A New York mother says she went from casually scrolling a moms’ Facebook group to living inside a full-blown conspiracy rabbit hole, and then clawed her way back out. Erica Roach, who once helped moderate a pro-QAnon Telegram channel, now describes her exit as slow, scary, and ultimately life-saving.
“I was just kind of in [the Facebook group], slowly getting radicalized to different things,” she said, recalling how online paranoia hardened into devotion to Donald Trump and QAnon’s apocalyptic mythology.
A former anti-vax NY Mother, Erica Roach, tells of her experiences with a facebook group who were “pretty anti-vax”. She notes that by the time her fourth child was born, she had become “so radicalized’ by the F.B. group 1/https://t.co/PkxroxvQdo
— Hqdepot1 (@Hqdepot1) September 3, 2025
Roach traces the slide to familiar markers: Alex Jones videos, “Q-drops,” and the intoxicating promise that secret insiders were revealing the battle plan to purge elite evil-doers. By late 2017, she was following QAnon influencers who “decoded” cryptic posts and convinced followers the movement had an inside line to Trump.
She says the digital sleights of hand, time-stamped tweets, mysterious photos, and coincidences spun as proof, worked on her because she already believed a shadowy elite pulled the strings.
Then came the pandemic. Trusted voices in her channels pushed anti-vaccine fantasies, including a doctored clip that made it look like Bill Gates wanted to “kill more people with better vaccines.” As the government fast-tracked COVID shots, Roach says her faith was rocked: if vaccines were a depopulation plot, why did Q’s hero back them? That contradiction started the first cracks in her belief.
“The stock market is down because of that because the stock market needs the tariffs and wants them. If you took away tariffs, we could end up being a third world country.” – Trump
One of the most unintelligent humans to ever roam the planet.
— Spencer Hakimian (@SpencerHakimian) September 2, 2025
Her break didn’t happen overnight. Roach says she was assigned to monitor a Telegram room critical of pro-Trump attorney Lin Wood, and unexpectedly found Republicans and Democrats talking respectfully and posting real articles that contradicted her feed. She messaged the channel’s admin, who connected her with a QAnon debunker. Months of tense conversations followed. “I would argue some points to death,” she admits, but the evidence kept piling up that she’d been misled.
The ugliest shove out the door came from her own side. Roach says conspiracists she’d clashed with doxxed her, spread lies, and even triggered visits from a sheriff and Child Protective Services by falsely accusing her of being in a pedophile ring. “I flipped out,” she recalls. “I was just so tired.” That was the moment she began changing her information diet, swapping fringe feeds for live news, reading books like The Storm Is Upon Us, and deleting accounts.
Listen to why this “MAGA junkie”—and others—regret voting for Trump after losing their jobs to DOGE cuts. It’s always the same: they expected better for themselves, not the rest of us. They were warned. pic.twitter.com/NG3Xj1ZUSO
— Christopher Webb (@cwebbonline) March 28, 2025
January 6 sealed it. Watching people she knew swarm the Capitol “stopped me on a dime,” she says, the movement she’d clung to as “peaceful research” looked like violence, not salvation. From there, the unspooling accelerated: Roach disentangled from Q channels, confronted how much she’d helped amplify lies, and began writing about the psychological trap of conspiracism. This summer she self-published Leaving The Mirror World, a memoir about exiting QAnon and the MAGA ecosystem.
Today, Roach is part of Leaving MAGA, a nonprofit network of former believers sharing testimony and helping others walk back from the ledge. The group’s mission is to give doubters a soft landing, and to reconnect families torn up by politics. “It’s remarkable how much happier I am,” Roach now says, crediting new routines, healthier media habits, and a community that doesn’t demand total loyalty to a personality cult.
Her message to parents and friends who see a loved one sliding into the mirror world is simple: don’t mock, don’t surrender, and don’t give up. “You don’t know what’s on the other side waiting for you,” she says of leaving extremism. For Roach, the other side turned out to be a life where the news isn’t a battlefield, her kids don’t eat dinner to White House pressers, and the future feels less like a looming storm, and more like a second chance.
