Leaving MAGA: NY mom who fell for anti-vaxxers, QAnon and Trump describes painful escape

Long before “crunchy” moms championed the “Make America Healthy Again” agenda of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Erica Roach found a Facebook group of women who homeschooled their kids and embraced wellness.

As some moms today who seek more natural lifestyles for their families are also anti-vaccine, so were some of Roach’s Facebook friends.

By the time her fourth child was born, Roach said, she was “pretty anti-vax,” declining vaccines in her baby’s first year after initial shots at the hospital.

“I was just kind of in [the Facebook group], slowly getting radicalized to different things,” Roach told Raw Story.

Roach said her beliefs soon became more extreme, and she ended up following a path that led to QAnon, the far-right conspiracy movement whose “outrageous” premise revolved around Donald Trump waging war on Satan-worshipping cannibalistic pedophiles among supposed Democratic elites in Hollywood and the federal government.

Coming out of the “extremism group” took months, Roach said, and led to her being doxxed — seeing private information shared online.

“My house was attempted to be broken into. Somebody had called the sheriffs and [Child Protective Services] and anonymously said I was in a pedophile ring,” Roach said.

“As much as it scared me, all those things, it emboldened me. It’s like I want nothing to do with people who will do this to me.”

Roach has now joined communities of “former-something extremists,” among them Leaving MAGA, a growing online community of former Trump supporters.

“It's remarkable how much happier I am,” Roach said, noting that her relationships and physical health have improved since she left QAnon and MAGA.

‘Mortifying’

Roach’s path to extremism started when her ex-boyfriend began sending her “Q-drops,” messages from the anonymous figurehead of QAnon.

“He kept telling me that Trump was going to save the world,” said Roach.

Initially she was skeptical — after all, she had disliked both candidates in the 2016 election, Trump and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

But in her early 20s, Roach had dabbled in conspiracy theories, “getting into the Alex Jones type of craziness,” referring to the InfoWars host, and once considering herself a “9/11 truther,” convinced the terror attacks on New York and Washington on Sept. 11, 2001 were an “inside job.”

“It's so mortifying to admit out loud, but that's what kind of started me on this path,” Roach said.

Between her history and the moms’ Facebook group, when COVID-19 hit, Roach said she was “primed” to embrace QAnon. Soon she was spending between 18 to 24 hours a day as an administrator of a “pretty big Q-influencers channel” on Telegram, a platform popular with right-wing extremists.

“I listened to [Trump’s] pressers every day, religiously, at my dinner table with my kids because I wanted to know what was going on, and I was scared of COVID,” Roach said.

“I had believed that COVID was the tool that was supposed to enact this depopulation agenda.”

When Trump announced Operation Warp Speed, a public-private partnership to accelerate development of the COVID-19 vaccine, Roach said “it was confusing.”

“All the people that I trusted, all the people I communicated with every day, were saying this vaccine is going to kill us all,” Roach said.

With Trump as the hero of the QAnon movement, reconciling vaccine conspiracies with his actions required “mental gymnastics,” Roach said.

But “it was just enough to make me start questioning things because I was like, ‘This doesn't make any sense,’” she said.

Roach monitored Telegram channels for anyone posting negatively about “Q” or Q supporters, such as former Trump adviser Michael Flynn and pro-Trump attorney Lin Wood.

In a channel critical of Wood, Roach began noticing “inconsistencies” with beliefs she held and also articles questioning Trump’s “gross abuse of power” and millions of dollars made during his first term.

“It was enough to be like, there's something wrong with me, not them,” she said.

Roach said she reached out to the channel administrator, who met her “with nothing but kindness and empathy and genuine caring.”

“When you're anonymous, and you're in an extremist group, you don't know what's on the other side waiting for you because you're under the impression that they're going to eat you alive for believing in this stuff,” Roach said.

Through the administrator, Roach connected with someone who debunked QAnon conspiracies. Still, Roach wasn’t fully out of her QAnon world by the time of the 2020 election and wished there was “some magical way for Trump to stay” in office when Joe Biden won, she said.

A friend offered to pay for Roach’s travel from New York state to Washington, D.C., on January 6, 2021, but she wasn’t able to arrange childcare.

“I watched it live all day, knowing that people who represented the cause I believed in … were there, and I was horrified, completely horrified,” Roach said.

“Watching them attack the Capitol, attack police officers, the things that they were saying, it stopped me on a dime. I've never wanted to distance myself so much from something because I realized this isn't peaceful. This is violence. This is an attempted coup.”

‘Fighting back’

Roach extracted herself from QAnon via four to five months of “re-educating” herself, she said.

A restaurant worker, she went back to college to study medical billing and coding. Last month, she self-published a book, “Leaving The Mirror World,” about her departure from QAnon.

She voted for Kamala Harris in 2024 and was disappointed the US did not elect its first female president.

“I voted down-ballot blue, and I will till the day I die,” Roach said.

“I know the destruction that's in the minds of the Republican Party, and I could never support that again.”

Roach said her former QAnon friends were “cheering on” Trump’s second presidency, particularly the building of detention camps for migrants and the deployment of the National Guard in major cities, which she found “disgusting” and “sadistic.”

“Everything that's happened so far was outlined in Project 2025,” Roach said of the right-wing policy agenda created by the Heritage Foundation, a far-right think tank.

“It is a conspiracy theorist’s wet dream that this is all happening to their enemies.”

Nonetheless Roach said watching “hundreds” of neighbors protest against Trump on a bridge in her town every Saturday made her optimistic.

“That's something uniquely American, I think,” she said. “That we're not going to destroy everything without fighting back.”