Danny Collins’ family lived “pretty much in poverty” during his childhood in Fort Pierce, Florida in the ‘80s and ‘90s. When he was 9, he discovered that the woman he thought was his biological mother was in fact his stepmother. It turned out that his biological mom left when he was a baby, and took with her a half sister he hadn’t known about.
“I didn’t know how to process the emotions I felt from all of this,” Danny says in his testimonial for Leaving MAGA. “I responded to it by vowing to become a Major League baseball player. I told my Little League coach I was going to play for the Atlanta Braves one day, and then maybe my mom would want me.”
He pitched for his high school team and excelled in academics, graduating with a 4.13 GPA. His childhood dream seemed to come true when the Braves drafted him in his freshman year at Fort Pierce’s Indian River Community College (now State College). Danny signed with the team in 2003 after his sophomore year, when he was all state and all conference, and pitched the only no-hitter in school history.
The Braves gave him a six-figure signing bonus and put $40,000 into a fund to pay for school if he wanted to finish college later. He had just turned 20.
Danny spent a couple of seasons in the Braves’ farm system, but he didn’t know how to handle his newfound wealth. “All that time, I was partying, doing lots of drugs,” he says.
“I routinely violated curfew; I would go out all night to bars and clubs. I would get so hung over that I wouldn’t show up for practices, team meetings, or team workouts. I was addicted to alcohol and drugs, but I didn’t realize it because I was still putting up good numbers. I had a 3.25 ERA during the time I played. I was young, rich, entitled and arrogant.”
His behavior finally got him suspended from the team, but he didn’t change his lifestyle. A year and a half later, the Braves released him at age 22.
“All that time, I had been partying every night, and I didn’t stop,” Danny says. “I was basically homeless, couch surfing with friends, living out of my truck.”
He tried to go to college “but I wasn’t in the right state of mind to succeed. I tried a variety of treatment programs. I would have short periods of sobriety, but I would always go back to using.”
Danny tried to take his life in 2008 and in 2009. The latter incident involved him getting into a high speed chase in the middle of the night. He crashed his truck into a canal and nearly drowned. That landed him in prison for four years on a variety of felony charges.
“I served the first year and a half of my sentence in a county jail,” Danny says. “During that time, I got further indoctrinated in the beliefs of conservative Christianity. We had ministers visit us three times a day, seven days a week. They would tell us, ‘There is only one God,’ that ‘Allah is a false God,’ and ‘Muslims are jihadists.’”
Growing up, his family didn’t talk about politics very much. “I developed my political beliefs through my friends, who were all super redneck, die-hard conservatives,” he says. “They were today what you would call Christian Nationalists. They were MAGA before MAGA.”
After his release from prison in 2013, Danny attended Covenant Bible College and Seminary, a Southern Baptist school. “That experience helped push me further to the right,” he says. “I was very anti-abortion, anti-gay marriage. I believed we were supposed to be a ‘Christian nation,’ and that we were getting away from our roots by granting equal rights to LGBTQ people.”
But he was also still an addict. After pawning his parents’ computer in 2014, his mother called the police in an attempt to get him help. His parents dropped the burglary charge, but the state of Florida pursued it anyway. Danny eventually took a plea deal to spare his parents the ordeal of a trial. He was sentenced to seven years.
This time around, “I got caught up in the prison subculture, especially gang life. I started running with Unforgiven, a white supremacist group that was hard core Trump and MAGA.” This was during the 2016 presidential campaign. “On the campaign trail, Trump was feeding their narrative that white people were under attack, and that we had to take our country back. I bought into all of that.”
Danny started reading “right-wing, ultraconservative books by people like Mike Lindell. I started getting super passionate and vocal about politics.”
He joined Unforgiven in 2019. “I didn’t consider myself racist; I didn’t hate Black people. But to me, it made sense politically. I bought Candace Owens’ line that Black people had to get off the ‘Democratic plantation.’” And he agreed with the idea that “the white man was under attack, that society was tolerant of everyone except whites. It felt to me that if you were a white straight conservative male, then you were being blamed for everything going wrong in the country.”
Danny’s feelings only intensified during the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020. “I thought systemic racism didn’t exist, that people had to stop claiming to be the victim,” he says.
During January 6th, “I was cheering it on from prison. I thought, ‘Yeah, let’s take our country back, the election was stolen.’”
Although he had joined the white supremacist gang, Danny had made a good friend in prison who was Black. Rashawn had been sentenced to 20 years for armed robbery, “even though his brother was the one who had the gun and Rashawn was only 16 when the crime occurred.” They connected partly because they were from the same town. “I taught him about the stock market,” Danny says.
At one point, Rashawn tried to convince Danny that the criminal justice system “was modern day slavery. I countered that we’re all responsible for our actions and should be held accountable for them. He said: ‘The judge in your case saw you as a college kid, an ex-baseball player with mental health issues. You’ve got 14 felonies and have been in prison twice, but you’ll still get out before me.’
Rashawn told Danny that “‘If I had all those felonies I would have gotten a life sentence. The judge looked at me as a savage, a criminal, a thug, another black kid lost to the system. He didn’t find me redeemable.’”
Danny says “I didn’t get it, but I realized later that he had planted seeds.” His friendship with Rashawn would be the key to his leaving MAGA.
Rashawn had told Danny to read The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander, and he did right after he was released from prison in June 2021. “It was life changing,” he says. “I had thought that systemic racism ended with the 1964 Civil Rights Act. But I discovered that between 1970 and 2010 there was a 700% increase in the US prison population. Racism didn’t end; it just evolved. Government just started targeting the Black community with the War on Drugs.”
Danny says he learned that about one in four Black people carry the label of convicted felon, “and as a convicted felon myself, I knew that was the one sector of society you could still discriminate against in jobs and housing. I had experienced that personally.”
Danny read Caste by Isabel Wilkerson, and watched the documentary 13th, about how the 13th Amendment abolished slavery but made it legal to enslave prisoners.
“I came to understand that telling people to ‘stop being the victim’ was ridiculously simplistic, that the issue is much more complex and nuanced than that,” he says. “I saw that in the past I didn’t have the historical context, or all the facts and data, to talk intelligently about race.”
Danny’s intellectual awakening “changed my life in every way possible. It actually saved my life; I would probably be back on drugs and maybe even dead if I hadn’t gone down this path.” He also “went through the whole deconstruction thing with Christian Nationalism,” which he now describes as “the main brand of white supremacy in the US.”
Danny started a social media page to tell his story, and it went viral. “That caused a lot of friction with my family,” he says. “Everyone — except for my dad and my sister — are die-hard MAGA. Some cousins and aunts and uncles stopped talking to me. Some would throw my past in my face, saying, ‘Who are you to talk?’”
His new political orientation led to the end of Danny’s marriage to a woman he had married while in prison. She was a MAGA follower, and worried that his outspokenness against Trump would harm her business. “I said, ‘I’m not going to compromise,’ so we got divorced in 2022.”
Danny started giving motivational talks all over the country, “sharing my story, talking about what changed me and made me go from being MAGA to what I am now.”
Nearly five months into Trump’s second term, Danny believes “we’re fighting for democracy. He wants to be a dictator; he’s doing everything he can to supersede the constitution with executive orders. He’s put yes men in positions of power who don’t have the competence or qualifications for their jobs — like Pete Hegseth.”
Danny believes “Trump speaks to the fear in people, especially mediocre white men. They’re the most afraid. If there is ever a truly level playing field, they’re the ones who will be left behind.”
Trump “makes people feel safe,” he continues. “If you’re in MAGA, you don’t have to learn anything new, you can stay comfortable in your bubble.”
Danny says when he was in the depths of his addiction, his father wrote to him: “‘Words are easy to say. Actions govern our lives. Life is a short trip on a small planet. Life everlasting is your choice.’ I try to live by that credo every day as I act to wake people up to the threat Trump poses to our democracy.”
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.
