I was born in Waco, Texas in 1972. When I was two, my parents moved to the northwest suburbs of Chicago. 

I grew up in a very conservative environment. My dad ran the public relations office of the American Farm Bureau, which was focused on supporting farmers in advocating for themselves. In that context, farmers were “the salt of the earth,” and city people didn’t understand them or their lifestyle. That evolved into, “Country people are good and city people are bad, and Republicans are country people and Democrats are city people.”

Religion played a big role in my upbringing. I grew up in the Church of Christ, which is more fundamentalist than Baptists. It banned any instrumental music in worship, alcohol, and visiting any coed swimming pools. Opposition to abortion was a huge priority. 

The church leadership thought they were the only ones with the proper reading of the Bible — the whole Church of Christ movement was based on this belief that there was a “right” way to do church. We were doing it right, and everybody else was misinterpreting how to live, how to worship, how to behave. This black-and-white perspective made it easy to split society into good guys and bad guys. 

Because of my dad’s work, politics was ever-present in our house. My parents watched the news every night; my dad would often comment on what was happening. He was very pro-Reagan; he really disliked Jimmy Carter, as best I could tell, just because he was a Democrat. He would cast aspersions on “the liberals in the cities.” I soaked it all up.

While I considered myself a conservative, I stayed pretty checked out from politics through college, where I received my BA in Marketing from Abilene Christian University, in West Texas.

While I was still in college, I lost my mom to a short battle with cancer. My dad remarried about a year later. Through some of his career choices, he wound up unemployed for nearly two years, and ended up in Olympia, Washington, running the state Farm Bureau. 

That three-year period was a shock to the system; I went from having an engaged, supportive family to feeling completely isolated and alone. It was me against the world. 

I ended up in Dallas, where I met my wife at a rock climbing gym. The day after we got married in 1998, we moved to Washington to be closer to my dad. We ended up in Seattle.

By 1999, I worked at a corporate travel management company, teaching employees and customers how to use that newfangled Internet. I was still checked out from politics, and still involved in church. By then I was done with the Church of Christ. It proved too restrictive for my tastes. We switched to the Presbyterian Church of America; while it is that denomination’s more conservative branch, it is still significantly less conservative than the Church of Christ.

After that church went through a split, we left. For a time, we attended Mars Hill Church, led by Pastor Mark Driscoll. It was an edgy, kind of hipster church. It had a post-grunge Emo vibe; lots of good music (for the evangelical world). With my dad off in Olympia, I wanted someone to teach me what it meant to be a good man, a good husband, a good father. (By this time, we had two young kids.) I found it very appealing to have someone stand at the pulpit and say, “I know what it means to be a man, and I’m going to tell you how to do that.”

Driscoll preached a really hardcore masculinity: the man is the head of the family, the wife is supposed to obey the husband. This misogynistic take on relations between the sexes rang true to me because it echoed what I had learned in my childhood church. 

We eventually left Mars Hill because Driscoll had created a very toxic environment; he was abusive and domineering. You would think that after having been through this a few times I would have become wiser, and not fall into the same tent again. But no!

In 2008, we had the opportunity to move to London for work. My wife and I had always wanted to live abroad, so we jumped at the chance. We stayed for four years, returning to the US in 2012.

In November 2008, we watched the election returns as Barack Obama defeated John McCain. We were super excited that the country had elected a Black man. 

The failure to prosecute the big banks responsible for the Great Recession really angered me. It felt unjust that the people who had caused the financial crisis escaped accountability. Meanwhile, people were losing their homes left, right and center. I got really cynical about everything.

We moved to New York City in 2012. I still believed Republicans were the fiscally responsible ones, supporting business and balanced budgets. I was also still strongly anti-abortion.

Around 2013, I started reading Zero Hedge. It started out as a contrarian Wall Street website run by an insider who supposedly knew about the financial industry’s sordid underbelly. But it was like the frog in the pot; the site kept becoming more conspiratorial, and more pro-Russian. It even backed the invasion of Crimea. I read it every day, and I ate it up.

Zero Hedge served as a gateway to Breitbart, Alex Jones, and Mark Dice. I became politically schizophrenic, holding totally opposing views at the same time. My dad would watch Fox, but it drove me crazy, I couldn’t stand it. It was clear to me how propagandistic it was. But I didn’t have the skills to really think it through. 

I continued nursing my resentment about the financial crisis and my cynicism about government. When Trump popped up in 2015 talking about draining the swamp, I was primed to listen. I wanted to light a match and blow the whole thing up. (Although I still had never voted.)

In terms of the issues, my dad had drummed the concept of states’ rights into my head, so I was a big proponent of paring back the federal government and pushing decision-making down to the local level. Abortion was a big motivating factor; I also wanted to call people to account for the financial crisis, and I found the trade imbalance with China really troubling.

By this point I had added the Daily Wire to my information diet; I had started moving away from Jones, but I still watched Mark Dice.

Hillary Clinton’s “basket of deplorables” statement really upset me. It felt like an attack on the “good country people” my dad had called the salt of the earth.

I was definitely MAGA—not the type to buy a MAGA hat or put a MAGA sign in my front yard, but I held those beliefs very passionately.

I justified, minimized, and excused all of Trump’s controversial comments. I accepted his explanation about the Access Hollywood tape that it was just “locker room talk.”

I cast my first vote when I backed Trump in 2016. I remember turning to my wife and saying, “This is either going to be a really good thing or a really bad thing, and I don’t know which one it will be.” It felt like a last ditch effort to fight what I thought was a deeply corrupt system.  

When Trump tried to ban Muslims, I accepted his argument that it was about stopping terrorists from entering the country. When he talked about “very fine people on both sides” after Charlottesville, I was too deep into MAGA to see the white nationalist rally for what it was. I can’t stress enough how poor my critical thinking skills were at that time.

Zero Hedge was running ads for Russia Today, and I started getting news from it. I would say, “Why are we getting all worked up about Putin? The Cold War is over.” Never mind that my wife had read three books on Putin and said he was an evil motherf*k*r. I was totally clueless.

When the pandemic hit, I thought Operation Warp Speed was brilliant— it got everyone together to cut through red tape and accelerate the development of the vaccine. I wasn’t anti-vax, but I thought people should be free to decide what they wanted to do, even if it was stupid—kind of a libertarian approach.

But then came the cognitive dissonance: Trump undercutting the vaccine, attacking Dr. Fauci, talking about injecting bleach. How could they go from Operation Warp Speed to undermining the public health approach? I knew something was wrong, but again, I didn’t have the skills to tease it apart. 

After Joe Biden won the 2020 election, I was skeptical of Trump’s claim the election was stolen. The Dominion allegations didn’t sound legit to me. I work in technology, so I knew it wasn’t possible to hack the voting systems the way they were claiming. 

But everything was still muddy for me. When January 6 happened, I wasn’t as outraged about it as I am today. I was still in this foggy world of not really knowing how to process things. I did believe Trump sent the mob to the Capitol, but it was hard for me to confront the fact that this was a consequence of my actions. I was in denial.

An Old Friend Helps Find the Exit

I reconnected with my old friend “Steve” (not his real name) around that time. He reached out after we had lost touch for about 15 years. We started talking once a week on the phone or Zoom. Our conversations went on for hours. 

He displayed great patience with me as he helped me learn critical thinking, and how damaging cynicism is.

I remember one call that stands as a turning point. I lived in Bedford-Stuyvesant, a predominantly Black neighborhood in Brooklyn. I had been in my backyard one day and watched a Black Lives Matter march through our neighborhood. It seemed to be almost entirely white people; I thought it was insulting, these white liberals walking through Bed-Stuy. I felt they were just virtue signalling.

When I shared that with Steve, he said, “Maybe a third of them were doing that. But I’ll bet there was another third who have thought very deeply about this, and were out there because they’re passionate about the issue. And probably another third came out because they’re motivated to do something, given what’s going on in our culture.”

I remember cocking my head and thinking, “Yeah, that makes a lot of sense.” We had already been talking about critical analysis and nuanced thinking. It was apparent to him that there was no way I voted for Trump and had the beliefs I had unless I was emotionally numb and didn’t have those skills. He was right; I lived in a black-and-white world. I was in my late 40s, and I still operated with the logic of a child.

Steve suggested some books we could read together. That spread to documentaries, podcasts, and news articles. One book—Jesus and John Wayne—had a big impact on me. It outlined how the evangelical church shifted to a reactionary view of masculinity, and how that played into the rise of the religious right. It gave me something important to hang onto.

Then I read a book about the Sandy Hook school massacre. It forced me to confront my very pro-Second Amendment beliefs about gun rights. The book made me realize that a free-for-all with guns is not healthy for society. I stepped outside of myself, and thought about how I’m a member of a larger society, and that the things I support have a ripple effect on the people around me. I came to understand that you can’t run a country based on hyper-individualism; we all have to be in this together.

I remember listening to a civil debate about abortion on a podcast (again, which Steve shared with me). It taught me that abortion is super complicated, and that a reasonable person could end up on either side of the issue.

Steve also sent me the Equal Justice Initiative’s report on the more than 4,000 lynchings in the US between Reconstruction and World War II. As I read it, I felt I had been punched in the face. I knew nothing about any of it.

I began to pull away from the rugged individualist, John Wayne-type masculinity I had been doubling down on for decades. I stopped reading Breitbart and Zero Hedge. But I was still watching Ben Shapiro every day.

Steve helped me learn to appreciate the critical role independent journalists play in a democratic society. He would steer me to sources he trusted. I started reading The New York Times, which was a big deal for me, since I had bought into the whole “fake news” propaganda. I watched The Bulwark, and I subscribed to Medium. 

Steve kept teaching me critical thinking tools, how to assess information and have an eye for what’s true and what’s not. He helped me grow up and think for myself. I developed a sense of humility about what I didn’t know. I really owe my political transformation to him. 

It’s hard to pinpoint an exact time when I fully broke with MAGA, but it was probably late 2021. By that point I had stopped watching Ben Shapiro and the rest of the pro-MAGA mediasphere.

While I was in MAGA, I convinced my wife of a lot of the nonsense I believed. I was a bully about it: super opinionated without the knowledge to back it up—the epitome of ignorance. I had to walk back a lot of stuff with her. Thank God she put up with me; I was a total asshole.

Going along with my MAGA beliefs had created a lot of cognitive dissonance for her, particularly because she’s half-Mexican. I look back and I think, “How could I have done this? My kids are one-quarter Mexican.”

I’m now a registered Democrat; I knocked on doors for Kamala Harris in 2024. We live in Santa Fe now; I’ve been going to protests since Trump took office a year ago.

I’m still connected on Facebook to a lot of folks from earlier parts of my life who are still very much MAGA. I’ll post things that I know will be controversial for them. I’m not trying to be inflammatory; I’m just trying to get them to think for themselves. Our relationships have become pretty adversarial; according to them, I’ve been brainwashed, I’ve drunk the liberal Kool-Aid. Now I’m an ignorant baby killer because I’m pro-choice. 

But I’ve never felt healthier mentally. I’m so happy I left MAGA, and I hope my story inspires others.

                                                                                                                                                                      —January 2026