Once a teenage MAGA follower and self-identified conspiracy theorist, Addy Leugers, 24, now finds herself supporting Democratic Socialist candidates, a political current that Bernie Sanders' presidential campaigns carried from the left's margins toward the Democratic mainstream.

Leugers said she was primed to back Donald Trump and his Make America Great Again movement at just 14 years old, during the 2016 presidential election.

"I was working, so I did have that exposure to other thought processes, but it really wasn't enough to pull what was essentially the foundation that primarily my dad laid for me to become infatuated with Donald Trump and with the thoughts and ideologies that he was putting out into the world around his first election in 2016," Leugers told Raw Story.

She grew up in a wealthy suburban Kansas City household marked by "very authoritarian-style parenting" and was homeschooled for religious reasons. Her home was a "Fox News 24/7 household," and she came to believe in far-right conspiracy theories such as QAnon, which promotes the lie that Trump waged a secret war against cannibalistic pedophiles among Democrats, Hollywood elites and the so-called "deep state." QAnon first surfaced on internet message boards in late 2017 around an anonymous poster, "Q," who claimed to be a government insider, and the FBI warned in a 2019 intelligence bulletin that conspiracy theory-driven domestic extremism was a growing threat.

"I was raised, 'You respect the military. You respect the police. You respect the president. These are the people that God put in power. You listen to them because it's your moral obligation, basically,'" Leugers said. "I feel like that's kind of where things started to go downhill for me."

Her break with the movement began, she said, when Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin murdered George Floyd in May 2020, sparking a national racial reckoning. Chauvin was convicted of Floyd's murder in April 2021 and sentenced to 22 and a half years in prison.

"I was one of those people that was like, 'Well, because I haven't experienced it, and everyone else says that racism died when we ended slavery, racism isn't real,' and people were like, 'Addy, you're stupid,'" Leugers said.

"My breaking point was that because I did have friends that I knew closely that were trying to correct me and trying to be kind and helpful, and I was just being nasty, and I doubled down, and they were like, 'OK, well, I'm not gonna be your friend anymore because you're not being open-minded, and I'm trying to help you, and you're just being ignorant on purpose.'"

Researchers who study how people exit extremist movements have long found that the reactions of friends and family are among the decisive factors in whether someone ultimately leaves, a dynamic that runs through Leugers' account of peers who refused to keep validating her views.

Leugers, a registered behavior tech who works with children who have autism spectrum disorder, has since joined dozens of others — among them a Jan. 6 rioter who has spoken of leaving the movement — in Leaving MAGA, a growing online community of former Trump supporters whose allegiance to Trump led them to lose friends, family relationships and marriages, commit crimes in Trump's name, embrace Christian nationalism, and believe conspiracies.

'Echo chamber'

Leugers, who now lives in the Honolulu area, said she primarily votes for Democrats these days and is very supportive of younger representation in politics.

"I'm no longer a Republican," she said.

Her time inside MAGA gave her insight into how drastically the movement's direction has changed since Trump's first election, when MAGA was more about "regular people" whose "support for our president is unmatched," she said. Now, "MAGA [is] taking such a hit in the last couple of years because of what the president has been doing," Leugers said.

"The MAGA movement itself is very shallow, but it's based in this sense of community and banding together, almost of 'Oh, they hate us. They hate our president, but we have each other, and we have God, and everything's gonna be OK because this is God's will,'" Leugers said. "It does turn into this little echo chamber of everyone believing all the same things and no one challenging anything."

Leugers said she believes MAGA started with good intentions, with people seeking community, but "it lacks nuance, and it lacks education, and that is what turns into this slippery slope, because it's like the hills they choose to die on."

The movement's anti-abortion stance is one example, she said.

"You have the anti-abortion on one hand. They also have like ICE is killing people in the streets right now, so it's like it becomes very closed-minded, narrow, blinders-on type of thinking that ignores a broader picture," Leugers said.

Policies of the second Trump administration have been of particular concern to Leugers and her roommate, especially the aggressive actions of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which she said has led to "people getting killed in the streets, shot in the streets, kidnapped in the streets, U.S. citizens being taken into detention centers without due process."

At least 52 people in ICE custody have died since January 2025, and at least 23 people have been shot by ICE in that time, six of them fatally.

Leugers cited other concerns as well, including food contamination and recalls alongside the historic lows of food inspections by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, as well as what she called "propaganda" coming out of the White House. The FDA regulates the bulk of the nation's food supply, and the inspection decline coincided with the mass staffing cuts that swept federal health agencies in 2025.

"We kind of laugh it off every day … but it kind of is getting to feel pretty dystopic," Leugers said.

Leugers said she knows firsthand that "admitting you're wrong sucks," but she hopes that sharing her story will help others who are considering deconstructing their MAGA beliefs.

"If I can be one person to do my little part in this grand scheme of what is 2026 politics, then that's enough for me, and maybe even one person will see it and be like, 'Well, if she can change, I can change.'"

With the midterms approaching, Leugers hopes for historic voter turnout in November. The elections will determine control of both chambers of Congress, with all 435 House seats and roughly a third of the Senate on the ballot.

"I hope that we, the American people, decide to get stuff done, and we decide that enough is enough," Leugers said.

Source: Raw Story