By Julie A. Ryan
It’s been over four years since I’ve posted my deep thoughts on this site.
You might be wondering why I retired from this blog and what brought me out of retirement. In a nutshell, I quit blogging here, quit social media, and quit promoting my When Life Was Still trilogy after being told, when I was fifty-three, I had a health condition that would probably keep me from reaching my fifty-fourth birthday if I didn’t have surgery. I had life-saving surgery and was ready to prioritize how I spent my time during whatever my second chance would allow me. But I completely lost my ability to successfully interact with bullies because I had become painfully aware that life is short—too short to waste on other people’s dumb behavior.
Being born with a sensitive nervous system, I’ve never been that good at tolerating bullies. Their behavior is unpredictable and illogical, and I’ve never processed it successfully. But I’ve always been impulsive and protective of other people’s feelings. And I have a long history of blurting out comments in an effort to put bullies in their place. My desire to silence bullies mainly comes from being bullied a lot myself and knowing how awful it is to feel helpless around someone who can inflict a lot of pain. I can’t say that my efforts to teach bullies how to be better humans have ever actually been successful. I do know that I’ve succeeded at making myself an easy target way too many times by standing up to those who bully others.
Blogging, being on social media, and promoting When Life Was Still—which calls out the behavior of bullies and promotes human decency—painted a huge and constant target on my back. Prior to my surgery, I might have enjoyed being forced to engage with certain bullies because I once enjoyed the challenge of putting them in their place with the hope of never having to deal with them again. Unfortunately, ever since Donald Trump entered the political scene, I’ve discovered through social media and blogging that I have an alarmingly high number of so-called friends and family members who are bullies that cheer on Trump’s desire to target and hurt vulnerable people. I’m surrounded by them, and it takes far less precious energy and time to walk away than to engage. I couldn’t stay on any social media platform because I had alienated too many people by saying I don’t understand how people, especially all the evangelicals I know, can support Trump when he’s clearly on a mission to trample as many people as he can in order to elevate himself. He is the exact opposite of everything Jesus represents. I made social media unfun for people by talking about how important human decency is in our political candidates.
I’ve been told many times that I could have just blocked the people who were rude to me and stayed on social media. But it caused me literal pain to see that people I once respected were letting their racist, homophobic, and xenophobic flags fly on social media because Trump made it popular to do so. Insecure and naïve people I knew were clearly finding the love and acceptance they craved in the communities who supported their offensive statements on social media. People on social media were making me really sad as I watched them devolve as human beings. And, ironically, I didn’t want to risk hurting Trump followers by blocking them because I had so many overlapping circles of friends and acquaintances where it was likely they would figure out they didn’t have access to my posted information that their close friends had access to. It just took too much energy to navigate the political minefield on social media. People close to me were losing relationships because Trump supporters wanted those people to choose between me and them. And even people who weren’t necessarily Trump supporters during his early political career started saying hurtful things to me because I was that rare person in 2015 who was saying Trump had the disturbing potential to become a cult leader if he was elected president in 2016. Even though I’ve had plenty of personal experience with cult leaders, people reacted as if I was being overly dramatic and told me I didn’t understand politics. They didn’t understand why I was confusing religion and politics. I’ve been a political junkie since elementary school, when I loved reading about political events in Newsweek, the local newspapers, and Reader’s Digest. I respect everyone’s right to have political beliefs that are different than mine—that’s what democracy is all about. Although I’m currently politically independent, I have been a Republican, I have voted for Republicans. I understand as well as anyone what the range of political views encompasses. The reaction I was seeing to Trump on social media in his early political career was more about popularity than politics. I watched as people embraced Trump’s hurtful rhetoric and received cyber love for the first time from a large community of people with questionable moral standards. People just weren’t listening to my dire warnings about Trump and his rise to power on social media because it didn’t give them anything they needed. So while I was writing my books, I burdened my When Life was Still protagonists with processing a variety of tyrants’ abuses of power, including Trump’s.
That was over ten years ago when I first started sounding alarm bells and writing about the potential state of our country if we handed power to Trump. I was obsessed with the idea of history repeating itself and that’s what fueled my novel writing and social media posts. As I look back, because of where Trump has taken our society—on a downhill path to autocracy—I regret that I didn’t do a whole lot more to sound the alarm bells in 2015. Although I was prescient back then with my concerns about our country, I failed to think specifically about what the state of my state, Minnesota, would be. I’ve lived in Minnesota my entire life, and I’ve taken for granted that it was once a safe place to live.
It is the sad situation caused by the occupation of ICE in Minnesota that has brought me out of blogging hibernation. In the last few weeks, I’ve cried about the murder of strangers—Renee Good and Alex Pretti. They were my fellow Minnesotans, and I cry for them because they were human beings and because of what I learned about them after they were killed by federal agents. They probably would have been more likely to help me in a situation of need than many of my family and friends. I feel like I have come to know Renee and Alex as I have seen the videos and images of their killings hundreds of times in the media I am exposed to. I feel I have interacted with them way more during this artic Minnesota January than any of my family members or friends. Renee and Alex have been a constant presence in my life in this new year, this second year of Trump’s second tyrannical reign, and I deeply feel the loss of their lives. Instead of them, it easily could have been my loved ones that got murdered. It isn’t difficult for those of us who live in close proximity to Minneapolis to feel the horror of these murders on a deeply traumatic level. Anyone with a beating heart in this area where I live is feeling the constant fear that it could be them or their loved one who is killed next by our federal government.
Because of my physical limitations that keep me from marching on the cold and icy streets of Minneapolis, I am posting these thoughts now. It won’t be nearly as cathartic as lobbing F-bombs at ICE agents would be, but at least I won’t get shot to death for exercising my first amendment right to express my views that differ from my autocratic country’s leader. To all who continue to faithfully support Trump, and ICE, and Greg Bovino, and Kristi Noem, and Pete Hegseth, and Pam Bondi, and Tom Homan, and Kash Patel, and Todd Blanche, and Karoline Leavitt, and Steven Miller, and J.D. Vance, and all of Trump’s complicit minions in Congress, his cabinet, and all his other enablers and cult followers, please understand that they are all bullies who intentionally hurt other people. The list of Trump’s supplicants is long, but I apparently feel this issue is worth spending lots of my post-life-saving-surgery energy on. I am using several moments of my second chance at life to say I really really really hate the pain that Trump and his thugs are causing my neighbors. I hate the ugly behavior Trump has brought to the surface of people I know who act like him because he has modeled human indecency from the highest platform in this land. I hate what Trump and his thugs are doing to people so much that I’m completely willing to risk losing more relationships with family members and “friends” by sharing this little PSA:
- Increasing numbers of people are abandoning their support for Trump because of what he is doing to people through his ICE operations. If you are still supporting Donald Trump at this point, you are either living under a rock or you are brainwashed. There is no other explanation for continuing to condone the erratic and harmful words and actions that come from Trump’s aging body. He doesn’t appear to have a lot of time left on this earth, but he can continue doing a lot of damage in the time he has left. Please stop supporting him and his dangerous policies and rhetoric. I don’t publicize this message to hurt anyone. Because I wish someone would have pointed out that I was in a religious cult long before I finally realized it, I say this to Trump’s remaining supporters with the hope that at least one person will stop to question why they currently believe what they do. Does your leader tell you not to believe what you see with your own eyes? Are you able to publicly disagree with your Trump-supporting community on any issue? If you lost your Trump-supporting community, do you fear that you would lose the love and support you desperately need from them? Would you lose your identity if you walked away from your Trump-supporting group? Do you dare risk publicly consuming any information that might contradict Trump’s current views? If you are afraid of the consequences of stepping outside of the ring of beliefs your Trump-supporting community has built around you, you are most likely in a cult.
If you are selectively exposing yourself to media coverage that convinces you Renee Good and Alex Pretti deserved to be killed for getting in the way of ICE operations in Minneapolis—like Donald Trump, Kristi Noem, Greg Bovino, Todd Blanche, and several other damaged human beings are telling you to believe so they can keep their jobs—I think you might have something more to address than cancelling your Trump Cult membership.
© 2026 by Julie A. Ryan. All rights reserved.
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WHEN LIFE WAS STILL . . . 