I was born in New York, the eldest of three kids. My mom stayed home to raise us. When I was in my teens she went back to college; she’s now an administrative assistant. 

I never knew my biological father. My stepdad was around since I was about 4 years old. He worked in the freezer compartment of a warehouse.

Ours was a quaint little four-street neighborhood. It was on the “wrong side of the tracks,” but we were happy there. I had lots of friends I would play with.

While I was growing up, my parents would watch the news on TV every night, but they never really talked about politics. I didn’t know what a Democrat or a Republican was. I didn’t have a firm understanding of anything political.

I was in 9th or 10th grade when 9/11 happened. I vividly remember one of the older girls in my neighborhood said we deserved what happened. 

I got really angry. I was super patriotic, singing the God Bless the USA song all the time. I didn’t know about any of the things we had done in other countries, like CIA-backed coups overthrowing governments the US didn’t like.

I was angry – but her words stuck in my head. After all, she was smart, she was in college.

That’s when a lot of things changed for me.

Not too long after that I started watching Alex Jones’ InfoWars. I thought he was cool because he had infiltrated the Bohemian Grove. 

He was the catalyst that got me to where I ended up. InfoWars led me to a dark place that led to even darker places.

I watched Jones for years, into my early 20s. During that time InfoWars was my predominant source of information. I trusted him because he seemed to be questioning the conventional narrative about what was going on in the world.

I told myself I wanted to hear both sides and formulate my own opinion, and I did read some mainstream books about 9/11 and Vietnam, for example. But then I would watch videos or read posts on the internet that were lies or twisted narratives about those subjects, and I always found a reason to believe the twisted narrative/conspiracy perspective. I’m sure it’s because Alex Jones had conditioned me to mistrust what seemed obvious and to search for the hidden plot.

When the Great Recession hit, I had backed away from conspiracy theories for the most part — 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. I voted for Obama in 2008, but I got very disappointed when the banks got bailed out while millions of regular folks lost their homes and jobs. It was awful. It seemed like 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 got me really angry. My husband at the time was in the military — he repaired helicopters — so his paycheck would be affected. I felt anger — and panic. I wasn’t angry at Republicans or Democrats, but at the government in general. 

Towards the end of Obama’s second term I was learning a bit about what the US had done in Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, and how many people we had bombed. I was no expert on these conflicts, but emotionally I was tired of the US indiscriminately killing people in other countries. 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. 

I didn’t even vote in the 2016 election; I didn’t like Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton. I only knew Trump as a big New York realtor who hosted The Apprentice on TV. I didn’t feel either candidate would make much of a difference.

The QAnon-MAGA Pipeline

Towards the end of Trump’s first year in office, my ex-boyfriend — we had separated by then — got excited when “Q” started posting on Twitter in October 2017. 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.

My ex started sending me all of Q’s “drops.” After several weeks of this, I was getting annoyed. He kept telling me Trump was going to save the world. I said, “OK, buddy, you’re insane.” He said, “Start a Twitter account and see for yourself.”

I accepted his challenge. I joined Twitter and started following a bunch of Q “influencers,” who would “decode” the drops.

I entered this world already convinced there was a shadowy global elite that controlled everything. It just seemed there were two ways of living in the US: There was the day-to-day struggle of regular working class folks like us, and there was the cushy life of those in power, who always had things go their way while making life harder for the rest of us (and bombing people in other countries). 

I didn’t think Jews or Democrats ran an international kidnapping/pedophilia ring and drank babies’ blood. But all that was about to change.

Q — or whomever was posting in the name of Q — used all sorts of digital sleights of hand to fool people. They would shift the time stamps on tweets to make it appear as if Q had prior knowledge of what Trump was going to tweet. They would drop a picture of a pen that was the same style as the pen Trump used. They carried out all sorts of little manipulations to make it appear that Q was in Trump’s inner circle.

Because I already believed in some conspiracy theories when I started checking Q out, I was easy prey. Before long, I was all in.

I believed the Obamas, the Clintons and Hollywood celebrities were running a Satanic worldwide child kidnapping ring and sexually abusing the children before killing them and drinking their blood. I believed some of this was happening in the basement of a Washington, DC pizza parlor. I believed the Federal Emergency Management Agency planned to put Americans in concentration camps. I believed Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and other Democrats had a 16-year plan to destroy America.

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. 

To their everlasting credit, my friends and family didn’t abandon me. They all thought I was crazy, of course, and anytime I tried to talk to them about QAnon they shut me down. That was very frustrating. I started drinking a lot. If I did go out with a friend I would spend the whole time drinking because I wasn’t allowed to participate in the conversation in the way I wanted.

I spent a lot of time reading the comments people left on Q posts; they said the left was trying to create a one-world government, that it was trying to usher in communism. They said Democrats were intentionally dumping millions upon millions of illegal immigrants into the country, which was making it harder for Americans to get jobs. 

There was an assumption that Democrats were heinous, that they just did the bidding of lobbyists or foreign governments. And they would say, here’s how Trump is going to fix the problem.

The consistent message in the comments on Q posts was that 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. 

That’s how I made the jump from QAnon to MAGA. For the first time, I changed my voter registration from independent to Republican.

In Trump I thought we had finally found somebody who was going to change things, especially when it came to improving people’s financial situations and ending forever wars. I followed all of Trump’s kids and spouses on social media. I hung on their every word. 

I believed Trump could do no wrong; any time he did something controversial, I believed he was being smeared by the media. I felt that this is what happens when a shadow government goes after somebody it doesn’t want in power.

Trump said the mainstream media was “fake news,” so I stopped paying attention to them. I got my news from Fox, QAnon channels on Telegram and YouTube commentators. 

My belief in QAnon also led me to the anti-vax movement, and ironically that was what started my circuitous journey back to reality.

Confusion, Discovery, and a Daughter’s Influence

I spent a lot of time on Telegram, and I administered a big pro-QAnon channel. I was a fly on the wall in a lot of other Telegram channels too. As the government started overseeing the development of a COVID vaccine after the pandemic hit in 2020, a lot of people I completely trusted were posting that Bill Gates created the vaccine to kill off much of the population. A doctored video circulated that made it seem as if Gates was saying he could kill more people with better vaccines. 

Then Trump played up Operation Warp Speed, which led to the creation of the COVID vaccine. He called himself the father of the vaccine. He said he had saved millions of lives. That didn’t make sense to me.

I started doing a bunch of research in the White House archive; I found Trump executive orders, including one setting up a national influenza vaccine task force. I learned that Trump had asked Bill Gates to be the White House science advisor. 

This all upset me terribly; 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?

I thought, “Something’s wrong here, something’s very, very wrong.” I couldn’t understand what was going on. I was totally conflicted and super panicked. 

At the time, the owner of the Telegram channel I administered had given me the task of monitoring a Telegram channel dedicated to exposing lies told by Lin Wood, one of Trump’s lawyers in Georgia. My assignment was to keep tabs on what was considered a hostile channel. But a funny thing happened: As I tracked the channel, I saw Republicans and Democrats getting along, treating each other with respect. And they were posting lots of news articles, not just about Wood but about other things that Trump was doing.

All this gave me an idea, and after an anguished month of indecision, I screwed up the courage to privately message the owner of the Lin Wood channel. I was afraid of how she would react to hearing from “one of those crazy QAnon people.” I was also terrified that my reaching out to her would get back to the Q community and I would be ostracized.

I explained who I was, and told her I had been monitoring the channel. I said, “I have questions and I don’t know who to turn to. I’m really feeling conflicted. I don’t know what to believe.”

She quickly responded, and thanked me for feeling I could trust her. I said I needed someone to help me figure out what I was experiencing. She suggested I contact a woman who specializes in debunking QAnon on Twitter.

I watched this woman on Twitter for a while; she was trying to refute Q narratives in real time. I discovered she focused a lot of her efforts on a group that I knew well: Negative 48. It arose from the Telegram channel I administered; it was started by a man named Michael Protzman, and it is based on Gematria, which is the practice of assigning numbers to words, names and phrases. I had watched in despair as many friends left the “mainstream” QAnon to join Negative 48. This is the group that went to Dallas in late 2021 because their Gematria practices had convinced them that JFK Jr. was going to be resurrected.

After realizing we had this mutual connection, I reached out to the QAnon debunker. She created a group chat for her, the owner of the Lin Wood channel, and me. We met regularly for six months. But I was very resistant to what they were saying. When they tried to show me something that demonstrated I had been lied to and misled, I would push back. I would argue some points to death. 

The thought of denouncing everything I’d believed for so long was very scary. And it wasn’t just QAnon; they were trying to debunk things I’d believed since 9/11.

Then came another gut punch: I got doxxed by people who were supposed to be on my side. They belonged to a group of conspiracy theorists I had a conflict with. They had been obsessively attacking a woman they didn’t like; they mocked her in YouTube videos, and they told child protective services she was neglecting her son, who has special needs. These sickening attacks had been going on for years. I confronted them and tried to get them to stop, but they didn’t.

So I became their enemy too. Besides doxxing me, they posted lies about me, and told the local sheriff and child protective services that I was in a pedophile ring. The sheriff even turned up at my house. 

I flipped out. I was just so tired. That’s when I started taking the stuff I was doing on Twitter a lot more seriously. 

Crucially, 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. I took it slowly; I thought I’d overwhelm myself if I turned on the spigot of information all the way.

I started reading a lot of books again. I read Mike Rothschild’s book about QAnon, The Storm is Upon Us, and I was blown away. I started following others who were debunking Q, like the Poker and Politics podcast.

I started deleting Telegram accounts, although I kept my main account. I was scared, since I had already been doxxed. 

But I still considered myself MAGA. I was torn about the Nov. 2020 election, but I did end up voting for Trump. 

On election night, I stayed up with my very liberal, Biden-supporting 14-year-old daughter to watch the returns. As the mail-in ballots started coming in and Biden moved into the lead, she was elated. 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.

Then Trump and his supporters immediately claimed the election was stolen. Once the election was called for Biden, I vowed to step away from MAGA and Trump. Something was wrong; my teenage daughter could see it and I couldn’t.

I deleted my main Telegram account.

Then came Jan. 6. As someone who was trying to leave MAGA, it was overwhelming watching that. People I knew were at the Capitol that day, and I realized that could have been me. I was horrified to see QAnon people taking part in the attack; I always considered it to be a peaceful research movement.

That helped me break my final tenuous bonds.

I have had a lot of guilt since then; I blamed myself a lot for helping perpetuate all the lies and conspiracy theories. 

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. I try every day to educate myself on something from a trusted source. No more word of mouth; no more believing so-and-so on Twitter or YouTube. I never want to fall into a situation where some charismatic person comes along and I’m eating out of his or her hand.

It took a while for me to be comfortable enough to do it, but I go to 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.

My relationships with friends and family are much improved. We talk more now — a lot more! 

I also learned not to respond to things purely in an emotional way, particularly if they make me angry. My anger is what led me down dark paths.

It took me three years to figure that out, but I’m so glad I did!