and therefore shielded from legal consequences. 

To prove any doubters wrong, Steinbart decided to go on a mini crime spree. He started with some old footage he had surreptitiously recorded at his doctor’s office, where he filmed himself illicitly accessing the brain scans of football players suffering from chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or CTE. 

Steinbart released the footage in one of his first QAnon videos, offering it as proof that he operated above the law, while not mentioning that he had been a patient at the clinic himself for unspecified reasons. If MI6 gave James Bond a license to kill, Austin Steinbart wanted to prove that QAnon gave him, somewhat less exaltedly, a license to film celebrities’ brain scans, enjoying what he called an “obvious immunity from prosecution.”

“Brain’s a little holey,” Steinbart said as he pointed at what appeared to be brain damage on another player’s MRI results. 

Steinbart seemed to be pursuing QAnon fame at all costs, no matter how self-destructive it could be to his own life. If the original Q had gained fame with his outrageous assertions, Steinbart was set on proving that he was Q by brazenly committing crimes and getting away with them. 

The personal risks of that strategy became clear six days after Steinbart published the video, when the FBI knocked on his door. 

Steinbart answered the door with a Desert Eagle pistol in hand, according to the FBI agents. His mood brightened more when he learned his new visitors were from the FBI, and explained that he was an agent for the government, too.

Steinbart’s interview quickly turned into a defense attorney’s nightmare of self-incrimination, according to an account provided in court later by FBI agents seeking his arrest. Steinbart said he had smuggled marijuana across the Mexican border. He confirmed that he had accessed the clinic’s files, saying he did “outrageous” things to prove he was a spy, acting on orders from his future self, transmitted through an implant in his brain. 

The FBI visit didn’t dissuade Steinbart. Two days later, he picked a new fight and urged his supporters to harass a cloud storage company that had deleted some of his files. When the company’s CEO asked Steinbart to call off his fans, who had cost the company more than $10,000 by tying up their customer service lines, Steinbart told the executive he was impeding “Operation QAnon” and would soon be dealt with.

Ten days later, FBI agents arrested Steinbart on an extortion charge for the threats. Despite prosecutors’ warnings that Steinbart had “significant unaddressed mental health issues,” a judge released him from jail, putting him on house arrest with an ankle monitor.

Steinbart’s backstory as a superspy working for the military started to unravel after the indictment, when prosecutors were unable to find proof that he worked for his supposed employer, the DIA. But his name in QAnon had never been bigger. Thanks to the handful of videos he had posted before his arrest, he attracted more than 20,000 YouTube subscribers, plus roughly a dozen followers who showed up at his court hearings waving a Q flag.

After one hearing, Steinbart was met outside by Jacob Chansley—the “Q Shaman” whose painted face and horned helmet would become infamous a few months later when he joined other rioters breaking into the U.S. Capitol. Steinbart winced when Chansley gestured with his spear to emphasize his points about metaphysical truths and realms beyond our imagining. 

“We have the high ground, and we’re taking down them low-ass motherfuckers,” Chansley assured Steinbart, turning to bellow at the federal courthouse behind him. “Where we go one, we go all, motherfuckers!”

Steinbart, under house arrest and wearing an ankle monitor ahead of trial, started collecting his followers at the Ranch. The plan: launch the Space Force, bring down the cabal, and help Steinbart achieve his destiny as Baby Q.

Kiley shared a room with another woman, a 24-year-old New Ager who had been researching conspiracy theories since the 2016 election. The other members of Steinbart’s group dubbed them the “Crystal Sisters.”

Phase One of Steinbart’s master plan to become the public face of QAnon relied on making a lot of YouTube videos. Each channel was meant to target a specific demographic: millennials, or Fox News–loving boomers, for example. A gluten-free cooking show was planned.

Kiley and her roommate launched “Quantum Consciousness,” a show aimed at millennials and New Age spiritualists where they toasted new QAnon developments with White Claw hard seltzers. One episode centered on how the quantum internet could be used to time travel, and even see into the brains of historical figures like Julius Caesar or John F. Kennedy.

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.

“She’s more into it than even before,” she said.

I never heard from Kasey again. After we spoke in July, she stopped responding to my calls and text messages. But in videos posted by Steinbart’s group, Kiley addressed her sister’s recent death. Kasey died of a heart attack at twenty-seven years old.

With Kasey gone, I lost my closest connection to Steinbart’s group, right as he drew in more followers and became a more vocal figure in QAnon. But internally, Steinbart’s compound had already started to collapse.

The Ranch crew projected a cheerful image online, coming off like a season of The Real World with a time-traveler for a roommate. Steinbart’s videos garnered tens of thousands of views, filled with responses from QAnon believers convinced he was Q.

It seemed like there was nothing those closest to Steinbart wouldn’t accept. They didn’t seem to mind that there was no evidence that he had billions of dollars. At times, it seemed like Steinbart had set up a force field outside the Ranch that no sense of reality could penetrate.

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. But Steinbart’s drug and alcohol use became a vulnerability as some of his followers started to become suspicious about his claims.

A follower named Mike became disaffected. Instead of working to carry out “Operation QAnon,” Mike noticed, residents at the Ranch just drank all night and slept the day away. And while Steinbart claimed that he had enough money to fund the entire Space Force, he asked his followers to pay whenever he wanted a six-pack of beer.

“He never paid for a single thing there,” Mike said in a video posted online, urging other Steinbart followers to abandon their leader.

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.

Somehow, whether from one of Steinbart’s defectors or some other means, court officials discovered that Steinbart had violated his bail restrictions. He was arrested again in September 2020, and admitted to drinking alcohol and smoking marijuana. When police searched his house, they found a “Whizzinator,” a prosthetic penis meant to cheat drug tests. A judge ruled him held until trial.

Steinbart’s imprisonment shattered the Ranch. With their charismatic leader now in only sporadic contact via a jailhouse telephone, some of Steinbart’s remaining followers began to wonder what they were doing with their lives.

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.

Michael Rae Khoury, a Steinbart follower who had put $40,000 of his own money into the group invited me to Phoenix to see Steinbart give a speech at the premiere of an election fraud documentary. Other QAnon believers treated Steinbart’s flock like “lepers,” Khoury complained, but they didn’t know what was really going on since Steinbart’s release. I should come see it for myself.

I couldn’t turn down the chance. Steinbart’s QAnon experiment had burned itself out, but it was still one of the strangest ways that QAnon had played out in the real world. And I wanted to find out what had happened to Kiley Mayer.

Steinbart had somehow snagged a speaking spot at the premiere of a conspiracy-theory film about election fraud.

Steinbart helped secure a church on the outskirts of Phoenix for the premiere, and his remaining followers passed out flyers to drum up interest. The premiere coincided with the end of Arizona Republicans’ controversial inspection of millions of votes—an attempt to find any scrap of evidence to dispute the fact that Biden had won the state—and the premiere doubled as a party for the audit team. It had drawn some boldface names on the right, including Michael Flynn’s brother and some state lawmakers.

Steinbart struggled to get invited to conferences for mainline QAnon believers, who still saw him as, at best, a crank. But he had no problem getting a booth at the premiere, where his roughly dozen remaining supporters advertised a club service called “Q Meetups”—Steinbart’s latest attempt to take his version of QAnon nationwide.

I met Steinbart in the church lobby and saw that he had traded his backward baseball cap and polo shirt for a Young Republican–approved navy blazer and wingtips. Kiley was with him. Rarely leaving Steinbart’s side ahead of the premiere, Kiley seemed like his second in command, or perhaps something more. While Kasey had hoped Kiley would leave Steinbart’s orbit, she had in fact only risen higher in the group. Before the movie started, Kiley told me that she and Steinbart were now a couple.

Months earlier, Steinbart had been eating prison food and trying to red-pill other inmates. Now he was hobnobbing at a film premiere backstage with Republican Party officials. And while his speech at the premiere turned out to be unremarkable—he told me later that the event’s organizers told him not to mention QAnon—the fact that he was even able to make it onstage at all was unbelievable.

Steinbart’s compound had failed, but in a way, he had found something even better. Thanks to Republican leaders’ willingness to accommodate QAnon and treat it as a legitimate faction of the party, Steinbart, an obvious grifter and charlatan who specialized in sucking vulnerable people dry to support his own delusions, would be treated like a credible political figure. He had even managed to insinuate himself into the team handling the Arizona ballot recount, becoming one of the audit’s staffers shortly after his release from jail.

After the movie, Steinbart and Kiley took me backstage for an interview. Sitting alone with them, I had a fleeting thought that no one else in the world knew where I was. I had put myself in the hands of a recently convicted felon who claimed he killed people, and often spoke of the violence he had witnessed and inflicted. But he was all charm this time.

Steinbart seemed like a conservative operative on the make. QAnon, Steinbart thought, should be for everyone. And he thought that, in retrospect, trying to create a QAnon compound wasn’t the right move after all.

“I didn’t do myself any favors doing the ranch thing,” he said.

Kiley was still entrenched in QAnon, too, and not just because she was now Steinbart’s girlfriend. She told me lengthy stories about her own brushes with the deep state as a “targeted individual.” Steinbart said he still listened to episodes of her old YouTube show about his QAnon adventures.

“Two pretty girls talking about me?” he said. “How could I not love that?”

The premiere was Steinbart’s coming-out party into a mainstream brand of Republicanism. But as we rejoined his supporters in the lobby after the interview, it was clear the mood had changed.

A frowning Steinbart follower approached his leader, holding out a phone so he could read it.

Steinbart’s QAnon detractors had been watching the event on a $45-per-person livestream and were outraged that Steinbart was allowed to give a speech. His QAnon critics slammed the event’s organizers, accusing him of either being duped into promoting Steinbart’s claims that he was Q or an FBI plant. Cowed, the hosts denounced Steinbart in a social media post.

The tide was rapidly turning on Steinbart’s moment of triumph. His followers were twitchy, looking around the lobby like they could be bounced by security at any moment. But Steinbart and Kiley were still enjoying their victory.

“That’s what’s so funny,” Kiley said. “People don’t realize we don’t mind the controversy.”

“I thought I handled myself like a gentleman,” Steinbart said.

Before I left, I asked Kiley about her sister, and her hope that Kiley would leave QAnon. Kiley said her father was coming around on Steinbart, and had attended the premiere—only leaving early because he was so upset by the idea that the election had been stolen.

“They’re very supportive of everything,” she said of her parents. “And I would hope if my sister was alive, she would be in that same camp.”

From the book TRUST THE PLAN Copyright (2023) by Will Sommer. Published on February 21, 2023 by Harper, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers. Reprinted by permission.

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