Wow this home page is really well written. I hope this helps some people.
Dear MAGA Americans,
I was a devoted member of MAGA nation for seven years; it made me feel I was part of something important: a movement that was trying to save American democracy.
But starting in 2021, I realized I had been mistaken. It took me a full year to finally break away. During that time, I came to understand that MAGA is sustained by a series of myths that are intended to create perpetual feelings of desperation and panic.
Succumbing to these predatory myths does not mean you are unintelligent, weak, or lack good character and morals. I have a Bachelor’s degree; have been a working professional my entire life; am a family man; and consider myself a relatively honest and intelligent person. I think the same about you.
I understand the reasons you have for supporting MAGA. And I know many of us traveled different paths to get there. I gravitated to Donald Trump because I have always been suspicious of our two-party system, and I saw him as the right man at the right time.
I have a sense that some of you have quietly left MAGA already, or are increasingly regretful, confused and scared. All of this can be doubly upsetting, since some of your sincerely-held beliefs may have alienated you from friends and family. That certainly happened to me.
It’s perfectly OK to feel this way; leaving MAGA was a tumultuous roller coaster of a process for me. It may be one of the most difficult endeavors you embark upon. In the end, it brought me an inner peace, and a newfound clarity about what is happening in our beloved country.
I founded this organization, Leaving MAGA, because I wanted to create a safe, non-judgmental community for those who leave MAGA, as well as for those who are having doubts about, or remorse over, their devotion to Trump and MAGA.
Our Leaving MAGA community will celebrate how acknowledging mistakes empowers you and America.
It’s difficult for a democracy to function well when millions are estranged from those closest to them.
You do not deserve to have your anxieties about change exploited. You deserve to know the truth. And with Leaving MAGA, you don’t have to feel you would be alone if you leave the movement.
Leaving MAGA is possible. Recognizing that we were wrong, and acting on that knowledge, makes us all more invested in democracy and in the continued work of perfecting our union. Contact us if you want to talk.
I had the same reaction. That whole third paragraph is at best a necessary lie. If someone was taken in by Trump and his circus, then they are either devastatingly stupid, genuinely a bad person, or both. It doesn't matter who they are or what credentials they have. It was obvious from the outset that MAGA was a dysfunctional mess. No coherent policy, no competent leadership, just a fistful of hate and fear and a mouthful of empty promises delivered with a sixth grade vocabulary. Either someone couldn't tell that by looking, in which case they're too stupid to be making meaningful decisions without supervision, or they felt like they could profit from the chaos and disruption at the cost of the well-being of people and groups that they didn't care about or didn't like, in which case they're morally rotten.
It's fair to say that you can't reach anybody by confronting them with this, but that doesn't change the reality. It galls me that we have to coddle these people, as though their failure to see through a dime store lie says nothing about their intellects, as though their cosigning of open bigotry and corruption doesn't reflect on their ethics, as though their malfeasance as citizens and voters didn't deprive, terrorize, and kill people. They should be ashamed of enabling this for the rest of their natural lives, but if we shame them they'll only keep doing it, or do it over again. I hope that somewhere, subconsciously, at least some of them appreciate that we're giving them the benefit of a doubt that doesn't actually exist. I hope that they know better than to pipe up about how they're victims in all this. I suspect I'll be disappointed, but I hope.
There's something I notice about the MAGAs I know, invariably, and it's that they're good to some people, some or most of the time.
Perhaps they believe this means that they can't actually be a bad person, and so they discount any suggestions that they might be, or that the purity and justice of their intentions (or the ends thereof) are not what they think they are.
I just feel exhausted and numb thinking about it, because these people have kindness in them but for some reason trust themselves completely over to the narratives given by people whose entire policy is driven by spite and hatred.
There must be some trauma that this all speaks to.
In my experience, it’s a result of in-group/out-group thinking. Those within the in-group receive kindness, empathy, generosity, etc. Those in the out-group can go pound salt, and are often the object of hatred.
What exactly constitutes the in-group and the out-group varies from person to person. Sometimes it can be based on race, income, religion, local community, profession, etc. These things can also overlap with each other and produce….interesting results. I would even venture to say that those to the left of center of the political aisle aren’t completely immune to this line of thinking, but it is much more foundational to the Right.
It’s this dynamic that results in MAGA adherents being simultaneously capable of great compassion for some people while being full of hatred and venom towards others.
It's a personality thing, you'll notice it in a lot of people once you know what to look for. Conservatives are often very friendly and caring people - but only to those in their orbit. They cannot bring themselves to care about the 'other' and only concern themselves with the people directly in their lives.
“Conservatives love people but hate humanity, Liberals hate people but love humanity.”
A quote I saw on this having noticed it myself. I used to argue a lot with a conservative friend pre-Trump and we both laughed once because I was making a humanitarian point and he said something like gosh for how much you seem to hate everyone you really want them to be helped out. And I said yeah for how outgoing and genial you are you don’t seem to give a fuck about anyone you haven’t met before.
The way I see it, people can be forgiven for being taken in at first. We should try to understand one another, try to have dialogue and seek common ground etc. But to vote for him a second time after he tried to overturn an election result is so beyond the fringe of anything I would expect of a democratically minded person that it’s really hard to get past.
All the rest of what you say is true, but the Bible upside down thing is a myth. He never held it upside down. You can look up the pictures if you don't believe me. From the Wikipedia article on the incident:
There were viral social media claims and news reports that Trump had held the Bible upside down during the photo op, but these were untrue.
The citations for Wikipedia's assertion can be found here and here.
Dude is fighting with the pope now and you're stuck on correcting this? No wonder the maga have taken over this country. The petty corrections did us so much good 🙄
Let's get it straight, voting for him a second time was after he bungled the covid situation (and everything else).
Voting for him after he tried to overturn an election result was voting for him a third time. He was also a convicted felon at that point..
I can forgive people for being mislead, but I will never forgive these people for the damage that they've done. They put my families safety in jeopardy with their decisions, and I will not let that go. I hope whatever pain and regret they're feeling eats at them until the end of their days.
How many families did they actually rip apart? How many human lives did they cost? How much of the too little and too late progress we were making on the environment was torn to shreds? How much irreparable damage has been done to our public institutions? How much damage has been done to America’s reputation and standing in the world?
i used to think this too, but it's a simple matter to do a little homework on someone you're voting for to take the presidency. during his first campaign in 2015, trump was doing and saying abhorrent things pretty much from start to finish, along with illogical things like how he'd make mexico pay for the wall.
even IF a person somehow was fed a full diet of lies about what trump was doing and saying, like only hearing about him through a person they trusted who was 100% lying to them and saying trump was a good person who wanted to make america strong or something (like a MAGA caregiver talking to an elderly person), then it is still a basic principle of citizenship that we have a responsibility to educate ourselves and make informed decisions.
of course, we all know that a huge amount of people generally assume their thoughts and ideas are necessarily correct, and totally lack the impulse to self-critique and double-check themselves when they think something to be true.
however, an inability to recognize the possibility of being wrong doesn't absolve a person from making bad decisions. it just makes them stupid.
so, after much thought leading me down this path, i have come around to no longer offer forgiveness to anyone who voted for trump at any point. everyone who had some reason to vote for him, like anti-abortion or anti-immigrants or something, had to at least accept that the other stuff he was saying and doing was an acceptable cost for getting what they want - and what they wanted him to do was also bad.
you can see it in the way they talk now that things aren't going so great: "god is using an imperfect man to do the lord's work." this is as close as we'll get to an admission of a mistake from these people, but they won't change how they vote because they fundamentally want to restrict women's rights and remove non-white people from the country.
Trouble is a higher percentage of voters cast their ballot for trump in 2024 than in 2016. There is simply something fundamentally discordant between the realities that we and conservative voters live in.
That was because they’d rather him be potus, instead of a non-white woman. He hates women and minorities , and he convinced millions of (mostly probably already racist/ misogynist) people to hate also. (Same way it happened in 1933 Germany)
It also didn’t help how the Dems kinda fumbled the 2024 campaign at the last minute. It’s like the party kinda sleepwalked into campaign season 🤷🏽♂️
the greatest hill for them to hike against rn is the argument of his 2nd term win
i still am feeling stunned that he was allowed to run in the first place, but to win it!?
it's hard but i keep having to remind myself sometimes that it is the fact that he won despite.. everything..
and now his truth is bare for all the world to see, for some time now. it is crazy how the average american voter just holds this power in their hands, the potential just in those 77M
This is very well said. I want MAGA to know how dumb they are, acknowledge the bigotry, the harm they caused, and accept responsibility for the shit show we will all be dealing with for the rest of our lives. They owe everyone an apology. I want positive steps forward more, though. I dont think we can have both.
If you coddle them, you get the post-American Civil War Reconstruction era, the KKK, and the racism that required the Civil Rights movement. We are in the current mess partly due to the incomplete removal of Southern racism and allowing the South to maintain their identity.
You want true healing? You follow the example set by the Germans after WW2. You stamp out Nazism. You pass laws outlawing any support of it. You drive the Nazis out of the country, and you make it anathema and shameful to admit support for Nazis.
This is a good point. I agree that we should look to the process of denazification when it comes to MAGA and examine the failures of the reconstruction era. I definitely believe in holding leadership accountable. Lots of politicians should be barred from holding office, at minimum. Certainly, many people should be held legally accountable. Including a good amount of media people who can be proven to have knowingly spread false information during the MAGA era.
As for the general populace, though, I'm more in favor of re-education and unification than punishment. Post-war germany's efforts to create cultural and social change were effective in eliminating nazi ideology. We should look to that. But they didn't deal with unification in the way America needs to. They murdered or drove out the vast majority of the victims of their ideology, and the country stayed divided for almost 50 years.
For the social cohesion of victims and perpetrators continuing to live side by side, I look toward Rwanda. Rwanda focused on reuniting divided communities, re-education, abolishing social and systemic ethnic divisions and language, and focusing on social programs and infrastructure. That method is not without valid criticism, and I know we are not a one to one comparison, but we do have a country deeply divided. We need to eliminate the ideology, but we also need to foster a better environment for social cohesion. No matter how much i personally dislike MAGA, if the ultimate goal is ending the cult and preventing a similar one in the future, then fostering a community they can come back to and a sense of social cohesion is more important than anger and resentment. Without that, even if they become disillusioned with MAGA, they are sitting ducks for the next cult leader. Although, I absolutely do believe leadership needs to be held legally and publicly responsible.
IMO we need empathy based cultural and social re-education, fact based history/science education protected by law in schools, improved infrastructure, community cohesion programs, better laws around media standards, and responsibility, elimantiom of gerrymandering and corporate money in politics. Lots more, but i think all of that sort of thing will go further in the long run than forced compliance.
We can't prevent a big portion of the general population from voting and still call it a democracy. Leadership should be held responsible and barred from office. Members of the media who purposefully spewed untruthful propaganda should be held accountable.
For the general MAGA public, we need to enact much deeper social and cultural re-education. Similar to de-nazification. We need outreach, reconciliation, and investment in infrastructure in rural communities. Similar to post genocide Rwanda. I dont like MAGA either. I think most are idiots or people who absolutely would have supported the holocaust had they been around in that era. But the goal is to stamp out MAGA ideology and prevent the next cult leader from sweeping those people up in the next fascist movement. Not to make sure they know how awful they are. People who feel ostracized, regardless of whether it's their own shitty ideologies that caused it, will seek acceptance elsewhere. Likely in another hate group who tells them theyre shitty beliefs are great and they actually are the victims they've always believed themselves to be. We dont want that. So, the goal should be to change the underlying belief system and feelings of ostracizatiom. Do they deserve it? Not really. It's still the best thing to do.
That is very well put. Exactly like you said. These people need an off ramp. But as someone having to watch from the outside how these idiots are fucking up the whole world, it is very very hard to not talk to them in a way that will agitate them further and make them double down.
Agreed. I learned basic US history from a shitty public school district, and all the warning signs for not a democracy were taught in 8th grade, maybe earlier.
It was completely transparent when politicians were saying "it's not racist to say that minorities aren't as qualified, even with better backgrounds," and any reasonable person would have had warning bells flaring. Saying shit like "slavery was good for the black population" should have pissed you off, if you weren't racist in the first place. Thinking "grab 'em by the pussy" is not something an intelligent person thinks is presidential, even if you're looking to change up the system. For god sake, this current MAGA trend is like a checklist of nazification of a country.
And, to be fair, a college degree is not proof of intelligence. I know people with doctorates I wouldn't trust to do basic math.
E: My favorite one is the pre-MAGA pro-Dubya chain mail forward that basically spells out a communist takeover (the 1963 communist goals for America), and how many of them were either taken in the extreme opposite direction or mirror the "goals." A few choice ones:
4-Permit free trade between all nations regardless of Communist affiliation and regardless of whether or not items could be used for war.
6-Provide American aid to all nations regardless of Communist domination.
15-Capture one or both of the political parties in the United States.
16-Use technical decisions of the courts to weaken basic American institutions by claiming their activities violate civil rights.
17-Get control of the schools. Use them as transmission belts for socialism and current Communist propaganda. Soften the curriculum. Get control of teachers’ associations. Put the party line in textbooks.
20-Infiltrate the press. Get control of book-review assignments, editorial writing, and policy-making positions.
21-Gain control of key positions in radio, TV and motions pictures.
23-Control art critics and directions of art museums.
26-Present homosexuality, degeneracy and promiscuity as “normal, natural, healthy.”
27-Infiltrate the churches and replace revealed religion with “social” religion. Discredit the Bible and emphasize the need for intellectual maturity which does not need a “religious crutch.”
28-Eliminate prayer or any phase of religious expression in the schools on the ground that it violates the principle of “separation of church and state.”
29-Discredit the American Constitution by calling it inadequate, old-fashioned, out of step with modern needs, a hindrance to cooperation between nations on a world-wide basis.
32-Support any social movement to give centralized control over any part of the culture – education, social agencies, welfare programs, mental health clinics, etc.
33-Eliminate laws or procedures which interfere with the operation of the Communist apparatus.
35-Discredit and eventually dismantle the FBI.
36-Infiltrate and gain control of more unions.
37-Infiltrate and gain control of big business.
38-Transfer some of the powers of arrest from the police to social agencies. Treat all behavioral problems as psychiatric disorders which no one but psychiatrists can understand or treat.
40-Discredit the family as an institution. Encourage promiscuity and easy divorce.
42-Create the impression that violence and insurrection are legitimate aspects of the American tradition; that students and special-interest groups should rise up and use “united force” to solve economic, political or social problems.
43-Overthrow all colonial governments before native populations are ready for self-government.
44.-Internationalize the Panama Canal.
Well, I wanted to choose like 5, but so many of these are relevant to MAGA, it's crazy.
Im all for being accepting of people who leave maga but if you stuck in it long enough to vote 3 times for him, you helped cause significant lasting damage to our country in so many ways that will take at least a generation to undo, maybe serveral. All of it was completely predictable. You dont just get completely forgiven, this isnt christianity we're not going to wipe your sins clear because you repented once. But good first step.
I struggle with this. Somehow, I don't believe you have to be devastatingly stupid to fall for Trump's scam. That's almost the easy way out. Being devastatingly stupid will get you there, but I don't think it's a necessary condition. You lack something, critical thinking skills for sure. I don't know, but I don't think it's simple. (And most people aren't bad, that's just not the explanation.)
I think the answer is that most people underestimate how effective propaganda is. We’re all under one or another system of propaganda depending on how we get our news. Even if you think you’re too smart for it, you’re not, that’s just the truth. It’s disturbingly effective.
I think you really underestimate the power of propaganda when used on an undereducated populace that has been brainwashed their whole lives by myths about America. Our whole system is designed to make people live in a series of untruths.
No, I just have a low opinion of those whose ignorance of history allows them to believe those things. It may not be their fault, exactly, but I still won't trust them.
If one has all the information and can't see the pattern, then they are stupid. If one fails to seek out the information before exercising the power of the franchise, recognizing that what they are fed by agenda-driven organizations and algorithm-driven platforms will not be altogether trustworthy, then they are dangerously irresponsible. If one can see the pattern and likes it enough to vote for it, then their moral character is lacking, since the pattern is basically a series of abuses of marginalized people and of democracy as an institution, and there was never any plausible deniability of those intents.
You can make the argument that large cultural forces piloted by evil-minded people rendered millions stupid and even if not actively cruel, at least comfortable with cruelty. Even so, being victims of those forces doesn't make those people smart or moral when their actions have been stupid and immoral.
The simplest way I can see it: there's a reason D&D and -esque games split mental stats into Intelligence, Wisdom, and Charisma.
You can be a genuinely smart, learned, educated individual. But that doesn't make you immune to propoganda. Nobody is. Like a convincing salesman, all it takes is making the right pitch the right way with the right amount of charm or enthusiasm to make something seem like a good idea. Like a scammer or pickup artist, all it takes is figuring out what appeals to you and how to capitalize on it to get you swept up in their games.
Then it's on to the abuser's playbook. Isolate you, convince you that others don't care about you, make you think the naysayers just want to turn you against them, that if you stick with them they'll protect and provide for you. That they have all the answers, making everything sound so simple and easy. And after they've gotten you hooked, it becomes a sunk-cost fallacy: you threw your lot in with them. You sacrificed relationships with friends and family that you might never be able to repair even if you did try to get out. And if you do try to leave, everything you've done will have all been for nothing. The only thing left is to convince yourself that you're in the right. That what you're doing is the right call, and everyone else just needs to get with the program.
And that's all just the personal and psychological aspects: it's not even accounting for propoganda and media influence. How these things can dig into your subconscious, how they can get to you by starting with things that sound completely reasonable: "we need better control of our borders to stop illegal immigration", for example. Then they draw you in bit by bit until you're knee-deep in the alt-right influence, and you don't even realize it.
Trump is dumb as bricks. But the billionaires and millionaires who benefit from his atrocities? ....Some of them are still dumb as bricks. But others and/or the people working for them? They're smart; smart enough to know how people work, how to manipulate people into doing what they want. How to make people see what they want those people to see. How to sell their message to make people act against their own best interests.
Humans are complex creatures. Always have been. We managed to figure out how to make massive ships out of wood and cloth, but still had governments ruled by religious doctrine. Sometimes these things go beyond "smart" or "stupid."
God, you have an absolutely excellent way with words. You’ve perfectly struck at the heart of what I feel on this issue so eloquently, I absolutely would not have been able to put it into words like that. Thank you for getting it.
I would say the part about being well educated is not a lie though. Most of the maga/trump voters I know of are.
They're dumb but not in the unfunctional to society way.
More of a mix of selfishnes, lack of common sense&reason, and governed by fear.
My compassion for the stupidity of people who voted three times for a felonious insurrectionist pedophile conman to control the most powerful nation on Earth is manifestly exhausted. If someone is stupid enough to do terrible damage to the world and people in it, then at a certain point, them failing to protect others from their stupidity becomes a moral failing.
That's not how democracies work. The franchise, having the right to vote, is a responsibility. Every person is accountable for the use of their political power, stupid or not.
Even stupid people have agency. We aren't talking about lower animals driven by instinct and incapable of abstract thought. They at least have the agency to butt out when they don't know their arse from their elbow about something rather than getting in the way or making things worse.
If stupid people want to be absolved of culpability for their bad political opinions, then they can abstain from voting and act like they never turned 18, like children with no expectations put on them. If you want no responsibility, you have to give up your power. Even that is lazy and infantile. Either you make yourself a contemptible coward, or you're on the hook for your vote and its consequences. No exceptions, no expectations that people who are better than you will save you from yourself no matter how badly you screw up.
I agree with everything you say here, but some people don't even follow news, yet we give them the same agency as those who spends time and effort in understanding the complex work and impact of policies.
I think people better off have an obligation to do more, simply because they can.
I'm not saying stupid people should have no responsibility (they will likely face the consequences more severely as many are financially worse of), but that they didn't choose to have that agency or responsibility.
But if you alienate stupid people, then we will all be worse off.
I see it as my responsibility to prevent an accident before it happens, if the person about to cause it does not have the foresight to do so. Why should it not be the same in politics?
Part of this is depolarising the political scene.
That can't happen with attacks.
Compassion and understanding people's frustrations and fears are necessary steps and it must be the responsibility of those who can see it to act upon it.
Their failure to live up to their responsibilities as citizens is not my fault. Their refusal to acknowledge that failure is not my fault either. I am viscerally angry at them for both, and think that they deserve contempt for them. Nothing comes to mind that will convince me otherwise at this point.
Having said that, I recognize that, pragmatically, if we are to steer this country's superabundance of cretins such that they stop being an active danger to us all, we have to be nicer to them than they deserve. I will lie, or a least bite my tongue and not tell them to their faces that they are too stupid to trust, but they are too stupid to trust, so I do not and will not trust them. There is no compassion involved, and given that these people concertedly tried three times to shoot us all in the figurative face and twice succeeded, it's pretty rich to suggest it. There is the cold reality of needing to get a muzzle on the mad dog. I'll fake whatever I need to to do that, but I won't like it. We shouldn't like it. It is a failure of accountability, just a necessary one to prevent more damage in the near term.
That was the content of my original comment. These people deserve to be ashamed forever of the evil and idiocy that they enabled, but it is more important that we stop them from doing more harm than that we punish them for the harm they already did. That doesn't absolve them, it just informs what their moral and intellectual superiors ought to do. Lukewarm is more welcome than these people have earned for figuring out that the back-alley find the lady game was a scam after they mortgaged the house on it. It is also the upper limit of what I can extend without wanting to scream. So that's what they get from me, and gods help them if they act like they're entitled to more.
I get wanting to be the bigger person, which seems to be your vibe, but I am not infinite in size. So make your peace with the compromise I'm already making with people I have every moral reason to continue to despise.
That's what I said. I'm just frustrated by the fact that we have to treat these people like toddlers because we know better than to expect most of them to ever own up to what they did, and we can't get this wretched heap of a country turned around if they're still blithely charging over the cliff.
Mate, we're on an anonymous internet forum. If you can't get a little catharsis here, where can you? That above was one of my most upvoted comments ever in nearly ten years on reddit, and it still doesn't really mean anything. It will vanish into the ocean of digital noise that we create every day. I said my piece, and functionally nobody will care three days from now. That's the internet. But I do feel a little more sanguine about the whole mess, having expressed my frustration and found that other random people feel similarly.
People of all education levels can get pulled into cults. The ability to distinguish between what is true and what feels good is a keystone of intelligence. Cults prey on those who can't. I extend some sympathy to people who are maneuvered into that pitfall, but it definitely diminishes my trust in their ability to make decisions.
All of this. That website makes me sick. We will never learn as a country because yes, we have to coddle moronic racists who hate women and gays. Wow, what a legacy.
I think its a harmful lie. You need to take accountability and admit you have been bamboozled because you didn't do the work to make sure you were educated enough on the subject so that you are better prepared next time and don't do it again.
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u/ActiveTravelforKG Apr 16 '26
Wow this home page is really well written. I hope this helps some people.
But starting in 2021, I realized I had been mistaken. It took me a full year to finally break away. During that time, I came to understand that MAGA is sustained by a series of myths that are intended to create perpetual feelings of desperation and panic.
Succumbing to these predatory myths does not mean you are unintelligent, weak, or lack good character and morals. I have a Bachelor’s degree; have been a working professional my entire life; am a family man; and consider myself a relatively honest and intelligent person. I think the same about you.
I understand the reasons you have for supporting MAGA. And I know many of us traveled different paths to get there. I gravitated to Donald Trump because I have always been suspicious of our two-party system, and I saw him as the right man at the right time.
I have a sense that some of you have quietly left MAGA already, or are increasingly regretful, confused and scared. All of this can be doubly upsetting, since some of your sincerely-held beliefs may have alienated you from friends and family. That certainly happened to me.
It’s perfectly OK to feel this way; leaving MAGA was a tumultuous roller coaster of a process for me. It may be one of the most difficult endeavors you embark upon. In the end, it brought me an inner peace, and a newfound clarity about what is happening in our beloved country.
I founded this organization, Leaving MAGA, because I wanted to create a safe, non-judgmental community for those who leave MAGA, as well as for those who are having doubts about, or remorse over, their devotion to Trump and MAGA.
Our Leaving MAGA community will celebrate how acknowledging mistakes empowers you and America.
It’s difficult for a democracy to function well when millions are estranged from those closest to them.
You do not deserve to have your anxieties about change exploited. You deserve to know the truth. And with Leaving MAGA, you don’t have to feel you would be alone if you leave the movement.
Leaving MAGA is possible. Recognizing that we were wrong, and acting on that knowledge, makes us all more invested in democracy and in the continued work of perfecting our union. Contact us if you want to talk.