“I wasn’t there one hundred percent as I should have been,” she recalls.
After the November elections, she spent days on TikTok, Facebook, and YouTube and became indoctrinated in the world of QAnon. On the day of the inauguration, she was convinced that if President-elect Joe Biden took office, the United States would literally turn into a communist country. She was terrified that she would have to go into hiding with her daughter.
Many QAnon believers have clear political motives, but Vanderbilt says she is a passive participant in politics.
“I’ve always been someone who just tells me what to do and I’ll do it. I grew up hearing we were Republicans, so I’ve always been that outright red card,” she explained in an interview with CNN near her. house in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, last Saturday.
She doesn’t watch the news. What have we heard in the last four or five years? Don’t watch the news. ‘ Fake news. “Fake news.” ‘
Vanderbilt worked in the office of a construction company. But, like millions of Americans in 2020, she says she lost her job at the start of the Covid-19 lockdown. She felt depressed and had more time on her hands and started spending a lot of time online.
The 27-year-old mother is an avid user of the video app TikTok. It is there, she says, that she was first introduced to QAnon.
She mainly followed entertainment accounts on the platform, but as the election approached, she began interacting with pro-Trump and anti-Biden TikTok videos. Soon, she says, TikTok’s “For You” page, an algorithmically determined feed in the app that suggests videos a user might like, showed video after video of conspiracy theories.
A TikTok spokesperson told CNN that the company is “committed to countering misinformation and promoting media literacy in our community. Content and accounts promoting QAnon are not allowed on our platform and will be removed as identified.”
Clearly, the company’s security measures in the Vanderbilt have failed.
What started on TikTok continued on Facebook, YouTube and Telegram, where Vanderbilt said by January that she spent hours every night learning about the alleged cabal of pedophiles in the Democratic Party who stole the election.
But all was not lost.
She believed that although Biden was declared the winner of the election, his inauguration would be thwarted.
That was the conspiracy theory pushed by QAnon followers on the eve of the inauguration, and that’s what Vanderbilt believed.
But on the morning of January 20, 2021, Trump flew from Washington to his new Florida home and Biden became the 46th president of the United States.
“I was devastated,” Vanderbilt recalls. “I immediately panicked.”
She called her mother who was at work. ‘I just told her it’s like we’re all going to die. We will become the property of China. And I thought, maybe I should get my daughter from school because they are going to get her. ‘
Her mother tried to calm her. “It was clear that it was God’s will for President Biden to come to this country, so it will be fine,” Vanderbilt said, her mother told her. ‘This happens all the time. It’s elections. Changing parties, no problem. ‘
After their call, she said her mother texted her not to pick up her daughter from school.
An important principle of QAnon is that a master plan is at work and Trump is in charge. “The plan” said he would round up the so-called deep state and bring it to justice. “The plan” said he would win the 2020 election in a landslide. When this didn’t happen, QAnon supporters began making absurd predictions that Trump would somehow stop Biden’s inauguration in the days or hours leading up to it.
None of that happened. But as in many sects, the knowledge and predictions in QAnon are constantly changing. Every time a prophecy doesn’t come true, a new theory pops up to fill the void.
And so, in the hours following the inauguration, some QAnon supporters came up with a new conspiracy theory. The inauguration of President Joe Biden himself was an important part of the plan, the new theory held out, and Trump would return as president in the coming weeks. Surely then all arrests would take place in the deep state.
That was a step too far for Vanderbilt. She began to realize that with an almost religious zeal she had walked into a lie. For the past two weeks, she has been posting to TikTok, the platform that dragged her into conspiracy theory, sharing her story in the hope that it could help or inspire others to see the light.
Some followers of QAnon quote specific messages from the anonymous person or people behind the conspiracy theory as if they were Scripture.
Vanderbilt attributes her faith in God to helping her out of QAnon. While deep in conspiracy theory, she said Trump was becoming an almost messianic figure to her who could do no harm. She remembers once asking herself, “Do I even put Trump above God?”
Vanderbilt reflects that she might have been pulled from QAnon before inauguration day had Trump himself condemned it. Instead, he flirted with it and tacitly embraced it by retweeting prominent QAnon accounts and saying positive things about QAnon followers.
Instead, she had a revelation of her own.
She was able to do something that many people, including some elected representatives and a few members of the Republican Party, are not. She has admitted she was wrong and condemned QAnon as a dangerous political movement.
On the national stage, Vanderbilt hopes her story will help others.
At home, four-year-old Emmerson is just happy that her mother is back. She didn’t become a QAnon orphan, a child with a parent who lives in a parallel universe of conspiracy theories, but others did.