I was born and raised in Connellsville, a suburb of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. It was the 1960s; my parents were JFK Democrats: pro-life, culturally conservative. My dad was a big union guy; he worked for West Penn Power. My mom was an administrative secretary for a local hospital.

I attended a private Catholic school from kindergarten through 12th grade. At home, we were encouraged to discuss political issues. My dad talked about politics much more than my mother. She is almost apolitical, although she would vote in elections, mostly for Democrats.

I started paying attention to politics when Ronald Reagan ran for president in 1980. I liked his message, and my dad and I got into it a couple of times over Reagan. I remember asking my dad, “Can you explain to me how you’re pro-life and you support the Democratic Party?” He said, “Well, the Democrats aren’t forcing women to abort. I’m personally against abortion and I would try to talk someone out of it, but I’m not going to be a single-issue voter.”

A huge influence on my politics came through my becoming a born-again Pentecostal Christian when I was 17. I had a friend in that branch of the church, and she told me Catholics aren’t real Christians. She argued I needed a personal relationship with Christ. She invited me to her church. I don’t know what it was; maybe the atmosphere or the way the people were welcoming to me. I felt something happen to me during that service that felt like a real change at a spiritual level. 

My parents would not have approved, so I didn’t tell them that although I was still attending their Catholic church, I was sneaking out to go to the Pentecostal church. One thing led to another and I started watching Christian TV, with its televangelists like Jimmy Swaggart, along with some local ones. 

That evangelical message coordinated very well with Reaganism. It became a spiritual journey for me. It reinforced for me that I needed to support the Republican Party, because I saw the Democratic Party as amoral, too secular. I thought if the country were more in line with Christian values, we’d be better off.

I would go to Republican rallies and it would feel like an old-time tent revival. I felt a real fervor; it was very exciting.

I got married in 1988 and moved to northern Virginia. I became a Licensed Practical Nurse. I was still a conservative evangelical, and I got involved with some local Republican groups. I was a delegate in 1994 to the state GOP convention in Richmond as a supporter of Oliver North for US Senate. I was a member of the Republican Women’s Committee, and I worked on some local campaigns. 

When Bill Clinton was elected president in 1992, I thought, “How could anybody support this guy? He’s slimy. He cheats on his wife.” I thought he was a sexual predator, and so wasn’t morally fit to serve as president.

By the time George W. Bush became president, my husband and I had two children, and we were trying to build a ceramic floor tile business. I had my cultural conservatism, and now fiscal conservatism resonated with me. I believed Republicans were more business-friendly. They believed in equal opportunity, keeping taxes low, not over-regulating companies. 

After 9/11, I came to believe that if you’re a Christian, an American, a believer in freedom and democracy, these radical Islamic fundamentalists wanted to kill us because of those things. I believed Republicans were more willing to stand up to that type of terrorism than Democrats.

Around 2003, when I got divorced, I found myself moving away from the evangelical movement. I still had those basic values, but I was noticing things going on in the church that made me uncomfortable. I started hearing about sexual abuse. And the church and the televangelists were always asking for money. I started asking myself, “Is this just some kind of a scam?”

Then I began questioning things that were happening during services. It started to look like psychological manipulation to me. People were told they were healed of diseases, so they would stop taking their meds, and they would die. There was a whole push about holy laughter. We were told the holy spirit would come across certain members and cause them to go into fits of hysterical laughter. It felt like it was just the power of suggestion. People would go up and the pastor would pray over them about being “slain in the spirit.” They would fall over, sometimes speaking in tongues. I thought people weren’t having a religious experience, but instead were being tricked, like some kind of psy-ops. 

So I pulled away from the evangelical movement and never went back. No more 700 Club, no more Jimmy Swaggart.

The next important chapter in my political development came around 2012. My kids were coming of age, and I had friends whose kids were coming back from Iraq and Afghanistan with PTSD and terrible injuries. I saw that vets weren’t getting the help they needed. I said to myself, “What are we doing? How long is this going to go on?” Given that we were told we were spending our blood and treasure to defeat terrorism, I started questioning whether the goals were being achieved.

Then ”The Afghanistan Papers” book came out (an inside history of how successive US governments misled the public about the war). I started to think, like a lot of leftists, that the wars were just to enrich the weapons industry, and that the Iraq invasion was just the result of a Bush family vendetta against Saddam Hussein. I soured on the hawkish, neocon wing of the Republican party.

You can see how this tracks logically. By this point I’m saying to myself, “Both parties suck. They’re elitist, they’re working for their millionaire donors, they’re giving us a load of crap.”

Then in 2015 Trump came along. He had an anti-establishment message, and I was mad at the establishment. He wasn’t my first pick, but after he won the Republican primary I got behind him. He struck me as kind of creepy, crass, with a lot of bluster. But I didn’t want a choir boy. I was willing to overlook some aspects of his personality if he could go in and expose what he was calling the swamp, so we could maybe do a reset. 

There was a bit of cognitive dissonance because I had been mad at Clinton for being a womanizer and a sexual predator, and I chose to selectively dismiss it in Trump’s case. I thought, “Yeah, he was probably a bit of a masher, but he’s a rich guy, that’s what they do.” I was making all these excuses for him.

Most of my information came from right-wing sources. Fox was always on at our house. I listened regularly to WMAL radio out of Washington, DC. It had a lot of Rush Limbaugh, Chris Plante, G. Gordon Liddy, Mark Levin. When I got on social media, it was Breitbart, Ben Shapiro, Candace Owens, Ann Coulter, Michelle Malkin, Glenn Beck.

I got more and more excited about Trump. I liked that he wasn’t beholden to big donors. He was paying for his own campaign. I liked that he talked tough, that he said patriotic things. I liked his America First anti-war message, that we needed to get out of all these expensive wars. I liked that he was saying, “I’m a rich guy, I have access, I know who the crooks are in DC, I’m going to expose them, we’re going to get rid of them, we’re going to hold them accountable, we’re going to be more transparent.”

I had a different take on the Access Hollywood tape that came out right before the 2016 election. Someone I know who worked on that show said Producer David Shapiro waited until October to release the tape as an October surprise to hurt Trump’s chances. So I thought they were trying to paint him as worse than he was. I said to myself, “Oh, it’s just locker room talk, he never touched women in that way, it’s just guys being guys.”

When Trump took office and immediately implemented his Muslim ban, I was taken aback, but my initial response was to defend him, by saying, “Look, a lot of these terrorists are groomed and trained in Syria, so we can’t be too careful.” We were hearing about sleeper cells in our country, about isolated attacks. My response was, let’s not jump to conclusions and think that he’s against all Muslims, that it’s rooted in racism or xenophobia. 

Over the next months, I didn’t like that he was playing footsie with dictators and autocrats. I thought, “What is going on here? You act like you want to date them. You said you were going to be tough on this kind of stuff. Where’s this coming from?” So my balloon started to deflate a little.

More credible information emerged in 2017 and 2018 about Trump molesting women, how he talked creepily about his daughter, and walked in on beauty pageant contestants while they were getting dressed. I’m a victim of rape; it seriously traumatized me. And it traumatizes me to hear how powerful men get away with this kind of stuff. 

I was still within the tolerable spectrum in terms of my support for Trump and MAGA, but I was starting to get a bad taste in my mouth. I had an uncomfortable, squirmy feeling. But I still supported him, because I believed that at the end of the day it was his policies that mattered. 

My break up with MAGA truly began when the pandemic hit. 

I watched Trump butt heads with Dr. Fauci and Dr. Birx (Trump’s White House Coronavirus Response Coordinator). He seemed more open to trying unproven treatments like hydroxychloroquine. It seemed he was saying that people were dying and we should try this as an emergency measure; that made sense to me. I didn’t know at the time that the experts were telling him to stop, that he was going to do more harm with hydroxychloroquine. 

Trump kept on saying stupid things at his press conferences. He appeared to be grasping at straws, trying to do whatever he could to stop the lockdowns and get everybody back out doing their thing. All he cared about was the economy; he didn’t understand a pandemic is like a war with an unseen enemy. You have to make sacrifices, like we did during World War II with rationing and power shutoffs.

But my frustration was focused less on Trump and more on MAGA and the right wing in general, especially the disinformation mills that were spreading dangerous lies (like the one about the vaccine killing people). I saw a lot of my peers fighting the public health protocols tooth and nail, like a bunch of petulant toddlers. We were losing people, people were suffocating because their lungs were filling with this glue. And we didn’t know how virulent this novel coronavirus was going to be. But all the critics said was, “I don’t want to wear a mask. I don’t want to stay home. I want to do what I want to do.” I was so mad, I was seeing red.

As we headed into the 2020 election, I agonized over whether to vote for Trump again. In the end I chose him because I thought I had inside information on the Bidens’ corruption in Ukraine. In 2017-18 I helped transcribe interviews for a journalist friend. He had interviewed a Ukrainian diplomat, Andriy Telizhenko, who accused Joe and Hunter Biden of various corrupt activities. It turned out his claims were unsubstantiated. (At the tail end of the Trump administration, the State Department revoked Telizhenko’s visa for his role in spreading disinformation, and the Treasury Department sanctioned him for his role in Russia’s disinformation campaign regarding Ukraine.)

Trump’s whole “stop the steal” campaign, his nonsense about the election being stolen because of widespread voter fraud, the January 6 coup attempt, and subsequent reports about how there was a coordinated plan to overturn the election, were the final nail in the coffin for me. I officially walked away from MAGA in 2021.

Then I asked myself, “In what other ways have I been lied to?” I started digging deeper, and I started to learn a lot. I learned that a lot of how I thought the economy works is wrong. I learned that what I thought about Muslims was wrong. I realized I had been propagandized. I decided I needed to de-program myself. It was a journey of self discovery. I was on a mission to educate myself to think more critically about the information I was consuming. I learned to vet sources. I learned about confirmation bias, motivated reasoning, and heuristics. I pulled myself out of that funk of right-wing propaganda.

I stopped watching or listening to right-wing media; they spread so much misinformation and disinformation. I turned to independent journalists, like the MeidasTouch Network team. They admit they’re progressives, but when I listen they give me meat to work with. I’m now able to separate data and facts from opinion. I like to listen to people who debunk right-wing nonsense,  while being mindful they can be reporting from a place of bias. I follow David Pakman, Robert Reich, Heather Cox Richardson, Jane Mayer, and The Majority Report.

I started calling myself a “citizen journalist.” I became a fact checker on social media and with friends and family. I have done a lot of debunking of disinformation about vaccines and other medical issues.

Sadly, I discovered that facts don’t reach people in MAGA. They’re not interested in hearing facts. It doesn’t even occur to them that they might have been wrong about something.

It’s very hard to convince somebody who’s using motivated reasoning and confirmation bias that they’re being misled, that their information ecosystem is misleading them. It’s easier to fool people than to convince them that they’re being fooled.

It’s so easy to program people, but it’s almost impossible to deprogram them. 

I acknowledge that I have been fierce as I go after MAGA on social media. I haven’t always been nice, because those folks exasperate me, and I’m not a patient person. I have lost some friends; a couple don’t talk to me anymore. Others on social media engage and argue with me. Some are vicious, attacking me over my looks or mocking me for having had miscarriages.

At the same time, I’ve had a couple of people tell me in private that I’ve made a difference for them. They said they didn’t know certain sources of information existed. They checked them out, found the information valuable, and took it to heart. That was a win for me.

But I have also learned to pick my battles. You don’t have to fight with everybody all the time. When you find the truth, you’re maybe over-passionate. 

My husband is still in MAGA. I’ve learned how to be very diplomatic at home. We have had a lot of arguments — now we just agree to disagree.

My millennial kids are in the middle. They’re not politically active, unfortunately. I told them they need to be more aware, they need to do more. After all, it’s their future at stake.

                                                                                                                                                                                                       —January 2025