I was born in Mobile, Alabama in 1988, and raised in an evangelical Christian home. We didn’t actually go to church much; mainly it was a lot of home religious study. I went to public school for a couple years, then my mom pulled me out of 3rd grade and homeschooled me all the way through high school. Mom wanted my schooling to have a more religious approach.

From the time my brother and I were very young, mom taught us a lot about the Rapture. She said we had to be on our best behavior every day, that we had to constantly ask for forgiveness for our sins. She said tomorrow could be the end of the world, the Rapture. She often would get angry, and scream at us at the top of her lungs that Satan was going to get us.

So of course I was constantly scared about doing anything wrong or sinful, since the world could end any day. I became morally judgmental of those who didn’t share our beliefs.

I felt isolated a lot; I was quite different from the other kids. I had a bunch of friends but they went to public schools, and there was a big cultural disconnect between us. We did have one area of common ground: video games.

We moved around some when we were young; my dad served on an Army Explosive Ordnance Disposal team for 13 years. Part of the time he was posted to Eglin Air Force Base in Florida. He left the military before I was 10, and we returned to Mobile.

Dad left religion and our religious education to my mom. I became very protective of women; I didn’t like how my dad would crack jokes, making fun of women.

I grew up apolitical; my parents never talked about politics.

Our homeschool program didn’t offer a high school diploma, so I had to get a GED after I finished. 

After getting my GED, I got an AA in criminal justice from the University of Phoenix. I had thought about trying to become a police officer, but I got a job offer from the post office (my dad worked there after the military). I became a clerk, and then a mail carrier for several years. Delivering mail helped me so much with my social skills. I got more and more comfortable talking to people.

My obsession with video games continued into my early 20s. At the same time, I was having a lot of trouble in the ladies department, due in large part to my upbringing. I ended up going down the rabbit hole of anti-feminist videos, and became a fan of the Incel and MGTOW [Men Going Their Own Way] movements.

I felt I had found a community, hearing others voice the same complaints I had. I believed women were leading men on, lying about what they wanted from a man. (“You say you want a nice guy, but when a guy is nice you say you don’t want that.”) I believed that women only wanted “bad boys.” I put all the blame for my romantic troubles on women; I never thought it was related to anything I was doing.

Then the Gamergate controversy hit in 2014, and I agreed with a lot of the horrible things that were being posted about women. It all reinforced the stereotypes I was developing.

That really marked the beginning of my political life. The anti-feminist narrative I had bought into was one of the two big reasons I became a supporter of MAGA.

The other thing was my antipathy to the Black Lives Matter movement, which began when protests broke out after the 2014 killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. I was one of those “all lives matter” people. I thought Black Lives Matter was racializing everything. In my mind, racism was over. We had solved it. We had a Black president. We weren’t a racist country. 

I knew nothing of the historical context. My mom never taught us the history of racism, what Black Americans went through and still go through today. I was so ignorant; I had no understanding of how much prejudice and bias were baked into my belief system.

President Obama backed Black Lives Matter, which fed my distrust of the government. I wondered, “Why are you helping racialize this?” I went down more social media rabbit holes, where I found those who said white people were the ones being discriminated against. I came to believe that society thought it was fine to talk about every other race’s challenges, but not when it came to whites.

My distrust of those pushing the narratives about racism grew. “Why are they pushing this?” I would ask myself. I came to feel like there was some sort of agenda.

More generally, I was disappointed that Obama hadn’t changed the system during his presidency. I thought nothing was ever going to get better, and that we needed someone to shake the system up.

Then Trump started his first run for president. The first thing that caught my attention was when he said Mexico wasn’t sending its best, it was sending its worst. He said some were rapists. In my mind, those were two different things; I didn’t believe he was saying all Mexican immigrants were criminals. I felt people were lying about what he had said. I didn’t understand that he was feeding people’s biases.

Trump was also calling the mainstream media “fake news,” and said, “They have an agenda.” That played perfectly into my conspiracy theory about a hidden agenda about race. 

I didn’t bother to vote in 2016, because I thought the system was rigged and Hillary Clinton was going to win. Trump’s win totally shocked me. I realized voting does work. I immediately got hooked on the anti-social justice warriors on YouTube: Ben Shapiro, Milo Yiannopoulos, and Steven Crowder, among others. I watched a lot of them and Tucker Carlson. 

I became very right-wing. I felt more and more that America was being attacked by a force from within. I totally bought into Trump’s narrative of, “They’re out to get you, and I’m the only thing standing in the way.” 

I saw a lot of online communities I had been involved with become more anti-Semitic. People would say, “I’m not a Nazi, it’s just that the Jews control everything.” I thought that was insane thinking.

Nothing that happened during Trump’s first few years in office shook my support or made me question anything. If he did or said something controversial, I would just say, “Give him a chance.”

When Trump said there were “very fine people on both sides” after Charlottesville, I thought he wasn’t talking about the neo-Nazis, but rather the folks who didn’t want Confederate statues torn down for historical reasons.

Something very personal started my journey out of MAGA. In late 2018, the woman I had been involved with off and on for a bunch of years finally left me for good. I got very mad, and I was surrounded by people who told me I was right and she was wrong, that it was her fault, not mine. 

In mid-2019, I was taking a walk, having an imaginary conversation with my ex in my head. I imagined her saying, “If I came back to you, but you knew I would never be happy, would you want me in your life?”

That hit me really hard; in fact, it jumpstarted my questioning everything in my life. For the first time, I started thinking from her perspective. I had never taken her point of view into account. I tried to spend time outside my head and walk in her shoes. After two or three months of this, I came to empathize with what the feminist movement was saying back in 2014 during Gamergate. I couldn’t believe what I had believed.

That led me to have doubts about everything else. I thought, “I was wrong about this. What else was I wrong about?”

I started digging into Black Lives Matter. I did a lot of research, reading and watching content — particularly from leftists — that challenged my viewpoint. I spent a good six to nine months doing this. If I would get triggered or upset about the content, I would pause, walk away, and come back. 

I looked for people to talk to. I would go into the comments of the leftist content creators, learning how they thought about stuff. That community was very friendly, very open to me. I finally started to empathize with Black Lives Matter, realizing that my response to it had been ignorant.

For a time, I rationalized Trump’s behavior by telling myself he was wrong on these issues because the people around him were misinforming him. Then slowly but surely, I started to turn away from MAGA.

When the pandemic hit, I took it very seriously as a public health threat. I couldn’t believe Trump was downplaying it. I was already not entirely on board with him. When he started to pop off about how it was nothing, I thought, “This is a serious thing, you need to take this seriously. You’re stupid or you’re lying.”

After the George Floyd murder, I saw a lot of content across my feeds showing glaring differences in how people were treated by the cops. You saw white people being coddled, but if a Black person made the slightest wrong move their whole life was in danger. That was a huge wakeup call.

Trump’s hostility towards the Black Lives Matter protestors upset me. I thought, “You’ve got this entirely wrong, what are you doing?”

By the fall of 2020, I was done with MAGA and Trump. I stopped following Crowder, Carlson, Shapiro, and the rest. I turned to media I would never watch as a Trump/MAGA supporter: mainstream media like NBC and ABC. I felt I was getting caught up on a whole different world. 

I came to understand that Trump has no ability to be a leader, or to understand what’s going on in the country. He has no interest in trying to lead or unite us. He has no interest in trying to understand what others are talking about. No true leader can be like that. I voted for Joe Biden in 2020. 

My friends got really mad that I left MAGA. We argued a lot. I would say, “Just listen to me for a second.” But they wouldn’t; it was nonstop pushback. They’re stuck in that toxic mindset, and can’t bring themselves to question the MAGA narrative at all. That was a very frustrating time. I don’t really talk to any of them anymore.

Today I consider myself left or left-of-center. As someone who left MAGA, a main focus for me is trying to take as much accountability for my beliefs and actions as possible. I can’t just say, “Oh, I was lied to.” It’s my fault, because I let myself become that way.

I wish I could say Trump’s behavior in his second term has surprised me, but he’s behaving exactly like how I’ve come to see him. I read a lot of Project 2025, and he’s followed it like a playbook.

It’s important for people like me to speak out right now. But Trump is not the ultimate cause of this. There are underlying issues, like poor education. People aren’t taught enough about women’s issues and minority issues, for example. And people are having trouble pulling together the bare necessities. Once that happens, it’s really easy to become angry and want to blame the system. And when you feel the system isn’t going to change, it’s easy to say, “Let’s try the lunatic. Put the bull in the china shop and let it loose.”

My mom and dad voted for Trump three times. My mom’s pretty angry with Trump right now. She’s upset about him forcing people to resume repaying their student loans — that pissed her off. And she’s upset with Trump over the Epstein stuff. She can’t figure out why they’re sitting on that information. 

The Epstein scandal is creating such an opening. It’s very important for anyone who’s left MAGA to be as kind and open and honest as possible. There’s a lot of questioning right now, and sometimes that’s all it takes. We have to get people in MAGA to think about why they believed this stuff in the first place, and to reflect — to ask themselves, “How did we get here?”

                                                                                                                                                                                              —August 2025