By the time the Great Recession hit, Erica had largely backed away from conspiracy theories. “I was too busy being a working mom (waiting tables, selling cars, working at a Quick Lube, among other things), especially when I had my second child.” She voted for Barack Obama in 2008, but “I got very disappointed when the banks got bailed out while millions of regular folks lost their homes and jobs.”
Erica felt it was ”the same old story: big conglomerates doing horrible things with everybody else’s money and then getting bailed out while everybody else suffers.”
The 2013 government shutdown angered her. It affected her husband’s paycheck — he repaired helicopters for the military. “I wasn’t angry at Republicans or Democrats, but at the government in general,” Erica writes.
After learning a bit about what the US had done in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Yemen, “I was tired of forever wars. After that I went down the rabbit hole again. By the end of Obama’s second term I was completely back into conspiracies.”
Erica didn’t vote in the 2016 presidential election; she didn’t like Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton, and didn’t think either would make much of a difference.
Towards the end of Trump’s first year in office, an ex-boyfriend got excited about posts by “Q” on Twitter. “I didn’t know much about QAnon, although I had heard of the conspiracy theories it recycled about the New World Order, the Illuminati, and depopulation plots.”
Erica’s ex started flooding her with Q “drops.” He kept telling her Trump was going to save the world. “I was getting annoyed,” she writes. She told her ex he was “insane.” He challenged her to start her own Twitter account and see for herself.
Erica accepted his challenge. “I joined Twitter and started following a bunch of Q ‘influencers,’ who would ‘decode’ the drops,” she says.
I entered this world already convinced there was a shadowy global elite that controlled everything,” Erica writes. “Because I already believed in some conspiracy theories when I started checking Q out, I was easy prey.”
Erica soon came to believe prominent Democrats were running a global child trafficking ring, and that they sexually abused the children, murdered them, and drank their blood. She believed the government planned to put people in concentration camps, and that Democrats had “a 16-year plan to destroy America.”
Erica writes: “The online Q community became my community. I became terribly paranoid. I lived with constant, overwhelming fear. I abandoned a lot of things; I wouldn’t go out much. I was practically a hermit.”
She spent a lot of time reading the comments on Q posts, which said “heinous” Democrats were “trying to usher in communism.” The consistent message was, “Trump was going to fix everything, that he ran for president to protect us. Some drops would say the military chose him for this role.”
And that, Erica writes, was “how I made the jump from QAnon to MAGA.” She believed “Trump could do no wrong; any time he did something controversial, I believed he was being smeared by the media.” Since Trump called the mainstream media “fake news,” she stopped paying attention to them: “I got my news from Fox, QAnon channels on Telegram and YouTube commentators.”
Erica’s journey into QAnon also led her to the anti-vax movement, “and ironically that was what started my circuitous journey back to reality.”
When the pandemic hit, Erica was administrator of a QAnon channel on Telegram. “[A] lot of people I completely trusted were posting that Bill Gates created the vaccine to kill off much of the population,” she writes. Then Trump played up Operation Warp Speed and called himself the father of the vaccine. “That didn’t make sense to me,” she says.
Erica’s research led to the discovery that Trump had once asked Gates to be the White House science advisor. “This all upset me terribly,” she writes. “Q had said Trump knew about the 16-year plan to destroy America, so why was he backing what I believed to be a depopulation tool?”
She was totally confused, “conflicted and super panicked.” At her wits’ end, Erica reached out to an unlikely figure. She had been tasked with monitoring a Telegram channel that exposed the lies told by Trump lawyer Lin Wood, and was impressed by the civility and information she had found there. So she contacted the woman who administered the channel.
“I said, ‘I have questions and I don’t know who to turn to … I don’t know what to believe,” Erica writes. The woman connected her with another woman who debunked QAnon myths on Twitter. The three of them talked online for six months. “I was very resistant to what they were saying,” she says. “The thought of denouncing everything I’d believed for so long was very scary.”
Then a group of QAnon members she had been in a conflict with doxxed Erica. They “told the local sheriff and child protective services that I was in a pedophile ring. The sheriff even turned up at my house.”
That broke the dam. “I flipped out,” she writes. “I was just so tired. That’s when I started taking the stuff I was doing on Twitter a lot more seriously.”
The crucial step came when "I started changing my information diet. I started following experts who were covering QAnon and countering its narratives. I started watching live network news coverage on YouTube and I stopped following individual YouTube commentators.” She read books debunking QAnon.
“But I still considered myself MAGA,” Erica says. “I was torn about the Nov. 2020 election, but I did end up voting for Trump.” She watched the election night returns with her 14-year-old daughter. “As the mail-in ballots started coming in and Biden moved into the lead, she was elated,” Erica writes. “That moment rocked me. I looked at my highly intelligent, morally good daughter and had a deeply unsettling moment of self reflection. Suddenly I was mad at myself for not voting for Biden.”
Trump’s claim that the election was stolen, followed by the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, “helped me break my final tenuous bonds” with MAGA,” she says. Today, Erica still feels a lot of guilt. “I blamed myself a lot for helping perpetuate all the lies and conspiracy theories.”
Now, “I try every day to not only debunk a narrative that I had believed but to work on any biases I may have had and not known I had.”
Erica is also connecting with various online communities “to ask questions and explain what I went through. I try to help others who were like me. That’s really important to me, trying to help people get out.”
And since she left MAGA and QAnon, “[m]y relationships with friends and family are much improved. We talk more now — a lot more!”
Erica was as deeply steeped in the myths of QAnon and MAGA as anyone. It most likely would have taken her longer to find her way out if it hadn’t been for that nudge from the people who doxxed her. But she did it, and she deserves our respect for making that journey. Sharing stories like Erica’s is a critical part of the work of breaking MAGA’s hold on so many Americans.
