We were reunited, my shieldmaiden and her illicit van, and now we had to figure out what to do next.

I had a lot of money in accessible (thanks Amazon RSUs), and so decided to execute on our dream of buying land and building a homestead. I found a great looking 38" RV on craiglist for a great price, except it had been parked for 5 years. I went and met the elderly couple who told me if I could get it started, they would give me $5,000 off.

It is impossible to threaten me with a good time, so I went to work on the underside. It had to be fuel, spark, or air flow.

In short, I got it to fire. I took it to get new tires and new brakes, and away we went, on a zig zag route from Phoenix to Snowflake, AZ.

This is the story of how I nearly lost everything to activist Swedish Social Services.

In 2017, my family and I were living in Sweden.

I had lived there before as a single man. We thought it was the safe, stable, open society everyone in the West keeps praising.

What happened instead nearly destroyed us.

I am a former Marine with a couple combat deployments to Afghanistan (this detail matters) and was part of Marine Corps Forces European Command in Germany. I worked for Amazon Web Services with a Nordic focus, staged in Stockholm

I managed teams across Sweden, Denmark, Norway, and Finland.

We lived in the countryside, paid taxes, followed every rule. We even insisted on speaking the local language.

We tried to be the ideal expat family. Then the Swedish social services system turned its eyes on my family.

Not because of abuse. Not because of neglect.
One of my kids insisted on being "decidedly American". He climbed trees, he was enthusiastic, he was proud of my military service, he would not stand in line if he couldn't determine a reason. He was the James Dean 'Rebel Without a Cause' archetype, despite our pleadings.

And in Sweden, that non-compliance simply would not do.

What we didn't know was that the Swedish Social Services system is engineered to view foreign families as disruptions to the social order if they are not "Swedish Enough" (their words).

Once you fall into their process, innocence and evidence do not matter.

All that matters is their internal bureaucratic logic.

If they decide you are a target, you are a target.

Swedish friends warned me that Social Services was the last holdout of hard-line Marxists who believed the doctrine of the "New Swedish Man" (Nya Svenska Man), where they could recreate people based on their social and political doctrines.

And because we were Americans during the first Trump Admin, pursuing us was considered "punching up".