This is one of my most vulnerable essays because I am outing myself as someone who is exploring Trump's political platform. And it is very sad to me that it feels scary to even admit that I'm looking at what Trump is proposing and the values that the #MAGA movement is standing for. When ideally, all voters in an election should be dispassionately looking at both platforms and able to elucidate arguments in favor of and against each policy in the platform before deciding who to vote for.

I share this with the caveat that I'm an immigrant in the US–I cannot vote in the elections and yet I feel so grateful for everything that this country and society has brought me. And I think it is important that democratic values and ideals are preserved in the world and big, powerful, democratic-oriented nations like the US and India continue to remain strong, influential military powers because, on the other hand, we have autocratic military powers like Russia and China and it would be horrible for society if they were at the top of the global political order.

Ideally, we do not even have these nation-states and we have network states, in my opinion, that are more collaboratively incentivized through the global capitalist economy but till we get there, I think it is important that democratic nation-states remain at the top of the global political hierarchy.

I'll start off with the caveat that I can't tell if I'm just a jaded democrat or if I'm truly aligned with the values of the MAGA platform, values that Trump is running on. And this is an exploration and I'm doing it openly because I want people to feel comfortable talking about what they don’t know.

So there are aspects about the MAGA platform that truly appeal to me as I see it presently.

I like JD Vance's emphasis on making it easier to have and incentivizing having kids. This just aligns with my personal values because I want to start a family and the main reason I was considering moving to Europe was because I want a reasonably pleasant life as a father. And the US sometimes just feels ridiculously alone to me, as a society, in the western world for how challenging it seems to be raise kids. I just imagine shuttling kids around to all of these different classes that they have to go to to maintain a well-rounded personality *in a car* and just not having any kind of social nourishing life myself and it just terrifies me, absolutely terrifies me as a potential father. I’m just not interested in living a normie hustle culture lifestyle anymore. I want a life where I feel nourished, I can follow my passions but not needed to be so calendared all the time and it just feels difficult presently to pull that off in American culture.

As necessary as it can be sometimes to need space from one's family for doing healing work especially in this day and age where horribly abusive childhoods are quite common, I don't want familial estrangement to become the societal norm nor for it to be institutionalized in the system of law and incentives that we create through the government. I really believe from my spiritual self that we are born to our parents for a karmic reason and our greatest spiritual work is with our families and I want societal structures to incentivize that while also supporting the need for taking space. There is a distinction here between incentivizing and supporting. I want society to support liberty in its truest sense where people are free to move in whatever direction feels right for them so that they can root in the agency of their choice. And I want there to be a directionality in the incentive structures we create in our society. A directionality that supports the evolution of a human soul from dark to light. And there is a directionality there. Which can be sometimes missing in liberal conversation spaces. Especially liberal conversation spaces that deny the soul and are very rooted in a lower form of atheism.

I was reading about a case from Vancouver, British Columbia where the neighbors of a father who had trained his five kids to take public transport to school reported him to the Canadian equivalent of child protection services for negligence. Let that just sink in for a bit. This was a father who had trained his kids to use public transport to go to school and he was reported by some of his neighbors for negligence because they saw his kids walking along on the street by themselves. To an outsider like me that is such a ridiculous facet of North American culture and I get the fear for safety of kids but how will kids learn to be independent if they are suffocated by this fear and need parents to ferry them around everywhere?

For me this is an example of how the institutionalization of child protective services in North America has already reached the realms of whatthefuckery. and this father he fought a legal case for three years and I'm pretty sure he ended up losing that legal case which is ridiculous. When I hear kids in Amsterdam biking safely to their classes to meet their friends at the age of 7 or 8, that's the kind of society I want for my kids. I want them to have freedom while also having safety and not need me to be shuttling them around everywhere.

There is this underlying notion in North American culture which is that institutions need to step in to protect children from abusive parents and this notion is rooted in a very benevolent idea but horribly under-thought, poorly-executed and a horrific slippery slope. In my direct exploration of child sexual abuse, some of the worst abuse happens in these institutions that have unsupervised access to children. They are often staffed by repeat offenders of the worst kind and there is an increased likelihood of child on child sexual abuse. I don't think that's the answer to reducing childhood sexual abuse or childhood abuse in general. I'm not sure what the answer is right now but taking kids away from parents and sticking them into an protective institution with other abused kids is just another manifestation of the Isolationary design that underlies so many of the institutions in the West institutions that seek to redress harm.

This includes old age homes. I recently visited one and it was so sad to see these old humans being isolated and see these people working there who, bless their souls, felt so jaded and sad to be working there. So sad for old folks to live out their last days in such isolation.

Prisons have that same design. Child protective institutions also have that same underlying design. Let's isolate whatever the problem is. Let's just isolate it in one place and pray that it goes away. I don't think that works. I think we need a better integrative solution for fixing issues in our society. So when I see a VP nominee that actually supports the flourishing of nuclear families I consider that a positive–it truly feels aligned with my own values. I'm intending to make more content on my exploration of Trump's platform and I'm very curious to hear *thoughtful* responses from others who have a conscious, introspective practice, others who want to raise families, others who want to have kids especially those who identify as liberal like I do. I'm very curious to hear how this lands on you and what comes up for you. If you're even able to hold the possibility that the answers to your desires might come from a very unexpected place. That someone you absolutely detest might have the answers to what you're trying to create in your life. Thank you for reading!