Recently nominated Republican Senate candidate Jo Rae Perkins (Ore.) on Wednesday contradicted her own campaign by saying she stands with QAnon.
“I stand with President Trump, I stand with Q and the team. Thank you anons, thank you patriots, and together we can save our republic,” Perkins said Tuesday in a now-deleted Twitter video.
Perkins won the Republican Senate primary Tuesday against three other GOP candidates and is slated to run against Sen. Jeff Merkley (D) in November.
According to ABC, Perkins’s campaign attempted to separate the candidate from QAnon, saying that she “would never describe herself as a follower,” contradicting Perkins’s previous statement.
However, Perkins told ABC on Wednesday that she was “literally in tears” after her own campaign posted the statement via her personal Twitter account.
“My campaign is gonna kill me,” Perkins told ABC. “How do I say this? Some people think that I follow Q like I follow Jesus. Q is the information and I stand with the information resource.”
Perkins said the contradiction occurred because she misread a line in the statement before it went out, adding that she would have asked the campaign to “fix it” had she realized the mistake.
“I scanned it and said, ‘Yeah, it looks good to me’ and out it went. And then I saw it afterwards and I am like, literally was in tears, literally physically in tears because I’m so blown away. Because I went, ‘Crap, that’s not me.’ And I don’t back down,” she added.
Perkins said she is not backpedaling and that she is “frustrated” because she feels like the mistake is forcing her to backpedal, she added, reinforcing her support for QAnon.
QAnon is a conspiracy theory that has garnered vast attention online for its claims that President Trump and his administration are fighting against enemies in an alleged “deep state” within the U.S.
The theory touts that an online forum user, “Q,” is the information source and claims to be a government agent with access to highly classified data.
Perkins reportedly snapped at her campaign after someone told her “not to worry” about correcting the statement, saying, “I’m the candidate and the buck stops with me.”