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Greene, who is expected to easily defeat her Democratic opponent in the solidly red district in November, has since walked back her support of the theory, telling Fox News that \"once I started finding misinformation, I decided that I would choose another path.\"

'We want to make sense of the world'

If scattered Republican candidates have dabbled in the theory, it may be because the leader of their party has flirted with it for years.

President Trump has retweeted dozens of QAnon-tied accounts, tweets and hash tags, with the first coming early on in the movement’s development in the fall of 2017. It's a pattern of behavior at odds with his comment at the now-infamous press conference that he knew little of the group.

For a movement built around Trump as a savior-like figure, his refusal to disavow the theory appears to be a rallying cry for some, like Mike Cargile, a long-shot California congressional candidate.

\"The president's very deliberate, very exact, in what he says because he knows everything he says is getting scrutinized to the Nth degree,\" Cargile told ABC News' Juju Chang. \"So when he makes little statements, little overtures, little retweets that seem to affirm something, I'd believe it.\"

Cargile said he began investigating the theory because \"I feel my responsibility as a congressional candidate is to know everything.\"

\"I give the allegation credibility. I don't know if this is true or not,\" Cargile told Chang. \"So I started checking into it and a lot of it I agreed with. And there are some fringe elements I don't agree with.\"

While sex trafficking does exist, Chang pressed Cargile on whether he believed, despite lack of evidence, that \"there is a deep state conspiracy that is trafficking in these young children.\"

\"I don't have a doubt in my mind that this exists,\" Cargile responded.

\"I'm a very average human being,\" he said. \"And I think I have hundreds of millions of people out there like me who just want the world to make sense, and we want to make sense of the world around us.\"

ABC News' Chris Francescani contributed to this report.

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