I was born on Christmas Eve 2003, in Cape Girardeau, Missouri. It’s a smallish town, rather conservative. It’s the regional hub of southeast Missouri. It’s not far from where the Cherokee and the other tribes crossed the Mississippi River during the Trail of Tears march.

My mom, my five younger brothers and I lived with my mom’s mom and stepfather. My parents split up not too long after I was born. My dad was in and out of prison for a number of years, mainly for charges related to controlled substances. He finally got out when I was around twelve, and I didn’t get to meet him until I was closer to fifteen.

When I was two, I was diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder, so I had communication issues because of that.

My grandparents are far right politically, big Fox News fans. My grandma started talking politics with me when I was around six years old. She was really big into doomsday prep, and her political views reflected that. She tried to teach me what to do if we ran out of food or water. It quickly moved from that to teaching me to hate a guy named Barack Obama. She said the president was going to bring on the end of the world as we knew it unless someone got him out of office. 

I would parrot what my grandmother said in school. My mom would say, “She’s not supposed to be telling you this stuff, you’re too young.”

When Trump ran for president the first time, I was in middle school. My grandma said she didn’t know if she would support him because she thought he was a bit of a brute. But when he became the frontrunner in the Republican primary race, she changed her mind and backed him. Her thinking was along the lines of, “We can’t have Hillary Clinton because she’ll ruin the country and it will be a communist hellhole.” She and my grandpa became strong MAGA followers. I totally accepted their perspective, and my position didn’t change as I entered high school.

During my freshman year in high school, my mom told me, “You know, everything is not left or right. Sometimes it’s more complicated.” But when Covid hit in 2020, she did a complete 180, telling me there was a correct ideology, and anything other than that was wrong. She was adamant that Trump was going to be the one to save us all. MAGA became more than a political philosophy; it was spiritual.

I was really solidified into MAGA by that point. When the Black Lives Matter protests broke out after the murder of Geoege Floyd, my grandparents saw them as an excuse for young people to tear stuff up. I believed that a lot of the activism was just that. I believed that Floyd’s death wasn’t worth protesting or rioting over. People said he had a huge amount of drugs in his system, and that’s what killed him. My grandparents were saying that stuff, too.

My family believed — and still does — that the Covid vaccine is detrimental to people’s health. Mom thought it would give people the mark of the beast. When that didn’t happen, they said it would kill you or make you sick. We heard stories about people who got the vaccine and had cardiac arrest. While my family knew Trump had championed the vaccine, some believed he had been pressured to do it by his advisors or his adversaries. Either way, it was a lot of mental gymnastics that allowed them to continue cheering on Trump while also condemning the vaccine.

Looking back, it’s so nuts that we as a nation politicized something that shouldn’t be a partisan issue. But at the time I thought it was an excuse for the government to impose totalitarian control. A lot of blue state governors were imposing some of the strictest measures, while red states were looser. I heard of people having get-togethers and the cops coming to shut everything down. I thought, “Oh no, this is tyranny.” I believed Covid was just like the flu; I didn’t realize it was so much more serious than that, so of course the government was going to be very cautious in containing it.

My family thought the virus was fabricated, created to shut down this part of the world enough that we couldn’t have free and fair elections. That was a huge thing Trump was talking about, especially in the runup to the 2020 election. 

When Trump claimed the election had been rigged and stolen from him, I believed him. All my sources of information were unreliable; I followed Typical Liberal and DC Draino on Instagram, along with Catholic Vote, which pandered to conservative Catholics.

I didn’t have much of an opinion on the January 6 attack on the Capitol. I bought the propaganda that it wasn’t MAGA or MAGA supporters, but was fabricated by bad actors on the far left, like Antifa. 

I didn’t care for Biden. For one thing, he was anti-Trump, and I thought he was trying to undermine our democracy. He used a lot of strong language when talking about people who chose not to get vaccinated. I thought a lot of his language was divisive. When he issued an executive order forcing employers to have a vaccine mandate, I thought it was an overreach of presidential power. 

In 2022, I started to drift politically. I was a fiery 18-year-old, and I was feeling MAGA had basically failed, that we needed something else. I fell in with a group of traditionalist Catholics and eastern Orthodox; some of them supported installing a Christian monarchy in the US, which didn’t sit right with me.

I joined a group called We the People of Cape Girardeau County, a subgroup of We the People Missouri. It was a neo-libertarian organization formed when local governments started imposing mask mandates. But the county had rescinded the mandates, so the people in the group turned on each other, fighting over who was the bigger lover of liberty. So I moved on, joining the Young Americans for Liberty chapter at Southeast Missouri State University. This was the peak of my far-right journey.

But one of the first conversations I joined in the YAL Snapchat group was two guys arguing over who was more liberty loving. I left; I was so disgusted that they couldn’t get along. I thought the Libertarian movement was a joke.

I believed we needed to have a strong Christian figure running the country, so I had stopped caring about democracy. I thought Christian Nationalism was just love of God and country. Before I knew who Groypers were, I was becoming one. Thankfully, I never did join that movement.

I knew people who disowned MAGA because they thought it wasn’t conservative enough. I was still strongly supporting Trump. I liked what he did in his first term, so I wanted to see what he would do in a second term. Criminal charges were being filed against him, and I accepted everything he said about all of it being fabricated. I thought my best course of action was to support the heck out of Trump. The economy, the influence of my family, and the Covid lockdowns had left a very sour taste in my mouth.

I voted for Trump in the 2024 election, thinking we’d return to how things were before the pandemic. Then in early 2025, I started hearing about ICE raids around the country. Being raised conservative, I had always supported the idea that people who were in the U.S. illegally shouldn’t be here. But I started doing some independent research. I was horrified to find out what was going on. 

You want some degree of law and order, but what you don’t want is an overreach of said law and order. I felt some of ICE’s tactics were immoral and harsh. When Ron DeSantis said he was converting an old air strip into Alligator Alcatraz, and I learned what was going on there, I was disgusted. If there were gas chambers, it would be Auschwitz. People in regular prisons get much better facilities than people getting sent to these detention centers. I felt awful about what I enabled by voting for this guy. That was when I broke with MAGA. 

I kept up with my independent research. When Matt Walsh said on his Daily Wire show that there were “riots” in Los Angeles last summer, and that protests were overtaking the country, it didn’t sound right. So I did some digging, and sure enough, while there were some bad actors, the majority of these gatherings were not riots, they were peaceful protests. 

I’m also angry that the Trump administration is excluding certain fields from federal student aid. They’re all essential programs, like nursing, and my field, engineering. I have an Associate of Technology degree, and I work as an engineer on HVAC systems. If I wanted to go for a Masters or PhD, I would have to take on a whole bunch of debt, which is insane. 

I stopped watching Fox and CNN, and I no longer follow the far-right social media influencers. I get information from a variety of sources, including NPR, PBS, the BBC, and C-SPAN.

I consider myself morally conservative, but I’m pretty left-leaning economically. I’ve been interested in AOC and Zohran Mamdani. I don’t think I’m a socialist, but I’m more than willing to listen to the views of people from a variety of political affiliations.

I don’t see a reason for anyone to follow MAGA anymore. It’s the epitome of anti-intellectualism. When you consider the beginnings of the Republican party it’s a huge slap in the face to its existence.

MAGA only works if you don’t question it, if you don’t look into what’s actually going on. The moment you start questioning stuff, when you start thinking critically, that’s when things fall apart. 

I think people who leave MAGA fall roughly into one of two groups: First, there are those who leave when they are directly affected by Trump’s policies. The second group is made up of people like me, people who opened their eyes. They weren’t directly affected, but they have a moment of cognitive dissonance, and instead of hiding from it, they decide to do something about it.

I still have friends and family in MAGA, and I understand why they are still holding on to the movement’s ideals. There’s one fear in particular: Being politically lonely. A lot of people in MAGA don’t want to admit they were wrong, because they’re afraid no one will believe them or no one will trust them or want to hear from them. I know some Democrats and leftists say that anyone who voted for Trump is not welcome in their circle and they can go to Hell. I think that’s the wrong message for people in MAGA.

I found Leaving MAGA through one of Rich Logis’ social media posts. The organization is a way to give back to this country. I don’t hide the fact that my actions did a disservice to the nation. I really appreciate Leaving MAGA, because it gives people like me a chance to speak, to feel we are heard and understood. No one will attack us. We are simply making amends for what we’ve done. This is my way of giving back and making amends and starting over.                                                             

                                                                                                                                                                                   —May 2026