The people I’ve helped write their testimonials for Leaving MAGA came to the movement for all sorts of reasons, and they found their way out in all sorts of different ways. Even so, James Hicks’ story stands out.
James grew up in a strict Apostolic Pentecostal household in West Helena, Arkansas. “The town was highly segregated,” he says in his testimonial for Leaving MAGA. His family moved to Conway, Arkansas when he was in 10th grade. It was a mostly white town. “It was the first time I was in a minority,” he writes.
“My high school American history class had a huge impact on how I approached politics for the next several years,” James says. He was particularly taken with the Federalist Papers; his favorite was Federalist No. 10. “In it, James Madison talks about the benefit of factions, how important it is that everyone has the opportunity to express their opinions through different political parties. I thought it was beautiful that people could find meaning and purpose in all the chaos of arguments and debates.”
James decided he “wanted to do everything I could to ensure that everybody got along. I was very hopeful and optimistic, even when faced with racism.”
Here’s where things get a bit unusual. James’ desire to bring about social harmony led him to “[embrace] perspectives of the dominant culture.”
He thought that if he was “good and accepting, if I embrace [people who are racist] and don’t ostracize them, then I can get people to abandon those beliefs.”
In 2014, James started watching Fox more, right around the time police killed Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. He didn’t like the Black Lives Matter protests that broke out. “I thought the demonstrators were being abrasive, and needed to be more accommodating to accomplish anything…we needed to present ourselves as more likeable to the white people who were so outraged.”
He believed “those angry white people were acting in good faith. I started taking on more views of those opposed to civil rights as a way to try to patch things up. I was seeing on Fox and online that people were up in arms about taking down Confederate statues. I figured if I took on that issue it would be a bridge between these communities…and that might create an opening to talk to them.”
So he started defending Confederate statues and flags. “I started wearing a Confederate flag wristband. I was trying to show that I understood what they were arguing. I even started adopting the argument that the civil war started because of states’ rights, not slavery.”
Then Donald Trump ran for president the first time. James liked how Trump seemed to be saying he was going to help the white working poor, “the people I had been defending…I felt they had been ignored.”
He went to a Trump rally, and was attracted to his seeming toughness and candor. “People at the rally embraced me,” James writes. “I thought I had made inroads, that I had broken ground, that because of my support they could have a better perspective on Black people.”
He became a dedicated MAGA loyalist, frequently posting pro-Trump content on social media. “I was pretty low-information. Fox and Breitbart, along with pro-Trump social media, were my sources of news. I wasn’t talking much to friends or family.”
James defended Trump “no matter what he said or did, even when he said there were ‘good people on both sides’ after Charlottesville. I justified it to myself by thinking that he was perhaps trying to reach out to people who have different stereotypes.”
Trump’s attempt to overturn DACA in September 2017 started James on his journey out of MAGA. “I was going to a Hispanic church; my fellow congregants were afraid of deportation. I didn’t want that to happen to the people I went to church with.” This was around the same time he took a college journalism class, and discovered that “Fox News had biases of its own” and he needed to question his own assumptions about various issues. He moved on to other news sources.
James stuck with MAGA until the pandemic hit and the George Floyd protests erupted in 2020. “When I saw the video of Floyd getting smothered to death, I knew there was no way to spin it, even though Fox was defending the police, saying, ‘The guy was a criminal.’”
He was repulsed by Trump’s threats to use the military against protestors, and his walk to the church near the White House with a military escort.
“I thought that what I had been doing over the years would lead to change,” James says. “But it turned out that the protests led to actual change. Businesses were stepping up for the Black community, adding people to boards of directors, engaging in strategic hiring. I realized I had just been appeasing everybody.”
When the pandemic hit, “I wasn’t anti-mask or anti-social distancing. That put me at odds with a lot of Trump supporters,” James writes. “I didn’t understand why he kept speaking against those things. I was thinking, ‘People are dying, please say something’…I was coming to understand that Trump didn’t care.”
James left MAGA in 2020. He now sees being in the movement “like being maladjusted. I think Trump is a psychopath. I finally realized there is evil in this world.”
He says lower-income whites, the people he previously felt such a kinship with, “are getting destroyed by MAGA. Their minds have been warped.”
James’ friends and family embraced him when he left the movement. “I’m so happy that I left MAGA and now see the world in all its beauty and complexity.”
You can read James’ full testimonial on the Leaving MAGA website.
