On Tuesday night in Colorado, conservative newcomer Lauren Boebert bested five-term GOP congressman Scott Tipton in Colorado's 3rd district. Boebert is a gun rights activist and local bar owner who has expressed interest in the sprawling QAnon conspiracy theory. In a statement to CNN, Boebert's campaign manager denied that Boebert was a follower of QAnon.

But earlier this year, Boebert told the host of an online talk show that she was "very familiar with" QAnon and that she "hope(s) that this is real."

She joins the GOP's Oregon Senate nominee Jo Rae Perkins and Georgia's Marjorie Taylor Greene, who won a 20-point victory in a June primary and faces an August run-off in a safe Republican district. Perkins, after winning the nomination, said in a video "Where we go one, we go all. I stand with President Trump. I stand with Q and the team. Thank you Anons and thank you patriots -- and together we can save our republic." Greene said in a 2017 video that "Q is a patriot," and that "He is someone that very much loves his country, and he's on the same page as us, and he is very pro-Trump."

It's often said that three makes a trend, but these women are just the most successful of the 59 candidates who have recently run for congress and have backed QAnon or have expressed support for its conspiracies, according to a list compiled by the liberal research outfit Media Matters.

What exactly is QAnon, you might reasonably ask? Whoo-boy -- get ready for some deep strangeness that defies anything resembling logic.

One of the best long-form articles about the subject, by Adrienne LaFrance in The Atlantic captures the broad contours of QAnon's belief system: "Q is an intelligence or military insider with proof that corrupt world leaders are secretly torturing children all over the world; the malefactors are embedded in the deep state; Donald Trump is working tirelessly to thwart them."

If you're tempted to dismiss that as some kind of unintelligible hyper-partisan Mad-Libs, here's another description by two of the best reporters who've chronicled the movement from its murky origins, Ben Collins and Brandy Zadrozny wrote in 2018: "QAnon is a convoluted conspiracy theory with no apparent foundation in reality. The heart of it asserts that for the last year the anonymous 'Q' has taken to the fringe internet message boards of 4chan and 8chan to leak intelligence about Trump's top-secret war with a cabal of criminals run by politicians like Hillary Clinton and the Hollywood elite. There is no evidence for these claims."

Sounds weird, right? That's because it is.

But it has seeped into the groundwater of the Trump era hyper-partisanship, with Q paraphernalia sold outside of Trump rallies and appearing with disturbing regularity on his supporters. Although he hasn't spoken directly about QAnon, the President has fanned the flames, by repeatedly retweeting QAnon-supporting accounts, memes and hashtags. The Trump campaign has even included QAnon signs in an ad, which followers may see as an