I was born in 1970 in Ramsey County, Minnesota, near St. Paul. I am part Native American; I have a Lakota grandfather and a Blackfoot grandmother. My parents split up when I was 5 or 6. 

I was raised mostly in Oakdale; we moved later to Brooklyn Center and Ham Lake. When I was 18 I left home. I became homeless; I reached out to my dad and ended up living with him in Las Vegas for six years. I moved to North Carolina in 1994.

I hadn’t finished high school, but I went back to adult high school in 1996, graduating with honors. I started taking accounting classes in community college, but I had to quit in 1997. I was getting sick with MS, although I wasn’t properly diagnosed until 2015.

I couldn’t physically get around, but I took online courses at the University of Phoenix. I got an AA in health care administration in 2010. I had a stroke in 2011, but I went on to get my BS in health care administration in 2012. I kept going; in 2017 I got a Masters in nonprofit management. I wanted to get a PhD but I couldn’t afford to continue. 

I was never into politics. I voted, but not all the time. 

My initiation into politics happened in 2015 when Judge Jeanine Pirro posted on Twitter apologizing to someone on the left for something she had said incorrectly. I posted “kudos for the apology.” All of a sudden a bunch of people from the far left were screaming at me on Twitter, saying she didn’t really apologize. I got one death threat, and someone else told me to commit suicide. I was shocked by the viciousness of the attacks.

What really got me into the Republican party was the video of Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam saying he supported late term abortions and even infanticide after a baby was born (none of that was true, but I didn’t find out until much later). I don’t believe in late term abortion, so that really got me.

When Donald Trump ran as the Republican in 2016, I voted for him because I didn’t want Hillary Clinton to win (I wasn’t happy about what happened in Benghazi and I didn’t want her husband back in the White House). I knew Trump was a rich, smug, stuck up guy, someone born with a silver spoon in his mouth. He was also a businessman, so I thought ok, I’m tired of politicians, let’s try this man. 

I was confused why seemingly everybody on the Democratic side hated Trump. Before he ran for president, he was on Oprah, he hung out with Democrats. The constant attacks against him started sucking me into MAGA. 

I wasn’t one to watch Fox. At the time, I was mostly getting my news from video clips on Twitter. I followed Ben Shapiro, Charlie Kirk at times, Mike Cernovich, and Tucker Carlson. 

I watched Newsmax more than anything else on YouTube. All I heard was that Trump was under constant attack. After hearing “fake news” for so long, when something came up, I didn’t even pay attention, because I believed everything Trump’s critics said was fake. I didn’t even try to do research anymore; I just ignored it. 

I would defend Trump, but not for certain things I couldn’t support, like his mocking of a disabled man. When that happened, I just didn’t say anything.

I didn’t always go along with the MAGA beehive mentality. For example, I pushed back on the idea that all LGBTQ people are pedophiles. Whenever I questioned something, I would get a lot of hate from others in MAGA. I got into online arguments with Twitter influencer Joey Mannarino, who was weaponizing rape. He would make fun of E. Jean Carroll, saying Trump wouldn’t rape her because she was old, that kind of crap. When I pushed back, he came at me, saying I didn’t have to worry about rape based on my profile picture. 

When the pandemic hit, folks in MAGA were screaming at people who got vaccinated that it would kill them. That made no sense to me. I mean, Trump got vaccinated. He brought about Operation Warp Speed. I thought some of the stuff he said was stupid, like the bleach thing, but I also defended him, saying, that’s not what he meant. 

As the returns from the 2020 election came in, I believed Trump when he said it had been stolen. I saw how the numbers changed during the vote count (I didn’t understand they were counting absentee and mail-in ballots). Then he kept going to so many courts, and they kept turning him down, saying there was nothing there. I started questioning, but wasn’t saying anything about it online.

When Jan. 6 happened, at first I went along with the MAGA narrative — oh, it was just a riot and some people got out of hand. I believed Antifa and the FBI were involved. I believed there was no justification for the shooting of Ashli Babbitt. I was hearing the cops had started using tear gas before people pushed through the barricades, and that they were allowing people into the Capitol building.

I watched the 2000 Mules documentary after it came out in May 2022, and it convinced me that the election was stolen. I didn’t learn the truth about what happened until later. 

I watched some of the January 6 Congressional hearings, but I thought it was all a waste of time. I thought they were blowing the whole thing out of proportion. 

Eventually I saw more videos about the storming of the Capitol, including the shooting of Babbitt. They showed the fuller context, that she was screaming, irate, heading into the chamber.  I watched other videos of Capitol police officers getting beaten, the woman who got trampled, the cop crushed in the door. I learned the cops weren’t letting people in; the video I had seen was much later, when they were trying to funnel people out.

I started to change my mind about what had happened. Rather than a riot, I considered what happened to be an insurrection. 

Another thing that started to weaken my feelings about MAGA was when many in the movement started seeing Trump as a deity. That man is not Jesus. 

Trump also angered me when he initially reacted to the hammer attack against Paul Pelosi by embracing conspiracy theories suggesting the whole thing was some sort of hoax.

I started having online conversations with people on Twitter about politics and MAGA, and they helped me see where I had been lied to. I left MAGA in the spring of 2023. 

I research everything now. I read lots of articles: from Yahoo News, MSNBC News, CNN, and some conservative outlets. I’m a big-time reader; I eat up books. Once you open your eyes to it all being a cult and just a bunch of crap, you can’t ignore the stupidity anymore. 

When I was in MAGA, everyone said you couldn’t talk to the left, they couldn’t be cordial. But I have found that’s not true, except for a handful of people on the extreme left. Meanwhile, if you disagree with hard-core MAGA followers, they come after you. I’ve been called every dirty word you can think of. 

When I announced on Twitter I wasn’t going to vote for Trump, I considered myself unaffiliated. I wasn’t going to vote at all. 

Then I learned about Project 2025, particularly its sections on women’s rights. It terrified me. It reads like a blueprint for the Handmaid’s Tale, like a plan for a Christian Nationalist theocracy. It says the woman should be the traditional wife, that the man has to lead the family. 

That  — along with other things, like Trump later on making fun of the Paul Pelosi attack, and his decision to force the Republicans in Congress to kill the bipartisan border bill because it would take away his big campaign issue — persuaded me to vote for Kamala Harris. 

When I left MAGA I felt like I didn’t have a political home. I felt displaced. I’m still learning as much as I can. I know the left isn’t perfect, but Trump is demonizing all Democrats. 

                                                                                                                                                                —September 2024