“I wasn’t 100 percent there as I should have been,” she recalls.
After the November election, she spent days on TikTok, Facebook and YouTube, becoming indoctrinated in the world of QAnon. On the day of her inauguration, she was convinced that if President-elect Joe Biden took office, the United States would literally become a communist country. She was afraid 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 was always someone you just tell me what to do and I do it. I grew up hearing that we were Republicans, so I was always that straight 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 in the past four or five years? Don’t watch the news. ‘Fake news’. ‘Fake news.’ ”
Vanderbilt worked in a construction company’s office. But, like millions of Americans in 2020, she says she lost her job at the start of the Covid-19 blockade. Feeling depressed and with more time available, 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 says, that she was first introduced to QAnon.
She mostly followed the entertainment accounts on the platform, but as the election approached, she started 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 that a user might like, was showing your video after video of conspiracy theories.
A TikTok spokesman told CNN that the company is “committed to tackling misinformation and promoting media literacy in our community. Content and accounts that promote QAnon are not allowed on our platform and are removed as identified”.
Clearly, the company’s safeguards have failed at Vanderbilt.
What started at TikTok continued on Facebook, YouTube and Telegram, where in January Vanderbilt said he spent hours every night learning more about the alleged conspiracy of Democratic Party pedophiles who stole the election.
But all was not lost.
She believed that although Biden was declared the winner of the election, his tenure would be thwarted.
This was the conspiracy theory being promoted by followers of QAnon on the eve of the inauguration, and this is 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,” recalls Vanderbilt. “Instantly, I went into panic mode.”
She called her mother who was at work. “I just told her that it’s like we’re all going to die. We’re going to be owned by China. And I thought, maybe I have to get my daughter out of school because they are going to take her.”
Her mother tried to calm her down. “Obviously, God’s will was for President Biden to come to this country, so it’s going to be okay,” Vanderbilt said his mother told her. “It happens all the time. It’s an election. Changing parties, it’s not a big deal.”
After the call, she said her mother texted her not to take her daughter out of school.
A fundamental principle of QAnon is that there is a master plan in action and Trump is in charge. “The plan” said that it would surround the so-called deep state and bring them to justice. “The plan” said that he would win the 2020 elections overwhelmingly. When that didn’t happen, QAnon supporters began making absurd predictions that Trump would somehow stop Biden’s inauguration in the days or hours before.
None of this happened. But, as in many cults, the tradition and predictions in QAnon are constantly changing. Each time a prophecy does not come true, a new theory appears to fill the void.
And so some QAnon supporters invented a new conspiracy theory in the hours after the inauguration. President Joe Biden’s inauguration itself was a fundamental part of the plan, the new theory was maintained, and Trump would return as president in the coming weeks. Then, certainly, all deep-state prisons would happen.
It was a step too far for Vanderbilt. She began to realize that she had believed a lie with an almost religious fervor. In the past two weeks, she posted on TikTok, the platform that dragged her into conspiracy theory, sharing her story in the hope that it might help or inspire others to see the light.
Some followers of QAnon cite specific posts from anonymous people or people behind conspiracy theory as if they were scriptures.
Vanderbilt credits her faith in God for helping her out of QAnon. While she was immersed in conspiracy theory, she said that Trump was becoming an almost messianic figure for her that could not do anything wrong. She remembers once asking herself, “Am I even putting Trump above God?”
Vanderbilt thinks that perhaps she could have been removed from QAnon before opening day if Trump himself had condemned him. Instead, he flirted with him and tacitly embraced him, retweeting prominent QAnon accounts and saying positive things about QAnon’s followers.
Instead, she had a revelation of her own.
She was able to do something that many people, including some elected representatives and some Republican Party members, are not. She admitted that she was wrong and condemned QAnon as a dangerous political movement.
On the national scene, Vanderbilt hopes his story will help others.
At home, four-year-old Emmerson is simply happy to have his mother back. She did not become an orphan QAnon, a child with one parent living in a parallel universe of conspiracy theory, but others will stay.