She Left QAnon. Now She Doesn't Know What To Believe.

[Nevilledog]

Link to tweet

Tweet text:
Daniel Funke
@dpfunke
“The inauguration hasn’t signaled an end to QAnon, just the beginning of a new chapter for its believers.”

She Left QAnon. Now She Doesn’t Know What To Believe.
A millennial stay-at-home mom from South Carolina, a gay couple from Texas, and a social worker in New York believed in QAnon. Now that Biden is president, they’re not sure where to go from here.
buzzfeednews.com
7:18 AM · Mar 28, 2021

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/scaachikoul/qanon-believers-turning-away-from-trump


When I first found 27-year-old Ashley Vanderbilt’s TikTok account, it only had a handful of followers. During the pandemic, Vanderbilt lost her job as an office manager in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, which left her with plenty of time to browse QAnon conversations on Telegram and read conspiratorial QAnon posts on Facebook. By October, she was far down the rabbit hole thanks to a family friend, and she even eventually brought one of her cousins in with her. “I’d talk to a family member of mine, and he’d send me articles. I started believing those,” Vanderbilt told me in January. Indeed, before President Joe Biden’s inauguration on Jan. 20, Vanderbilt’s TikTok was almost completely nonpolitical — her posts mostly featured her fiancé dancing while vacuuming, her 4-year-old daughter singing karaoke, and some axioms from her therapist. Engagement on her posts hovered around 20 to 40 likes, and not much more.

But the day before Biden would be sworn in as the 46th president, Vanderbilt posted something different. “I have two crazy theories,” she said in a video on Jan. 19. “My first one is tomorrow, everything goes down… I’m sure [Biden] will be arrested, along with thousands of Hollywood elites and politicians. We need to get our country back to the republic it used to be over a hundred years ago.”

The next day, she posted again from her front porch. “Well, I was wrong. And it sucks. I have spent the better part of the day crying,” she said, puffy-eyed. “I think I need to spend some time on personal development and time in prayer… I can’t go through that heartbreak and disappointment again.” From there, sometimes multiple times a day, Vanderbilt began posting videos explaining how she got wrapped up in QAnon in the first place, and what she was doing to deprogram herself from beliefs that clearly didn’t end up being true. “I thought that before Kamala [Harris] would be taking her oath, getting sworn in, I thought the emergency broadcast system would go across our TV and everything would go black,” she told me over the phone at the end of January. “I thought everyone would be arrested and then Trump would be back. Everything would go into martial law.”

For most of the time that Trump was in office, Vanderbilt believed in many QAnon-sanctioned mass delusions, from Pizzagate (the belief that the vast majority of the Democratic Party is engaged in a pedophilia ring) to Tom Hanks and Lady Gaga being baby-eaters (“Lady Gaga was wearing a red dress, and [Q supporters online] were saying Nancy Pelosi wears red shoes a lot. Those people wearing red is supposed to symbolize the blood of those children,” Vanderbilt told me). She had been so sure that nearly everyone at the inauguration, from Lindsey Graham and George W. Bush to the Clintons and the Obamas, would be arrested. (Garth Brooks, she believed, would have been spared.) But once Biden was inaugurated without incident, it finally became clear to her that the tenets of QAnon that she had believed were all untrue.

*snip*

[SoonerPride]

1. Pelosi wears red shoes so she eats babies?

Fuck, you goddamned lunatic your “savior” trump wears a long red tie tied incorrectly dribbling over his fat gut and hanging to his knees which obviously symbolizes the blood of infants pouring from his mouth.

I mean it is soooo obvious.

Sigh.

These people are so fucking stupid it hurts my head.

[brush]

9. I know. These are grown adults believing that stuff. How did so many Americans...

get so stupid? No critical thinking skills at all. None.

[Celerity]

22. ...

[SoonerPride]

25. Hahahahahahaha

Please forward to the inbox of every qmoron.

Thanks in advance.

😂

[samnsara]

2. she needs to go somewhere for a LOOOOONG rest before the white coats come take her away...

[Xavier Breath]

4. Humming this as they take her away...

[JI7]

3. Blame herself for her failures

[gopiscrap]

5. fuck all of these idiots

they are all a bunch of ignorant POS's

[IrishAfricanAmerican]

18. Yup!

[snort]

6. Fucking Morons

[Runningdawg]

7. She can always join a socially acceptable cult called a church.

[niyad]

12. I am guessing that she is already in one.

[Vinca]

8. Hmmm - South Carolina is a "red" state. Is Ashley a secret baby eater???

[CrispyQ]

10. I've gone from being fully employed to not, & I didn't go chasing rabbits.

WTF?

[soothsayer]

11. I expect better from a gay couple

Why would anyone like drumpf ever?

[Iggo]

24. Don't.

Gay people are people.

And there’s good people and bad people; people who care and people who don’t.

[Boomerproud]

13. Please stay in your own little cray cray world. Don't come

near me and infect mine. You all have done enough damage. I could go on and on but you idiots are not worth it. STAY AWAY!

[John Ludi]

14. I was

into conspiracy theories way back in my teens and twenties when people like Robert Anton Wilson made it fun and whimsical...before the internet even existed (I'm 56 now). I never took ANY of it is gospel as most of it was pure speculation and proof was lacking for almost all of it. Most of the people I knew that were into such things traded these notions like baseball cards.

Once in a while someone would go off the deep end and start taking it seriously and in observing the type of person that did so I came to the realization that, like automatic weapons and sharp objects, there are a fair amount of people who should be kept FAR away from such things as their sense of objectivity and ironic detachment never seemed to have been more than an intellectual vestigial organ that didn't develop beyond infancy.

And now, thanks to the ability that we now have to create our own little reality tunnels, all of THOSE people seem to flock to insane crap like this...by the millions.

[XanaDUer2]

15. It's hard to feel sorry nt

[Crunchy Frog]

16. Imagine being "devastated" and "heartbroken"

because there weren't mass arrests and martial law.

[Biophilic]

17. This was my thought also. How could you be devastated about that not happening?

There is something really, really not right about someone who thinks that. I tell you what, if it were me, I'd never say it out loud.

[meadowlander]

19. Stop believing. Start thinking.

[Buckeye_Democrat]

20. After reading this part, it may never happen...

"I think I need to spend some time on personal development and time in prayer."

[tavernier]

21. I can sympathize with her devastation and heartbreak

That’s exactly how I felt the night that Trump was elected, along with nausea and panic. And the next four years proved me right.

[keithbvadu2]

23. Some believe it wholeheartedly and take action.

Some believe it wholeheartedly and take action.

Trump's cop killing terrorists on Jan 06.

The guy who went to the pizza place with a rifle.