I was born in 1995 in Dayton, Ohio. My mom was a full-time student and a full-time mom. My dad was a crackhead. 

Dad was selling dope, and was constantly in trouble with the law. When I was 2, he briefly kidnapped me. My mother eventually left him.

When I was 5, we moved to St. Paris, a village in the middle of nowhere in western Ohio. My mom had met Mike, whom she would later marry; he eventually adopted me as his daughter. We were 40 minutes from everything; people dug their own water wells, because if a fire broke out, you couldn’t count on the fire department getting there in time.

We were pretty well off. Both parents made good salaries. We lived in a nice ranch house on 10 acres. 

But I was a very difficult kid. I went to a Catholic pre-school and kindergarten, but the priest told my mom it wasn’t the place for me, because I was too unruly and always getting into trouble.  My mom said I was awful, unbearable.

I believe I have undiagnosed autism; when I was growing up, the cultural norm was that “girls can’t be autistic.” I was on mood stabilizers when I was 6; I was diagnosed with depression when I was 7 or 8. At 9, they said I was bipolar. Then they said I was schizophrenic. Then it was something else. From the time I was 9 until I was about 20, I was on lithium and time-release Vyvanse.

I started smoking marijuana consistently around the age of 12. By the time I was in high school, I was smoking a lot of marijuana, drinking a lot, and doing other drugs. I was addicted to coke and Xanax by the time I was 18. It wasn’t until I got clean a few years later that my mom told me that my biological dad had been addicted to the exact same drugs.

I didn’t learn about the dangers of long-term use of Vyvanse and lithium until I was in my twenties. My therapist said, “No wonder you have a drug issue.”

Growing up, my parents listened all the time to Rush Limbaugh and Alex Jones. They always had Limbaugh on in the background. And they always had Fox News on the TV. 

Then 9/11 happened, and everything changed in our house. With all the racism, the bigotry, and the fear, my household became blood-chilling. My dad installed surveillance cameras everywhere, and put up motion sensors. He cemented our fricking mailbox because he thought Muslims were going to blow it up. We weren’t allowed to go on vacations because he thought the Taliban would be at our house when we got back. 

I believed Muslims wanted to kidnap me; Asian men wanted to sell me; and Black men wanted to rape and murder me. I thought every big city had an area where they were beheading people, that there were bodies lying in the streets. 

I had these beliefs embedded in my DNA until one day when I was 16. I got in a friend’s car and we went to Columbus by ourselves. (We had to lie about where we were going.) We expected to be robbed or that one of us was going to die. We were too afraid to get out of the car, so we just drove around, sitting in silence the entire time. I saw my first homeless people — I was horrified by that. But of course the city wasn’t anywhere near as horrific as we were led to believe. It was one of the first times I experienced something that contradicted what my parents had said about it.

My dad was openly sexist. He was always saying Republican women Senators were so much prettier than the Democratic women Senators. He would make fun of how “ugly” the Democrats were. He talked about how being led by emotion — implying that’s how women act — was stupid. The only book I ever saw my dad read was The No Spin Zone by Bill O’Reilly.

My belief system was also influenced by church. We attended the Primitive Methodist Church. It’s evangelical; we were taught that the natural order of things is God, husband, wife, child. There was a lot of shame, a lot of bigotry. It wasn’t a blind hatred; the preacher didn’t damn gays from the pulpit. It was always more subtle. He would say, “The Bible says the gays are wrong, but I don’t mind if you are gay.” He also said he didn’t think gay people should pay taxes — he didn’t want them to have the same privileges as heterosexuals. It was very manipulative, very calculated.

When I was younger, my parents tried to use church as a form of control. They would make me stand up in front of the congregation on Sundays and tell about every bad thing I had done that week. So I started doing even more outrageous things, and they realized that tactic wasn’t working. 

I haven’t always been fully on board with Christianity. By high school, I didn’t go to church much. I was a burning leaves kind of girl; I would try to practice witchcraft in my bedroom just to piss my parents off.

By that point we had moved to Wapakoneta, Ohio. Mom had divorced Mike and married Dave. It was much larger than St. Paris, but it was still a very small town. 

I graduated high school and spent a year at Wright State University. I got caught selling acid on campus and was facing federal charges. I had just turned 19, I had no prior criminal activity — I was terrified. So I rolled on the others I was selling drugs with. I didn’t have to go to prison, but I was banned from all Ohio public schools for five years. That was the end of college.

I got pretty radicalized after that. I bounced around in Ohio for a while, living on and off with my dad Mike. He and my mom had split up; she moved to Charlotte, North Carolina. Mike really kicked off my diving into the alt-right. I then followed my mom to North Carolina. In March 2015, Mike killed himself.

After that, I got deeper into my drug use, and deeper into the alt-right. I listened a lot to Info Wars — Alex Jones and Ben Shapiro. On YouTube, I followed Baked Alaska, White Rose (a white supremacist trans person — really), and Hunter Avalon (who is now a left-leaning media creator). 

I was drawn to people who seemed unique, so I thought finding a transgender person who agreed with me proved I was right about my beliefs. 

I had become a white supremacist. I posted a photo on social media of a cemetery decorated with Confederate flags, and expressed my admiration for the beauty of the scene. Once I posted something about Hitler not being that bad because he advanced transportation in Germany. I would debate people on social media until I was blue in the face.

In 2016, I heard that people were organizing an event in Charlottesville that would be called Unite the Right. I got involved helping to promote it, handing out fliers on the street. I didn’t go to the rally, though. Going would have made it too real. As long as I didn’t go I was able to think it wasn’t that bad.

Meanwhile, I kept doing drugs. I wrecked cars, got concussions. I’m not sure how I’m still alive.

My racism started to fall apart not long after Charlottesville. I realized you can’t be a crackhead and be racist. I used to say, “White privilege isn’t a thing.” But I realized that as a white girl, I got away with everything. It happened time and time again: The police would catch a bunch of us — a group of Black people and me — doing drugs. They would bust everyone else, and they would let me go. Every time.

I started getting clean in 2018. It took some months for my brain to get clear. I was living in Wilmington. My mom and her boyfriend were both very pro-Trump. I was gung ho, mindlessly supporting Trump.

I kept following right-wing media, especially Ben Shapiro and a lot of Joe Rogan. I was a big Joe Rogan girl. I dropped Alex Jones after the Sandy Hook massacre.

As the pandemic hit in 2020, followed by the George Floyd murder and the Black Lives Matter movement, I was trying to find a way to justify my beliefs. About George Floyd, I would go along with the MAGA talking points about how he had a rap sheet, and what about his victims? 

With regard to Covid, I was very aggressive on social media. I was hostile to masks. I believed “alternative medical facts” about Covid, even after getting a horrible case of the disease myself.

I started questioning my support for Trump and MAGA when he claimed the 2020 election was stolen from him. I never believed it. I was in therapy as part of my effort to stay clean, and I realized he was acting similarly to a lot of the adults I grew up with. I recognized patterns: lack of accountability, deflection, it’s always everybody else’s fault. It reminded me a lot of what I’d experienced in my life. 

The breaking point for me was January 6th. I still want to believe in America; I want to believe in our Constitution. I watched the live coverage on TV at work. I was just frozen, horrified. After screaming about election fraud that didn’t exist, the president of the United States was inciting Americans to attack federal police officers and our elected officials. It was the most un-American thing I’d seen in my entire life. 

I felt an almost instantaneous hatred of Trump.

I turned off all the right-wing media I had been following, except for Joe Rogan. He interviews people with different perspectives, and a lot of them write books. I found a lot of left-leaning thinkers by listening to him. 

I didn’t start following other US media. I felt all the media was evil, and that all Democrats and Republicans were evil. I started following foreign media when Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022. For a long time my big focus was on Ukraine. I made friends on social media with people in Ukraine, Lithuania, and Estonia.

Like most everyone else, I was horrified by Hamas’ massacre on October 7, 2023. Growing up in what would become MAGA, I grew up a Zionist. But when Israel started carpet bombing Gaza in response, I was disgusted. I reached out on social media and connected with some people who lived in Gaza. Some of them were killed in the Israeli attacks. A couple of weeks after Israel started bombing, I made my first political video on social media. I talked about feeling violated and lied to about Israel.

I started educating myself, wanting to get involved in American politics. We had Joe Biden and Trump running, and I didn’t want to vote for either. I posted on social media about how Biden had as much blood on his hands as Israel, but as someone who grew up inside MAGA, I had to let everyone know that Trump was the more evil of the two. Thank God Biden dropped out and I didn’t have to vote for him. I wasn’t all that excited to vote for Kamala Harris either, but come on. 

As a former white supremacist, I have taken it upon myself to try to dispel the myths they push. I educated myself on the Crusades (because they’re obsessed with the Crusaders’ cross) and Celtic and Nordic paganism, since supremacists wrongly claim to be the direct racial and spiritual descendants of “heroic” pagans. I taught myself German, and I learned how to identify white supremacist logos and symbols, so I can call them out on their lies.

I also stay aggressive and vigilant about the Democrats and the Republicans. Both sides are overdue for criticism. 

It’s so distressing watching the second Trump administration terrorize and emotionally drain everyone. I am fortunate; I’m a white heterosexual woman, married (since November 2023) to a white man, getting a college degree – I don’t have a lot to complain about. 

I’m about to get my associate degree in film from Cape Fear Community College. I’m going to pursue a BA in business at UNC-Wilmington starting next January. One day I want to set up my own documentary production company, and go to places in the world where people are ignored, and tell their stories.

My break with MAGA thinking has had consequences in my family. A few weeks ago, my mother invited my husband and me to her house for a July 4th cookout with some friends. These friends have been incredibly racist in the past, and I asked her to have a conversation with them before the cookout about keeping it to themselves. That led to a huge argument. Mom was more interested in protecting her friends’ feelings than ours. So I broke off contact. 

Hopefully we’ll be able to reconcile at some point; and maybe one day I can help her see how Trump and MAGA are bad for America.

                                                                                                                                                                                             —July 2025