I was born on Halloween in 1963, in Elizabethtown, North Carolina. We lived for some years in the small town of Lumberton, and when I was a teenager we moved to Fayetteville.

I had a pretty average childhood; my dad managed a furniture store, and my mother was a stay-at-home mom.

Neither of my parents went to college, but they encouraged us to read, and we would discuss books and politics. I became an avid reader and a devoted follower of politics. They were Democrats, but fairly conservative.

When I was twelve or thirteen, I campaigned for Ed O’Herron Jr., who was running for the Democratic nomination for governor. I happened to walk by his campaign office one day, and it seemed like it would be fun. I didn’t know a great deal about the issues, but I handed out buttons and went to a rally. 

When I was 16 or 17, the Libertarian Party had a booth at the county fair. I got interested in it, and stayed on that path for quite a while.

I was really attracted to the idea of being free, doing your own thing. To me, that was what it meant to be an American; we were meant to have less government. I started reading books about it, like Restoring the American Dream by Robert Ringer.

I went to work after high school. I got a good paying warehouse job. For a brief period in the mid-80s, I was chair of the state Libertarian Party. 

I went to all the meetings, went to rallies, wrote articles for the state Libertarian newsletter and letters to the editor of local newspapers.

But we didn’t accomplish anything. Around 1992, a friend and I decided it would probably be better to join the Republican Party, since the Libertarians weren’t getting anywhere. So I tried to advance free market ideas within the Republican Party.

I read the daily Fayeteville Observer newspaper, as my parents had. By the early 2000s, I also watched a lot of Fox News while occasionally watching MSNBC or CNN. On the radio, I listened primarily to Rush Limbaugh, and sometimes to Sean Hannity, Mark Levin, or Michael Savage.

I served briefly as a Republican precinct chairman, and I ran for the nomination for the state House but I lost. I figured I was more of a behind-the-scenes person. From then on I wrote articles. Around 2006, I started writing online articles about conservative issues, free market issues. I tried to write from a working class perspective. I had a good bit of luck; for a while I wrote for Americans for Limited Government, and some of my pieces got picked up by other sites and newspapers. 

When Donald Trump ran for president the first time I thought, “Man, this is it, we’ve got us a rock star, he’s the one. This is what we need: an outsider, a tough street fighter.” I was excited. Here was somebody who finally had the guts to say we needed to close the border. I was excited about that for quite a while. I believed he was his own man, that he wasn’t bought and paid for.

I went to a Trump rally near the Fayetteville airport, and I wrote a guest editorial for the local paper about why we needed him.

In Trump’s first term, I thought things were going well, that the country was doing well economically. We weren’t at war with anybody, and he seemed to be a straight shooter, calling it as he saw it. 

When the pandemic hit, I supported how Trump handled it for a while. I forgave him some of his mistakes, since it was something we’d never dealt with before. I was opposed to mask mandates. But as the pandemic wore on, I had less and less patience for Trump’s leadership. For example, I couldn’t believe he said crazy things like suggesting people inject bleach.

I was still solidly MAGA by the time of the 2020 election. When Trump claimed it had been stolen from him, I initially thought it might be true. But I didn’t hold on to that for very long. I got to thinking, “He’s a crybaby, he’s a sore loser. The courts dismissed it, the legislatures dismissed it. He lost, pure and simple.”

I missed watching the January 6 attack as it happened, but when I heard about it later in the day, I thought at first it was just a demonstration that got out of control. But the more footage I saw, the more I thought it was disgraceful, and that Trump had incited it. It was surreal; I couldn’t believe what I was seeing.

I kept reflecting on what happened that day, and the more I did, the more my support of MAGA just didn’t feel right anymore. If the situation had been reversed, if Biden supporters had stormed the Capitol, I would have been livid. So why was it right when my side did it? I thought about Trump turning on his own vice president. I stopped looking at the day through a political prism; I started looking at it morally. It was about right and wrong. I realized Trump is shady, a con artist. I thought about everything I had been told by Fox and talk radio, and I thought, “They’ve been lying to me.”

My decision to leave MAGA was gradual; it took a fair amount of reflection and thinking. Eventually, I stopped watching Fox and listening to the right-wing talk radio people. I tried to get a wide range of opinions. I started listening to other voices, like David Pakman and Steve Schmidt. I had always been told everyone on the left was automatically wrong, but I realized that wasn’t true, they were making sense.

By the time of the 2024 election, I was done with Trump. It was a big move for me not to vote for him; I was proud of that. I wrote in Ron DeSantis; in hindsight, I’m not crazy about that choice.

I found some of Leaving MAGA’s posts on X, and they really helped me. They convinced me it’s okay to speak out and say, “Yeah, I was wrong.” It’s actually honorable, noble. I love the line: “Today is the perfect day to leave MAGA.” 

I still lean to the right, I’m still a less-government guy. But I don’t automatically dismiss the left, I don’t think everyone on the left hates America and wants to destroy me. I’m willing to listen to them; what the left told me about Trump was true. He’s a con man, he’s a degenerate, and he doesn’t care about anybody. They were right about all of that. 

I think Trump’s losing his marbles. He promised no new wars and then he started the Iran war. Prices aren’t going down. He doesn’t care about people’s financial situation. The way he’s deported people, sending ICE into cities to round people up, that’s not how you do things. Taking over the Kennedy Center, that was childish. Sending Musk to make these cuts everywhere, dealing with stuff he didn’t know anything about. Trump’s a showman, he just throws out red meat for his base. 

And the corruption, making money off the presidency, I don’t know how people turn a blind eye to it. People act like it’s normal. Then there’s the cozying up to dictators, whoever tells him what he wants to hear.

I can’t change people’s minds; they will have to come to it themselves, just like I did. If I could get a message to everyone in MAGA, I would say: “Quit looking through the prism of politics and go with what you know is right and wrong. You wouldn’t want somebody like this running your business or dating your daughter or doing your taxes. Just set politics aside and just go with what you know in your heart is right and wrong.” I think that will lead people onto the right path.

The more you attack Trump, the more the people in MAGA will defend him. They think you’re picking on them, so they become all the more defensive. We need to let people know it’s okay to admit you were fooled. It’s not a reflection on your character or intelligence. 

                                                                                                                                                                        —May 2026