I was born in 1984 in Roseburg, Oregon, and I grew up in Glide. It was a very small town, maybe 1,500 people. My grandfather was a major surveyor in the county. I spent a lot of time around blue collar guys: welders, fabricators, metal engineers, loggers. My grandfather was also a farmer; he raised his own crops, had his own orchard. 

My dad owned a construction company, but we were very poor. It was me, my little sister and my parents in a 1970s double-wide mobile home. Meals would consist of things like white sauce with fried chicken and Bisquick biscuits made with water.

When I was a teenager we moved to Sutherlin, about 12 miles north of Roseburg. I went to high school there.
My parents didn’t really talk about politics as I was growing up. There might be the occasional discussion of something they’d seen on TV, but that was about it. I started paying a little more attention to politics when I took civics and social studies in high school. At that time I leaned a little bit more towards the Democrats. I was 17 when the Twin Towers were hit on 9/11. I remember walking into my job at McDonalds and seeing it on TV.

I switched to Republican after President Bush declared the War on Terror. At that time there was a lot of unity, a lot of patriotism. I left school, got my GED, and tried to enlist in the military. I’m deaf in my left ear, so it took two years for the military to clear me to join. I finally was able to enlist in 2003. I joined the Army National Guard: Charlie Company First Battalion, 186th Infantry of the 41st Infantry Brigade. In June 2006, I began my first deployment, in Afghanistan. I served at Camp Phoenix in Kabul. It was a little more interesting than I’d expected. While I didn’t experience nearly the level of violence some of my battle buddies did, within my first month there a car bomb blew up the front gate of Camp Phoenix. A week after that my platoon got moved to Gardez, a couple hours south of Kabul. When the first patrol went out, someone drove up behind with with a car bomb, blowing up the rear end of a Humvee. Guys came back bloody; that was a wakeup call for me. It was like, “Oh shit, anything can happen to me, I’m actually in a combat zone.” A few days later we got pelted with rockets. That went on every night for about two weeks. One landed next to our huts; thankfully we were in our bunkers.

After six or seven months, my platoon got reassigned to Mazar-i-Sharif, in the very northern portion of Afghanistan. The city was peaceful for the most part. We had troops from our NATO allies, including Swedes and Norwegians, and the people did not support the Taliban and Al Qaeda. But as soon as we went outside the city — we were tasked with convoy security —we’d have to stop for IEDs or a truck would get blown up by an IED. Despite all the violence, I found Afghanistan to be the most beautiful country I had seen in my life. Not only was the landscape gorgeous, but the people were wonderful. The world is so much bigger and so much cooler and so much more beautiful than the little microcosm in which I was living at that time.

I was honorably discharged from active duty in June 2007, and went back home to Oregon. I was still in the National Guard, and in early 2008 we got the warning order that we’d be deploying to Iraq in 2009. I served about a year in Iraq, starting in June 2009. I worked base security and convoy security from the Al-Assad Marine base near Iraq’s western border. It was a way station for troops and supplies coming in from Jordan.

I returned to Roseburg in June 2010. I studied criminal justice in college, but after a couple years I ran out of money. I was unemployed and homeless for a year and a half. For the first few months I stayed in my truck. It was the pride in me that kept me from asking for help. I finally reached a breaking point and I asked my aunt and uncle if I could stay with them. In 2015, I started working for FedEx. That’s when my body started going downhill. I had fallen quite a bit while in Afghanistan.  I was very rough on my body, jumping from helicopters and other heights. Experiencing all the explosions didn’t help. I had pain in my joints and my back, and I had headaches, I have arthritis, degenerative lower back disc disease, synovitis, bursitis — my body’s all messed up. I have ADHD and I’m bipolar as well. In 2017 the VA said I couldn’t work anymore, and that it was service connected. I went on disability and social security.

While I was leaning more Republican at the start of the War on Terror, I had seen what was going on with the war, what had happened to my battle brothers. I was slowly starting to change. I thought, all these Republicans just want war. I voted for Obama in 2008. My feeling was, let’s try for some change. I voted for him again in 2012. I started moving towards being Republican heading into the 2016 election. At that time there was a lot of anti-politician sentiment. We had two terms of Obama — a career politician — then we had Hillary Clinton running, another career politician. Then Donald Trump started talking about her and Bill, that they were part of the “deep state.” I was attracted to Trump because he was a businessman, and I thought he was going to run the country like a business. I believed him when he said he would “drain the swamp.”

There was a lot of anti-Trump language, including a lot of anti-Trump voter language. There were a lot of attacks on Trump voters rather than on Trump, like when Hillary called people who supported Trump “deplorables.” I saw how Trump had enraged Democrats, how he had whipped the left into a rage. And he kept talking about the deep state, how it’s against the people, they’re outsiders here to hurt us. All of that appealed to me.

Up to that point I got my information from a wide variety of sources: CNN, MSNBC, ABC, CBS, some Fox News. But I came to believe there was a lot of unfair coverage of Trump in the mainstream media. So I stopped watching all media that was not pro-Trump. I started listening to more Fox, more Ben Shapiro, Alex Jones for a while, Glen Beck, Bill O’Reilly — all the sources that were more favorable to Trump. Their coverage validated my feelings about what was going on. I supported MAGA, but I wasn’t politically active. I was afraid of being physically attacked by Antifa or someone from the Democratic Party. I was afraid if Clinton won the Democrats would start carrying out Gestapo-style roundups, that America would turn into a hellscape.

That was the narrative being pushed to those of us in MAGA: you must be bold and brave, you must only hang out with MAGA people, and be sure you don’t listen to anybody else but MAGA. Once Trump was elected president, there were certain things that happened that planted the seeds of doubt in my head about him. The Stormy Daniels incident made me think, he’s a little compromised here. Then there was the Ukraine impeachment. It was spun that he was acquitted, but no, he wasn’t. It was just that they didn’t have enough votes in the Senate for a conviction to remove him from office. Trump’s handling of the pandemic further fed my doubts. There shouldn’t have been so many people dying. That’s on him, the damage he caused.

I was starting to slowly pull away from MAGA by the time the 2020 election rolled around, but I still voted for Trump. I saw it as a choice between an old man or an older old man. When Trump claimed the election was stolen, 60% of me believed him, while 40% of me was thinking, “In every election I’ve ever known, every candidate has wanted it to be fair. If you lose, you lose. Everyone has that mutual agreement, that mutual respect. What if he’s wrong about this?” The pro-Trump news outlets were all telling stories about dead people voting or forged signatures or conspiracy theories about the mail-in ballot system. Each recount, audit, or failed court appeal that confirmed Biden won chipped away a little more of Trump’s credibility. By the time all that had concluded, I thought, “Dude, you’ve got to accept it. Take the L, move on. Michael Jordan has lost some games too, you know?”

I still wasn’t fully out of MAGA. I felt I still had to support Trump; it was a belief I had because of the community I was in. On Jan. 6, I watched the rally live. As soon as Trump said, let’s go to the Capitol, I thought, “What the fuck? What are you saying? If there are errors and issues in the voting, okay, fight it out in court. But don’t try to storm the Capitol and interrupt the election process.” That day, I said to myself, “Never again. No more.” That was too far for me.

I was still following the same media sources. But I slowly started widening my scope of information. I started to listen to CNN, MSNBC, ABC, NBC, CBS. I started listening to podcasters, like Rachel Maddow. That’s when I started my deconstruction and seeing things for how they truly were. I met my future wife in 2022; we moved to Sacramento and got married in Dec. 2023. In Sacramento I started meeting new people from different cultures and backgrounds, hearing different opinions, different ideas. It was eye opening, as opposed to the narrow lens I had been in with MAGA.

I see Trump for what he is now. I see how he and MAGA demonize everybody who is an other, whether it’s a different religion, a different race, a different political party, a different country. “They” are coming in, “they” this, “they” that. My wife is an immigrant from Taiwan, so immigrant issues are very important to me. I have also become a strong supporter of women’s right to control their bodies. When it comes to deciding shit for women, men shouldn’t have any say in that.

I’m starting to learn more again. That feels great. I’m feeling comfortable talking about politics with people again. I’m getting a lot of positive, welcoming messages from people. I had a friend reach out whom I hadn’t talked to in 10 years.

—September 2024