Recently, we featured Rihanna Teixeira ( @thediaryofrihanna ), a 38-year-old ex-Evangelical woman who went viral for sharing how she deconstructed her racist and sexist beliefs and eventually stopped supporting Trump, despite voting for him in 2016. Rihanna opened up about how, after George Floyd was murdered in 2020, she saw hypocrisy within the belief systems held by her conservative Evangelical communities. She explained that her church would grant "grace" to Trump's behavior, including intense racist , anti-Islamic , and anti-trans conspiracy theories about the Obamas, but wouldn't do the same for Barack Obama's less severe shortcomings, which further made her question the hypocrisy.
Since opening up about her "deconstruction," as she called it, thousands thanked her for sharing her story, and many others shared their own experiences deconstructing their beliefs, too. As others pointed out, it's not often we hear about people taking accountability for their racist, sexist, or dangerous belief systems. And with a country that feels so divided and often fueled by anger and hate, it sometimes feels like there's no hope of changing people's perspectives.
However, because so many people in Rihanna's comments shared they had their own "deconstruction" experiences, I was curious to know about them. So, I asked members of the BuzzFeed Community who previously voted for Trump but won't in 2024 what their "last straw" was that made them shift their perspective or even deconstruct t.