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'Propaganda's Greatest Enemy is Curiosity' — Wisdom From a Former MAGA Member [1]
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Date: 2025-05-21
KC Cain grew up in the rural Indiana town of New Castle in the 1990s. Her parents didn’t discuss politics, but “I definitely absorbed their beliefs,” she says in her testimonial for Leaving MAGA. “The background noise of my childhood was Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter and Bill O’Reilly.”
She clashed with liberal students at Ball State. The term “Social Justice Warrior” had become popular on the internet. As a conservative, she didn’t like “the purity testing, the scolding, people freaking out when you disagreed with them…Commentators I followed — Ben Shapiro, Jordan Peterson, Steven Crowder — were producing a lot of anti-SJW content.”
KC graduated with a BS in psychology shortly before Donald Trump started his first campaign in 2015. “I was primed for the picking for MAGA,” she says. “I was anti-SJW and getting riled up by the internet pundits. At the same time, I didn’t like the Republican Party because I felt it never got anything done.”
She was “a hard-liner on immigration and felt the mainstream Republican Party had accomplished nothing on it. And I hated how Republican representatives were so strait-laced and traditional. I didn’t feel they were authentic.”
KC briefly considered Bernie Sanders, because he was an outsider. “But after Bernie got snubbed by the DNC, I realized there wasn’t going to be any change unless something dramatic happened.”
That’s when she started considering Trump. “While I felt [Hillary] Clinton was saying ‘I’m better than you,’ Trump was saying, ‘I’m just like you.’”
KC got active online, boosting right-wing content creators.
When Trump won the 2016 election, KC thought he would “save” the country, because he was going to “drain the swamp and handle immigration.”
But she soon started having doubts about Trump and MAGA.
When Trump imposed his Muslim ban, “I thought it made sense to ban people from countries with high amounts of terrorism,” she says. Then she saw stories “about American citizens not being able to return because of the ban. I realized it had been executed poorly. It was ridiculous.”
When Trump “filled his cabinet with rich people, I wondered if we were just trading the swamp of the government for the swamp of corporations.” Still, she figured she would “give him some time.”
KC was working a call center job she hated; it left her stressed out and irritated. The “non-stop firehose of Trump’s antics” in the media led her to stop paying attention to politics for a long stretch.
The Jan. 2020 assassination of Iranian Gen. Qasem Soleimani “snapped me back to attention.” KC wondered why the US carried out the attack, since “Trump had promised on the campaign trail that he would end foreign conflicts.”
Then Covid hit. When Trump said the pandemic would just go away on its own, KC was shocked. “That’s not how pandemics work.” She was turned off by Trump’s talk of UV rays and bleach as possible cures, and his attacks on Dr. Anthony Fauci.
“Freezer trucks filled with corpses were lined up outside hospitals, and people in MAGA were saying, ‘My body, my choice’ as an argument against getting vaccinated. I couldn’t believe it; I mean, you can catch Covid, but you’re not going to catch a pregnancy.”
After the murder of George Floyd in May 2020, “I was appalled by the racism I was hearing from MAGA. People on the right were putting out all this ‘He was no angel’ crap. That didn’t make it acceptable for him to be killed by a cop.”
Then KC noticed a surge of sexism from within MAGA’s ranks. “Pundits were talking about how women needed to be in the home. One pundit said women shouldn’t be in STEM fields…This was counter to what I grew up with around conservatives. My grandpa encouraged women in the family to go into medicine.”
That was the last straw for KC. “After the science denialism around Covid and the racism around George Floyd, the burst of sexism made me realize I was in the wrong place,” she says.
KC broke away from MAGA in the summer of 2020. She stopped watching Fox and following right-wing pundits. “I started searching for alternative sources of information on YouTube.” She discovered some left-leaning pundits — including Kyle Kalinsky and hbomberguy — and realized “they were making a lot more sense than the feverish cacophony of madness coming from the right.”
She began doing more historical research. “I became more knowledgeable about where we are and why we’re here.”
KC voted for a Democrat for the first time in 2020, when she supported Joe Biden. She voted for Kamala Harris in 2024. “I’m now firmly somewhere on the left politically,” she says.
“There’s always going to be a little part of me that’s disappointed with myself,” KC says. “Why didn’t I see through the misinformation? But I wasn’t in a good place when I was in MAGA; I wasn’t happy. And I know lots of educated people, including doctors and nurses, who got sucked into it.”
Sometimes she’ll engage with MAGA followers online by asking questions, rather than getting into arguments. For example, on the subject of Ukraine, “I’ll ask people if they’re aware of the Budapest Accords, and our obligation to defend Ukraine. I’ll ask, ‘Do you think we should abandon an ally?’”
KC says the point isn’t to convert people, but rather “to plant seeds of doubt. Propaganda is designed to bypass our logical faculties and get us to act against our better angels, and I have come to understand that propaganda’s greatest enemy is curiosity. Propaganda’s whole point is to kill curiosity about any information outside your bubble.”
She doesn’t see people who are still in MAGA as evil. She has sympathy for those who are starting to question what’s going on now, “with the push towards authoritarianism, deporting US citizens, etc.”
KC finds some solace in the color revolutions of Europe. “I look at places like Ukraine and Poland, which had popular revolutions that overthrew authoritarian governments,” she says. “What we’re facing is not unique and Trump’s regime is making a lot of mistakes.”
You can read many more testimonials from people who left MAGA on my Substack, The Paulemic, and on the Leaving MAGA website.
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