Alex’s Presentation (free to listen):

• Why Madison invoked Lycurgus in Federalist 38 to defend a Constitution penned behind closed doors

• Lycurgus’ sacrificial leader…

Read more

At our 250th Anniversary Celebration, my friend and Constitutional Action co-founder Ben Wilson announced that he has begun treatment for cancer. The most promising treatments are extremely expensive, and he has requested our support. Please donate if you can here.

(Our A/V situation didn’t go the way we had hoped at the event at the Theater-In-The-Pines on Wednesday, so I’ll likely re-record my remarks. In the meantime, here’s the text.)

I didn’t dedicate a lot of my preparation to the Constitutional Action pitch in particular — I want to talk tonight about the pitch for America. But I’d like to briefly introduce who we are and what we’re about.

Constitutional Action is built on the idea that slavery to proceduralism is un-American.

In fact, the story of American history is the story of bold men taking action in defiance of unjust judges, unjust procedures, unjust decisions.

So even if you were to say, “I’m deeply committed to our current procedural architecture” — well, LBJ made that up, and before him, FDR, and before him, Lincoln, and before him, Jackson.

You don’t have to agree with the substance of all of those bold actions to acknowledge that our situation was not built by rule-followers, but by people making decisions.

You can make decisions. You can take action. You can take Constitutional Action, in harmony with the spirit of the freedoms that the founders intended to preserve.

The Constitution is a product of the American people — the American people are not a product of the Constitution. We predate it. We created it. It is a reflection and articulation — in imperfect words — of who we are and what we believe in.

So, to be enslaved to line-item proceduralism by people who don’t respect, and in fact despise, not only the American idea but all of the people past and present who are responsible for it, is insanity.

And largely the reason that Republicans hide behind that proceduralism is straightforward cowardice.

Republican politicians don’t get invited to parties if they’re honest about that. They don’t get taken out to lunch — and they like being taken out to lunch, and they like going to parties, and that’s why they’re in politics.

So Constitutional Action reflects a new approach.

We are developing new political leaders with the courage to do what is right for the American people, in harmony with the intent of the Constitution — in defiance of stays, and injunctions, and bureaucratic stonewalling from lawyers and judges who do not care about the Constitution, or the American people.

Last month, we did a beautification event at Memory Grove, a veterans’ memorial in Salt Lake City, barely a thousand feet from the Capitol. As you walk through it, it’s beautifully maintained as far as a normal person’s sight lines.

But immediately up the hill, it’s homeless encampments, drug dens, crack pipes, needles. If there’s a better metaphor for the state of things in Utah, I don’t know what it is. They’re excellent at maintaining appearances. They’re excellent at sweeping things under the rug.

We found four truckloads of vagrant garbage, and the people walking through the park were shocked at the pile of stuff that we were able to produce from just this one hillside.

And everybody we spoke to — several politicians at the Capitol, several of the park employees, all of the people we walked past — said, “This is shocking, and thank you for doing this.”

We are looking for these things that everybody wants done, but that are not getting done because of this slavery to proceduralism — this sense that we’re not allowed to fix it, that it’s against the rules to fix it, or that it offends various constituencies (a lot of this is just the fact that vagrancy makes important people money. They get paid to make the problem worse.)

So that’s Constitutional Action. If you want to get involved with our cleanups, or you want to get on the list to come to more events like this, it’s constitutionalaction.org.

But I want to talk about the next 250 years.

It felt important for us to address the mood that I know many people are feeling — and that I was tempted to feel — as we came to America’s 250th anniversary.

You don’t have to be a genius to know that we’re spending more than we take in, and the interest, the servicing of the debt, is stacking up.

People aren’t starting families or having babies, so this growing army of older people is supported by a dwindling population of the young. This, too, is interest stacking up. The demographic debt gets harder to service as it builds. Problems get worse as they get worse. They don’t just accumulate, they accelerate.

We’ve shipped our industrial base overseas, which threatens our global security guarantee. It means we’re not in a position to arm and equip our own soldiers to defend this global industrial system that the things we still produce rely on for import and export. Again, this is a problem where the interest accrues. It gets worse as it gets worse.

Mass migration has created explicitly anti-American constituencies in America’s most powerful cities, who then vote for more mass migration and for the looting of the commons. The interest stacks up. It gets worse as it gets worse.

Political paralysis in Washington is also escalating, as the pretense that we’re all on the same team gets thinner and thinner, and the violations of norms justify further violation of norms. Again, it stacks up. All these lines are going parabolic in the wrong direction.

And you’re not just reading about it on Twitter: your salary comes in the dollars that are getting inflated away to service that debt. Your taxes are going to the Social Security Ponzi scheme that’s going bankrupt as the population ages, and you’re not going to see a dime of it. Your job, and everything you buy with your paycheck, is dependent on the globalized supply chain that keeps taking these security shocks, and you don’t know which one’s going to be The Big One.

Your neighborhood — certainly the downtown that you work in — is increasingly an incoherent economic zone full of people who do not believe in the American idea, but who are free to vote for its dissolution.

So you ask yourself: “How could all of that not be going to hell? And if that all goes to zero, where does that leave me?”

“I build dashboards to surface actionable business insights for stakeholders. That may be fake, and it may be soulless, and it may be miserable, but my body is not ready for the Thunderdome. I have kids to feed, and I’m right on the edge of paying my bills as it is.” That’s scary.

But if you ask me, “Is America going to zero?” My answer is: Someone is.

It’s absolutely clear that all these systems that look like they’re failing are failing.

The big managerial Goliath, the money printer, the carrier strike groups, the international rules-based order, the S&P 500, the bipartisan consensus, the global financial system — all of that is in terminal decline, and there’s basically no human agency that could possibly stop it.

The question is: is that America?

Are those the source of America’s freedom and prosperity? Are they, in fact, the only thing between your family and catastrophe?

I’m here to tell you that none of that is America. In fact, all of those things are a blight on America, and the fact that they are dying is the best news we’ve had in decades — for the nation in general, but especially for you and your family.

The average American worker is 2.6 times more productive than the generation that raised four kids on a single income and put a man on the moon.

Do you feel two and a half times wealthier? Where has that productivity gone? Someone is getting a whole lot wealthier. So who is it?

China is the largest manufacturer in the world, but they have more than three times the population: per capita, Americans still do the most building in the real world of any people on Earth.

We’re a net energy exporter. We produce fifteen percent of the world’s food, three times as much as we need — and that’s with all of the headwinds that I’m about to describe.

So I am not here to argue that we’re going to go back to the 1960s, or that we’re going to catch up with China, or that we can be as beautiful and safe and secure as El Salvador.

I’m here to tell you that if we can get out from under this paralyzed, broken, dysfunctional regime, the things that we can accomplish are almost beyond imagining.

People talk a lot online about how the economy is fake — and certainly when you’re sitting in your cubicle working on your B2B SaaS dashboard, it can feel pretty fake.

But you’re encouraged to think that this is your fault — that you wanted to work a fake job because “nobody wants to work hard anymore” — and that’s why the Chinese manufacture everything, and the Mexicans do all the construction, and Hart-Cellar immigrants run all the strip-mall businesses.

Everything in the physical economy is not in your hands — and you’re told that this is really a favor that all these people are doing for you, letting you live this way.

But you need to understand that that is absolutely false — I’m not just saying that because it’s a slander of our country, but because it has enormous consequences for what comes next.

The reason we lost our industrial base to the Chinese is that we have allowed frictionless trade overseas, and an absurd regulatory regime back home.

If you want to build a factory, you have to deal with OSHA and EPA and EEOC and CPSC and FTC and everybody else. If a Chinese guy wants to build a factory, he just needs an uncle on the right Party committee.

The Chinese system is actually deeply bloated and corrupt and inefficient, but it looks like an Ayn Rand fantasy compared to the paralysis in America — so that’s where the factories get built.

Likewise, the black market for labor here at home creates a two-track economy where illegal immigrants and their corporate employers get to live in Ancapistan, where there’s no Obamacare, no workmen’s comp, and no HR department.

If you talk to a corporate factory manager — this is something I’ve done personally — they’ll tell you that illegal workers often aren’t actually paid less than citizens: sometimes they’re paid more. The savings is because they take cash, and they don’t ask questions, and they’ll stick their fingers in the machine when they need to.

But if you want to employ Americans, you have to live with near-EU levels of regulation, precisely because you and they are American citizens.

So naturally, millions of smart and dynamic Americans have crowded into software or into the finance casino, because that’s where they’re still free to build.

They have to pay five figures for a credential from the indoctrination factory because it’s illegal to give them an IQ test, and because there’s no entry-level, middle-class on-ramp to real ownership in the real world. All of that is controlled by the multinational corporations that can afford the compliance burden and send the dirty work overseas.

They huddle in these sterile, atomized suburbs because the cities are controlled by politicians and NGOs who profit from crime, drugs, and misery. They can’t afford to live in the neighborhoods we grew up in, and it’s against the law to maintain safe streets.

You’re dumping all your fake dollars into assets that you know are inflated, but there’s nowhere else to run from the money printer.

So that’s the fake economy. That’s the system you live in, and that’s why you’re stuck in it.

That’s your “privileged” position in it — and you’ve got people actively defrauding the racial spoils system that you pay taxes for, telling you that you’re afraid of competition.

The government spends eighteen billion dollars a day, and that’s outrageous, but it doesn’t even touch the wealth and productive capacity that is locked up in this derangement of our capital markets, our labor markets, our real estate markets — the way we train people, the way we allocate people.

So let’s ask ourselves the question again: what if that was going to zero?

What if that system was in fact destined to be flattened by God, and you got to see it? Would that be worth risking your email job?

What if we could build 1,000 nuclear reactors in this country? What if household energy was too cheap to meter, and we desalinated twenty trillion gallons of water and turned the Great Basin into a green paradise?

What if you didn’t have to go through a four-year, hundred-thousand-dollar compliance test to prove you could handle a job? What if it were legal to train our most gifted students at the speed and intensity of which they’re capable?

What if the stunning advances of software innovation made your real physical environment better, more enjoyable, more beautiful?

What if you could start a production business without asking permission from a dozen regulators, and you could hire anybody you wanted to hire? What if it were legal to build safe and functional cities?

Solving this problem alone (safe cities) unlocks trillions of dollars in real estate value and billions of man-hours of pointless commuting. What if Salt Lake City were a safe and attractive place to raise a family? What would a place like that be worth?

What if you didn’t get paid in counterfeit bills?

What if your mom and dad didn’t furiously vote to juice their house prices because it was viable to save in dollars, and money wasn’t the only way to keep a neighborhood safe?

We could build a world that we can’t even imagine right now — and it’s going to happen.

This fake, absurd system’s confrontation with reality is absolutely guaranteed, and it’s not going to be Mad Max.

Americans are not going to forget how to use electricity or build computers. In fact, we’re going to remember how to use electricity and build computers. Your family is not going to go hungry.

The technology now exists to build things at personal scale that used to require armies — and that’s partly why the managerial system is dying: It isn’t necessary anymore, and it’s being challenged by small, nimble, cohesive groups (most of whom are way dumber than you.)

But things are going to be volatile. A lot of the people who’ve pushed in their chips on this system are going to lose big. A lot of power relationships are going to be renegotiated — but that’s what winning looks like. That’s what it means. That’s what we want.

The only question is: how do we prepare ourselves for that future and position ourselves together to build for what comes next?

Constitutional Action is the civic arm of what we’re doing. I run Exit, which is focused on fraternal and business networking.

The reason we’re doing these events and trash cleanups is to start building the human, personal networks of people with names and faces who love their country and understand what time it is and want to take responsibility for their communities.

As these changes unfold, we’re all going to need good friends, and I’ve been incredibly impressed by the number and caliber of people who show up. They say it’s a curse — may you live in interesting times. I want to live in interesting times. I’m glad that the courage and ambition of the Founding Fathers did not conclusively settle all political questions two hundred and fifty years ago.

I’m glad it’s our turn. It means we get to be Americans. We get to be part of the story. It’s a great day to be an American. God bless you, and God bless the United States of America.

EXIT News

• Weekly Full Group Calls (Tuesday nights, 9PM ET/6PM PT)

  • This week (6/30) we had our EXIT Q2 Review and Q3 Preview. The Q3 theme will be “Making Hay While the Sun Shines”. We live in abundant times, and there is so much we can build and accomplish.

  • Next week (7/7) we will have an extended discussion of The Next 250 Years: what is possible for America on the other side of the coming volatility, and how we can be prepared to build it.

  • The following week (7/14) we will hear from Douglass Mackey, who got the worst of the Biden-era repression, including prosecution and jail-time for posting anti-Hillary memes. We’ll discuss how he weathered that storm and what he learned.

• EXIT Member Events (see group chat for details):

  • 7/11: Nashville Beautification Event

  • 7/11: Houston Member Meetup

  • 7/11: New York City Member Meetup

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Constitutional Action Beautification Event, Provo Canyon Trail

The thesis of Constitutional Action is that we should be inspired to action by the spirit of the Constitution, rather than enslaved to (our enemies’ interpretation of) the letter.

We believe the Republican Party exists to divert political energy and keep Americans inert — so our mission is to seek executive power, and demonstrate what could be accomplished if we removed our fraudulent and self-dealing political class.

It starts with taking action as citizens to expose what they’ve swept under the rug, and show the people that these politicians do not represent our interests.

In this case, proverbially strait-laced Provo, home of Brigham Young University, now hosts eyesore junkie dens and sprawling homeless encampments.

On May 31st, forty volunteers gathered at Provo Canyon, and we removed four dormant camps while documenting two active ones. (You can get in trouble for removing the wrong kind of garbage.)

We didn’t have to go far: the camps were just beyond the treeline, a two-minute walk from the trailhead where families walk every day.

The camps were right next to (and in some cases intersecting) active Provo city maintenance and construction work — the city clearly knows these people are here, and has done nothing.

The strangest thing about the camps was that they were either literal “altars” of rock, or else bowl-like “nests” stuffed with decade-spanning archaeological strata of garbage.

In the Book of Kings, whenever a righteous king takes power in Judah, his immediate enemy is “the groves” (asherim) and “the high places” (bamot):

These are hidden sites of self-mutilation, ritual prostitution, and child sacrifice in the name of Ba’al, Molech, and Asherah — the gods of the tribes that Israel neglected to eradicate in the conquest of Canaan.

Weak kings allow these altars to fester in the wilderness; truly wicked kings bring the whoredoms into the cities, and eventually into the holy place of the temple.

It struck me, as we pulled down the rocks and bagged the garbage, that the homeless camp is an altar to our enemies’ gods.

Their most sacred principle is the abolition of distinction, the worship of entropy — and the shrine of their cult is a midden heap, ideally somewhere that was once beautiful.

You can tell this is true because of the vigorous legal protections that these shrines enjoy in enemy territory.

The vagrants play the role of both sacrificial victim and sacred cow, whose damage and detritus (and self-destruction) must be preserved at all costs.

If you didn’t understand that our enemies’ religion is entropy, it would be difficult to explain their zeal for homeless encampments.

They obviously don’t care about the vagrants themselves, whose misery they actively nourish and sharpen by every policy means available.

None of it makes sense until you understand that the real object of worship is misery and squalor itself. It felt good to pull those altars down.

We are also learning a lot about organizing concerned citizens.

It turned out to be pretty involved coordinating vehicles, load-balancing work crews, maintaining real-time comms across sites — it was a good exercise of “dual-purpose capacity”.

Next time we run an event at this scale, we will have our operations lead stay at base camp directing traffic, crew leads trained with handheld radios, and dedicated runner and vehicle teams.

We also got to work together and problem-solve on the fly, recognizing each other as people who showed up to meet a need in their community.

Our next cleanup will be this weekend, at Memory Grove Park.

Memory Grove is a veterans’ memorial in the shadow of the State Capitol, which has been an active homeless encampment for years, and a source of violent crime and drug offenses near Temple Square.

Our overwhelmingly Republican legislature can literally see the camps from their offices. Their mundane bureaucratic excuses make no sense — loitering and camping in public city parks is straightforwardly illegal, and they could enforce the law at any time. They want it this way. We’d like to hear them explain why.

Constitutional Action is going to clean up what we legally can, and present the rest to the judgment of the public.

You can sign up to join the Memory Grove cleanup here — or, if you want to support the next Constitutional Action event (covering snacks and PPE for volunteers, equipment rental, dump fees, event venues, etc.), you can make a contribution here. (Thanks to American Conservation Coalition for sponsoring this cleanup.)

The EXIT Leadership Group is currently working on a new target list to expand Constitutional Action outside Utah.

The cities where we have the greatest operational depth are Dallas, Houston, Seattle, Nashville, DC, and New York. If you know of a place that could use a cleanup, let us know.

Our next event will be a celebration of America’s Semiquincentennial, and a look at The Next 250 Years.

One of the consequences of the Constitutional Action thesis is that our nation’s present difficulties are not, in fact, inescapable political reality.

As Nayib Bukele revealed in El Salvador, things can get massively better in very little time if you are not ruled by thieves and gangsters. But El Salvador remains a small and poor country: what could the United States accomplish with that kind of transformation?

We want to explore what is possible with the restoration of human government to the United States of America — with leaders loyal to the spirit of freedom embodied in the Constitution. You can register for free here:

Join us for America's Next 250 Years

EXIT is a fraternity dedicated to shorting managerial systems, and building the human institutions that come next. You can apply for membership at exitgroup.us.

EXIT News

• Weekly Full Group Calls (Tuesday nights, 9PM ET/6PM PT)

  • This week (6/2) we heard from Kevin Daley and Davis Hunt on political action in Nashville. Davis is the founder of Pamphleteer, and has organized excellent events to connect aligned people, including the Erik Prince Q&A with IM-1776.

  • Next week (6/16) we will hear from EXIT man and author of the Steadermen Substack John Del about parenting teenagers. He’s made it through the gauntlet successfully, and we want to know what did differently, and what he has learned.

• EXIT Member Events (see group chat for details):

  • 6/12: Nashville Meetup

  • 6/13 Constitutional Action Cleanup Event in Salt Lake City

  • 6/13: Houston Meetup

  • 6/13: Budapest Meetup

  • 6/15: Dallas Meetup

  • 6/19: Atlanta Meetup

  • 6/19: Denver Meetup

  • 6/20: Columbus Meetup

  • 6/27: Salt Lake City Passage Press Event

  • 6/27: St. Louis Meetup

  • 7/1: Constitutional Action Event (“The Next 250 Years”) in American Fork

Subscriber Events (RSVP below):

RSVP for Nashville Cocktail Hour 6/12

RSVP for CAS Cleanup Event 6/13

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RSVP for American Fork CAS Event 7/1

The UK authorities have released the footage of the murder of Henry Nowak.

The footage is not cinematic. The officer is clearly bored as he cuffs Nowak’s corpselike, already-bloodless wrists. He slurs through Nowak’s “rights” like he’s a server at Denny’s reciting a scripted upsell.

Even when they start to realize something is wrong (“I think he’s going to be sick”; “his pupils aren’t even reacting”), there is no change in tempo. Just another day at the office.

Nowak has blood on his clothes. He has blood in his mouth. He has been slashed in the face. He is unable to stand or even sit upright. He is telling the officers “I have been stabbed”.

If he were actually that drunk, his assailant’s story of “fearing for his safety” would make no sense — he is obviously not a physical threat to anyone, and there is no reason to handcuff him.

The most charitable interpretation of the officers’ behavior is that they think they’re dealing with a guy who said something racist while blackout, incapacitated drunk, and therefore deserved to be attacked and arrested — and if anything else happened, they don’t want to know about it.

This is obviously a massive dereliction of their “job” as police officers, as articulated to the public — but it’s right in line with what they are paid and incentivized to do.

If this call requires them to arrest the brown guy, who is surrounded by his friends, it’s going to be a very stressful night, followed by a lot of paperwork and media attention for themselves and their bosses the next day — especially if they got anything wrong.

On the other hand, if they’re a little too rough with the white guy, or it turns out his story checks out better than the brown guy’s, they can mumble a “whoopsie” and it’ll probably be fine. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred.

The white guy doesn’t have half a dozen internationally funded civil rights NGOs looking for any opportunity to chew their way up the department’s ass for the next 18 months. There won’t even be a story in the local news about it, let alone internationally. The chain of command will back the officers’ play all the way.

They probably aren’t consciously thinking, “I’m going to let this kid bleed out so I don’t get called racist”. They’re thinking, “I need to be careful how I handle this” — and only in one direction.

These officers were unlucky — they caught a case in which the facts were so egregious that it blew through all those institutional guardrails, and their one-sided negligence has become a problem. But it’s obvious from their affect that this kind of interaction is routine. They know exactly what is expected of them here.

This is not a regime animated by pathological, superabundant, “suicidal” empathy.

You are not ruled by people whose greatest weakness is that they care too much.

In fact, every single point of failure in this and many other recent atrocities is traceable to the obvious reality that nobody gives a shit.

Why are there millions of hostile foreign immigrants in Britain? Because, as in the US, mass migration generated enormous power and wealth for a few, while the costs were diffuse and socialized, and there was no organized will to resist.

Why are the English forbidden to own kitchen knives? Because the UK government has no theory of the rights of its citizens and no interest in articulating one, so it stumbles from crisis to crisis, and the easiest way to be seen as “responding” to a tragedy is to impose deeper and more invasive controls.

Why are Sikhs permitted to carry knives? Because the exemption matters more to a small clique of lawyers and NGOs than it does to the general population, and nobody wants to “make an issue of it.”

Why is the accusation of racism (from white people) a social superweapon that justifies physical assault, investigation, and arrest? Because the alternative is a complex confrontation with the citizens and their grievances. It is always easier to punish the quieter and less-volatile (and busier) party.

Why don’t obvious cases of racial violence and abuse from foreigners get investigated and punished? Because the level of tribalism and community complicity in such crimes is so pervasive that to even contemplate punishing it would require you to examine their collective compatibility with the Western liberal criminal justice system — which would then demand a re-evaluation of the entire postwar moral and political order. (“That sounds like a job for somebody else.”)

Why are the families of the victims always pressured to “call for calm” and disavow the obvious explanations for what happened before their loved ones’ bodies are cold?

Is it because the regime functionaries turning the screws on them are so drunk with empathy?

Of course not. It’s because the alternative would be messy, and the functionaries’ desire not to deal with a mess outweighs the family’s desire for truth, or justice, or even the basic liberty to grieve.

It is always easier to tax, accost, threaten, investigate, and jail law-abiding people than it is to arrest criminals. It’s always easier to make life steadily worse and less free for people with shit to do than it is to institutionalize the violently mentally ill. It’s always easier to bow to the demands of loud unemployed deviants than to advocate for normal people.

The people running the homeless industrial complex and the refugee-resettlement NGOs and the criminal advocacy groups are not animated by over-zealous virtue, and they aren’t incompetently trying to save the world — they look for ways to make these problems worse, because that’s what gets them paid.

Of course, at a social level, it would be much “easier” — low-friction, cost-saving — to arrest the handful of chronic offenders in every major city than it is to let them keep terrorizing the public (reminder that a “25 strikes policy” would be a dramatic improvement of our criminal justice system) — but at the level of the individual police officer, judge, bureaucrat, the incentive gradient is toward inaction.

Canada and the UK are doing worse than the US, not because they are a Nation of Empaths, but because they have a much stronger culture of keeping your head down and not making waves.

These people aren’t working idealistically toward some glorious eschaton.

This is why liberals don’t care when you point out what their pet “refugees” think about women’s rights or homophobia.

Feminists, for whom an awkward text is Literally Rape, don’t care that mass migration policies have directly subsidized the sexual slavery of young British girls. Gay activists don’t care that some other gays might be thrown off buildings in Gaza. Trans activists don’t care who, specifically, needs to Stop Killing Trans People. Race hustlers don’t care that the end of Western hegemony would mean a much more forthrightly racist world order.

It would not occur to any of these people to argue with you about the end state. They do not have an end state in mind. They aren’t thinking that far ahead. None of these costs will fall on them personally.

More refugees and homeless people means more budget and more sinecures. Dependent classes reliably vote for gibs, which make them a reliable power source. Busy, productive, thoughtful, independent people (and the things they build) are more conveniently consumed as fuel. That’s all that matters to these people.

They aren’t trying to usher in the workers’ paradise. They want power for utterly venal and petty reasons. They like being taken out to lunch and treated like they’re important. They like buying nice things.

They profit from filth and squalor and discord, and they want more of it, so they can have even more nice things and feel even more important, and they do not care where it’s all headed.

Our enemies are not slaves to empathy, they are slaves to entropy.

Henry Nowak was murdered by the British state — when they disarmed him, when they filled his country with enemies, when they beggared him to enrich those enemies, when they overlooked those enemies’ escalating violence and cruelty, and arrested anyone who spoke out about it — and finally, when they restrained him and refused to render aid as he bled out.

There was no misguided compassion in any of this. Things are just falling apart because nobody’s in charge and nobody gives a shit.

And there are things about our situation that are unique and unprecedented, but “nobody’s in charge and nobody gives a shit” is actually the default condition.

It’s the state of nature, the Law of the Jungle — to be “ruled” only in the sense that there are organized parasites and predators who are stronger than you.

The shape of the entropy — the hierarchy of the predators and parasites — is defined by the logic of mass democracy.

The state is not on the side of the dependent and unproductive because the state is overflowing with compassion, but because the dependent and unproductive have:

1. No capacity or property of their own that can be efficiently expropriated, and

2. No means of obtaining power other than mass democratic expropriation from the productive, which makes them exceedingly reliable and energetic clients.

So the global state, having broken down and consumed all external power structures, is now starving, and consuming all the functional structures within itself — its own vital organs.

And we have to understand this, because internalizing this meme that our enemies are Bleeding Hearts who Care Too Much is generating strategic errors.

First, you’re just lying to yourself. You care.

You see what the consequences of all this absurdity will be, all the pointless misery and degradation it will cause (and is already causing), all the beauty that will be destroyed — and you care so much that it overrides the strong impulse to keep your head down.

You don’t just care because it will affect you. You care because you love your children, your friends and neighbors, and because — perhaps in secret shame — you also care about the fate of humanity.

That is literally the difference between you and them.

Don’t accept the leftist’s obviously self-serving conceit, and cast yourself as the villain in their story. Love is the energy that drives heroic action, and to sneer at it is to cut yourself off at the knees. (It will also make you the wrong friends.)

Second: it’s just bad messaging.

Love covereth the multitude of sins — and accusing your enemies of Loving Too Deeply actually absolves them in the minds of most people.

This isn’t just a ridiculous lie when it’s said of shark-eyed sociopaths like Newsom — it’s a lie when your liberal aunt believes it of herself.

These people aren’t actually too stupid to understand second and third-order consequences. They don’t care about second and third-order consequences — those fall on other people, sometime later, but they get to look and feel righteous right now.

Some of these people can be shaken awake — but not by leaning into their absurd self-regard. You have to make them care more, not less.

Third: you cannot make the world (or yourself) worse in any way that will disrupt this process of entropy.

You do not need to harden your heart, you do not need to sharpen your capacity for cruelty.

The obstacle to action on our side is not a lack of sociopaths. The sociopaths are already here, and — not to cite the dictionary definition — but they’re in it for themselves.

The obstacle to action on our side is coordination, trust, and connection. People who lack empathy cannot build it — are not even capable of wanting to build it.

The generations that got us into this mess were not deficient in hatred for their enemies — they were deficient in love for their friends (and for their own children.)

They stayed comfortable while the costs fell on other people, while they ran up the bill and left it to their descendants. It would have been relatively clean and easy back then to head these problems off, but they saw no reason to stick their neck out. The love that motivates action had waxed cold.

Now we are approaching crises that will require enormous effort and sacrifice and moral courage (the courage to brave morally complex terrain.)

That work — including the “dirty work” — will be done by people who love intensely: who have built bonds and friendships that are worth the cost.

A man who has a “why” can endure any “how”.

EXIT News

• Weekly Full Group Calls (Tuesday nights, 9PM ET/6PM PT)

  • This week (6/2) we had our internal Investment Showcase. Several career investors told me it was the most impressive set of founders and projects they’d ever seen at a pitch event.

    • Signal jammer detector- for civilian / police / military use. Criminal gangs have begun actively using jammers for break-ins, in America. He’s in an adjacent space and has some DoW contracting already

    • Meat processing plant- Expansion of a business purchased last year, as it launches D2C options.

    • Crypto Mining - Phase 2 expansion of operational mining facility

    • Tick Disease testing - Rapid testing of ticks, with proprietary technology, to check for diseases (Lyme, alpha-gal, etc). Potential DoW applications with all these diseases ticks mysteriously showing up (in boxes) around military training areas.

    • Adult Stem Cell Storage & Cultivation - for use in medical treatments down the road, new facility under construction

    • “An App” - not sure if this one is out of stealth mode yet

    • A film project - a follow-up on a project that EXIT guys have been invested in for almost four years now, creating Hallmark and Lifetime films. (We can save them.)

  • Next week (6/9) we will hear from Kevin Daley and Davis Hunt on political action in Nashville. Davis is the founder of Pamphleteer, and has organized excellent events to connect aligned people, including the Erik Prince Q&A with IM-1776.

  • The following week (6/16) we will hear from EXIT man and author of the Substack John Del about parenting teenagers. He’s made it through the gauntlet successfully, and we want to know what did differently, and what he has learned.

• EXIT Member Events (see group chat for details):

  • 6/4: San Francisco Meetup

  • 6/5: Stanford Meetup

  • 6/6: North Bay Meetup

  • 6/6: Utah Valley Meetup

  • 6/12: Nashville Meetup

  • 6/13 Constitutional Action Cleanup Event in Salt Lake City

  • 6/13: Houston Meetup

  • 6/13: Budapest Meetup

  • 6/15: Dallas Meetup

  • 6/19: Atlanta Meetup

  • 6/19: Denver Meetup

  • 6/20: Columbus Meetup

  • 6/27: Salt Lake City Passage Press Event

  • 6/27: St. Louis Meetup

  • 7/1: Constitutional Action Event (“The Next 250 Years”) in American Fork

Subscriber Events (RSVP below):

RSVP for San Francisco Cocktail Hour 6/4

RSVP for Stanford Cocktail Hour 6/5

RSVP for North Bay Cocktail Hour 6/6

RSVP for Nashville Cocktail Hour 6/12

RSVP for CAS Cleanup Event 6/13

RSVP for Dallas Cocktail Hour 6/15

RSVP for Denver Cocktail Hour 6/19

RSVP for American Fork CAS Event 7/1

Ben’s podcast focuses on great men of history, and the lessons we can draw from their lives in achieving our own ambitions.

Too often, the study of history devolves into materialist analysis — human outcomes unfolding deterministically, according to iron physical and economic laws. It locks analytical thinkers into the belief that nothing can change, nothing can be done, that individual human agency is irrelevant.

Like so many things, history can be either a tool that makes you powerful, or an excuse that makes you weaker.

Ben has spent years gathering practical insight from history as the biography of heroes and villains — asking in every episode, “How did this extraordinary man find solutions to the problems of his time? What did he see that no one else saw? What did he do that no one else was doing?”

In this podcast, we discuss the opportunities that lie in volatility.

Ben uses the examples of Napoleon, Alexander Hamilton, and John D. Rockefeller to illustrate:

• Why great men crave volatility: because it shatters moribund hierarchies and opens the way for new growth

• How great men use volatility: how they exploit new frontiers and patiently prepare for opportunities

• How great men survive volatility: how they measure risk, maintain discipline, and choose when to strike

We also discuss our plans for Constitutional Action: why we have to build now for the political and social changes that we can all see coming, and why Constitutional Action is the way to contest the regime’s legitimacy.

EXIT News

• Weekly Full Group Calls (Tuesday nights, 9PM ET/6PM PT)

  • This week (5/26) we heard from EXIT man Nick on Boomer Whispering — how to find common ground and build what we need to build with our boomers (we love our boomers, we have the best boomers) in politics and business.

  • Next week (6/2) we will have our Investment Showcase, with EXIT men presenting startups and projects for which they are seeking investment. (EXIT makes no endorsement of any of these projects, presentations are for educational and entertainment purposes only, everyone must do their own research and risk assessment.)

  • The following week (6/9) we will hear from Kevin Daley and Davis Hunt on political action in Nashville. Davis is the founder of Pamphleteer, and has organized excellent events to connect aligned people, including the Erik Prince Q&A with IM-1776.

• EXIT Member Events (see group chat for details):

  • 5/30: Utah Valley Constitutional Action Beautification Event

  • 6/4: San Francisco Meetup

  • 6/5: Stanford Meetup

  • 6/6: North Bay Meetup

  • 6/6: Utah Valley Meetup

  • 6/12: Nashville Meetup

  • 6/13: Houston Meetup

  • 6/13: Budapest Meetup

  • 6/15: Dallas Meetup

  • 6/19: Atlanta Meetup

  • 6/19: Denver Meetup

  • 6/20: Columbus Meetup

  • 6/27: Salt Lake City Passage Press Event

  • 6/27: St. Louis Meetup

Subscriber Events (RSVP below):

RSVP for Utah Valley Beautification 5/30

RSVP for San Francisco Cocktail Hour 6/4

RSVP for Stanford Cocktail Hour 6/5

RSVP for North Bay Cocktail Hour 6/6

RSVP for Denver Cocktail Hour 6/19

It was a chance to pitch what we’re doing and why to a crowd that was values-aligned, but not steeped in exactly the same memetic environment.

The “elevator pitch” for this thing is difficult, because you have to question so many premises and dispute so many definitions.

I could feel that they liked certain things that I was saying, but I was not quite establishing the connective tissue that made it all hang together: Managerialism [“what is that”], and therefore natalism [“what is that”], and therefore Great Houses [“what is that”], and therefore fraternity [“what is that”], and therefore entrepreneurship [“oh, ok”].

People recognize that family formation has collapsed, politics are out of control, they don’t live in the country they thought they did. It’s a relatively short walk from there to “liberalism as runaway civilizational entropy”.

But then to point to “where it all went wrong,” and what can be built that will survive the crisis, you have to cover some pretty difficult ground.

It’s not enough to say “we have to go back to 1950” (or 1650, or 600 BC) — that can’t be done.

In order to build for the future, you have to think about what civilization is doing, and why it has gone awry, and what is worth trying to save as we pass through this catastrophic historical bottleneck.

Preparing for the Free State Party event was a great exercise, because it forced me to re-examine the chain of thought that brought us here — but because I hadn’t accurately mapped out the conceptual distance between us ahead of time, I don’t think I was able to communicate to that room exactly what I intended.

So the above podcast is my attempt to do that plumbing a little more carefully. I still don’t have a pithy, 30-second pitch that gets people nodding along — and maybe that’s just not possible for this — but the essence is that we have to rebuild the engine of civilization, starting with family and fraternity.

The prompt they gave me was to discuss “iteration”: which is distinct from replication.

Our goal cannot be to rewind and replicate some prior civilization — nor can you replicate your own genetics or attitudes or worldview with any fidelity (and it would not be worth doing if you could.)

Instead, you have to cultivate people who cultivate themselves — fellow creators. (This is the actual meaning of the word “culture” — yet another term that has to be redefined.)

You have to recognize the children you raise, not as extensions of yourself, but as conscious, embodied expressions of what you love and value: works of living art. And then you have to build the economic, cultural, and political machinery that allows them to build families that reflect their highest loves and ideals (which, again, will not be — and should not be — exactly your own. The art is to beget artists.)

This deliberate approach to life and culture — life as art — is a matter of survival, because family formation has become an expensive and increasingly unusual “lifestyle choice”. You have to supply some compelling vision, or your children simply won’t do it.

In other words: your family (and humanity at large) is going to consciously orient toward a shared vision of glory and beauty, or it is going to end.

EXIT is a fraternity dedicated to shorting managerial systems, and building the human institutions that come next.

exitgroup.us

EXIT News

• Weekly Full Group Calls (Tuesday nights, 9PM ET/6PM PT)

  • This Tuesday (5/19), we had our Member Q&A with Joost Strydom, CEO of Orania. A deeply inspiring discussion of the community they have built, against all odds, in South Africa. Full recording coming soon.

  • Next week (5/26) we will hear from EXIT man Nick on Boomer Whispering — how to find common ground and build what we need to build with our boomers (we love our boomers, we have the best boomers) in politics and business.

  • The following week (6/2) we will have our Investment Showcase, with EXIT men presenting startups and projects for which they are seeking investment. (EXIT makes no endorsement of any of these projects, presentations are for educational and entertainment purposes only, everyone must do their own research and risk assessment.)

• Events

  • 5/30: Utah Valley Constitutional Action Beautification Event

  • 6/5: San Jose Meetup

  • 6/6: San Francisco Lunch

  • 6/19: Denver Meetup

  • 6/27: Salt Lake City Passage Press Event

Links to EXIT cocktail hours in San Francisco (6/5) and Denver (6/19) available to supporting subscribers here.

EXIT cocktail hours are the best way to get to know the guys in your area, and decide if full membership in the group is right for you.

At last month’s meeting, we presented a historical model for what is happening in Utah, & how we got here — and I made the case that we need a state government willing to defend its citizens and their rights under the Constitution, instead of using the letter of the law as an excuse to ignore the spirit.

The question that I hope it raised in your minds is, how do we get there? Can we get there?

I’m here tonight to tell you that we can.

I suspect most of you are here because, like me, you feel like you’re going a little bit crazy.

You grew up in a state that was arguably the most cohesive and functional place, in a much more cohesive and functional country.

Now, you’re watching as the Republican state government sells your home out from under you in a hundred procedural ways.

The Republican state legislature and governor appointed a single “expert” (who happened to be a radical leftist activist) to assess the performance of every judge in the state.

This year, through the Better Boundaries initiative, Republicans have handed one of those leftist judges the authority to unilaterally redraw our Congressional districts, creating a radical socialist seat in Salt Lake City.

That seat was just won at the Democratic state convention by Liban Mohamed, thanks to a Somali ethnic political machine that the Republican Party willfully imported, along with tens of thousands of “refugees” and hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants, all protected by de facto sanctuary policies.

After decades of work by Republican lawmakers, Salt Lake City is as violent, depraved, and dysfunctional as any blue state capital, with the flag of the big gay empire hanging from every parapet — and every year, the tumor spreads further into the suburbs.

The Utah Board of Higher Education, hand-picked by the Republican governor, runs the leftist indoctrination factory where Charlie Kirk was assassinated. The State Board of Education — which is elected by the voters and is 88% Republican — employs the same insane Bolshevik teachers as every other public school system in America.

Again, this is the third most Republican state in the country — effectively a one-party state — and they are consciously, deliberately, systematically working to replicate the squalor and corruption of San Francisco or Minneapolis.

Maybe ordinary liberals in the 90s could not have anticipated how bad it would get — but how perverse would you have to be to walk into this with your eyes open?

But when you try to explain this to your friends and neighbors, they have no idea what you’re talking about.

The people who are doing this are world-class at evading responsibility, maintaining a stable decline, and keeping up appearances.

The trajectory of our state looks dramatic if you can remember what life was like ten years ago — but that’s just not how the median voter operates.

They’ll say, sure, Salt Lake County is a mess, but all cities are liberal — you can always move another 15 minutes out into the suburbs. Sure, the schools are bad, but you can apply for a charter school. Sure, there’s a drug problem, but not for you and me, not for our kids, right? Sure, houses are getting unaffordable, but that’s a pretty cool deal if you refinanced at 2.9% five years ago. Nothing a little conservative personal responsibility can’t solve. It’s not that bad, you can fly above it. Maybe you should get offline and touch grass.

And even if you convince your friend that these problems are real, what are they supposed to do? Are we supposed to vote for Republicans harder?

And then you get into a much trickier conversation. At a certain point you have to acknowledge that actually, the Republicans are the ones doing this to us.

Why?

Because the Republican Party’s purpose is to slowly fail.

In frontier America, including in the Utah territory, the federal government employed Indian Agents. These agents were sent to establish official relations with the local Indians — to create a formal channel that the Indians were supposed to follow if they had a grievance with the settlers or the government.

Of course, the intent of federal policy was always to move in and expropriate the Indians — but the Indian Agent’s job was to create the illusion of a diplomatic process — to continually make promises they couldn’t keep, to vent political energy, to prevent alternative constituencies from forming.

Today, that’s the Republican Party’s job: to negotiate the terms of your surrender.

The party recruits ambitious men who want a career in politics. They ensure that those careers depend on the national party infrastructure, the donor networks, and the consultant class. These are people who like making friends, and making money, and being taken out to lunch.

It is extremely cozy — for now — to be a Utah Republican politician who does not make waves. And not only that, the media will fawn over you, and tell you what a hero you are for abetting the rape of your country.

Now, the Plains Indians were in an impossible situation, hopelessly outnumbered and outgunned — but our puzzle is, Heritage Americans are still more than half the country, and the overwhelming majority in Utah. They’re way more than half the police and armed forces. Our Indian Agents tend to be local boys — and from what I’ve seen, we’re not sending our best.

Nothing about this feels inevitable.

How did they convince us to do this to ourselves?

Anti-Soviet dissidents in the Eastern Bloc faced the same confusion. The Soviets repressed the population with military force, but the actual officers and bureaucrats, the functionaries of the regime in East Germany were mostly East Germans; Poles in Poland, Hungarians in Hungary.

In his essay, Power of the Powerless, Vaclav Havel talks about the greengrocer who hangs his “Workers of the World Unite” poster in the shop window — not because he’s a committed Communist, but because it’s simply what you do — and if you didn’t do it, it would be noticed.

Do you remember the black square thing, during BLM?

That whole operation was designed around the scrolling grid of an Instagram feed — the whole grid was supposed to be blacked out, so that if anyone was saying anything else, it would stick out, and you could mob them and berate them for not complying.

According to Havel, the greengrocer is not expressing a political opinion. What he’s saying is: “I, the greengrocer, live here and I know what I must do. I behave in the manner expected of me. I can be depended upon and am beyond reproach. I am obedient and therefore I have the right to be left in peace.”

If that doesn’t sound like Utah.

It’s stunning how much of Havel’s essay, written in the Brezhnev era of the declining Soviet Union, maps to what we experience today, from the hypocritical language of human rights, to the judicial corruption, to the underhanded methods of punishing dissent — by threatening your job or your education, encouraging petty harassment, and so forth. It’s almost one-for-one — except instead of being conquered by Soviet tanks, we somehow voted for this.

How did they convince us to do this to ourselves?

Well, we talked a bit about how that happened last month — how the federal conquest of Utah created an institutional anxiety to conform — a tyranny of the people, by the people.

But the question now is, how do you break people of that?

You’ve tried talking to your friends and neighbors, and you’ve seen how that has gone. It’s easy to get discouraged.

But go read Havel’s essay. Havel was a playwright — he ran little gatherings smaller than this one, under a far more heavy-handed regime, with a much more openly corrupt political and legal system — and he won. Havel was the first elected president of Czechoslovakia.

I’ve spent the last five years — since we started EXIT — studying any parallel movement that I thought might have anything to teach us.

How did Havel go from being an underground essayist, running little reading groups and secret university classes, to taking the Presidency almost unopposed in 1989?

How did Lech Walesa go from being an electrician in an illegal trade union, to executing a 12-million-man general strike that crippled the Soviet government and ended the occupation of Poland?

How did the Founding Fathers go from anon poasters to fielding a conventional army and beating down the most powerful empire on the planet?

Some of you are anon poasters. Maybe you’ve been talking about politics on the internet for a long time, and from here that kind of victory may seem far away.

It feels like ideas don’t matter — it doesn’t matter how clear it is, or how right you are — your grandma is still going to vote for Spencer Cox, and Spencer Cox (or someone just like him, he’s not the point, there’s a thousand of them) is going to make sure that your dispossession is orderly, quiet, and complete.

But if your model of victory is that your grandma needs to get redpilled, you need to understand: that’s just not what politics is — neither transformative politics, nor even ordinary get-out-the-vote politics.

It’s not that ideas don’t matter, or that poasting never leads to power: in fact, almost all parallel movements start with poasting. The Founding Fathers had their pamphleteering, the Soviet dissidents had samizdat, the Ayatollah smuggled cassette tapes.

But the Founding Fathers didn’t win by getting the median American colonist to read their essays on political theory.

They won by mobilizing an energetic and dedicated minority to contest the regime’s legitimacy, and then contest its sovereignty — and that’s what politics is.

Each of these parallel movements began by building fraternal, economic, and social institutions among a small group of like-minded people, to replace the public square that repression had hollowed out.

They formed book clubs, neighborhood watches, mutual aid societies, trade unions, underground universities — they got to know and trust each other by building things that they knew their community needed. That’s what EXIT is doing as a fraternal organization, and Constitutional Action is the logical next step.

You don’t break the greengrocer’s habit of obedience by getting him to read your Substack. You break his habit of obedience by showing him an alternative way of life, by proving to him that he does not have to lie.

That’s what it means to contest the regime’s legitimacy — you contest its status as the default, because the greengrocer, or your grandma, is always going to do the default thing.

And the methods that a movement uses to contest legitimacy are, by definition, moral, lawful, and popular. They have to be, because that’s what legitimacy is.

You have to demonstrate, by doing what the regime purports to do, and promises to do, that all its compromises, all its hypocrisies, all its excuses for inaction, are lies.

President Bukele didn’t just call the Right in El Salvador cowards and hypocrites — he proved that they were cowards and hypocrites by doing in a matter of months what they said could never be done.

They said that attacking El Salvador’s crime and gang problem would be too unpopular, it would collapse the economy, it would trigger international sanctions, it would start a civil war.

Bukele showed the world that those politicians weren’t letting it happen because they were prudent or high-minded or pragmatic — and they sure as hell weren’t thinking about the rights of their citizens — they were just on the take. And now he is the most popular head of state in the world by far. But he couldn’t just say it — he had to prove it.

Lech Walesa was able to mobilize 12 million Polish workers because he showed them what it looked like when an institution actually organized and empowered workers — and by doing that, he showed them just how fraudulent the communists were. He broke the back of the regime’s legitimacy — but not just with a criticism. He had to show them.

I don’t know if you’ve read your county’s Republican Party platform, but it’s actually pretty good.

In Havel’s words: ”If an outside observer who knew nothing at all about life in Czechoslovakia were to study only its laws, he would be utterly incapable of understanding what we were complaining about.”

The Republican Party claims to believe in states resisting Federal power in accordance with the Tenth Amendment. They claim to believe in self-defense, traditional marriage, secure elections, public safety, and parents rights in education. They claim to oppose illegal immigration, birthright citizenship, and benefits for illegal aliens.

Now — you live in a state completely controlled by these people, from top to bottom — but they tell you that the reason you can’t have literally anything that they claim to want is that your Republican politicians are just that principled, that committed to civic virtue.

Of course that’s a joke — but we have to prove it.

So Constitutional Action is developing candidates for office who will act within their constitutional authority, to demonstrate what is possible in this state.

Anti-communists in Eastern Europe had the idea of life in America, or Munich, or Paris, they had smuggled Japanese electronics and Led Zeppelin albums, to prove that life could be different.

This was a mixed blessing, because it also meant that many people who wanted freedom and vitality simply left the country.

But freedom-loving people all over the nation are watching Utah right now — because for us, there is no Munich or Paris — there is nowhere to run. If we cannot hold the line in Utah, we cannot hold the line anywhere.

But this is also our opportunity. We can make Salt Lake City the most beautiful, vital, free city in the country — the example of what is possible to the whole nation. And we can do it by restoring the principles that made America the City on the Hill in the first place.

And in the meantime, we will do the work as citizens.

Friends who are watching Utah right now are ready to publicize corruption as we expose it.

We will clean up the squalor that the state refuses to clean up, and help the people they refuse to help — and we will document what we find, and ask them publicly, in city council meetings and town halls, why they refuse to help.

We want the people to see — and, just as important, we want you to see — the people with names and faces who are suffering in your state — and the people, with names and faces, who are inviting and intensifying that suffering — sometimes for money, sometimes for much less. We will make them look us in the eye.

We will use state public records law to obtain information that Utah Republicans don’t want publicized, about exactly who is being arrested in our state and who is being released, and for what crimes.

We will investigate fraudulent refugee and homeless initiatives connected to elected officials in the state, and expose the channels by which Utah Republicans get paid to betray their people.

We will monitor public schools and libraries to ensure that they act in harmony with the intent of state law, and we will hold administrators publicly accountable when they cover for abusive and anti-American teachers.

We will phone bank and knock doors to oppose the retention of corrupt judges, and to ensure that Blake Moore is not allowed to sell his Congressional seat to the radical left and then buy another one.

The purpose of all this is to punch a hole in the Republican apparatus of managed decline —

To bring state and national attention to incumbents who are used to doing their work in the dark.

And into that gap, we send our own people — leaders who will act to solve the problems we expose.

We will prove that Utah’s actual values can win, and that our people can govern themselves according to those values — that decline is not inevitable.

We will prove, in fact, as the Eastern Europeans did, that it is our enemies who are on borrowed time: that it is the lying — the absurd lying — that cannot go on forever.

And when it breaks — as lies always break — we will have built a city, and a state, and a people who point the way for America, as America once did for the world.

EXIT News

• Upcoming EXIT Group Calls

  • 5/19: Joost Strydom, CEO of Orania, will join us to discuss how they built a parallel polis in South Africa. (2PM ET/11AM PT)

    • Please note that this will be an afternoon call, to accommodate Mr. Strydom’s time zone. At the regular time (9PM ET/6PM PT) we will have a postgame members-only conversation, and discuss the establishment of the EXIT HQ/Clubhouse in Utah Valley.

  • 5/26: Nick Weil will discuss the art of the Boomer Whisperer

  • 6/2: Investment Showcase — an opportunity for EXIT entrepreneurs to give a report on their progress. (If you’d like to be included in the showcase, please reach out ASAP.)

• Events

  • 5/16: Washington, DC Meetup

  • 5/16: Sandy, UT Hike

  • 5/18: New York City Meetup

  • 5/18: Dallas Meetup

  • 5/19: Manchester, NH Meetup and speaking event with Free State Party

  • 5/30: Utah Valley Constitutional Action Beautification Event

  • 6/5: San Jose Meetup

  • 6/6: San Francisco Lunch

  • 6/19: Denver Meetup

  • 6/27: Salt Lake City Passage Press Event

Below the paywall here:

Cocktail hour invites for supporting subscribers in:

• Washington DC (5/16)

• Dallas (5/18)

• New York City (5/18)

• Boston (5/19)

• San Francisco (6/5)

• Denver (6/19)

EXIT cocktail hours are the best way to get to know the guys in your area, and decide if full membership in the group is right for you.

Radical Family Camp, Indianapolis.

Met the Indianapolis crew at Joshua Sheats’ Radical Family Camp. It’s hard to provide a great experience with a light ticket price, — especially over multiple days, especially for families — but their team (several of whom are EXIT guys) absolutely nailed it.

~200 attendees, tons of kids, and great vibes — an inspiration for how we want to do the next NatalCon. More to come on that topic soon.

My only regret was coming by myself. Next year, we’re packing up the van and bringing the whole family.

Leadership Group.

EXIT has launched a “Strategic Leadership and Preparedness” group to collaborate on special projects.

The group is composed of 25 EXIT members, divided into General Staff, Intelligence, Operations, Logistics, and Communications teams. A few of the projects we’re working on together:

• “The Moldbug app” (a set of tools for coordinating national political activism.)

• Utah political action group (OSINT, comms, operations support for ground team)

• Tennessee political action group (same)

• Area study templates (allowing EXIT guys to perform a “paint-by-numbers” area study of their community, identifying threats and opportunities.)

• EXIT tech stack refresh (creating secure internal search, EXIT data repository, etc.)

15 Meetups in 14 cities.

Each of these was a recurring meetup run by the guys. We’re up to 330 members nationwide, and over the next quarter we are expanding monthly meetups to San Francisco, Boston, Las Vegas.

Here’s how we’re getting to critical mass in your city:

• Regional E-meetups: Connecting EXIT guys virtually across one of 6 regions (Northeast, Southeast, Midwest, Texas, Rocky Mountains, Pacific Rim).

• Weekend Meetup: Organizing a group that might be a couple hours apart to drive in for a weekend event.

• Monthly Meetup: Once we have 8 guys within a 100 mile radius, we plan a regular monthly meetup.

• Family Meetup: Once we get to ~20 members within a 100 mile radius, we can start arranging regular family events (barbecues, holiday parties, picnics, pot lucks, etc.)

We also hold cocktail hours in select cities for supporting subscribers to this newsletter. This is the best way to get to know the guys in your city, and decide whether full EXIT membership is right for you. Become a paid subscriber here:

Subscribe now

Utah GOP Convention.

We had a dozen EXIT delegates at the State GOP Convention, along with another dozen or so Constitutional Action members.

We were mainly there to learn: what do the delegates care about? What are the politicians selling? Does any of this even matter, or are the levers of power truly occulted?

We were surprised to find that the delegates are basically our people already — they’re just a little afraid to get creative.

They’re also deeply demoralized: no one was particularly excited about the candidates or the process. The delegates were there to support a handful of politicians who are supposed to be the Real Republican Insurgency — but when you ask the delegates about these guys, you hear a lot of stuff like “he’s decent”, “she means well”, “he’s trying hard”.

The establishment candidates, meanwhile, are running on the benefits of their incumbency: they’re on committee seats, they have existing back-scratching deals to bring pork back to the state, etc.

Pretty bleak picture — but the good news is that these people are not unbeatable. When I told a certain Congresswoman’s comms director that we had 100 people coming to a speaking event later that month, his face became a mask — these are candidates for national office, and they’re struggling to get a dozen people to show up to a meet-and-greet.

The biggest win of the day was starting up the chorus of boos during Blake Moore’s speech: he was visibly rattled, it generated embarrassing headlines, and it led to a lot of conversations with the delegates. (Lots of people hadn’t even heard that he was the architect of the redistricting fiasco — and these are the most high-info voters. Truly, online is not real life.)

Will it matter, in the general election, that he was practically shouted off the stage at convention? Unclear. Our main goal was to find out where the power actually flows, which institutional nodes are worth contesting — and we won’t have a complete answer to that until the election.

Anyway, the boys had fun yelling at him, and a good tactic is one that your people enjoy.

Constitutional Action, American Fork Veterans’ Hall.

Second meeting of Constitutional Action doubled our previous crowd: standing-room-only at 100 attendees. Just have to do that five or six more times and we’ll be bigger than the state GOP.

The Veterans’ Hall was the right place to do it. It’s tucked behind a grimy bar (which had patrons promptly at 11AM) and a tattoo parlor.

The American Legion post commander told me that they can hardly afford these buildings anymore. He asked me if we were Democrats or Republicans; I said, “We’re trying to do something outside those categories”. He said “Oh. I hope that’s good.”

The interior wall was lined with photos of servicemen from Utah who had died in foreign wars. I spent a long time before the event looking at their faces — very open, handsome, classic Utah faces — and it occurred to me that we cannot afford to be even a little bit cynical about America’s history or its future.

Local EXIT guys showed up early to help with security, A/V, and logistics — and EXIT men from out of town are helping with operations and legal as we expand.

The event itself was a hit. We are still learning how to do this, but the crowd was energized and ready to work: more than half of the new attendees signed up to volunteer after hearing the pitch.

I’ll post our full remarks (along with some added commentary) next week, but the bottom line is this: we are going to expose our fraudulent “conservative” political class by ignoring the procedural excuses that they hide behind, and actually doing what they pretend to support — as citizens for now, and as a slate of candidates in 2028.

It will start this month, May 30th, with a beautification project: cleaning up abandoned homeless encampments that the state has left to rot on our hiking trails. Join us:

Join Utah Valley Beautification 5/30/26

Provo Family Meetup.

For the EXIT guys, my priority this summer is to get the families together: house parties, picnics, barbecues, etc. We’re piloting in Utah because it has the greatest density of families, but the next phase for all of our active meetup groups is to get the wives and kids together.

Last weekend, the Utah crew had their second family meetup of the year. One of the guys hosted the Utah Valley crew for brisket and ribs at a local park. 15 adults and ~25 kids. The energy is getting more relaxed, the wives are starting to set up playdates independently — you can sense the transition from “meeting up with Weird Online Friends” to just getting together with friends.

In the cities where we don’t have this kind of critical mass, a good alternative is public events: if there’s just two or three EXIT guys in town, arrange to meet up at the Fourth of July Parade. (We will be banging this drum aggressively for the next two months.)

What’s coming in May:

• Weekly Full Group Calls:

  • 5/12: the Leadership Group will present a Preparedness update, discussing the tools and resources they are compiling to improve our emergency preparedness.

  • 5/19: we will hear from Joost Strydom, CEO of Orania, on building a parallel polis in a hostile and declining state. There is still time to apply and join us for the Q&A. The weekly call will be moved to 2PM ET/11AM PT to accommodate Mr. Strydom’s time zone.

  • 5/26: EXIT guy Nick will present on Boomer Whispering — his experience building relationships and doing business across generational divides.

• Whistle-stop tour of DC, New York, and Boston. I’ll be speaking at a Free State Party event in Manchester, NH on 5/19, on the topic of “Building things that iterate”. If you’re on the East Coast, join us for a cocktail hour.

• City Club Development. We have taken our preliminary concept to the planning and zoning department — we have a space that may be workable, if renovations are approved by the structural engineer. Learn more about the EXIT city club plan.

• Constitutional Action Beautification 5/30.

We are building faster than I would have thought possible when we started, but we need to accelerate — 10X and then 100X the scale and speed — because we are running out of time. We need a whole lot more capable, aligned friends than we have right now, and so do you. Join us at exitgroup.us.

Below the paywall:

Cocktail hour invites for supporting subscribers in:

• Nashville (5/8)

• Washington DC (5/16)

• Dallas (5/18)

• New York City (5/18)

• Boston (5/19)

• San Francisco (6/5)

• Denver (6/19)

EXIT cocktail hours are the best way to get to know the guys in your area, and decide if full membership in the group is right for you.

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• Prospects for Alberta secession

• Bilingualism as gibs for Quebec in federal govt

• Why Poilievre was crushed by Mark Carney

• Chinese money laundering in China through banks and casinos

• How the occupational class sells the commons to India, China

• Emergent identity groups forming as geographic borders evaporate

• The blockbusting of Canada

• The role of fraternities and mutual aid societies in post-Westphalian society

EXIT News:

• Weekly Calls:

  • This week (4/28), we heard from on lessons from the founding of Sparta and Rome. Recording coming soon.

  • Next week (5/5), we will discuss values-aligned venture capital.

• Constitutional Action meeting in American Fork was a great success — we filled up the veterans’ hall with about 100 people. Video soon to come.

  • We will meet again Saturday, May 30th for a neighborhood beautification project in Utah Valley. Sign up here to join Constitutional Action and receive updates.

  • Huge thanks to our volunteers, who have already begun assisting with logistics, security, A/V, web design, legal, and more.

• Below the paywall, invites for EXIT subscriber cocktail hours in:

  • Washington, DC (5/16)

  • New York, NY (5/18)

  • Boston, MA (5/19) — JCB speaking at a Free State Party event in Manchester, NH.

  • San Francisco (6/5)

  • Denver (6/19)

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I hear a lot of reasons why nothing can be done.

• The Republican Party is useless

• The structure of modern politics inherently favors our enemies

• The only actions available are immoral

• The only actions available will land us in jail

• It’s too late to do anything (demographic change is irreversible, the libtards closed the doors to infiltration behind them)

• It’s too early to do anything (the boomers need to die, things need to get worse, etc.)

• We can’t emulate historical winners because our problems are too different

• We can’t emulate historical winners because they were just the libtards of their time, coasting on the currents of inevitable libtard victory

Next week in Utah, we’re going to explain why all of that is nonsense.

We’re going to lay out the history of movements that successfully defeated and supplanted modern managerial regimes, under conditions that were, in many ways, more challenging than our own:

• Heavier state surveillance

• More totalizing narrative control

• Fewer practical constraints on official power

• Their political and legal systems were far more fake

• Prospects of extralegal resistance were even less favorable

We’ll discuss some “good guy” cases that are cleanly exemplary (Czech anticommunists, the Polish Solidarity movement, the Founding Fathers), as well as a few “bad guy” cases from which we should take narrower lessons — but what all these movements have in common is this:

They contested the state’s legitimacy long before they contested its sovereignty.

By this we do not just mean that they critiqued the state’s actions (though exposing the managerial state’s corruption and hypocrisy and ill will is part of dismantling it, for reasons that we will explain.)

These movements contested the state’s legitimacy by picking up responsibilities that have been abdicated, starting in the domain of “civil society”: clinics, schools, media and publishing, youth groups, trade unions, volunteer emergency response, etc.

All things that “good citizens” were in theory permitted — in fact, in theory, encouraged — to do.

We will describe how these movements’ (by definition) legal, lawful, and popular actions earned them a deep reserve of credibility and goodwill with the people.

This “reserve account” made the movement increasingly difficult to target, even as they became obvious competitors with the state, openly taking on responsibilities that the state claimed to provide for the citizens, but that it did corruptly, ineffectively, or not at all in practice:

• dispute resolution

• shadow land recording

• parallel credentialing

• election monitoring

• illegible finance, etc.

In the cleanest and best cases, the contest for sovereignty only began in earnest (with the revolutionary movement assuming military and law enforcement functions) when the contest for legitimacy was already over.

As the incumbent regime decayed, the new movement built legitimacy brick-by-brick, taking over more and more basic functions — until one day, the movement was simply The Government, and its enemies were the rebels, unable to reconquer a population that now viewed them as foreign, hostile, and criminal.

Dozens of successful movements have followed this basic pattern, and nothing about our technological or political situation suggests that the pattern has changed.

In fact, we will discuss in detail just how precisely the 20th-century anticommunists’ diagnosis mirrored our own, what they did about it, and why they succeeded.

We will identify what is new and different from the historical cases: we face (solvable) challenges that the historical victors did not face — but also opportunities that they could not have imagined.

We will demonstrate that our enemies are not historically unique, either in their power or their wickedness — and overcoming them will require neither impossible virtue, nor a willingness to lose one’s soul.

It will require ordinary, decent people to show up.

If you are in Utah, sign up to join us here:

RSVP for Constitutional Action 4/30

We will invite in-person attendees to join Constitutional Action, and volunteer for beautification and door-knocking activities in May.

The event will also be recorded and made available to subscribers.

Subscribe now

Below the paywall, invites for EXIT subscriber cocktail hours in:

• Chattanooga, TN (4/24)

• Washington, DC (5/16)

• New York, NY (5/18)

• Boston, MA (5/19)

• San Francisco (6/5)

• Denver (6/27)

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is the author of Leaving a Legacy and the Becoming Noble Substack. His work, like EXIT’s, is the restoration of the multigenerational family as a sovereign institution — a Great House. He has left his tech job in London and relocated to Romania to write and consult for high-net-worth families full-time.

In this Q&A, we discuss:

• Johann’s relocation to Romania, and Eastern Europe as a place to build

• How his experience in the elite tech world colors his new project

• Why there seems to be so little imagination and ambition among the wealthy

• Categories of patronage that are still alive in high-net-worth circles

• Strategies that have worked in reactivating patronage relationships

The West is in the political and cultural doldrums because wealth has become totally decoupled from vision and ambition. The skills, temperament, and worldview that create great wealth seem almost anticorrelated with the will to change the world.

As the world becomes more volatile, much of this fake wealth and status will either evaporate or change hands. We have to build institutions that capture as many of these existing streams of wealth and power as possible, and convert them into something that will matter on the other side.

Below the paywall, Invites for paid subscribers to attend EXIT events in:

• Columbus, OH (4/18)

• Dallas, TX (4/20)

• Chattanooga, TN (4/24)

• American Fork, UT (4/30) — Constitutional Action Speaking Event

• Washington, DC (5/16)

• New York, NY (5/18)

• Boston, MA (5/19)

• San Francisco (6/5)

• Denver (6/27)

Read more

Many on the left (and certain factions of the right) have been freaking out over Trump’s latest Genocidal Madman post.

He says:

“A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again. I don’t want that to happen, but it probably will. However, now that we have complete and total regime change where different, smarter, and less radicalized minds prevail, maybe something revolutionarily wonderful can happen. WHO KNOWS. We will find out tonight. One of the most important moments in the long and complex history of the world. 47 years of extortion, corruption, and death will finally end. God bless the great people of Iran.”

So there was speculation about whether Trump was going to nuke Tehran, or deploy the space lasers, or demonic UFO zero-point-energy anti-gravity wonder weapons. And of course, nothing happened, because nothing ever happens.

But many are still Deeply Concerned about the President’s Rhetoric.

The evening after he posted this on Truth Social, it looks like the Iranians, mediated by Pakistan, came to the table and at least in principle agreed to a two-week ceasefire. That will depend on whether or not Bibi wants a ceasefire. We will see how it goes, but the Plan Trusters are saying, “See, Trump was crazy like a fox. He freaked you out, he freaked them out, and that is why everybody came back to the table.”

So, during Operation Giant Lance in 1969, President Nixon sent nuclear-armed B-52s to press Soviet airspace for three days.

During this time, Kissinger is on the phone with the Kremlin nonstop, warning them that Nixon was drunk and dangerously unstable and his finger was on the button. In the same year, the North Koreans shot down a spy plane and killed 31 American crewmen — a story you probably did not hear about in history class, and that is part of the point I am going to make here.

The story is: Nixon is loaded. He is furious. He orders a tactical nuclear strike on the North Koreans. But apparently he is incapacitated enough that Kissinger is able to step in, countermand the order, and let Nixon sleep it off. In the morning, he thinks better of it.

There are also accounts that Nixon was basically drunk throughout the entire 1973 Yom Kippur War, which was a three-week period.

Some of these stories should probably be understood as damnatio memoriae, a retrospective discrediting of Nixon by his enemies. But it seems to be true that, number one, Nixon really did drink a lot, and number two, he deliberately cultivated his enemies’ belief that he was a volatile and irrational actor.

Now, what was different back then is that this whole drama took place with Nixon on the Red Phone, one-on-one with the Kremlin, and the public either never heard about it or heard about it years later.

Whereas Trump is playing Drunk Nixon live on the timeline.

But in both cases, the strategy only works if the Russians, or the North Koreans, or the Iranians — who study American leaders much more carefully than the median American voter — have good reason to believe in this irrationality.

There is no way for the American leader to wink at the voters, or even at his staff, to say, “I am running dread game, everything is going to be okay.” And not only that, but you cannot just deploy this tactic when you need it. Nixon needed to be a guy who drank a lot for this tactic to work.

Trump does not drink, but he is definitely mercurial, and in addition to that being a true fact about him, he has also cultivated that as an image.

So if you got got by the most recent Genocidal Madman tweet, that is not, in principle, an absurd thing to believe. He is definitely volatile when it is smart to be volatile, but he is also just volatile all the time.

I cannot be sure that is what he was doing, or what was going through his head, or whether that was a smart thing to do, or even whether it is a good idea in general.

We know various leaders have done it — but, given our information environment, even looking back, it is hard to say a whole lot. For instance, in the 2017 Kim Jong-un “Rocket Man, my button is bigger” thing: we, the public, still do not know — may never know — the exact contours of North Korea’s nuclear program.

We have some basic information about what they were doing, the big visible tests, but we do not actually know how they felt about what Trump said, or even really what they did about it. It does seem like they went back to launching test rockets.

And even looking back as far as the late sixties and early seventies, it is pretty tough to prove the counterfactual in some of these nuclear standoff situations.

We still do not know exactly what the escalation calculus was on either side in 1969 or 1973.We do not really know what Nixon’s real goals were. We do not know actually how drunk he was. Some facts are better corroborated across people with different axes to grind, and maybe that is useful.

But that is the point: you just don’t get to know.

When this latest thing popped off on February 28th, everybody rushed onto Twitter with the Takes: whether this was righteous or wicked, whether it was prudent or foolish — all of this predicated on:

• our respective stockpiles and output of munitions

• the escalation ladder

• the penetrability of Iran’s underground sites

• how resilient their leadership bench was to a decapitation strike

• where the KC-135s were

• whether the transponders were turned on or off

• what we know about Iranian sleeper cells

And of course, it was all bullshit. Nobody knew anything. If you were closely monitoring the situation, you were anti-informed — the information you received was worse than useless.

And it was just bizarre to see so many Based and Redpilled guys talk about this war as if the public ought to know or could know, ought to be consulted or even could be consulted in theory about it.

We are all talking about whether or not it is a good idea, and it is like — we do not even know what “it” is.

They do not tell us what they plan to do. They do not tell us what their objectives are. They do not tell us whether they think it is likely to succeed, and what justification they have for that belief. They do not tell us what they think we could gain. They do not tell us what they think we could lose. They do not tell us what we might lose if we do not do anything.

And that is the top-level strategic summary stuff. They are definitely not going to tell you where the submarines are and where the B-52s are, and how many JDAMs we have got and how many Shaheds they have got, and what about the radars.

All that stuff is classified to the gills for the obvious reason that you cannot let the enemy know your mind.

You may or may not have a good plan, but if you have a good plan, the very act of consulting the public about it makes it unworkable. None of this is to argue that any of this was prudent or morally justified — just that all of the information that you or I would use to make that kind of assessment is not available.

And that is fine. A lot of this is entertainment. If you like your unplugged controller, you can keep your unplugged controller.

But it got me thinking about how media-managed mass democracy seems to be changing.

The last war we officially declared — which is, not coincidentally, the last major war we were able to conclusively win — was World War II.

I am going to suggest two reasons why that is the case: why World War II was the last major war, and why, to the extent that subsequent military interventions have been successful, they were successful. First reason is information control, and the second reason is information tempo.

In the 1930s, in the run-up to World War II, the Roosevelt administration had either captured or, to some extent, invented the modern apparatus of narrative control through mass media. The public was not consulted about the attack on Pearl Harbor. They had no time to theorize about what FDR knew and when he knew it — which, if they had had that kind of time, some serious doubts may have arisen.

But instead, on the front page of every morning newspaper, they were given a single data dump that said: here is what happened, here is what it means to you, here is what is going to be done about it.

And from then on, every piece of information they received about the progress and prospects of that war was heavily censored — literally just marketing materials pulled from this curated reserve of facts and stories, or just made stuff up. That was what you got. All you knew was what they told you.

Our entry into World War II — actually, just prior to our entry into World War II, 1940 — was when the government inaugurated the military intelligence classification system, which now codifies and in fact guarantees that the public cannot be provided the means to render informed decisions about foreign policy.

And of course, as we seem to learn more and more every day, foreign policy and domestic policy in the Empire are not easily separable.

As our constitutional conservative autist friends point out, the United States was never intended to be a democracy.

The founders recognized that government by plebiscite is not only undesirable but impossible. And so it was a republic, a representative form of government.

Various politicians and thinkers have been more or less honest about this, but there has always been a hypocrisy and unreality to this idea of popular sovereignty, because our whole system of government was carefully structured around the recognition that the voter is actually stupid — and very much in the way, actively unhelpful when any actual decisions need to be made.

You can understand the structure of the government as basically trying to get as much of the legitimizing function of democratic accountability with as little practical exposure to actual democratic accountability as possible.

The representative, at the time, was a latency buffer to give the system time to think. If all these decisions are being made and disseminated on horseback, and your representative has to ride to Washington and go behind a locked door with no recording equipment to make these decisions, then the system is capable of OODA loops that extend across weeks or even months without the possibility of any disruption from the public, or hostile domestic or foreign agitators of the public.

So if you are not familiar with that term, an OODA loop is a decision-making model used in the U.S. military. It stands for Observe, Orient, Decide, Act.

The speed with which you are able to

1. Gather relevant intelligence from your surroundings — that is Observe.

2. Make sense of that intelligence, those facts, and your relationship to them — that is the Orient step

3. Decide what to do, and then

4. Act: do what you have decided to do.

The speed with which you can do that, and then iterate — act, then observe the consequences of the action, orient yourself with that, decide again, act again — that is your operational tempo.

This framework is used in the military because it is specifically valuable for contested, competitive decision-making environments.

If I can get through an OODA loop faster than you can, then I can change the terms of the game, change the environment, so that you are deciding and acting on the basis of out-of-date observations and orientation. That is called “getting inside your OODA loop.”

So if you are trying to prosecute a war as a mass democracy, as an elected official, one of the ways your enemy can get inside your OODA loop is by manipulating public opinion — partly because maybe you are worried about the next election, but also conscientious objection, civil disobedience, protests.

The reason I lay that out is that communications and transportation technology have sucked all this friction out of the system that was actually load-bearing for that system — particularly a system predicated on the fiction of popular sovereignty.

You could draw an analogy to the hypocrisy and fakery around immigration. When Europeans had to take a three-month boat ride to get here, and everyone else it was six months or nine months or not at all, you could afford to say things like, “Oh yeah, we want everybody. Anybody who wants to can come here” — because realistically, who was going to come here was heavily, heavily selected.

Now that we have airplanes and literally anybody can come here, one of the biggest political questions of our time is: “okay, did we really mean ‘anybody’”?

And all these conversations about freedom of religion that we had between basically Northern European Protestants and a handful of Catholics — we are having to say, okay, does that actually universalize? Does that actually generalize to every conceivable religious belief on planet Earth?

All these advances in communications and transportation technology are pulling all this really useful friction out of the system and forcing us to confront — maybe it is not even fair to call it hypocrisy — but just that we came up with an inherently local solution, and maybe some of the Founders thought it would generalize, but it turns out not to generalize.

With respect to fighting wars: on horseback, our political system worked. With telegraph and rail and steamships, things got pretty shaky.

That is a non-trivial part of what incited the Civil War: Americans got to know each other, especially Northern and Southern Americans. They realized they did not like each other.

This dissonance of values and custom, that previously only a handful of rich, highly mobile people had had to confront — well, now you are seeing the bad things going on in Charleston being disseminated almost in real time in Connecticut and Boston.

During the war, as much as we talk about how the North had the advantage in rail lines and telegraph lines and logistics, they were also challenged back home by these communication changes.

Suddenly the speed and detail with which wartime hardships could be exposed, or tactical decisions could be second-guessed, or diplomatic maneuvering could be criticized — all of those things were suddenly at an order of magnitude higher resolution and crossing the country in a day instead of a matter of weeks.

And so Lincoln says, not without justification, “We have got to win this war.” Suspends habeas corpus, locks up a lot of journalists, tells the newspapers what to print, and wins the war.

As technology pulls friction, pulls buffer out of the system, these competing political directives are now grinding metal on metal.

The political promises we have made to legitimize the state grind against the actual practical need for the state to get things done.

Lincoln solved that the hard way: the insight that FDR discovered — or that he represented, his team, his philosophy, his government — what they discovered was that this apparatus of narrative generation was actually capturable, and that it was actually cheaper, faster, more efficient to capture that narrative apparatus than it was to fight it and coerce compliance.

And so for basically the whole of the 20th century, we had instantaneous, centralized mass communication, which meant that you could have basically rock-solid, in some sense genuine, popular sovereignty. Genuine popular legitimacy. Genuine popular buy-in — because all the raw materials of that public opinion, all they knew was what you told them.

And all the discourse, all the terms of every debate, was this very clear one or two or three options that you set up. You sometimes tell your kids, “What vegetable do you want with dinner? Do you want the broccoli or do you want the asparagus?”

And apparently it works just about as well with grownups as it does with kids, because for almost a hundred years, Americans really thought of themselves as having these informed opinions and making these choices, doing their duty as a citizen.

The problem that had been caused by the speed and the depth of this communications technology was solved by its centralization. And in fact, the state now had more popular legitimacy than ever.

But you can draw a pretty clear line from our combat effectiveness and operational constraints in World War II to Vietnam, to Afghanistan, to Iraq, and now potentially Iran.

The more the public demanded to be involved in the war effort, the less successful it was.

This dimension of OODA loops helps you see why some U.S. military interventions seem to work and others do not. For an operation to work now, it has to take place within a single news cycle.

Panama, Venezuela, Grenada, Desert Storm — all these things could be presented to the public as basically, “Hey, by the way, we did this and it is over.”

Certain dedicated, semi-professional anti-war constituencies are going to be mad about those things, but basically nobody else is, because the news cycle just moves on.

This is one reason why the U.S. military and intelligence community have really transformed, doctrinally and structurally, toward this very SOF-heavy, very spook-heavy, cloak-and-dagger, in-and-out, overwhelming-force model of warfighting — because they are trying to extract an entire war’s worth of political outcomes out of a single news cycle.

But you can see how that forces the empire to teeter on this very, very tiny balance point. We have got this enormous global apparatus of intelligence and force projection, all built around making sure that problems never get so big that we cannot handle them with a couple of Black Hawks over a weekend — which means we actually have to care what is going on everywhere in the world.

We actually have to be paranoid and invasive, because it is actually not that uncommon or that difficult for some foreign power structure somewhere to get irrevocably too big for us to handle that way.

We are dominant in that kind of engagement, and it looks like we could probably handle ourselves in a strategic nuclear exchange: but everything in that “messy middle” — the architecture on which our political legitimacy is built just does not support that.

And it is not because the voters are directly consulted from moment to moment. It is because the institution cannot lie to the public without lying to itself.

The Iraq War is the best example of this. In the run-up and execution of the Iraq War, the DOD could not maintain a clean separation between its public justifications and its internal planning. The institution had to become dumber in order to stay publicly coherent.

And as the information environment gets more transparent, more decentralized, this need for coherence with the public story — and so this need to get stupid — gets worse.

You can frame all that narrative control and censorship and classification and dirty tricks as a sinister conspiracy to abolish democratic accountability and practice — and certainly it did that — but it is hard to say exactly what the alternatives were.

You can say, “I want a democracy where my voice is heard and I am kept informed and the politicians work for me — that also wins wars.”

And you just cannot have one. Democracies do not win wars, especially not globally networked, instantaneous, real-time democracies.

This certainly is not an endorsement of the war — I think it is going to go badly — but it is a condemnation of spectacle.

You should not take a posture with respect to these things that assumes you are a stakeholder in the decision, that they are looking for your consent, that your assessment matters, that the outcome depends on whether enough people believe the right thing. That whole discourse is a malfunctioning control system.

I make this point a lot, but in The Forest Passage, Ernst Jünger talks about plebiscites and referenda and elections, and how the real purpose of all the propaganda — the reason they want you to participate in these processes — is not to persuade you of a particular set of facts necessarily, but to get you invested in questions that you cannot personally influence, in which you are not actually involved.

Because if all that psychic energy is devoted to the global and the spectacular, and you begin to feel “this is what matters, something must be done about this” — well, the only way to satisfy that psychological need is to pick a team.

But I say it is a malfunctioning control system because that narrative ecosystem is so fragmented, so decentralized, so leaderless that letting you play with your unplugged controller no longer gives you this feeling of buy-in.

“I am a responsible citizen doing my civic duty to become informed about the events I am going to vote on” — it sort of still matters in the sense that free speech still matters a lot to the architecture of political legitimacy.

But for the most part, the Take Economy, particularly on matters of foreign policy where all of the operational details are classified, is just running on inertia. It is spinning on its own internal logic.

It is partly a form of entertainment. It is partly a surrogate activity, a form of masturbation. And obviously, I am not trying to pretend I am above either of those things.

But the more I become aware of this dynamic, the more I can see what is happening, I am thinking two things:

First: this enormous architecture of the empire is just obsolete in a hundred different ways. Its contradictions, its imprecisions — you could call them manufacturing tolerances — there used to be a lot more buffer between the components. Now it is just metal on metal, and it is going to break.

And the second thing I am realizing is that I want to convert as much of this fake stuff that I have — including, to some degree, attention in this fake, jerk-off, Take Economy — into something real. Something that is going to matter as all the fake stuff burns off.

I want to find the domain of action where I am not playing with an unplugged controller.

And that does not mean think small or abandon the political. It just means to acknowledge where you really are and what you really have the power to influence.

We were having a conversation in the EXIT chat about this latest outrage where the guy who stabbed Iryna Zarutska, after however many dozens of arrests and trials, this time was found not competent.

And of course it is wrong and it makes us angry. I have said in detail publicly what I think about all that, how I think we got here.

But the question I ask myself when we are expressing anger is always: what are we doing here? What do we hope to accomplish? Are we building capacity or burning capacity? Does this make us stronger or weaker?

The Take Economy and discussing these outrages, or discussing the difficult realities of our political situation — including, in the Iran case, our entanglements with Israel — those discussions are good when they lead you to organize, when they inspire productive action.

One of the things I hope to accomplish with EXIT is to create that bridge from impotence and rage and demoralization and fantasies about violence to real action and the accumulation of real power.

One of the really bad dynamics that emerges in this Take Economy is that, since nobody is doing anything, nobody has any real power, the status game and the way you signal seriousness is paradoxically by how alienating and how unrealistic and how fantastic your take can be.

The problem with these fantasies is not that they are extreme, or radical or even, in principle, that they involve force: the problem is that they are fantasies.

And the more you indulge them and ruminate on them and insist on them as tribal signifiers, the farther you get from actual power.

I do not know if anybody engineered it that way, if that is the explicit design intent of the take economy, but it is super convenient that that is what it does.

And so we have this situation where the whole country, but particularly young men, are intensely radicalized in their capacity as consumers and observers of the spectacle.

But one of our guys in the civic engagement chat just posted a ballot for the Republican Party primary in his county, and there is no candidate for sheriff.

It is a position of enormous political power, basically right up there with the DA in terms of how much it determines what your actual practical rights are in your community. And even a zero-dollar campaign with a handful of volunteers can impose immense costs and force the enemy to deploy resources — but we are just giving it away.

One of the guys put together a church beautification and garbage cleanup for a downtown cathedral in his area. He was immediately made chair of a GOP party committee and got a job at the courthouse.

All this stuff is lying around. But The Discourse is engineered to keep you talking and thinking about what you feel like doing instead of what you actually can do.

You can understand why people want to live there: when you wake up in “the Desert of the Real”, the scope of your actual opportunities can feel painfully small — especially compared with thinking of yourself as a statesman on the Internet.

When people say Twitter is like a PvP video game, there is a sense in which that is literally true. And especially as the real world gets more volatile and uncertain and difficult to navigate, the seduction of these surrogate activities gets stronger and stronger.

But the way to think about that is that the competition has all the same problems.

This fragmentation, this fear, this disorder, this lassitude — it means that a handful of high-morale, high-trust, dedicated, loyal guys who deserve to be in charge can make themselves the only game in town.

Jünger published his book in 1950, and you could feel his resignation in the face of these immense abstractions.

The concept of the Forest Passage, the thesis of the book, is basically: how do you survive as a human being — how do you keep your soul — in the face of this colossal, superhuman machinery?

But the good news for us is that that machinery is failing.

All those abstractions no longer command any loyalty from ordinary people. It is all just stasis, inertia, incumbency.

While our practical zone of control in the real world may be small, the potential to expand that zone of control — especially for organized people — has never been greater.

And the price is just to put down the simulacra, put down the surrogate activities, take stock of your position in the real world, and get organized.

That includes political organizing: EXIT guys are doing phone banking, fundraising, door-knocking for aligned candidates here in Utah with the Constitutional Action Society.

But it also includes economic organizing: we do an entrepreneurship call, real estate, AI; we have done a machine learning boot camp, a business incubator.

It also includes organizing as families — getting our wives and kids together. The social dimension of who your family spends time with, who your kids grow up around, is a massively important point of leverage.

So that is how we are taking action. That is how we are organizing for power.

We have 325 active guys now. We have monthly meetups in a dozen cities.

And it just could not be more obvious to me that this is where the energy is. These are the guys who are going to figure it out. As everything else falls apart, these are the guys who are going to carry the fire.

But we need to get a lot bigger. We need to find a lot more of that kind of guy.

If you want to get involved, check us out at exitgroup.us.

In this Q&A, we discuss:

• Johann’s relocation to Romania, and Eastern Europe as a place to build

• How his experience in the elite tech world colors his new project

• Why there seems to be so little imagination and ambition among the wealthy

• Categories of patronage that are still alive in high-net-worth circles

• Strategies that have worked in reactivating patronage relationships

The West is in the political and cultural doldrums because wealth has become totally decoupled from vision and ambition. The skills, temperament, and worldview that create great wealth seem almost anticorrelated with the will to change the world.

As the world becomes more volatile, much of this fake wealth and status will either evaporate or change hands. We have to build institutions that capture as many of these existing streams of wealth and power as possible, and convert them into something that will matter on the other side.

Below the paywall, Invites for paid subscribers to attend EXIT events in:

• Columbus, OH (4/18)

• Dallas, TX (4/20)

• Chattanooga, TN (4/24)

• American Fork, UT (4/30) — Constitutional Action Speaking Event

• Washington, DC (5/16)

• New York, NY (5/18)

• Boston, MA (5/19)

• San Francisco (6/5)

• Denver (6/27)

Read more

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

Read more

[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.

• 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