November 30, 2025 • 44 mins
Leaving MAGA is a community for those who have left the movement, or have doubts and remorse about staying in MAGA but are afraid to leave. Rich Logis and Erica Roach tell their stories of falling into MAGA and then climbing out.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
I'm John Cipher and I'm Jerry O'sha. We have over
sixty years of experience as clandestine officers in the CIA,
serving in high risk areas all around the world, and.
Speaker 2 (00:11):
Part of our job was creating conspiracies to deceive our adversaries.
Speaker 1 (00:15):
Now we're going to use that experience to investigate the
conspiracy theories everyone's talking about as well as some of
you may not have heard.
Speaker 2 (00:22):
Could they be true or are we being manipulated?
Speaker 1 (00:24):
We'll find out now on Mission Implausible.
Speaker 2 (00:29):
Today, we would like to welcome rich Logius and Erico
Roach from leaving MEGA, which is a community an organization
for those who have left the Mega organization. You were
both deeply entrenched inside of MEGA ideology and mindset and
(00:49):
you both left and so we're really pleased to have
you here to talk about what led you into MEGA
and what motivated that, and what brought you out and what.
Speaker 3 (00:57):
The consequences are that.
Speaker 2 (00:59):
So, or Erica, would you like to start off and
give us to sensu your journey into the belly of
the beast.
Speaker 4 (01:05):
Okay, I'm a former QAnon supporter follower. It's a long story,
but summed up in my life, I kinda like always
thought that conspiracies were fun, They were entertaining, They were
a what if, Like what if there's this grand thing
going on that the government is trying to hide from us?
(01:25):
And it was like a little adventure that I could
go on, and it for me, it all started surrounding
nine to eleven. But I wasn't like a at first.
I wasn't like a hardcore like nine to eleven truth
or anything, but I liked entertaining the idea that Bush
had allowed this to happen, and on and off into
(01:45):
my early twenties, I started following like the New World
Order conspiracies and the Illuminati, thinking that Alex Jones was
like the greatest truth teller ever. And then I got
sucked into conspiracies after leaving an abusive relationship, Like I
just threw myself into it, and I think it was
(02:08):
a coping mechanism for me. And unfortunately what happened was
it led to me finding Q drops and the Dakoders,
and in the comment sections of these posts, people believed
the same things I believe, and I thought that I
had finally found my place, and I got heavily, heavily
(02:30):
entrenched in this world from twenty eighteen, probably until just
after January sixth, twenty twenty one. At one point I
was a admin in Telegram for a large Q influencer.
He's no longer posting anymore on Twitter, but he went
(02:52):
by the Punisher, and I would spend my days not
only just researching all this stuff and promoting all sorts
of new conspiracies that I researched on my own, and
some days I was on Telegram for up to twenty
twenty two hours doing this stuff.
Speaker 2 (03:10):
So it started out as fun and interesting, and basically
you sort of wandered into quicksand that's what you're saying, right,
that sort of and that became really involved rich What
was your experience?
Speaker 5 (03:21):
Yeah, So for me in twenty fifteen, I was someone
who was very politically lonely. I believe that both parties
were the same. I felt that they did not represent
most Americans, only represented a small sliver of the country,
the wealthy and the powerful. I had voted third party
(03:43):
many times in my life, and very rarely did I
vote for a major party candidate. My first vote ever
for president was Ralph Nader in the year two thousand,
when I was living in New York. You know, being
in New York, al Gore was going to win anyway,
so my vote was safe. But I didn't vote. I
didn't vote third party solely because of being anti two parties.
(04:06):
I was long attracted to the rogue, iconoclastic candidates, and
when Trump came on the scene in twenty fifteen, I
was curious in the beginning, and even though he ran
as a Republican, what enticed me about his candidacy was
that both parties saw him as a threat and that
he was a true outsider. He had no government, no military,
(04:28):
no political experience. And after many months of justifying away
comments that I knew were indefensible, like the John McCain
comment and the comments about Muslims, the comments about women,
I came to believe that if the Democrats had won
(04:51):
in twenty sixteen, that they would have seized power permanently.
So I fell prey to the demographics or dea in mythology.
And it was in early twenty sixteen when I went
from Trump curious to being all in and I worked
on the campaign. I was a grassroots volunteer. I did
phone banking, I recruited people to vote for Trump, I
(05:14):
even contributed some of my journalistic and writing skills to
the call script for the campaign, and I felt something
that I had never felt before from the campaign, which
was a communal sense, a sense of feeling belonging. And
I feel like that's going to be a motif that's
(05:35):
going to run throughout this conversation, because you know the
way Erica was talking about having a community through QAnon
and conspiracies. For me, I wouldn't say my entrain to
MAGA was conspiratorial initially, but once I was in I
bought into lock stock and barrels, so many of the
conspiracies that still exists right now. The Democrats are coming
(05:58):
for your guns, and this rus or indoctrinating children into
transgender Marxism and were replacing white people with brown people
and foreigners. There's this really toxic amalgam and mix of
lies and conspiracy theories that magas buttressed on. And I
allowed myself to fall prey to those mythologies really quickly.
(06:21):
And I was around people who were Trump voters, people
I knew, people I was close with, people I trusted,
And it was throughout the course of the next several
years after the twenty sixteen election that I just got
deeper and deeper. I became a Maga influencer, or I
aspired to be a Maga influencer. I was writing freelance
(06:42):
articles for writing publications. My media diet was steadily Maga media.
I was professionally producing a podcast. I was doing all
of this because I felt that I was in this
existential battle between good and evil and I wanted the
President to see my work because it was my aspiration
to be a Maga pundit and influencer, and that's how
(07:04):
I lived my life devoutly, every hour of every day
before my doubts started. So I really relate to Erica
talking about being online for twenty twenty two hours because
for me, Maga consumed my identity. It was my being,
my personhood, and it was my It was completely how
(07:25):
my worldview had been shaped.
Speaker 1 (07:28):
So it sounds like you're both saying separately that community
was a big part of it, right Rich You're saying, yes,
you actually were out dealing with people and stuff. Eric,
if I understand yours was more of an online experience.
You're watching info Wars, you got onto Twitter. Did you
also go to rallies and do all that type of stuff.
Speaker 4 (07:47):
Or was it mostly I didn't participate in some protests
in the capital of New York and Albany with some
people who were rallying at the time against Governor Cuomo.
I mean it wasn't like on a regular basis, but
it was significant. But most of my interaction within my
community at the time was online, but I did enter
(08:10):
into real world spaces with those same types of people
as well.
Speaker 2 (08:15):
This is something I've always often wondered about. What is
between the two of you? What is the difference between
a cult and a community? I mean, both have shared beliefs,
both have this sort of fellowship, Both have an us
them sort of relationship with the rest of the world,
and both both can be comforting. One is more threatening.
The word word community seems more fluffy and huggable. What
(08:39):
for you is the difference between cult and community?
Speaker 3 (08:42):
So for me, I.
Speaker 4 (08:45):
Thought that community was people who had shared beliefs with you,
who believed the same things and influenced your views. But
also at the same time, you could disagree that I
thought that's what I was in. A cult for me
is actually what I was in. You can't question the leader,
(09:06):
you can't have different opinions on anything, and no matter what,
you have to toe the line. You have to believe this,
You have to believe that there's no questioning what is
being told to you.
Speaker 1 (09:18):
Yeah. I remember reading what some of your experience you
talk about how even as you were still part of
the community, you would start to ask some questions, but
people really then turned against you and docs Yeah.
Speaker 4 (09:27):
Yeah, I ended up getting docksed. There was an anonymous
police reports to my local sheriff's office, to the local
child's Protective Services unit. My house was attempted to be
broken into. I had to change my phone number a
couple times, my email addresses. It got very serious and
quite scary. Honestly, It's why I hesitated for so long
(09:50):
to become a public face. It wasn't until I met
Rich that I had the courage to step out from
an anonymous Twitter user.
Speaker 3 (10:00):
He really gave me the courage to do that.
Speaker 1 (10:02):
It's tough because they seem to go after people who
were I mean, even at the highest level. We're seeing
it right now with Marjorie Taylor Green right. Trump he
brings people in as long as they're very much fawning
towards him. But the minute they question anything, they become
an enemy. If you look at the people that they're
trying to send to jail, that they're putting, they got
(10:22):
the Justice Department going after right now. Almost all of
them our people. He brought in the FBI director Rail
Kelly Bolton. All these people were his own people. But
they if they disagree with them, they then become enemies.
And so even Marjorie Taylor Green has become an enemy.
So you know, it's a difficult thing because I think
it's has to do with I think Trump's psyche more
(10:45):
than even the movements.
Speaker 4 (10:46):
But at the same aspect, they see him doing those things,
so they think it's okay to do it to everybody else,
which is why you're seeing Marjorie Taylor Green, for example,
being swarmed. Her comment sections are atrocious, they're horror Fine.
I don't think that Marjorie Tayler Grain is a great person,
but she has every room and every opportunity to change
(11:10):
her mind and change her stance on things, and I
would allow her. I would give her that grace. She
doesn't deserve this treatment. Nobody does.
Speaker 5 (11:18):
I understand guys, why people would look at MAGA and
say this is a cult. I can attest to the
fact that in my life there were some cult like aspects.
I always mentioned in this context that I had a
Maga second family, and that second family oftentimes took precedence
over my own blood family, where I neglected husband and
(11:41):
familial and parental duties in the pursuit of this movement.
That I was a part of The reason I'm ambivalent
about referring to Maga as a cult is largely informed
by my work at Weaving Maga and the kind of
advocacy that Erica has done for our organization as well.
We want to extract people out of Maga, especially as
(12:03):
they start to have doubts, and we feel that if
we refer to people in Maga as cultists, it's going
to make them dig their heels in. You know, when
I was in Maga, we used to hear the cult language,
and we used to all the time say not even
half facetiously, but half seriously that we weren't in the cult,
that everyone in the outside world was in the cult,
(12:25):
and that we weren't the crazies. Everyone else in the
outside world were the crazies. And as hard as it
is to leave Maga, it's Still I believe easier to
leave MAGA than it would be a bona fide cult
of which I've never been a part of. Unless we're
going to call my Catholic upbringing that. No, I shouldn't say.
That's a joke. Everyone, that's a joke. One's a Catholic,
(12:48):
always a Catholic. My wife and my family's going to
hear that and say, is that what you really think
about your Catholic upbringing? No, I don't really think of
it that way. But I've not been in an actual cult,
but I do. I do see where people can think
that about MAGA, and there are certain traits about it
that would match most likely being in an actual cult.
Speaker 2 (13:09):
Yeah, Rich, you said something really interesting that I want
to touch back on. You mentioned Trump's comments about John McCain.
John McCain, you know, just to remind people, was shot
down over North Vietnam. He was tortured. He could have
left early the prison, he refused. He was stayed with
his men. This is a guy who was crippled lifelong.
And I've had the opportunity to meet with John McCain
(13:32):
inside CIA to brief him in Baghdad, a place that
was really dangerous At the time he flew in, he
was really interested in the truth. He was interested in
the people who were serving on the front lines, troops,
CIA officers. I have enormous respect for the guy. And
when Trump a draft died, or at least he never
served in the military, called him a loser because he
(13:53):
was shot down and tortured by the North Vietnamese. I thought,
as so many of us have on so many occasions,
that the end of it, right, there's certain third reels
you can't touch, and one is like going after genuine
bona fide war heroes. I mean, you can disagree with
their political stance, but the fact that they serve their
country and sacrificed is undebatable. And yet that didn't happen.
(14:15):
And yet people who swore that they loved the military
and swore by American heroism and they just abandoned John
McKay And so I was wondering, what is it for
both of you? But that is an example when a
tenet of the community interferes with what you've always believed in,
or interferes with basic reality, how do you react to it?
(14:37):
Is it like I've got to I don't really believe it,
but I've got to say this in order to stay
in the community, or do you actually change your mind.
Speaker 4 (14:44):
For example, we'll take McCain because that's relatively easy to
talk about. Unfortunately, so regardless of his war hero status,
the being a political prisoner, the being tortured, all of that,
because Trump called him out within the q ON community,
he was a trader to his country and that was justifiable.
The way that it works within QAnon is Trump highlights
(15:07):
people who we need to dig into to find out
what traitor's actions they did against the United States and
the American people. So as soon as he says these
types of awful things about John McCain or any other
but any anybody else, they're a trader, they did something horrific.
They deserve to be put to death. That's why you'll
(15:29):
still see to this day they compare like Dan Crenshaw
to being the new John McCain. And then at John
McCain's funeral, the flag on his casket was wrinkled, so
that meant that he was executed in the q and
On world. And because it's something that gets pushed and
pushed and pushed and pushed, it's that repetition that makes
(15:51):
it believable, and you just go along with it whether
you believe it or not. But eventually, if you are
a true believer like I was, you believe it.
Speaker 5 (16:00):
Even before the Obamacare vote from Senator McCain, John McCain was,
amongst many in MAGA a hated person, and one of
the disparaging remarks that was often made about the late
John McCain and MAGA was that he was a globalist.
This was something that was which I'm thinking about again,
(16:23):
the conspiratorial way of how people opposed to Trump and
MAGA were, how they're identified, just like with Mitt Romney,
similar referred to as the same way as a globalist,
a crony capitalist, these kinds of monikers. But that's the
moment for me, the John McCain comment that I should
have run. Whatever curiosity I had about the Trump campaign
(16:47):
should have ceased at that moment because I knew that
it was an unjustifiable comment, but I so quickly, And
I should preface by saying that none of anything I
say I want to be construed as a self defense,
because everyone has agency, and I made these choices on
my own. Nolan coaxed to course me into my support,
(17:08):
but I so quickly fell prey to the idea that
the Democrats would win in political power and definitely, and
I would be an irrelevant citizen of my country that
I look the other way on the John McCain statement.
And throughout Trump's presidency, there were several times that I
had very critical private conversations about Trump. Charlottesville was another one.
(17:32):
I was very close with someone who worked as a
paid staffer in Trump's campaign, and I remember when Charlottesville happened.
I'm a little embarrassed to talk about it the way
that I will, and ashamed because my concern wasn't the
fact that a woman, Heather Hire, had died and that
people were injured. My worry when Charlottesville happened was that
(17:54):
the press and Democrats and anti Trump Republicans were going
to label all of we and Mac as neo Nazis
and white supremacists. So my concern was damage control. It
wasn't the fact that a woman was innocently run over
and murdered and that others committed violence. So I had
that kind of I remember we censured Trump privately, but
(18:20):
that's private. We never did it publicly. Maybe they hurt
our cult explanation, and they're still thinking, well, it still
sounds like a cult. I'm going to give them fodder
on this one because you just never criticized Trump publicly.
You didn't do it because if you did it, you'd
be exiled, just like Eric is saying, and just like
we're seeing what Marjorie Taylor Green right now. If you
(18:40):
go and censure the president in your remarks publicly, you're
going to become persona and on grive. And that's because
you absolutely will be because Trump is the he's the
titular leader of the community. He's the one who took
a brand of right wing politics that are not new,
not novel, but he branded them. And for me, make
(19:03):
America Great Again was not nostalgic. I was thirty nine
years old in twenty sixteen. As delusional as it sounds,
Make America Great Again, for me was very forward facing
and progressive. I saw it even as a second kind
of founding of the country. So that's that was just
that was my fealty to MAGA. And whenever Trump was attacked,
(19:26):
we felt that we were attacked. So I even had
a phrase that I used for the media that I
trademarked I called it the Democrat media industrial complex. You
know that it was in that trademark's now available if
anyone wants it. I don't have I don't have it
anymore because I don't think that there I don't think
there is a I don't believe that there's a liberal
(19:47):
media conspiracy. But I did believe that at one time.
Speaker 1 (20:01):
Being part of a tribe, being part of something bigger
than yourself is powerful. Did you come out of it?
What was the hardest part about realizing you no longer
believed in it, or how you were coming out of it?
And we could tell there's probably a lot to this,
but just start to talk a little bit about like
when did you start to realize there was a problem
if you could justify all those things for so long,
when did it turn? For both the maybe Eric cos
(20:23):
so for me.
Speaker 4 (20:24):
It was towards the tail end when the vaccines were
being discussed, Operation Warp Speed was almost completed. That's for
me where my doubts started coming in. On one hand,
Trump was touting and just so excited about Operation Warp
Speed and the COVID vaccines that were going to be
(20:44):
coming to Fruition soon, and on the other hand. Everybody
in my community was telling me that it was Bill Gates'
death job coming to to populate us. So it was
a very confusing time for me. And then January sixth happened,
and I knew people who were there. I'd had an
opportunity to go, but I didn't have anybody to watch
(21:07):
my kids, and I couldn't leave them for a couple
days by themselves, so I didn't go. But the fact
was that I could have met up with my friends
there and participated in what unfolded that I watched live happening.
It was just such a shock to the system that
I couldn't ignore my questions anymore. But a lot of
(21:29):
my doubt was around COVID because I had actually gotten
COVID and I got very, very sick. I got pneumonia
after I was recovering from the COVID, and I was
sick for almost three months. It damn near destroyed my lungs.
So it wasn't just a flu. It wasn't just you know,
something that's going to go away in fifteen days and
go away if we don't test. It quite possibly could
(21:51):
have killed me. So I knew that that we were
being misled somehow, and then the COVID vaccine talks started,
and I just I couldn't ignore it anymore.
Speaker 5 (22:00):
So I like to paraphrase the late and venerable Ernest
Hemingway and say that my epiphany out of MAGA happened
gradually and then suddenly, all at once. Trump's mismanagement of
COVID January sixth, the stolen election lies. Those were all
some of the cracks, but they weren't enough for me.
The first accelerant for my leaving of MAGA was actually
(22:22):
not Donald Trump. It was my governor, Ron de Santees.
In the summer of twenty twenty one, if we recall,
there had been the delta surge of COVID and children
were getting sick, children were dying from the virus, and
Ron de Santees, rather than continue his vaccine advocacy, he
started platforming anti vaxers at his press conferences, people who
(22:45):
said that the COVID vaccine was changing people's RNA and
was deadlier than the virus. Now, I am a parent
of two children, and I recall when I would read
the stories about children getting sick and dying from COVID,
all I could think about was the suffering that those
kids went through, and the parents and the parents, the
(23:07):
bereaved parents, grieving and in mourning. So when Ron de
Santas did that when kids were getting sick, it really
shocked me and I didn't understand why he took that approach.
And it was shortly thereafter that I did something that
sounds very simple but was very profoundly life changing and
altering for me, which was I diversified my news and
(23:29):
information sources. And as soon as I did that, I
started to slowly, painfully but liberating. We realized that so
much of what it was that I had believed and
had created an identity around, was not true. You know,
the conspiracies I mentioned earlier about guns and our kids
(23:51):
being indoctrinated in white replacement theory, these kinds of conspiracies
that exist legion with MAGA. I had a lot of
late nights just myself and my thoughts where I would
sit at my desk and I would say, I have
been believing lies for years, and not just one or
two wives, but years accumulated of them. And the final
(24:15):
straw for me was May twenty fourth, twenty twenty two,
which was the day of the Uvalde, Texas school shooting,
another incident where children died and were injured and others
died and were injured. And I knew exactly how the
Republican Party and Donald Trump were how they were going
to respond to that incident, and they responded exactly as
(24:36):
I knew they would. They would nonchalantly accept yet another
incident of avoidable deaths and suffering, just like ron De
Santees did with the anti vaxxer, just like January sixth,
defense of politically motivated violence and acceptance of avoidable debts
and suffering. And it was shortly after Uvalde that I
(24:58):
quietly left MAGA. I only told my wife and a
few other people. But there was something, guys, that was
really gnawing at me. After Uvalde and after I silently
left MAGA. I was always so unapologetically public in my
support for Trump. I felt that I needed to be
public and my renunciation of the movement. And it was
on August thirtieth of twenty twenty two, which is what
(25:21):
I call my leaving magaversary, I wrote a mea culpa,
and in that story I said that I was wrong
for supporting Trump and MAGA, that I was sorry, and
that I wanted to apologize to anyone I may have
hurt with my words and deeds. And the God's honest
truth is that I never thought anybody would care. I
thought that I would just do it. I would close
(25:43):
that chapter of my life. It would bring the catharsis
of finally severing myself from that world and moving on.
But it turned out that people did care, and I
received instantaneously one after another from friends and family of
people in MAGA. And I was completely naive and oblivious
(26:03):
to how many relationships had been torn asunder by this movement.
And I had a hand in that. I was culpable,
I was complicit. I was complicit in helping the president
divide the country and amplify conspiracy theories.
Speaker 1 (26:19):
Yeah, I mean reach individuals. It's a large country. You
can't put too much on yourself, but I think it
is important for the people who are listening to hear,
like if there are other people looking to come out
of the movement. You know, the guilt, the anger, the relief,
how you deal with it as a person. It sounds
like you had some guilt around it and how you
got over that guilt And Erica, it sounds like you
(26:40):
started to question things. Did you find yourself all of
a sudden having all sorts of anger issues or was
it relieve?
Speaker 4 (26:47):
At first, I was very hesitant. I fought against it
as hard as I could, because I knew that on
the other side of my beliefs was things in people
and events that were truly horrific that I justified for years,
and I didn't want to face that.
Speaker 3 (27:06):
At first. I was scared.
Speaker 4 (27:09):
But I found a great little support system online, people
who had been debunking QAnon conspiracies for years at that point,
and it took about probably six months after I started
talking to them, and then, like Rich said, it was
slow at first and then suddenly it was all at
(27:31):
the same time. I resisted hard though, because I truly
believed that the deep state had conspired to get Trump
out in twenty twenty, because the Democrats wanted to unfold
the sixteen Year Plan, which ushered in globalism, in the
New World Order and pretty much just capalist slavery and depopulation.
(27:53):
I believed it to my core, and the things that
I justified, the things I accepted, the thing in relationships
that I fractured, all that pain if I accepted that
I was wrong this whole time, all that pain was
going to be front and center.
Speaker 3 (28:09):
And it took a while to get to that point.
And then I spent probably.
Speaker 4 (28:14):
A good year grieving, grieving, re educating myself, diversifying my media,
and take the people around me, the people I spoke to,
And it was a long, very painful, very like agonizing
to realize just what I had believed in.
Speaker 2 (28:31):
So bringing in John and I are CIA background, this
is really interesting because in our careers we dealt with
a lot of people, people who were in Al Qaeda,
people who were in the Russian system, the North Korean system,
and they tell similar stories that I remember sitting across
(28:51):
from one North Korean and he had too many drinks
and he really wasn't supposed to be talking to me.
Although he didn't know I was CIA at the time,
it probably suspected it, but he'd lowered his voice. He'd
looked around after telling the greatness of North Korea how
wonderful it was, and he said, it's really not that great.
(29:12):
The dear leader isn't as good as people say. And
he had just committed treason. He had committed a capital
crime by saying that he could have been ostracized, it
was dangerous to his family, and yet he clearly had
been saying to everyone who would listen, to his own family,
this is what I think, But inside he knew it
(29:34):
wasn't true. And oftentimes, at least in our world espionage,
we look for people Russians, Chin, people inside the Russian
government of Chinese government, who like, they know it's not true, right,
and they can't live with the lie, and eventually they
want to do something about it, and some go into
internal exile, some just never mind. Others actually wanted, you know,
(29:56):
it's like I want to fight back, and you know,
I'd like to work with the US. Yes, John, You've
had a lot of experience with Russians who have been
in a system who were afraid to say what they
really thought. And some of our best spies, Russian spies,
are people who simply couldn't do it anymore.
Speaker 1 (30:13):
I think we're living with that with Vladimir Putin. So
when your country fell apart, it's like a trauma. So
these people belonged to a country they thought was one
of the most powerful in the world, it was a superpower,
and it fell apart. Can you imagine if you're a
person who's defending that, the trauma of trying to deal
with that. You can imagine if our country actually did
get into civil war and fell apart. But you see,
(30:34):
you think you feel guilty. Now imagine how you would
feel if that kind of happened. And so, you know,
dealing with those kind of people. Different people have different
ways of reacting to things. Some like Vladimir Putin doubled
down and said I'm going to be more aggressive and more.
Others that we try to deal with would say, hey,
we just want to be a normal country. What can
we do to move forward? And that's why it's really
(30:55):
interesting to talk to you guys, because you know, you
belong to one tribe and then you had to come
up out of it. What's the next step do you, like,
are you looking for another tribe? Do you become a
democrat or do you just stay away from politics? What's
the next step?
Speaker 5 (31:09):
I think of it as an odyssey, and I am
very lucky in that after I left Maga, I didn't
know where I was going to go, but I was
asked by various media and organizations to keep recounting my story,
So I kept doing it, and I did it because
I felt it was part of an ongoing reckoning to
(31:30):
continue to make amends for my past. So I found
myself telling my story over and over again, and it
eventually from the telling of that story was born our
organization Leaving Maga. And when I founded it, I never
run a nonprofit before. I didn't know what it would
(31:51):
what form it would take, but I remember thinking, there
have to be others out there who also left, you know,
it couldn't be just There's got to be others out there.
And Erica was one of the very, very first leaders
I ever met who left MAGA. When there's a I
would really encourage everyone to read her testimonial at our
(32:11):
Leaving Maga dot org site, and all of our testimonials
for that matter. It shows the courage that so many
went through to have to come to their own realization
that they needed to leave because being in MAGA didn't
comport any longer with their values. So, you know, when
it came to q and On, I knew of q Andon,
but when I was in MAGA again, I was naive
(32:33):
and ignorant. I thought it was basically a hobby. I
didn't know anyone who was in QAnon. I remember Katie
Turr asking Trump in that interview before the election about
q and on, and I remember thinking, this, this line
of questioning is so silly. Q Andon is just a
couple of people online in the bowels of the Internet
(32:54):
talking about whatever conspiracy that they are. And then it
was after my diversific of news and information sources that
I realized that not only was QAnon not a hobby,
but that it had the blessing of the most powerful
person in the history of the world, along with groups
like the Proud Boys and the Oathkeepers. This was another
moment for me where it was like running into a
(33:16):
brick wall, where I realized that this conspiracy that existed
had reached all the way into the upper echelons of
the power structure of our country.
Speaker 4 (33:24):
So for me, the most important thing after I left
was making amends. I didn't care where I went, or
I didn't honestly, I didn't want to continue anything with politics.
I wanted to make my amends and I wanted to
walk away. It was almost like I had to refigure
out who I was because it consumed every part of me.
(33:47):
And after a while I realized that for me, making
amends wasn't enough that I needed to not only tell
my story and reach out to people who are still
in or who have questions, or people on the other
side of the political spectrum who don't understand why their
loved one has left them behind for this movement that
(34:11):
is just based on conspiracies. So I decided that I
was going as long as there was people who believed
in q ANDON, I was going to continue to speak
out against it. Whether that's on Twitter or Facebook or
Reddit or wherever, on podcasts. It doesn't matter. As long
as there's people in there, there's still hope to get
them out.
Speaker 2 (34:45):
So I did want to ask anti Semitism is that
inside of q andon and the MAGA movement. I've been outsider,
I hear different things. There's struggles going on with Tucker
Carlson platforming Flentes, who is a Holocaust de I are
in a clear anti semi Are there factions within the
MEGA movements pro Israels more anti Semitic, more sort of
(35:07):
pro Nazis more or less? And how would you differentiate
some of the streams within the current Mega movement.
Speaker 4 (35:14):
Specifically for q Andon. QAnon is roughly based on hundreds
and thousands of years of old anti Semitic tropes. It
is built on anti Semitism. You may not be aware
of that when you first start to believe it, but
coming out of it and you learn about all of
these tropes that have gone around, all this anti Semitism,
all this Jewish hatred over centuries, is exactly similar things
(35:38):
that people in QAnon believe currently now though since October
seventh with Israel and Humas. Prior to that, there was
certain groups in QAnon who believed that saving Israel for
last meant that the Jewish people were going to be
taken care of, that their lives were going to be exposed,
(35:59):
that their control over our country was going to end,
and that Trump was going to expose all of us. However,
since October seventh, there has been a clear divide between
people in QAnon who truly believe that Israel is doing
the right thing, Israel has the right to existat and
(36:20):
Yah who is not doing anything wrong, et cetera, et cetera.
And then there are people who have gotten fed up
with Trump supporting Israel, and now they're converging onto the
path of Nick fuentt As where they're denying the Holocaust.
Speaker 3 (36:35):
Their Hitler was right, we need another Hitler.
Speaker 4 (36:38):
We need to, you know, purge every Jewish person from local, state,
federal government.
Speaker 3 (36:44):
It's very extreme in some aspects.
Speaker 4 (36:46):
And then there's certain Q andon followers who just believe
that Q is saving Israel for last, that the fake news,
which in certain aspects called the Sabataean Jews or Kazarian
Jews in their speak, that they're going to be exposed,
(37:07):
that they're not real Jews, but they pretend to be
Jews to control everything. One of the last interactions that
I had with somebody who is in a very vocal
Nazi now he's involved with a lot of the kind
of Patriot front groups where they go out and they
put stickers everywhere in White Lives Matter. He's involved with
those types of things now. One of the last interactions
(37:29):
I had with him before I left was him sending
me translated Hitler speeches into English telling me that the
deep State had gotten to Hitler and.
Speaker 3 (37:39):
That they're going to do the same thing tom Before.
Speaker 1 (37:42):
The deep State existed, he somehow got to Hitler.
Speaker 4 (37:45):
And that they framed him to have killed six million Jews.
And I'm like no, because I'm obsessive with topics. Okay,
I find something I want to learn about, and I
will learn it to death. Titanic, World War Two, the Holocaust,
Cambodian Jennis. It's just who I am, and I knew
right that, and there like something's wrong here. I don't
(38:06):
support Hitler.
Speaker 5 (38:07):
There is a form of anti Semitism that happens in
Maga that I think a lot of adherents don't realize
they're trafficking in. And I'll give you a specific example
of it. We used to say all the time that
democratic voting Jews were not real Jews, and that democratic
voting Christians were not real Christians. And anyone who was
(38:31):
with us on the Maga side, we were the real Americans.
We were on the right side of history, and everyone
against us they were the fake Americans, and they were
on the wrong side of history. And anyone who was
not one hundred percent with us, they were one hundred
percent against us. It didn't matter if they were ninety
nine point nine to nine percent with us. You were
(38:52):
either with us or you were against us. And so
the idea that we cast dispersions on someone's faith because
they don't vote a certain way, and in particular with
Democratic Jews, that to me is a form of anti
Semitism that I think is overlooked amongst those in Maga.
And I think, not to defend, but I think most
(39:14):
in Maga who engage in that kind of rhetoric, I
don't think they're thinking of it that way. They're not
thinking of it as antisemitic. They're thinking of it as
who's on the right side of history and who's the
existential threat? Because I looked at if I had met
you guys when I was in Maga, and if I
met Erica right now and I was still in Maga,
(39:36):
I would wump you into the one big category of
being an existential threat to my life, my livelihood, my family,
and my country. That's what I would think, without knowing
anything about you, that's what I would say about you. So,
this idea of who's a real Jew and who's a
fake Jew, and who's a real Christian and a fake
(39:56):
and a fake Christian that went on all the time.
When I was in Maga. There was even a movement,
It didn't it gained very little traction, and to my knowledge,
it's not even really around anymore. There was a group
called Jexit, which was Jews exiting the Democratic Party. Yeah, Jexit.
You know, I knew people who who had founded this organization,
(40:19):
and you know, talking about how you can't be a
Democrat and be a Jew at the same time. And
I was all about it. I said, yeah, I said,
look at these, look at these, look at Jews, and
look at Black Americans, and look at minorities, the way
they vote Democratic and they vote against their own interests.
I was engaging in those kinds of tropes as well
(40:41):
without me realizing it. And again, I don't say that
as a self defense. It's that it was my own
obliviousness and ignorance that spoke that way.
Speaker 1 (40:49):
Are you finding that more and more people are interested
in what you're selling? Are you finding that more people
are starting to come around? I mean, I think in
the regular media you hear because of the elections in
New Jersey and Virginia and people think that they're starting
to there's some movement away from Trump. But that's just
in the mainstream media. I wonder if you're seeing it
(41:10):
where you are.
Speaker 3 (41:11):
Yeah, absolutely so. Rich and I are.
Speaker 4 (41:16):
In many group chats together, and if I was to
look through my messages right now, I probably have at
least ten different group chats where we had to keep
adding people to them because there's so many people who
are reaching out to Rich who have decided that they're
done and they want to tell their story. But also separately,
(41:39):
for me, I keep a lot of my conversation on
Twitter with people, and at least once a week I
have somebody who will comment under something of mine or
send me a message and we talk and I let
them know when you're ready, I'm here. Granted, getting somebody
out of Quenanus a little bit harder than most other
(42:02):
things because it's been so long since they've been involved
with the conspiracies, and normally there's a trauma underneath and
it has to be addressed as well, So that's a
little harder than what Rich does so eloquently.
Speaker 5 (42:17):
Well, thank you Erica for saying that, and I'm glad
that all of you are mentioning trauma because being in
MEGA is a traumatic experience, and having left MAGA was
good for my soul and for my psyche. It improved
and resurrected relationships that I had lost with people I
fell out of contact with, why because they were Blue
(42:37):
voters even though I had known them for years and
they were important people in my life. But I'm happy
to report that leaving MEGA as an organization has never
been busier. We have testimonials we're working on at the moment.
We even have some twenty twenty four MAGA supporters who
have come to us privately and are they're working through
(42:59):
their own doubts in their own trauma. So between our
public speaking, our media requests, our fundraising, the testimonials we're
working on, we're growing our staff. As an organization, We've
never been more active, and I don't take any credit
for that. That's really a reflection of our leaving MAGA
(43:20):
leaders like Erica and all of the others, who have
so eloquently given witness to their own stories. So I
would encourage everyone who's listening to read those stories. Read Erica's,
read the others. We've got people who are in Christian
nationalist churches. We have leaders who were at the Capitol
on January sixth and served time and rejected Trump's pardon.
(43:43):
We have a black American who so desperately sought community
as a MAGA supporter that he wore a Confederate flag
wristband as part of his time in MAGA. I think
people will find these stories to be quite uplifting and inspirational.
And so everyone can reach out to us and find
us at leaving Maga dot org. My email is on
our contact page and yes I actually do check my email,
(44:07):
so anyone who reaches out to us will make sure
to acknowledge the message.
Speaker 1 (44:10):
Now, thank you guys both. What you've done is difficult
and it's hard.
Speaker 3 (44:14):
It's hard to leave.
Speaker 1 (44:15):
Your experience I think will be useful for other people.
Speaker 2 (44:18):
Thank you very much for come on. Thank you very
much for what you guys are both doing and you
are going to say it.
Speaker 6 (44:27):
Mission Implausible is produced by Adam Davidson, Jerry Osha, John Cipher,
and Jonathan Stern. The associate producer is Rachel Harner. Mission
Implausible It's a production of honorable mention and abominable pictures
for iHeart Podcasts.
I'm John Cipher and I'm Jerry O'sha. We have over
sixty years of experience as clandestine officers in the CIA,
serving in high risk areas all around the world, and.
Speaker 2 (00:11):
Part of our job was creating conspiracies to deceive our adversaries.
Speaker 1 (00:15):
Now we're going to use that experience to investigate the
conspiracy theories everyone's talking about as well as some of
you may not have heard.
Speaker 2 (00:22):
Could they be true or are we being manipulated?
Speaker 1 (00:24):
We'll find out now on Mission Implausible.
Speaker 2 (00:29):
Today, we would like to welcome rich Logius and Erico
Roach from leaving MEGA, which is a community an organization
for those who have left the Mega organization. You were
both deeply entrenched inside of MEGA ideology and mindset and
(00:49):
you both left and so we're really pleased to have
you here to talk about what led you into MEGA
and what motivated that, and what brought you out and what.
Speaker 3 (00:57):
The consequences are that.
Speaker 2 (00:59):
So, or Erica, would you like to start off and
give us to sensu your journey into the belly of
the beast.
Speaker 4 (01:05):
Okay, I'm a former QAnon supporter follower. It's a long story,
but summed up in my life, I kinda like always
thought that conspiracies were fun, They were entertaining, They were
a what if, Like what if there's this grand thing
going on that the government is trying to hide from us?
(01:25):
And it was like a little adventure that I could
go on, and it for me, it all started surrounding
nine to eleven. But I wasn't like a at first.
I wasn't like a hardcore like nine to eleven truth
or anything, but I liked entertaining the idea that Bush
had allowed this to happen, and on and off into
(01:45):
my early twenties, I started following like the New World
Order conspiracies and the Illuminati, thinking that Alex Jones was
like the greatest truth teller ever. And then I got
sucked into conspiracies after leaving an abusive relationship, Like I
just threw myself into it, and I think it was
(02:08):
a coping mechanism for me. And unfortunately what happened was
it led to me finding Q drops and the Dakoders,
and in the comment sections of these posts, people believed
the same things I believe, and I thought that I
had finally found my place, and I got heavily, heavily
(02:30):
entrenched in this world from twenty eighteen, probably until just
after January sixth, twenty twenty one. At one point I
was a admin in Telegram for a large Q influencer.
He's no longer posting anymore on Twitter, but he went
(02:52):
by the Punisher, and I would spend my days not
only just researching all this stuff and promoting all sorts
of new conspiracies that I researched on my own, and
some days I was on Telegram for up to twenty
twenty two hours doing this stuff.
Speaker 2 (03:10):
So it started out as fun and interesting, and basically
you sort of wandered into quicksand that's what you're saying, right,
that sort of and that became really involved rich What
was your experience?
Speaker 5 (03:21):
Yeah, So for me in twenty fifteen, I was someone
who was very politically lonely. I believe that both parties
were the same. I felt that they did not represent
most Americans, only represented a small sliver of the country,
the wealthy and the powerful. I had voted third party
(03:43):
many times in my life, and very rarely did I
vote for a major party candidate. My first vote ever
for president was Ralph Nader in the year two thousand,
when I was living in New York. You know, being
in New York, al Gore was going to win anyway,
so my vote was safe. But I didn't vote. I
didn't vote third party solely because of being anti two parties.
(04:06):
I was long attracted to the rogue, iconoclastic candidates, and
when Trump came on the scene in twenty fifteen, I
was curious in the beginning, and even though he ran
as a Republican, what enticed me about his candidacy was
that both parties saw him as a threat and that
he was a true outsider. He had no government, no military,
(04:28):
no political experience. And after many months of justifying away
comments that I knew were indefensible, like the John McCain
comment and the comments about Muslims, the comments about women,
I came to believe that if the Democrats had won
(04:51):
in twenty sixteen, that they would have seized power permanently.
So I fell prey to the demographics or dea in mythology.
And it was in early twenty sixteen when I went
from Trump curious to being all in and I worked
on the campaign. I was a grassroots volunteer. I did
phone banking, I recruited people to vote for Trump, I
(05:14):
even contributed some of my journalistic and writing skills to
the call script for the campaign, and I felt something
that I had never felt before from the campaign, which
was a communal sense, a sense of feeling belonging. And
I feel like that's going to be a motif that's
(05:35):
going to run throughout this conversation, because you know the
way Erica was talking about having a community through QAnon
and conspiracies. For me, I wouldn't say my entrain to
MAGA was conspiratorial initially, but once I was in I
bought into lock stock and barrels, so many of the
conspiracies that still exists right now. The Democrats are coming
(05:58):
for your guns, and this rus or indoctrinating children into
transgender Marxism and were replacing white people with brown people
and foreigners. There's this really toxic amalgam and mix of
lies and conspiracy theories that magas buttressed on. And I
allowed myself to fall prey to those mythologies really quickly.
(06:21):
And I was around people who were Trump voters, people
I knew, people I was close with, people I trusted,
And it was throughout the course of the next several
years after the twenty sixteen election that I just got
deeper and deeper. I became a Maga influencer, or I
aspired to be a Maga influencer. I was writing freelance
(06:42):
articles for writing publications. My media diet was steadily Maga media.
I was professionally producing a podcast. I was doing all
of this because I felt that I was in this
existential battle between good and evil and I wanted the
President to see my work because it was my aspiration
to be a Maga pundit and influencer, and that's how
(07:04):
I lived my life devoutly, every hour of every day
before my doubts started. So I really relate to Erica
talking about being online for twenty twenty two hours because
for me, Maga consumed my identity. It was my being,
my personhood, and it was my It was completely how
(07:25):
my worldview had been shaped.
Speaker 1 (07:28):
So it sounds like you're both saying separately that community
was a big part of it, right Rich You're saying, yes,
you actually were out dealing with people and stuff. Eric,
if I understand yours was more of an online experience.
You're watching info Wars, you got onto Twitter. Did you
also go to rallies and do all that type of stuff.
Speaker 4 (07:47):
Or was it mostly I didn't participate in some protests
in the capital of New York and Albany with some
people who were rallying at the time against Governor Cuomo.
I mean it wasn't like on a regular basis, but
it was significant. But most of my interaction within my
community at the time was online, but I did enter
(08:10):
into real world spaces with those same types of people
as well.
Speaker 2 (08:15):
This is something I've always often wondered about. What is
between the two of you? What is the difference between
a cult and a community? I mean, both have shared beliefs,
both have this sort of fellowship, Both have an us
them sort of relationship with the rest of the world,
and both both can be comforting. One is more threatening.
The word word community seems more fluffy and huggable. What
(08:39):
for you is the difference between cult and community?
Speaker 3 (08:42):
So for me, I.
Speaker 4 (08:45):
Thought that community was people who had shared beliefs with you,
who believed the same things and influenced your views. But
also at the same time, you could disagree that I
thought that's what I was in. A cult for me
is actually what I was in. You can't question the leader,
(09:06):
you can't have different opinions on anything, and no matter what,
you have to toe the line. You have to believe this,
You have to believe that there's no questioning what is
being told to you.
Speaker 1 (09:18):
Yeah. I remember reading what some of your experience you
talk about how even as you were still part of
the community, you would start to ask some questions, but
people really then turned against you and docs Yeah.
Speaker 4 (09:27):
Yeah, I ended up getting docksed. There was an anonymous
police reports to my local sheriff's office, to the local
child's Protective Services unit. My house was attempted to be
broken into. I had to change my phone number a
couple times, my email addresses. It got very serious and
quite scary. Honestly, It's why I hesitated for so long
(09:50):
to become a public face. It wasn't until I met
Rich that I had the courage to step out from
an anonymous Twitter user.
Speaker 3 (10:00):
He really gave me the courage to do that.
Speaker 1 (10:02):
It's tough because they seem to go after people who
were I mean, even at the highest level. We're seeing
it right now with Marjorie Taylor Green right. Trump he
brings people in as long as they're very much fawning
towards him. But the minute they question anything, they become
an enemy. If you look at the people that they're
trying to send to jail, that they're putting, they got
(10:22):
the Justice Department going after right now. Almost all of
them our people. He brought in the FBI director Rail
Kelly Bolton. All these people were his own people. But
they if they disagree with them, they then become enemies.
And so even Marjorie Taylor Green has become an enemy.
So you know, it's a difficult thing because I think
it's has to do with I think Trump's psyche more
(10:45):
than even the movements.
Speaker 4 (10:46):
But at the same aspect, they see him doing those things,
so they think it's okay to do it to everybody else,
which is why you're seeing Marjorie Taylor Green, for example,
being swarmed. Her comment sections are atrocious, they're horror Fine.
I don't think that Marjorie Tayler Grain is a great person,
but she has every room and every opportunity to change
(11:10):
her mind and change her stance on things, and I
would allow her. I would give her that grace. She
doesn't deserve this treatment. Nobody does.
Speaker 5 (11:18):
I understand guys, why people would look at MAGA and
say this is a cult. I can attest to the
fact that in my life there were some cult like aspects.
I always mentioned in this context that I had a
Maga second family, and that second family oftentimes took precedence
over my own blood family, where I neglected husband and
(11:41):
familial and parental duties in the pursuit of this movement.
That I was a part of The reason I'm ambivalent
about referring to Maga as a cult is largely informed
by my work at Weaving Maga and the kind of
advocacy that Erica has done for our organization as well.
We want to extract people out of Maga, especially as
(12:03):
they start to have doubts, and we feel that if
we refer to people in Maga as cultists, it's going
to make them dig their heels in. You know, when
I was in Maga, we used to hear the cult language,
and we used to all the time say not even
half facetiously, but half seriously that we weren't in the cult,
that everyone in the outside world was in the cult,
(12:25):
and that we weren't the crazies. Everyone else in the
outside world were the crazies. And as hard as it
is to leave Maga, it's Still I believe easier to
leave MAGA than it would be a bona fide cult
of which I've never been a part of. Unless we're
going to call my Catholic upbringing that. No, I shouldn't say.
That's a joke. Everyone, that's a joke. One's a Catholic,
(12:48):
always a Catholic. My wife and my family's going to
hear that and say, is that what you really think
about your Catholic upbringing? No, I don't really think of
it that way. But I've not been in an actual cult,
but I do. I do see where people can think
that about MAGA, and there are certain traits about it
that would match most likely being in an actual cult.
Speaker 2 (13:09):
Yeah, Rich, you said something really interesting that I want
to touch back on. You mentioned Trump's comments about John McCain.
John McCain, you know, just to remind people, was shot
down over North Vietnam. He was tortured. He could have
left early the prison, he refused. He was stayed with
his men. This is a guy who was crippled lifelong.
And I've had the opportunity to meet with John McCain
(13:32):
inside CIA to brief him in Baghdad, a place that
was really dangerous At the time he flew in, he
was really interested in the truth. He was interested in
the people who were serving on the front lines, troops,
CIA officers. I have enormous respect for the guy. And
when Trump a draft died, or at least he never
served in the military, called him a loser because he
(13:53):
was shot down and tortured by the North Vietnamese. I thought,
as so many of us have on so many occasions,
that the end of it, right, there's certain third reels
you can't touch, and one is like going after genuine
bona fide war heroes. I mean, you can disagree with
their political stance, but the fact that they serve their
country and sacrificed is undebatable. And yet that didn't happen.
(14:15):
And yet people who swore that they loved the military
and swore by American heroism and they just abandoned John
McKay And so I was wondering, what is it for
both of you? But that is an example when a
tenet of the community interferes with what you've always believed in,
or interferes with basic reality, how do you react to it?
(14:37):
Is it like I've got to I don't really believe it,
but I've got to say this in order to stay
in the community, or do you actually change your mind.
Speaker 4 (14:44):
For example, we'll take McCain because that's relatively easy to
talk about. Unfortunately, so regardless of his war hero status,
the being a political prisoner, the being tortured, all of that,
because Trump called him out within the q ON community,
he was a trader to his country and that was justifiable.
The way that it works within QAnon is Trump highlights
(15:07):
people who we need to dig into to find out
what traitor's actions they did against the United States and
the American people. So as soon as he says these
types of awful things about John McCain or any other
but any anybody else, they're a trader, they did something horrific.
They deserve to be put to death. That's why you'll
(15:29):
still see to this day they compare like Dan Crenshaw
to being the new John McCain. And then at John
McCain's funeral, the flag on his casket was wrinkled, so
that meant that he was executed in the q and
On world. And because it's something that gets pushed and
pushed and pushed and pushed, it's that repetition that makes
(15:51):
it believable, and you just go along with it whether
you believe it or not. But eventually, if you are
a true believer like I was, you believe it.
Speaker 5 (16:00):
Even before the Obamacare vote from Senator McCain, John McCain was,
amongst many in MAGA a hated person, and one of
the disparaging remarks that was often made about the late
John McCain and MAGA was that he was a globalist.
This was something that was which I'm thinking about again,
(16:23):
the conspiratorial way of how people opposed to Trump and
MAGA were, how they're identified, just like with Mitt Romney,
similar referred to as the same way as a globalist,
a crony capitalist, these kinds of monikers. But that's the
moment for me, the John McCain comment that I should
have run. Whatever curiosity I had about the Trump campaign
(16:47):
should have ceased at that moment because I knew that
it was an unjustifiable comment, but I so quickly, And
I should preface by saying that none of anything I
say I want to be construed as a self defense,
because everyone has agency, and I made these choices on
my own. Nolan coaxed to course me into my support,
(17:08):
but I so quickly fell prey to the idea that
the Democrats would win in political power and definitely, and
I would be an irrelevant citizen of my country that
I look the other way on the John McCain statement.
And throughout Trump's presidency, there were several times that I
had very critical private conversations about Trump. Charlottesville was another one.
(17:32):
I was very close with someone who worked as a
paid staffer in Trump's campaign, and I remember when Charlottesville happened.
I'm a little embarrassed to talk about it the way
that I will, and ashamed because my concern wasn't the
fact that a woman, Heather Hire, had died and that
people were injured. My worry when Charlottesville happened was that
(17:54):
the press and Democrats and anti Trump Republicans were going
to label all of we and Mac as neo Nazis
and white supremacists. So my concern was damage control. It
wasn't the fact that a woman was innocently run over
and murdered and that others committed violence. So I had
that kind of I remember we censured Trump privately, but
(18:20):
that's private. We never did it publicly. Maybe they hurt
our cult explanation, and they're still thinking, well, it still
sounds like a cult. I'm going to give them fodder
on this one because you just never criticized Trump publicly.
You didn't do it because if you did it, you'd
be exiled, just like Eric is saying, and just like
we're seeing what Marjorie Taylor Green right now. If you
(18:40):
go and censure the president in your remarks publicly, you're
going to become persona and on grive. And that's because
you absolutely will be because Trump is the he's the
titular leader of the community. He's the one who took
a brand of right wing politics that are not new,
not novel, but he branded them. And for me, make
(19:03):
America Great Again was not nostalgic. I was thirty nine
years old in twenty sixteen. As delusional as it sounds,
Make America Great Again, for me was very forward facing
and progressive. I saw it even as a second kind
of founding of the country. So that's that was just
that was my fealty to MAGA. And whenever Trump was attacked,
(19:26):
we felt that we were attacked. So I even had
a phrase that I used for the media that I
trademarked I called it the Democrat media industrial complex. You
know that it was in that trademark's now available if
anyone wants it. I don't have I don't have it
anymore because I don't think that there I don't think
there is a I don't believe that there's a liberal
(19:47):
media conspiracy. But I did believe that at one time.
Speaker 1 (20:01):
Being part of a tribe, being part of something bigger
than yourself is powerful. Did you come out of it?
What was the hardest part about realizing you no longer
believed in it, or how you were coming out of it?
And we could tell there's probably a lot to this,
but just start to talk a little bit about like
when did you start to realize there was a problem
if you could justify all those things for so long,
when did it turn? For both the maybe Eric cos
(20:23):
so for me.
Speaker 4 (20:24):
It was towards the tail end when the vaccines were
being discussed, Operation Warp Speed was almost completed. That's for
me where my doubts started coming in. On one hand,
Trump was touting and just so excited about Operation Warp
Speed and the COVID vaccines that were going to be
(20:44):
coming to Fruition soon, and on the other hand. Everybody
in my community was telling me that it was Bill Gates'
death job coming to to populate us. So it was
a very confusing time for me. And then January sixth happened,
and I knew people who were there. I'd had an
opportunity to go, but I didn't have anybody to watch
(21:07):
my kids, and I couldn't leave them for a couple
days by themselves, so I didn't go. But the fact
was that I could have met up with my friends
there and participated in what unfolded that I watched live happening.
It was just such a shock to the system that
I couldn't ignore my questions anymore. But a lot of
(21:29):
my doubt was around COVID because I had actually gotten
COVID and I got very, very sick. I got pneumonia
after I was recovering from the COVID, and I was
sick for almost three months. It damn near destroyed my lungs.
So it wasn't just a flu. It wasn't just you know,
something that's going to go away in fifteen days and
go away if we don't test. It quite possibly could
(21:51):
have killed me. So I knew that that we were
being misled somehow, and then the COVID vaccine talks started,
and I just I couldn't ignore it anymore.
Speaker 5 (22:00):
So I like to paraphrase the late and venerable Ernest
Hemingway and say that my epiphany out of MAGA happened
gradually and then suddenly, all at once. Trump's mismanagement of
COVID January sixth, the stolen election lies. Those were all
some of the cracks, but they weren't enough for me.
The first accelerant for my leaving of MAGA was actually
(22:22):
not Donald Trump. It was my governor, Ron de Santees.
In the summer of twenty twenty one, if we recall,
there had been the delta surge of COVID and children
were getting sick, children were dying from the virus, and
Ron de Santees, rather than continue his vaccine advocacy, he
started platforming anti vaxers at his press conferences, people who
(22:45):
said that the COVID vaccine was changing people's RNA and
was deadlier than the virus. Now, I am a parent
of two children, and I recall when I would read
the stories about children getting sick and dying from COVID,
all I could think about was the suffering that those
kids went through, and the parents and the parents, the
(23:07):
bereaved parents, grieving and in mourning. So when Ron de
Santas did that when kids were getting sick, it really
shocked me and I didn't understand why he took that approach.
And it was shortly thereafter that I did something that
sounds very simple but was very profoundly life changing and
altering for me, which was I diversified my news and
(23:29):
information sources. And as soon as I did that, I
started to slowly, painfully but liberating. We realized that so
much of what it was that I had believed and
had created an identity around, was not true. You know,
the conspiracies I mentioned earlier about guns and our kids
(23:51):
being indoctrinated in white replacement theory, these kinds of conspiracies
that exist legion with MAGA. I had a lot of
late nights just myself and my thoughts where I would
sit at my desk and I would say, I have
been believing lies for years, and not just one or
two wives, but years accumulated of them. And the final
(24:15):
straw for me was May twenty fourth, twenty twenty two,
which was the day of the Uvalde, Texas school shooting,
another incident where children died and were injured and others
died and were injured. And I knew exactly how the
Republican Party and Donald Trump were how they were going
to respond to that incident, and they responded exactly as
(24:36):
I knew they would. They would nonchalantly accept yet another
incident of avoidable deaths and suffering, just like ron De
Santees did with the anti vaxxer, just like January sixth,
defense of politically motivated violence and acceptance of avoidable debts
and suffering. And it was shortly after Uvalde that I
(24:58):
quietly left MAGA. I only told my wife and a
few other people. But there was something, guys, that was
really gnawing at me. After Uvalde and after I silently
left MAGA. I was always so unapologetically public in my
support for Trump. I felt that I needed to be
public and my renunciation of the movement. And it was
on August thirtieth of twenty twenty two, which is what
(25:21):
I call my leaving magaversary, I wrote a mea culpa,
and in that story I said that I was wrong
for supporting Trump and MAGA, that I was sorry, and
that I wanted to apologize to anyone I may have
hurt with my words and deeds. And the God's honest
truth is that I never thought anybody would care. I
thought that I would just do it. I would close
(25:43):
that chapter of my life. It would bring the catharsis
of finally severing myself from that world and moving on.
But it turned out that people did care, and I
received instantaneously one after another from friends and family of
people in MAGA. And I was completely naive and oblivious
(26:03):
to how many relationships had been torn asunder by this movement.
And I had a hand in that. I was culpable,
I was complicit. I was complicit in helping the president
divide the country and amplify conspiracy theories.
Speaker 1 (26:19):
Yeah, I mean reach individuals. It's a large country. You
can't put too much on yourself, but I think it
is important for the people who are listening to hear,
like if there are other people looking to come out
of the movement. You know, the guilt, the anger, the relief,
how you deal with it as a person. It sounds
like you had some guilt around it and how you
got over that guilt And Erica, it sounds like you
(26:40):
started to question things. Did you find yourself all of
a sudden having all sorts of anger issues or was
it relieve?
Speaker 4 (26:47):
At first, I was very hesitant. I fought against it
as hard as I could, because I knew that on
the other side of my beliefs was things in people
and events that were truly horrific that I justified for years,
and I didn't want to face that.
Speaker 3 (27:06):
At first. I was scared.
Speaker 4 (27:09):
But I found a great little support system online, people
who had been debunking QAnon conspiracies for years at that point,
and it took about probably six months after I started
talking to them, and then, like Rich said, it was
slow at first and then suddenly it was all at
(27:31):
the same time. I resisted hard though, because I truly
believed that the deep state had conspired to get Trump
out in twenty twenty, because the Democrats wanted to unfold
the sixteen Year Plan, which ushered in globalism, in the
New World Order and pretty much just capalist slavery and depopulation.
(27:53):
I believed it to my core, and the things that
I justified, the things I accepted, the thing in relationships
that I fractured, all that pain if I accepted that
I was wrong this whole time, all that pain was
going to be front and center.
Speaker 3 (28:09):
And it took a while to get to that point.
And then I spent probably.
Speaker 4 (28:14):
A good year grieving, grieving, re educating myself, diversifying my media,
and take the people around me, the people I spoke to,
And it was a long, very painful, very like agonizing
to realize just what I had believed in.
Speaker 2 (28:31):
So bringing in John and I are CIA background, this
is really interesting because in our careers we dealt with
a lot of people, people who were in Al Qaeda,
people who were in the Russian system, the North Korean system,
and they tell similar stories that I remember sitting across
(28:51):
from one North Korean and he had too many drinks
and he really wasn't supposed to be talking to me.
Although he didn't know I was CIA at the time,
it probably suspected it, but he'd lowered his voice. He'd
looked around after telling the greatness of North Korea how
wonderful it was, and he said, it's really not that great.
(29:12):
The dear leader isn't as good as people say. And
he had just committed treason. He had committed a capital
crime by saying that he could have been ostracized, it
was dangerous to his family, and yet he clearly had
been saying to everyone who would listen, to his own family,
this is what I think, But inside he knew it
(29:34):
wasn't true. And oftentimes, at least in our world espionage,
we look for people Russians, Chin, people inside the Russian
government of Chinese government, who like, they know it's not true, right,
and they can't live with the lie, and eventually they
want to do something about it, and some go into
internal exile, some just never mind. Others actually wanted, you know,
(29:56):
it's like I want to fight back, and you know,
I'd like to work with the US. Yes, John, You've
had a lot of experience with Russians who have been
in a system who were afraid to say what they
really thought. And some of our best spies, Russian spies,
are people who simply couldn't do it anymore.
Speaker 1 (30:13):
I think we're living with that with Vladimir Putin. So
when your country fell apart, it's like a trauma. So
these people belonged to a country they thought was one
of the most powerful in the world, it was a superpower,
and it fell apart. Can you imagine if you're a
person who's defending that, the trauma of trying to deal
with that. You can imagine if our country actually did
get into civil war and fell apart. But you see,
(30:34):
you think you feel guilty. Now imagine how you would
feel if that kind of happened. And so, you know,
dealing with those kind of people. Different people have different
ways of reacting to things. Some like Vladimir Putin doubled
down and said I'm going to be more aggressive and more.
Others that we try to deal with would say, hey,
we just want to be a normal country. What can
we do to move forward? And that's why it's really
(30:55):
interesting to talk to you guys, because you know, you
belong to one tribe and then you had to come
up out of it. What's the next step do you, like,
are you looking for another tribe? Do you become a
democrat or do you just stay away from politics? What's
the next step?
Speaker 5 (31:09):
I think of it as an odyssey, and I am
very lucky in that after I left Maga, I didn't
know where I was going to go, but I was
asked by various media and organizations to keep recounting my story,
So I kept doing it, and I did it because
I felt it was part of an ongoing reckoning to
(31:30):
continue to make amends for my past. So I found
myself telling my story over and over again, and it
eventually from the telling of that story was born our
organization Leaving Maga. And when I founded it, I never
run a nonprofit before. I didn't know what it would
(31:51):
what form it would take, but I remember thinking, there
have to be others out there who also left, you know,
it couldn't be just There's got to be others out there.
And Erica was one of the very, very first leaders
I ever met who left MAGA. When there's a I
would really encourage everyone to read her testimonial at our
(32:11):
Leaving Maga dot org site, and all of our testimonials
for that matter. It shows the courage that so many
went through to have to come to their own realization
that they needed to leave because being in MAGA didn't
comport any longer with their values. So, you know, when
it came to q and On, I knew of q Andon,
but when I was in MAGA again, I was naive
(32:33):
and ignorant. I thought it was basically a hobby. I
didn't know anyone who was in QAnon. I remember Katie
Turr asking Trump in that interview before the election about
q and on, and I remember thinking, this, this line
of questioning is so silly. Q Andon is just a
couple of people online in the bowels of the Internet
(32:54):
talking about whatever conspiracy that they are. And then it
was after my diversific of news and information sources that
I realized that not only was QAnon not a hobby,
but that it had the blessing of the most powerful
person in the history of the world, along with groups
like the Proud Boys and the Oathkeepers. This was another
moment for me where it was like running into a
(33:16):
brick wall, where I realized that this conspiracy that existed
had reached all the way into the upper echelons of
the power structure of our country.
Speaker 4 (33:24):
So for me, the most important thing after I left
was making amends. I didn't care where I went, or
I didn't honestly, I didn't want to continue anything with politics.
I wanted to make my amends and I wanted to
walk away. It was almost like I had to refigure
out who I was because it consumed every part of me.
(33:47):
And after a while I realized that for me, making
amends wasn't enough that I needed to not only tell
my story and reach out to people who are still
in or who have questions, or people on the other
side of the political spectrum who don't understand why their
loved one has left them behind for this movement that
(34:11):
is just based on conspiracies. So I decided that I
was going as long as there was people who believed
in q ANDON, I was going to continue to speak
out against it. Whether that's on Twitter or Facebook or
Reddit or wherever, on podcasts. It doesn't matter. As long
as there's people in there, there's still hope to get
them out.
Speaker 2 (34:45):
So I did want to ask anti Semitism is that
inside of q andon and the MAGA movement. I've been outsider,
I hear different things. There's struggles going on with Tucker
Carlson platforming Flentes, who is a Holocaust de I are
in a clear anti semi Are there factions within the
MEGA movements pro Israels more anti Semitic, more sort of
(35:07):
pro Nazis more or less? And how would you differentiate
some of the streams within the current Mega movement.
Speaker 4 (35:14):
Specifically for q Andon. QAnon is roughly based on hundreds
and thousands of years of old anti Semitic tropes. It
is built on anti Semitism. You may not be aware
of that when you first start to believe it, but
coming out of it and you learn about all of
these tropes that have gone around, all this anti Semitism,
all this Jewish hatred over centuries, is exactly similar things
(35:38):
that people in QAnon believe currently now though since October
seventh with Israel and Humas. Prior to that, there was
certain groups in QAnon who believed that saving Israel for
last meant that the Jewish people were going to be
taken care of, that their lives were going to be exposed,
(35:59):
that their control over our country was going to end,
and that Trump was going to expose all of us. However,
since October seventh, there has been a clear divide between
people in QAnon who truly believe that Israel is doing
the right thing, Israel has the right to existat and
(36:20):
Yah who is not doing anything wrong, et cetera, et cetera.
And then there are people who have gotten fed up
with Trump supporting Israel, and now they're converging onto the
path of Nick fuentt As where they're denying the Holocaust.
Speaker 3 (36:35):
Their Hitler was right, we need another Hitler.
Speaker 4 (36:38):
We need to, you know, purge every Jewish person from local, state,
federal government.
Speaker 3 (36:44):
It's very extreme in some aspects.
Speaker 4 (36:46):
And then there's certain Q andon followers who just believe
that Q is saving Israel for last, that the fake news,
which in certain aspects called the Sabataean Jews or Kazarian
Jews in their speak, that they're going to be exposed,
(37:07):
that they're not real Jews, but they pretend to be
Jews to control everything. One of the last interactions that
I had with somebody who is in a very vocal
Nazi now he's involved with a lot of the kind
of Patriot front groups where they go out and they
put stickers everywhere in White Lives Matter. He's involved with
those types of things now. One of the last interactions
(37:29):
I had with him before I left was him sending
me translated Hitler speeches into English telling me that the
deep State had gotten to Hitler and.
Speaker 3 (37:39):
That they're going to do the same thing tom Before.
Speaker 1 (37:42):
The deep State existed, he somehow got to Hitler.
Speaker 4 (37:45):
And that they framed him to have killed six million Jews.
And I'm like no, because I'm obsessive with topics. Okay,
I find something I want to learn about, and I
will learn it to death. Titanic, World War Two, the Holocaust,
Cambodian Jennis. It's just who I am, and I knew
right that, and there like something's wrong here. I don't
(38:06):
support Hitler.
Speaker 5 (38:07):
There is a form of anti Semitism that happens in
Maga that I think a lot of adherents don't realize
they're trafficking in. And I'll give you a specific example
of it. We used to say all the time that
democratic voting Jews were not real Jews, and that democratic
voting Christians were not real Christians. And anyone who was
(38:31):
with us on the Maga side, we were the real Americans.
We were on the right side of history, and everyone
against us they were the fake Americans, and they were
on the wrong side of history. And anyone who was
not one hundred percent with us, they were one hundred
percent against us. It didn't matter if they were ninety
nine point nine to nine percent with us. You were
(38:52):
either with us or you were against us. And so
the idea that we cast dispersions on someone's faith because
they don't vote a certain way, and in particular with
Democratic Jews, that to me is a form of anti
Semitism that I think is overlooked amongst those in Maga.
And I think, not to defend, but I think most
(39:14):
in Maga who engage in that kind of rhetoric, I
don't think they're thinking of it that way. They're not
thinking of it as antisemitic. They're thinking of it as
who's on the right side of history and who's the
existential threat? Because I looked at if I had met
you guys when I was in Maga, and if I
met Erica right now and I was still in Maga,
(39:36):
I would wump you into the one big category of
being an existential threat to my life, my livelihood, my family,
and my country. That's what I would think, without knowing
anything about you, that's what I would say about you. So,
this idea of who's a real Jew and who's a
fake Jew, and who's a real Christian and a fake
(39:56):
and a fake Christian that went on all the time.
When I was in Maga. There was even a movement,
It didn't it gained very little traction, and to my knowledge,
it's not even really around anymore. There was a group
called Jexit, which was Jews exiting the Democratic Party. Yeah, Jexit.
You know, I knew people who who had founded this organization,
(40:19):
and you know, talking about how you can't be a
Democrat and be a Jew at the same time. And
I was all about it. I said, yeah, I said,
look at these, look at these, look at Jews, and
look at Black Americans, and look at minorities, the way
they vote Democratic and they vote against their own interests.
I was engaging in those kinds of tropes as well
(40:41):
without me realizing it. And again, I don't say that
as a self defense. It's that it was my own
obliviousness and ignorance that spoke that way.
Speaker 1 (40:49):
Are you finding that more and more people are interested
in what you're selling? Are you finding that more people
are starting to come around? I mean, I think in
the regular media you hear because of the elections in
New Jersey and Virginia and people think that they're starting
to there's some movement away from Trump. But that's just
in the mainstream media. I wonder if you're seeing it
(41:10):
where you are.
Speaker 3 (41:11):
Yeah, absolutely so. Rich and I are.
Speaker 4 (41:16):
In many group chats together, and if I was to
look through my messages right now, I probably have at
least ten different group chats where we had to keep
adding people to them because there's so many people who
are reaching out to Rich who have decided that they're
done and they want to tell their story. But also separately,
(41:39):
for me, I keep a lot of my conversation on
Twitter with people, and at least once a week I
have somebody who will comment under something of mine or
send me a message and we talk and I let
them know when you're ready, I'm here. Granted, getting somebody
out of Quenanus a little bit harder than most other
(42:02):
things because it's been so long since they've been involved
with the conspiracies, and normally there's a trauma underneath and
it has to be addressed as well, So that's a
little harder than what Rich does so eloquently.
Speaker 5 (42:17):
Well, thank you Erica for saying that, and I'm glad
that all of you are mentioning trauma because being in
MEGA is a traumatic experience, and having left MAGA was
good for my soul and for my psyche. It improved
and resurrected relationships that I had lost with people I
fell out of contact with, why because they were Blue
(42:37):
voters even though I had known them for years and
they were important people in my life. But I'm happy
to report that leaving MEGA as an organization has never
been busier. We have testimonials we're working on at the moment.
We even have some twenty twenty four MAGA supporters who
have come to us privately and are they're working through
(42:59):
their own doubts in their own trauma. So between our
public speaking, our media requests, our fundraising, the testimonials we're
working on, we're growing our staff. As an organization, We've
never been more active, and I don't take any credit
for that. That's really a reflection of our leaving MAGA
(43:20):
leaders like Erica and all of the others, who have
so eloquently given witness to their own stories. So I
would encourage everyone who's listening to read those stories. Read Erica's,
read the others. We've got people who are in Christian
nationalist churches. We have leaders who were at the Capitol
on January sixth and served time and rejected Trump's pardon.
(43:43):
We have a black American who so desperately sought community
as a MAGA supporter that he wore a Confederate flag
wristband as part of his time in MAGA. I think
people will find these stories to be quite uplifting and inspirational.
And so everyone can reach out to us and find
us at leaving Maga dot org. My email is on
our contact page and yes I actually do check my email,
(44:07):
so anyone who reaches out to us will make sure
to acknowledge the message.
Speaker 1 (44:10):
Now, thank you guys both. What you've done is difficult
and it's hard.
Speaker 3 (44:14):
It's hard to leave.
Speaker 1 (44:15):
Your experience I think will be useful for other people.
Speaker 2 (44:18):
Thank you very much for come on. Thank you very
much for what you guys are both doing and you
are going to say it.
Speaker 6 (44:27):
Mission Implausible is produced by Adam Davidson, Jerry Osha, John Cipher,
and Jonathan Stern. The associate producer is Rachel Harner. Mission
Implausible It's a production of honorable mention and abominable pictures
for iHeart Podcasts.
Hosts And Creators
Adam Davidson
John Sipher
Jerry O'Shea
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