“It wasn’t one hundred percent as it should have been,” he recalls.
After the November election, he spent days on TikTok, Facebook and YouTube indoctrinating himself into 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 become a communist country. She was terrified that she would have to hide with her daughter.
Many QAnon believers have clear political motives, but Vanderbilt says he is passively involved in politics.
“I’ve always been someone who tells me what to do and I do. I grew up telling ourselves we were Republicans, so I’ve always been that direct red ticket,” he explained in a CNN interview at his home in Myrtle Beach. South Carolina, last Saturday.
He doesn’t see the news. “What have we heard in the last four or five years? Don’t look at the news.” Fake news “.” Fake news “.”
Vanderbilt worked in the office of a construction company. But like millions of Americans in 2020, he says he lost his job at the start of the Covid-19 closure. Feeling depressed and with more time on her hands, she started spending a lot of time online.
The 27-year-old mother is an avid user of the TikTok video app. It was there, she said, that she first introduced QAnon.
He mostly followed entertainment accounts on the platform, but as the election approached he began interacting with pro-Trump and anti-Biden TikTok videos. Soon, according to her, TikTok’s “For You” page, an algorithmically determined feed in the app that suggests videos a user might like, showed its video after video of conspiracy theories.
A TikTok spokesman told CNN that the company is “committed to fighting misinformation and advancing media literacy in our community. Content and accounts that promote QAnon are not allowed on our platform and are removed as identified “.
It is clear that Vanderbilt failed in the company’s guarantees.
What started on TikTok continued on Facebook, YouTube and Telegram, where in January Vanderbilt says he spent hours every night learning more about the alleged Democratic Party pedophile cabal that had stolen the election.
But all was not lost.
He believed that even though Biden was declared the winner of the election, his inauguration would be thwarted.
This was the conspiracy theory driven by QAnon’s followers on the eve of the inauguration, and that’s what Vanderbilt believed.
But on the morning of January 20, 2021, Trump left Washington for his new home in Florida and Biden became the 46th president of the United States.
“He was devastated,” Vanderbilt recalls. “Instantly, I went into panic mode.”
He called his working mother. “I just told her it’s like we’re all dying. We’re going to be owned by China. And it was like it was possible that I had to get my daughter out of school because they were going to take her.”
Her mother tried to calm her down. “Obviously, it was God’s will for President Biden to come in for this country, so he’ll be fine,” Vanderbilt says his mother told him. “This happens all the time. It’s an election. The parties change, it’s not a big deal.”
After the call, she said her mother sent her a text message warning her not to take her daughter out of school.
A key principle of QAnon is that there is a master plan at work and Trump is responsible. “The plan” said it would round out the so-called deep state and bring them to justice. “The plan” said he would win the 2020 election forcefully. When that didn’t happen, QAnon supporters began making absurd predictions that Trump would somehow stop Biden from taking office in the days or hours before.
None of this happened. But, as in many cults, the tradition and predictions in QAnon change. Whenever a prophecy fails, a new theory emerges to fill the void.
Thus, some QAnon followers invented a new conspiracy theory in the hours after the inauguration. President Joe Biden’s own inauguration was a key part of the plan, the new theory held, and Trump would return as president in the coming weeks. Then, certainly, all the arrests would take place in a deep state.
It was too long a step for Vanderbilt. He began to realize that he had bought a lie with an almost religious fervor. For the past two weeks, she has been posting on TikTok, the platform that dragged her toward conspiracy theory, sharing her story in hopes that it could help or inspire others to see the light.
Some QAnon followers cite specific posts from people or anonymous people behind the conspiracy theory as if they were scriptures.
Vanderbilt credits her faith in God to help her get out of QAnon. While deep in conspiracy theory, she said Trump was becoming an almost messianic figure for her who could do no harm. Remember once when you were asked, “Am I even putting Trump above God?”
Vanderbilt reflects that perhaps she could have been removed from QAnon before the day of the inauguration if Trump himself had condemned her. Instead, he flirted with it and tacitly embraced it by retweeting prominent QAnon accounts and saying positive things about QAnon followers.
Instead, he had a revelation of his own.
He was able to do something that many people, including some elected representatives and some members of the Republican party, are not. He has admitted that he 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 happy to be back with his mother. She did not become an orphan of QAnon, a girl with a father who lived in a parallel universe of conspiracy theory, but others did.