Arizona congressional candidate confirms QAnon influencer is running his campaign
Republican candidate Jerone Davison: “Austin [Steinbart] is my campaign manager”
Written by Alex Kaplan
Published
Jerone Davison, a Republican running for Congress in Arizona, confirmed that QAnon influencer Austin Steinbart is running his campaign, weeks after Steinbart boasted of his new role as campaign manager.
Steinbart, known online as “Baby Q,” has previously claimed that QAnon was ”a military intelligence operation” that used “space age quantum technology to post messages from the future to internet forums in the present,” and that former President Donald Trump was personally involved. Steinbart has served time in prison for hacking the medical records of celebrities, and, as noted by The Daily Beast, he got in legal trouble for using a “synthetic penis, in an apparent attempt to evade drug tests for marijuana while out on bail.”
In early June, Steinbart released a video to his supporters on Discord in which he said that Davison, who is running for Arizona’s 4th Congressional District, “made me his campaign manager last week, like officially.” According to Steinbart, he created a campaign site for Davison to go “really hard” on the “Q stuff” as a core part of his campaign messaging, and he plans to continue working with Davison “from the Capitol” should he successfully win a seat in Congress this November.
In a June 16 interview on an online show, Davison said, “I have somebody on my campaign who had a past, Austin,” adding that the “FBI set him up” and that he is a “guy on my team.” He also suggested that someone was creating “dummy websites” of his campaign, even though his social media promoted as his own campaign site a site that had the QAnon slogan -- “where we go one, we go all,” or “WWG1WGA” -- in its metadata, listed next to “breadcrumb,” another QAnon term. (Davison during the interview also said, “I was at January 6.”)
Additionally, a Facebook post from Davison on June 20 was even more specific on Steinbart’s role in his campaign, stating, “Austin is my campaign manager,” and claiming that “the left is so afraid of my campaign that they tried to force me to fire” Steinbart. Davison also lashed out at Media Matters for allegedly “attempting to stop” his supposed campaign momentum by reporting the connections between himself and the QAnon movement, a conspiracy theory that has inspired internal warnings from multiple government agencies.
In response to Davison’s Facebook post, Steinbart wrote on Discord, “Jerone has our back. Let’s make sure we have his!”