MIDDLETOWN, Pennsylvania — At first glance, John Sabal doesn't fit the profile of a typical Republican foot soldier. He's not a fan of Big Business, and before 2016 he'd never voted for a Republican president.
The 30-year-old salesman and Navy veteran — who was in grade school in Philadelphia when the 9/11 terror attacks happened — believes that President George W. Bush secretly collaborated with foreign powers to take down the Twin Towers and murder 3,000 Americans as a pretext to start a war "for profit" and impose mass domestic surveillance.
But on an overcast Saturday in late September, Sabal and his girlfriend posted up under a white tent in the parking lot outside a Donald Trump campaign rally near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, to show their undying support for the current Republican president.
Sabal's willingness to indulge dark conspiracies drove him away from Bush, but the same tendency has delivered him into Trump's arms.
For the past two years Sabal has been a devoted follower of the far-right movement known as QAnon. A "Q" banner adorned his tent, and he sported a T-shirt featuring ex-national security advisor Michael Flynn's face and the words "Great Awakening."
How QAnon infiltrated GOP Twitter
Insider analyzed how keywords and hashtags associated with QAnon have propagated on the Twitter accounts of prominent GOP elected officials and pundits.
First QAnon-related tweet for user
Dot size represents number of retweets
Republican brass tweeted about QAnon or child sex-trafficking 10 times a week, on average, a number that more than doubled after notorious pedophile Jeffrey Epstein's arrest and suicide in mid-2019.
Despite Epstein's well-documented friendship with Trump and close association with major Republican donors, he's loomed large in the GOP Twittersphere even after his death. During one week in November 2019, a high of three dozen tweets were posted pertaining to QAnon or child sex-trafficking, 14% of which concerned the late sex offender.
Since August another wave of activity has cropped up.
"This is your daily reminder that the mainstream media dedicated more time and fever to the number of diet cokes @realDonaldTrump drinks, than to transcripts which reveal that former President @BillClinton visited a private sex/pedophile island with two young women," conservative activist Candace Owens tweeted in early August.
The tweet has racked up more engagement than any other in Insider's analysis, with nearly 48,000 retweets.
'We're all Q'
QAnon isn't an explicitly partisan movement. Instead, the theory pits Trump as a godlike warrior against an evil political establishment that includes both Republicans and Democrats.
Unlike most conspiracy theories, QAnon offers an aspirational, positive vision for the future, one in which good will prevail over evil (after Trump carries out mass arrests and sends the "deep state" to Guantanamo).
It provides something close to community for many of its followers, who argue that the movement is overwhelmingly nonviolent. While many remain isolated online, some meet in person at Trump rallies and other gatherings.
Vince LaPorte, who attended the late-September Trump rally in Pennsylvania with his wife and young daughter, wearing Trump-branded clothing, said he felt as if he was part of a righteous global community.
"We're all Q," he said. "All these people you see across the whole world, it's worldwide, you see 'em all over the world standing up for America, standing up for freedom, standing up for God, standing against Satan, standing against pedophilia and corruption and all that."
Like a religion, the delusion gives many hope in a dark time, even if they acknowledge the bright vision of a "great awakening" may not come to pass.
"If we're crazy, at least we're hanging on to something to look forward to," Megan Fellers, a 35-year-old mother of three, told Insider at the Trump rally.
"I don't think everyone else can say that right now. A lot of people are filled with doom and gloom and the world's gonna end, so we have something to look forward to that a lot of people don't."
The vast conspiracy movement has converted some independents and politically disengaged people into hardcore Trump supporters.
Michael Matroni, a 37-year-old employee in the mouthwash department at Johnson & Johnson's manufacturing facility in Lititz, Pennsylvania, voted for Libertarian Gary Johnson in 2016. Matroni, who believes 9/11 was an "inside job," has long distrusted the Democratic and Republican parties.
Last year a few of Matroni's coworkers and a cousin introduced him to QAnon. Matroni showed up to the Pennsylvania rally with his friend Gary Ketterer, both wearing QAnon merchandise. While waiting for hours in line outside the rally venue at Harrisburg International Airport, they met and chatted with other QAnon believers.
Some experts say QAnon fits the classic profile of a cult.
Rick Alan Ross, executive director of the nonprofit Cult Education Institute, called QAnon a "destructive cult" engineered for a digital age.
Like most cults, it seeks to discredit all opposition. It features a leader who's morphed into an "object of worship." And it's a "destructive, pernicious" force that hurts people, whether that be its own adherents or the exasperated friends and family of QAnon believers.
Facebook cracks down
One Republican close to Trump blames the rise of QAnon on the failure of mainstream news organizations to cover subjects of intense interest to conservative readers.
When conservatives want to read about the texts of former FBI agents Peter Strzok and Lisa Page and the allegations against Hunter Biden in Ukraine, this Republican said, they have to go to fringe conspiracy-minded sites like Gateway Pundit or follow alt-right figures such as Posobiec.
Far-right websites successfully attracted more conservatives and Trump supporters writing about those stories, and then mixed in QAnon-related stories, effectively disseminating the conspiracy theory wider than expected, the Republican close to the president said.
After years of permitting QAnon to propagate virally on its platform, Facebook recently cracked down, announcing in early October that it would ban all pages, groups, and Instagram accounts that promote the conspiracy theory.
Shortly after, YouTube announced it would implement new measures to stem QAnon's spread on its platform. But QAnon leaders have urged followers to "camouflage" their accounts and many have already found workarounds, rebranding as anti-sex-trafficking and health and wellness groups.
Sabal said his Facebook page, with its tens of thousands of followers, was shut down this summer, but, after 10 unsuccessful attempts, he now has a new account on the platform.
The 'free speech' defense
Even among Trump supporters who reject QAnon, there's a tendency to defend it as a harmless expression of free thought.
Chad Connelly, a 33-year-old construction worker at Trump's Middletown rally, likened QAnon to a religious belief.
"It could be conspiratorial, but so was Russiagate," said Connelly, who said he voted for Obama for president in 2008. "Who cares if people believe in conspiracy theories? Who cares? You're allowed to believe in whatever you want to believe.
"If you believe there's a guy up in the sky who's watching everything that you do, who's omniscient, you're allowed to believe that. If you believe there's nothing up there, you're allowed to believe that, too."
QAnon supporters insist their movement centers on free speech and intellectual empowerment. They see themselves as free thinkers and "digital soldiers" fighting corrupt institutions and ideologies.
They often cite the vague, choose-your-own-adventure nature of QAnon in defending the movement against claims of indoctrination.
"People say Q is a cult, but that's impossible because Q tells you to think for yourself," Sabal, the man at the Pennsylvania Trump rally who goes by "QAnon John," said.
"QAnon teaches you to take information and make your own decisions," Edward Szczenski, a Trump supporter who attended the Middletown rally, told Insider. "It's not telling you what to believe. It's telling you freedom, it's telling you where we go one, we go all. What's wrong with that?"
In the crucial weeks before the 2020 election, QAnon has generated much-needed wind beneath the Republican Party's sails.
Even without Trump, or the party's explicit endorsement, the movement has mobilized a new breed of conservative activists, infiltrated the party's base, and brought independents and political outsiders into the fold.
Sabal said he'd never voted for a Republican presidential candidate or attended a political rally before Trump launched his presidential bid.
In the 2008 and 2012 presidential elections, he wrote in Ron Paul.
But in 2016, Sabal said he registered as a Republican because of Trump.
He told Insider, "I only voted for Trump because he was talking in a language that I could understand."
