December 13, 2024 • 64 mins
Part 2 of a conversation with a Gonzaga Law School student about the appeal of MAGA as a community, restorative justice and the alt-right.
NOTE: Views expressed are not necessarily those of the university.
For more My Leaving MAGA Odyssey podcast episodes, visit here:
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Episode Transcript
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(00:00):
Let me just pull that up.
(00:01):
Okay.
All right.
So, yeah.
Thanks again for doing this.
All right, let me pull up my questions real quick.
Okay.
So I was hoping that today we could discuss
a little bit more about how you go
about building community specifically,
(00:21):
because this is such a new idea
that I believe your organization might be the only one,
at least that I've heard of,
so I'm wondering when you first got started,
what was that process like?
How did you start gathering members?
How did you start getting the word out?
What was the first few months like for you?
(00:45):
A lot of social media engagement,
probably more than I would like to admit,
but whatever my ambivalence about
the political effects of social media,
the fact is that it has been actually quite instrumental
in finding others who left.
And there are some individuals
(01:06):
I really need to personally thank,
so one of whom is former Illinois Congressman
Adam Kinzinger.
He happened to discover my Twitter account.
He retweeted out to his million plus followers at the time.
And next I know my Twitter notifications are nonstop.
So I knew that someone with a large following
(01:29):
had engaged some of my content,
and it turned out to be he.
And then next I know I'm in touch with him,
we're communicating, we're messaging,
we're having Zoom calls.
And he became really an advocate for leaving MAGNA.
So as a result of his belief in what we're doing,
it enabled me to keep creating on social media
(01:49):
and reach a larger and larger audience.
And as I did that, I started to get to know others online
who had said, I know someone who left MAGNA,
speak to this person.
I also expanded my social media reach
going into other places like Instagram and TikTok,
(02:10):
your normal frequented social media apps.
And I started discovering others
who were telling their stories
about having been in MAGNA and left.
And I reached out to all of them and I said,
hey, here's our group, here's our community
for those who left.
We want to ask you to make, offer a testimonial.
(02:33):
And thus far, yes, I wish that these testimonials
were happening, Vicki, sooner and more rapidly
than they have been, but we're up to over a half dozen.
We've got others who are gonna give it, tell their stories.
We've also got friends and family of those
who are in the throw of MAGNA
(02:53):
who are also going to tell their stories.
We've already actually published a few of them
with Midas Touch Network, where we produce videos
in collaboration with those guys there.
Yeah, I saw some of the videos on YouTube.
And the idea of community is one admittedly
that didn't occur to me initially.
My background is as an English major, I was a journalist,
(03:18):
did a lot of feature writing, didn't formally write
professionally in any sense really throughout my many,
many years after graduating college.
Even my time in MAGNA, I had mentioned
in our first conversation, I wrote dozens of stories,
I was never paid for any of them.
Some of the stories I've published
after having left MAGNA did pay, but those are,
(03:41):
technically makes me a professional freelancer,
but it wasn't like I was, I wasn't,
I didn't have this idea of I've got it,
it's gonna be a community that we're gonna create.
So I was really just looking to focus on storytelling.
But the more I would speak to,
and after a few testimonials,
and after having gotten to know others,
(04:03):
and I started to think, okay, what this,
what really MAGNA needs to be,
is it needs to be a place without judgment,
without ostracization.
Every one of us, our homosapien species
yearns for communal existence.
Yeah.
This is not a want, it is a necessity.
(04:24):
And one of the biggest lies that I think we tell ourselves
as a species is when we say,
well, we don't care what other people think about us.
That is not true, Vicki.
Yeah.
Now I'm not suggesting that we try to be everything
to everyone.
That's also an endeavor of futility to do that.
But those who, with whom we've spoken,
(04:46):
when they've told us their stories,
and I've asked them, I said,
so let's say we hadn't met.
Were you aware that there would be a new community?
Did you ever think that there would be a place
for people who left and could say,
hey, I'm someone who wasn't MAGAI supported
for the right reasons, I decided to leave.
(05:06):
And all of them have said, no.
We never really thought there was a place
for people who left.
We never really thought there would be a community.
We just told our stories and we thought that that was it.
And now I'm proud of the fact that it's not,
I don't take credit for this,
but our team has developed a community
where people are now actually leading.
So we're still telling stories, but we are,
(05:28):
I feel like our organization is at the beginning.
No, let me rephrase.
It's at the end of the beginning.
So it's that phase one.
So we're at the end of the beginning of leaving MAGA,
which is more storytelling, expanded reach,
more testimonials from those who left
and more conversations with friends and family.
(05:49):
So I'm really, I consider myself as lucky a human being
as any when it comes into the topic of having left MAGA
because if not for so many of the key people around me
and around this organization,
we would not be in a position we're in right now.
Yeah, it sounds like the community that you've built
(06:12):
is really helping to support
the wider community as a whole.
And I think you should give yourself
a little bit more credit.
If you didn't come up with the idea
and try to get the word out and start the organization,
there wouldn't be a community in the first place.
So-
Well, thank you for saying that.
Well, I am personally, in addition to my gratitude
(06:37):
and in addition to feeling quite lucky,
I do feel like those who are gonna hear this,
they should know that I put in full-time hours
into this organization,
even though I'm not paid from a full-time basis.
We're gonna go through fundraising,
which I'm really dreading having to do this.
(06:58):
Right, and I small business success.
So it's not that I ever had reservations in the past
about asking for money.
It's different in a nonprofit though,
because everyone is inundated with requests for money.
Yeah.
We just went through this entire election cycle
where we were bombarded dozens of times a day.
Yes.
But I know that we're gonna need to go through that.
(07:19):
And I'm confident in what it is
that we're offering in our work
that I think we're gonna have fundraising success.
And again, that's the credit to our team,
but I am putting in full-time hours on almost no pay,
aside from some donating.
We've had some sizable benefactors
(07:39):
who have actually, who have decided to donate,
but we're gonna start on that path
because we just need to do it.
As much as we wish it weren't the case,
we need capital to operate and expand.
Yeah, for sure.
So I think last time you mentioned that
you guys are trying to set up in-person community
(08:00):
in every single state.
As of right now,
is most of your community building online still?
Yes, it is online.
Our team and those who have given testimonials,
we are scattered across the country.
We're in every time zone right now
between our editorial, our creative,
(08:21):
those who manage our website, even the testimonials,
those individuals are all across the country.
What I envision actually for the in-person events,
eventually is what those are gonna be is,
you may recall in our first conversation,
I had mentioned a dis and misinformation literacy workshop
(08:44):
that we're putting together.
And the reason that that issue was so important
is because mis and disinformation not only
contributed to my unapologetic support for Trump and MAGA,
it's what kept me in.
And then once I started to figure out
that my beliefs were actually incorrect,
(09:06):
or maybe were accurate to some extent,
but were lacking nuance or context
or just too black and white,
I started to figure out,
well, relying solely on one ideological type of media
is gonna keep someone stuck in that silo.
(09:28):
It's not a good comparison,
but I've always aspired to wanna go to law school actually.
After our conversations, you might say, don't do it.
No, Rich is a better place.
And I'm not suggesting that I'm gonna resign
from leaving MAGA and go to law school,
but I've always had an ambition to do it.
And I think about one of the traits
(09:50):
that makes for a really good attorney
is that you put yourself on the,
you try to think like the opposing counsel.
You wanna figure out the strategy, yeah.
Exactly, exactly.
And I can imagine that's particularly important
in let's say criminal law,
or maybe high profile class action lawsuits as an example,
(10:12):
you try to put yourself in that position
to think about what the opposing legal team,
where they might come with us, right?
Because everyone's got the same evidence, right?
By law, you have to all be working with the same evidence
that's been approved by a judge, right?
Yeah, okay, right.
Until you discover it's not the case
and then have to be quick on your feet,
(10:33):
because that's why I know lawyers get a bad rap,
but I do respect the preparation
that goes into cases like this.
I do respect the preparation that goes into casework,
even though I've never been in that world.
I can appreciate just how hard it is to prepare and prep.
With information, there are some overarching principles,
(10:57):
because when I started to diversify my news
and information sources,
I now started to have to think about,
well, those who are providing different information,
what are they doing in such a way that
they've done their preparation
and they've done their fact checking.
And it doesn't mean, Vicki,
that even the most accurate media is 100% correct.
(11:21):
We know that.
But when you're in the info silo,
that's one of the reasons that keeps people
in the MAGA community, because there is this question,
it's asked exasperatedly by a lot of people
who have never been in MAGA and have never scored a trump.
(11:41):
Rich, I don't understand after XYZ and ABC,
why do people still stay?
And I know that this is probably an unsatisfactory answer
as it pertains to the communal existence,
but everybody has a particular line of demarcation.
And I really do believe that for many in MAGA,
(12:03):
there's gonna come a point where
they're gonna cross a Rubicon because of one lie too many,
or because of one unnecessary death too many,
or because of one avoidable illness too many.
And everyone, we have to look at people as individuals,
(12:23):
even when they're in a communal existence.
Because for me, I had to go through January 6th
and I had to go through anti-vaccine sponsorship
by Ron DeSantis, and then I had to go through Yuvalde.
So I went through all of this.
And for those who are just trying to ask,
they're just so frustrated with,
(12:45):
I don't understand why people stay.
What you and I are talking about is I think really key,
because I think when people think of MAGA less as a cult,
less as a hate group, and more as like something
that we all yearn for, which is community,
it starts to make a little more logical sense.
Now, do I think that MAGA is a toxic community?
(13:07):
Yes, it's also why it's important to separate
the people from the community.
Because as I'd mentioned in our initial conversation,
there's no ideology.
The closest to ideology in MAGA
is a belief of the evils of liberalism.
And that gets manifested in a lot of the rhetoric
(13:29):
and a lot of the invective that is lobbed
at democratic figures and anti-Trump Republicans
and conservatives.
Yeah.
I think that's absolutely a great point
is the sense of community.
I do think that people who,
(13:50):
and it also comes down to the double downing,
I think of the mindset of some people in MAGA are all right.
Like you have the entire world telling you that you're wrong
and that you're a bad person for believing what you believe.
And you're like, well, I have to prove them wrong then.
I got a double, triple, quadruple down.
(14:10):
That's right.
Because if I admit I'm wrong,
then my entire existence has been right.
Like...
Well, I had to figure out something to that point.
And I think this is one of the,
I don't know if it's an inherent flaw
or it's just something we,
I don't believe it is because I think we can control it.
One of the, something about activism
(14:34):
that just drives me crazy
is that I look at the way that certain activism is deployed
and there can be broad concurrence on the goal.
But it's the methodology
that I'm also really paying close attention to.
And in anti-MAGA activism,
(14:56):
if I were to go around and ask everybody
who's got friends and family in MAGA,
hey, do you want your friends and family to leave MAGA?
Simple question, not a gotcha.
Oh yeah, absolutely, I want them to leave.
Okay, great.
So we have this broad agreement on the goal.
Yeah.
But I'll ask them,
well, but what's your standard operating procedure for this?
(15:17):
Yeah.
What are your tactics?
Well, my tactics are tough love
and I got to tell them they're in a cult
and I need to tell them.
And I said, well, that's exactly what makes it harder
for them to leave.
Yeah.
And I'll joke with them sometimes and say,
damn it, you're making my job harder.
And I don't wanna pick on any one group,
but it's like, for example, environmental activists.
(15:38):
And look, I want the earth protected.
I want clean water, clean air.
I think most Americans feel that way,
even those who are right leaning.
Well, if your activism is that,
and we agree on the goal, great,
but then it's let's throw,
let's spray paint stone hands,
or let's throw carrot soup at something.
Well, guess what people are gonna pay attention to?
(15:59):
They're gonna pay attention to the methods.
And not your message.
So they're completely overlooking.
So you've given them a reason to overlook.
So every time I hear cult about mag,
I really caution against that kind of language, Vicki,
because all that does is it strengthens
the already strong bond
that those people have to the community.
(16:20):
And perhaps even worse.
Yeah.
Let's say that the cult language is utilized
in the context of someone who's maybe having doubts.
Well, guess what one of the ways
is to start erasing their doubts,
tell them they're in a cult.
Yeah.
And it's why I really,
it's why I see in the marketplace,
and I'm not gonna name names
(16:41):
because they're not here to defend themselves,
you know, thinking like an attorney here,
but there are people out in the political world,
punitary world, who talk about how mag is a cult
and they portray themselves as experts
because maybe they do have PhDs
or maybe they've got a lot of experience
in clinical psychology
and they're out there talking about mag as a cult.
(17:02):
And I try to tell people with all due respect to them,
I'm not saying don't listen to them,
but I would say really scrutinize
what it is that they're saying,
because number one, they were,
they don't have anyone as a actual client.
No one is one of their patients, number one.
So there's an ethical question.
But if calling maga was a cult,
(17:23):
if, think about it this way,
there have probably been billions of words,
pendants spoken about how maga Americans are Nazis
and evil and misogynists, et cetera.
Well, Vicki, if that worked, nobody would be in maga.
Yeah.
Like the conversation you and I would be having
would not be about leaving maga,
it would have been, oh my God, everybody left.
(17:44):
This is amazing.
You know, well, why did you leave John while I left?
Because someone said that I was a Hitler sympathizer.
Or why did you leave Mary?
Well, they told me I was an Islamophobe.
And I said, oh yeah, I'm an Islamophobe.
I think I'll leave maga.
I said, no one ever.
And they never will.
Yeah, yeah.
And that's why as a community, part of what we do
(18:07):
is that we want to, we want to not just say, but show
that it's okay to say that we're wrong.
That we could have done something
with what we thought were good intentions,
but it turned out that what we were doing
didn't really reflect who we are and our values.
And this argument that no, no, no, people were in maga,
(18:30):
it appealed to them because they are racist deep down,
because they have hate deep down.
I don't really buy that from those people.
Now, again, like we said in our first conversation,
are there some bad people?
Yes.
And there always will be.
But I don't believe that to be the case
of those in the community.
And I do believe that there are many there right now
whose doubts have commenced,
(18:53):
who are starting to question their beliefs.
Can I prove that?
Not really.
Can I offer a number of however many that may be?
I can't, but here's what I know.
I know that there are people who have left.
I know that there are people who have come to us
and are starting to tell us they've got doubts.
So I know that they're out there.
We're gonna just, we want everyone in the United States
(19:15):
to know who Leading MAGA is.
Every American, we want them to know who we are.
And we want them to know that when we say
that our invitation to our community
is open and indefinite, we mean that.
Yeah.
So what do you think is the most important,
like if someone is trying to build a community
(19:37):
like you are, what do you think is something
that is the most important people should hold onto
in order to form a community?
Let me just make sure I understand what you're asking.
Yeah.
And my apologies if I misconstrue.
Oh, no worries.
Are you referring to what some of the necessary steps
(20:00):
are to build?
Yeah.
Okay, okay.
I think, so I'm very big on leadership.
And I believe that one of the traits
of a successful leader that is perhaps most important
than any other tree is that the leader actually cares
(20:21):
about other people.
So in a community, the leadership has to show
that they actually do care about those
who are within the community and the organization,
but those who are outside of it.
So empathy.
And not empathy, because empathy and education
are inextricably linked.
And it's why I know I drive a lot of people mad
(20:46):
with a lot of my social media saying,
look, extending the olive branch doesn't mean
that you are agreeing with the beliefs of someone in Naga.
That is not what it means, but that phobia has developed
because of polarization.
And if someone is showing, forget about saying,
anybody can say I care about other people.
(21:07):
Anybody can say anything.
But people are smart and intuitive,
and they see when someone says you have to care
about people and they're doing it, people recognize that.
And I would like to think from our team
that they do see that it's very clear
that I do believe in that caring about other people
(21:27):
is the bedrock of leading Naga.
If you look at our mission statement,
we talk about empowerment, storytelling,
we talk about reconciliation, we talk about leadership.
Sometimes caring about people can be uncomfortable
in the way that, but it can never be disrespectful.
(21:49):
It can never dehumanize.
And I'm very attuned, Vicky, to dehumanization
because I engaged in it every hour while in Naga.
So I think first and foremost,
it needs to be shown that empathy
for those in the community and outside of.
Now there's something else that I think also
(22:11):
is really important with leadership.
A leader will never ask somebody to do something
that he or she is unwilling to do herself.
And if we're gonna talk about building a community
and I as the founder, okay, to use a good,
again, sports analogy here,
you gotta be the first to arrive and the last to leave.
(22:34):
You have to be.
And if someone doesn't want that, fair, fair enough,
but don't try to lead an organization then.
Don't do that because again, people are instinctual
and they see it, they observe it with their own eyes
and our eyes often don't lie to us.
(22:55):
And so that's an important trait also.
So I really come down to those two.
I know that we can read a book
and say the top five reasons and the top 10,
but I feel like if you're caring about other people
and you're the first one to arrive, last one to leave,
and the third one that I would add in there,
and again, it's about what's observable,
(23:15):
the organization does need to show gradual growth.
Now I don't think that means that you gotta go
from zero to 60 in four seconds,
but people also want to feel like they are part of something
that is building and growing.
(23:35):
As much as I don't wanna make this about winning and losing
because I don't look at leaving MAGA that way,
but people do wanna have a feeling
that they're on the winning side.
There's movement, yeah.
Right, and again, that's part of what has become attractive
about MAGA, I will tell you after 2016 when we won
and we were vindicated and we were validated
(23:58):
and we took on the world and defeated the world,
I remember not sleeping that night
and I remember thinking this is where I'm meant to be.
So this wasn't, see in four years, guys,
this was I'll talk to you in the morning
so we can get our game plan in motion,
(24:19):
right, without sleeping, that's how it was.
So winning, people want to be on that side, right?
I know there's a famous speech by our revere general,
George Patton during World War II, right,
when he said Americans love a winner.
Yeah.
And I do think that that's true because we are a people,
as I mentioned initially, we're people
(24:39):
who are rebellious people.
And while I do think there's too much
of a zero sum mentality in politics,
we want to be on the side that's showing growth.
So we've got empathy, which I'll call empathy in education.
We've got the first two arrive, last to leave
(25:01):
and then we've got the you're showing gradual growth
because people need to see that the marketplace
actually wants what the product is that's being offered
and that's a little bit of a sales
and marketing perspective that I'll add in there.
So those are the three I honestly live and die about.
Yeah, no, these are really great.
(25:22):
I definitely think that your point about the growth is,
that's a really great point because you're absolutely right.
MAGA is very organized in comparison to a lot of
the more liberal or leftist leaning groups.
We're kind of just in fighting all the time.
(25:43):
Whereas I do feel that MAGA is very,
and the right in general is very good at organizing people
and getting people to show up locally
and be active basically in the community.
So that's a really great point actually.
And like the kind of group mentality is so,
I think is so important in building a community
(26:04):
because now you're part of the in-group, right?
Yeah, exactly.
And you may recall on our first conversation
about keeping information out of the MAGA community.
Even if I disagreed privately with something
the president did, it was never publicly said.
Yeah.
And we didn't publicly say it because if we went out
(26:25):
and publicly said it, it weakened the ties
that bound the community.
Yeah.
And I know how people are gonna respond to that.
Oh, Rich, you said a few minutes ago, don't say cult.
Well, it sounds like a cult.
Yeah.
Okay, I understand why someone would say it.
Yeah.
And I'll try to meet in the middle on that point
that some aspects of it may be cult-like,
(26:47):
and it were for me.
Yeah.
But there's no guiding ideology that MAGA relies on.
And I know I've mentioned that point a few times,
but I think it's important to reiterate that
because there is not, when you look at what is generally
defined as a cult, MAGA is not that.
Mm-hmm.
(27:07):
You know, cults are not tens and tens and tens
of millions of people.
Mm-hmm.
You know, and Donald Trump isn't some master propagandist.
That's something else that I see a lot of
among so-called experts is they speak about him
as if he's, you know, someone who actually thinks
all of this through.
No, his skill, his superpower is lying.
(27:31):
Yeah.
And one of the reasons that MAGA can remain organized
is because people are adhering publicly and or privately
to the same lies.
Mm-hmm.
So those same lies that exist in Washington state,
the same right-wing MAGA lies that exist there
(27:52):
are the same that exist in Florida where I am.
Mm-hmm.
The same ones that exist in Los Angeles
are the same ones that exist in a rural town
of 500 people.
Yeah.
The lies are all the same.
And with democratic politics,
there's that old famous saying,
I'm not a member of any organized party, I'm a Democrat.
(28:14):
Yeah.
It's very difficult to lead majorities.
Mm-hmm.
Because majorities have various groups.
Some of those interests can overlap
and sometimes groups have particular interests
that are unique to their group that are valid wants
and valid concerns.
Mm-hmm.
(28:34):
So it makes it very difficult.
And I don't think that the democratic party
up until this election,
I don't think they had accepted that their old mythology
of demographics or destiny wasn't,
(28:55):
that they still believed it was true.
That's how I should phrase this.
Let me rephrase that.
I think for some, they still believe in the mythology
of demographics or destiny.
Yeah.
And this election should retire that once and for all.
And I also think, and I hope,
because I give them the benefit of the doubt,
that democratic party is going to understand
that you cannot combat
(29:15):
mis and disinformation solely online.
Yeah.
And that's why our in-person workshop ideas,
which can be done online as well.
I'm willing to do it in any way we can
about how to identify mis and disinformation
is really crucial to leaving MAGA's work.
Because it's the reason that I essentially
(29:36):
became MAGA and stayed MAGA.
So it directly pertains to my own life and my experiences.
So do you normally have community members,
are they able to talk to each other?
Do you have a Facebook group or something or anything?
(29:57):
Yes, we do.
We communicate.
So right now we've been communicating up until recently.
It's been on Twitter.
There's also some communication on other social media apps,
Blue Sky, while it's starting to now pick up.
Very happy to see that growth.
The new Twitter.
And again, as they're growing,
(30:18):
they're starting to now start to experience
some of those growing pains.
Yeah.
And now we're curious to see how they handle,
because whatever one's opinion of Jack Dorsey,
when he was in charge of Twitter,
Twitter was a far superior public square
than it is right now.
Yeah.
(30:40):
And everyone knows that.
Yes.
Elon Musk knows that.
Because Elon Musk probably knows what he doesn't know.
And he knows that what he's done with Twitter is he's...
Burnt it to the ground.
Essentially annihilated.
He's just annihilated so much of what Dorsey
(31:02):
at the time and his team did well.
Now I stay on Twitter.
A lot of our community members are on Twitter,
but we're expanding that community where we're gonna have
our community groups that are included,
the testimonials, or excuse me,
those who gave testimonials about leaving,
the friends and family.
I am just completely humbled by how many people
when I put a social media post out of,
(31:24):
hey, do you have a friend or relative who's in MAGA
or did you leave or are you having doubts?
And people write to me privately
and they offer to do testimonials unsolicited.
Well, I guess technically there's a solicitation
because I ask them to contact me.
But when they approach me, they say, I wanna do this.
(31:47):
And I'm just, and I think,
I'm a complete stranger to these people.
Yeah.
But that trust has been built
because of empathy and education.
People see us doing the work.
Yeah.
And people see we're growing.
Yeah.
So those three traits, we're right back to them.
Once again, we've, right?
(32:08):
So in a circular way, we've gotten back to them.
And so there is that community that will keep growing
and growing and growing.
And as we do, what they, those in the community know
is that for anyone who wants to take on a larger role
as in a leadership position, it is open to them
because who better to lead, if you think about it,
(32:29):
who better to lead the movement
than those who left in the friends and family?
Yeah.
The friends and family are our allies.
Yeah.
And that's what I, and this again,
is completely accidental, Vicki.
I did not plan for it this way.
No matter where we go in the country,
like I mentioned earlier,
whether it's in Washington state or Florida,
or it's a rural area of 500, or Los Angeles,
(32:51):
everywhere in the country has been affected
by Niagara in some way.
Yeah.
Every square inch has been traumatized
by Donald Trump and his sick offense.
Yeah.
Now that's not good news,
but the opportunity before us is such
that no matter where we are,
people can leave having learned something
if they're willing to, right?
And it's, and the onus is on us.
(33:14):
The onus is on us to teach them.
Mm-hmm.
And not teach them because they lack intelligence
or good character, but the educational part of it,
that's our burden.
Yeah.
But our team is willing to assume that burden
because of this staunch belief that we have
and what it is that we are doing.
And you said that no one looks like
no one's doing it out there.
(33:36):
You know, I thank you for recognizing that.
I, if someone comes along with a better idea
to help people leave, I will cease and desist efforts
and I will immediately align with whomever
that other group or person is.
Mm-hmm.
Because my interest is not in rich getting credit,
it's in getting people to leave MAGA.
(33:57):
That's what I want.
Mm-hmm.
Right, that's our, that's the ultimate end goal.
Even with our allies, friends and family,
when they tell their stories, they all say,
I'm gonna share the video with my son or my mother
or my father.
They all agree to do it.
And I tell them, whatever conflicts you may have had,
I'll tell you this, they're not gonna turn away
from this video.
The fact that someone would make a public appeal
(34:19):
and say, I just want my kids back.
Yeah.
You know, we had a video came out today
of a lady whose sons first succumbed to QAnon
and then they fell prey to this tech bros community.
The Elon, yeah, the Elons.
Right, and now what does that community have in,
(34:41):
what do they have in common with leaving MAGA?
They've got individuals leading the community.
Mm-hmm.
So they have a common place with leaving MAGA
and actually with MAGA itself,
because MAGA, you've got Donald Trump leading the community,
leaving MAGA, you've got our team.
Yes, I as the founder, I'm the public face.
And then you've got the tech bros who are Elon Musk
(35:02):
and Joe Roe, these guys.
So what do you, now who's the leader of the Democratic one?
Great question.
Who's leading, let me ask you,
who's leading that community?
That.
Here's part of the problem.
There are so many who could.
Yes.
They're not, the Democratic party's not want for talent.
Yeah.
But I've got a saying that I taught my kids
(35:24):
and I think this is a pretty good business one.
If I have to ask who's in charge, nobody is.
Yeah.
No one has to, and again, I take no credit,
no one has to ask that at leaving MAGA.
Mm-hmm.
No one has to ask that at MAGA,
no one has to ask that in the tech bros.
Yeah.
Doesn't matter one's opinion of these individuals.
What matters is who's in charge.
(35:44):
Who's in charge of the Democratic party.
There's, they've got to get to a position
where the jockeying for that leadership role,
because right now the closest they have
is probably former president Obama.
Yeah.
I think you're right.
Who hasn't been president in nearly a decade.
Yeah.
I think it's probably.
(36:04):
And I'm not criticizing,
and I'm not criticizing former president Obama.
I have a great deal of admiration for that man.
But this is what happens after a loss.
You lick your wounds and you say, okay,
did see on issues, the majority of the people
are on the side of the Democratic party on issues.
Yeah.
The question is how to translate it
in the zero sum world of electoral politics.
(36:27):
Yeah.
But at the same time, the Democratic party does,
I know that it may not seem that way right now
with what happened,
but they actually do have very good political instincts.
Yeah.
So that's about as much punditry
as I'm gonna offer for our conversation here.
Yeah.
No, that's great point.
I wish I could talk to you about like so many other things.
Because I.
(36:48):
Well, you're welcome to any time
you wanna bounce stuff off me and ask questions,
even if it's not,
even if it's not particularly related to your paper,
I'm here to help.
That's real.
When I say empathy and education, it's what we do.
Yeah.
So you're welcome anytime.
It's never a bother really.
That's awesome.
And I like work with young,
(37:12):
I feel reinvigorated.
Mm-hmm.
Having the useful energy and caring so much deeply
about these issues, right?
And it's not,
and I know young people get such a bad rap.
I don't think that it's that young people don't care.
I think that the ways that they are messaged
(37:33):
and the attempts to appeal to them aren't done
in such a way that their demographic can really grasp onto.
Yeah.
And again, it's not an intelligence problem.
It's a sales and marketing problem.
Mm-hmm.
And this is where the right wing tends to not have a problem
(37:54):
because all of the figures
are essentially selling the same problem.
Mm-hmm.
Now granted, I think the marketplace isn't that big for it,
but everyone's selling this.
So it doesn't matter.
You throw out a name of the right wing.
You give me any two or three names.
And I will tell you that they're selling the same product.
Okay, you don't have to exactly do it at this moment,
but I'm saying you give me two or three names
(38:16):
you think about, and I promise you
that they're selling the identical
or very close to product.
Yeah.
Okay, that's what they're selling.
What's Joe Rogan?
What's Joe Rogan selling?
What's Tucker Carlson selling?
What's Alex Jones selling?
You're all selling the same product,
the evils of liberalism.
Mm-hmm.
But because it's sales and marketing,
we package it a certain way.
(38:38):
Maybe we use certain language.
Maybe we have other surrogates who do it a certain way.
Kevin McCarthy and Mike Johnson in Congress
and Mitch McConnell and Rick Scott
are not calling up Sean Hannity and saying,
hey Sean, I've got a great bullet point for you.
Yeah.
For your show.
It's the other way around.
(38:58):
Those politicians watch what's being said
in the right-wing media info ecosystem
and then just adopt those points
for their own fundraising and their own rhetoric
and everything else that they do
when they're campaigning day to day.
Yeah.
So that's how this, I realized when I left MAGA
(39:21):
that actually Donald Trump did not have
a singular original idea.
Not one.
Yeah.
He just had a bunch of people who trafficked
in the right-wing media world and said,
well, this is what they're talking about
and this is what they're talking about
and this is what they're talking about.
And he said, okay, we're gonna adopt it as our own then.
Mm-hmm.
That's exactly what Elon Musk doesn't have
(39:42):
a singular original idea.
People should have more babies.
You could go back to the earliest days of America
and find them.
Yeah.
So there's nothing, there's no innovation
on the part of Elon Musk's rhetoric.
Yeah.
I don't wanna pick on him.
I'm just saying it cause he's one of the,
he wants to put himself in that position though.
(40:04):
That's, as Hyman Roth told Michael Corleone
in the Godfather Part Two,
it's the business we've chosen.
It's the business I chose.
So I'm willing to take the swings and arrows
on behalf of our team.
Yeah.
No, that's great.
Okay.
So, cause we just wanna make sure I get through everything.
So-
Has this been helpful, can I?
Has this been helpful?
(40:24):
Yes, very much so.
Okay.
I'm very glad that we're doing the second session
because I think the community part building
has been quite the biggest challenge, I think,
in the past of getting people to leave
because me personally,
I started learning a lot more about right-wing ideology
and how it forms and kind of like
(40:47):
the more academic perspective of it through YouTube.
Actually, I watch a lot of YouTubers kind of break down
the method and the ways that, you know,
right-wingers form their community.
And those YouTubers for a very long time
have been kind of at the forefront of de-radicalization.
(41:11):
But because it's a YouTube video,
it's very difficult for people to actually form a community
around like the comment section, right?
So hearing that, you know,
you're facilitating person-to-person communication
and like really getting that human connection,
like that I think is such an important part
of building and maintaining the community.
So like this is like learning how to organize
(41:33):
is what has been missing, I think, for a while
and for to get people to leave or help people leave.
And if people want to get on, for example, Boost Guy,
they have on there called Starter Packs.
And what those Starter Packs are,
are accounts who are part of the Leaving MAGA community.
And it's a variety of people.
It's friends and benefactors,
(41:56):
it's those who have given testimonials,
friends, or excuse me, yeah, friends and family.
It's also others whose work has helped informed
a lot of our approach.
And that's growing.
That's growing virtually every day as we do that.
And I'm just, I do have a great source of pride
(42:18):
that we've been able to, all of us as a team,
we've held true to our values and our principles.
Doesn't mean we're not flexible.
You know, maybe someone who's looking at leadership
might want to throw flexibility in.
I'm okay with that.
There's other important traits beyond
just the three I offered earlier,
but that is growing on a daily basis.
(42:39):
And so the people who are doing the work,
they can see that.
That their efforts are actually bearing fruit.
It's important to really be able to see that.
So do you see people who get involved
who were formerly MAGA,
do you see them go on to further the Leaving MAGA message
and help others get out as well?
(43:01):
Yes, and I also, and I can see even that they're,
and it's not that their approach was incorrect,
it's not that their approach was incorrect before
joining us in Leaving MAGA,
but a lot of the messaging started to evolve a little bit
(43:22):
about the importance of leaving
and the importance of that personal story and experience.
And they've taken on that role
as a way of approaching those in MAGA,
not in a way that condescends,
not in a way that impugns their integrity,
but in such a way of we can relate to why you're there.
(43:43):
It's probably many of the same reasons
we decided to become a MAGA American.
And here are the reasons why we left.
I just posted something today on social media
about how to navigate holiday conversations
with our MAGA friends and family.
(44:04):
And I know that people are gonna read it.
So many, right?
I don't wanna prejudge this.
I'm not judging anyone,
but either they're gonna read it and think,
well, Rich, I think I've tried that already.
And I'll give them the benefit of the doubt
and I'll say, okay, maybe you did,
but here's something that we can show you
has actually had real-world experience in applicability.
(44:27):
And I can see the comments coming in saying,
okay, thank you, I've not tried all of this,
or maybe I tried it in such a way
that I created a little hostility.
I'm gonna try again.
One lady today wrote us a message saying,
I watched your last video
with the lady whose sons fell to QAnon and the tech bros.
You've changed my mind.
I need to do better.
(44:47):
There's a person who wrote this.
And I wanna say something, Vicki, about that point.
And again, I take no credit.
The apogee of influence
is changing people's cognition and behavior.
It is not getting them to send money.
The apex of influence is someone says,
I'm gonna behave differently,
(45:09):
I'm gonna think differently.
When you've reached that point,
and again, why is that important I say this?
Because the people who are devoting their time,
treasure, and talents to leaving MAGA
need to see that people are complete strangers
in the marketplace are actually telling us,
I changed my mind.
So this idea, which I will call a mythology,
(45:31):
that people aren't persuadable,
that people can't change their minds, it's not true.
But because it doesn't happen often,
is again, why I can understand why someone might say,
Rich, it's a quixotic endeavor
to try to get someone to change their mind.
(45:52):
I recognize that our beliefs are to be cemented,
but it doesn't mean they can't change.
Yeah.
Doesn't mean, and we're showing,
we've got living proof that it has happened, Vicki.
You know, perhaps you could start with me on this.
Well, I changed my mind.
Yeah.
Okay, I changed my mind.
We've got others who changed their minds,
and now we've got those who are tracking what we're doing
(46:13):
and following us, because they believe in the movement,
saying, okay, you changed my mind, also.
Yeah.
Because we need to make it so where we champion
and celebrate that we're evolving.
Changing our mind is a sign of personal evolution
and maturation.
It's growth, yeah.
It's growth, right?
(46:33):
And we're back to the theme.
There's a late motif throughout today, growth.
But because changing one's mind has been so stigmatized
as a sign of weakness,
it makes people, even if they want to change their minds,
it gives them incentive to say,
well, if I change my mind, I'll be,
(46:56):
I'm probably gonna be ridiculed for it,
and I don't want that to happen.
No one wants to be ridiculed.
Yeah.
I'll give you this point also
about being on the inside of MAGA,
and this is a point that I'm gonna be mentioning
a little bit more than I have in the past,
is that in MAGA, you never apologize.
(47:16):
Ever.
And I mean ever.
It doesn't mean if you're,
even if you are 100% in the wrong,
you never apologize,
because when you apologize, you empower your enemies.
That's what we believed.
And I have no reason to believe
that that belief is still not pervasive
across the community right now.
So do you now think apologizing
is a really important part of the reconciliation process?
(47:42):
I would defy anyone respectfully
to show me how progress in our country's history
could have been made without people changing their mind
in reconciliation.
How did we evolve,
and I'm not comparing myself, okay,
to any of the movements of the past.
Yeah.
(48:03):
Abolitionists, the Union Army, okay,
President Abraham Lincoln, the women's suffrage,
suffragists, civil and voting rights activists,
and champions.
They could not have made the progress they did
(48:23):
without people changing their minds,
without someone saying,
I used to support slavery, I don't any longer.
I used to think women should not be able to vote,
now I believe that they should be enfranchised.
I used to think that segregation was constitutional,
I don't believe that anymore.
That's how we've made gains in our country's history.
(48:43):
And I do see Leaving MAGA as an important organization
with a really relevant and I hope relatable message
going forward post-election.
I want us to be positioned as one of the leaders
in finding a way to have a reconciliation and a forgiveness.
(49:07):
Yeah.
But I do want to also, if I may, reiterate this point.
There cannot be reconciliation without accountability.
And what that meant for me is that I had to find a way
to forgive myself and I needed to say, I'm sorry.
(49:30):
I was wrong.
Yeah.
I was wrong about pretty much everything.
Yeah.
I was wrong about the way I thought about those closest
to me, and I was wrong about that.
I was wrong about those closest to me.
Mm-hmm.
I don't believe the American people will frown upon that.
I believe they'll embrace it.
Yeah.
(49:51):
I definitely think so too.
I think accountability is a huge part
because it really shows the growth, right?
And it shows the learning.
There we are again.
There we are.
There we are, growth and learning, education and empathy.
I'm liking this.
Vicki, I'm liking what I hear.
And again, I'm not making any comparison to, for example,
(50:12):
the South African reconciliation or peace accords
after Vietnam or even post-bellum America
after the Civil War, not saying we are like those groups
and individuals, however, there are some similar principles
because we are gonna need to figure out a way
to live harmoniously again with those who
(50:38):
are in the MAGA community.
Yeah.
Democracy, and in particular, have it thrive
if tens and tens and tens of millions of Americans
are pitted against each other and estranged from
and alienated from those closest to them.
(51:00):
I'm not talking about being alienated from strangers.
I'm talking about alienation and estrangement
from those closest to them, friends and family.
Like the, so that actually brings me to my next question
like really well, would you say that,
like what is the reconciliation process that you see
when people reconcile with people in like
(51:20):
their personal lives, especially after leaving MAGA?
Like, do you think that friends and family are very willing
to take people back and where do you think forgiveness
like kind of plays a role in all of that?
Sure, and I don't think, thank you.
And a lot of what I'll say, yes, admittedly will come
from my personal experience.
Sure, yeah.
(51:41):
I don't think that forgiveness should be free.
And the reason I don't say that is because yes,
a lot of my interviews and a lot of my media appearances,
I talk about how these MAGA and right wing mythologies,
once they, once the claws get stuck,
(52:02):
they tend to just burrow in, but having said that,
we still also need to remind ourselves
that all of us have agency.
Yeah.
I can say all day long, and I see this online,
there are some people out there who left MAGA
and they say, I was duped because I was in a cult.
(52:23):
Yeah.
I find that to be a lazy take.
Yeah.
Because I think that to ask for forgiveness,
someone has to actually, this is where the I
is really important, because the I, part of this story
is that we have agency and that no one is coerced
(52:45):
or coaxed into their support.
No one forced me into saying what I said.
No one demanded of me that I needed to think
the way I thought, but I know that the American people,
because we are a good people, a good people are always,
(53:06):
will show grace if genuine penitence is sought
by those who are in the MAGA community,
who may have, which if you're in the community,
for those listening who are gonna hear this
who are in the MAGA community, I am saying this
as least judgmental as I can, but being in the community
means aiding and abetting, truly, truly reprehensible
(53:30):
statements and actions.
And that was something that I really had to come
to terms with.
Yeah.
That I had, as part of the self-forgiveness,
I had to sit back and think so much of what I said.
Well, even now, Vicki, looking back on it,
(53:51):
I still feel a degree of shock a little, saying it.
So it can't be free, but I think that reconciliation,
it's complex because we're a complex species,
but I think the process of it is relatively simple.
Yeah.
It's someone coming to a place of saying,
(54:12):
I'm sorry and I was wrong, and I wanna offer to you
an apology, maybe as part of that it could be,
I understand if you may not accept that apology,
but I wanna offer it.
Yeah.
And those who do that, Vicki, they are going to find
overwhelmingly that those to whom they apologize
(54:33):
are going to welcome them back.
Yeah.
Now, it's probably gonna take time
for some of the reconciliation and restoration to occur.
Again, there's a different kind of growth.
Yeah.
The gradual mending of those ties.
(54:53):
But you know what?
I'll take a gradual mending and not at all.
That's great.
Yeah.
No, that's really powerful.
Okay.
We are running up against time here,
but I have one more question.
Sure.
I wanted to get your thoughts on the self-forgiveness part.
(55:13):
Right.
It sounds like a lot of your journey really comes from,
like you started learning more and realizing
your past actions and your past thoughts
and how they have caused harm.
So when you say self-forgiveness and forgiving yourself,
what was that process like?
As in how did you come to realize
(55:35):
what your beliefs were incorrect?
Or yeah, your beliefs were incorrect.
And how did you come across
reconciling that with yourself, I suppose?
Right.
I had to take stock, which was so uncomfortable to do this,
but I deemed it necessary for me to take stock
(55:57):
of everything that I had published,
everything I'd said privately,
which oftentimes was the same language that I used
to describe, for example, Democrats.
I referred to them in my works as malignant.
(56:18):
Yeah.
That kind of language is the nadir of dehumanization.
Yeah.
Okay, the overlooking loss of life.
Yeah.
Because I was concerned about the political ramifications,
such as Charlottesville,
(56:40):
such as Trump managing COVID, such as January 6th,
such as Uvalde.
Uvalde was a time though that I stopped overlooking.
I came to stop overlooking the loss of life.
For me, what made it so deeply personal for me
(57:00):
was that I had deemed it acceptable
that people died and were traumatized
and suffered needlessly.
And I also realized that I had made it acceptable
that avoidable, excuse me,
that politically motivated violence was deemed justified
(57:24):
by Trump and the Republican Party.
And those are really the two reasons I left.
You know, when I think of them as lines of demarcation,
the acceptance of avoidable deaths and suffering
and the defense and justification
of politically motivated violence,
a coup that was partly orchestrated
(57:45):
by the president at the time,
those were two lines of demarcation
I couldn't cross any longer.
And so when I thought about self-forgiveness,
what makes it so, so excruciatingly tumultuous
is that you really have to look at,
you have to look at what you said and thought and did
(58:06):
truly for what they were.
You can't sugarcoat this
when you're talking about forgiving yourself.
You have to say what I said and what I thought
and what I did should never ever have been said or done.
(58:26):
And when I came to a point where I finally said
this was so wrong, there's no argument that could be made
in the remotest that it was correct.
That's eventually what brought me to self-forgiveness.
And as part-
You really unpack like the why, right?
(58:48):
Like the why you believed or fell in and everything.
You have to just, you have to exude all of the emotions
and the trauma and the allowance,
allowing myself to say and think this, to do this.
Because again, we have agency.
But once you exume all of it and you dig it up,
(59:11):
now you're seeing all of it in front of you.
And you can't say, well, maybe that was justified
or maybe that was defensible.
No, you have to say, this doesn't reflect who I am,
but I allowed it to reflect who I was for many years.
And as I went out and wrote my mea culpa, told my story,
(59:34):
retold it over and over and over,
the vast majority of responses, Vicki,
that I've received are from people who said,
and again, I'm not saying this in any kind of
super-silliest way, but from people who have said to me,
you know, Rich, it takes a lot of guts to leave.
(59:54):
And I'm a little embarrassed by that,
not because I don't appreciate it,
but because I think, damn it,
I should have never gotten to that point.
But I do think about two biblical quotes,
which again, will be appropriate for perhaps some Jesuits
who may be listening.
And not just Jesuits, of course,
(01:00:15):
it could be people who are listening
and not just Jesuits, of course,
it could be people of any belief.
And I think actually this is applicable.
One of the reasons I so, so think the Bible,
why I extol it the way I do is because it's,
anyone can read it.
An atheist can gain knowledge.
Oh yeah, for myself.
I have gained quite some knowledge.
(01:00:35):
Yeah, okay, from this good, sagacious book,
you know, there's two quotes from the mind.
One is from the book of Isaiah,
which is to bring good news to the afflicted.
And then there's another one
that has informed our work immensely,
which is the book of Romans, be patient in affliction.
And I think though leaving Maga
is not an overtly religious organization,
(01:00:57):
we welcome all beliefs, someone who could be a devout.
We have a lady who gave a testimonial
who is devout in her faith.
Yeah.
But she knew that her devotion had been perverted.
Yeah.
In Maga.
And then we have those who are not perverted.
And then we have those who are not believers.
So there, you know, there's,
or I should say not so much they're not believers,
(01:01:19):
but religion isn't particularly prevalent in their lives.
Yeah.
To be clear, I should clarify that point.
Then for me, I always joke
that I'm an excommunicated Catholic.
That's, my wife doesn't like that joke.
I always say that if I lived in the 1400s,
I'd be in the excommunication file, you know,
down in the tunnels of the Vatican somewhere.
(01:01:40):
But I think there is certainly,
for those who are inclined to believe in faith,
I think that they will,
I think they will hear some aspects of faith in our work.
And I think for those who aren't inclined to faith,
that they'll still be able, I hope,
to be able to relate to redemption.
(01:02:00):
Like we can redeem ourselves
in ways that aren't necessarily of faith and of religion.
And I'm not saying this in the context of an actual savior
of someone is a believer in salvation in the hereafter,
but here in the here and now,
(01:02:21):
nobody can save another person, Vicki.
Yeah.
Someone has to want to be able to save themselves.
I can't make anyone leave Magna.
Yeah.
But if someone comes to us with those doubts,
we can show them that there's an exit ramp
and that they actually have support from people
(01:02:42):
who have been through it.
And that's so important.
Yeah, the empowerment.
The people, exactly, the people who have been through it
are the ones who have decided to lead and say
that if our stories and our experiences
can help people leave, we are here to help in the long run.
Yeah.
And I'm just so, so honored that people so courageously
(01:03:05):
have decided to take those leadership roles
and tell their stories because it does really require
a lot of intrepidity to go and be that vulnerable publicly.
Yeah, for sure.
That's really powerful.
And I think that you're doing amazing work.
I really hope that your organization-
Don't embarrass me.
Don't embarrass me.
Thank you.
(01:03:25):
No, I honestly, this is really important and crucial work.
And something I think that,
like empathy is a lot of things that people forget,
unfortunately, and you're absolutely,
like I think at the fundamental core,
all humans, all we want is to be seen and heard
by other people.
Yes.
We are able to see and hear other people.
(01:03:46):
That's how we like build connection and build community.
And that point right there is why a lot of people decided
to join the MAGA community because they felt seen
and they finally felt recognized.
Yeah.
It's very true what you said.
Yeah.
Okay, so we are out of, like just-
Do you want to stop the recording?
Sure, yeah.
(01:04:06):
I also wanted to ask if you-
Let me just pull that up.
(00:01):
Okay.
All right.
So, yeah.
Thanks again for doing this.
All right, let me pull up my questions real quick.
Okay.
So I was hoping that today we could discuss
a little bit more about how you go
about building community specifically,
(00:21):
because this is such a new idea
that I believe your organization might be the only one,
at least that I've heard of,
so I'm wondering when you first got started,
what was that process like?
How did you start gathering members?
How did you start getting the word out?
What was the first few months like for you?
(00:45):
A lot of social media engagement,
probably more than I would like to admit,
but whatever my ambivalence about
the political effects of social media,
the fact is that it has been actually quite instrumental
in finding others who left.
And there are some individuals
(01:06):
I really need to personally thank,
so one of whom is former Illinois Congressman
Adam Kinzinger.
He happened to discover my Twitter account.
He retweeted out to his million plus followers at the time.
And next I know my Twitter notifications are nonstop.
So I knew that someone with a large following
(01:29):
had engaged some of my content,
and it turned out to be he.
And then next I know I'm in touch with him,
we're communicating, we're messaging,
we're having Zoom calls.
And he became really an advocate for leaving MAGNA.
So as a result of his belief in what we're doing,
it enabled me to keep creating on social media
(01:49):
and reach a larger and larger audience.
And as I did that, I started to get to know others online
who had said, I know someone who left MAGNA,
speak to this person.
I also expanded my social media reach
going into other places like Instagram and TikTok,
(02:10):
your normal frequented social media apps.
And I started discovering others
who were telling their stories
about having been in MAGNA and left.
And I reached out to all of them and I said,
hey, here's our group, here's our community
for those who left.
We want to ask you to make, offer a testimonial.
(02:33):
And thus far, yes, I wish that these testimonials
were happening, Vicki, sooner and more rapidly
than they have been, but we're up to over a half dozen.
We've got others who are gonna give it, tell their stories.
We've also got friends and family of those
who are in the throw of MAGNA
(02:53):
who are also going to tell their stories.
We've already actually published a few of them
with Midas Touch Network, where we produce videos
in collaboration with those guys there.
Yeah, I saw some of the videos on YouTube.
And the idea of community is one admittedly
that didn't occur to me initially.
My background is as an English major, I was a journalist,
(03:18):
did a lot of feature writing, didn't formally write
professionally in any sense really throughout my many,
many years after graduating college.
Even my time in MAGNA, I had mentioned
in our first conversation, I wrote dozens of stories,
I was never paid for any of them.
Some of the stories I've published
after having left MAGNA did pay, but those are,
(03:41):
technically makes me a professional freelancer,
but it wasn't like I was, I wasn't,
I didn't have this idea of I've got it,
it's gonna be a community that we're gonna create.
So I was really just looking to focus on storytelling.
But the more I would speak to,
and after a few testimonials,
and after having gotten to know others,
(04:03):
and I started to think, okay, what this,
what really MAGNA needs to be,
is it needs to be a place without judgment,
without ostracization.
Every one of us, our homosapien species
yearns for communal existence.
Yeah.
This is not a want, it is a necessity.
(04:24):
And one of the biggest lies that I think we tell ourselves
as a species is when we say,
well, we don't care what other people think about us.
That is not true, Vicki.
Yeah.
Now I'm not suggesting that we try to be everything
to everyone.
That's also an endeavor of futility to do that.
But those who, with whom we've spoken,
(04:46):
when they've told us their stories,
and I've asked them, I said,
so let's say we hadn't met.
Were you aware that there would be a new community?
Did you ever think that there would be a place
for people who left and could say,
hey, I'm someone who wasn't MAGAI supported
for the right reasons, I decided to leave.
(05:06):
And all of them have said, no.
We never really thought there was a place
for people who left.
We never really thought there would be a community.
We just told our stories and we thought that that was it.
And now I'm proud of the fact that it's not,
I don't take credit for this,
but our team has developed a community
where people are now actually leading.
So we're still telling stories, but we are,
(05:28):
I feel like our organization is at the beginning.
No, let me rephrase.
It's at the end of the beginning.
So it's that phase one.
So we're at the end of the beginning of leaving MAGA,
which is more storytelling, expanded reach,
more testimonials from those who left
and more conversations with friends and family.
(05:49):
So I'm really, I consider myself as lucky a human being
as any when it comes into the topic of having left MAGA
because if not for so many of the key people around me
and around this organization,
we would not be in a position we're in right now.
Yeah, it sounds like the community that you've built
(06:12):
is really helping to support
the wider community as a whole.
And I think you should give yourself
a little bit more credit.
If you didn't come up with the idea
and try to get the word out and start the organization,
there wouldn't be a community in the first place.
So-
Well, thank you for saying that.
Well, I am personally, in addition to my gratitude
(06:37):
and in addition to feeling quite lucky,
I do feel like those who are gonna hear this,
they should know that I put in full-time hours
into this organization,
even though I'm not paid from a full-time basis.
We're gonna go through fundraising,
which I'm really dreading having to do this.
(06:58):
Right, and I small business success.
So it's not that I ever had reservations in the past
about asking for money.
It's different in a nonprofit though,
because everyone is inundated with requests for money.
Yeah.
We just went through this entire election cycle
where we were bombarded dozens of times a day.
Yes.
But I know that we're gonna need to go through that.
(07:19):
And I'm confident in what it is
that we're offering in our work
that I think we're gonna have fundraising success.
And again, that's the credit to our team,
but I am putting in full-time hours on almost no pay,
aside from some donating.
We've had some sizable benefactors
(07:39):
who have actually, who have decided to donate,
but we're gonna start on that path
because we just need to do it.
As much as we wish it weren't the case,
we need capital to operate and expand.
Yeah, for sure.
So I think last time you mentioned that
you guys are trying to set up in-person community
(08:00):
in every single state.
As of right now,
is most of your community building online still?
Yes, it is online.
Our team and those who have given testimonials,
we are scattered across the country.
We're in every time zone right now
between our editorial, our creative,
(08:21):
those who manage our website, even the testimonials,
those individuals are all across the country.
What I envision actually for the in-person events,
eventually is what those are gonna be is,
you may recall in our first conversation,
I had mentioned a dis and misinformation literacy workshop
(08:44):
that we're putting together.
And the reason that that issue was so important
is because mis and disinformation not only
contributed to my unapologetic support for Trump and MAGA,
it's what kept me in.
And then once I started to figure out
that my beliefs were actually incorrect,
(09:06):
or maybe were accurate to some extent,
but were lacking nuance or context
or just too black and white,
I started to figure out,
well, relying solely on one ideological type of media
is gonna keep someone stuck in that silo.
(09:28):
It's not a good comparison,
but I've always aspired to wanna go to law school actually.
After our conversations, you might say, don't do it.
No, Rich is a better place.
And I'm not suggesting that I'm gonna resign
from leaving MAGA and go to law school,
but I've always had an ambition to do it.
And I think about one of the traits
(09:50):
that makes for a really good attorney
is that you put yourself on the,
you try to think like the opposing counsel.
You wanna figure out the strategy, yeah.
Exactly, exactly.
And I can imagine that's particularly important
in let's say criminal law,
or maybe high profile class action lawsuits as an example,
(10:12):
you try to put yourself in that position
to think about what the opposing legal team,
where they might come with us, right?
Because everyone's got the same evidence, right?
By law, you have to all be working with the same evidence
that's been approved by a judge, right?
Yeah, okay, right.
Until you discover it's not the case
and then have to be quick on your feet,
(10:33):
because that's why I know lawyers get a bad rap,
but I do respect the preparation
that goes into cases like this.
I do respect the preparation that goes into casework,
even though I've never been in that world.
I can appreciate just how hard it is to prepare and prep.
With information, there are some overarching principles,
(10:57):
because when I started to diversify my news
and information sources,
I now started to have to think about,
well, those who are providing different information,
what are they doing in such a way that
they've done their preparation
and they've done their fact checking.
And it doesn't mean, Vicki,
that even the most accurate media is 100% correct.
(11:21):
We know that.
But when you're in the info silo,
that's one of the reasons that keeps people
in the MAGA community, because there is this question,
it's asked exasperatedly by a lot of people
who have never been in MAGA and have never scored a trump.
(11:41):
Rich, I don't understand after XYZ and ABC,
why do people still stay?
And I know that this is probably an unsatisfactory answer
as it pertains to the communal existence,
but everybody has a particular line of demarcation.
And I really do believe that for many in MAGA,
(12:03):
there's gonna come a point where
they're gonna cross a Rubicon because of one lie too many,
or because of one unnecessary death too many,
or because of one avoidable illness too many.
And everyone, we have to look at people as individuals,
(12:23):
even when they're in a communal existence.
Because for me, I had to go through January 6th
and I had to go through anti-vaccine sponsorship
by Ron DeSantis, and then I had to go through Yuvalde.
So I went through all of this.
And for those who are just trying to ask,
they're just so frustrated with,
(12:45):
I don't understand why people stay.
What you and I are talking about is I think really key,
because I think when people think of MAGA less as a cult,
less as a hate group, and more as like something
that we all yearn for, which is community,
it starts to make a little more logical sense.
Now, do I think that MAGA is a toxic community?
(13:07):
Yes, it's also why it's important to separate
the people from the community.
Because as I'd mentioned in our initial conversation,
there's no ideology.
The closest to ideology in MAGA
is a belief of the evils of liberalism.
And that gets manifested in a lot of the rhetoric
(13:29):
and a lot of the invective that is lobbed
at democratic figures and anti-Trump Republicans
and conservatives.
Yeah.
I think that's absolutely a great point
is the sense of community.
I do think that people who,
(13:50):
and it also comes down to the double downing,
I think of the mindset of some people in MAGA are all right.
Like you have the entire world telling you that you're wrong
and that you're a bad person for believing what you believe.
And you're like, well, I have to prove them wrong then.
I got a double, triple, quadruple down.
(14:10):
That's right.
Because if I admit I'm wrong,
then my entire existence has been right.
Like...
Well, I had to figure out something to that point.
And I think this is one of the,
I don't know if it's an inherent flaw
or it's just something we,
I don't believe it is because I think we can control it.
One of the, something about activism
(14:34):
that just drives me crazy
is that I look at the way that certain activism is deployed
and there can be broad concurrence on the goal.
But it's the methodology
that I'm also really paying close attention to.
And in anti-MAGA activism,
(14:56):
if I were to go around and ask everybody
who's got friends and family in MAGA,
hey, do you want your friends and family to leave MAGA?
Simple question, not a gotcha.
Oh yeah, absolutely, I want them to leave.
Okay, great.
So we have this broad agreement on the goal.
Yeah.
But I'll ask them,
well, but what's your standard operating procedure for this?
(15:17):
Yeah.
What are your tactics?
Well, my tactics are tough love
and I got to tell them they're in a cult
and I need to tell them.
And I said, well, that's exactly what makes it harder
for them to leave.
Yeah.
And I'll joke with them sometimes and say,
damn it, you're making my job harder.
And I don't wanna pick on any one group,
but it's like, for example, environmental activists.
(15:38):
And look, I want the earth protected.
I want clean water, clean air.
I think most Americans feel that way,
even those who are right leaning.
Well, if your activism is that,
and we agree on the goal, great,
but then it's let's throw,
let's spray paint stone hands,
or let's throw carrot soup at something.
Well, guess what people are gonna pay attention to?
(15:59):
They're gonna pay attention to the methods.
And not your message.
So they're completely overlooking.
So you've given them a reason to overlook.
So every time I hear cult about mag,
I really caution against that kind of language, Vicki,
because all that does is it strengthens
the already strong bond
that those people have to the community.
(16:20):
And perhaps even worse.
Yeah.
Let's say that the cult language is utilized
in the context of someone who's maybe having doubts.
Well, guess what one of the ways
is to start erasing their doubts,
tell them they're in a cult.
Yeah.
And it's why I really,
it's why I see in the marketplace,
and I'm not gonna name names
(16:41):
because they're not here to defend themselves,
you know, thinking like an attorney here,
but there are people out in the political world,
punitary world, who talk about how mag is a cult
and they portray themselves as experts
because maybe they do have PhDs
or maybe they've got a lot of experience
in clinical psychology
and they're out there talking about mag as a cult.
(17:02):
And I try to tell people with all due respect to them,
I'm not saying don't listen to them,
but I would say really scrutinize
what it is that they're saying,
because number one, they were,
they don't have anyone as a actual client.
No one is one of their patients, number one.
So there's an ethical question.
But if calling maga was a cult,
(17:23):
if, think about it this way,
there have probably been billions of words,
pendants spoken about how maga Americans are Nazis
and evil and misogynists, et cetera.
Well, Vicki, if that worked, nobody would be in maga.
Yeah.
Like the conversation you and I would be having
would not be about leaving maga,
it would have been, oh my God, everybody left.
(17:44):
This is amazing.
You know, well, why did you leave John while I left?
Because someone said that I was a Hitler sympathizer.
Or why did you leave Mary?
Well, they told me I was an Islamophobe.
And I said, oh yeah, I'm an Islamophobe.
I think I'll leave maga.
I said, no one ever.
And they never will.
Yeah, yeah.
And that's why as a community, part of what we do
(18:07):
is that we want to, we want to not just say, but show
that it's okay to say that we're wrong.
That we could have done something
with what we thought were good intentions,
but it turned out that what we were doing
didn't really reflect who we are and our values.
And this argument that no, no, no, people were in maga,
(18:30):
it appealed to them because they are racist deep down,
because they have hate deep down.
I don't really buy that from those people.
Now, again, like we said in our first conversation,
are there some bad people?
Yes.
And there always will be.
But I don't believe that to be the case
of those in the community.
And I do believe that there are many there right now
whose doubts have commenced,
(18:53):
who are starting to question their beliefs.
Can I prove that?
Not really.
Can I offer a number of however many that may be?
I can't, but here's what I know.
I know that there are people who have left.
I know that there are people who have come to us
and are starting to tell us they've got doubts.
So I know that they're out there.
We're gonna just, we want everyone in the United States
(19:15):
to know who Leading MAGA is.
Every American, we want them to know who we are.
And we want them to know that when we say
that our invitation to our community
is open and indefinite, we mean that.
Yeah.
So what do you think is the most important,
like if someone is trying to build a community
(19:37):
like you are, what do you think is something
that is the most important people should hold onto
in order to form a community?
Let me just make sure I understand what you're asking.
Yeah.
And my apologies if I misconstrue.
Oh, no worries.
Are you referring to what some of the necessary steps
(20:00):
are to build?
Yeah.
Okay, okay.
I think, so I'm very big on leadership.
And I believe that one of the traits
of a successful leader that is perhaps most important
than any other tree is that the leader actually cares
(20:21):
about other people.
So in a community, the leadership has to show
that they actually do care about those
who are within the community and the organization,
but those who are outside of it.
So empathy.
And not empathy, because empathy and education
are inextricably linked.
And it's why I know I drive a lot of people mad
(20:46):
with a lot of my social media saying,
look, extending the olive branch doesn't mean
that you are agreeing with the beliefs of someone in Naga.
That is not what it means, but that phobia has developed
because of polarization.
And if someone is showing, forget about saying,
anybody can say I care about other people.
(21:07):
Anybody can say anything.
But people are smart and intuitive,
and they see when someone says you have to care
about people and they're doing it, people recognize that.
And I would like to think from our team
that they do see that it's very clear
that I do believe in that caring about other people
(21:27):
is the bedrock of leading Naga.
If you look at our mission statement,
we talk about empowerment, storytelling,
we talk about reconciliation, we talk about leadership.
Sometimes caring about people can be uncomfortable
in the way that, but it can never be disrespectful.
(21:49):
It can never dehumanize.
And I'm very attuned, Vicky, to dehumanization
because I engaged in it every hour while in Naga.
So I think first and foremost,
it needs to be shown that empathy
for those in the community and outside of.
Now there's something else that I think also
(22:11):
is really important with leadership.
A leader will never ask somebody to do something
that he or she is unwilling to do herself.
And if we're gonna talk about building a community
and I as the founder, okay, to use a good,
again, sports analogy here,
you gotta be the first to arrive and the last to leave.
(22:34):
You have to be.
And if someone doesn't want that, fair, fair enough,
but don't try to lead an organization then.
Don't do that because again, people are instinctual
and they see it, they observe it with their own eyes
and our eyes often don't lie to us.
(22:55):
And so that's an important trait also.
So I really come down to those two.
I know that we can read a book
and say the top five reasons and the top 10,
but I feel like if you're caring about other people
and you're the first one to arrive, last one to leave,
and the third one that I would add in there,
and again, it's about what's observable,
(23:15):
the organization does need to show gradual growth.
Now I don't think that means that you gotta go
from zero to 60 in four seconds,
but people also want to feel like they are part of something
that is building and growing.
(23:35):
As much as I don't wanna make this about winning and losing
because I don't look at leaving MAGA that way,
but people do wanna have a feeling
that they're on the winning side.
There's movement, yeah.
Right, and again, that's part of what has become attractive
about MAGA, I will tell you after 2016 when we won
and we were vindicated and we were validated
(23:58):
and we took on the world and defeated the world,
I remember not sleeping that night
and I remember thinking this is where I'm meant to be.
So this wasn't, see in four years, guys,
this was I'll talk to you in the morning
so we can get our game plan in motion,
(24:19):
right, without sleeping, that's how it was.
So winning, people want to be on that side, right?
I know there's a famous speech by our revere general,
George Patton during World War II, right,
when he said Americans love a winner.
Yeah.
And I do think that that's true because we are a people,
as I mentioned initially, we're people
(24:39):
who are rebellious people.
And while I do think there's too much
of a zero sum mentality in politics,
we want to be on the side that's showing growth.
So we've got empathy, which I'll call empathy in education.
We've got the first two arrive, last to leave
(25:01):
and then we've got the you're showing gradual growth
because people need to see that the marketplace
actually wants what the product is that's being offered
and that's a little bit of a sales
and marketing perspective that I'll add in there.
So those are the three I honestly live and die about.
Yeah, no, these are really great.
(25:22):
I definitely think that your point about the growth is,
that's a really great point because you're absolutely right.
MAGA is very organized in comparison to a lot of
the more liberal or leftist leaning groups.
We're kind of just in fighting all the time.
(25:43):
Whereas I do feel that MAGA is very,
and the right in general is very good at organizing people
and getting people to show up locally
and be active basically in the community.
So that's a really great point actually.
And like the kind of group mentality is so,
I think is so important in building a community
(26:04):
because now you're part of the in-group, right?
Yeah, exactly.
And you may recall on our first conversation
about keeping information out of the MAGA community.
Even if I disagreed privately with something
the president did, it was never publicly said.
Yeah.
And we didn't publicly say it because if we went out
(26:25):
and publicly said it, it weakened the ties
that bound the community.
Yeah.
And I know how people are gonna respond to that.
Oh, Rich, you said a few minutes ago, don't say cult.
Well, it sounds like a cult.
Yeah.
Okay, I understand why someone would say it.
Yeah.
And I'll try to meet in the middle on that point
that some aspects of it may be cult-like,
(26:47):
and it were for me.
Yeah.
But there's no guiding ideology that MAGA relies on.
And I know I've mentioned that point a few times,
but I think it's important to reiterate that
because there is not, when you look at what is generally
defined as a cult, MAGA is not that.
Mm-hmm.
(27:07):
You know, cults are not tens and tens and tens
of millions of people.
Mm-hmm.
You know, and Donald Trump isn't some master propagandist.
That's something else that I see a lot of
among so-called experts is they speak about him
as if he's, you know, someone who actually thinks
all of this through.
No, his skill, his superpower is lying.
(27:31):
Yeah.
And one of the reasons that MAGA can remain organized
is because people are adhering publicly and or privately
to the same lies.
Mm-hmm.
So those same lies that exist in Washington state,
the same right-wing MAGA lies that exist there
(27:52):
are the same that exist in Florida where I am.
Mm-hmm.
The same ones that exist in Los Angeles
are the same ones that exist in a rural town
of 500 people.
Yeah.
The lies are all the same.
And with democratic politics,
there's that old famous saying,
I'm not a member of any organized party, I'm a Democrat.
(28:14):
Yeah.
It's very difficult to lead majorities.
Mm-hmm.
Because majorities have various groups.
Some of those interests can overlap
and sometimes groups have particular interests
that are unique to their group that are valid wants
and valid concerns.
Mm-hmm.
(28:34):
So it makes it very difficult.
And I don't think that the democratic party
up until this election,
I don't think they had accepted that their old mythology
of demographics or destiny wasn't,
(28:55):
that they still believed it was true.
That's how I should phrase this.
Let me rephrase that.
I think for some, they still believe in the mythology
of demographics or destiny.
Yeah.
And this election should retire that once and for all.
And I also think, and I hope,
because I give them the benefit of the doubt,
that democratic party is going to understand
that you cannot combat
(29:15):
mis and disinformation solely online.
Yeah.
And that's why our in-person workshop ideas,
which can be done online as well.
I'm willing to do it in any way we can
about how to identify mis and disinformation
is really crucial to leaving MAGA's work.
Because it's the reason that I essentially
(29:36):
became MAGA and stayed MAGA.
So it directly pertains to my own life and my experiences.
So do you normally have community members,
are they able to talk to each other?
Do you have a Facebook group or something or anything?
(29:57):
Yes, we do.
We communicate.
So right now we've been communicating up until recently.
It's been on Twitter.
There's also some communication on other social media apps,
Blue Sky, while it's starting to now pick up.
Very happy to see that growth.
The new Twitter.
And again, as they're growing,
(30:18):
they're starting to now start to experience
some of those growing pains.
Yeah.
And now we're curious to see how they handle,
because whatever one's opinion of Jack Dorsey,
when he was in charge of Twitter,
Twitter was a far superior public square
than it is right now.
Yeah.
(30:40):
And everyone knows that.
Yes.
Elon Musk knows that.
Because Elon Musk probably knows what he doesn't know.
And he knows that what he's done with Twitter is he's...
Burnt it to the ground.
Essentially annihilated.
He's just annihilated so much of what Dorsey
(31:02):
at the time and his team did well.
Now I stay on Twitter.
A lot of our community members are on Twitter,
but we're expanding that community where we're gonna have
our community groups that are included,
the testimonials, or excuse me,
those who gave testimonials about leaving,
the friends and family.
I am just completely humbled by how many people
when I put a social media post out of,
(31:24):
hey, do you have a friend or relative who's in MAGA
or did you leave or are you having doubts?
And people write to me privately
and they offer to do testimonials unsolicited.
Well, I guess technically there's a solicitation
because I ask them to contact me.
But when they approach me, they say, I wanna do this.
(31:47):
And I'm just, and I think,
I'm a complete stranger to these people.
Yeah.
But that trust has been built
because of empathy and education.
People see us doing the work.
Yeah.
And people see we're growing.
Yeah.
So those three traits, we're right back to them.
Once again, we've, right?
(32:08):
So in a circular way, we've gotten back to them.
And so there is that community that will keep growing
and growing and growing.
And as we do, what they, those in the community know
is that for anyone who wants to take on a larger role
as in a leadership position, it is open to them
because who better to lead, if you think about it,
(32:29):
who better to lead the movement
than those who left in the friends and family?
Yeah.
The friends and family are our allies.
Yeah.
And that's what I, and this again,
is completely accidental, Vicki.
I did not plan for it this way.
No matter where we go in the country,
like I mentioned earlier,
whether it's in Washington state or Florida,
or it's a rural area of 500, or Los Angeles,
(32:51):
everywhere in the country has been affected
by Niagara in some way.
Yeah.
Every square inch has been traumatized
by Donald Trump and his sick offense.
Yeah.
Now that's not good news,
but the opportunity before us is such
that no matter where we are,
people can leave having learned something
if they're willing to, right?
And it's, and the onus is on us.
(33:14):
The onus is on us to teach them.
Mm-hmm.
And not teach them because they lack intelligence
or good character, but the educational part of it,
that's our burden.
Yeah.
But our team is willing to assume that burden
because of this staunch belief that we have
and what it is that we are doing.
And you said that no one looks like
no one's doing it out there.
(33:36):
You know, I thank you for recognizing that.
I, if someone comes along with a better idea
to help people leave, I will cease and desist efforts
and I will immediately align with whomever
that other group or person is.
Mm-hmm.
Because my interest is not in rich getting credit,
it's in getting people to leave MAGA.
(33:57):
That's what I want.
Mm-hmm.
Right, that's our, that's the ultimate end goal.
Even with our allies, friends and family,
when they tell their stories, they all say,
I'm gonna share the video with my son or my mother
or my father.
They all agree to do it.
And I tell them, whatever conflicts you may have had,
I'll tell you this, they're not gonna turn away
from this video.
The fact that someone would make a public appeal
(34:19):
and say, I just want my kids back.
Yeah.
You know, we had a video came out today
of a lady whose sons first succumbed to QAnon
and then they fell prey to this tech bros community.
The Elon, yeah, the Elons.
Right, and now what does that community have in,
(34:41):
what do they have in common with leaving MAGA?
They've got individuals leading the community.
Mm-hmm.
So they have a common place with leaving MAGA
and actually with MAGA itself,
because MAGA, you've got Donald Trump leading the community,
leaving MAGA, you've got our team.
Yes, I as the founder, I'm the public face.
And then you've got the tech bros who are Elon Musk
(35:02):
and Joe Roe, these guys.
So what do you, now who's the leader of the Democratic one?
Great question.
Who's leading, let me ask you,
who's leading that community?
That.
Here's part of the problem.
There are so many who could.
Yes.
They're not, the Democratic party's not want for talent.
Yeah.
But I've got a saying that I taught my kids
(35:24):
and I think this is a pretty good business one.
If I have to ask who's in charge, nobody is.
Yeah.
No one has to, and again, I take no credit,
no one has to ask that at leaving MAGA.
Mm-hmm.
No one has to ask that at MAGA,
no one has to ask that in the tech bros.
Yeah.
Doesn't matter one's opinion of these individuals.
What matters is who's in charge.
(35:44):
Who's in charge of the Democratic party.
There's, they've got to get to a position
where the jockeying for that leadership role,
because right now the closest they have
is probably former president Obama.
Yeah.
I think you're right.
Who hasn't been president in nearly a decade.
Yeah.
I think it's probably.
(36:04):
And I'm not criticizing,
and I'm not criticizing former president Obama.
I have a great deal of admiration for that man.
But this is what happens after a loss.
You lick your wounds and you say, okay,
did see on issues, the majority of the people
are on the side of the Democratic party on issues.
Yeah.
The question is how to translate it
in the zero sum world of electoral politics.
(36:27):
Yeah.
But at the same time, the Democratic party does,
I know that it may not seem that way right now
with what happened,
but they actually do have very good political instincts.
Yeah.
So that's about as much punditry
as I'm gonna offer for our conversation here.
Yeah.
No, that's great point.
I wish I could talk to you about like so many other things.
Because I.
(36:48):
Well, you're welcome to any time
you wanna bounce stuff off me and ask questions,
even if it's not,
even if it's not particularly related to your paper,
I'm here to help.
That's real.
When I say empathy and education, it's what we do.
Yeah.
So you're welcome anytime.
It's never a bother really.
That's awesome.
And I like work with young,
(37:12):
I feel reinvigorated.
Mm-hmm.
Having the useful energy and caring so much deeply
about these issues, right?
And it's not,
and I know young people get such a bad rap.
I don't think that it's that young people don't care.
I think that the ways that they are messaged
(37:33):
and the attempts to appeal to them aren't done
in such a way that their demographic can really grasp onto.
Yeah.
And again, it's not an intelligence problem.
It's a sales and marketing problem.
Mm-hmm.
And this is where the right wing tends to not have a problem
(37:54):
because all of the figures
are essentially selling the same problem.
Mm-hmm.
Now granted, I think the marketplace isn't that big for it,
but everyone's selling this.
So it doesn't matter.
You throw out a name of the right wing.
You give me any two or three names.
And I will tell you that they're selling the same product.
Okay, you don't have to exactly do it at this moment,
but I'm saying you give me two or three names
(38:16):
you think about, and I promise you
that they're selling the identical
or very close to product.
Yeah.
Okay, that's what they're selling.
What's Joe Rogan?
What's Joe Rogan selling?
What's Tucker Carlson selling?
What's Alex Jones selling?
You're all selling the same product,
the evils of liberalism.
Mm-hmm.
But because it's sales and marketing,
we package it a certain way.
(38:38):
Maybe we use certain language.
Maybe we have other surrogates who do it a certain way.
Kevin McCarthy and Mike Johnson in Congress
and Mitch McConnell and Rick Scott
are not calling up Sean Hannity and saying,
hey Sean, I've got a great bullet point for you.
Yeah.
For your show.
It's the other way around.
(38:58):
Those politicians watch what's being said
in the right-wing media info ecosystem
and then just adopt those points
for their own fundraising and their own rhetoric
and everything else that they do
when they're campaigning day to day.
Yeah.
So that's how this, I realized when I left MAGA
(39:21):
that actually Donald Trump did not have
a singular original idea.
Not one.
Yeah.
He just had a bunch of people who trafficked
in the right-wing media world and said,
well, this is what they're talking about
and this is what they're talking about
and this is what they're talking about.
And he said, okay, we're gonna adopt it as our own then.
Mm-hmm.
That's exactly what Elon Musk doesn't have
(39:42):
a singular original idea.
People should have more babies.
You could go back to the earliest days of America
and find them.
Yeah.
So there's nothing, there's no innovation
on the part of Elon Musk's rhetoric.
Yeah.
I don't wanna pick on him.
I'm just saying it cause he's one of the,
he wants to put himself in that position though.
(40:04):
That's, as Hyman Roth told Michael Corleone
in the Godfather Part Two,
it's the business we've chosen.
It's the business I chose.
So I'm willing to take the swings and arrows
on behalf of our team.
Yeah.
No, that's great.
Okay.
So, cause we just wanna make sure I get through everything.
So-
Has this been helpful, can I?
Has this been helpful?
(40:24):
Yes, very much so.
Okay.
I'm very glad that we're doing the second session
because I think the community part building
has been quite the biggest challenge, I think,
in the past of getting people to leave
because me personally,
I started learning a lot more about right-wing ideology
and how it forms and kind of like
(40:47):
the more academic perspective of it through YouTube.
Actually, I watch a lot of YouTubers kind of break down
the method and the ways that, you know,
right-wingers form their community.
And those YouTubers for a very long time
have been kind of at the forefront of de-radicalization.
(41:11):
But because it's a YouTube video,
it's very difficult for people to actually form a community
around like the comment section, right?
So hearing that, you know,
you're facilitating person-to-person communication
and like really getting that human connection,
like that I think is such an important part
of building and maintaining the community.
So like this is like learning how to organize
(41:33):
is what has been missing, I think, for a while
and for to get people to leave or help people leave.
And if people want to get on, for example, Boost Guy,
they have on there called Starter Packs.
And what those Starter Packs are,
are accounts who are part of the Leaving MAGA community.
And it's a variety of people.
It's friends and benefactors,
(41:56):
it's those who have given testimonials,
friends, or excuse me, yeah, friends and family.
It's also others whose work has helped informed
a lot of our approach.
And that's growing.
That's growing virtually every day as we do that.
And I'm just, I do have a great source of pride
(42:18):
that we've been able to, all of us as a team,
we've held true to our values and our principles.
Doesn't mean we're not flexible.
You know, maybe someone who's looking at leadership
might want to throw flexibility in.
I'm okay with that.
There's other important traits beyond
just the three I offered earlier,
but that is growing on a daily basis.
(42:39):
And so the people who are doing the work,
they can see that.
That their efforts are actually bearing fruit.
It's important to really be able to see that.
So do you see people who get involved
who were formerly MAGA,
do you see them go on to further the Leaving MAGA message
and help others get out as well?
(43:01):
Yes, and I also, and I can see even that they're,
and it's not that their approach was incorrect,
it's not that their approach was incorrect before
joining us in Leaving MAGA,
but a lot of the messaging started to evolve a little bit
(43:22):
about the importance of leaving
and the importance of that personal story and experience.
And they've taken on that role
as a way of approaching those in MAGA,
not in a way that condescends,
not in a way that impugns their integrity,
but in such a way of we can relate to why you're there.
(43:43):
It's probably many of the same reasons
we decided to become a MAGA American.
And here are the reasons why we left.
I just posted something today on social media
about how to navigate holiday conversations
with our MAGA friends and family.
(44:04):
And I know that people are gonna read it.
So many, right?
I don't wanna prejudge this.
I'm not judging anyone,
but either they're gonna read it and think,
well, Rich, I think I've tried that already.
And I'll give them the benefit of the doubt
and I'll say, okay, maybe you did,
but here's something that we can show you
has actually had real-world experience in applicability.
(44:27):
And I can see the comments coming in saying,
okay, thank you, I've not tried all of this,
or maybe I tried it in such a way
that I created a little hostility.
I'm gonna try again.
One lady today wrote us a message saying,
I watched your last video
with the lady whose sons fell to QAnon and the tech bros.
You've changed my mind.
I need to do better.
(44:47):
There's a person who wrote this.
And I wanna say something, Vicki, about that point.
And again, I take no credit.
The apogee of influence
is changing people's cognition and behavior.
It is not getting them to send money.
The apex of influence is someone says,
I'm gonna behave differently,
(45:09):
I'm gonna think differently.
When you've reached that point,
and again, why is that important I say this?
Because the people who are devoting their time,
treasure, and talents to leaving MAGA
need to see that people are complete strangers
in the marketplace are actually telling us,
I changed my mind.
So this idea, which I will call a mythology,
(45:31):
that people aren't persuadable,
that people can't change their minds, it's not true.
But because it doesn't happen often,
is again, why I can understand why someone might say,
Rich, it's a quixotic endeavor
to try to get someone to change their mind.
(45:52):
I recognize that our beliefs are to be cemented,
but it doesn't mean they can't change.
Yeah.
Doesn't mean, and we're showing,
we've got living proof that it has happened, Vicki.
You know, perhaps you could start with me on this.
Well, I changed my mind.
Yeah.
Okay, I changed my mind.
We've got others who changed their minds,
and now we've got those who are tracking what we're doing
(46:13):
and following us, because they believe in the movement,
saying, okay, you changed my mind, also.
Yeah.
Because we need to make it so where we champion
and celebrate that we're evolving.
Changing our mind is a sign of personal evolution
and maturation.
It's growth, yeah.
It's growth, right?
(46:33):
And we're back to the theme.
There's a late motif throughout today, growth.
But because changing one's mind has been so stigmatized
as a sign of weakness,
it makes people, even if they want to change their minds,
it gives them incentive to say,
well, if I change my mind, I'll be,
(46:56):
I'm probably gonna be ridiculed for it,
and I don't want that to happen.
No one wants to be ridiculed.
Yeah.
I'll give you this point also
about being on the inside of MAGA,
and this is a point that I'm gonna be mentioning
a little bit more than I have in the past,
is that in MAGA, you never apologize.
(47:16):
Ever.
And I mean ever.
It doesn't mean if you're,
even if you are 100% in the wrong,
you never apologize,
because when you apologize, you empower your enemies.
That's what we believed.
And I have no reason to believe
that that belief is still not pervasive
across the community right now.
So do you now think apologizing
is a really important part of the reconciliation process?
(47:42):
I would defy anyone respectfully
to show me how progress in our country's history
could have been made without people changing their mind
in reconciliation.
How did we evolve,
and I'm not comparing myself, okay,
to any of the movements of the past.
Yeah.
(48:03):
Abolitionists, the Union Army, okay,
President Abraham Lincoln, the women's suffrage,
suffragists, civil and voting rights activists,
and champions.
They could not have made the progress they did
(48:23):
without people changing their minds,
without someone saying,
I used to support slavery, I don't any longer.
I used to think women should not be able to vote,
now I believe that they should be enfranchised.
I used to think that segregation was constitutional,
I don't believe that anymore.
That's how we've made gains in our country's history.
(48:43):
And I do see Leaving MAGA as an important organization
with a really relevant and I hope relatable message
going forward post-election.
I want us to be positioned as one of the leaders
in finding a way to have a reconciliation and a forgiveness.
(49:07):
Yeah.
But I do want to also, if I may, reiterate this point.
There cannot be reconciliation without accountability.
And what that meant for me is that I had to find a way
to forgive myself and I needed to say, I'm sorry.
(49:30):
I was wrong.
Yeah.
I was wrong about pretty much everything.
Yeah.
I was wrong about the way I thought about those closest
to me, and I was wrong about that.
I was wrong about those closest to me.
Mm-hmm.
I don't believe the American people will frown upon that.
I believe they'll embrace it.
Yeah.
(49:51):
I definitely think so too.
I think accountability is a huge part
because it really shows the growth, right?
And it shows the learning.
There we are again.
There we are.
There we are, growth and learning, education and empathy.
I'm liking this.
Vicki, I'm liking what I hear.
And again, I'm not making any comparison to, for example,
(50:12):
the South African reconciliation or peace accords
after Vietnam or even post-bellum America
after the Civil War, not saying we are like those groups
and individuals, however, there are some similar principles
because we are gonna need to figure out a way
to live harmoniously again with those who
(50:38):
are in the MAGA community.
Yeah.
Democracy, and in particular, have it thrive
if tens and tens and tens of millions of Americans
are pitted against each other and estranged from
and alienated from those closest to them.
(51:00):
I'm not talking about being alienated from strangers.
I'm talking about alienation and estrangement
from those closest to them, friends and family.
Like the, so that actually brings me to my next question
like really well, would you say that,
like what is the reconciliation process that you see
when people reconcile with people in like
(51:20):
their personal lives, especially after leaving MAGA?
Like, do you think that friends and family are very willing
to take people back and where do you think forgiveness
like kind of plays a role in all of that?
Sure, and I don't think, thank you.
And a lot of what I'll say, yes, admittedly will come
from my personal experience.
Sure, yeah.
(51:41):
I don't think that forgiveness should be free.
And the reason I don't say that is because yes,
a lot of my interviews and a lot of my media appearances,
I talk about how these MAGA and right wing mythologies,
once they, once the claws get stuck,
(52:02):
they tend to just burrow in, but having said that,
we still also need to remind ourselves
that all of us have agency.
Yeah.
I can say all day long, and I see this online,
there are some people out there who left MAGA
and they say, I was duped because I was in a cult.
(52:23):
Yeah.
I find that to be a lazy take.
Yeah.
Because I think that to ask for forgiveness,
someone has to actually, this is where the I
is really important, because the I, part of this story
is that we have agency and that no one is coerced
(52:45):
or coaxed into their support.
No one forced me into saying what I said.
No one demanded of me that I needed to think
the way I thought, but I know that the American people,
because we are a good people, a good people are always,
(53:06):
will show grace if genuine penitence is sought
by those who are in the MAGA community,
who may have, which if you're in the community,
for those listening who are gonna hear this
who are in the MAGA community, I am saying this
as least judgmental as I can, but being in the community
means aiding and abetting, truly, truly reprehensible
(53:30):
statements and actions.
And that was something that I really had to come
to terms with.
Yeah.
That I had, as part of the self-forgiveness,
I had to sit back and think so much of what I said.
Well, even now, Vicki, looking back on it,
(53:51):
I still feel a degree of shock a little, saying it.
So it can't be free, but I think that reconciliation,
it's complex because we're a complex species,
but I think the process of it is relatively simple.
Yeah.
It's someone coming to a place of saying,
(54:12):
I'm sorry and I was wrong, and I wanna offer to you
an apology, maybe as part of that it could be,
I understand if you may not accept that apology,
but I wanna offer it.
Yeah.
And those who do that, Vicki, they are going to find
overwhelmingly that those to whom they apologize
(54:33):
are going to welcome them back.
Yeah.
Now, it's probably gonna take time
for some of the reconciliation and restoration to occur.
Again, there's a different kind of growth.
Yeah.
The gradual mending of those ties.
(54:53):
But you know what?
I'll take a gradual mending and not at all.
That's great.
Yeah.
No, that's really powerful.
Okay.
We are running up against time here,
but I have one more question.
Sure.
I wanted to get your thoughts on the self-forgiveness part.
(55:13):
Right.
It sounds like a lot of your journey really comes from,
like you started learning more and realizing
your past actions and your past thoughts
and how they have caused harm.
So when you say self-forgiveness and forgiving yourself,
what was that process like?
As in how did you come to realize
(55:35):
what your beliefs were incorrect?
Or yeah, your beliefs were incorrect.
And how did you come across
reconciling that with yourself, I suppose?
Right.
I had to take stock, which was so uncomfortable to do this,
but I deemed it necessary for me to take stock
(55:57):
of everything that I had published,
everything I'd said privately,
which oftentimes was the same language that I used
to describe, for example, Democrats.
I referred to them in my works as malignant.
(56:18):
Yeah.
That kind of language is the nadir of dehumanization.
Yeah.
Okay, the overlooking loss of life.
Yeah.
Because I was concerned about the political ramifications,
such as Charlottesville,
(56:40):
such as Trump managing COVID, such as January 6th,
such as Uvalde.
Uvalde was a time though that I stopped overlooking.
I came to stop overlooking the loss of life.
For me, what made it so deeply personal for me
(57:00):
was that I had deemed it acceptable
that people died and were traumatized
and suffered needlessly.
And I also realized that I had made it acceptable
that avoidable, excuse me,
that politically motivated violence was deemed justified
(57:24):
by Trump and the Republican Party.
And those are really the two reasons I left.
You know, when I think of them as lines of demarcation,
the acceptance of avoidable deaths and suffering
and the defense and justification
of politically motivated violence,
a coup that was partly orchestrated
(57:45):
by the president at the time,
those were two lines of demarcation
I couldn't cross any longer.
And so when I thought about self-forgiveness,
what makes it so, so excruciatingly tumultuous
is that you really have to look at,
you have to look at what you said and thought and did
(58:06):
truly for what they were.
You can't sugarcoat this
when you're talking about forgiving yourself.
You have to say what I said and what I thought
and what I did should never ever have been said or done.
(58:26):
And when I came to a point where I finally said
this was so wrong, there's no argument that could be made
in the remotest that it was correct.
That's eventually what brought me to self-forgiveness.
And as part-
You really unpack like the why, right?
(58:48):
Like the why you believed or fell in and everything.
You have to just, you have to exude all of the emotions
and the trauma and the allowance,
allowing myself to say and think this, to do this.
Because again, we have agency.
But once you exume all of it and you dig it up,
(59:11):
now you're seeing all of it in front of you.
And you can't say, well, maybe that was justified
or maybe that was defensible.
No, you have to say, this doesn't reflect who I am,
but I allowed it to reflect who I was for many years.
And as I went out and wrote my mea culpa, told my story,
(59:34):
retold it over and over and over,
the vast majority of responses, Vicki,
that I've received are from people who said,
and again, I'm not saying this in any kind of
super-silliest way, but from people who have said to me,
you know, Rich, it takes a lot of guts to leave.
(59:54):
And I'm a little embarrassed by that,
not because I don't appreciate it,
but because I think, damn it,
I should have never gotten to that point.
But I do think about two biblical quotes,
which again, will be appropriate for perhaps some Jesuits
who may be listening.
And not just Jesuits, of course,
(01:00:15):
it could be people who are listening
and not just Jesuits, of course,
it could be people of any belief.
And I think actually this is applicable.
One of the reasons I so, so think the Bible,
why I extol it the way I do is because it's,
anyone can read it.
An atheist can gain knowledge.
Oh yeah, for myself.
I have gained quite some knowledge.
(01:00:35):
Yeah, okay, from this good, sagacious book,
you know, there's two quotes from the mind.
One is from the book of Isaiah,
which is to bring good news to the afflicted.
And then there's another one
that has informed our work immensely,
which is the book of Romans, be patient in affliction.
And I think though leaving Maga
is not an overtly religious organization,
(01:00:57):
we welcome all beliefs, someone who could be a devout.
We have a lady who gave a testimonial
who is devout in her faith.
Yeah.
But she knew that her devotion had been perverted.
Yeah.
In Maga.
And then we have those who are not perverted.
And then we have those who are not believers.
So there, you know, there's,
or I should say not so much they're not believers,
(01:01:19):
but religion isn't particularly prevalent in their lives.
Yeah.
To be clear, I should clarify that point.
Then for me, I always joke
that I'm an excommunicated Catholic.
That's, my wife doesn't like that joke.
I always say that if I lived in the 1400s,
I'd be in the excommunication file, you know,
down in the tunnels of the Vatican somewhere.
(01:01:40):
But I think there is certainly,
for those who are inclined to believe in faith,
I think that they will,
I think they will hear some aspects of faith in our work.
And I think for those who aren't inclined to faith,
that they'll still be able, I hope,
to be able to relate to redemption.
(01:02:00):
Like we can redeem ourselves
in ways that aren't necessarily of faith and of religion.
And I'm not saying this in the context of an actual savior
of someone is a believer in salvation in the hereafter,
but here in the here and now,
(01:02:21):
nobody can save another person, Vicki.
Yeah.
Someone has to want to be able to save themselves.
I can't make anyone leave Magna.
Yeah.
But if someone comes to us with those doubts,
we can show them that there's an exit ramp
and that they actually have support from people
(01:02:42):
who have been through it.
And that's so important.
Yeah, the empowerment.
The people, exactly, the people who have been through it
are the ones who have decided to lead and say
that if our stories and our experiences
can help people leave, we are here to help in the long run.
Yeah.
And I'm just so, so honored that people so courageously
(01:03:05):
have decided to take those leadership roles
and tell their stories because it does really require
a lot of intrepidity to go and be that vulnerable publicly.
Yeah, for sure.
That's really powerful.
And I think that you're doing amazing work.
I really hope that your organization-
Don't embarrass me.
Don't embarrass me.
Thank you.
(01:03:25):
No, I honestly, this is really important and crucial work.
And something I think that,
like empathy is a lot of things that people forget,
unfortunately, and you're absolutely,
like I think at the fundamental core,
all humans, all we want is to be seen and heard
by other people.
Yes.
We are able to see and hear other people.
(01:03:46):
That's how we like build connection and build community.
And that point right there is why a lot of people decided
to join the MAGA community because they felt seen
and they finally felt recognized.
Yeah.
It's very true what you said.
Yeah.
Okay, so we are out of, like just-
Do you want to stop the recording?
Sure, yeah.
(01:04:06):
I also wanted to ask if you-
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