(C) Daily Kos
This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered.
. . . . . . . . . .
She Left MAGA and 'De-Programmed' Herself [1]
['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']
Date: 2025-03-01
PattyAnn Giles grew up in the 1960s in a Democratic household that was also culturally conservative. Her politics changed significantly when she became a born-again Pentecostal Christian at 17.
As she explains in her testimonial on Leaving MAGA (I’m Editor-in-Chief), “I started watching Christian TV, with its televangelists like Jimmy Swaggart. That evangelical message coordinated very well with Reaganism. It became a spiritual journey for me.”
She came to believe the Democratic Party was “amoral…I thought if the country were more in line with Christian values, we’d be better off.” Republican political rallies felt “like an old-time tent revival. I felt a real fervor; it was very exciting.”
After getting married and moving to Virginia, PattyAnn worked with local Republican groups, and attended the 1994 state GOP convention as a delegate supporting Oliver North’s [he of Iran-Contra infamy] run for US Senate.
When Bill Clinton was elected president in 1992, I thought, “How could anybody support this guy? He’s slimy. He cheats on his wife. I thought he was a sexual predator, and so wasn’t morally fit to serve as president.”
When George W. Bush became president in 2001, PattyAnn and her husband were trying to build a ceramic floor tile business. She said Republicans’ fiscal conservatism and opposition to government regulation resonated with her on top of their cultural conservatism.
PattyAnn started drifting away from the evangelical movement in the early 2000’s. “I started hearing about sexual abuse,” she writes. “And the church and the televangelists were always asking for money. I started asking myself, ‘Is this just some kind of a scam?’” She also came to believe that pastors were psychologically manipulating parishioners.
“The next important chapter in my political development came around 2012,” says PattyAnn. “My kids were coming of age, and I had friends whose kids were coming back from Iraq and Afghanistan with PTSD and terrible injuries. I saw that vets weren’t getting the help they needed. I said to myself, ‘What are we doing? How long is this going to go on?’…I started questioning whether the goals [of defeating terrorism] were being achieved.”
Then ”The Afghanistan Papers” book came out (an inside history of how successive US governments misled the public about the war). “I started to think, like a lot of leftists, that the wars were just to enrich the weapons industry, and that the Iraq invasion was just the result of a Bush family vendetta against Saddam Hussein. I soured on the hawkish, neocon wing of the Republican party.”
PattyAnn adds: “You can see how this tracks logically. By this point I’m saying to myself, ‘Both parties suck. They’re elitist, they’re working for their millionaire donors, they’re giving us a load of crap.’”
She was primed to support someone like Donald Trump. When he first ran for president, PattyAnn was drawn to his anti-establishment message. “He struck me as kind of creepy, crass, with a lot of bluster. But I didn’t want a choir boy. I was willing to overlook some aspects of his personality if he could go in and expose what he was calling the swamp, so we could maybe do a reset.”
She says most of her information came from Fox, along with pro-Trump radio hosts and social media personalities. “I got more and more excited about Trump. I liked that he wasn’t beholden to big donors. He was paying for his own campaign. I liked that he talked tough, that he said patriotic things. I liked his America First anti-war message, that we needed to get out of all these expensive wars.”
She acknowledges the “cognitive dissonance” caused by backing Trump while having refused to support Bill Clinton because of the sexual misconduct allegations he faced. “I chose to selectively dismiss it in Trump’s case,” PattyAnn writes. “I thought, ‘Yeah, he was probably a bit of a masher, but he’s a rich guy, that’s what they do.’ I was making all these excuses for him.”
She was taken aback by his Muslim ban right after he took office, but she defended it. She had heard about terrorist sleeper cells. “My response was, let’s not jump to conclusions and think that he’s against all Muslims, that it’s rooted in racism or xenophobia.”
PattyAnn didn’t like that Trump “was playing footsie with dictators and autocrats. I thought, “What is going on here? You act like you want to date them…So my balloon started to deflate a little.”
She wavered even more when she heard what she considered more credible information about Trump molesting women, and learned about “how he talked creepily about his daughter, and walked in on beauty pageant contestants while they were getting dressed.” As a rape victim, “it seriously traumatized me.”
PattyAnn “was starting to get a bad taste in my mouth. I had an uncomfortable, squirmy feeling. But I still supported him, because I believed that at the end of the day it was his policies that mattered.”
It was the pandemic that moved her closer to breaking up with MAGA. “I watched Trump butt heads with Dr. Fauci and Dr. Birx (Trump’s White House Coronavirus Response Coordinator),” PattyAnn says. “He seemed more open to trying unproven treatments like hydroxychloroquine…All he cared about was the economy; he didn’t understand a pandemic is like a war with an unseen enemy. You have to make sacrifices, like we did during World War II with rationing and power shutoffs.”
But in the end she was more frustrated with “MAGA and the right wing in general, especially the disinformation mills that were spreading dangerous lies (like the one about the vaccine killing people).” She writes of seeing “a lot of my peers fighting the public health protocols tooth and nail, like a bunch of petulant toddlers. We were losing people, people were suffocating because their lungs were filling with this glue…I was so mad, I was seeing red.”
PattyAnn “agonized” over her vote in the 2020 election; she chose Trump “because I thought I had inside information on the Bidens’ corruption in Ukraine.” [She had heard interviews with Andriy Telizhenko, a Ukrainian diplomat who later had his visa revoked by Trump’s State Department for his role in spreading disinformation about Ukraine.]
She officially broke ties with MAGA in 2021, following Trump’s “nonsense about the election being stolen because of widespread voter fraud, the January 6 coup attempt, and subsequent reports about how there was a coordinated plan to overturn the election.”
The experience led PattyAnn to ask herself: “In what other ways have I been lied to?” She stopped watching or listening to right-wing media. Nowadays, she follows independent progressive journalists, such as the MeidasTouch Network, along with others “who debunk right-wing nonsense, while being mindful they can be reporting from a place of bias.” She lists David Pakman, Robert Reich, Heather Cox Richardson, Jane Mayer, and The Majority Report among her other sources of information.
As PattyAnn dug deeper into various issues, “I learned that a lot of how I thought the economy works is wrong. I learned that what I thought about Muslims was wrong. I realized I had been propagandized.”
She decided, “I needed to de-program myself. It was a journey of self discovery. I was on a mission to educate myself to think more critically about the information I was consuming. I learned to vet sources. I learned about confirmation bias, motivated reasoning, and heuristics. I pulled myself out of that funk of right-wing propaganda.”
PattyAnn says she learned that “[i]t’s very hard to convince somebody who’s using motivated reasoning and confirmation bias that they’re being misled, that their information ecosystem is misleading them. It’s easier to fool people than to convince them that they’re being fooled.”
She admits to having “been fierce as I go after MAGA on social media…At the same time, I’ve had a couple of people tell me in private that I’ve made a difference for them. They said they didn’t know certain sources of information existed. They checked them out, found the information valuable, and took it to heart. That was a win for me.”
PattyAnn adds that she has “learned to pick my battles. You don’t have to fight with everybody all the time. When you find the truth, you’re maybe over-passionate. My husband is still in MAGA. I’ve learned how to be very diplomatic at home. We have had a lot of arguments — now we just agree to disagree.”
She laments that her millennial kids are not politically active. “I told them they need to be more aware, they need to do more. After all, it’s their future at stake.”
[END]
---
[1] Url:
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2025/3/1/2307016/-She-Left-MAGA-and-De-Programmed-Herself?pm_campaign=front_page&pm_source=more_community&pm_medium=web
Published and (C) by Daily Kos
Content appears here under this condition or license: Site content may be used for any purpose without permission unless otherwise specified.
via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds:
gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/dailykos/
