The Unlikely Alliance

You’d think rural country boys and urban software engineers would be miles apart — culturally, economically, ideologically. But here’s a mystery that only your friendly neighborhood tech bro-turned-country-boy might be equipped to solve:

They’re actually aligned. Deeply.

Grit Over Gloss

Both embody this hardy, problem-solving ethos. A kind of don’t complain, just fix it yourself attitude. Do a good job, but don’t waste unnecessary energy or money. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. If it can be done cheaper, do it cheaper. That’s the shared DNA — whether it’s tuning a V8 or optimizing backend latency.

And both carry a deep distaste for eliteness — not wealth, not excellence, but eliteness as the performance of superiority via status. You know it when you see it: that sneering posture toward folks who don’t talk right, dress right, or think right. The software engineers I admire, like the country folks I meet, don’t play that game. In the Valley, you’ll find billionaires in hoodies & shorts building stuff because they love building — not because they want to look rich. It’s not about aesthetics. It’s spiritual.

Eliteness is a disease.

And it afflicts humans across economic class. You can be rich and not elite. You can be broke and full of it. Eliteness is when you let money or social standing define you — and start believing it makes you better than others.

Now, mediocre tech folks? They often get caught in the trap. They become the mid-layer bureaucrats of their industry. But top-tier devs and top-tier welders? They see through all that noise.

What MAGA Actually Unites

What MAGA does — and this really confuses people — is it brings together two types of folks who rarely show up in the same room: philosopher-engineers and country patriots. In that way, it reminds me a little of early Communism. Not the authoritarian part — but the way Communism tried to unite intellectuals and workers.

The difference is the glue.

Communism’s glue was despair. MAGA’s glue is reverence.

Reverence for what’s already good. What’s worth keeping. What’s worth defending.

In particular — the First and Second Amendments of the Constitution of the USA.

The right to free speech and the right to bear arms.

And these aren’t just legal ideas. They’re spiritual realities. They are human truths. You can lock someone in a cell, and they’ll talk to air and punch at the walls, still continuing to exercise these incontrovertible rights.

And even if you silence their body, they’ll still resist inwardly, subtly. That’s what makes them inalienable — they don’t come from governments or a piece of paper. They live in us.

Living Wisdom, Forgotten Truths

Most people are quite unfortunately disconnected from that. That's the impact of trauma or the broader variant of it from Buddhism – sankharas. They’ve been conditioned to collapse. Taught to believe they have no voice, no power. So they walk around like they’re in invisible prisons — picking from a tiny set of options shaped by fear, social programming and past karma.

But those who remember? They move differently.

Country folks, in my experience, live this generationally. They may not be able to articulate the values as eloquently as a Twitter-thread philosopher, but they’re just living it. And I’ve found myself genuinely appreciating the absence of emphasis on eloquence — like when someone just says “small government is good.” Even if they can’t win a policy debate with a liberal intellectual who walks away feeling smug about how smart he sounded, there’s still something real there. They might not have the language, but they have the knowing.

There is a parallel here to the origin story of Sanskrit.

Legend goes that the Rishis — the ancient Indian seers — received all the spiritual wisdom a person needs to live a beautiful human life. But then they were faced with a real problem: how do you actually transmit all of this deep, nuanced, layered wisdom to everyday people? How do you design accessibility into the wisdom system?

Their solution? They designed a language that encoded the wisdom directly into it. A language where the sounds themselves carry the teachings. Where pronunciation mattered because the vibration itself was healing. You didn’t even have to intellectually understand the meaning — just speaking it was said to realign your body and spirit.

One word might carry multiple meanings to reflect layers of truth. The Sanskrit word "sneha" means both “love” and “oil” — gently teaching that massaging your body with oil is an act of self-love. That’s just one example. Sanskrit is filled with this kind of embedded wisdom. It’s not just a language. It’s a transmission.

And that’s what I see in country folks.

They may not speak in essays or frameworks, but they are living something deeper. Their choices, their gut instincts, the things they hold dear — they speak it, even without saying it.

And honestly, real kudos to the Founding Fathers for this. For channeling something so deep and timeless into a set of incontrovertible rights — the kind of truths that don’t just belong to a nation, but to all people. To recognize that these weren’t rights granted by government, but rights that live in us. And to have the clarity and guts to enshrine them.

Most urban folks today are completely cut off from that. Conditioned out of it. Taught to live from performance and secondhand ideas rather than real, embodied knowing.

The Real Problem Isn’t Trump

And when people are cut off from embodied knowing, they don’t just lose their sense of freedom — they start living from surface. From performance. That’s what performative eliteness does. It puts polish above substance. Makes people care more about how things look than what they actually are.

And that’s killing us — spiritually and literally. We throw away what isn’t shiny. We buy more to feel worthy. We try to fill the void with packaging. And while we’re doing that, we crunch numbers on abstract spreadsheets about climate change and march in the streets like that’s enough. But it’s all misdirected energy. We’re solving the wrong problem with the wrong part of ourselves.

Part of that disconnection is how liberally anger gets spewed at Trump supporters. Like they’re dumb. Like they’re beneath you. A lot of people project all their unprocessed rage and insecurity onto these folks — justify it with clever arguments, dress it up in moral superiority, but it’s just raw projection. It’s toxic. It’s dehumanizing. All the while claiming to be against elitism–without understanding what elitism really is. Musk isn't elite – if you hate him, it's more likely that you are.

So yeah — if you’re a fellow engineer reading this, I’m curious how it lands for you.

And for everyone else — especially those of you who live in cities, who’ve been trained to perform cleverness, to curate your persona — I invite you to pause and ask:

What have you already forgotten?

What lives in your bones that your performance has covered over?

Because this isn’t just about Trump. And it’s not even just about America.

It’s about reclaiming something real.