I grew up in Cherryvale, a very poor rural town in southeast Kansas. There were a lot of cows, corn, and drug addiction. Everyone knew everyone. I played a lot of sports in school: volleyball, basketball, softball.

My dad made good money, but we were poor. He was a meth addict, so he spent all our money on drugs. We lived in an old trailer in the middle of nowhere. 

My parents weren’t super religious. They took us to church once in a while; we attended a non-denominational church in the next town. I did go to vacation Bible school, which had a big influence on me. I became a conservative Christian, which made me strongly anti-abortion.

My parents didn’t talk about politics at home. They would rarely turn on the news on TV. Barack Obama was president during my middle and high school years. All I knew was that everyone disliked him, so I did too. 

I voted for the first time when I was 20, when Donald Trump ran for president the first time. I wasn’t political, and I was not an educated voter. I had heard a few things about Trump that tickled my fancy — he was going to improve the economy, and he ran on an anti-abortion platform.

But I wasn’t MAGA. That didn’t happen until 2018, when I started listening to Ben Shapiro, Matt Walsh, Joe Rogan, and Megyn Kelly. They became my sources of information, and validated a lot of my beliefs. I became a full-blown supporter of the MAGA movement. I got really angry, and I started a lot of arguments with people over politics, even though I couldn’t back up what I was saying. I mainly repeated what I had heard from the pundits.

Things started to change for me in 2019, after I enrolled at the online University of Mississippi. In pursuit of my BS in Industrial Engineering, I learned how to think critically, conduct research, and verify information. That opened my eyes and changed my world view. 

I also started deconstructing my religion around this time as well. I was still a believer in Jesus but I was becoming less associated with organized religion.

I started asking lots of questions of church officials, and they either couldn’t answer or provided answers that didn’t make sense to me. After I married my husband in 2020, I asked a critical question: Would my husband, who is an atheist, go to heaven with me when we die? I did not like the answer I got.

Along with questioning my religion, I took a closer look at what all those pundits I followed were saying. I got out of my information bubble. I started reading AP stories, listening to NPR, and following different thinkers on TikTok. I stopped following Walsh, Kelly, Shapiro, and Rogan.

I had been in such an information silo, I hadn’t known about all the racist, bigoted, horrible things Trump had been saying. I only discovered them when I switched my news sources. 

Despite all my changes, I was still subject to manipulation. When the pandemic hit, I heard lots of conspiracy theories about Covid, and I ended up sharing one on Facebook. Someone messaged me to say the person behind the theory wasn’t credible, and sent me resources to debunk what I had shared. I felt a lot of shame and embarrassment about that.

My exit from MAGA accelerated as the pandemic wore on and I began watching Trump’s daily press briefings. I was still clinging to the last shreds of my connection to him, but I did not like how he handled Covid. I kept hoping he would get his act together and stop saying all the insane shit he was saying, like telling people to inject bleach. But he wouldn’t, and that was a big turning point for me.

I no longer considered myself part of MAGA, but I still voted for Trump in the 2020 election. I had entered a short-lived phase of identifying as a libertarian, and from that perspective, I thought Trump was the lesser of two evils compared with Joe Biden.

After the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, I severed any last connection I had with Trump. There was no way I could ever support someone who instigated an attack on our democracy. 

I started looking into different political ideologies, including democratic socialism. That really resonated with me. At the same time, I kept deconstructing my religious beliefs, and that pushed me further left politically. For example, I learned that the word “abortion” is not even mentioned in the Bible, that it’s not a direct sin. 

I just want people to be free to be who they want to be, and to love who they want to love. At this point, I’m perhaps a bit further to the left than Bernie Sanders.

I voted for Democrats for the first time in the 2022 midterms, and in 2024 I voted for Kamala Harris. I live in Tulsa now, and I have been working with an organization that fights to defend public education against Oklahoma officials who are trying to undermine it.

As a former MAGA follower, I’m sad and angry watching what Trump is doing in his second term. It’s disheartening to hear the next horrible thing to come out of his mouth or show up on Truth Social. But I’m so glad I realized I was living in the MAGA echo chamber — and that I broke out of it!