Cameron Joseph for Vice News:

In June 2020, stuck at home with her kids and growing increasingly infuriated by the government’s response to the coronavirus pandemic, Toni Shuppe binge-watched a QAnon conspiracy theory video series that changed her life—and altered the trajectory of her state’s politics.

“I knew there was more going on with this whole COVID crap than what we were being told, but I couldn’t figure out what it was, and in some weird way, the rabbit holes helped make sense of the craziness, ”she wrote in an April substack post recounting the moment. “I started sharing my newfound information with my family and friends who were willing to listen. Some of them woke up with me.”

Shuppe became a pro-Trump activist and embraced his false claims that the election had been stolen after he lost. In February 2021, Shuppe co-founded Audit the Vote PA to pressure lawmakers to audit Pennsylvania’s 2020 election. The group’s petition got 100,000 signatures in less than four months, transforming her into a fast-rising star of the hard right that soon landed on Trump’s radar—and perhaps most fatefully, introduced her to Pennsylvania state Sen. Doug Mastriano, who was just making a MAGA name for himself with his own fight to overturn the 2020 election.

Now, Mastriano is the GOP’s nominee for governor, and there’s been widespread chatter—and some concrete signs—that he might appoint Shuppe to run the state’s election system if he wins this November.

But Shuppe’s conspiracy theorizing goes way beyond the 2020 election and COVID-19. She’s promoted a number of even wilder claims popular with the QAnon community—including the idea that a cabal of elites are running a global child sex slave ring.

This isn’t that different from Mastriano, who regularly used the hashtags #QAnon and #thegreatawakening, and teamed up with a coalition of QAnon-aligned candidates running for office. He and Shuppe both spoke at a conference hosted by prominent QAnon activists.