I grew up in a strict Apostolic Pentecostal household in West Helena, Arkansas. The town was highly segregated: there were the Black schools, which were the public schools, and there was the white private school. I was mostly exposed to Black kids.

When I was in 10th grade, we moved to Conway, Arkansas, a mostly white town. It was the first time I was in a minority. My high school American history class had a huge impact on how I approached politics for the next several years. I learned about the Constitution, and in particular the Federalist Papers. My favorite was Federalist No. 10. In it, James Madison talks about the benefit of factions, how important it is that everyone has the opportunity to express their opinions through different political parties. I thought it was beautiful that people could find meaning and purpose in all the chaos of arguments and debates.

I came away believing that I wanted to do everything I could to ensure that everybody got along. I was very hopeful and optimistic, even when faced with racism. So I embraced perspectives of the dominant culture.

I spent a lot of time in high school with a neighbor girl who would always insult me. She would tell me Black people are scary, but that I was OK. She would say things like, “Black people look like monkeys.” My brothers and Black friends were really upset with how she treated me. But I thought I would just reinforce her negative stereotypes if I reacted strongly. I thought my outreach to her was going to change things.

I figured there were reasons she and others felt the way they did. I thought, “If I’m good and accepting, if I embrace them and don’t ostracize them, then I can get people to abandon those beliefs.” (I didn’t realize they were the problem, not me.)

I carried that mindset into my more political years. In 2014-15, I started watching Fox more. That coincided with the rise of the Black Lives Matter protests in the wake of the killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. I didn’t like the BLM protests, because I thought the demonstrators were being abrasive, and needed to be more accommodating to accomplish anything.

I had watched CNN, but I stopped after the protests broke out.

During the controversy in 2016 over Colin Kaepernick taking a knee during the national anthem, I thought this type of protest wasn’t working. My feeling was that if Blacks were continuing to experience unequal opportunity and stereotyping, we needed to present ourselves as more likeable to the white people who were so outraged.

I thought those angry white people were acting in good faith. I started taking on more views of those opposed to civil rights as a way to try to patch things up. I was seeing on Fox and online that people were up in arms about taking down Confederate statues. I figured if I took on that issue it would be a bridge between these communities. They would see I’m not threatening, and that might create an opening to talk to them.

So I started defending Confederate statues and flags, I started wearing a Confederate flag wristband. I was trying to show that I understood what they were arguing.

I even started adopting the argument that the civil war started because of states’ rights, not slavery.

When Donald Trump ran for president the first time, he made all these promises about how he was going to turn the economy around. It seemed to me like he spoke for the people I had been defending. My cause had been so intertwined with the white working poor, and his message to the white working poor was that he was going to help them. I felt they had been ignored.

I eventually went to a Trump rally, and I liked his seeming toughness. He seemed to be really candid. People at the rally embraced me. I thought I had made inroads, that I had broken ground, that because of my support they could have a better perspective on Black people. One older woman said she was glad I was there, but she still didn’t like Black women. I thought she was opening up to me; again, I thought everything was in good faith.

I became a dedicated MAGA loyalist. I started posting a lot of pro-Trump content on Facebook and Twitter. I did paid Twitter campaigns to spread my ideas further.

I was pretty low-information. Fox and Breitbart, along with pro-Trump social media, were my sources of news. I wasn’t talking much to friends or family.

I defended Trump no matter what he said or did, even when he said there were “good people on both sides” after Charlottesville. I justified it to myself by thinking that he was perhaps trying to reach out to people who have different stereotypes.

My journey out of MAGA actually began when Trump overturned DACA in September 2017. I was going to a Hispanic church; my fellow congregants were afraid of deportation. I didn’t want that to happen to the people I went to church with.

This happened around the same time I had taken a college journalism class, and discovered that Fox News had biases of its own. I moved to other news sources beyond Fox.

I again realized I needed to reassess my assumptions when I wrote a paper for my college writing class on climate change. I planned to argue that climate change wasn’t as bad as people were saying. But I couldn’t find any research that supported my argument; the science was more conclusive than I had been led to believe.

My dad would question my support of Trump. He’d ask how I could support him when he wanted to overturn the Affordable Care Act. I have struggled much of my life with mental health issues, so my dad was arguing that I was supporting Trump against my own interests.

In 2019 I had made enough progress on the health front that I could finally work again. I started getting exposed to more people and more perspectives.

But I was still with MAGA when the pandemic and the George Floyd protests broke out in 2020. When I saw the video of Floyd getting smothered to death, I knew there was no way to spin it, even though Fox was defending the police, saying, “The guy was a criminal, the protestors are siding with the criminal.”

I understood the anger and the protests. Then Trump threatened military action against the protesters, and there was the incident when he walked to the church near the White House with a military escort. It was such a terrible response, I thought, “Why is he doing this?”

I thought that what I had been doing over the years would lead to change. But it turned out that the protests led to actual change. Businesses were stepping up for the Black community, adding people to boards of directors, engaging in strategic hiring. I realized I had just been appeasing everybody. 

When the pandemic hit, I was working in maintenance in a restaurant. I wasn’t into conspiracy theories; I wasn’t anti-mask or anti-social distancing. That put me at odds with a lot of Trump supporters. I didn’t understand why he kept speaking against those things. I was thinking, “People are dying, please say something.” I had been working around lower-income white people and older white people. They were my customers; I cared about them. They would come in without masks, they wouldn’t observe social distancing. They’d say, “If I die, that’s God’s plan.” Their president was saying stuff that could get them killed.

I was coming to understand that Trump didn’t care.

I didn’t understand why he was doing things. I didn’t understand his motives. I finally broke with MAGA, and I switched to being neutral in the 2020 election.

After Trump said the 2020 election was rigged and that he won, he went against all I had learned about the principles of American democracy.

I had a terrifying phone call with my best friend. He said he was so scared about the election being stolen. He said, “What are we going to do? The country is going to be lost.” He was crying, and I couldn’t figure out how to calm him down. I hadn’t paid attention to all the propaganda coming from Trump and his supporters. I didn’t think anybody actually believed the election was stolen.

I thought, “Trump and the rest did this to him, I can’t tolerate this.”

Being in MAGA is like being maladjusted. I think Trump is a psychopath. I finally realized there is evil in this world. I worked recently in the insurance industry, making sales calls. Customers would utter the most disgusting vitriol about immigrants, about crime, spouting conspiracy theories. One man talked about how Jesus had saved him, then he went off about how the US is a Christian nation. Lower-income whites are getting destroyed by MAGA. Their minds have been warped.

Since I left MAGA, friends and family have embraced me. I haven’t talked much to my MAGA friends in the last few years. I recently talked to one friend from those days, and he talked about conspiracy theories. He’s been on the inside of MAGA, and his brain has been cooking all the time.

I’m so happy that I left MAGA and now see the world in all its beauty and complexity.

                                                                                                                                                                                                   —Feb. 2025