Zerrin Mueller, in Clearwater, Florida, U.S., November 3, 2024. REUTERS/Octavio Jones
Rich Logis was a full follower of President Donald Trump to the degree that one person who heard him speak called it a "cult." He's left that life behind, and now is talking to people about how to help their friends and family to get out too.
His story began in 2015 when he was sick of both parties. The idea of burning the system down appealed to him. When he went to his first rally it was like being surrounded by life-long friends, he described. It filled the void that even a happy life couldn't, he told The Palm Beach Post.
"MAGA was exciting," he told a crowd of progressives who gathered to hear him speak this week. "It was exhilarating, and it was enthralling. It was new. It was novel. And, most importantly for myself, it was a community."
"It was my being. It was my personhood," Logis said. "I had a second family, my MAGA compatriots who sometimes — I'm embarrassed to admit this — took precedence over my own blood family."
He's been a hardcore grassroots organizer for the far-right and spoken on Fox News. He created podcasts and told people that Democrats were coming for their guns and would indoctrinate their children.
"When I was in MAGA, I was certain of everything," Logis said. "I was on the right side. Everyone against us, they were on the wrong side. We needed to crush our enemies before they crushed us."
Reality and facts were pointless because anything that conflicts with their beliefs is "liberal propaganda." It was, as MS NOW host Nicolle Wallace calls it, Earth 1 and Earth 2.
What pulled him out at first was Gov. Rick DeSantis (R-Fl.). He'd never been an anti-vaccine person. So, when the pandemic hit, he started reading news outside of the right for the first time in years.
"As I incorporated more and more news sources, I started to have this painful realization that so much of what I believed turned out to be false," he said.
"I would listen to Trump talk about January 6, and I would say, 'I'm out. This is not for me,'" he said. "But then I would look at a photograph of an event at Mar-a-Lago that I went to, and I would think, 'No, no, this is exactly where I belong.'"
The final straw was the mass shooting at Uvalde Elementary School in Texas that killed 19 children. Once he turned, his MAGA family turned on him. He was no longer welcome. His email inbox was filled with people eager to reconnect with him as if he'd been away for years.
So, he put his organizing to work and started an ex-MAGA support group. They meet for 90 minutes over Zoom once a week.
One of the major problems, he said, is that there are a lot of MAGA people who want to leave but who are scared of being made fun of.
"Because folks, I'm telling you: That's one of the reasons people who want to leave MAGA might not," he said. "They feel they're going to be judged."
He thinks there are many more who could leave MAGA if only they had the love and support to do it.