EXIT Substack paid subscribers receive:

• full recordings of our member Q&As

• regular essays and updates

• invitations to our local cocktail hours, which take place after selected meetups.

Calls, chat, and full member meetups are for EXIT members only. Substack paid subscription is free with EXIT membership.

Below the paywall: invites for Provo 4/4, Houston 4/11, and Columbus 4/18 cocktail hours.

Cocktail hours take place at the end of a member meetup, usually after dinner, and are a great way to get to know the EXIT guys in your area, and see if full membership is right for you.

(If you are an EXIT member, you will be invited to the member meetup via email, and details will be available in your regional channel on RocketChat.)

This week’s calls:

NOTE: Investing Call has been moved to Tuesdays at 7PM ET.

• Monday, 4/6: Working Group, Fitness, (one-off) Running a Business in Latin America, AI

• Tuesday, 4/7: Entrepreneurship, Dating, Investing, Full-Group Call (Ben Wilson, httotw.com), (one-off) Iran Q&A with Francis, a Navy linguist with a 20-year career in Farsi and Iran issues.

• Wednesday, 4/8: Acquisition Entrepreneurship, Fitness, Paideia, Leadership Group

• Thursday, 4/9: Great Houses, Expat Social Hour, EXIT Bar Assc., Real Estate

• Friday, 4/10: Fitness

• Saturday, 4/11: Cybersecurity, MIT SICP Study Group, Jung

Upcoming General Calls

QUARTERLY EXIT PUSH: Genesis, Origin Stories, the Birth of the Nation — proactively creating family history, so that you can look back and say “this is when and where it began”.

• 4/7: Ben Wilson of How to Take Over the World will be speaking on seizing the opportunities that lie in volatility, and the risks taken by founders.

• 4/14: Colton Murray on multi-generational family business.

• 4/21: Becoming a Pillar of Your Community. What responsibilities have been abdicated? How could you become essential in your family, neighborhood, city?

EXIT Member Meetups

NOTE: May travel schedule has been adjusted — instead of Philadelphia meetup 5/22, we will hold meetups in DC (5/16), New York (5/18), and Boston (5/19).

Check #Announcements-WEEKLY channel for meetup details.

• 4/4: Utah Valley

• 4/10: Nashville

• 4/11: Houston (with JCB), Washington DC

• 4/17: Atlanta

• 4/18: Columbus (with JCB)

• 4/20: Dallas/Fort Worth, New York City

• 4/25: St. Louis (every other month)

• 5/2: Provo (with JCB)

JCB Upcoming Travel Schedule:

• 4/11: Houston

• 4/18: Columbus, OH

• 5/16: (new) Washington, DC

• 5/18: (new) New York City

• 5/19: (rescheduled) Boston

Below the paywall: invites for Provo 4/4, Houston 4/11, and Columbus 4/18 cocktail hours

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[What follows is a transcript. Please excuse errors.]

It’s a great day to talk about the Constitution — because today, apparently, we get to hear whether Ketanji Brown Jackson and Amy Coney Barrett think that we should have a country.

They’re ruling today on whether or not a Chinese Communist Party senior official can ejaculate into a cup, have that cup flown to Saipan, impregnate 10 or 20 or 50 surrogates (this is a real thing that happens), have those surrogates give birth on Saipan Island, then immediately fly all 10 or 20 or 50 children back to China as full American citizens. American as you and me.

And Justice Jackson has made the elegant argument that if she were to steal a wallet in Japan, that she would be subject to Japanese law, which is, in her words, “in a sense, allegiance.”

If you steal a wallet in Japan and you are arrested by the Japanese authorities and sentenced by a Japanese judge, you are essentially Japanese.

Amy Coney Barrett says we can’t strike down birthright citizenship for illegal migrants because what if you don’t know who the parents are? How can you prove that they’re not citizens? American citizenship is the default position: everyone’s an American until proven otherwise.

Which, of course, these arguments are absurd on their face. It takes like five seconds to figure out how they’re terminally unworkable. But Amy Coney Barrett and Ketanji Brown Jackson don’t have to win an argument.

Kagan and Barrett and Sotomayor and Jackson — our gay race communists — they’re going to vote against restrictions on immigration no matter what, because they don’t believe America should be a country. To the extent that they have any patriotic feeling toward America whatsoever, it’s as a void of nationhood, as the opposite of a nation.

A place where anybody can come and be anything, or just more accurately as a vehicle for communism and Barrett is maybe less ideological, but in terms of her emotional orientation, it all leads to the same place. She may not actively hate and want to destroy America, but any of the things that we could do to protect it are going to make her sad: and if it makes her sad, she’s going to vote against it.

So, in practical terms, that’s the state of constitutional law in America.

You got four judges who are pretty much always going to vote one way. You got four other judges who are pretty much always going to vote the other way, and the bottom line is just which direction makes Amy Coney Barrett feel less sad.

A lot of the criticism around this and other Supreme Court decisions has been that these women are stupid. I don’t necessarily think that’s true — or, at least, I don’t think they need to be stupid to behave the way they’re behaving. I don’t think if you sat them down and had this conversation, and you walked them through the logic of why it’s obviously silly to argue that “stealing a wallet in Japan makes you Japanese,” or “everyone’s an American until proven otherwise,” I don’t think they would be confused by the logic. I don’t think they would be flummoxed.

Instead, what’s happening here is they’ve got an object level moral outcome that they think is the right outcome, and there has to be some fig leaf of textual interpretation to get to that moral outcome, so they’re just backing into it. They’re just saying whatever they need to say to get to where they want to go.

The problem, if you are a textual constitutionalist like Mike Lee or Thomas Massie or Rand Paul, is that all the proper procedures were followed in putting these women in the chair.

You are morally and ideologically committed to a captured process, a process that is in the hands of people who don’t care about it.

You have no grounds from inside the frame of your own ideology to criticize that. Particularly if you believe that this construct of procedure and law is what makes Americans Americans, it’s what makes you you, then you’re in a really serious situation — because the people in control of this system don’t just lack respect for that procedure; they lack respect for that identity — and they have a completely different notion, in fact, a hostile notion of what America is and who Americans are.

So it’s not just that they disagree with you as a matter of ideology: they feel no kinship with you, and so your ideology requires you to subject yourself essentially to foreign occupation people who regard themselves as foreign to you and hostile to your interests.

About a month ago, Ben Wilson from How To Take Over the World Podcast came to the EXIT meetup here in Utah Valley, and I was talking about some of the thoughts I had putting together the Ordeal of Incivility for the podcast last month, and we were talking about how this problem:

How do you get the constitutionalists to understand the situation?

One of the things I’ve learned over the last 10 years of watching these systems fail, and changing my mind, and seeing other people change their minds, is that basically no one — not even a really smart person — lets go of a framework that gets them through the day until they have a new framework that they can similarly inhabit.

And if you’re going to break something as load-bearing, as someone’s national identity, along with their entire political worldview (which, for a civic nationalist, constitutionalist, Republican American, those are basically the same thing), and you don’t give them any way to recontextualize all those moral impulses, all the things that made that feel right and feel important for so long — if you take a hammer to all that moral architecture and you leave them nothing, well, they’re going to reject your facts and logic, and they’re going to go back to the moral framework that feels right and feels familiar.

That’s just the practical situation, what you can sell people on. But then there’s the deeper question of what’s actually true?

What should you sell them on? How do you recontextualize all those moral impulses that made them want to be a constitutional, civic, nationalist conservative in the first place? It seems to be both morally and practically true, that if you disrespect the intuitions that lead people to care about fairness, to care about the rule of law — to care, at least in theory, about neutral and impartial institutions — if you do that, people aren’t going to bow to your superior command of the facts. They’re just going to conclude that there’s something deficient, something wrong with you, and they’re going to be right.

This is especially true if you claim to be a big fan of Western civilization, in contrast to, let’s call it Oriental Despotism.

It makes an enormous difference to the way you live and the heritage that you come from, that Western Europeans have been able to build things and create things with the expectation of a more-or-less even playing field.

It matters a lot that a cop can’t just shake you down at a traffic stop. It matters enormously that if you have a business idea, you can expect that you’re not at the mercy of the ego or the greed of the local bureaucrat that you can expect your paperwork to be processed without a lot of surprise processing fees or whatever.

Of course, our whole thing, everything we do at EXIT, is predicated on the theory that power has found a way around all these rules — that bureaucrats, at least at the top, have found a way to milk the system and shake people down.

Yes, in theory you have freedom of speech and religion as long as you’re not one of the two-thirds of America that works for a corporation with an HR department — that America’s HR departments are in fact a privately funded political commissariat twice the size of the KGB with three times the funding.

But it’s incredibly stupid, both as a matter of messaging and as a matter of fact, to argue that these rules and principles are meaningless, just because they’re not self-enforcing.

So to get back to this conversation with Ben, we said, yeah, people need to understand that these rules don’t work the way we thought they did in eighth grade civics class, but they clearly matter.

Some people will say, well, that’s just white people. That’s the way white people build governments. That’s the way white people live. That’s obviously not true either. For all our problems, America is still a very different place to start a business. It’s a very different place to speak your mind. It’s a very different place to get into a self-defense altercation than Britain or Canada or New Zealand or Australia or anywhere in Western Europe.

It’s also become a popular meme to point out that the Liberian constitution is basically identical to the US Constitution. And of, course, Liberia is totally dysfunctional and you do have to bribe cops, and you don’t have any meaningful rights as a citizen. And I’ve talked about why that’s the case.

The text is not self interpreting, it’s not self defending. The words on the page are not guaranteeing your rights.

So if you’re a civic nationalist, you have to deal with the Liberia problem.

But if you want to say the Constitution doesn’t matter at all, you have to deal with the Canada problem.

These people were drawn from essentially identical British stock. They had the frontier experience. All these historical and biological factors that are supposed to have made Americans who they are. And yet their behaviors and their pathologies, especially under these postmodern conditions, are way more like the British and their behaviors and pathologies than they are like us.

So the specific circumstances of America’s founding, its self-concept, its system of laws, its Constitution — it’s doing something. It is demonstrably not the case that the American system is something that high-IQ Anglos build the way beavers build dams. They don’t. It’s only here, and it’s just obviously better — not just in terms of what America has been or could be, but what it is right now.

So it’s not just bad politics to tell people to discard that: it’s actually wrong.

So that got us thinking: if the Constitution isn’t self-enforcing — if it is, in a meaningful sense, in the hands of Ketanji Brown Jackson and Amy Coney Barrett, and until recently, Merrick Garland and Barack Obama — what is it doing?

Why is it still better here?

And my answer is basically that the Constitution matters as a religion in the minds of the powerful.

To the extent that it matters — to the extent that it has ever mattered — it’s always been to the degree that the people in power mutually agree on it and enforce it upon each other. And you could say, well, apparently that’s not a very robust way of governing human behavior — but it’s the only thing that has ever governed human behavior.

It’s just as real or just as fake as honor, or any other code of conduct, any other set of expectations that a people have believed in. And of course, it’s really important that the Constitution is a product of the American people. The American people are not a product of the Constitution. But it is a bona fide product of the American people. It is an expression of who we are.

Spengler says that the act of writing it down is an admission that it’s fake, or it makes it fake, or something. And yeah, I don’t know about that — I just know I’ve seen Canada, and I’ve seen here, and here’s better.

This model also explains pretty cleanly why you can’t just export the document to Liberia or Iraq: it’s an articulation and an expression of a living culture. It’s an expression of a spirit. If a group of people are possessed of that culture and share that spirit, then it’s very easy for them to use that document to meditate on that spirit and to remind themselves and remind each other of what it means.

And that may sound loosey-goosey, and not a foundation that you can build a state upon, but empirically it actually seems to work. You can maybe imagine a world in which there was, like, Protestantism about the Constitution, where there was this panoply of sincerely held but divergent views about the Constitution, and you just don’t see that basically at all.

Everyone who cares about the Constitution loves Clarence Thomas — because these basic principles of respect for conscience and respect for property are actually not that complicated.

But what has happened is that instead of viewing the Constitution and the American system of government as a banner and a spirit and a culture, we’ve come to view it as a text.

It’s a series of English words in a particular configuration, and we’ve come to believe that that configuration of words is somehow talismanic and self-reinforcing and solves its own problems. And to some extent, that’s what at least some of the founders believed about it too.

Not that they had any illusions about having done perfect work — but there does seem to have been at least some idea that the particular structure of the puzzle box matters, and if you could engineer the incentives and set power against power, that you could solve problems of politics, problems of judgment between human beings.

Of course, the constitution can’t do that because text can’t do that.

And this was the central insight of the postmodernists that they used to basically deconstruct all of Western civilization.

Derrida summed it up with “there is nothing outside the text” — meaning is always contingent upon context that the text itself can’t supply. And so when you try to treat the Constitution as a text with the deadness of the letter, you wind up with the kind of constitutional exegesis that we get.

The conservative side is always saying, well, here’s what Madison obviously thought, or here’s what Jefferson obviously thought — and that’s the context they bring to the text. And the liberals say, well, but Madison and Jefferson aren’t God, they were slave holders. And anyway, the Constitution has all these provisions for changing conditions. And on this journey that we’re on, our understanding has evolved, and here’s where we’re at now — and that’s the context that they supply to the text.

And liberals actually frequently win these arguments, because conservatives don’t think Madison and Jefferson were God either, and they get really uncomfortable if you try to nail them down to all the things that Madison and Jefferson actually believed and the way that America was actually run back then.

So when KBJ says, “if I steal a wallet in Japan, I’m Japanese”, or Barrett says, “if we can’t tell who a person’s parents are, they’re automatically American” — yes, they’re being very tendentious and stupid if what you think they’re trying to do is interpret the text.

What they’re really doing is thinking about the way it ought to be.

And they probably are — even the dyed-in-the-wool commies — thinking about the idea of America, the promise of America, the ideals upon which it was founded, which we’ve “learned so much about since then.”

And they could point out, not without justification, that the founding fathers were the libtard of their time. Both communists and reactionaries make the argument that big-L Libtard liberalism is a development and an outgrowth from small-l classical liberalism, Enlightenment ideals.

The leftist, the Communist, would point out that the French Revolution, the American Revolution, were heading in a direction — that history had an arc — and they want to ride that train all the way to the station.

Whereas a reactionary would say, yes, everything’s been on this trajectory — and it’s a bad trajectory, and we should have got off at feudalism or we should have got off at agriculture, or somewhere.

And where the reactionary is on the firmest ground is when he points out that, yeah, if you brought Washington or Jefferson or Madison to 2026 America, they’d be horrified.

But then the leftist, the communist can say, well, let’s take you back in time to 1776 and see how you like it. And virtually every right-wing American, every conservative American, would find things that they just couldn’t stomach about that time.

So we can say that liberals are being weaselly about what the specific words mean, like the parsing of the sentences.

You know, “you’re reading something into this that the founders never intended”, but they can just say, so what? Are we conducting a seance? Am I an LLM? No, I’m a judge. My job is to exercise judgment.

So our criticism of these judges should not be that they are malfunctioning search engines.

When Ketanji Brown Jackson argues that stealing a Japanese person’s wallet makes you Japanese, the problem with that is not that it’s “out of harmony with the Founders’ intent.” The problem with that is that it’s retarded. It’s bad judgment, it leads to a bad place.

But if one side of the argument is ideologically committed to being a search engine — to being a robot, and restricting themselves to the set of solutions that had been worked out by 1787 — and the other side has human beings who can update their priors, and respond to contingencies, and act like human beings — well, the human beings are going to win.

And they win, not only because that’s a brittle position, and forces you to be dumber than you are, but also because it’s a cowardly position.

I’ve talked to a lot of constitutionally autistic libertarians, and in almost every case, I’m way more comfortable with the founder’s actual intent than they are. I’m not saying I’d be perfectly comfortable if you sent me back in time to 1776 Virginia, but I’d be way more comfortable than these guys.

Their insistence on this Talmudic approach to the text has nothing to do with wanting to larp as 18th century classical liberals, and it has everything to do with avoiding moral responsibility.

They just want to be able to say, it’s not my fault. Rules are rules. They fundamentally don’t want to be in charge, and so leftists are happy to oblige them.

”You don’t want to be in charge, you want the text to be in charge — but the text can’t be in charge, The text can’t decide — so we’re going to be in charge.”

And that’s been the equilibrium of American politics for the last 150 years. And so this originalist versus progressive paradigm is obviously flawed. It’s the wrong way to look at the problem.

What we need is constitutional action.

We need human beings animated by the spirit of the constitution — who genuinely believe in the ideals and intent of the Constitution — and who have the courage to act and judge.

So last week, Ben Wilson and I held the first meeting of the Constitutional Action Society at Utah Valley University here in Orem, Utah.

The mission of the Constitutional Action Society is to serve as a shadow political party. It’s not a third party — we’d work within the bipartisan system — but we’re going to field and endorse candidates, we’re going to assess existing politicians on their adherence to our platform, and we’re going to fundraise and phone bank and knock doors on behalf of issues and candidates that we support.

We didn’t heavily publicize this first meeting because we had a little concern about the security situation (it’s UVU, it was “No Kings” weekend), but on the basis of one tweet and passing it around to some group chats, we had 50 guys show up.

Our delivery was not polished — this was something that we felt we had to do, and so we wanted to move as quickly as possible — but there was enormous energy in the room.

It actually reminded me of the early days of EXIT back in 2021, the Bad Old Days: the concept of the group was literally just a few days old and it was very abstract, but people were ready for a solution.

I gave about a 15 minute speech and Ben gave his, and afterward we had so many guys saying, “All right, how do I get started? Where do I sign? Put me in.”

My speech was an elaboration of some of the things I said in the Ordeal of Incivility, specifically aiming this question of moral responsibility at Latter-Day Saints. Even in Orem, Utah, not everybody in that room was LDS — and the problems we’re addressing are national problems, they have national solutions — but what I said to the Gentiles in the room was basically, “If you want Utah to figure itself out, Latter-day Saints have got to figure themselves out.”

So I talked about the Church’s experience with the Constitution in particular: how in 1890, the Supreme Court ruled 9-0 that religious advocacy for polygamy — even if you didn’t personally practice it, or even if you were just a member of a church that practiced polygamy — was sufficient grounds to be disenfranchised: which basically wiped out the entire local government of Utah.

And that’s just one example, but we’ve put the paper shield of the Constitution to the test: we’ve run it all the way up the chain, and the Supreme Court told us unanimously that the Constitution didn’t say what it obviously said.

So we ought to have learned something from our historical experience with the Constitution, but we also have a unique relationship to text as such.

Derrida’s insight that “there is nothing outside the text” is something that Joseph Smith actually picked up as a 14-year-old boy.

He’s living through the Second Great Awakening, and he’s trying to figure out which church is right, and he says: “the teachers of religion of the different sects understood the same passages of scripture so differently as to destroy all confidence in settling the question by an appeal to the Bible.”

Which our critics will sometimes say is a disparagement of the Bible, but it isn’t at all. We believe the Bible’s the word of God. We just don’t believe that you can lawyer your way to the right answer through an English text. It’s not a limitation of the Bible, it’s a limitation of human language.

And Joseph Smith lived and taught that way his entire life. You know, preachers would come and say, you know, like, “debate me IRL, prove me wrong with facts and logic” — and he would literally be like, “how about we wrestle for it?”

The whole message of the Restoration is not that we have some new important addendum to the text.

He didn’t say, I’ve puzzled out the true meaning of the text. He said, “I saw a pillar of light. I saw God, I talked to God.” And he didn’t say, “trust the text”, or trust my reading of the text.

He said, “you have to talk to God.”

Which, if it works, is a genuine solution to both the problem of postmodern textual subversion and Nietzsche’s Death of God (which are basically the same problem.)

I’ve already made the argument in the last podcast about why latter day saints are so hyper institutional, so hyper conformist — I won’t recapitulate it — but I just want to point out again how remarkable it is that they’re like that, given how little doctrinal justification they have for that position.

We hide behind text for the same reason everybody hides behind text: because we don’t want to talk to God. We’re scared of what he might say. We’re scared of being accountable. We’re scared of exercising judgment and being wrong.

So we pretend to have this reverence for the text of the Constitution, and it lets us get lawyered and subverted and deconstructed and manipulated in a way that we would never tolerate with the actual word of God.

That was my message to Utah: get off your knees. Stop scraping for the approval of people who hate you. Stop being so desperate to be liked. Stop being so afraid to decide. Stop waiting for the church to tell you what to do. You have to talk to God. And then you have to decide, and then you have to be held accountable for those decisions.

And the text, instead of being a slavemaster, is a schoolmaster.

It’s an inspiration, it’s a reminder. It sharpens your moral intuitions: but ultimately you’re accountable to God and you have to act, and that’s why we call it the Constitutional Action Society.

Ben’s message was about the original notion of American citizenship.

He showed an image, which I’ll probably use as the banner image for this podcast, of the Salt Lake Dragon, which I guess was the cryptid mascot of Salt Lake City for a minute, for the 24th of July Pioneer Day Parade in 1897.

What he points out is that there’s no bollards. There’s no barricades. People have their feet swinging off of second-story balconies. They’re perched on telephone poles. And he asks basically, who gave them permission to sit there? And the obvious answer is “Nobody did.”

This is their city. It’s their parade, they’re real citizens.

He talks about how his great-grandfather grew up in downtown Salt Lake City, and I might have some of the details wrong, but he was like seven years old and he would walk several times a week to the ZCMI, the general store.

And Ben’s point was, why not? It’s his home, it’s his town. A little boy should be able to walk to the store, even in downtown Salt Lake City. It’s not that much to ask.

And he contrasts that with an image from a recent Gay Pride parade in Salt Lake City. And of course it’s extremely gay and it’s a foreign imposition, but that’s not the point: the point is that there are barricades and police. The people are on one side and the parade, the official parade selected by the city is on the other. The problem is not just that these people hate us, the problem is that it’s not our city. It’s their city. It’s up to the experts to decide what the parade will be and who’s going to stand where.

And the experts have decided that downtown doesn’t belong to you: it belongs to trannies and drug addicts and homeless people.

Then he tells a story about his dad, and I won’t go into the details about his dad’s story because it’s not my story — but he’s really making a point about his dad’s generation.

This is the first fully postwar generation. The first generation raised from birth under the shadow of the Hitler Mythos.

The message of the Hitler Mythos is good guys don’t act, they don’t want, they don’t decide.

Good guys might fight, but only to stop the bad guy — to stop him from getting what he wants.

Basically all popular media, all popular mythmaking, from 1950 until today, is: Darth Vader wants the Death Star, and we have to stop him. Voldemort wants the Elder Wand and we have to stop him. Thanos wants the Infinity Gauntlet. We have to stop him.

The particulars — it doesn’t really matter exactly what the villain wants, because whatever you want, ultimately you want power. You want because you want the power to get the thing you actually want.

And of course, wanting power is bad, so the hero doesn’t want anything. He’s just good — and the good thing to do, when there’s a villain, when there’s someone who wants something, is to get in their way.

So you can see very quickly how this moral reasoning left to unfold by itself becomes essentially opposition to human life, human consciousness.

We didn’t coordinate on our speeches, but the message of both was that good people have to want power.

For starters because they’re human beings, and if you’re not allowed to want power, you’re not allowed to want anything. But also because, at the end of the day, someone’s going to be in charge, someone’s going to decide, and if you tell the world good people don’t do that, good people can’t do that, then only bad people are going to do it.

And that’s basically how we got where we are: that’s the terminus of the postwar ethos.

So we presented a little platform that said, these are the kinds of things we want.

We want to institutionalize the homeless and clean up the streets.

There’s absolutely no justification for the squalor and the crime and the violence, particularly in downtown Salt Lake City. There’s absolutely no legitimate constituency that it serves. It’s for the drug traffickers, it’s for the corrupt NGOs, and it’s for the cowardly politicians. That’s the reason we do it that way.

We’re also going to fire all leftist teachers at every level of education, K through university. Your free-speech rights do not extend to what I pay you to tell my kids. And it’s not something that we’re going to solve by imposing particular rules and saying, “You can’t utter the following words” because again, these are leftists.

They’re not going to be bound by the text. They’re going to find any way they can to defy these laws. So they just need to be fired. They need to be removed.

We’re going to prosecute and destroy all radical leftist gangs, including Antifa. And this is already the policy of the federal government. But I can tell you from friends in the administration, there is no will inside the administrative state to fulfill the President’s directive. There’s no willingness to press RICO charges. There’s no willingness to follow the money. And it’s pretty clear in my view that Yarvin’s right — it’s because Antifa is an arm of the US federal government. But there’s absolutely no reason that a state could not pursue state level civil and criminal charges against these people.

We’re going to prosecute and destroy all drug gangs. We’re going to deport all illegal aliens. We’re not going to tolerate rundown neighborhoods that don’t feel like Utah. If necessary, after the deportations, we’re going to bulldoze them and start over.

We’re going to incentivize our young families to buy homes. These kinds of programs are sometimes unpopular among Republicans because they’ve been manipulated by fraudsters, but the bureaucrats are complicit in that — we don’t have to do that. We can actually target the people we want to help and punish people who manipulate the rules.

We’re also going to severely punish all forms of anti-white discrimination, including in hiring and admissions. It’s straightforwardly illegal and unconstitutional, even by the terms of the 1964 Constitution. And all we have to do is stop tolerating it: we can do early morning SWAT raids on public administrators who engage in that kind of behavior. We can perp-walk them in front of the courthouse.

We’re going to reward Utahns who are healthy and engage in healthy practices, and we’re going to disincentivize unhealthy behaviors: and, ultimately, we’re going to make Salt Lake City the most breathtakingly beautiful city in the United States.

All of these objectives and methods are completely harmonious with both the spirit and the letter of the Constitution.

There’s absolutely no reason it can’t happen except that powerful people don’t want it to happen. But our whole system of (let’s call it) “Rooseveltian managerial mass democracy” — basically the system of government we’ve lived through since the Depression — is predicated on using the tools of mass media to manufacture consent.

There was a story out of Brazil a couple days ago. So Bolsonaro got wrecked, da Silva’s back in charge, and it’s sort of like an Abigail Spanberger situation: they’re wasting no time, they’re passing the most deranged laws you can imagine.

And one of them — this is true — is that if you interrupt or express doubt when a woman is speaking during a work meeting, that is now a prosecutable criminal offense in the nation of Brazil.

And that really got me thinking because, presumably, if you violate this law, some police officer’s got to come arrest you, or the tax authorities levy a fine (I don’t know exactly how it’s punished), but ultimately the enforcement of that law is backstopped by either direct violence or expropriation. Which, like, the Brazilian police have to enforce.

They have to execute this law — and I’m not going to pretend to know a ton about Brazil, but I don’t think Brazilian police are, by and large, committed gay race communists.

And of course the same is true here in the States: the vast majority of the military, the vast majority of law enforcement, they don’t actually approve of any of this stuff.

But it’s perceptions of legitimacy. It’s habits of obedience. It’s saying, you know, it’s not up to me. I have to do my job. I have to make sure I keep my pension.

This mode of governance — media-managed liberal democracy — is more dependent on the ability to control narrative and manufacture consent than almost any other form of government in history.

There’s a sort of analog in our foreign policy posture: we’ve built these weapons systems that can put warheads on foreheads, anywhere in the world, on five minutes’ notice. And for that reason, we don’t fortify anything. There’s no anti-aircraft guns on the Pacific Coast. There’s no pill boxes or parapets.

You’ve got NORAD, and you got the White House, and everything else in the whole empire is basically guarded with a chain link fence.

So, by way of analogy, mass media control narrative control is that force projection. It’s the ability of the state to direct attention, to direct outrage, to justify violence, to delegitimize violence in this very precise, targeted way, that says, “don’t look at that, look at this.”

And the whole spasm of social media censorship and political prosecutions from roughly 2017 to 2021 was the state saying, “Oh shit, our targeting system doesn’t work anymore.” We’re starting to lose the ability to suppress outrage about our bad behavior, and we’re also losing the ability to direct and channel outrage toward our enemies.

Now again, these people hate you and they don’t care about the Constitution. If they could get away with ignoring it, they would. Yet the Constitution, even in its weakened and degraded state, apparently shapes those perceptions of legitimacy and habits of obedience to a sufficient extent that it makes a huge difference.

Whether you spoke out against the government — even in California versus Australia or New Zealand or Canada — living through COVID in America was a very different experience from living through COVID in the UK.

We know a couple things.

• We know that all of the explicit machinery of force is in the hands of people who are much more like us than they are like our enemies.

• We know that the machinery of force is only accessible to our enemies because of the perception of legitimacy that they still maintain.

• And we know — and we know that they know — that that perception of legitimacy is still very much shaped by the Constitution of the United States.

So what we’re saying with the Constitutional Action Society is: that’s the thermal exhaust port.

The whole system runs, lives, dies on that — and the way you attack that weak point, is you find people who actually want to govern, who want to protect the Constitution and the rule of law — not in this cowardly, cringing, lawyering sense, but in the sense that the average police officer, the average infantryman, the average normal American, intuitively believes.

You want politicians who are willing to assert their rights, particularly under the 10th Amendment, which is, in other words, to tell federal authorities, “this is not your jurisdiction.”

Of course the roadmap here is not that the federal authorities are going to say, “oh, we’re sorry. We didn’t know we were violating the Constitution” and leave you alone.

The roadmap here is you act. You act within your constitutionally and divinely sanctioned authority to clean up the state. You make it beautiful, you make it functional.

You make it a place where healthy people want to raise healthy families, and you absolutely ignore all the injunctions, all the stays, all the lawfare, and you just say, “You can come get me when I’m done.”

You obey the Constitution as it’s understood in the minds of regular people. You pull off an El-Salvador-style turnaround — and then you say, “go ahead and put me on trial for that. Arrest me for Saving America.”

And of course they are going to arrest you.

Anyone who attempts this is guaranteed at least a little bit of jail time, but they will be the ones in the position of lawless and naked and illegitimate force. (I don’t mean illegitimate in the libertarian sense in which, you know, “I subjectively feel that you’re wrong, and that really matters a lot, even though I can’t do anything about it” — I mean popular legitimacy.)

And they no longer have the narrative monopoly that allowed them to sink Nixon that allowed them to get away with the Kennedy assassination. They’re going to have to put all their cards on the table, and they’re going to have to trust themselves and their safety and their security and their power to an apparatus of violence that is in increasingly, deeply resentful, if not mutinous hands.

The only alternative they have is just to let you do it: t let you build something that absolutely humiliates them, that exposes how cynical and fraudulent they’ve been the entire time, that exposes that they could have fixed it anytime they wanted to — they just didn’t want to.

So is that going to work? I don’t know, the enemy gets a vote.

They’re not going to play fair. They’re going to use every tool of media manipulation and tendentious regulatory enforcement that they still have at their disposal. All we can do is make that job difficult — and difficult to justify to the public — recognizing that there isn’t One Weird Trick, there’s no risk-free way to take your country back.

But this is the connective tissue between words and actions that we’ve all been looking for.

The whole online right-wing group chat thing has these very strong norms against fed-posting for good reason: because all the smart guys on our side — all the guys capable of leading — understand intuitively that not only are violence and criminality effortless for the system to interrupt, but even if you got away with it, it would not only not weaken the system, it would strengthen it.

Because, again, the whole system depends on this perception of legitimacy — and the fed-poster casts himself in the role of the boogeyman, the bad guy that the system exists to protect you from.

So everything has to be done within the purview of orderly, legal, lawful, legitimate, authorized force: which is the purview of politics.

Again, just to be clear, this does not mean we’re just going to go get badges and guns and do what we want. When I say legitimate, I mean legitimate. We have to obtain political power so that we can do the good work that the Constitution — both in letter and in spirit — authorizes us to do.

So that’s the Constitutional Action Society. Again, if you want to get involved, we’re going to be doing a lot of legwork, knocking doors, phone banking, vetting candidates.

Right now in most of the country, the field is what it is, so some of the work will involve supporting existing candidates. While we work on fielding our own, we’re also going to be doing some things like beautification, trash cleanup, voter registration. We want to get our message out, and we also want to understand the voters.

We want to build organizational muscle and name recognition and buy-in so that during the next election cycle we’re a known quantity, and we can say to a politician or a bureaucrat, with some credibility, “here’s what we can do for you. Or maybe we can do it for your opponent.”

We’ve already gotten started: 17 EXIT guys were elected delegates this month. 17 votes is not that many votes, but the purpose of all this is — may Allah forgive me for uttering the word — journalistic, because it’s giving us a view of how the party works. I’ve already heard one report of an EXIT guy who was at a quasi-political dinner party, and when a handful of people let on that they were state delegates, one of the candidates just glommed onto them and wouldn’t stop talking to them.

We also get to know the other delegates — and their opinion is both important in itself, but it’s also helping us to get an intuition for the right end of the bell curve of public opinion.

So we’re moving fast. We’re throwing a lot of things at the wall. These guys, all other considerations aside are just a really good hang. So come sign up.

We’re starting in Utah because that’s where we have the manpower right now. But this is a national problem, it’s a national movement, and as soon as we’ve got the demand signal, we want to set up in your city. So I’ll be posting a link in the show notes.

I strongly encourage you to sign up. There’s no explicit affiliation between EXIT and Constitutional Action, but I’ll just say: this is the kind of thing we’re cooking up at the EXIT meetup. These are smart, capable, dedicated guys, and you just can’t spend that much time with them before you say to yourself, we’re going to make it. We’re going to figure it out. These are the good guys. This is who’s going to do it.

EXIT membership is fraternal. It’s vetted. You sign up, you have a phone call with me. We talk a little bit about your background, what you’re hoping to accomplish, what made you decide to join, and to a real extent, it’s a vibe check.

I don’t have an algorithm, other than “do you believe in the mission” and “could I explain in one sentence why you’re an asset to the group”. We have 15, 20 group calls a week. We talk about entrepreneurship, investing, crypto, AI, tech, real estate, fitness, homeschooling, fatherhood. Then on Tuesday nights we have our full group call, and that’s where we do our member Q&As, we discuss the big picture, I go over the news of the week, the projects we’re working on.

That includes Constitutional Action, it also includes our physical HQ, some private education projects, investment showcases, upcoming meetups and retreats. We have monthly meetups in a dozen cities now.

So if you want to join Constitutional Action, I’ll post the link in the show notes — and if you want to be involved with the fraternity and work with us on some of these cultural and entrepreneurial projects, you can sign up at exitgroup.us.

Thanks for listening.

Join the Constitutional Action Society

March 13: Austin EXIT Retreat.

About a dozen of us got an Airbnb southwest of Austin, and checked out a beautiful MAHA community in the Hill Country.

I observe that Austin is gradually being encircled by compounds of Like-Minded People at various stages of radicalization — who will eventually meet the sprawl of multi-family immigrant barracks, which shows no signs of stopping.

We also got together with about 20 EXIT guys in Dallas, and discussed similar trends: as “the America of America”, Texas is economically dynamic and welcoming to a fault, sucking in a mixed bag of blue-state refugees, illegals, and H1Bs.

Texas’ libertarian identity is being challenged by its own success, in the same way California’s was a generation ago — and, like California, it will be a high-stakes place to play. It’s not all downside: Texas will be one of the last self-contained real economies when the fake money burns off.

We have monthly meetups in Dallas, Austin, and Houston — more three-to-five-day retreats planned to bring together all the Texas Triangle guys and their families.

March 17: Utah GOP Caucus.

EXIT guys secured 17 delegate positions and 5 precinct chairs, and a dozen or so friends of the group reported that they had also been made delegates.

At our local meeting, I was asked to read the county party platform aloud in full, and it was surprisingly good considering how useless the state party is. There are clearly a lot of people in Utah who want good government, even if they are afraid of what it takes to get there.

I was appointed a state delegate By Acclamation (see image) and have since been to a handful of “meet the candidates” events.

Overall, you get the same sense at one of these meetings that you get on X, the Everything App: lots of resentment, lots of despair, and politicians gesturing at those emotions in a vague sense, without a lot of ideas.

It’s remarkable how many of the local politicians are roughly as fake as the national ones — lots of cowboy hats, everybody “grew up on a ranch” — it’s just less polished.

The Republican Party in Utah appears to be largely composed of people who enjoy being taken out to dinner — which is a bad news story if you have to vote for them, but my main takeaway was: these are the people to beat, and they’re not unbeatable.

March 26: Constitutional Action Society Event

Last Thursday, Ben Wilson and I held the first event for the Constitutional Action Society at UVU.

Given the security environment after Charlie Kirk’s assassination, we didn’t publicize it much (or even really talk about our intentions), but word-of-mouth brought about 50 people to hear us speak.

I’ll say more about it soon, but the goal of the society is to encourage voters and candidates to take action in pursuit of the spirit of the Constitution — the freedom, sovereignty, and citizenship that we were raised to believe in — without being hamstrung by bad-faith talmudry from people who do not believe in any of these things.

We believe that our government has apostatized from the spirit of the Constitution at every level, and we need leaders who defy corrupt lawyers and judges to restore that spirit. (Imagine a world in which we were as fundamentalist about the 10th Amendment as we currently are about the 14th — that change alone would be transformative.)

My remarks were focused on Utah: Latter-day Saints have unique doctrinal and historical reasons to reject lawyerly Constitutional exegesis, but our people are paradoxically some of the most timid and procedural “conservatives” in the country. There’s no good reason for this — we are simply afraid of accountability, afraid to be wrong, afraid to act.

Ben discussed our inherited postwar immune response against leadership or action of any kind, and how we can throw it off. His talk deserves a longer treatment, but the upshot is: if you teach a generation that “good people never seek power”, only good people will listen — and you’ll be ruled by imbeciles and sociopaths.

March 27: Bountiful family meetup

Family meetups turn out to be a lot more logistically challenging — if you want the wives to show up and relax and have a nice time, you need a space where the kids can’t break anything and can’t get lost. (This makes house parties challenging.)

Nick had the idea to cook an enormous amount of Mexican food and have dinner in an LDS church gym. The space was free to reserve, and self-contained, and indestructible.

The kids played with field-day stuff on one half of the gym, while the adults socialized and ate on the other half. After a few minutes of ice-breaking, we established that their husbands’ weird online right wing friends are all pretty normal, and it went great.

It might sound like a small thing, but getting a dozen families together (with fifty-some kids between them) is a big lift. But now we have the template, we’ll be doing many more meetups like this.

Scouting for EXIT HQ

We are scouting for club space in the Orem/Provo area. Virtually all the commercial real estate for sale in Utah Valley is the same hideous dentist’s office built in the 1980s, surrounded by strip malls and car dealerships. We’re looking for something different: a place of power.

We are going to build a members-only city club — so we want an older building in a downtown area that could be made beautiful.

There are a handful of sites we like — we are assembling the pitch for sellers and investors.

In the basement, we build an old-school, grimy free-weight gym, with sauna, plunge pools, and showers.

On the ground floor, a socializing space with a parlor for cards and chess, big overstuffed sofas for long conversations, a simple kitchen with clean food. Here, we would host events where BYU kids would be invited to sip a White Monster and listen to some naughty out-of-town speakers who wouldn’t otherwise come through town.

Upstairs we’d have our reading room with shelves full of beloved unapproved books, permanent and open office space for members, conference rooms, and workshop.

We have some due-diligence to perform on locations, remodeling, parking, etc., but we intend to have a pilot space in operation this summer.

Our quarterly focus for Q2 2026 is Genesis: the things we need to do now so that we can look back and say “this is where it all began.”

Our weekly calls this quarter will build on three themes:

1. Becoming a load-bearing pillar in your community, especially as things become more difficult and responsibilities are abdicated.

2. Taking calculated risks to seize the opportunities that lie in the coming volatility.

3. Preparing the founding story of your House that your children will tell their children.

As we’ve reached a critical mass of expertise inside the group, these presentations increasingly come from EXIT founders, historians, investors, and civic leaders. Many of the leaders and mentors we’re looking for are already among us.

(One exception that I’m particularly excited about will be Joost Strydom, CEO of Orania, who will join us on May 19th to discuss the community they have carved out of the wilderness in South Africa.)

If you want to get involved and help us build, apply for membership at exitgroup.us.

NOTE: Investing Call has been moved to Tuesdays at 7PM ET.

• Monday, 3/30: Working Group, Fitness, Tech/Crypto

• Tuesday, 3/31: Entrepreneurship, Investing, Full-Group Call (Q1 Review, Q2 Preview),

• Wednesday, 4/1: Acquisition Entrepreneurship, Fitness, Paideia, Ham Radio, EXITville

• Thursday, 4/2: Great Houses, Expat Social Hour

• Friday, 4/3: Fitness

• Saturday, 4/4: No Calls

Upcoming General Calls

QUARTERLY EXIT PUSH: Building Multi-Domain Sovereignty: Personal & Network // Domestic & Foreign. March Theme: Taking Pro-Social Action for Sovereignty

• 3/31: Review of Q1 2026 and preview of Q2 main line of effort.

• 4/7: Ben Wilson of How to Take Over the World will be speaking on seizing the opportunities that lie in volatility, and the risks taken by founders.

• 4/14: Colton Murray on multi-generational family business.

Meetups

NOTE: May travel schedule has been adjusted — instead of Philadelphia meetup 5/22, we will hold meetups in DC (5/16), New York (5/18), and Boston (5/19).

Check #Announcements-WEEKLY channel for meetup details.

• 4/4: Utah Valley

• 4/10: Nashville

• 4/11: Houston (with JCB), Washington DC

• 4/17: Atlanta

• 4/18: Columbus (with JCB)

• 4/20: Dallas/Fort Worth, New York City

• 4/25: St. Louis (every other month)

• 5/2: Provo (with JCB)

• 5/8: Nashville

• 5/9: Houston

• 5/15: Atlanta

• 5/16: (new) Washington DC (with JCB), Columbus

• 5/18: (new) New York City (with JCB), Dallas/Fort Worth, Boston

• 5/19: (rescheduled) Boston (with JCB)

• 5/22: Philadelphia

Big Meetups needing RSVP

• 4/24-4/26 Hudson Valley Spring Meetup

• Please RSVP Promptly!

JCB Upcoming Travel Schedule:

• 4/11: Houston

• 4/18: Columbus, OH

• 5/16: (new) Washington, DC

• 5/18: (new) New York City

• 5/19: (rescheduled) Boston

• 6/5: San Francisco

• 6/27: Denver

EXIT Shiller’s List: Support EXIT projects

• Johann Kurtz’s new book has dropped. *Leaving a Legacy: Inheritance, Charity, & Thousand-Year Families.*

• Greg Treat’s Great Houses Call has spun off into an independent podcast, the Great Houses Forum. Please subscribe and repost.

• An EXIT Man has published a new book, *Code Architect: Intentional Designing with AI.*

• Aginter Press has completed another translation of important historical documents: Allied War Crimes.

• Sigilante has published a book, The Deseret Alphabet: A Fixed and Unalterable Sound

• Chris Hardman has launched his new sleep drink, Sova. Use promo code EXIT10 for 10% off.

• Kindred Harvest Tea Company.

• Brett Peterson’s direct-to-consumer beef processor in Missouri.

• Federated Computer is offering 30% off to EXIT guys. (Check the chat for the offer code.)

• Nelson has released a Crusader Coloring Book.

• Lightning Shipping & Logistics is a shipping/warehousing/order fulfillment company providing services to businesses with physical products interested in outsourcing order fulfillment, particularly if they don’t want customer data going through a politically non-aligned intermediary. Contact LightningShipping@protonmail.com.

Cocktail Hour Invites for EXIT Members and Substack Paid Subscribers: Cocktail hours take place at the end of a member meetup, usually after dinner, and are a great way to get to know the EXIT guys in your area, and see if full membership is right for you.

(If you are an EXIT member, you will be invited to the member meetup via email, and details will be available in your regional channel on RocketChat.)

Read more

NOTE: Investing Call has been moved to Tuesdays at 7PM ET.

• Monday, 3/23: Working Group, Fitness, Fatherhood/Homeschool, AI

• Tuesday, 3/17: Entrepreneurship, Investing, New Guy Call, Full-Group Call (Trevor Lee), Leadership Call Update

• Wednesday, 3/18: Drones/EWAR Call, Acquisition Entrepreneurship, Fitness, Paideia, Texas Regional E-Meetup, West Coast Regional E-Meetup

• Thursday, 3/19: Great Houses, Expat Social Hour, EXIT Bar Association Call

• Friday, 3/20: Fitness

• Saturday, 3/21: Cybersecurity, Study Group (MIT’s “Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs”), Jung

Upcoming General Calls

QUARTERLY EXIT PUSH: Building Multi-Domain Sovereignty: Personal & Network // Domestic & Foreign. March Theme: Taking Pro-Social Action for Sovereignty

• 3/24: We will hear from Utah State House Rep Trevor Lee on the view from the Utah statehouse, running & governing as a Poaster, and how our guys can get involved in their own jurisdictions.

  • After the call, we will discuss progress and agenda of EXIT Strategic Leadership & Preparedness initiative.

• 3/31: Review of Q1 2026 and preview of Q2 main line of effort.

• 4/7: Ben Wilson of How to Take Over the World will be speaking on seizing the opportunities that lie in volatility.

Meetups

NOTE: May travel schedule has been adjusted — instead of Philadelphia meetup 5/22, we will hold meetups in DC (5/16), New York (5/18), and Boston (5/19).

Check #Announcements-WEEKLY channel for meetup details.

• 3/27: Bountiful, UT (with JCB)

• 4/4: Utah Valley

• 4/10: Nashville

• 4/11: Houston (with JCB), Washington DC

• 4/17: Atlanta

• 4/18: Columbus (with JCB)

• 4/20: Dallas/Fort Worth, New York City

• 4/25: St. Louis (every other month)

• 5/2: Provo (with JCB)

• 5/8: Nashville

• 5/9: Houston

• 5/15: Atlanta

• 5/16: (new) Washington DC (with JCB), Columbus

• 5/18: (new) New York City (with JCB), Dallas/Fort Worth, Boston

• 5/19: (rescheduled) Boston (with JCB)

• 5/22: Philadelphia

Big Meetups needing RSVP

• 4/24-4/26 Hudson Valley Spring Meetup

• Please RSVP Promptly!

JCB Upcoming Travel Schedule:

• 4/11: Houston

• 4/18: Columbus, OH

• 5/16: (new) Washington, DC

• 5/18: (new) New York City

• 5/19: (rescheduled) Boston

• 6/5: San Francisco

• 6/27: Denver

EXIT Shiller’s List: Support EXIT projects

• Johann Kurtz’s new book has dropped. Leaving a Legacy: Inheritance, Charity, & Thousand-Year Families.

• Greg Treat’s Great Houses Call has spun off into an independent podcast, the Great Houses Forum. Please subscribe and repost.

• An EXIT Man has published a new book, Code Architect: Intentional Designing with AI.

• Aginter Press has completed another translation of important historical documents: Allied War Crimes.

• Chris Hardman has launched his new sleep drink, Sova. Use promo code EXIT10 for 10% off.

• Kindred Harvest Tea Company.

• Brett Peterson’s direct-to-consumer beef processor in Missouri.

• Federated Computer is offering 30% off to EXIT guys. (Check the chat for the offer code.)

Cocktail Hour Invites for EXIT Members and Substack Paid Subscribers: Cocktail hours take place at the end of a member meetup, usually after dinner, and are a great way to get to know the EXIT guys in your area, and see if full membership is right for you.

(If you are an EXIT member, you will be invited to the member meetup via email, and details will be available in your regional channel on RocketChat.)

Read more

New Call: Starting this Saturday, and for the next 20 weeks, Anthony will be guiding us through MIT’s “Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs”, on software architecture design, which is still a critical human skill in AI/ML software development.

• Monday, 3/16: Working Group, Fitness, Tech/Crypto

• Tuesday, 3/17: Entrepreneurship, Dating, Full-Group Call (Exitville Retreat), Civic Engagement

• Wednesday, 3/18: Acquisition Entrepreneurship, Fitness, Paideia, Meditation

• Thursday, 3/19: Great Houses, Expat/Social Hour, Investing, Canada Regional E-meetup, Real Estate

• Friday, 3/20: Fitness

• Saturday, 3/21: Cybersecurity, Study Group (MIT’s “Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs”)

Upcoming General Calls

QUARTERLY EXIT PUSH: Building Multi-Domain Sovereignty: Personal & Network // Domestic & Foreign. March Theme: Taking Pro-Social Action for Sovereignty

• 3/17: EXIT man Jonathan reviewing the ExitVille Retreat and future major EXIT event discussion. Hosted by DB (JCB will be at his local Utah GOP caucus.)

• 3/24: We will hear from Utah State House Rep Trevor Lee on the view from the Utah statehouse, running & governing as a Poaster, and how our guys can get involved in their own jurisdictions.

  • After the call, we will discuss progress and agenda of EXIT Strategic Leadership & Preparedness initiative.

• 3/31: Review of Q1 2026 and preview of Q2 main line of effort.

Meetups

Check #Announcements-WEEKLY channel for meetup details.

• 3/16: Dallas/Fort Worth (with JCB), New York City

• 3/19: Canada E-Meetup

• 3/20: Seattle

• 3/20: Brian Head, UT (with JCB)

• 3/21: Columbus

• 3/22: St. Marys, KS

• 3/27: Bountiful, UT (with JCB), Atlanta

• 4/4: Utah Valley

• 4/10: Nashville

• 4/11: Houston (with JCB), Washington DC

• 4/17: Atlanta

• 4/18: Columbus (with JCB)

• 4/20: Dallas/Fort Worth, New York City

• 5/2: Provo (with JCB)

Big Meetups needing RSVP

• 3/20- 3/22- EXIT members ski trip in Brian Head, UT (with JCB)

• 4/24-4/26 Hudson Valley Spring Meetup

• Please RSVP Promptly!

JCB Upcoming Travel Schedule:

• 3/13-3/16: Austin

• 3/16: Dallas/Fort Worth

• 3/21: Brian Head, UT

• 4/11: Houston

• 4/18: Columbus, OH

• 5/18: Boston/Manchester, NH

• 5/22: Philadelphia

• 6/5: San Francisco

• 6/27: Denver

EXIT Shiller’s List: Support EXIT projects

• Johann Kurtz’s new book has dropped. Leaving a Legacy: Inheritance, Charity, & Thousand-Year Families.

• Greg Treat’s Great Houses Call has spun off into an independent podcast, the Great Houses Forum. Please subscribe and repost.

• An EXIT Man has published a new book, Code Architect: Intentional Designing with AI.

• Aginter Press has completed another translation of important historical documents: Allied War Crimes.

• Chris Hardman has launched his new sleep drink, Sova. Use promo code EXIT10 for 10% off.

• Kindred Harvest Tea Company.

• Brett Peterson’s direct-to-consumer beef processor in Missouri.

• Federated Computer is offering 30% off to EXIT guys. (Check the chat for the offer code.)

Cocktail Hour Invites for EXIT Members and Substack Paid Subscribers: Cocktail hours take place at the end of a member meetup, usually after dinner, and are a great way to get to know the EXIT guys in your area, and see if full membership is right for you.

(If you are an EXIT member, you will be invited to the member meetup via email, and details will be available in your regional channel on RocketChat.)

Read more

Calls:

EXIT Members have access to 15-20 group calls per week.

• Monday, 3/9: Working Group, Fitness, Fatherhood/Family, AI

• Tuesday, 3/10: Entrepreneurship, General Call, Special Call on Iran

• Wednesday, 3/11: Acquisition Entrepreneurship, Fitness, Paideia, Leadership, Inter-Mountain Regional E-Meetup

• Thursday, 3/12: Great Houses, Expat/Social Hour, Investing, EXIT Bar Assc., Real Estate

• Friday, 3/13: Fitness

• Saturday, 3/14: Cybersecurity, Jung

Upcoming General Calls (Tuesday nights)

QUARTERLY EXIT PUSH: Building Multi-Domain Sovereignty: Personal & Network // Domestic & Foreign. March Theme: Taking Pro-Social Action for Sovereignty

• 3/10: 7PM ET/4PM PT (Earlier than Normal): EXIT Man Alec DeLeon on Salazar’s book, How to Raise a State.

  • To be followed immediately by Special Iran Situation call with EXIT Man Francis (retired military Farsi linguist). Call not recorded.

• 3/17: EXIT man Jonathan reviewing the ExitVille Retreat. Hosted by DB. JCB will be at his Utah GOP Caucus meeting.

• 3/24: We will hear from Utah State House Rep Trevor Lee on the view from the Utah statehouse, running & governing as a Poaster, and how our guys can get involved in their own jurisdictions.

• 3/31: Review of Q1 2026. Preview of next quarter’s main line of effort.

Meetups

EXIT Members have regular meetups in 10 major US cities, and more cities are coming online all the time. Check #Announcements-WEEKLY channel for full meetup details.

• 3/13: Nashville

• 3/14: Austin (with JCB), Houston

• 3/16: Dallas/Fort Worth (with JCB), New York City

• 3/19: Canada E-Meetup

• 3/20: Atlanta, Seattle

• 3/21: Columbus

• 3/22: St. Marys, KS

• 3/26: Orem, UT (with JCB) — EXIT man and I will be speaking on America, the Constitution, and Utah's unique destiny in the years ahead.

• 3/27: Bountiful, UT (with JCB) — this will be a members-only family meetup at an LDS meetinghouse. Nick is preparing the food, bring your wife and kids and a dessert.

Big Meetups needing RSVP: Members only, see details in #Announcements_Weekly channel on RocketChat.

• 3/20-3/22: EXIT members ski trip in Brian Head, UT (with JCB)

• 4/24-4/26: Hudson Valley Spring Meetup

• Please RSVP Promptly!

JCB Upcoming Travel Schedule:

• 3/13-3/16: Austin

• 3/16: Dallas/Fort Worth

• 3/21: Brian Head, UT

• 4/11: Houston

• 4/18: Columbus, OH

• 5/2: Atlanta (Will have to reschedule this one due to a conflict)

• 5/18: Boston/Manchester, NH

• 5/22: Philadelphia

• 6/5: San Francisco

• 6/27: Denver

EXIT Shiller’s List: Support EXIT projects

• Johann Kurtz’s new book has dropped. *Leaving a Legacy: Inheritance, Charity, & Thousand-Year Families.*

• Greg Treat’s Great Houses Call has spun off into an independent podcast, the Great Houses Forum. Please subscribe and repost.

• An EXIT Man has published a new book, *Code Architect: Intentional Designing with AI.*

• Arbogast has launched a new publishing company, 1325 Publishing.

• Aginter Press has completed another translation of important historical documents: Allied War Crimes.

• Chris Hardman has launched his new sleep drink, Sova. Use promo code EXIT10 for 10% off.

• Kindred Harvest Tea Company.

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I’m hearing lately that Utah has Gone Woke.

The puppet masters of every institution of power in the Utah conservative establishment are actually secret communists. Governor Spencer Cox is a communist. Also Senator John Curtis, Mitt Romney, the Church, possibly even the Utah Republican electorate itself.

Friends I know who know these people would laugh at this; not because Mitt Romney and Spencer Cox and John Curtis are all such swell guys, but because it’s just a total misread of where these guys are coming from, who they are, what they care about.

But you can see where an outsider would get the idea.

Ever since the church sponsored Prop 8 to ban same-sex marriage in California (and won, by the way), Utah has led the way in capitulating on basically every progressive cause they can think of.

So you got the Utah DEI Compact, which they signed, and then, uh, recently reversed. You’ve got the Utah Compromise on LGBT discrimination, the Conservative Climate Caucus, which John Curtis runs Disagree Better, which is Spencer Cox’s project (what if we just got along with the communists, has anyone tried getting along with the communists?)

All of our state representatives supported the Respect for Marriage Act, which ratifies by an act of Congress what the Supreme Court had already decided at Obergefell. But you saw how with the Dobbs decision, once Roe v Wade was overturned, the states were able to go back to having abortion law. Well, the Respect for Marriage Act basically says you can’t do that.

And most recently you’ve got this redistricting fight where several Utah Republican legislators said, “We need an independent, impartial, bipartisan redistricting commission.”

And then, on the basis of that ruling, this liberal female judge basically hands over redistricting to this progressive advocacy group called Mormon Women for Ethical Government, which carves out this like D+50, basically overtly communist congressional district in the middle of Salt Lake City.

And then you’ve got KSL and the Deseret News and Deseret book and BYU, all of which are owned by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, which is obviously the dominant political and cultural elephant in the room.

And all these secondary institutions have the usual cast of journalists and MBAs and academics pumping out basically the same commie corporate Memphis that you’d expect from any secular institution.

And so you would not be crazy as an outside observer to conclude, like conquests third law says, that “the behavior of any bureaucratic institution can be best understood by assuming it is controlled by a secret cabal of its enemies.”

But the puzzle here is that all of this has happened while the state has maintained ironclad Republican dominance — and, in fact, explicitly growing support for Donald Trump.

The state went 21 points up for Trump in 2024, which was a wider margin in 2020, which was itself wider than in 2016.

Utah may not be the reddest state, the most MAGA state — but it actually is one of the most Republican and least Democrat states in the Union. Only Wyoming and Idaho have a higher proportion of registered Republican voters, and only Wyoming, Alaska, and Idaho have fewer registered Democrats.

And so the narrative that you sometimes hear, both inside and outside the state, is that Utah is this rock ribbed, red-blooded MAGA Republican electorate, and it’s just this thin layer of traitors, this again, cabal of communist infiltrators, who’ve been playing the long game their whole lives, and now they’re finally in control.

But what’s weird about it is that all of these secret communist infiltrators are actually still doing pretty okay with their voters. Who again, in terms of their party affiliation, in terms of their stance on the issues, are about as Republican as it gets.

Governor Spencer Cox, who’s the DEI compact guy and the disagree better guy, his overall approval rating is in the 50s, and his approval rating with Utah Republicans is in the high 60s, low 70s.

He’s actually having trouble with Democrats and Independents (who are overwhelmingly secular) because he’s going too MAGA, he’s too hard line.

But the weirdest part is that, among latter day saint voters in particular, Mike Lee, John Curtis, and Mitt Romney have the exact same approval rating, 57%.

Now, if you’re an online right wing guy and you know who these people are, you’re thinking we are in the middle of a (possibly doomed) life and death struggle for control of America’s institutions, maybe for the future of Western civilization, and Mike Lee and Mitt Romney are very obviously on opposite sides. But apparently Latter-day Saint voters just want everybody to have fun and try their best.

And you could say, you know, well, okay, The People Are Retarded: but Utah Republicans are not stupid and they’re not out of touch — at least, not any more stupid or out of touch than any other voters. They’re among the most educated, economically productive, institutionally engaged subpopulations of the Republican party.

In fact, while the implicit right wing meme about Utah is that it’s this weirdly libtard red state (no doubt forcibly libtarded by their weird foreign religion), you if look at who these people are demographically — not just racially, but their careers, their education, their families, basically any socioeconomic access you wanna look at — the native population of Utah looks a lot more like Vermont or Connecticut or (until recently) Minnesota, than it looks like any red state.

Thich suggests that these are actually demographically, psychologically, culturally, natural Massachusetts libtards — and they’re being forced into these awkwardly right wing positions by their weird foreign religion.

And that awkwardness is basically the whole story.

In his book, the Ordeal of Civility, John Murray Cudahy describes the psychological turmoil of the Jewish shtetl bumpkin, who moves to Western Europe and has to accommodate himself to liberal Protestant modernity.

These are people who haggled with shopkeepers, and they weren’t all that strict about finding a toilet when they had to go, and they didn’t respect or even really understand liberal expectations of privacy.

They shamelessly preferred their own people, whether it was family or their co-religionists in ways that European liberals regarded as repugnant, if not criminal. They made emotional scenes in public in ways that were embarrassing to their more assimilated cousins. You could call them Vibrant. They introduced a lot of Vibrancy. Of course, the parallels to contemporary situations are obvious.

His thesis is particular to the Jews, but you can find parallels in all kinds of pre-modern cultures and the aggregation of all these individual choices, either to dissolve into the universal solvent of modernity or else to find some accommodation, some way to. Sublimate their identity and make it persistent in view of these overwhelming cultural and economic pressures.

And so, for example, the Indians are going through something like the Ordeal of Civility right now, where there’s this small population of successful, relatively assimilated Indians who are having extremely complicated feelings about their relationship to their home country, their current country of residence, and their cousins coming off the boat.

But what’s different about the ordeal this time is that in the struggle with the pre-modern shtetl, it’s pretty obvious that liberal modernity is no longer winning or even interested in winning.

The mainstream liberal position is now to encourage unassimilated peoples in their clannishness, their ethnonarcissism, their Vibrancy.

Assimilation is now a dirty word: it’s an imposition, a tyranny on authentic self-expression, as well as being a critical front in Liberalism’s war on standards of behavior as such.

It’s bad to make brown people do anything, but it’s especially bad to make brown people do white people things.

Now, this doesn’t exactly mean that Indians and Somalis and Hispanics are not assimilating at all.

They’re still assimilating into Western liberal culture — it’s just that that culture hates white people and loves brown people in the abstract.

And so you’ll get these really exotic outcomes like a young Chinese woman born in the States from literal Chinese Communist Party royalty, but she talks like a gay white man trying to sound like a black woman, and she’s got all these thoughts about white supremacy and oppression.

And of course, she’s not meaningfully Chinese, anymore than the Arab girls are Arab, or the Indian girls are Indian: they’re not Muslim, they’re not Hindu.

They all have basically the same things to say about how dinner was like a ritual in my family, like it would happen every night and we would talk to each other, and white people could never understand.

Zohran Mamdani is maybe the best embodiment of this phenomenon; he comes from a “market dominant minority” in Uganda: this Indian merchant upper class that was of course shamelessly racist, shamelessly colonial, shamelessly, extractive, never meaningfully on the wrong end of any oppressor/oppressed dynamic (except when Idi Amin expropriated all their property and threw them all out.)

And that’s really the proof of this assimilation process, because none of those particularities matter.

Zohran’s not Indian in any sense that causes friction with any of the groups that have historically had friction with Indians. He’s not Muslim in any sense that makes it hard for him to deal with his very progressive wife or his very progressive female voters. He’s Indian and Muslim (and maybe even a little bit African, though he has to be careful about how he talks about that) only in the sense that these things make him Not White.

And the reason he wants to be Not White — the reason all these people want to be Not White — is that all of Western liberalism’s entitlements, all of the things that it purports to give, are nominally for everybody, but especially for Not White people.

And all of Western Liberalism’s requirements — all of the responsibilities and principles and constraints on your behavior — those are for white people.

And so of course this means that the liberal machinery of institutional neutrality and fair play and procedural decision making have all just become means by which the former targets of the Ordeal of Civility — the people who were pressured to conform to liberal modernity — can now extract gibs and compliance from the cultures and peoples that internalized those liberal managerial virtues.

The trajectory of Western civilization over the next 10 years will be an Ordeal of Incivility:

In which we will all find out a) how long societies can remain functional as they abandon liberal managerial values, and b) how quickly and thoroughly the cultures that internalize those values first can put them down again in order to survive.

And this confrontation is especially complex for Latter Day Saints, because in one sense, as an ethnos, we’ve always been unambiguously Anglo-American with a little bit of Nordic; but for most of the church’s history, it was regarded by the broader American public as a regression to foreign barbarism. (The Republican Party was ostensibly founded in the 1850s in opposition to the Twin Relics of Barbarism: Polygamy, and Slavery.)

The Mormons had been these very tidy, conscientious English Puritans, who had somehow become militant clannish, bride kidnapping, bearded polygamists.

And some of that was slander, but the church really was and is illiberal in pretty deep ways that generate these more superficial, visible departures from the Anglo norm:

We have very different attitudes toward emotion and intuition, specifically their primacy over text and words and rules. We’re much more willing to defer to personal authority and hierarchy, and allow leaders to exercise judgment and make exceptions. We practice strict endogamy, marrying inside the church.

But above all, just the idea that someone on earth could have a supernatural mandate here and now to instantiate God’s will and say what God wants said: these things make a lot of trouble for a political and moral complex that’s built around argument and rational consensus seeking. Even today, that’s part of the reason why we’re not allowed in the tent.

But back in the 19th century, before the process of assimilation, before some of the rough edges got rolled off, this political and cultural incompatibility precipitated the Utah War.

A lot of people don’t know about this corner of American history, but the federal government imprisoned Church leaders, expropriated all Church property, dismantled the entire elected political system (because it happened to be basically the religious hierarchy) and replaced everybody with federal officials and openly hostile anti-Mormon locals —people who had come to open a saloon or a mine or to provision settlers to California.

But an enormous amount of what had been Church property and private property was either directly or indirectly expropriated by the feds.

We can compare it to the process of Reconstruction in the post-war South.

In the same way that Reconstruction imposed loyalty oaths, and disenfranchised anybody who had held an office in the Confederacy (which was 10 to 15% of the white male population of the South), The Edmunds Tucker Act imposed an anti-polygamy oath and disenfranchised all polygamists, which that was about 20 to 30% of the electorate in the Utah territory.

Wives were forced to testify against their husbands, and in Davis v Beeson, a Supreme Court case out of Idaho in 1890, the Court ruled 9-0 that religious advocacy for polygamy — or even membership in a church that advocated polygamy — was sufficient grounds for disenfranchisement.

So, a totally naked, unprincipled exercise of power.

But in fact, the church decided not to test that legal theory any further:

In the same year (1890) they abandoned polygamy and the toponym “Deseret”. They scrubbed all sermons and literature of any anti-federal rhetoric, of which there was a lot, because of the way things had gone down in Ohio and Missouri and Illinois.

They adopted a state flag, which had been designed by a Canadian bartender who’d only lived in the territory for a couple of years. And this flag is interesting: it’s got the little Deseret beehive surrounded by sego lilies, this peaceable, harmless, industrious scene on a shield — and the shield is flanked by US flags on either side, hanging from spears, and the American eagle is perched on the shield and looming over it with its wings out.

And so the symbolism is very obvious: it’s occupied territory.

But the Mormons are trying to get out from under territorial status. They’re trying to become a state so they can appoint their own governor, their own judges and marshals, so they can at least put their own people in these bureaucratic positions.

And one of the conditions of statehood was that the federales needed to believe that there were regular political institutions in the state: it couldn’t just be one local political party that was obviously just a proxy for the church.

And so it’s funny: in this simultaneous exercise of power and submission, church leaders go to every congregation in Utah, they chopped the congregation in half, and said: “This side of the chapel, you’re gonna be Democrats. Now, this side of the chapel, you’re Republicans.”

Now, the Republican party had been the church’s main antagonist in the federal government for half a century. So even though people are technically, you know, registered half and half, the state goes overwhelmingly Democrat in the first elections.

So several church leaders have to make this big show of joining the Republican party and saying, “it’s okay to be Republican — in fact, look at me, I’m the Top Dog, and I’m a Republican.”

This performance of neutrality is still basically the church’s approach to politics today.

And because church leaders serve until death, it actually hasn’t been that long since all this happened, from the point of view of institutional memory.

The president of the church who just died, Russell M. Nelson, was born in the 1920s, and grew up under president Heber J. Grant, who himself had been born in the thick of the Utah War, in 1856, and was in the prime of his life in the 1890s when the church was really going through the Ordeal and trying to wrestle back some autonomy by proving to the feds that they’d be good citizens.

So it’s literally just one lifetime, one man from here to there.

And when President Nelson was a young man in the 1950s, this was another sea change in the Church’s approach. Men in the Church were shaving their beards, putting on business suits and starting to build the identity that we’re all familiar with now: very competent, conscientious, reliable corporate executives and anti-communist G-men.

You know, there’s that clip that a lot of the online right wing guys like, with Joe Pesci and Matt Damon and Pesci is a mobster, and he is saying, “we Italians, we got the Church. What do you got?” And Matt Damon’s in his suit with his horn rimmed glasses and he says, “the United States of America”.

That totally could have been us — that character easily could have been one of our guys.

Ezra Taft Benson, who would become President of the Church in the 1980s, was buddies with J. Edgar Hoover, and a huge booster of the John Birch Society.

He wrote books like Civil Rights: Tool of Communist Deception and he wrote an approving foreword to a book called. The Black Hammer: a Study of Black Power, Red Influence, and White Alternatives.

And just so you understand, when Ezra Taft Benson was the prophet, it was very difficult to convince members of the church that every word out of his mouth was not a divine pronouncement.

The church explicitly had to tell people this — not just about him, but about all of them. And still today, if you ask a member of the Church, “Was Ezra Taft Benson, a prophet, in the same sense as Moses or Elijah”, the answer is almost always yes.

And if you want to own them with some of the more Based things that Ezra Taft Benson said, you can make a 2026 moderate, centrist, respectable Latter-day Saint really uncomfortable. And in fact, this is a favorite tactic of liberal exmormons. They keep a big, long list of all the Based things prophets have said, expressly for this purpose.

And so they’ve got all these memes where like Dallin. H Oaks (the current prophet) says explicitly that adultery, fornication, prostitution, and homosexuality should carry criminal penalties. And another apostle who passed away a few years ago says, “the biggest threat to the Kingdom in the coming years will come from feminists, homosexuals, and so-called intellectuals.”

There’s some horseshoe theory here: we’re all tickled with these memes, and we like owning the centrist, moderate, respectable latter-day saints with them too.

So anyway, Ezra Taft Benson is Eisenhower’s Secretary of Agriculture. Despises Communists says the Civil Rights Movement is a communist plot. (He was right about everything.)

And so a ton of our guys pile into the FBI and CIA. They’ve served missions, so they speak languages. They generally have families. They piss clean.

(As an aside, this is the origin of the Mormon Fed meme — so anytime someone’s like, “Mormons are feds because they’re libtards and communists,” it’s like, come on man.)

So in the 1950s, when our recently departed Prophet was entering into adulthood, was when the Mormons as a people had finally made it:

We had come all the way through our Ordeal of Civility to the other side, with this new, safe, stable identity: which was to be “more American than Americans.”

And that new identity wasn’t just concocted or cynical or “put on.”

The church really had been largely descended from America’s most venerable, conscientious, and (at least in their own minds) respectable founding stock: the New England WASP.

And theologically, the church’s self concept had always included this idea that America’s founding was a providential eschatological miracle.

And so Ezra Taft Benson wasn’t just an anti-communist on the basis of thinking hippies smelled bad: he had concluded that the Left was the fundamental vehicle of eschatological evil in the latter days. (Again, just right about everything.)

Anyway, so the Ordeal of Civility in the first place had been not what it was for Third Worlders or shtetl Jews from the Pale of Settlement: this resentful assimilation to a superior alien culture.

It was more about recovering from a fall from grace. We’d always been Americans, we’d never felt like anything other than Americans.

And in 2012, Mitt Romney was the apex of Mormon assimilation.

We had finally made it. Our man was going to the White House.

Clean-cut, corporate, patriotic, procedural to the bone, devoted to the Constitution, you know, as as interpreted by whoever happened to be running things at the moment, completely disdainful of bickering and tribalism: our own managerial liberal super soldier.

This was “the Mormon moment.” It took a minute to break through Mike Huckabee and the Bible bash from the evangelicals during the primaries, but now, even the Southern Baptists were gonna hold their nose and vote for Our Guy. Wow.

But unfortunately, for him and for us, we had just found our way back into the good graces of the Big Gay Empire when it started to fly apart.

In fact, it was Mitt Romney himself who taught the GOP base that accommodation and procedural loyalty were no longer workable. The cooperative equilibrium of respectable bipartisan civility that he represented was gone, and maybe had been fake the whole time.

But Romney himself just could not internalize this lesson. He was 65, he’d been climbing this ladder his whole life — his vocabulary of success, his definition of who he was as a man, as a Latter-day Saint, as an American, was all wrapped up in this game, and he just couldn’t do it.

His postmortem assessment was that he had failed to appeal sufficiently to minority voters — and what he’s really talking about there is the “47% gaffe”, where Mother Jones caught him at a closed door fundraiser saying that Obama was basically guaranteed the votes of 47% of the electorate because they paid no income tax.

Of course, this was one of the most honest and authentic things he ever said during the campaign.

Democratic politics — both Big-D and little-d — obviously is the politics of redistribution, and in the years since 2012, Democrats have stopped bothering to conceal that.

And Romney did lose the election because of dependency and demographics. The electorate that his manicured persona was designed to impress no longer existed.

But Romney couldn’t bring himself to ask the deeper questions that that observation should have generated. Instead, he just flagellated himself for having said it out loud.

Apparently the day after the leak was published, he stopped eating and sleeping. He started beating the hell out of himself on the elliptical. And he felt very sincerely he had failed his people, failed his team, failed his country. He started asking around to his advisors — two months out from Election Day — if he ought to drop out.

And of course, there’s no forgiveness in that game, there was no way for him to backpedal, and so we got another four years of Obama.

Now Trump and the Party at large learned the right lesson, and started tacking in the direction of authenticity and realism. But Romney just retreats deeper and deeper into the vision of the America into which he had assimilated.

And so he spends the final act of his career more than a decade, as like the nation’s number one hall monitor for liberal procedure and decorum.

But you just can’t tell me that Mitt Romney is actually a secret communist. Neither is Spencer Cox, and neither are their Utah Mormon voters (who again, still basically approve of them.)

But there’s maybe no American subpopulation that went so hard in the paint on liberal managerial Civic Virtue — and now, as the managerial system implodes under the weight of its own contradictions, nobody is having a harder time coping.

Their identity is imploding too. They’re still trying to be more American than Americans, and America is a communist country.

Now, the purpose of this history lesson is not to excuse anybody. At a certain point, naivete is a choice and a vice, and the difference between being willfully blind and being complicit is kind of immaterial.

We’ve got this baby faced haircut in the state, Blake Moore, who was trying to “reach across the aisle” and be a good bipartisan with this Better Boundaries Commission.

Of course, as I said earlier, it failed catastrophically: cost him his seat, and may cost the GOP the House.

And now he’s recording videos being like, “well, yes, I got world historically cucked in the most predictable way possible, but, but by golly, I still believe in the process and we needed transparency and if we could just come together — real bipartisanship has never been tried!”

So this is the type of guy we’re dealing with.

At a certain point, even if they don’t know better, they ought to know better. To be that gullible when you’re a leader, when you’re responsible for other people, is an abdication.

So why talk about this at all?

For one thing, as Utah politics has entered the discourse, I’m seeing a lot of guys on the outside who are good guys, and we want the same things for America — but because they’re reading this situation wrong, they’re slamming up against questions of identity in a way that’s not productive, it’s not gonna work for these voters.

If you want to capture the political energy of Utah, you have to recognize that this is not a low energy system, with people just sort of drifting gently into the liberal background radiation.

These are people under immense internal psychological pressure from these mutually contradictory directives — this intense belief and this intense identity and particularity being bent back against itself.

We have this wild, illiberal, uncompromising, visionary, ecstatic history, and then we’ve got all these elements of morality and identity that are actually just accommodations to conquest by a cosmopolitan empire.

But when that conquest happened, the empire was being run by similarly conscientious, rule-following cousins.

It was a society that, at least around the time of the Utah War, every single member of the church had been born and raised into — so confronting reality and making accommodations with that culture barely felt like assimilation at all, because we’d never been anything other than Americans.

Again, the parallels to the South are instructive here. Southerners obviously did not see themselves as betraying their country. And likewise, when Latter Day Saints — even those visionary, ecstatic latter day saints — when they thought about America, you know, they had some choice words for federal officials, but they really saw them as something like the Pharisees, like apostates — people who’d been given something precious, a divinely ordained form of government from which they had apostatized. (That word is used explicitly in this context.)

So, again, Latter Day Saints becoming uber-loyal turbo-Americans was not a big leap. It was a natural fit. And maybe there was even a sense that, you know, since we’d been invited into the fold, maybe America had come to its senses, and was becoming what it was supposed to be, fulfilling its prophetic destiny.

But now, the Empire has invaded and invited the world — and in order to hold together its own internal contradictions, it can no longer tolerate any distinctions of value, any particularities.

Which means that maintaining our commitment to accommodation and procedure and loyalty requires us to surrender every other principle.

So the compromise being offered to Latter-day Saints now is the same compromise being offered to you and everyone else in the European West:

If you go extinct spiritually right now, we’ll delay your physical extinction by a generation. Give the war to your children.

The political conflict in Utah, just like everywhere else in the West, is just between the people who are willing to take that deal and the people who are not.

So the Ordeal of Civility required new habits of compromise, accommodation, respect for institutions — and the Ordeal of Incivility will require us to shed them.

Now interestingly, for people who are pretty used to getting marching orders directly from the top, the Church itself has actually spent the last 10 years leaning hard into this “home centered, church supported” paradigm — which basically means fewer official programs, fewer explicit rules, and (at least in theory) a pretty broad mandate for families to talk to God and figure it out.

And while the church is restricting itself to political issues that directly impact its institutional mission, the members of the church are being encouraged to “get involved”, “make our influence felt”, etc. We’re explicitly told to exercise political power in defense of our values, and support candidates who do the same.

Now, the hostile interpretation of these facts is that the Church is Libbing Out — or maybe just paralyzed by these mutually irreconcilable commitments to be “good citizens” on the one hand, and “believing in literally anything at all” on the other.

But a more charitable interpretation is that these moves are an exercise in signature reduction.

So the Church today is this enormous target for lawfare and international diplomatic pressure. It has huge investments, many of which are in land and food production and distribution. Some things that make sense as pure investments, but a lot of things that really only make sense if they’re holding onto state capacity.

If you thought that volatile times were coming, in which a lot of political questions would be up in the air, and possibly unfriendly people in control of the US Government again, then maybe it make sense, both from the history of the Utah territory and more recently with Prop eight, to run quiet for a little while.

The Kingdom of Deseret was Certifiably Based, but it’s not obvious that the Church taking a strident institutional role in Utah’s politics (let alone the nation’s) has ever been particularly helpful, either for the Church or for the causes that it championed.

Going back to this comparison with Civil War Reconstruction, one of the reasons that Southerners were not so fundamentally transformed by their Ordeal is that they were Protestant — which meant that there wasn’t one guy in the Confederate camp who could credibly tell the feds, “I’ll go talk to my people and bring them in line.”

But you don’t necessarily have to buy either the charitable or the hostile interpretation of what the Church is doing, because, in a practical sense, they lead to the same place, which is decentralization.

People are being explicitly invited (for whatever reason) to stop waiting to be told what to do.

Start talking to God, start making your own decisions.

And in my opinion, that’s exactly what our people need to hear. I think that’s why they are the way they are right now. They’re desperate for someone to tell them what to do, because they don’t want the responsibility of deciding and maybe deciding wrong.

And so it’s always just, “well, Senate procedure doesn’t allow that,” or “the Supreme Court would never approve.”

Even in local politics, “I don’t know what the Church’s lobbyists would think” — and you’ll catch this even with like petty interpersonal stuff: people in the Church will really do this Talmud thing where they pick through the Church’s marketing materials, and press releases, and the art on the magazines, to be like, what is the Church trying to tell me?

What, what should I be doing? (More importantly, what should I not be doing?)

And they’ll literally argue about that on Twitter, exactly like rabbis.

Which, in my opinion, is the antithesis of the whole concept of revelation. It’s exactly the kind of thing Jesus told the Pharisees not to do. It’s exactly the kind of thing that Joseph Smith railed against all the preachers for.

But if you’re that terrified to act and to take responsibility for your actions, then you’ll look absolutely everywhere for some bird guts to read some, some precedent, some authority, some text that you can scry.

That is what the world looks like without revelation.

And of course, this doesn’t mean the text doesn’t matter: I believe the Constitution was divinely inspired — not just in the sense that it’s an expression of true principles, but that it was important to write those principles down. But ultimately, they’re just English words. They don’t supply their own interpretation.

Nobody on earth — no politician, no judge, no constitutional scholar believes that anything about America today reflects “the Founders’ intent.”

It’s very clear to everybody that if you brought Thomas Jefferson or James Madison or George Washington to America today, they would be horrified. The only question about which there is any debate whatsoever, is whether we ought to care about that: whether it’s good or bad.

So, if you regard the Constitution as a product of human ingenuity — a human experiment in political science — the best you can say about it is “It had a good run.”

Maybe it did what they hoped it would do for a while. It’s not doing that anymore. Even if you say you want to instantiate “the Founder’s intent”, their culture and worldview is so alien from our own that we can’t reconstruct it even if we want to. We actually don’t know how to think like they thought and want the things they wanted.

Now, if you believe, as I do, that the Constitution was divinely inspired — that it’s God’s project, and that America still has a prophetic destiny to fulfill — then in order to understand that text and its intent, to try to obey it, you have to figure out what God wants. The words on the page by themselves can’t tell you.

So ultimately all you have is discernment. A lot of people believe in God in the abstract, and many even believe in principle that God answers prayers. But it’s a whole other thing to say. “I trust my perception of those answers.” “I trust my ability to understand”. (Or, framed differently, “I trust that God will bless my earnest attempts to understand.”)

It’s the fear of this confrontation that is the mechanism by which postmodernism is eating our country, every western liberal country, your church, my church.

Because we want to hide out in this maze of Text and law and custom and precedent — we want to offload the moral responsibility for our actions to the preacher, or to Paul, or to James Madison, or to Ketanji Brown Jackson.

And that’s the right illustration, because the system you live under has chosen Ketanji Brown Jackson to decide what the Constitution says, and there is just no way that you believe she’s actually qualified to do that.

There’s no way that you believe that what she says about the law has anything to do with the Founder’s Intent or good government or justice.

So the only reason that anyone would defer to her on these questions is because they just don’t want to decide. They don’t want it to be their responsibility to decide.

In Exodus 20, God gives the children of Israel the 10 Commandments, and they hear his voice. He says, “Ye have seen that I have talked with you from heaven.”

But when the people see the thunderings, and the lightnings, and the noise of the trumpet, and the mountain smoking, they say to Moses, “Speak thou with us, and we will hear, but let not God speak with us, lest we die.”

Later, Moses says, “Would God that all the Lord’s people were prophets, and that the Lord would pour out his spirit upon them!”

But if you had the God-given ability to discern truth, then you would be alone with God: and He might tell you to do anything.

And you would be accountable for whatever you did or didn’t do — and if you could have understood and you chose not to understand, you’d be accountable for that too.

So it’s just much easier to tell yourself, “well, it’s not for me to decide.”

And if you’re a guy like Mitt Romney or Spencer Cox, you feel very honest and decent and humble — maybe even noble — when you say, “Justice Jackson, please go up into the mountain. Tell us what the Constitution really says.”

It’s her job. It’s not your job.

And when she and people like her, inevitably, predictably smash the plane into a mountainside at 700 miles an hour, you can say, “well, that’s who the Constitution put in charge.”

“The Constitution is divinely inspired. So therefore, I’m not only not to blame for letting this happen: I’m kind of a hero. What a sacrifice for me, to turn my children’s inheritance into a smoking crater, because that’s what Our Divinely Ordained Constitution demanded.

I’m having a little fun there, but I’m pretty sure they actually believe that. I’m pretty sure something like that is actually rattling around in their brains when they do the shit they do.

And the reason I believe that, and this is where I’m trying to get to with all this, is that they’ve got this moral syphilis real bad, but I think we’ve all got it.

Even the most Our Guy of our guys, we’re all looking for the right analytical framework, the right ideology, the unified theory of being a right wing guy.

Even when we fantasize about accelerationism and bronze-age steppe warlord, whatever — what’s so cathartic about that fantasy is the idea that there will come a permission structure, which is another way of saying someone will tell us what to do.

And to be clear, I’m not talking about somebody else, I’m talking about me. I’m talking about everybody.

And the only thing that I’ve found that has broken me out of that paralysis is to ask God — and I think you should ask God, in earnest: Does He want you to lose? Does He want your kids to lose? Does he want you to abandon this wicked, sinful world? Leave it to the Bolsheviks, let them have it?

Does he want you to just keep your head down, work your job, be a nice guy — and with no preparation and no thought on your part, he will deliver you, as a pure miracle?

The answer that I get to all those questions is no, and it’s pretty unambiguous. I don’t have to think about it that hard. We’re supposed to win. Our inheritance is not ours to surrender: it doesn’t belong to us. We have a responsibility to pass it down to our kids.

And if we’re supposed to win, and God’s not going to hand it to us, then we have to get way more capable, as quickly as we possibly can.

And the good news, maybe, from understanding ourselves as going through this Ordeal of Incivility, is that there’s actually a lot of capability lying around.

Last week’s writeup was about the tech billionaires — how any one of the top five of those guys, if you wanted to, could buy the entire California political system in perpetuity, could fund every election. And if Silicon Valley Tech guys as a class did that, they wouldn’t even miss the money, let alone if the conservaboomer, SEC donor wanted power

And these are smart, successful, capable people — the reason they don’t have power is that they don’t want it.

The same is true, in a different sense, in Utah. You’ve got this incredibly cohesive, incredibly productive, incredibly functional culture that can organize to do absolutely anything in the world except say no.

So we are not living in a system where all the loose energy and power has been scooped up and somebody’s guarding all the doors and holding all the keys.

But there’s a particular habit of mind that you find with smart, conscientious right wing guys — because they have respect for the natural order, for nature, and nature’s God — that power is efficiently distributed.

Even if it’s not in the right hands, it’s in strong hands. The market for power is efficient, money flows to capable people; “if that idea was going to work, somebody would’ve tried it already.”

George Orwell wrote a reply to The Managerial Revolution called “Second Thoughts on James Burnham”, in which he diagnoses this tendency:

“It will be seen that, at each point, Burnham is predicting a continuation of the thing that is happening. Now, the tendency to do this is not simply a bad habit, like inaccuracy or exaggeration, which one can correct by taking thought. It is a major mental disease and its roots lie partly in cowardice, and partly in the worship of power, which is not fully separable from cowardice…

Power worship blurs political judgment because it leads almost unavoidably to the belief that present trends will continue. Whoever is winning at the moment will always seem to be invincible.

If the Japanese have conquered South Asia, then they will keep South Asia forever. If the Germans have captured Tobruk, they will infallibly capture Cairo. If the Russians are in Berlin, it will not be long before they’re in London, and so on.”

And yeah, Orwell was a little commie-curious, but this is one of the virtues that commies have: they’re genuinely not at all encumbered with the idea that their enemies deserve power.

They don’t see anything — not even the laws of physics — as fixed variables that they’re obligated to respect.

To come back to this online-right-wing misread of the Utah political situation: a lot of the conspiratorial thinking about Utah (and about America and about the West more broadly) is rooted in a need to explain why we are losing to such weak people.

How did Minneapolis get captured by Somalis?

How is Utah — this cohesive, functional, overwhelmingly socially conservative, overwhelmingly Republican state — just folding like a cheap suit. They’re flying pride flags — they’re still flying BLM flags.

Utahns are smart people. Minnesotans are smart people. Californians are smart people. And so if you have this habit of mind, this tendency toward power-worship, you ask yourself, “How could we possibly be losing?”

It must be that there’s some immense insurmountable hidden power — something that, for all our capacities, we just can’t break.

It can’t be that all these smart, conscientious, functional people are just, like, jerking off, and not paying attention.

It can’t be the case that there’s a couple million really high-octane, dynamic, productive guys, who just don’t want to have an uncomfortable conversation with the wife.

It can’t possibly be the case that the power to fix these problems is just lying on the ground — and you actually don’t need Thielbuxx, and you don’t need an ambitious general to declare martial law, before you can fix them.

So Curtis Yarvin generated some controversy this past week.

He was accused of demoralization because he and Peter MacCormack were talking about the possibility of civil war.

He says:

“It’s not gonna happen, because people have no balls. They will not resist. All the thought that they will get their muskets and put on their tri cornered hats or whatever — when you go back into the period when people actually did this, you’re just like, these people are completely alien to us. It will never happen. It won’t happen at all.

What will happen is exactly what happened in South Africa: which is that they will just acknowledge that they’ve lost all of their power forever, and then they will sit quietly in their houses, and build more and more barbed wire, and electric fences, until they’re finally exterminated in one big pogrom.

That’s the future. That’s what will happen to your children.”

Now, there’s a couple things going on here.

First of all, a lot of this stuff Yarvin does is basically “Coffee’s for Closers”. He’s on a mission of mercy. “You have no balls” means “Go find your balls.”

And of course he’s right that there’s not gonna be a White Intifada in 2028 if the election goes the wrong way.

But he’s sneaking in the assumption that that would be the right thing to do if, in fact, we had balls.

But the most obvious difference between us and the Founders — yeah, maybe a little bit of this is testicular microplastics — but the biggest difference is ubiquitous technical surveillance and 3,000 miles of ocean.

If George Washington were here right now, he wouldn’t put on his tri-cornered hat and pick up a musket either, because he was a guy who actually wanted to win.

The founding fathers were brave, but they were also canny. There was a lot of subterfuge, there was a lot of politicking. There was a lot of networking. They obviously didn’t call it “opsec”, but they talked and thought about “opsec” a lot.

So to bring a couple threads back together:

If our enemies were actually not insurmountable, and if we were neither fated nor morally obligated to lose, and if there were no question of courage or will to win — if it were strictly a technical question — how would we acquire the power to win?

I recently wrapped up after almost two years trying to get through it. The German version of the Percival Grail myth — and it was hard to get through because it doesn’t obey the storytelling conventions, the narrative arc that you’re accustomed to. A lot of things seem to just happen and it’s not clear what they mean — which is a lot more like real life.

And it was sort of interesting to confront those expectations and how like fiction-brained we all are.

Anyway, the Knights of the Round Table are looking for the Grail, and it’s this fundamentally spiritual quest. The Grail Castle is never in the same place twice, and a lot of knights try to joust their way, through feats of valor and defeating monsters, to sort of summon or demand the grail.

But at the same time, it’s understood by everyone involved that you just have to go into the Forest Perilous and you have to go fight monsters and you have to save princesses in castles.

All the Knights of the Round Table are told, “Go in what direction seemeth good to you.”

They’re actively seeking out adventure, but they’re taking whatever adventure comes — and this is a necessary-but-not-sufficient condition for the emergence of the Grail and the crowning of the Grail King and the healing of the land.

So the story presents this harmony between human enthusiasm and will and dynamism and violence of action, with the humility to see that what they’re seeking is something fundamentally miraculous.

They can’t make it happen. And even as they’re just furiously hunting for quests and feats and things to do, the recognition that God is doing something to them and through them — that what they’re actually doing is making themselves available for whatever experience and refinement God intends to send them.

And that’s how we have to approach this problem.

We don’t actually know what capacities we’re going to need. We don’t know how the environment’s gonna change over the course of our lifetime and our kids’ lifetime. We don’t know what’s gonna work. We just have to take a lot of swings. And, ideally, we want to do it with as many aligned people as we can, because nobody can do it all — and we need to compare notes.

The guy who’s working out of Panama is going to have resources and opportunities that the guys in the States don’t have, and vice versa. The tech guys are going to have things to offer the vets, and the vets are gonna have things to offer the business owners, and we’re all gonna benefit from knowing guys who are working in politics.

When I started thinking about this idea of the Ordeal of Incivility, it occurred to me that there’s like a very instinctive negative framing associated with that, which is: “We (Westerners) used to be decent, compassionate, trustworthy people, and now we have to harden up and we have to become cruel and we have to become untrustworthy (you know, like the third worlders are.)”

But really, it just means that we have to take responsibility for a lot of the social infrastructure that we used to take for granted.

Instead of neither having friends nor enemies, you’ve got to figure out who your friends are — and you have to build with them consciously, and you have to organize for power consciously.

And yeah, some things that used to go without saying have to be articulated, and maybe that means some uncomfortable conversations — but the adaptations that we have to make to survive this Ordeal have a lot more to do with how we treat our friends than how we treat our enemies.

It’s that type of organizing for power — groups of guys who assume responsibility for their communities, who pick up responsibilities that have been abdicated — that’s who is going to build the new world on the other side of the Ordeal of Incivility.

So right now, EXIT is working on a private club space in Provo, Utah. We’re developing a cooperative education project that’ll be hosted in the club space. We’re doing civic organizing in several cities, so we’ve got some guys on the ground hosting and attending events, making friends, and we’ve got an intelligence team that’s feeding them information, helping them navigate. We’ve got our ongoing entrepreneurship calls, where our guys are holding each other accountable as they build their businesses.

And maybe it sounds like it’s all over the place, but that’s kind of the point.

We’re not waiting around for a coherent, theoretical framework. We’re just throwing things at the wall — but it’s working. We’re figuring it out.

Our guys are getting better jobs, their businesses are getting traction — they’re showing up to GOP meetings, and it turns out, if you just go to some of these GOP meetings and you tell the boomers, “I love tax cuts and I love Ronald Reagan,” they’ll basically put you in charge of the county.

Anyway, you can check us out at exitgroup.us. If you take a look at the member map, it’ll show you what kind of depth we have in your city. I’m also going to post, shortly after this goes live, a weekly EXIT News breakdown that will talk about all the projects we’re working on.

It’ll also have cocktail hour invites — so, after the meetup for the members, we always have a cocktail hour for the Substack guys. So you can check and see when we’re getting together in your city.

We have regular monthly meetups in Dallas, Austin, Houston, New York, Seattle, Nashville, Atlanta, Columbus, salt Lake City, and Provo. And in the next couple of months, we’re going to get together in Denver, the Bay Area, Philadelphia, Boston, and DC.

So check out the member map, check out the website, exitgroup.us. Feel free to reach out on Substack or send me an email. Thanks for listening.

California is mooting a “one time” (lol) tax on residents whose net worth exceeds $1 billion, amounting to 5% of their total assets.

The tech libtards with the courage of their convictions are promising to stay and eat the tax, but Chamath Palihapatiya estimates that $1 trillion in billionaire wealth has already left — not to speak of corporate wealth — mostly to Texas.

For all leftists’ talk about the unaccountable power of the Tech Oligarchs, they’re being routed without a fight from their home: a city whose wealth and power they can credibly claim to have built (at least as a class), and which is among the most beautiful places on earth.

This is, of course, a death-spiral move for the state of California — but the real puzzle is this:

For what they’ll spend on relocation costs alone, the tech exiles could have bought the entire California political system in perpetuity.

The last San Francisco mayoral race involved around $34M including all candidates, as well as independent spending. The gubernatorial contenders in 2022 spent about the same, maybe a little less (Newsom was a lock). The California legislative races (state house and senate) combined probably total $250M. The sum of spending on ballot measures is about $400M, with another $500M for the US House and Senate.

Based on these expansive, generous estimates, the entire California political system costs, at most, $3 billion per election cycle.

If you wanted to be the dominant donor in every single California political race, in every cycle, you might have to budget $75M per year. In a pinch, Elon could cut that check all by himself — he donates more than that to his charitable trust every year for tax purposes.

A more disciplined operation, focused on key races and ballot initiatives, could get all the juice it needed for half as much. And that’s if you want to lock up the whole state — stabilizing San Francisco politics would be a rounding error.

In short: any one of the wealthiest Silicon Valley billionaires could (in theory) transform California’s political landscape all by himself.

If Big Tech organized as a class, they could do it effortlessly, at personal costs they would hardly notice — but it’s obvious to anyone with even passing familiarity with these people that they will never do anything like this.

Elon Musk is by far the most radical and iconoclastic of the Silicon Valley billionaires, and he’s nowhere near this — which would, itself, be an embarrassingly petty exercise of political power by the standards of the wealthiest men in history. (Or even in comparison with the industrialists of the turn of the 20th century.)

There’s no point in jerking off about how dumb this is, and how we’d do a better job with their money — but it’s worth asking why their wealth seems to mean so little: even if they have no grand vision to instantiate, you’d think that at least they’d be able to avoid getting run out of town by spiteful mutants.

You can come up with structural excuses for this:

The wealthiest Americans are smaller relative to the state, and less concretely tied to its coercive function, than historical aristocracies.

The wealthiest man in America contributes ~0.1% of US tax receipts (and the dollar empire is much bigger than US tax receipts), while the most powerful rebel baron in 1215 held around 3.5% of England’s “knight’s fees” (a handy combined metric of land, military levy, and tax revenue.) States are just way bigger and more powerful than they used to be, relative to any one person.

Also, shares in a tech company aren’t the same kind of wealth as lands that support a knight and his retinue. Tech wealth is a claim on future cash flows that are meaningfully contingent on a) the stability of the stock market, b) the stability of the dollar, c) the stability of global trade, d) continued availability of credit & funding rounds, e) favorable media coverage, etc.

The fakeness of the global economy is an underrated source of its strength. No matter how many Fedbuxx a billionaire has on the computer, he can’t meaningfully abscond with them, or use them to destabilize the system — the Fedbuxx are the system. They have no meaning outside of it.

But these are, of course, fake excuses:

As long as the system keeps humming, they (and you, anon) might exchange Fedbuxx for real-world goods and services, which can be converted into power.

George Soros bought colossal political power that was just lying around, that nobody cared about, by funding nationwide DA and judicial elections for a couple million dollars a year — far less than the largest individual donor to your local college football team.

At the time of this writing, a private entrepreneur has (allegedly) secured all of Haiti’s natural resources and ports for (purportedly) a modest 8-figure sum.

Moreover, Elon himself controls the US military’s orbital launch infrastructure, and therefore its access to space — especially if that domain is ever contested, and new assets need to be put into orbit quickly. This means that the efficacy of America’s exquisitely-integrated weapons systems would depend on Elon continuing to do his patriotic utmost in a crisis. That seems like a lot of leverage!

And yet, Elon, who ought to be the most powerful man in America by any conventional standard, seems to post pretty much exactly like a guy who owns a car dealership. Look at the hypocrisy, look at the double standards, the Woke Left has truly gone insane this time.

The tech billionaires aren’t alone in this — basically every powerful national figure upon whom we might stake our hopes thinks and talks the same way.

A moralizing explanation is just incorrect, as well as unhelpful: these people aren’t risk-averse; they certainly aren’t lazy. Sure, they aren’t Achilles — but they aren’t up against Hector, either.

If they felt that it was right to obtain real power, there’s little doubt that they could — and that’s what is in the way.

Elon is the best example, but it’s true of all of them: he is very comfortable (and skilled) at exercising power in the form of money.

This is not to say that “all he cares about is money.” Elon is a genuine romantic, in the way that tech people can be.

But like virtually all of his class, he is a genuine spiritual libertarian, all the way down to his balls, which means that the only human relations he understands (or regards as fully legitimate) are legible, voluntary, reciprocal transactions between individuals — which is to say, money transactions.

Within that world, though, among people who know and respect such things, he is widely regarded as Napoleonic in his ability to inspire (and demand) excellence from extraordinary people. If it can be extracted with the promise of money (or the threat of being fired), Elon can extract it.

The problem is that basically every significant question that we face now lies outside that moral framework.

As technology shrinks geographic distances (and expands moral/psychological ones), the space of public shared values has collapsed — and with it, the things that can be settled by “the market” (i.e. voluntary mutual agreement.)

Everything in the West has become Politicized — fewer and fewer aspects of everyday life conform to a common framework under which we can agree to be governed, within which we can cooperate voluntarily.

One perspective must rule, and the other must be ruled: that’s politics.

Politics can, in fact, be understood as “the set of human questions that cannot be settled via voluntary reciprocal transactions between individuals in a free market”.

In other words, politics is violence.

It includes direct violence, like fighting wars and killing criminals, but also taxation and regulation, which are backed by the threat of violence. It is, definitionally, the domain of coercive power processes.

Markets, meanwhile, are the domain of power processes beneath the aegis of the political — where the role of force is occulted.

Neither party in a market transaction applies coercive force — but only because an unseen third party applies force against both parties, insuring their respective property rights, enforcing contracts, etc.

What makes a libertarian a libertarian, morally/spiritually/temperamentally, is the belief that there ought not to be any outside power process.

Libertarians reach the (important) insight that all politics is violent, and thereby conclude that politics is illegitimate as such.

The heart of this moral frame is that power (“force”, “aggression”, “coercion”), is definitionally evil, and definitionally contraposed with freedom, which is good. To the degree that power is exercised, freedom is abrogated.

Huge swaths of people who call themselves “conservative” — virtually everyone we would call a “sympathetic normie” — is actually libertarian in this dispositional sense. The Republican politician, if he is animated by any ideals at all, is animated by libertarian ideals.

“Small government”, “the Constitution”, “the rule of law” — these are all different ways of saying, “I should not be in charge, because no one should be in charge — we should all just play by the mutually-agreed rules, so that all transactions can be voluntary and reciprocal.”

To be clear: their stupidity on this point is the only reason they are not leftists.

In fact, his stupidity is almost (but not quite) the only thing that binds the anti-Left coalition together.

I’ll explain why in a second, but first let’s talk about why this is a stupid thing to say and believe.

The first problem with this frame is that power, like matter and energy, is conserved.

The problem was well-understood by the Romans 2,000 years ago.

We can say that a ruler should “obey the Constitution”, but the Constitution cannot be obeyed — it does not have an intent, except maybe James Madison’s, and he’s not here to explain himself.

So someone has to evaluate whether the Constitution has been “obeyed”. Is it James Madison’s intent that is sacred? Should we conduct a seance?

Maybe we accept that Madison was a mere mortal — is there some magic in the words themselves, something God-breathed? Even then, scripture is not self-interpreting: which prophet or priest is authorized to discern the divine will from the words, and why them?

No matter what theory you have about what the Constitution is and what it means, in the end you are left alone with the words on the page. Theocracy doesn’t mean “rule by God”, it means “rule by priests”. “Rule of law” means “rule by lawyers”.

No matter what Rube Goldberg machine we construct to govern us, it will be composed of human beings — and in the final analysis, some human being has to decide what to do.

Power is always conserved, because someone always decides.

The second problem with this frame is that power and freedom are synonyms.

Because someone always decides, there is no such thing as “being left alone”.

“Leave me alone” is a command, and the power to command works the same regardless of its content. Either you are strong enough to make uncooperative people do what you want, or you are not.

The man who says “I just want enough power to defend my rights” is, in fact, saying “I want enough power to impose my will on everyone who disagrees with me about what my rights are”.

You may insist on using power defensively, but you can’t insist on having power defensively. A gun means the same thing in a home defense as it does in a home invasion: “Do what I say or I am going to kill you.”

There is no special category of pure, righteous, NAP-compliant power that works some other way.

The tribe across the valley wants your land; you want to keep it. These are symmetric, mutually incompatible claims, and they are not self-enforcing: someone is going to decide.

And, in general, that person is not going to be you.

Because threats to individual rights come in the form of mobs/armies, virtually every person who has ever lived on earth has owed their freedom (such as it was) to a guarantor — a sovereign who organizes collective violence.

By definition, this cannot be a voluntary arrangement, because the whole reason to outsource your security to a sovereign guarantor is that he can deploy more coercive power than you can. That’s “what you pay him for”, so to speak.

If the sovereign lacks the power to revoke your freedom, then he also lacks the power to defend it: they are reciprocal expressions of a single capacity.

This doesn’t mean that your relationship to the guarantor must be abusive, or even adversarial.

In fact, being ruled by a sovereign who roughly shares your values and political interests is what most people mean by “freedom”.

Being aligned with the sovereign means you are free to do all the things you actually want to do, and — just as important — it also means you are protected from competing claims that you regard as predatory, criminal, and tyrannical. His sovereignty is your sovereignty.

When Hollywood libtards say they feel more free in Canada or the UK, they mean it: the fact that you do not feel free there is part of what makes them feel free, and vice versa — because your notions of freedom involve symmetric and mutually incompatible claims.

Leftists understand all of this intuitively.

They understand that force sets the default of all social and cultural questions.

Everything you take for granted as a freely chosen, reciprocal relationship — your job, your mortgage, your marriage, your relationship with your children — is, in fact, shaped by the invisible architecture of force that defines all the parties’ options, expectations, and legal rights.

You love your wife, and your wife loves you — but your community’s collective tacit knowledge of divorce law colors how and when and why you got married, what your mutual expectations were, and how you were taught to cooperate.

There is no neutral way to “referee” sociocultural questions like:

• what is a woman

• what is a marriage

• what tradeoffs should be made to ensure public order

• who is (or ought to be) “equal” to whom, and on which axes of comparison

• who has which rights to what property, based on which historical claims

The system cannot be neutral — these questions will be answered in the law — in one person’s interest, and against another’s.

The system only feels neutral when it conforms to your moral intuitions and doesn’t get in your way. The Woke are Correct when they point this out.

Leftists are power-hungry because they see the world’s answers to all these questions as badly upside-down, and so they want the power to change the world — and they’re not so afraid of screwing it up. It’s already screwed up.

This is the one sense in which leftist perspective is more sane and healthy than yours and mine.

A conservative or a libertarian (which is to say, most of Trump’s voting base, and ~100% of his institutional support) is a liberal who just doesn’t want to go where liberalism is obviously headed.

But because he has no alternative moral framework to justify imposing an alternative trajectory, all he can say is “no”. He wants to stop the world so he can get off.

Many of these are smart people, and many of them have heard these arguments before: power is conserved; the rules are not self-interpreting; someone always decides. A surprising number of these guys have read Yarvin.

But the conclusion — Therefore, we need to make sure we are the ones who decide — is the problem.

In that directive, the conservative is denied recourse either to scriptural or constitutional exegesis — he cannot derive his justification for action from any outside consensus understanding. Neither Madison nor Paul can take the rap — he has to own his decision.

He has to say “actually, my moral and spiritual intuitions about the way things ought to be are simply correct, and I’m going to insist upon them — not just for me, but for everyone.”

He looks out over the edge of that cliff, and his head swims. To say that, and mean it, is very near his bedrock definition of wickedness — the Ring of Power.

So he flees back into the maze of procedure and authority, looking for someone to tell him what to do. Maybe we just haven’t done enough to Insist Upon virtuous judges and politicians and administrators. What if we Insisted Harder? Has anyone tried that?

Relatedly: this is why Western conservatism (and Christianity) has been eaten alive by postmodernism:

If the text does not supply its own interpretation, then you are, ultimately, left alone with your discernment — which is to say, your judgment, intuition, feelings, even taste. You may say, “I am too wise and humble to trust my spiritual intuitions” — sorry, friend, that’s what you’ve got.

It feels like an almost unsolvable problem: we are who we are, and the billionaires and politicians are who they are: you can’t insist upon a moral conviction that isn’t there.

And yet, if there were not some glimmer of will in these people, we would not live in such polarized and angry times.

What unites all these disparate factions of the “anti-Left” is the conviction that something about our present condition is intolerable.

They have a nagging feeling, in mounting tension with their liberal principles, that sitting on their hands and letting These Fucking People take over the world is a sin for which they will not be held guiltless.

And why is that? Why can’t these good, Christian men just renounce this fallen, wicked world, and let the Bolsheviks have it? Why do they experience anguish of conscience at the thought of doing that?

In short: because they are fathers.

Your son is not a market actor. He doesn’t get to pick his school, his friends, his neighborhood. He can’t move his operations to Texas, or Mars.

He is hostage to whatever institutional environment his father tolerates. And right now, that institutional environment wants to destroy him, body and soul.

So, if you want a permission structure, here it is: whatever indignities you may be called to suffer personally, you are not authorized, as a father, to sacrifice your child to Moloch. You do not have the right to allow that to happen.

You will not be able to say, in the Judgment, “I was so afraid of doing my job wrong that I decided not to do it at all”.

If we are called to protect our loved ones, then we are called to subdue their enemies (again, that’s what “protecting” means, if it means anything — “leave me alone” is a command.)

And if we are called to subdue their enemies, then we are called to govern — someone is going to decide, and it cannot be these enemies, so it must be us.

That may seem impossibly far off, but look back at the math at the top of the post:

The normiecon money flowing into your state college football team — forget about the tech money — would be enough to carve out breathing room, if it were in the hands of people who were not afraid to govern.

It’s a long road, but not impossible: crises are coming for these hostile institutions no matter what we do, as they buckle under generations of accumulated ideological contradictions. I’m not saying we should wait for things to fall apart on their own — they won’t (at least, not in any way you’d want) — but volatile and disorganized conditions amplify the power of organized, well-positioned actors.

The question is, who will build and organize for power? Who will be in position to govern when these institutions no longer can?

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EXIT News

• Weekly Full Group Calls, Tuesdays at 9PM ET:

  • 2/24: We discussed Digital Sovereignty with David Young, founded of Federated Computer. Principles of opsec, self-custody of data and digital assets, using open-source technology, etc.

  • 3/3: We will have an open Q&A with John Carter of Mars, writer of the Postcards from Barsoom Substack.

  • 3/10: We will be discussing Portuguese ruler Antonio Salazar’s political treatise, How to Raise a State, with translator Alec DeLeon.

• March 17 is Caucus day for the Utah GOP. It’s St. Patrick’s Day, a good day to out-Irish the Irish. Many of you attended Trevor' Lee’s delegate training, Find your caucus precinct here, and get appointed a delegate.

• Member meetups — Members can check their regional channel or contact DB for full details.

  • 2/27: Seattle.

  • 2/27: Knoxville.

  • 2/28: St. Louis.

  • 2/28: Waco.

  • 3/7: Utah Valley.

  • 3/13: Nashville.

  • 3/13-3/16: EXITville retreat in Austin.

  • 3/14: Houston.

  • 3/16: Dallas.

  • 3/16: New York.

  • 3/20-3/22: Ski Trip in Brian Head, UT.

  • 3/21: Columbus.

  • 3/27: Family Pot Luck, Bountiful UT.

Deportations of criminal aliens are still being prevented by leftist judges. The quisling GOP refuses to kill the filibuster, match Democrats on redistricting, or impose nationwide voter ID. And that’s really all you need to know.

There really is no ambiguity about leftists’ intentions. They are promising to do everything we accuse them of planning to do — packing the court, mass amnesty, political show trials — and if they can run an opaque election in 2028, there will be nothing to stop them.

Failing to escape the gravity well of the leftist administrative state, the greater energy and efficacy of MAGA 2.0 only ensures a harder landing upon re-entry, by antagonizing (and genuinely frightening) the old regime’s functionaries without actually disempowering them — in fact, handing them ample causes celebres and legal justification to conduct their promised purge.

Even beyond that near-term threat, America’s politics are just terminally incoherent and dysfunctional.

There’s no saving the money printer (which is the empire) — and the idea that “core” America will peacefully re-assert some defensible conceptual boundaries (“who is American”, and “who gets to live here”) looks increasingly implausible.

In short, none of the United States’ existential problems have solutions within the domain of regular politics — and as far as we can tell from the outside, the President isn’t going to cut the Gordian knot.

(Of course, if he were, we’d be the last to know — but we have to act on what information we have.)

When I laid out this set of facts, a wise and good friend chided me for blackpilling — but that isn’t how I see it at all.

We are confronting crises whose seeds were planted before our grandparents were born.

For a while, it looked like we had a chance of avoiding some of their worst consequences through the decisive action of a few (though, in hindsight, it’s not clear that this was ever possible, or even exactly what we were hoping to see in practice.)

Anyway, it sure looks like It’s Over.

But what do you mean by “It”? What do you mean by “Over”?

If “It” is a self-governing American nation-state, It’s been Over since long before you or I were born. If “It” is the world you grew up in, It’s been continually and freshly Over every day of your life.

Conservatism, if taken seriously, is a sure recipe for depression, because it locks you in an utterly doomed struggle with entropy — and therefore with reality itself.

Conservatism demands that old solutions keep working forever, that all dragons stay slain — and that’s just not the world God made.

But would you even want to live in such a world? Would you actually prefer it if the courage and ambition of the Founding Fathers had answered all political questions 250 years ago, tamed all inconvenient human impulses forever, and no such courage or ambition would ever be demanded of you?

We are so vexed by the challenge of holding together this tangle of contradictions.

Young families can’t afford a house, but America’s economic house of cards depends on steady appreciation. We’ve gutted domestic industry to the point that our national defense is dependent on supply chains from our chief geopolitical rival. We have naturalized so many hostile foreigners in our largest cities that they can elect politicians who explicitly campaign on our dispossession.

At an even more fundamental level, our economic system appears to be irreducibly incompatible with family formation.

Many Plan Trusters, in their understandable haste to counter the (genuinely insufferable) kvetching of blackpillers, have unconsciously assented to the blackpillers’ frame: that the national political struggle (in which we are really only voyeurs) is existential — and that failure is too horrible to contemplate.

This shared frame offers us nothing to do but sit and wait — either in hope or despair.

But more importantly, this fear of crisis prevents us from looking under the bed, and thinking seriously about what is ahead of us — especially the opportunities that lie in the crises that are coming, and the preparations we can make right now to seize them.

I think it’s extremely likely that, without executive action qualitatively different from anything we’ve seen so far from the Trump Administration, the chickens come home to roost sometime between 2028 or 2032: either in the form of a resurgent, vengeful institutional Left, and/or any combination of the impending fiscal, industrial, and foreign policy crises that have no solution within our present political paradigm.

I think the online-right consensus is roughly correct about how deep and how difficult these crises would be in the near term: but I think almost no one has reckoned with how quickly solutions might be found, how much opportunity will lie in the volatility, or how strong we might find ourselves if we just put down the burdens of this decrepit and sclerotic system.

When I look under the bed, here’s what I see:

A 2028 Newsomreich (or something worse) is not a stable equilibrium. It would take extreme competence — and, more importantly, heroic virtue and good will — to pull the US out of the situation in which it finds itself.

The only historical examples of countries spending more than a year or two in the fiscal territory to which we’re headed took place under 20th-century American suzerainty — and the resolution of those situations involved significant concessions of sovereignty (postwar Britain selling off its empire, indebted European countries accepting EU-brokered austerity regimes).

Vassal states can remain stable under these moribund and indebted conditions for the same reason that California or Illinois can: they aren’t operating in international anarchy. They can’t “fail” in the same sense that a sovereign state can, because USG can’t afford to let them.

When America’s fiscal situation collapses, there will be no hegemon to (in effect) take its assets into receivership and negotiate a structured settlement.

We hear often that “there’s a lot of ruin in a nation” and “there are still libtards in South Africa” — but it actually takes tremendous effort and expense (and competence) for the Empire to keep South Africa the way it is, to hold all these geopolitical wounds open and rotting.

South Africa’s private security forces outnumber the South African military plus police by a factor of 9 to 1, with near-parity in spending ($6 billion vs. $9 billion — depending how much of SANDF spending you think is jobs-program graft).

Despite having no constitutional “right” to firearms or self-defense, white South Africans’ “2A rights” are far more expansive, in practice, than Americans’ — largely because the state lacks the power to disarm them. Despite its explicit commitments to race communism, South Africa plays host to a white separatist enclave that it does not have the capacity to dislodge.

It’s among the most beautiful, temperate, resource-rich places on earth. If America’s carrier strike groups went to the bottom tomorrow, South Africa’s sovereignty would be hotly contested — at least regionally — within the week.

Which is to say: South Africa is only South Africa because America is America.

If America ever “becomes South Africa”, it will lose the capacity to maintain all these badly dysfunctional regimes through force of will — including domestically.

The hyper-scaled, globally integrated configuration of the empire means that it can’t just conduct an orderly retreat from the world and focus on tyrannizing its own people.

USG’s entire security paradigm — not just the deployment, but the design philosophy of all its weapons systems — assume global standoff capability, and don’t work without it, in the same way that China’s military is purpose-built to defeat the US Navy in the South China Sea, but has no capacity to replace it as guarantor of the sea lanes.

The same characteristics that have (so far) given huge managerial empires the advantage in modern warfare — the dominance of exquisitely-designed, highly integrated, and capital-intensive weapons systems — make those war machines narrow in their application, and difficult to retool for a new geopolitical situation.

And we are unambiguously headed into a new geopolitical situation.

In the 20th century, USG could afford to be pretty illiquid. It was the only player with the scale to implement the most powerful new technologies, so it always got to be the disruptor.

But these new technologies are accessible at a retail price point, and they’re generating new capacity far more rapidly than a big managerial regime can adjust its doctrine to make use of that capacity.

The big managerial players can produce cutting edge computational capacity, force projection capability, communications infrastructure, etc. — but they can’t metabolize it (i.e. deploy it efficiently to grow and solidify their own power).

In other words, power is leaking.

In this new techno-industrial paradigm, second-mover advantages are immense.

AI data centers, drone factories, GPS satellites, social media networks are traditional managerial mega-projects, but they leak power in ways that a 20th century shipyard or tank factory did not.

USG launches and maintains the GPS fleet, but it can’t prevent other parties using GPS to calculate targeting solutions for artillery, for example. State-of-the-art AI models can immediately be used to reverse-engineer and build better models. $500 drones can be used to bomb $5 billion drone factories. Social media networks break the narrative monopoly on which the liberal world order is predicated.

This means that weaker players that are clever and liquid can outcompete the players on the cutting edge, who are on the hook for rapidly obsolescing infrastructure — including political infrastructure, and organizational infrastructure (the headless, trustless, hard-to-change doctrines, procedures, and institutions on which managerialism depends.)

The existing managerial class can’t simply ingest these insights and pivot — they’ve been selected and trained from birth to work within this system, and they are only adaptive (and cooperative) within it. If they could think or act some other way, they wouldn’t be libtards.

So, instead of nourishing the first-movers (big managerial states), these new technologies nourish competing power structures within the system, even though they still depend on managerial scale to advance.

It may not even matter who runs the big managerial leviathan, whether they are well-intentioned or competent: the returns to optionality and agility simply exceed the returns to scale.

I’m not even really predicting the future here:

Westphalian states are already being eaten from the inside by tumors of adversarial power, because those groups (many of which are comically venal and retarded) are just way more agile, cohesive, and responsive — precisely because they never underwent the ordeal of adopting managerial virtues — and those older virtues are matter more in our new social and technological paradigm.

There is no plausible way for the big dinosaurs to survive at their present scale and bureaucratic configuration.

This is maybe a “blackpill” for people who are still rooting for the Big Gay Empire — either because they hope for its reform and resurrection, or because they are just afraid of the consequences of losing it — but I’m going to make the case that, even in the reasonably near term, even in the Bad Timeline, Real Americans will be better off without it.

The American worker today is more than twice as productive as the American worker in 1965 who supported a family of five on a single income and put a man on the moon.

Despite all the headwinds of regulatory bureaucracy, expropriative taxation, and the US Government’s institutional war on competence, Americans still perform 17% of the world’s manufacturing, and produce 15% of the world’s food calories — more than 3X what we need to feed ourselves.

It’s true that much of that productivity would be interrupted, for a time, by a failure of global security and logistics — but only for a time.

America's impending collapse is often analogized to the fall of the Roman Empire — which is fine as a jeremiad against America’s sins — but the analogy is misleading if you’re trying to make actual predictions about the future, largely because everything happens faster now. Yes, it took centuries for Europe to stabilize after the fall of Rome — because it took centuries for anything to happen in the first millennium AD.

Lines of communication that took an empire to maintain back then can now be re-established with two working laptops and one working satellite. All kinds of resources — including real, physical capital, factories and heavy equipment — can be reallocated around the world in a matter of days. (Losing Pax Americana makes this more complicated, but not at all impossible — and also enormously more lucrative. Someone’s going to manage it.)

Knowledge that could be lost permanently in a single fire or barbarian raid is now backed up on thousands of servers and data centers all over the world. (You can, of course, concoct a threat model to which all of that infrastructure is vulnerable — but not, realistically, the category of threats that we are concerned with here.)

Whatever doomer scenario you’re imagining for America: instead of imagining Rome, it’s probably more useful to ask if you think we’re in a worse position to recover than China after Mao — or even Russia after Gorbachev. (Will there still be computers and solar panels and backhoes and paved roads? Will you be illiterate? Etc.)

Fracturing the empire would be a serious shock. We would lose access, for a time, to almost everything we consume. Many people would lose their savings, some places would become (more) violent, many people would have to relocate. We would have to learn how to make things again.

But what could we build, and at what speed, if we were not bound by the constraints of the present system?

Think about our current productivity in context of all the derangements of this forced imperial stasis:

It’s illegal to build new power plants, especially nuclear. It’s illegal to build businesses that hire for competence.

It’s illegal to train our most gifted students at the speed and intensity of which they’re capable, because to do so would reveal disparate impacts. (The Trump Administration banned this on paper, but the institutions are all just waiting for Mommy to come home.)

Our brightest and most dynamic minds are shunted into frothy, imaginary sectors like tech and finance, because it’s illegal to manufacture real things in the real world.

Practically every productive person in America has to drive an hour from their suburban barracks to get to work, because it’s illegal to build safe and functional cities. (Solving this problem alone would unlock tens of trillions of dollars in real estate value, and billions of man-hours of pointless commuting. Imagine what could be accomplished in San Francisco if it were a livable city. Imagine what it would be worth.)

Of course it would be nice if we could strip away all this accreted absurdity through “reform” under color of law — that’s what we all hoped for from Trump Regime. But if you examine that possibility closely, in terms of the dislocations and volatility it would demand, it’s not obvious that it would be all that much cleaner, or quicker, or more likely to produce a favorable outcome, than just letting the thing fall over so you can start from a clean sheet. (It would be, in many senses, the same thing.)

So much of the discourse on the online right is just morons piling on each other about How Bad Things Really Are, and how they’re Going to Get Way Worse.

If you’re a stupid right-wing guy with nothing to say, you can always just affect 10% more cynicism and world-weariness than the last guy, and feel very clear-eyed and honest and brave.

This demoralization is rooted in the fact that a lot of right wing guys know what needs to happen, but do not see themselves as Strong Men who can survive Hard Times. In their hearts, they see themselves as natural creatures of the Big Gay Empire, who have everything to lose from its collapse.

Of course, that might turn out to be true of them, or of me. (They expect some of us in the wreckage, brother.) But I think, overall, the online right-wing zeitgeist profoundly underestimates:

1. The speed with which good order can be restored locally after a crisis

2. The opportunities that can be seized within that crisis (and only within that crisis)

3. How much difference preparedness and positioning will make

4. The strength that will be revealed in themselves when strength is demanded

5. Just how sunny the sunlit uplands could be on the other side

If the sleeper awakens, and Trump (or some other Man of Action) steps into the breach to save America, we will, of course, celebrate — but it turns out that the preparations you’d want to make for that kind of chaos and opportunity are not so different from the preparations you’d want to make for (let’s call it) the “default case”.

The reasons for this are two-fold, and deserve a longer treatment, but basically:

1. Ubiquitous technical surveillance means that the only capacity we can currently build is deniable capacity — which is, by definition, multi-purpose. This is one of the lessons we can derive from leftist street tactics: they don’t bring guns to a protest, they bring bike locks and skateboards, so that acts of violence cannot be perfectly anticipated, and can be treated as spontaneous and personal, rather than premeditated and organized. If you want to organize for power under the nose of a hostile surveillance regime, the power you build must be useful across a broad array of applications (so that it isn’t too obvious which application you want.)

2. The speed of technological and cultural change is too rapid to make confident predictions about the future, so we have to look for resources and strategies that are meta-adaptive. When things are moving quickly and you have very low confidence about what the future will hold, you want things that are useful in the broadest array of plausible futures.

Exciting times are coming whether we want them or not — but don’t you kind of want them?

Do you actually envy the boomers their lives as zoo animals, the decades they had to get so fat and careless and self-involved? Would you rather that went on forever? Would you want to give that to your sons?

We lament the closing of the frontier, but the crises ahead of us are what frontiers have always looked like. Your ancestors were able to build empires from the frontier precisely because the frontier was dangerous, and most people were scared and stayed home.

We have time to prepare. Our task is to transmute all these fake assets (fake dollars, fake jobs, fake numbers on computers) into the assets that will matter when the music stops (productive real-world capital, physical security, optionality, intelligence, relationships), so that we are in position to build what comes next.

exitgroup.us

EXIT News

• Weekly Full Group Calls, Tuesdays at 9PM ET:

  • 2/10: We discussed Civic Engagement, showcasing the guys’ accomplishments with their local political apparatus in Utah, Indiana, Kansas, Texas, and Tennessee. Also the powerful networking we observed from the Fellas Occupied Government in DC last weekend.

  • 2/17: We will discuss Financial Preparedness with our man Rob Reineke, who runs the investment call. Emphasis on saving and investing under volatile conditions. (As always, we we will be discussing general principles for entertainment purposes only, not financial advice, etc.)

  • 2/24: We will discuss Digital Sovereignty with David Young, founded of Federated Computer. Principles of opsec, self-custody of data and digital assets, using open-source technology, etc.

  • 3/3: We will have an open Q&A with John Carter of Mars, writer of the Postcards from Barsoom Substack.

• Member meetups — Members can check their regional channel or contact DB for full details.

  • 2/13: Nashville.

  • 2/16: New York City.

  • 2/16: Dallas.

  • 2/20: Delegate Training at Utah State Capitol with Trevor Lee. We’re going to learn how to get elected delegates at the state caucus on 3/17.

  • 2/20: Atlanta.

  • 2/21: Columbus.

  • 2/21: Houston.

  • 2/27: Seattle.

  • 2/28: Waco.

  • 3/13-3/16: EXITville retreat in Austin.

  • 3/20-3/22: Ski Trip in Brian Head, UT.

  • 3/27: Family Pot Luck, Bountiful UT.

• RSVP link for Dallas Cocktail Hour (2/16), EXIT Delegate Training in Salt Lake City (2/20) and EXIT Speaker Series in Seattle (2/27) available below the paywall for subscribers. These events are a great way to get to know your local EXIT guys and find out if full group membership is right for you.

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We discussed:

• The need for science fiction as a prophetic and inspirational tool, driving innovation in technical fields

• Devon’s vision for a future humanity that is more powerful and more sophisticated, in contrast to the anti-human apocalyptic trends in publishing

• “Woke” media being downstream of the internet’s disruption of traditional media business models that enabled better curation for quality and taste

• The importance of auteurs putting their personal reputation and ego on the line to deliver something that they are proud of

• A right-wing commentariat that masturbates their audience’s feelings of rage and betrayal rather than helping them build

• The need for cultural projects to emerge from organic networks of human taste and personal connection, rather than top-down

Every managerial system that is designed to deliver efficient results at global scale is buckling under the weight of globally democratized communications: what we affectionately call “slop”.

Every applicant tracking system at every major corporation is clogged with hundreds of thousands of fake AI applications. X, the Everything App, is overrun with subcons shoveling AI-generated retard bait for a $3 payout. Movies are written for morons on their phones. The illusion of consensus can be effortlessly created with swarms of bots indistinguishable from the median voter (the only voter that matters).

The technological tools of mass democracy have already been automated beyond human control. Smart people from every discipline are recognizing this rising tide, and the existential need for human curation: of art, of information, of social networks.

The answer to the failure of managerial systems is aristocratic systems: or, if that term is too loaded, we could just say human systems — systems in which individual human judgment (and therefore individual human quality) is a load-bearing structure.

By definition these systems don’t scale fast — maybe don’t scale at all. The only way aristocratic systems compete with democratic ones is if the people they produce are overpoweringly effective, so that two can put ten thousand to flight.

If we want to build anything that can reach above the tide of slop, we need to be in the business of human cultivation.

EXIT is taking a short position in managerial systems, and building the human institutions that will come next. Learn more at exitgroup.us

EXIT News

• Weekly Full Group Calls, Tuesdays at 9PM ET:

  • 1/20: Mikkel Thorup from Expat Money, on acquiring productive assets overseas. Recording of this and our conversation with Joshua Sheats coming soon.

  • 1/27: Book Club with Johann Kurtz on his book, Leaving a Legacy. (This call will take place at 1PM ET/10AM PT to accommodate Johann’s European time zone.)

  • On 1/27, we will also have an evening call at 9PM ET to discuss a new EXIT Strategic Leadership Call.

  • 2/3: Brian Patterson on banking in the Caymans for regular fellas.

• Member meetups — Members can check their regional channel or contact DB for full details.

  • 1/24: Utah County meetup: Mobile sauna and cold-plunge on the river — come support Danny’s side hustle.

  • 1/24: Austin. Cancelled for inclement weather. See chat for rescheduling details.

  • 1/24: Dallas. Also cancelled. If you are in the Southeast and in need of mutual aid, please contact your file leader and DB immediately.

  • 1/31: New York City.

  • 1/31: Ontario (Ice Fishing with Matt G.)

  • 1/31: Atlanta.

  • 2/3: Salt Lake City.

  • 2/7: Washington, DC.

• RSVP links for EXIT cocktail hours in New York City (1/31) and Washington, DC (2/7) available here. EXIT cocktail hours are a great way to get to know your local EXIT guys and find out if full group membership is right for you.

EXIT is a fraternity dedicated to shorting managerial systems and building the human institutions that come next. Learn more here:

exitgroup.us

[None of what follows should be construed as a lack of sympathy for the railroading of the J6 detainees: this is strictly an attempt to derive principles from what happened, with the benefit of five years’ hindsight.]

On the fifth anniversary of January 6th, this tweet is worth some study and meditation.

Right-wingers tend to moralize: they like to think about success and failure in terms of personal responsibility and moral courage. This is good for some domains of personal development, but it can lead into cul-de-sacs where you settle for simple and unhelpful answers.

The consensus opinion seems to be that January 6th was a clown-show because the organizers were bad people: stupid, or irresponsible, or compromised. In varying degrees this may be true, but it doesn’t actually explain anything, and offers no concrete prescriptions.

I’m going to suggest an alternative theory:

January 6th failed because ubiquitous technical surveillance makes dissidents (including me, including you) stupid.

In the 2010s, Western intelligence services developed very robust systems for infiltrating and monitoring online discourse, originally (ostensibly) to suppress Islamist terrorism.

They didn’t have to knock on too many doors to achieve the desired effect:

Simply by establishing the widespread (and justified) suspicion that any Islamist group chat was likely to be infiltrated by federal agents, they made it extremely difficult for terrorists to recruit and organize online.

The same phenomenon occurred with right-aligned groups in the aftermath of Charlottesville. All it took was a few high-profile roll-ups of right-wing group chats — some of which were explicitly created by intelligence assets for entrapment purposes, and all of which were infiltrated very soon after their creation.

January 6th was a consummation: not only a demonstration of the state’s power to flush out, identify, and punish organized dissent, but a massive flex of its ability to scramble thoughtcrime.

Fed Suspicion doesn’t just suppress organizing — it suppresses many avenues of forecasting and planning.

If you ask anyone who writes for a living, they’ll tell you that writing is the only way to do certain kinds of thinking. You have to get the words on the page so that you can look at them, like dumping puzzle pieces out on the table.

(This is why most successful writers engineer some method of forcing themselves to vomit everything out first, before they do any editing.)

All kinds of macro structures, themes, fine points, and objections do not emerge to the conscious mind until after you’ve stared at the pieces and moved them around in relation to each other on the page.

You get an idea in your head, and you’re sure there’s something there — but often in the process of trying to get it on the page, you realize you haven’t really thought it through at all.

(Poasting is addictive because it provides an endless stream of these manipulations to perform, with instant feedback — and because it’s all on a screen, you can move the pieces around more fluidly than you can in ink.)

But if you do a lot of writing online, you will quickly become conscious of the impulse to self-censor.

You can’t help thinking of how a particular idea might go over with your audience — often it’s just insecurity about whether your idea is stupid.

But, particularly if your mind wanders to the details of anything that might attract government attention, you start to weigh the consequences of the writing itself (instead of thinking carefully about the topic you’re actually trying to write about.)

This is why popular online right-wing writing is so broad, emotive, and imagistic. You are free to be outraged, as long as you are not contemplating action.

(You are allowed to talk about Theory. This is a post about Theory.)

So, the Right Wing Insurrection on January 6th was also broad, emotive, and imagistic.

Many are puzzled at the lack of thought that seems to have gone into the “insurrection” — but it makes perfect sense if you think of January 6th as Tweeting IRL.

They were doing exactly what they had talked about doing online, to the exact extent they had felt comfortable talking about it: essentially, the expression of anger, and the production of scenes and images — photo-ops, and funny, memetic Content like pooping in Nancy Pelosi’s desk.

They had only ever talked about what they would do on the internet, consciously operating under ubiquitous technical surveillance — and because they couldn’t talk about their intentions seriously, they couldn’t really think about them seriously.

So when they overran the Capitol and the US Government fled in panic, they had no idea what to do, except wait around to get arrested.

Who knows if it was engineered this way on purpose — but Fed Suspicion has proved to be a world-historical instrument of thought control.

It works not by changing your mind, but by pruning lines of inquiry: ensuring that all sorts of thoughts — particularly high-resolution, concrete thoughts — never happen at all.

If you can’t write about a topic, even in an intimate setting, you can’t expose your thinking to constructive feedback, identifying lapses of logic or areas where factual ignorance leads you to flawed conclusions.

Even to discuss such topics in a private setting marks you as (at minimum) lacking in judgment. Intelligent people will — for good reason — distance themselves from you immediately. Feds are no longer necessary: the group chats very effectively police themselves.

So you never lay all the pieces out on the table even for yourself, and all your expectations and plans remain fuzzy and inchoate.

And when you can’t think about certain possibilities rigorously, they take on a feeling of unreality, no matter how confident you may be, in the abstract, that they are both a) uncomfortably likely and b) decisive to your family’s future.

And sure enough, that’s exactly what we observe:

Even very bright people, who are otherwise conscientious and forward-looking and serious-minded, think about the national situation (and their personal situation therein) with roughly the same emotional investment and intellectual rigor as professional sports.

They are “dissident” in the sense that they go online to exchange images and fantasies with other people hostile to the government. They say (and probably genuinely believe) that they are up against a ruthless and murderous enemy — but they are incapable of taking the implications of that belief seriously.

They talk (again, in broad, imagistic terms) about what somebody ought to do to their enemies, while making no effort to acquire the ability to do anything to their enemies, personally or collectively.

They talk about the need to Stand and Fight, while making no preparations for a world in which Standing and Fighting is called for.

All of this talk only serves to dig a hole, loudly and continually signaling hostility to The Regime, and waiting for it to come roaring back.

Like January 6th itself, this surrogate activity almost feels engineered to smoke you out — and justify your punishment — while exposing The Regime to no actual material threat whatsoever.

It’s foolish behavior, but these aren’t foolish people:

If you’re smart enough to think about these questions at all, you’re smart enough to know that it is dangerous to talk publicly about anything direct and concrete in the here and now.

Because these are not foolish people, they compartmentalize: they stick to the domains where their ability to forecast and plan is uninhibited, bringing their brains to the version of the future in which everything stays basically normal, where the professional ladders they’re climbing are still relevant.

They still feel the pall of dread hanging over them, but they simply set it aside: they behave and plan as if they will never have to match words to actions, because they (correctly) judge that all of their rumination on that possibility has been fundamentally unserious.

They deal with this anxiety by venting in safe (emotive, imagistic) ways — and through online arguments over “tactics” (which really just amount to regional or class prejudices): do or don’t learn a trade, do or don’t join the military, do or don’t relocate; the city mouse is doomed, the country mouse is doomed.

Of course, there isn’t one right answer — in fact, you need lots of friends pursuing multiple strategies at the same time.

But the reason otherwise smart people have these endless, pointless fights is to deaden that nagging undercurrent of fear — to convince themselves that whatever course they’ve personally drifted into does not require re-evaluation (because they can’t bring themselves to re-evaluate it.)

As things get more volatile, and confrontation looms closer, and the safe paths narrow, we can no longer defer: it’s increasingly obvious that we need to think seriously about topics that we are unable to think seriously about on the internet.

The danger is that, when a day of decision finally arrives, we will respond to it the way we’ve always talked about it: incontinently.

I am not interested in having my own personal January 6th. I do not fantasize about “bleeding out in the snow”: in my fantasies, I win.

So how can we think these things through?

First: stop doing all your thinking on the internet.

If you’ve ever expressed an “urge to fedpoast", you should stop being a woman, get out a spiral notebook, and go ahead and say what’s on your mind.

“The Founding Fathers would have been stacking bodies by now” — would they? Are you sure? What would that look like? Stop telling yourself that you’re just morally inferior to your ancestors, and game out what Righteous Action would look like.

Write up your detailed plan. What would it take to get you from here to there? What are the “red lines” that would trigger all the various forms of decisive action that you are not currently taking? What risks would you incur? What would the consequences be? Would it lead you somewhere you want to go?

When you’re in an unfriendly jurisdiction, it feels good to tell yourself that you’re going to Stand and Fight.

If that’s your plan, you need to ask yourself: what are the odds of (another) political upheaval in which your enemies are in uncontested control of your security environment?

Is there any plausible scenario in which your being present for that upheaval and shouldering those risks nevertheless accomplishes some worthy aim? What is your actual, no-bullshit plan for accomplishing that aim under those circumstances? What is your plan for your family?

If you’re not going to Stand and Fight, are you going to leave the country? At what point? To where? To do what? With whom?

(As an aside: these “stay or go” online arguments are almost always retarded because A) it’s obvious neither party has thought either scenario through beyond its moral/emotional valence, B) people are in different situations that justify different approaches, and C) because it’s obviously mutually beneficial for friends to deploy both strategies at the same time.)

Just as important: what will the consequences of inaction be? At what point will it become infeasible to keep your head down? (If you do this math and conclude that you can keep your head down indefinitely, then bitching about the government is almost certainly counterproductive and stupid, and you should focus on your job.)

You can lock your fedpoast notebook in a safe, or burn it when you’re done — the point is just to get real with yourself about what you are and aren’t going to do, what it would take, and what it would mean.

This is good for all sorts of fantasies, by the way: stop letting them hang in the air, and either operationalize them or put them to bed. It just happens that this category of fantasy is in the way of real shit you need to do, and might get you pointlessly killed.

Second: start building dual-purpose capacity.

Once you’ve written out and exorcised all your Hollywood ideas about going down in a blaze of glory (or whatever), and figured out what you actually believe about the future and your place in it, you can get down to the real work of preparing — and this will almost certainly involve “dual-purpose capacity”.

You can also think of this as deniable capacity: assets that have a legitimate application here and now, and which happen also to be useful in a more complicated future situation.

There are all kinds of practical organizing and capacity-building activities that are not only not illegal, nor even discouraged, but actually incentivized in various ways by the state.

It’s perfectly legal to build a production business with your friends. It’s perfectly legal to get to know your sheriff and city council, and maybe help a few of them get elected. It’s perfectly legal to become an EMT or volunteer first responder, with freedom of movement and comms access in an emergency. It’s perfectly legal to become a guy (or group of guys) who bring people together and help them solve problems.

These are activities that you can talk freely and in detail about — which means you can think about them much more clearly.

And they’re far more effective at increasing your practical sovereignty — the set of things you are able to do, that no one can stop you from doing — than any self-consciously ideological or state-hostile (let alone violent or criminal) activity.

Many on the Right discuss (in the abstract) the need for “mafias”, but in fact it may be more useful to think of our task as analogous to a mob operation “going straight” — laundering resources into uncontroversial, legitimate, real power flows.

Going back over your fedpoast notebook: the scary high-speed fantasy futures you’ve imagined, and your objectives within them, will be necessarily unique, and that should suggest the resources and relationships that you need to cultivate. What will put you in the most powerful position to lead your family and community as systems fail and responsibilities are abdicated?

If political power flowed from the barrel of a gun, your home arsenal would already mean a lot more than it does. Even in places like Lebanon and Afghanistan, political power flows from habits of obedience and perceptions of legitimate authority. You can pick up this kind of power almost literally off the ground by taking on uncontested responsibilities in your community.

If you don’t know what power flows there are to capture around you, the first step is an area study. Get to know the people and institutions around you: see what crowns are lying in the gutter. (An area study can be a group capacity builder in itself. We’ll discuss this on EXIT calls over the next quarter.)

The Founding Fathers would not be stacking bodies right now.

They would almost certainly be baffled at the gulf between our belligerence and our actual preparation for action.

They built wealth, and courted the wealthy. They spent enormous time and resources working the Parliament (as well as various foreign benefactors). They trained in His Majesty’s Army; they used the empire’s guns to secure their property, and they made enthusiastic use of the empire’s global trade network. None of this was a distraction or a compromise of their political objectives — they would not have succeeded without it.

The American colonies had been peopled and governed by political dissenters from the very beginning. They threw off the yoke only after 175 years of carefully building parallel institutions under the watchful eye of the most powerful empire in history to that point — and that empire had nothing on ours in terms of capacity to monitor and eliminate threats.

Given the trajectory of our empire, I don’t think we’ll have to wait that long — but that also means we are running out of time.

Get offline, and create space for yourself to think seriously about the future. The good news is that almost nobody else is doing it, so you don’t have to be all that astute to be way ahead of the game. Decide what you need to build, and get to work.

EXIT is a fraternity dedicated to taking a short position in managerial systems, and building the human institutions that come next. Learn more at exitgroup.us.

EXIT News

• Weekly Full Group Calls, Tuesdays at 9PM ET:

  • 12/30: EXIT Year in Review — what we’ve accomplished in 2025, and what we will build in 2026.

  • 1/6: The fifth anniversary of January 6th — what went wrong, and what can be learned.

  • 1/13: Joshua Sheets from Radical Personal Finance, on community building, financial preparedness, etc.

  • 1/20: Mikkel Thorup from Expat Money, on acquiring productive assets overseas.

  • 1/27: Book Club with Johann Kurtz on his book, Leaving a Legacy.

• Member meetups — Members can check their regional channel or contact DB for full details.

  • 1/9: Nashville.

  • 1/10: Houston.

  • 1/10: St. Marys, KS.

  • 1/16: Columbus.

  • 1/19: Dallas.

  • 1/21: Denver.

  • 1/24: Austin.

  • 1/31: New York City.

  • 2/7: Washington, DC.

• RSVP links for EXIT cocktail hours in Dallas (1/19), New York City (1/31) and Washington, DC (2/7) available below the paywall. EXIT cocktail hours are a great way to get to know your local EXIT guys and find out if full group membership is right for you.

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EXIT is a fraternity dedicated to shorting managerial systems and building the human institutions that come next. Learn more here:

exitgroup.us

What EXIT got done in 2025:

• 303 active members.

• At least 20 new babies. At this rate, EXIT will surpass 1 billion members in early 2066.

• 82 meetups in 24 cities.

• 8 consecutive months with at least one meetup per week.

• 780+ group calls, including entrepreneurship, real estate, investing, acquisitions, content creation, tech, AI, ham radio certification, cybersecurity, fatherhood, homeschooling, civic engagement, community engagement, and fitness — all led by domain experts.

• 43 file leaders who organize local events and check in on the members in their area.

• Monthly member-led meetups in Dallas, Houston, Salt Lake City, and Nashville.

• Quarterly member-led meetups in Austin, New York, and Seattle.

• $655,000 raised for EXIT projects.

• Sponsored Coronation Ball in Washington, DC.

• Hosted the second annual NatalCon in Austin, with 195 attendees (double the prior year).

• Member Q&As with , , , , , , , , , , , , , and .

EXIT member achievements in 2025:

• An all-EXIT startup team won an eight-figure contract with the Department of War.

• The D/FW guys held a black-tie gala for aligned families. D/FW very powerful.

• Brett bought a meat-packing plant and quickly got it in the black.

• Chris launched Sova, a new sleep drink.

• Several of our guys obtained positions of responsibility in the Trump Administration, and some are now serving the country at ICE.

• Kevin assumed management of Kindred Harvest, a microplastics-free tea brand from New Founding, and made it the flagship sponsor of Lomez and Rufo’s new show.

• Kevin also organized Catholics in his city to beautify a cathedral and register voters, and was appointed chair of a state GOP commission.

• Greg recorded 30+ hours of incredible content for the Great Houses call — standalone podcast coming soon.

• JD won the EXIT summer fitness competition, losing 10lb and 3% body fat.

• dropped his excellent new book, Leaving a Legacy (buy book, you must buy book).

• EXIT guy Alec has completed a translation of Portuguese dictator Antonio Salazar’s treatise on government, How to Raise a State, and a translated anthological report of Allied War Crimes.

• Dozens of EXIT guys have hired each other, worked together, launched businesses together, started creative projects together.

What’s coming in 2026:

More family meetups: Where we have successfully created groups of networked men, the ultimate victory condition is the creation of networked families. Our push for Spring and Summer 2026 will be to connect the families in our hub cities. Plan for lots of backyard barbecues, pool parties, service days, etc.

NatalCon 2026 will be a series of events held at much lower cost, to make it accessible for young people and families.

More meetups in more cities:

• By April of 2026, we expect to have a firm monthly meetup rhythm in Austin, Denver, New York City, San Francisco, Seattle, and Washington, DC.

• We are nearing critical mass in Atlanta, Boston, Dayton, Indianapolis, Knoxville, Las Vegas, Minneapolis, Philadelphia, and Raleigh. 1-3 more members in these areas will make a regular meetup feasible.

• Target: 150 meetups in 2026.

Education project: several of our guys with experience in public and private education are collaborating on a project to educate families as nascent Great Houses. Currently scouting locations and developing curriculum. More to come.

Civic engagement:

EXIT guys have begun connecting with their local party apparatus in preparation for the midterms. We will be encouraging and coordinating this on our biweekly civic and community engagement calls.

• In Soviet America, the biggest entrepreneurial hurdles we are encountering are not technical, they are regulatory. Getting to know your local political machine is essential to the success of these projects, especially in real-world industries.

• Republican demoralization in 2026 is a gift: if you show up when no one else does, you can establish a powerful position in your local party apparatus in 2028.

• Redistricting means safer red seats in several EXIT hub cities (esp. Dallas, Houston, Utah County, Dayton) — this means it’s possible to get a more aligned guy in those seats, but also increases the likelihood that the establishment GOP will try to anoint a lazy squish. The primaries will matter.

We are building the human institutions that will replace the crumbling and exhausted managerial systems in which we now live.

It starts with high-capacity guys pooling capital, launching businesses, building social and political influence, and cultivating families that can play games of honor.

Join us at exitgroup.us.

EXIT News

• Weekly Full Group Calls, Tuesdays at 9PM ET:

  • 12/23: Pre-Christmas conversation about decentralized networking — especially, the synthesis of IRL and digital networking.

  • 12/30: EXIT Year in Review — what we’ve accomplished in 2025, and what we will build in 2026.

  • 1/6: The fifth anniversary of January 6th — what went wrong, and what can be learned.

  • 1/13: Joshua Sheets from Radical Personal Finance, on community building, financial preparedness, etc.

  • 1/20: Mikkel Thorup from Expat Money, on acquiring productive assets overseas.

  • 1/27: Book Club with Johann Kurtz on his book, Leaving a Legacy.

• Member meetups — Members can check their regional channel or contact DB for full details.

  • 1/3: Salt Lake City.

  • 1/10: Houston.

  • 1/9: Nashville.

  • 1/16: Columbus.

  • 1/19: Dallas.

  • 1/21: Denver.

  • 1/31: New York City.

  • 2/7: Washington, DC.

• RSVP links for EXIT cocktail hours in Salt Lake City (1/3), New York City (1/31) and Washington, DC (2/7) available below the paywall. EXIT cocktail hours are a great way to get to know your local EXIT guys and find out if full group membership is right for you.

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It’s my take on it’s a Wonderful Life, which is my favorite Christmas movie, and it’s one that many of you seemed to get a lot out of.

In the process of writing it, talking about it, hearing your comments, and developing thoughts at EXIT over the last year, a lot of the ideas that we drew out of this movie feel increasingly relevant to the mission of Exit, so I thought I’d revisit it.

So, like I did for The Feudal Instinct, this will be a “director’s cut.” I’m going to read the article, but I’m also going to add some elaboration and commentary of things we’ve been developing since last year.

So here goes:

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[This post assumes you’ve seen It’s a Wonderful Life. If you haven’t, definitely watch it tonight.]

Mr. Potter is basically right about George Bailey.

You can’t run a lending business like a charity ward, particularly one owned by other people for whom you act as a fiduciary agent.

If George Bailey gave away money to anyone who asked, he would bankrupt the building and loan.

No matter how much profit Bailey selflessly chooses to leave on the table, it isn’t enough to build infinite houses for free.

And that’s the first clue as to what is really happening here: George Bailey doesn’t bankrupt the Building & Loan.

In fact, he somehow pulls it through the Great Depression (which, in the real world, sank Building and Loan Associations as a category — more on that later) and his large family lives simply but comfortably.

Which means that, somewhere off camera, someone at the Bailey B&L is denying loans, foreclosing on deadbeats, and repossessing properties.

It may be done very patiently, compassionately, judiciously — but it’s happening. A lending institution exists to make exactly these decisions — they have no other function.

We see George make a lot of decisions that aren’t “strictly business” — but he also isn’t giving everything away. So what is he really up to?

George Bailey conspicuously gives (the B&L’s) money to the people he thinks deserve it, and who he believes to be good for it.

Some of these choices are pretty sensible from the outside (like Ernie Bishop, his taxi driver buddy) — but others are harder to justify (like Violet Bick, who wants the money so she can skip out on a bad reputation).

In Potter’s words: “if you shoot pool with some employee around here, you can come and borrow money”.

Needless to say, any one of the informal, personal favors that Potter observes in the Bailey Building and Loan — virtually every decision we see Bailey make in his capacity as the president of the B&L — would likely land him in serious trouble today, even without the crisis caused by Uncle Billy’s nepo-hire incompetence.

Potter’s objections are, of course, self-interested — but they’re also a reasonably forthright representation of Yankee business norms, as critiqued by an Italian immigrant (writer/director Frank Capra).

From Potter’s perspective (which is the prevailing perspective at every company you’ve ever worked at, as well as their regulators), agents responsible for other people’s investments ought to be impartial and procedural, and perform their fiduciary duty to maximize shareholder returns.

As seen through this lens, George Bailey is essentially a gangster, using other people’s money to hand out favors to his friends and build a personal patronage network.

The film clearly admires George for his leniency to debtors and disregard for profit, but that too is a way of acquiring personal influence at the shareholders’ expense.

A lot of people in Bedford Falls owe George Bailey a favor — and the heartwarming climax of the movie is when that favor is called in, and his friends receive him into everlasting habitations.

Of course, that’s a reference to the parable of the unjust steward, where a steward is about to be fired by his rich master for mismanaging his funds.

The steward says, “Well, I’m about to lose everything. I’m too weak to dig and too proud to beg. So here’s what I’ll do: I’ll go to everybody who owes my master money, and I’ll use my authority to drastically write down their debt — and then when I’m thrown out of the stewardship, I’ll have all these friends and they’ll take care of me.”

And that’s essentially what George Bailey is doing throughout the film: he’s using his authority over other people’s money to acquire influence.

Whether you think that’s appropriate behavior or not largely depends on whether you think of him as an employee who’s responsible to act in the interest of his employers (the investors) — or a king, responsible to act in the interest of his subjects.

From the film’s perspective, George Bailey is clearly the rightful heir to the throne of Bedford Falls, and it’s exactly his unaccountable sovereign power that allows him to save the realm.

You don’t hear about Building & Loan associations anymore because they required human trust, loyalty, and coordinated action.

Building & Loan Associations operated under a mutual membership structure, in which homeowners paid for their homes through “share accumulation”, in which a significant portion of the monthly payment was a purchase of shares in the B&L.

The value of your shares was based on the profitability of the association, and you were obligated to buy and hold your shares to maturity. A B&L depended on strong economic alignment — you need your neighborhood to stay financially healthy, so that all of your neighbors will keep making their payments and maintain the value of your share price.

This is what George Bailey means when he says “…The money’s not here. Your money’s in Joe’s house, right next to yours … you’re lending them the money to build, and then they’re going to pay it back to you as best they can. Now what are you going to do? Foreclose on them?”

Well, in the real world, in the Great Depression, they did foreclose on each other, and B&Ls largely collapsed, in favor of Savings & Loan Associations (S&Ls) with conventional mortgages as we now understand them (a strictly bilateral contract between the individual debtor and the bank).

So, instead of this complex, multivariate, human, relationship-based institution where you have a vested interest in the health of the community and vice versa, now you have a totally transactional, totally trustless, totally automated flow of capital to you as an individual.

If the bank’s algorithm says you get a loan, you get a loan. And if it says you don’t, you don’t. If you can make your payments, you keep your house. And if you can’t make your payments, it really doesn’t matter why — there’s no human being in the loop — you just get foreclosed on.

And in some ways we can say, well, I understand why that happened.

Maybe I don’t want to invest in my community. Maybe I don’t want the value of my home, my investment to be dependent on every schmuck on my street.

But the fact is, that dependency existed anyway. There are obvious political reasons we don’t talk about it; but millions and millions of Americans had their equity in their home effectively wiped out through white flight, block busting, and the collapse of America’s inner cities.

Now, of course, Frank Capra was himself an Italian immigrant, so he scrambles the messaging a little bit here. But by depicting the dichotomy between Bailey Park and Pottersville, he clearly shows what happens — what did happen — when people lose their common ownership in their communities.

The miracle of It’s a Wonderful Life is that George Bailey, by God’s grace, holds his people together through courage, sacrifice, and force of will.

When George stands up to Potter, he’s not standing up for infinite free houses for everyone in Bedford Falls — and, importantly, he’s not fighting for a communitarian, democratic, common-property thing, either.

George is fighting for his own personal right to decide who gets the loans that don’t make sense on paper, who gets a few extra months to make payments, etc. He wants the power to decide the exception.

Which is to say: Bailey and Potter are fighting for sovereignty over Bedford Falls — to decide who lives there, and in what sort of homes, and on what terms. They are explicitly struggling for personal power.

The most important question to ask of It’s a Wonderful Life is: why would a selfless, decent man like George Bailey struggle for personal power? And why would the people of Bedford Falls struggle and sacrifice to keep him in power?

Answer: because both George Bailey and the people recognize that his sovereignty is their sovereignty.

If George had refused to take on the Bailey Building and loan after his father’s death, it would’ve been dissolved — and, for lack of a binding institution, every member’s property would’ve been gobbled up piecemeal by Potter.

If George and his wife had not set an example of sacrifice during the bank run, giving away their honeymoon fund to keep the B&L solvent, even the most loyal and stalwart members of the B&L would’ve been cleaned out, and forced to sell their shares — probably for less than the 50% discount Potter initially offered.

Without George Bailey as the sovereign, not only is loyalty and good faith not rewarded — it’s actively punished.

The holdouts, the people who stand and fight get the worst deal.

It matters very much that George Bailey has the power, the personal power, to cut all these informal human deals to prevent the bank from failing, and the personal magnetism to convince people to take less than they’re owed.

George’s sovereignty doesn’t compete with the members’ — it’s precisely because he is in charge that they are able to hold on to their own dominions

This is why the archetypal connection between the righteousness of the king and the health of the land is so resonant and intuitive.

People in our corner of Twitter are accustomed to thinking of our present algorithmic, headless, entropic state as a unique dysfunction of managerialism.

But it’s actually just the Law of the Jungle — the state of the land without a protector — and it’s one of the oldest stories there is.

It’s the story of the Book of Judges. It’s the story of the Fisher King in the Grail myth. It’s the story of post-colonial Africa. It’s the story of the Lion King.

In the alternate history of Bedford Falls in which no king emerges, power and sovereignty simply falls to the most cunning and dangerous predator (Potter). And Potter doesn’t actually want to rule Bedford falls in any meaningful sense. He just wants to eat it.

Potter is an agent of pure entropy, breaking down and extracting and consuming every competing node of power or value. (This is what Ben Shapiro likes about him: he’s efficient.) The strippers and vagrants in Pottersville are not the product of any affirmative human vision: they show up for the same reason crabgrass shows up in a neglected garden box.

That’s also the story of Judea under Roman rule — the Judea into which Christ was born.

The priests and scribes derive their authority from their interpretation of the dead law. They build the tombs of the dead prophets and stone the living ones. Why? Because the living prophets are around to defend themselves, to defend their words, to defend the Lord.

The words they left behind can’t defend themselves — and, of course, as we’ve learned so painfully over the last century, rule of law really means rule by lawyers.

So these lawyers, these priests, these scribes, these interpreters of the law, are enjoying the enormous benefits of the law’s infinite flexibility.

These are people who discovered the central insight of postmodernism, 2000 years early: “There is nothing outside the text.” The text does not supply its own interpretation.

Now, this is not to say that words don’t have value, but words are a communication between a person and another person. Your understanding of the word of God is wholly dependent on who you think God is — so the coming of Christ into the world is God saying, “Here I Am.” This is who I am.

He doesn’t come to abnegate the words of the prophets, or say that they’re not valid: he comes to assert his absolute sovereignty, his authority as the Lawgiver.

He doesn’t say the Sabbath doesn’t matter: he says, “the Son of Man is the Lord of the Sabbath.” When Jesus teaches in the temple, they marvel that he teaches “as one having authority, and not as the scribes.”

The state of Judea under the scribes and the Pharisees was one in which the kingdom, the sovereignty, the stewardship, had been usurped by parasites and predators.

When Simeon holds the baby Jesus in the temple, it says that he was looking for the consolation of Israel, their deliverance. That deliverance was the return of the true King: a Man, a righteous judge to judge Israel, in contrast to the predatory venality of the scribes and the Pharisees.

They’re tired of being preyed upon by the cleverest and most ruthless and best connected lawyers.

And that’s why the people want George Bailey to decide who lives in Bedford Falls and on what terms.

They want to be subject to a human judge and protector, executing a human vision, instead of the blind idiot god of entropy.

The desire to be subject to righteous human judgment — to kneel before a Good King — is not just the product of monkey instinct or propaganda. It solves all kinds of spiritual and practical problems.

Likewise, George doesn’t want power because he likes wielding it.

One of the most interesting scenes in the movie is when Potter totally correctly lays out George’s psychological situation: that he’s “trapped in this small town, frittering his life away, playing nursemaid to a lot of garlic-eaters.”

And it’s just so obviously true.

Power is not fun unless you’re crooked.

But George fights for his father’s throne because, if he doesn’t, the realm will come to ruin. It’s not (strictly) supernatural — things fall apart when they’re run by people who don’t give a shit.

Some friends have said that they never liked It’s a Wonderful Life because they understood it as a movie about giving up on your dreams and embracing the longhouse.

In the beginning of the film, George dreams of testing himself against the world as a knight-errant, and he is robbed of the opportunity by circumstance.

The war montage in which he fights “The Battle of Bedford Falls” is played as a joke, and the narrator describes him as merely “getting four years older”.

There’s a genuine element of tragedy in his being thrust too young into kingship — but that’s the sacrifice that sanctifies the real Battle of Bedford Falls.

It would be a longhouse movie, if George Bailey gave up adventure to be a clerk and obediently do his fiduciary duty — but it’s precisely his fight for unaccountable, personal power that makes him heroic.

If he had done what he was told, and followed the rules, and listened to the voice of the people — if there had been an empty suit at the head of the B&L — his home would have been destroyed.

George Bailey governs Bedford falls in the people’s interest, but not at the people’s pleasure.

The moral of It’s a Wonderful Life isn’t that placid domesticity is better than adventure — it’s that power is better than money, and good men should fight for it.

I mention this because it is exactly the distinction between genuine patriarchy and servile, “happy wife happy life” family-values conservatism, and this confusion gets in the way of a lot of young men pursuing the kind of power that they could win.

A lot of our guys feel that the struggle for space, the quest for sovereignty is fundamentally at odds with family life.

You’ll never hear us defend contemporary family norms, but your blood, and your close friends, and the people who know you personally really are the best place (if not the only place) to look for the kind of alignment and loyalty and cohesion that can actually lead to the accumulation of real power and real freedom — which, by the way, are synonymous.

There’s no English sentence in which you can talk about “freedom”, where “power” is not just as good a fit. The only type of “freedom” that doesn’t equate to power is permission.

In other words, you’re, you’re “free” to go to the bathroom if you have a hall pass because teacher says it’s okay.

But the freedom that we’re missing, the freedom that we crave, is power, and we want it for the same reason George Bailey wants it: so that we can rule well — so that the kingdom can be rightly ordered.

But as long as you believe that there’s some distinction, or some way to disentangle freedom, or duty, or responsibility from power, you’ll always be psychologically weakened.

You’ll always be double-minded (particularly if you’re a Christian) — because you will always have this nagging feeling that you’re doing something impure, and therefore you can’t be entitled to providence — you can’t be entitled to divine help — because you’re seeking “power” (in other words, seeking responsibility, seeking freedom, seeking stewardship.)

That above all is the story of our predicament: the righteous man — the man capable of judgment, capable of stewardship — has abdicated his responsibility to rule; maybe out of humility, maybe for less noble reasons. But in any case, now we’re ruled by people who don’t have those compunctions.

You live in Pottersville today because there was no George Bailey.

To the extent that our managerial system is worse than other historical forms of misrule, it’s because it actually moralizes procedural anarchy. Not only is there no human judgment, no human bonds of loyalty, no human order — but there ought not to be, and anyone who tries to create such an order is both a moral and political criminal.

Everything has to be governed by an abstract ideological algorithm so that it’s “fair”, so that it’s “impartial”. If you give your son a job opportunity rather than an Indian who can do it for cheaper, you’re not just being inefficient, you’re being corrupt — maybe even racist. Everyone has to be treated exactly the same.

And of course, no human can do that. So we all have to live like machines and be chopped to fit — and it’s almost impossible to overstate how sincerely this moral worldview is held. The average Westerner raised by the television really does believe that loyalty is a vice — that anyone who’s a good person, algorithmically defined, should be someone that you help, and anyone who’s a bad person, algorithmically defined, should be someone that you have no connection to.

They really believe that Pottersville is freedom because you’re free to be an alcoholic, you’re free to be a vagrant, you’re free to be a prostitute. Pottersville is the product of a million freely chosen individual transactions.

And seeking personal human power is immoral, because personal power can only be exercised immorally. It can only be used to decide exceptions — in other words, to be partial, to exhibit particularity, to exhibit bias, to prefer or to disfavor on the basis of something other than The Rules.

And it’s certainly not an accident that this movie, which has so much to teach us about our present moment, was produced by a Sicilian immigrant, who was raised in that thoroughly pre managerial, pre-modern personal worldview.

(You could do a very deep meditation on The Godfather for similar reasons.)

Now, obviously, we may say that foreigners with those tribal sensibilities are sand in the gears of our way of life — but it’s just dead obvious, at least to me, that all our “managerial virtues”, these liberal virtues (if you want to call them that) are designed for a technological and social environment that just doesn’t exist anymore.

The future will be a return to form, where politics, security, economics, and even epistemology are rapidly receding from this massive high point of centralization.

And I don’t really have it in me to mourn that loss.

So in this new paradigm, the peoples that never went through that ordeal of civility — that never acquired those managerial virtues — are just way, way more adaptive. So even societies that are wildly dysfunctional and antisocial, if they have this internal cohesion, this sense of us, they’re able to just run circles around all these bureaucratic managerial systems.

And so it’s not to say that we need to learn to be as dysfunctional and antisocial as Somalis, or even Sicilians. But we are going to have to figure out how to hang together, and cooperate, and make personal human judgements, human decisions, in ways that pre managerial peoples never forgot how to do.

And George Bailey represents that synthesis.

He’s conscientious, he’s ambitious, he’s productive, he’s pro-social: he’s an Anglo who has unlearned managerialism.

But in our world, we weren’t that lucky. No human power emerged to defend the “common wealth”, the reciprocal bonds of loyalty, the shared sovereignty represented by the Bailey Building & Loan. We were left to fight the vast, impersonal cultural and economic forces that threatened our families and property alone.

And here we are.

It’s a Wonderful Life is a Christmas movie because all stories about The Good King are stories about Christ.

George Bailey has to pour himself out over a lifetime to win the trust of a skittish, short-sighted people. And, critically, it’s not just his business dealings with them.

The town has gotten to know him through his whole lifetime of being groomed, both morally and intellectually, as the heir to the throne.

It matters enormously that George saved Mr. Gower, and saved his brother — and that, even as a child, he defended his dad’s honor and the Building & Loan against Mr. Potter, right to his face, in front of the board of directors.

It’s not just that people trust him as a capable administrator, or they view him as a shelling point for a coordination problem.

They have to believe in him as a good man because — critically — giving him sovereignty means giving him the power to betray them.

The whole point is that he’s not a clerk. They’re willfully and purposely surrendering the right to oversee and audit and judge his decision making. This arrangement does not work unless they do that.

It’s not a happenstance that his behavior would be considered criminal by modern standards. It’s exactly its extrajudiciality, its criminality, that makes it work.

Our system is failing precisely because it has made that kind of human judgment and discretion against the law.

Bailey’s personal virtue and sacrifice is what makes it possible for the people to credibly unite behind him and make their own sacrifices, to take up their own cross — which they desperately want to do, because it’s the only way they can resist the malevolent, inhuman powers that threaten them.

The Christmas miracle is the return of the King who will set things right, and judge us with compassion.

(To be judged with compassion is not to be infinitely indulged.) It’s a miracle because it is the defeat of the entropy that would otherwise be inevitable — the indifferent Law that would judge us to our destruction.

The turning point of human history is God revealing himself, not as an impersonal force or energy or law, but as a Man — with a man’s heart and judgment and particular love.

Exit is a fraternity dedicated to shorting managerial systems and building the human institutions that come next.

We believe that these managerial systems, in addition to being ugly and anti-human, are in the process of collapse.

The institutions that replace them, as the locus of social and political identity, will be much closer to the psychological roots of human connection: what we call the feudal instinct.

Basically, we believe in the return of the family as the fundamental unit of human society.

Like I said, I personally got a lot out of the feedback from this post last year. I’d love to hear your thoughts on this below.

Also, please subscribe to the weekly newsletter where we develop ideas like these, and I also post the week’s news for the group.

Subscribe now

If you’re a paid subscriber to the Substack, you get access to the full recordings of our member Q&As, as well as invites to our in-person cocktail hours.

If you’d like to apply for full Exit membership, and get access to our 15-20 weekly group calls, monthly meetups in over a dozen cities, and the opportunity to network and collaborate on internal projects with the guys, you can apply for membership at exitgroup.us.

It is Christmastime, which means it’s once again time for Vivek Ramaswamy to say some insultingly silly and self-serving nonsense about why he is entitled to what your ancestors built.

Perhaps he was swirlied as a child by blond kids in Christmas pajamas, inflamed to pogrom after a Boy Meets World marathon. Perhaps he was simply never meant to be this cold.

In any case, Andrew Torba’s response is eloquent and comprehensive — you should go listen to it, I don’t need to recapitulate it. Bottom line:

“The Founders created a nation for their posterity. They said so. They wrote it into the Constitution. They enacted it into law. They maintained it for generations. The idea that America was always a rootless proposition, open to the world, welcoming anyone who affirms the right ideas—this is a lie. It is a lie told by those who benefit from it.”

There’s really no disputing this, as a matter of history.

The problem: the average Republican voter in Ohio basically agrees with Vivek.

They don’t actually care what the Founding Fathers thought about Indians. In fact, the question of whether “dead people get a vote” is the central contention.

Put another way: the mainstream Republican position is that living Americans should get “neither credit nor blame” for what their ancestors did.

This is purely a position of convenience, of course — a way to avoid disputing the contemporary liberal judgment of your ancestors, while getting out from under that moral opprobrium yourself.

In order to thread that rhetorical needle, you have to reject the idea of patrimony as such: the idea that fathers have a right to build things that their children have a right to inherit.

In the Boomer Reaganite moral universe, everyone is a pure Platonic blank slate: deserving nothing from their ancestors and owing nothing to their descendants — entitled only to what they personally build and accumulate.

(This is an incredibly convenient position for the generation that somehow managed to spend down the mythic treasure of five hundred years of global conquest.)

It’s an explicit defiance of the warning at the close of the Old Testament:

Behold, I will send you Elijah the prophet before the coming of the great and dreadful day of the Lord:

And he shall turn the heart of the fathers to the children, and the heart of the children to their fathers, lest I come and smite the earth with a curse.

(Malachi 4:5-6)

It’s also totally incoherent, both morally and historically.

It tees up the (obviously correct) leftist critique that white Americans are, in fact, the beneficiaries of their ancestors’ choices.

This is one sense in which the “woke are more correct that the mainstream” — and it is what people like Vivek mean when they call us “Woke Right”.

We accept, like celebrated political theorist Kamala Harris, that we did not simply fall out of the coconut tree — we exist in the context of what came before us.

(She was lampooned for saying this because she’s a ridiculous person and said it with her trademark unwarranted cackling, but it’s a truism.)

Your wealth, your opportunities, your possibilities, are, in fact, a product of who your ancestors were and what they did. Obviously the wealth and property they passed along, but also:

• The culture they transmitted

• Whether and where they planted roots

• The communities and polities they built

• The connections they established

• Who they married (nobody wants to touch this one)

Every parent understands this with perfect clarity regarding their own children.

It’s the central load-bearing pillar of parental psychology; the one thing that, above all else, justifies the sleepless nights: the idea that you can build a better life for your children (and that you have a right to do so.)

The reciprocal love and mutual obligation between parent and child, extending beyond the veil of death, is the only reason people build anything really lasting at scale, whether a cathedral or a stable system of government. It’s the psychic bedrock of civilization: the reason people buy in.

The failure of that mutual obligation is the reason that all public and commercial buildings are now utilitarian rectangles of exposed-aggregate concrete: in keeping with blank-slate individualist moral assumptions, Western countries have made the collective ownership and control of property illegal.

The only property over which you have the basic rights of exclusion and disposition is your personal domicile, so we minimize investments in what we are not allowed to own and control (our common physical environment) so that we can extract the maximum of what we are allowed to own and control (US dollars).

The American state has been converted into an extractive, utilitarian economic zone under the same principles. Americans have been told that they no longer have any special right to it, and no power to bequeath it to their own children — so it no longer inspires allegiance and willing obedience.

Of course, this process of draining and dilution can’t go on forever: with no incentive for productive people to preserve the common-wealth beyond the time horizon of their own death, the common-wealth is rapidly collapsing — including, finally, the economic infrastructure underpinning even the most liquid and abstract unit of value: the dollar itself.

The hearts of the fathers have turned away from their children, and the children have rejected their fathers, and the earth has been smitten with a curse.

Human civilization is itself an extension and abstraction of the reciprocal bonds of kinship: especially the love and loyalty between father and son. Civilization cannot exist without a recognition of the debt owed both to one’s ancestors and one’s descendants.

Our parents and grandparents were persuaded by people like Vivek to cut that binding thread, because the alternative was a confrontation with their Privilege — the admission that they do, in fact, owe much of their wealth and comfort to the legacy of conquerors.

If they were forced to admit that, they would have basically two choices:

1. embrace that legacy, and accept that they have squandered the most titanic inheritance of all time, betraying the blood of generations in both directions

2. reject their inheritance as ill-gotten, and give it all away as reparations to the people their ancestors conquered.

Obviously they’re not going to do either of these things.

Vivek offers the Boomers a way out:

He tells them that history is meaningless — they earned their wealth as individual economic units, through grit and gumption. No one is entitled to anything they did not personally earn — that’s a handout! That’s socialism! That’s playing Woke Identity Politics!

Vivek tells them that it’s not only acceptable, but actually righteous to abandon their duty to their ancestors and descendants. In the boomercon moral universe, loyalty is a vice — at the personal level, it’s “nepotism” (or simply “corruption”). At scale, it’s “bigotry”.

You’re not supposed to have friends (or children) whom you care more about than other people — group identities, if they exist at all, must be fully ideologized and moralized. Your children and countrymen are only connected to you through an “accident of birth”. Vivek Ramaswamy is your ally on the much truer and deeper grounds that he loves Ronald Reagan.

This allows the Boomer to conceive of his life as a great jubilee, in which he can be a hero for selling his birthright to its truest and most deserving heirs (whoever will pay him the most for it).

Needless to say, we have no message to compete with this.

There is no rhetorical incantation that will persuade the Boomers, as a class, to confront the enormity of our situation.

It doesn’t matter that Vivek’s vision of America is morally and historically asinine: they benefit too much from believing it. There will be some miracles of deathbed repentance — but probably not at scale.

Between the Boomers, and the mass of foreigners with voting privileges who benefit from this arrangement more directly, we are approaching the inevitable terminus of mass democracy.

There is value in rebuking Vivek and his messaging with a spoiler vote in Ohio, but the political incentive gradient overwhelmingly favors his message. Globalization is amplifying failure modes of democracy that have been well-understood for centuries.

It is just too easy to print new citizens and incentivize them to loot the American commons — both directly, as Somalis do, through welfare fraud, and indirectly, as Vivek et al. do, through the dilution and sale of Americans’ political rights.

If you are concerned with sovereignty and the preservation of your inheritance, the Westphalian state is the wrong dimension of analysis.

There is no cooperative equilibrium, no common feeling among the descendants of America’s founding stock — as evidenced by the fact that the conservative, “nationalist” wing of American politics is largely buying what Vivek is selling (or, more accurately, selling what he’s buying).

The replacement of the state, as the primary locus of identity, with highly decentralized tribal diasporas, is already well underway. Peoples who never underwent the ordeal of adopting liberal managerial virtues are at a huge advantage.

In the death throes of managerial democracy, cohesion is so profoundly adaptive that Somalis and Chinese and Afghans and Israelis and Indians are effortlessly outmaneuvering peoples and states like ours, who actively discourage loyalty as a vice.

All of our broad, colossal abstractions of identity are in the process of collapse.

The people you can trust in the coming volatility will not be any group numbered in the tens of millions — they will be people with names and faces, people with whom you have a personal history.

The place to start rebuilding cohesion and peoplehood is much closer to the wellspring of civilization, where the instincts of human connection are the purest, where we can expect the irrational loyalty of blood to be reciprocated, and where peoples always begin: with interconnected groups of strong families.

So we are surrounding ourselves with the most admirable and excellent people we can find, and building the shared history that will carry us through what comes next.

You can learn more about our approach here, or join us at exitgroup.us.

EXIT News

• Weekly Full Group Calls, Tuesdays at 9PM ET:

  • Last week (12/15) we will have a Q&A with Stormy Waters, a VC and good poaster whom we last heard from almost two years ago.

  • This week (12/23) we’ll have a pre-Christmas conversation about decentralized networking — especially, the synthesis of IRL and digital networking.

  • Next week (12/30) we will discuss EXIT’s Year in Review — what we’ve accomplished in 2025, and what we will build in the new year.

• Other Calls:

  • Paideia Project standing call on Wednesdays and Thursdays, open to all EXIT guys.

• Meetups — Members can check their regional channel or contact DB for full details.

  • 12/20: Utah Valley Christmas Party was a huge success — a full house with a great spread and dozens of kids. Big thanks to Matt for hosting.

  • 1/31: New York City.

  • 2/7: Washington, DC.

• EXIT cocktail hours for New York City (1/31) and Washington, DC (2/7) available below the paywall. EXIT cocktail hours are a great way to get to know your local EXIT guys and find out if full group membership is right for you.

Read more

Over the last two years, NatalCon has conclusively won the argument.

In 2023, the idea that depopulation, not overpopulation, was the world’s most pressing demographic problem, was an eccentric, contrarian take.

Many middle-aged female journalists regarded it as so eccentric, in fact, that it couldn’t be a serious position — surely it was merely cover for a right-wing plot to seize the government and forcibly impregnate middle-aged female journalists.

NatalCon 2023 was very much an inside thing: we were joined by brave, contrarian academics, but very little media coverage, except to talk about how dangerous and far-right it was to want people to start families.

But in the months thereafter, things started to turn: they didn’t mention the conference, but the headlines were radically different. It wasn’t a far-right extremist fever dream anymore — now it was a legitimate issue, unfortunately co-opted by far-right extremists.

(We stole this issue, you see, from the libtards to whom it rightly belongs, by caring about it before they did.)

NatalCon 2025 brought in pretty much every mainstream academic making a serious study of this issue.

We had middle-aged female journalists literally trying to wrestle their way in past security (brave of them, if you think about it) — the conference was covered by CNN, the New York Times, NPR, The Atlantic, the BBC, the Economist.

The coverage was still mostly fantasizing about our hidden, wicked motivations — but they were no longer talking about us like a flat-earth convention.

Now the problem was obviously mainstream, obviously respectable academics sharing a stage with the likes of Jack Posobiec. Disparate (and sometimes hostile) factions of the Right, from Steve Bannon to Elon Musk to JD Vance, were all talking about this issue.

Even , who initially dismissed the problem out of hand, has clearly been chewing on it for over a year, is now coming up with characteristically inventive solutions.

Every major conservative think tank and policy shop is now standing up a department to think and talk (and think, and talk) about this issue. The taboo on natalism in academia has been broken, with tenured professors across multiple disciplines working openly on this issue and discussing their findings directly, without intermediary institutions.

Several articles asked, hilariously, if there shouldn’t be an attempt at “left-wing natalism” to flank the far right, and prevent them from monopolizing the rhetorical position that human life is good and should continue.

(Needless to say, leftists are incapable of even mouthing those words.)

So we won — but there’s not that much left to say, really, about The Data.

Nobody seriously disputes that demographic collapse is happening, or that it presents an existential problem for every developed nation on earth.

We successfully delivered that case to the President of the United States, the richest man on earth, and every essential node of the pro-family think-tank and non-profit complex.

Everything that could be accomplished by showing policymakers line graphs pointed in the wrong direction has been accomplished.

We started NatalCon with a lot of “epistemic humility” — we wanted to cover the issue comprehensively, with as many smart people as we could find, delivering as many angles as possible.

But what we learned, basically, is this:

• Demographic collapse is going to destroy the managerial systems that cause it,

• There’s very little that can be done about it until those systems fail,

• We wouldn’t want the managerial solutions to work, even if we thought they could.

Demographic collapse is the good news.

Falling in love and having babies is among the most natural and powerful impulses a human being can have. If billions of people are just vaguely saying they “don’t feel like it”, something has gone profoundly wrong, and the appropriate response is not a symptomatic policy band-aid.

If you find yourself trying to justify or sell this basic human imperative, as one lifestyle choice among many, or as a vehicle for delivering some other good — or, God forbid, as a means of wringing a few more years out of a decrepit and exhausted system — you’ve already lost.

People aren’t having babies because the system they live within is profoundly unnatural and anti-human, and it needs to fail.

Trying to make people breed in order to save that system is precisely backwards. The only good reason to care about the economy, or the budget deficit, or house prices, or the state of the military, is because those factors either support, or suppress — or, worst of all, derange — healthy family formation.

Demographic collapse tells us that human society can’t just infinitely circle the drain: the people capable of running the machinery may be willing to live as psychically gelded interchangeable productivity units, but they aren’t willing to breed that way.

This means that the processes that generate our present predicament really are self-terminating — which is very good news.

So why keep talking about demographic collapse at all?

For at least two reasons.

First: Demographic collapse will not self-terminate gently, like a thermostat.

This is many people’s first response to hearing that underpopulation is a crisis: “Well, there are already too many people, so we’ll just die off until there are fewer of us, and then things will get better, and people will start having kids again.”

We are losing not just interchangeable people at random, but specifically (for obvious reasons) we are losing the young, vibrant, and healthy — and, for less-obvious reasons, we are also disproportionately losing the conscientious, the productive, the ambitious, the responsible, the mentally stable.

The trend of Western welfare democracies’ expropriative hostility toward the remnant capable of keeping the lights on will only accelerate. It will not get easier to raise a family as the population shrinks and ages — it will get harder.

(If your goal was to get comfortable modern liberal people to breed the next generation of tax cattle, explaining this in detail is the last thing you would do.)

But if those people, their children, and their cultures are to make it through this crisis, they will have to find each other, and form parallel systems in which their strengths can compensate for their smaller numbers.

This means that we need to talk openly about what we see coming, find like-minded friends, and build the arks that will protect the things we care about.

Second: The volatility of demographic collapse will create opportunities for those in position to seize them.

It’s not all bad news. The failure of managerial systems that depend on steady population increase will be messy, but it will also mean many doors left unguarded, many responsibilities abdicated, and many more interesting things for courageous and energetic people to do.

We will have to be excellent — but if we can be excellent, things will be possible that were unthinkable in the safe stasis of the last century.

NatalCon 2026 will be focused on connection, organization, and action.

In terms of generating and winning arguments, NatalCon 2025 was a huge success — but we’ve realized that real answers aren’t going to come from petitioning the organs of technocratic consensus-generation and policy-making. The kinds of solutions those organs are capable of generating are both unworkable, and undesirable for our purposes.

We need to connect people directly, especially young people and people with families — people who want to solve this problem for themselves and the people they care about at human scale.

Accordingly, NatalCon 2026 will be:

1. In multiple cities, so that people with families don’t have to travel as far.

2. Much lower cost, so that more young people and families can attend; and

3. More participatory, so that attendees can spend more time getting to know each other, and less time listening to speakers.

Further details will be announced as they’re settled — to learn more, you can subscribe for updates here and on our mailing list at natalism.org.

Also: natalism.org is now a registered 501(c)(3) non-profit organization.

If you would like to make a tax-deductible donation before year-end, you can contact us at events@natalism.org.

EXIT News

• Weekly Full Group Calls, Tuesdays at 9PM ET:

  • Last week (12/9), we had an internal call on the political and economic prospects for the US, how we can adjust to headwinds, and what we can build to support each other.

  • This week (12/15) we will have a Q&A with Stormy Waters, a VC and good poaster whom we last heard from almost two years ago.

  • Next week (12/23) we’ll have a pre-Christmas conversation about decentralized networking — especially, the synthesis of IRL and digital networking.

• Other Calls:

  • Paideia Project standing call on Wednesdays and Thursdays, open to all EXIT guys.

• Meetups — Members can check their regional channel or contact DB for full details.

  • 12/20: Utah Valley Christmas Party.

  • 1/31: New York City.

  • 2/7: Washington, DC.

• EXIT cocktail hours for New York City (1/31) and Washington, DC (2/7) available below the paywall. EXIT cocktail hours are a great way to get to know your local EXIT guys and find out if full group membership is right for you.

Read more

A contractor in Minneapolis recently shared with me his stories of outright marauding graft of the Somalis in his city:

• Tens of thousands of fake “personal care assistant” jobs using Medicaid funds to “provide care” for inbred microcephalic sister-wife children (or for people who don’t exist)

• Vans and school buses driving around all day empty, on fraudulent contracts to transport fake kids to specialty schools, or disabled people to medical appointments

• Hundreds of fraudulent ADHD and autism clinics and adult daycares

• Libtard pediatricians running cover for rampant underground clitorectomies in the Somali community

The level of criminality uncovered by a handful of investigators beggars belief, and it’s just the tip of the iceberg.

Minnesota’s Somalis do not pretend to care about America’s laws, let alone its civic culture or interests. It’s not a few bad apples — the “Somali community” is itself a distributed transnational parallel state; an open, organized, flagrant criminal conspiracy that is too dumb to pretend otherwise.

(I thought for a moment about writing “what we can learn from the Somali fraud network” but the answer is basically nothing, because the whole thing is childishly transparent and would be immediately crushed if they didn’t have libtard judges and prosecutors babysitting them.)

The level of investigation, detainment, and deportation required just to punish the explicit criminal fraud and child abuse would implicate not only the entire Somali power structure — virtually all of its political and religious leadership — but the entire Minnesota Democrat establishment, and beyond.

In short, it would amount to a Reconstruction-style regime change at the state level (which would necessitate/amount-to a federal regime change).

It’s a straightforward acid test of the Trump Administration, and the legitimacy of the American state.

If the Administration can exercise its basic constitutional authority to punish open and obvious fraud, then it can pull that thread all the way to the top of the American political system, expose the rottenness and decrepitude of the status quo, and enjoy a straightforwardly legal and optical mandate to conduct the necessary arrests of the seditious conspirators (politicians, judges, what-have-you.)

Having demonstrated that capacity, they could then accomplish all manner of other necessary and long-overdue rectification of names.

Of course, I would love to see that happen. I think the Administration could do it — if they would just do it.

If they can’t or won’t do this — if they can’t excise a tumor of open rebellion & criminal fraud of this magnitude — then we have to ask ourselves what problems they do have the capacity to solve.

I think often about the difference between “redpills” and demoralization.

For a long time, it has seemed important that we spread stories of our enemies’ corruption, their perversion of justice, and our own dispossession.

The entire Western media and political environment has transformed in front of my eyes over the last decade as a result of the free flow of such stories on social media.

This new media paradigm put Trump in the White House, and now right-wing influencers have flattered themselves that they have “the ear of the President”. The question, then, is what having the ear of the President is actually good for.

We tell ourselves that the purpose of spreading atrocity propaganda is to draw the Administration’s attention to this or that policy objective — or to strengthen their hand, so that they can give us mass deportations etc.

Captive Dreamer got Trump talking about the Haitians in Ohio barbecuing cats and dogs, and it likely moved the needle for the campaign in some states. That felt pretty good — and, true to their word, the Administration has revoked Temporary Protected Status for Haitians. Unfortunately, the move is tied up in court, like virtually every other Trump executive action.

Online outrage over the stabbing of Iryna Zarutska and various other stomach-churning racial murders and assaults seems to have changed the tone of public discourse, with mainstream commentators like Matt Walsh, Tucker Carlson, and even various official federal law-enforcement accounts saying things that would have been unthinkable even in the Biden Administration. That seems important, right? The DHS called somebody a “sodomite” today. Wow.

But unless the Trump Administration actually takes aggressive, direct action against the traitorous judges themselves, the primary impact of all these based tweets will have been to justify the mass prosecution of Trump’s friends and allies when they are removed from power.

In principle, truth is better than lies — better to have the machinery of power visible and understood. If the lesson of all this is simply that democracy is fake, it’s better to know that than to keep on mashing buttons on our unplugged controller.

Once you know that, though, what is to be gained from continuing to gaze at the spectacle of dispossession?

What does spreading one more story of unpunished Bomalian gang rape accomplish? Spreading these stories isn’t costless; it weighs on people. It makes them feel weak.

Consuming these stories and venting your feelings of grievance and betrayal online is what Uncle Ted called a “surrogate activity”, a form of masturbation to which many of our people are addicted. The vast majority of Right Wing atrocity-peddling is in fact a species of pornography.

It’s seductive, though — because frequently we’ll see a United States Senator, or the richest man in the world, or even the President himself pick up one of these stories, and we’ll think: “Wow, shrieking about our betrayal in the millions has delivered our grievance to the very seat of American power — we actually were not jerking off, this whole time.”

But then the President or the Senator or the billionaire will talk as if he’s just another Right Wing atrocity peddler: “This is an outrage! A scandal! There ought to be a law!”

They are all going purple in the face trying to report this treason to somebody. They keep looking around for an authority figure to give them permission to solve the problem, and there is no such person.

Speaking on behalf of the atrocity peddlers, though:

Many really are holding out hope that our leaders can still be goaded, shamed, nauseated into action.

Maybe the zoomer interns at the various executive bureaucracies are doing something analogous with their Based Tweets: maybe they think they can fan the libtards’ fury to such heat that the boomers in charge will finally recognize that they have no choice but to win.

And who knows: maybe that works, somehow. Trump does seem to care what The People are mad about; maybe we have yet to find the depth of outrage and disgust that will get him out of the Rubicon. Maybe patriots are already in control, and we just need to be patient and let them work.

But even if that’s the case, it’s probably better for you and me to stop jerking off.

See if you can replace your surrogate activities with things that build real power. Host a dinner party. Join your volunteer fire department. Do your area study.

The EXIT Seattle guys run a speaker series to attract values-aligned people. The Dallas crew went in on a co-working space, and hosted a private black-tie event for like-minded families. The Nashville guys organized a trash cleanup downtown, and registered voters.

The people, resources, and institutions that will bring our families through the present crisis and restore our power as citizens will be personal and local, and we’re going to have to build them ourselves, from the ground up. Get to know your local guys and get started.

exitgroup.us.

EXIT News

• Weekly Full Group Calls, Tuesdays at 9PM ET:

  • Last week (12/2), we discussed aesthetics and creativity on the Right with Devon Eriksen, author of Theft of Fire. Recording coming soon.

  • This week (12/9), we had an internal call on the political and economic prospects for the US, how we can adjust to headwinds, and what we can build to support each other.

  • Next week (12/15) we will have a Q&A with Stormy Waters, a VC and good poaster whom we last heard from almost two years ago.

• Other Calls:

  • Paideia Project standing call on Wednesdays and Thursdays, open to all EXIT guys.

• Meetups (Members only) — Members can check their regional channel or contact DB for full details.

  • 12/12: Nashville, TN.

  • 12/13: Columbus, OH.

  • 12/14: Omaha/Des Moines.

  • 12/15: Dallas, TX.

  • 12/20: Utah Valley Christmas Party.

  • 1/31: New York City.

  • 2/6: Washington, DC.

• EXIT cocktail hours for Dallas/Fort Worth (12/15), New York City (1/31), and Washington, DC (2/7) available below the paywall. EXIT cocktail hours are a great way to get to know your local EXIT guys and find out if full group membership is right for you.

Read more

As we discuss on the call, the task has two components:

1. Land. Someone has to establish the relationships, agreements, legal frameworks, and public infrastructure for autonomous communities.

2. People. Someone has to build the communities themselves — groups of people with a shared vision that is sufficiently compelling, and drawing a population of sufficient scale, to draw a critical mass to the new polity.

Patri is primarily focused on the land — supporting projects like Prospera, which has established significant practical autonomy on an island off the coast of Honduras.

As we discuss on the call, the problem with a “land-first” approach is drawing committed people to the project once you’ve laid the groundwork.

Experiments with “special economic zones” and alternative governance have to be conducted in out-of-the-way places, usually in developing countries for whom relatively modest economic incentives are meaningful.

Digital nomads are almost always the first to support these projects — and obviously you don’t want to dismiss or alienate early supporters — but such people are defined by their disinterest in planting roots and embarking on the long, difficult work of founding a new community.

“Pop-up cities”, conferences, parties, etc. have drawn big crowds, but those crowds never seem to distill down to any permanent presence or community, because the crowds don’t actually have that much in common — certainly not the kind of trust that makes people want to raise children together.

If you’ve ever tried to build that kind of bond with other people (psychologically normal people, anyway) you realize that it doesn’t just happen — not even with people you like, who share your politics, etc.

But a “people-first” approach has its own challenges.

Through EXIT, I’ve found the type of people that I know I could build with, but they live in 50+ cities in 9 countries. They’re surrounded by extended families; they have deep friendships, and so do their wives and kids. They feel attachment and responsibility to the place they live.

They’re pillars of the community, builders, investors; they’re in it for the long haul. That’s exactly the kind of person you need to build something new, but its precisely those traits that make them difficult to uproot — and it’s not obvious that we should do that, even if we could.

We’ve accomplished a lot over the internet — we’ve launched businesses, run incubators and boot camps, organized conferences, raised millions of dollars — but our families can’t get to know each other on Zoom. Our kids can’t have a remote campout, or a remote boxing class, or a remote first kiss.

So we have to learn to build in diaspora.

The joke in the Network State space is that many of the guys writing essays about founding new cyberpunk nations have not demonstrated the capacity to pull off a successful dinner party.

In order to reach the critical mass that allows for genuine autonomy (things like genuine “special economic zones” or “city states”), we have to start with the basic social rhythms that help like-minded people to find each other and create local relationships.

Instead of trying to get our guys to detach from their local communities, we want them to lean into their natural impulse to lift where they stand. We want them to merge their local networks and become part of the load-bearing architecture of their communities.

The small wins pay big dividends.

The average EXIT guy experiences a massive improvement in his quality of life if he just has a handful of families with compatible values that get together once a month.

We’ve gotten that far in Salt Lake, DC, New York, Houston, Dallas, Austin, Seattle, Nashville, Denver, Minneapolis. We’re almost there in San Francisco, Las Vegas, Columbus, Indianapolis, Atlanta, and Boston.

These small clusters become nucleation points for new professional, civic, and social activities that make our guys stronger. And in the event that their local situation becomes unsustainable, they’ll have enough organizational practice and experience with one another to make an efficient exodus — and they won’t have to do it alone.

The only way to get to the epochal, historical moves that we need to make is to bank wins that make sense from where we are right now.

We need to connect with all the admirable, excellent, problem-aware guys we can find, and we need to make small, personal bets on each other — creating the shared history that will allow us to rely on each other in coming days, when knowing who your friends are will be a matter of life and death.

Your future, and the future of your nation, will not be defined by faceless ideological forces — it will be defined by personal, human relationships: who you know, and who knows you.

Join us at exitgroup.us.

EXIT News

• Weekly Full Group Calls, Tuesdays at 9PM ET:

  • Last week (11/25), we had an excellent presentation on Albion’s Seed, Anglo-America, and ethnogenesis from an EXIT academic whose domain of study is the throughlines of Anglo-American culture. Recording coming soon.

  • Last night (12/2), we heard from Devon Eriksen, author of Theft of Fire. It was a great conversation on building an audience, the importance of taste (and ego, and shame) in worthwhile creative pursuits, and the future of Our Thing.

  • Next week (12/9), we will have an internal call on the political and economic prospects for the US, how we can adjust to headwinds, and what we can build to support each other.

• Other Calls:

  • Paideia Project standing call on Wednesdays and Thursdays, open to all EXIT guys.

• Meetups (Members only) — Members can check their regional channel or contact DB for full details.

  • 12/6: Atlanta, GA. (Cummings area). Christmas party: see #Southeast channel.

  • 12/12: Nashville, TN.

  • 12/13: Columbus, OH.

  • 12/14: Omaha/Des Moines.

  • 12/15: Dallas, TX.

• EXIT cocktail hour for Salt Lake City (12/6) and Dallas/Fort Worth (12/15) available behind the paywall on las week’s post. EXIT cocktail hours are a great way to get to know your local EXIT guys and find out if full group membership is right for you.

Many of us have learned how painful it is to argue with an elderly loved one about politics: “you are arguing with the TV, and the TV can’t hear you and doesn’t care.”

It’s a cute turn of phrase, but it doesn’t really capture the dawning horror and anguish as you realize that you are no longer talking to your intimate relative: you are talking to Stephen Colbert.

And you can’t just say, “Sorry Stephen, I’d like to talk to my dad now” — what Stephen has to say is Very Important and he’s Deeply Concerned and he’s not going anywhere.

It’s not that it’s so unbearable to disagree: it’s the feeling that an alien presence has insinuated itself into your closest relationships.

Friends and loved ones whom you like and value for all sorts of human reasons are now separated from you by an impassable gulf. And for what?

Your dad isn’t going to change anything. His opinion doesn’t matter. In the aggregate, of course, these mass media campaigns work, but your dad’s contribution to the whole is infinitesimal. They parasitized his mind (and your relationship) to buy themselves one vote, out of 152 million: 0.000000657% of the objective.

The logic of mass democracy demands this, of course — power is officially vested in The People, and every election cycle it must be gathered in again to the organs of government. The state can’t just extract your dad’s passive obedience: they need to manufacture his enthusiastic (ideally, pissed-off and righteous) consent.

The side that refuses to consume your dad’s mind in this way will be defeated by the side that does so with vampiric hunger.

But it’s not even about the vote, really, from day-to-day:

The reason to break your dad’s brain is to create the impression of inevitable social and moral consensus — to launder the coercive muscle of the state.

(Why send State Security to your door when they can get everyone you love to enforce The Rules for free?)

The mastery of mass communications technology to impose this invisible apparatus of social control was what allowed American managerialism to win the 20th-century struggle with the (openly) authoritarian managerialism of Germany and Russia. With these technological tools, capturing the mind became paradoxically much cheaper and more efficient than settling for the coerced obedience of the body.

The cost of this success is, of course, the total, incurable social and psychological derangement of the Boomers.

It’s very easy to see the pointlessness — and frankly, tragedy — of this when it’s an old man you love being eaten alive by the television.

Social media is a different beast in a few ways:

The state can no longer maintain direct narrative control the way they could in the days of Cronkite or Brokaw. There is no consensus control of public attention and moral concern — and it is difficult to overstate the existential threat that this presents to the US government.

Americans have no shared identity or consensus values. The state does not have a robust apparatus of coercive control.

Postwar America is held together by an ideological self-understanding that utterly depends on the state’s ability to tell everyone who the good guys and bad guys are, and make everyone believe it. As that capacity fails, it becomes increasingly obvious that there is nothing beneath.

For ordinary people, the benefit of a unified media environment was the illusion of local stasis:

The current around us was so immense and so uniform that we didn’t notice it, like the velocity of the earth’s orbit around the sun. Personal relationships rose and fell for personal, human reasons.

Now we are being buffeted by tremendous narrative storms and eddies at human scale: relationships torn apart over galactic grievances with no direct bearing on either of the parties concerned (though of course the conflict itself exposes latent fault lines of character and personality.)

Instead of an ironclad, imperceptible moral consensus — the Titanic steaming serenely toward the iceberg — we have narrative warlordism: patchwork of influencers competing viciously to harness and profit from your attention and moral concern.

Spencer Cox sneeringly refers to these as “conflict entrepreneurs”.

Much of boomers’ and liberals’ loyalty to the mainstream media apparatus and Our Sacred Norms is nostalgia for the good old days, before Trump “made everything so political”. They sincerely hate how “divisive” he is.

But basically every political e-celebrity (including Cox, and every other elected official) is now a conflict entrepreneur of one stripe or another.

Chimping is just voting for right-wingers.

It’s the way that you, the Little Guy, participate in the power process: the way that power is aggregated and drawn back into the machinery of the state.

You “chimp” by signal-boosting various influencers on the grievance du jour, and they present your chimping as evidence of the political importance of a) the grievance and b) themselves.

Like all propagandists, their goal is to persuade you of the deep importance of the global issue, and your helplessness to confront it alone — and therefore your need to engage with the power process through them.

(This is not a bad thing, necessarily: many of these global issues are important, and you are helpless to confront them alone, and you do need to engage with the power process collectively. Organizing people to solve shared problems is also known as “leadership”.)

The flow of your energy through these influencers enriches and empowers them, in the same way that leftists’ voting enriches and empowers NGOs, PACs, unions, black churches, etc.

Trump also likes it when you chimp, because it provides him with a mandate to act (the “impression of inevitable moral and social consensus” discussed above) — and because it places him at the top of a new power process, circumventing the older power process which he does not control.

The desired outcome is a common understanding that petitioning President Trump online — en masse, mediated by this class of influencers — is the way to Get Things Done in America. The power of the state is accessed through direct supplication to the king.

Chimping works fine, as long as you’re chimping for something that Trump already wants to do, and has the capacity to do.

Chimping is largely done by Trump loyalists, precisely because they Trust the Plan. If you thought that Trump was powerless, or doomed to defeat, or that his intentions were hostile to your interests, chimping would be meaningless. You can’t actually make him do anything.

The power of chimping is roughly as “real” as voting: it allows organized constituencies to nudge the apparatus of power in directions it was already willing to go. And that’s fine, as far as it goes — that’s about as real as democratic power gets.

The problem emerges when those options are not adequate: when leadership appears not to have either the capacity or the willingness to do what is necessary.

In the last few weeks, people have begun to lose faith in Trump’s capacity to solve fundamental political problems — but, unfortunately, they have held on to the conviction that they are rudderless and alone in a hurricane of insuperable political forces.

So, while the boomers’ propaganda environment has made them insufferable at Thanksgiving, our propaganda environment has made us demoralized and despondent.

It’s true that our problems are bigger than we can handle alone — but that doesn’t mean we have to obsess impotently over events at global scale.

The solution is to become “conflict entrepreneurs” ourselves.

As long as you are transfixed by the spectacle of America’s decline, and parasocially dependent on the competence and virtue of Republican politicians, volatility will be a source of anxiety, paralysis, and despair.

But volatility always means opportunity. The system is leaking power all over the place.

We can organize, build capacity, and capture those power flows ourselves — in lawful, peaceful, and productive ways — becoming more adaptive, regardless of what the future holds.

At EXIT, we are taking a short position on managerial systems, and building the human institutions that will come next. We believe that the future is networked family empires: so we pool capital, launch businesses, cultivate social and political influence, and raise our children to inherit what we build.

Learn more at exitgroup.us.

EXIT News

• Weekly Full Group Calls, Tuesdays at 9PM ET:

  • Last week (11/18), we had a Q&A with Patri Friedman, founder of Pronomos, the world’s leading VC for charter cities and Special Economic Zones. Recording available to paid subscribers next week.

  • Tonight (11/25), we will have a pre-Thanksgiving call on Albion’s Seed, Anglo-America, ethnogenesis, etc. from an EXIT academic whose domain of study is the throughlines of Anglo-American culture.

  • Next week (12/2) we will hear from , author of Theft of Fire.

• Other Calls:

  • Paideia Project standing call on Wednesdays and Thursdays, open to all EXIT guys.

  • New Guy Networking tomorrow at 8:30PM ET (just prior to the full group call.) If you’re a new guy, don’t forget to pop in.

• Meetups (Members only) — Members can check their regional channel or contact DB for full details.

  • 12/6: Atlanta, GA. (Cummings area). Christmas party: see #Southeast channel.

  • 12/12: Nashville, TN.

  • 12/13: Columbus, OH.

  • 12/15: Dallas, TX.

• EXIT cocktail hour for Salt Lake City (12/6) and Dallas/Fort Worth (12/15) available below the paywall for paid subscribers. EXIT cocktail hours are a great way to get to know your local EXIT guys and find out if full group membership is right for you.

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