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“I wasn’t there one hundred percent like I should have been,” she recalls.
After the November election, she spent days on TikTok, Facebook, and YouTube indoctrinating herself 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 of having to hide 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 for you to tell me what to do and I do it. I grew up thinking we were Republicans, so I was always that red ticket,” she explained. in an interview with CNN near her home in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, last Saturday.
She doesn’t watch the news. “What have we heard for the past 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 when the Covid-19 lockdown began. Feeling depressed and with more free time, she started spending a lot of time online.
The 27-year-old mom is an avid user of the TikTok video app. It was there, she says, that she was first introduced to QAnon.
She primarily followed entertainment accounts on the platform, but as the election approached, she began interacting with pro-Trump and anti-Biden TikTok videos. Soon, she said, TikTok’s “For You” page, an algorithm-determined feed in the app that suggests videos a user might like, was showing its video after a conspiracy theories video.
A spokesperson for TikTok told CNN that the company is “committed to fighting disinformation and advancing media education in our community. Content and accounts promoting QAnon are not allowed on our platform and are deleted as identified. “
Clearly, the company’s guarantees failed at Vanderbilt.
What started on TikTok continued on Facebook, YouTube and Telegram, where in January Vanderbilt says she spent hours every night learning about the alleged Democratic Party pedophile cabal that stole the election. .
But all was not lost.
She believed that even if Biden had been declared the winner of the election, his nomination would be upset.
That was the conspiracy theory pushed by QAnon supporters 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 home in Florida and Biden became the 46th President of the United States.
“I was devastated,” Vanderbilt recalls. “Instantly, I went into panic mode.”
She called her mother who was at work. “I just told her it’s like we’re all gonna die. We’re gonna be from China. And I was like, maybe I should take my daughter out of school because they’re gonna take her away. . “
Her mother tried to calm her down. “Obviously, God’s will was to bring President Biden to this country, so it’s going to be fine,” says his mother Vanderbilt. “It happens all the time. It’s an election. Parties change, that’s okay.”
After their call, she said her mother texted her not to take her daughter out of school.
A key principle of QAnon is that there is a master plan at work and that Trump is in charge. The “plan” called for it to bring together the so-called deep state and bring it to justice. “The plan” said he would win the 2020 election in a landslide. When that 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 this happened. But as in many cults, the tradition and predictions of QAnon are constantly changing. Every time a prophecy doesn’t come true, a new theory arises to fill the void.
And so, some QAnon adherents concocted a new conspiracy theory within hours of the inauguration. The inauguration of President Joe Biden himself was a key part of the plan, of the new theory adopted, and Trump would return as president in the coming weeks. So, certainly, all the arrests in the deep states would happen.
It was a step too far for Vanderbilt. She began to realize that she had bought a lie with an almost religious fervor. Over the past two weeks, she posted on TikTok, the platform that trained her in conspiracy theory, sharing her story in the hopes that it might help or inspire others to see the light.
Some QAnon followers cite specific messages from the anonymous person (s) behind the conspiracy theory as if they were scripture.
Vanderbilt credits her faith in God for helping her get out of QAnon. While she was deep into the conspiracy theory, she said that Trump was becoming an almost messianic figure to her who couldn’t do anything wrong. She remembers wondering once, “Am I even putting Trump above God?”
Vanderbilt believes she might have been able to have been removed from QAnon before inauguration day had Trump himself condemned her. Instead, he flirted with him and tacitly adopted him by retweeting prominent QAnon accounts and saying positive things about QAnon followers.
Instead, she got her own revelation.
She was able to do something that a lot of people, including some elected officials and some members of the Republican Party, are not. She admitted she was wrong and condemned QAnon as a dangerous political movement.
On the national stage, Vanderbilt hopes his story will help others.
At home, four-year-old Emmerson is just happy to be reunited with her mother. She didn’t orphan QAnon, a child whose parent lives in a parallel conspiracy theory universe, but others will.
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