The Epstein Files brought full closure to the MAGA chapter of my life.

Following the release of the Files, there were 3 news moments where I noticed my eyes squinting and internally, I thought—what are you trying to do here exactly?—like when you suddenly see through someone’s lies and attempts to manipulate you.

1. Obama mentioning aliens, followed by Trump reprimanding him
2. US-Israel launching a war on Iran
3. Artemis moon landing

The timing of #1 was such that I couldn’t help but wonder—were they working together to take attention away from the Files? Dribbling the basketball of distraction between them while pretending to be on opposite teams?

Did Netanyahu have video proof of Trump engaging in sexual abuse of minors? Did he offer Trump another exit route from the news cycle’s focus on the Files? Is that why the US joined the war against Iran?

The timing of it all—just odd. Very odd.

Looking back, MAGA really hooked me when a particular layer of trauma-rooted hate was moving through me.

MAGA is not inherently hateful. As with any political ideology which is strongly rooted in principles, it can evoke a proclivity in the humans adhering to it, to hate the humans who adhere to the antithesis of those principles.

That’s where the inner battle lies. To fully embody an Idea, while loving the humans who embody its Antithesis. Only then can you be a vessel of Synthesis, bringing forth Hegelian dialectical transformation.

By the August of 2024, I had succeeded in being able to hear Trump and separate his ideas from the manner in which he presented them. It was quite a relief to not find myself so annoyed all the time by his being and his style. And I found myself in a tenuous position—of being a Progressive who thought Trump might be the right choice for November 2024.

I found it difficult to hold that position in face of other (not all) Progressives labeling me a Trump supporter. Quite the battle between inner clarity and layered projections from others.

Do you see the difference in those two descriptors?

Progressive who thinks Trump might be the right choice for November 2024 vs. Trump supporter

One is a more dynamic expression, limited to a specific context, with room for change. The other is a rigid static identity label.

One has room for disagreement with Trump on specifics. The other doesn’t capture that nuance.

Is there something inherent in language that pushes humans towards identity labels?

Is it because “to be” is such a dominant verb? It doesn’t have to be that way, no?

Does it come from our underlying tribal nature? And the safety scanner it creates in us—the reptile brain always attempting to categorize who belongs to the tribe and who does not, that then surfaces in language as widespread use of identity labels.

Perhaps that’s just a facet of the current stage of cultural evolution we are in?

I am reminded again of this quote from Ludwig Wittgenstein.

So in the end, when one is doing philosophy, one gets to the point where one would like just to emit an inarticulate sound.

The more inarticulate your sounds, the less you are beholden to the boundaried bifurcations that words create.

If a MAGA-core and a Woke-core were to face-off against each other but limit themselves to only inarticulate sounds, they’d sound kinda similar, no?

Language mirrors consciousness and culture.

The language you use reveals much about how your mind is wired. The linguistic forms in a culture reveal much about what the culture values.

That idea underscores the most potent use of Large Language Models like ChatGPT—asking it to reflect back to you what you’ve written and then ask it what’s in the shadows of how you’ve phrased it.

I could not hold onto that tenuous position of being a Progressive who thought that Trump might be the better choice for November 2024 for long. It was quite the mouthful. UItra MAGA, on the other hand, rolls better off the tongue.

So I became that. Full of hate for the “other side”, partaking in internet mockery of the queer Left.

What a queer experience it is to hate! I understand its texture much better now.

Hate reveals the top layer on a slice of your trauma cake.

At the bottom of the slice is grief, adding structural stability to it like the biscuit you find at the bottom of a Black Forest cake from Monginis.

Slathered on top is a cherry of denial.

Hate, seen through Denial, appears self-protective. As you indulge in it, you create “protective” sheathes around the heart. “Protective” in quotes because actually they disconnect you from it.

There are 2 ways of living—

1. Cultivate the self-protective orientation, that’s basically like continuously licking the cherry of the trauma cake slice
2. Express each layer but witness yourself in that expression, which is effectively like progressively alchemizing the successive layers of the trauma cake slice

When I witness myself in my full expression, I notice parts of me that are not the parts that are fully expressing the present layer. These newly noticed parts seem to bridge me onto the next layer.

In the beginning of my MAGA arc, I remember an instance where I was talking to a local friend of mine, who is quite the sweetheart.

She and I—we’ve had similar life arcs. I haven’t encountered many humans who have experienced both the Silicon Valley and the Dark Valley of Shamanic Schizophrenia—where seemingly scary portals into otherwise hidden spiritual reality open up and common meaning-making frameworks that don’t account for that aspect of reality completely break down.

I am so grateful to be alive in a society where I could completely lose my shit and still not be forcibly rounded up into the prison of a “mental institution”.

As I look back on these varied eras of my life, it seems like my soul was really longing for Isolation.

Firstly sought via Institutionalization in my Schizoid Era, then via Imprisonment in the Vengeance Era and finally succeeded via Cancellation in my MAGA era. Overall, I’d say I got lucky. Won’t you agree?

As my MAGA arc was beginning, I remember this friend telling me—”Vighnesh, you just want a nice long hug”.

For an instant that stretched out
Oh so nicely
All the political ideas I was holding tightly onto
For the warmth that only another human can bring
Completely let go.

It felt so true.

Have you ever experienced that? A reflection from another human being that feels simultaneously outlandish and true.

A moment that helps you glimpse beyond the imprisonment of your mind, into the greater truth of your body.

I just needed a nice long hug. I really didn’t know how to receive one. So, I became Ultra MAGA.

Receiving a hug used to be such a complicated process. Oh Lord, what a complicated process it used to be!

There were 3 types of hugs—

1. from a man
2. from a woman that I wasn’t attracted to
3. from a woman I was attracted to

In #1 and #2, I was afraid of evoking lust in them. In #3, I was afraid of not evoking sufficient lust to match my own.

My body fought hard to soften into the platonicity of a hug as this internal spiritual battle with lust demons waged and created contractions.

Rarely, very rarely, I’d be able to receive a full proper hug. While I couldn’t, I raged against cuddle puddles.

Now I can receive soft, long hugs a lot easily, be satiated and not want anything more and not be afraid of them wanting anything more! Oh, praise the good God for that! Is quite the freedom!

That inability to receive a hug made me susceptible to the hateful strains of MAGA. My collaborator on Progressives for Trump was less susceptible to that. I would see him hugging many folks easily.

I also remember being astonished at his capacity to not respond to anti-Trump comments on social media. I did not have that capacity. I would get hooked. Nerd-swiped.

You see, argument is a form of human connection. Is it as good as a nice, long hug? No. Can it sometimes feel better than no human connection? Absolutely, yes. Else you wouldn’t have so many keyboard warriors in the isolated culture that is America.

There are 2 types of spiritual tools at your disposal, to work with unsavory inner proclivities—

1. Practices that help you turn away from them
2. Indulgence with the goal of noticing what part of you wants to indulge

The left-hand spiritual paths—like Tantra—emphasize the latter. Mainstream variants of religions like Christianity or Buddhism emphasize the former. Both make for useful tools.

I started noticing the part of me that was getting hooked. Noticing how yucky it felt afterwards. What is it in me that causes me to argue with people I rarely interact with in-person, I wondered…

And then, there it was! A moment of clarity! It’s so funny, in the karmic sense of the term, now that I think of it.

You see, I have a friend from school with whom I had a complicated dynamic growing up. At the time, many of those interactions didn’t feel great to me but I fawned. I don’t hold this against him, and I imagine we were both operating with the tools we had. I didn’t have the capacity then to set clear boundaries, and I can now see how I kept placing myself in situations that later felt off. And yet, when I look back, some of those interactions do fit what I would have called bullying at the time, at least as I experienced it.

Now the Cosmic Jokers made it so that he was quite vehemently opposed to Trump. His anti-Trump comments hooked most easily into me. I just had to defend President Trump to him.

Why don’t you get it, dude?! Trump is not as bad as you think he is!

While I wasn’t aware of what his comments were hooking into, I wondered—is he doing so purposefully to hook me in?

Over time, I have learnt that whenever such suspicions arise, it’s important that I choose the right answer. The right answer is the one that retains my connection to my agency. If I had answered that question with a “yes”, I’d have lost my agency to make change.

Instead, I practiced my strong value adherence to the First Amendment.

Freedom of Expression.

Everyone has a right to their expression. I have the right to engage with someone else’s expression to the extent I want to. If I engage more than it feels good, that’s on me.

Setting a boundary doesn’t mean trying to control what others say, but deciding the extent to which you want to engage.

This First Amendment practice is really a type of self-hypnosis. Try it out next time you find yourself caught in an interaction that is not feeling good to you.

With sufficient practice, I got to a moment where I saw the relational constellation very clearly.

I was trying to prove to a past-bully how my present-bully wasn’t as bad as he thought he was!

So funny, in that cosmic, karmic manner of speaking!

The relational constellation resolved.

I got freed from MAGA and from many relational hooks between me and him. I could empathize with him more easily without getting into as many arguments. Without needing him to see and acknowledge my perspectives.

The capacity to empathize without needing to engage is a superpower.

That’s why MAGA hooked into me. Past unresolved bullying trauma! It seems so obvious now that I can see it.

President Trump, who brought the Bully archetype so effectively to the political realm, divided the country into those victims of bullying who want to defend the bully (MAGA-core) and those victims of bullying who hate the bully (Woke-core).

Neither end of the polarity actually being able to see the full picture of who he is.

I regret the hateful things I wrote from MAGA-core towards Woke-core. I remember a particularly charged conversation on Facebook where I used the pejorative—androgynous blobs—towards the Woke Queer Left.

I thought I was quite smart to come up with that then. Oof does it hurt to remember that now…

There was a vivid moment where the underlying causticity that birthed the comment fully melted for me.

I was at the Thursday night Contra dance at Warren Wilson. It’s a fairly queer-leaning dance crowd. Contra is a very fun dance environment with lots of swinging. It is so fun to swing with another!

Now I found myself swinging with a human who seemed quite gender-non-conforming.

As we swung together, I could feel the tremors in their body. Tremors that felt all too familiar to my body based on my history of overcoming daily panic attacks. I felt deep empathy for them, while also not feeling the need to help them.

The capacity to empathize without needing to engage is truly a superpower!

Aha! My deep desire to help other adult survivors would overwhelm my nervous system in the past and lead to a pushing away of them via judgments! That was when my empathy was deeply entangled with the rescuer in me. After I was saved by Jesus and learnt the technology of prayer, I realized that I could always go and pray for a human afterwards.

I noticed the part of my mind that held distaste towards queer humans.

My mind was going—oh why don’t these weirdos just heal their trauma instead of messing around with their identity, piercings, hair color and tattoos.
My heart was going—oof, so tender to be here with these tremors that seem so familiar and offer a moment of containment and presence.

All those past moments where tremors moved through my own body and I yearned to be held in a long hug came up and here was a chance to offer something like that to another human for a possibly shared flavor of suffering.

So tender. I bawled my eyes out on the drive back.

Back then, I was certain that repressed childhood sexual trauma led humans towards exploration of queerness and trans identity.

Looking back, I can’t quite fathom how I could have held that hypothesis and still carried much distaste—a euphemism for hate, really—towards fellow abused brothers and sisters.

If I were to attempt to put words to it, I carried this sense of needing to help all adult survivors heal. At points, this inner sense felt like a burden. In those moments of nervous system overwhelm—which is what was really going on under the surface—I did not feel spaciousness for the particularities of the healing journey of another human being and compared where they were to my own path and then tried to warp them onto my path.

It’s kind of like when people can’t help but give others advice, from this place of wanting to escape the felt discomfort of seeing someone else’s suffering, without taking the effort to understand and empathize with the particularities of their suffering.

I’m sure you’ve encountered that before, yeah?

It’s possible that in many of the cases where I claim to have seen a queer person’s suffering, I was simply projecting my own particular trauma. I’ll have to live in this new heart-open mode for a bit longer to suss out if that was the case.

While I was regularly allowing myself to be caustic in speech towards the Queer Left and found myself guffawing regularly at the plethora of right-leaning Internet memes that rely on such hatred, I did not have full awareness of this particular bullying-related trauma cake slice that was emerging in me.

Now I’ve eaten it. Was quite the delicious chapter.

The trauma cake offers many adventures, my friends. Don’t wait too long—grab a spoon and dig in.