(C) Daily Kos
This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered.
. . . . . . . . . .
Once 'Gung Ho' for MAGA, She's Now Distressed Watching Trump 'Terrorize Everyone' [1]
['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']
Date: 2025-07-27
As she tells it, Madison Morrison was “a very difficult kid,” always getting into trouble. “My mom said I was awful, unbearable,” Madison says in her testimonial for Leaving MAGA.
She got put on on mood stabilizers when she was 6 years old. Over the next few years, doctors kept diagnosing her with a different disorder: depression, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia. Madison thinks she has undiagnosed autism, but in the 90s, when she was growing up, “the cultural norm was that ‘girls can’t be autistic.’”
She went to elementary and middle school in the tiny village of St. Paris, “in the middle of nowhere in western Ohio.” Her mom had already left her “crackhead” father. She remarried, and her new husband, Mike, eventually adopted Madison. They were pretty well off, living “in a nice ranch house on 10 acres.”
Madison was prescribed lithium and time-release Vyvanse “from the time I was 9 until I was about 20.” She didn’t learn until later that that combination can lead to drug addiction. By high school, “I was smoking a lot of marijuana, drinking a lot, and doing other drugs. I was addicted to coke and Xanax by the time I was 18.”
Meanwhile, she was being brought up by extremely conservative parents. They “listened all the time to Rush Limbaugh and Alex Jones…And they always had Fox News on the TV.”
Things took a particularly dark turn after 9/11, when Madison was 6. She said “everything changed in our house. With all the racism, the bigotry, and the fear, my household became blood-chilling.” Her dad installed surveillance cameras “everywhere,” and put up motion sensors.
“He cemented our fricking mailbox because he thought Muslims were going to blow it up. We weren’t allowed to go on vacations because he thought the Taliban would be at our house when we got back.”
Madison was taught to believe that “Muslims wanted to kidnap me; Asian men wanted to sell me; and Black men wanted to rape and murder me.”
Her father was openly sexist. “He talked about how being led by emotion — implying that’s how women act — was stupid,” she says.
Madison’s beliefs were also partly forged by her church: “We attended the Primitive Methodist Church. It’s evangelical; we were taught that the natural order of things is God, husband, wife, child. There was a lot of shame, a lot of bigotry.”
Her mom later divorced and remarried, and the family moved to the small town of Wapakoneta, Ohio as Madison started high school. After graduation, she spent a year at Wright State University, but she was arrested for selling LSD on campus. Facing federal charges, the terrified 19-year-old informed on those she was caught with. “I didn’t have to go to prison, but I was banned from all Ohio public schools for five years.”
Madison followed her mom to North Carolina. In March 2015, her father Mike committed suicide.
“After that, I got deeper into my drug use, and deeper into the alt-right,” she says. “I listened a lot to Info Wars — Alex Jones and Ben Shapiro. On YouTube, I followed Baked Alaska, White Rose (a white supremacist trans person — really), and Hunter Avalon (who is now a left-leaning media creator).”
Madison says she was drawn to people “who seemed unique, so I thought finding a transgender person who agreed with me proved I was right about my beliefs.”
She says she “had become a white supremacist…Once I posted something about Hitler not being that bad because he advanced transportation in Germany. I would debate people on social media until I was blue in the face.”
As far-right activists started organizing for the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, Madison helped promote it, handing out fliers on the street. “I didn’t go to the rally, though,” she says. “Going would have made it too real. As long as I didn’t go I was able to think it wasn’t that bad.”
Meanwhile, “I kept doing drugs. I wrecked cars, got concussions. I’m not sure how I’m still alive.”
After Charlottesville, “my racism started to fall apart,” Madison says. “I realized you can’t be a crackhead and be racist…I realized that as a white girl, I got away with everything. It happened time and time again: The police would catch a bunch of us — a group of Black people and me — doing drugs. They would bust everyone else, and they would let me go. Every time.”
She started getting clean in 2018. During that months-long process, she lived in Wilmington with her mom and her mom’s boyfriend. They were both “very pro-Trump. I was gung ho, mindlessly supporting Trump. I kept following right-wing media, especially Ben Shapiro and a lot of Joe Rogan…I dropped Alex Jones after the Sandy Hook massacre.”
In 2020, in the midst of the pandemic and the Black Lives Matter protests following George Floyd’s murder, ”I was trying to find a way to justify my beliefs,” Madison says. “About George Floyd, I would go along with the MAGA talking points about how he had a rap sheet, and what about his victims? With regard to Covid, I was…hostile to masks. I believed ‘alternative medical facts’ about Covid, even after getting a horrible case of the disease myself.”
Trump’s Big Lie about the 2020 election being stolen from him started Madison on her path out of MAGA. “I never believed it,” she says. “I was in therapy as part of my effort to stay clean, and I realized he was acting similarly to a lot of the adults I grew up with. I recognized patterns: lack of accountability, deflection, it’s always everybody else’s fault.”
Madison’s “breaking point” was January 6th. “I still want to believe in America; I want to believe in our Constitution,” she says. “I watched the live coverage on TV at work. I was just frozen, horrified. After screaming about election fraud that didn’t exist, the president of the United States was inciting Americans to attack federal police officers and our elected officials. It was the most un-American thing I’d seen in my entire life. I felt an almost instantaneous hatred of Trump.”
She turned away from all the right-wing media she’d been following, “except for Joe Rogan. He interviews people with different perspectives, and a lot of them write books. I found a lot of left-leaning thinkers by listening to him.”
At first, Madison didn’t follow mainstream US media. “I felt all the media was evil, and that all Democrats and Republicans were evil.” She started following foreign media after Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022. “For a long time my big focus was on Ukraine,” she says. “I made friends on social media with people in Ukraine, Lithuania, and Estonia.”
Noting that “growing up in what would become MAGA, I grew up a Zionist,” Madison says she was “disgusted” by Israel’s carpet bombing of Gaza in response to the October 7, 2023 massacre by Hamas, which “horrified” her. She connected with some Gazans on social media. Some of them were subsequently killed in the Israeli attacks. She made her first political video for social media. “I talked about feeling violated and lied to about Israel,” Madison says.
That led her to turn her attention back towards American politics. She didn’t support Joe Biden (“who had as much blood on his hands as Israel”) or Kamala Harris, but “I had to let everyone know that Trump was the more evil” candidate.
As a former white supremacist, Madison has made it her mission to dispel the myths pushed by that community. “I educated myself on the Crusades (because they’re obsessed with the Crusaders’ cross) and Celtic and Nordic paganism, since supremacists wrongly claim to be the direct racial and spiritual descendants of ‘heroic’ pagans. I taught myself German, and I learned how to identify white supremacist logos and symbols, so I can call them out on their lies.”
She says it’s “distressing watching the second Trump administration terrorize and emotionally drain everyone.” She considers herself fortunate as “a white heterosexual woman, married (since November 2023) to a white man, getting a college degree – I don’t have a lot to complain about.”
Madison is finishing an associate degree in film, and she’s going to pursue a BA in business at at UNC-Wilmington starting next January. “One day I want to set up my own documentary production company, and go to places in the world where people are ignored, and tell their stories,” she says.
Madison’s break with MAGA has damaged her familial relationships. “A few weeks ago, my mother invited my husband and me to her house for a July 4th cookout with some friends,” she says. “These friends have been incredibly racist in the past, and I asked her to have a conversation with them before the cookout about keeping it to themselves. That led to a huge argument. Mom was more interested in protecting her friends’ feelings than ours. So I broke off contact.”
Madison hopes to reconcile with her mom at some point. “And maybe one day I can help her see how Trump and MAGA are bad for America,” she says.
You can read the stories of many others who have left MAGA on my Substack, The Paulemic, and at Leaving MAGA, where we also have a guide for talking to friends and family who are in MAGA.
[END]
---
[1] Url:
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2025/7/27/2335321/-Once-Gung-Ho-for-MAGA-She-s-Now-Distressed-Watching-Trump-Terrorize-Everyone?pm_campaign=front_page&pm_source=latest_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/
