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Top story:

Vineyard’s City Council voted to get rid of its Flock cameras. Ben Wilson opens with a question that goes beyond surveillance: if police already know who a suspect is and have witnesses who can identify him, what would another camera have changed? And why have Utahns come to expect that any new technology or policy initiative will be used against them? Vineyard vote coverage · Vineyard City Council packet and resolution · Utah legislative audit of the Salt Lake County DA’s office

Ben and Kevin Dolan take that question through rampant Medicaid home-care fraud, radical leftist violence at universities, and the growing impossibility of finding a neighborhood where ordinary Utahns can raise a family on a single income. They discuss the fight over Utah Amendment B, what we learned from Flavio Bolsonaro’s defeat in Brazil, and why the work of recruiting candidates for Utah’s 2028 Republican primaries has to start now.

The throughline is that a representative government cannot function when huge swathes of the electorate regard the society they live in as fundamentally illegitimate, and believe they have a moral right to defraud and parasitize it.

The closing discussion takes up LDS Apostle Quentin L. Cook’s warning about anonymous cruelty online. Kevin discusses posting under a pseudonym, being doxxed, and why we should not tolerate a situation where responsible people with jobs and families are afraid to speak under their own names.

Show notes

Recorded on Election Day, November 3, 2026.

• 0:00 — Top story: Vineyard drops Flock. Ben connects the vote to the Blue Line TRAX stabbing case, prosecutorial discretion, and due-process objections to red-flag laws.

• 5:33 — Who gets to use the tools? Ben and Kevin discuss the discretion officials exercise in applying the law, from police surveillance to proposals to help young families afford housing.

• 10:25 — Medicaid home care, fraud, and assimilation. The hosts discuss Luke Rosiak’s reporting on no-show home healthcare fraud in Pennsylvania, then broaden the conversation to immigration, assimilation, and public spending. The Daily Wire investigation

• 23:18 — A fight at the College Republicans’ table. A campus confrontation at the University of Utah prompts a discussion of political violence and how universities respond. FOX 13 reporting

• 29:27 — A West Valley killing and the price of a safe neighborhood. The hosts discuss the killing of Abraham Martinez. Ben recalls visiting a Taylorsville neighborhood where a teacher’s salary could support a family, and they ask how public safety came to be priced into housing. KSL reporting on the charges

• 39:27 — Amendment B and the business of ballot initiatives. The proposal would have required 60 percent approval for certain initiatives that increase taxes. Ben and Kevin discuss campaign spending, Utah’s caucus system, and the burden of asking voters to decide more questions directly. Utah’s voter pamphlet · Post-election reporting

• 48:47 — Brazil’s runoff and election monitoring. The hosts discuss Lula’s reelection, Bolsonaro’s departure for Miami, and their concerns about election administration. Official result from Brazil’s Superior Electoral Court

• 57:15 — Why start on 2028 now? Ben and Kevin make the case for contesting Republican primaries and recruiting people for precinct, city, and county offices while there’s still time to organize.

• 1:04:12 — Anonymity, pseudonyms, and doxxing. Elder Cook’s devotional leads to the Federalist Papers, Kevin’s experience going public, and what online anonymity made possible for people who risked losing their jobs.

• 1:18:54 — What makes it possible to speak openly? Kevin connects EXIT’s work on entrepreneurship and civic organizing to the costs of speaking publicly. The hosts close by debating the role of employers, HR, and the EEOC, then invite listeners to get involved.

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The hour is late in our country, and Utah’s ruling class has not shown a glimmer of the ambition, imagination, or foresight that the moment demands.

Utah needs a new class of leaders: a cohesive group of creative, dynamic, values-aligned friends willing to take responsibility for Utah’s future, and the nation’s.

We need to reindustrialize the state and the effort must be led by people with a holistic interest: building businesses and a community that they will be proud to present to their children.

On November 13–15, EXIT is joining Delphica Society, IM-1776, and Frontier Magazine for the Great American Weekender in Salt Lake City.

Honored guests include:

• Harvey Scott, chair of Utah County Chamber of Commerce

• Ben Wilson, founder of Constitutional Action and The Classical Society

• Kai Schwemmer, College Republicans national political director

• Riley Beesley, chairman of Utah College Republicans

• Thomas Hinnant, chairman of the Art and Literature Foundation

• Ulf Torsten Kemmsies of Archytas Energy Technologies

• Jesse Han of Math Inc and Morph Labs

• Robert Mendelsohn of Actinide

We will host leaders across a broad range of fields, from synthetic fossil fuels, defense AI, cloud-seeding, mining, refining, and modular nuclear power, to civic organizing and communications. We’ll discuss industry as art, and the ambition to build things that matter.

We’re spending the weekend together because the kind of connections we need take time to build, and we want it to be worth getting on a plane for. There’s a seated dinner on Friday, cocktails and dancing on Saturday, and a resort brunch on Sunday.

Many like-minded friends are feeling isolated and demoralized right now. We want to help them see the exciting work that other friends are doing, particularly here in Utah, and to recognize just how many dynamic and creative people are in their corner.

If you live here and feel some responsibility for what happens to this state, I hope you’ll come. If you live elsewhere, I hope you’ll make the trip, meet the people who want to build here, and see what you might want to be part of.

Tickets are limited. Use code EXITFRIENDS for 20% off.

Get your ticket now

See you there.

Kevin Dolan

EXIT

0:00-13:15 - EXIT and Kevin's origin story; cancellation & doxxing in the Bad Old Days

13:15-19:46 - Top Story: POPAI and violent left-wing extremism in Utah and beyond

39:33-54:17 - Utah AG sues Kalshi; federalism & preserving Utah’s distinctiveness

54:17-1:07:13 - BYU's sports success; decay of college teams into Brand Identities

Top Story: POPAI extremists advocate assassinating the President, murdering children

This week’s top story: the Cougar Chronicle published a minute of audio recorded by a patriot infiltrating a Provo antifa chapter, “People of Provo Against ICE”, or “POPAI”. In the recording, two speakers, identified as POPAI leaders Venna Anne and Ashton Hirschi, discuss the necessity of killing children to achieve their political objectives.

I’ll quote the captions from the recording in order:

Someone says to Anne: “You just can’t get away from capitalism.”

Anne answers: “No, unless we kill everybody.”

Hirschi, the voice of reason, responds: “We don’t need to kill everybody. Just... some.”

Then Anne says: “You also have to kill their... children. We need to do that for all the evil people. We have to kill those 10 people for each of them.”

Anne realizes she’s out over her skis, even for this crowd, so the two of them work out a number. “It’s like, 500 people that we NEED to kill.”

Later someone asks whether people like ICE agents could “integrate into society.” Hirschi asks who exactly they mean, politicians or billionaires, and gives his answer: “No. Those f---ers gotta go. Period and point blank.”

And when the subject turns to, quote, “counter-revolutionaries, or, like, MAGA people,” he says: “There’s a possibility. It would have to come through reeducation.”

Kill the leaders. Kill their children. Reeducate everyone else, and shoot them if they don’t like it. That’s the vision, in their own words.

This is the same group that passed around stickers reading “Shoot Trump, Be A Hero.” The Chronicle reports that Anne called the stickers “sick af” and told members to “put them up” around Provo.

The designer of those stickers was Hector Mujica, a Venezuelan illegal alien. POPAI leaders told Mujica to “double down” on the calls for assassination, and called the stickers “beautiful” — but they triggered a DHS investigation, and ICE took him into custody in downtown Provo on October 16th.

Another prominent member of the POPAI chat is David Chappell, Democrat candidate for state house district 62, covering downtown Provo and Springville. Chappell regularly attended the group’s meetings and protests, and participated in their group chat until the final weeks of campaign season.

When confronted about his association with POPAI, he said he’s a pacifist who condemns violence — but he didn’t condemn the murder of children when his friends called for it in their chats and private meetings.

When asked about it in public, he at first said he wasn’t a member — then said he was “no longer a member” — and “idk if I will be more involved afterwards”. He’s such a devoted pacifist that he’s not sure if he wants to rejoin his friends who call for mass murder.

After heavy pressure on X, he threw up his hands, saying, “Whatever y’all. There are more serious things to deal with”.

I don’t know what he thinks is more serious than shooting kids and putting conservatives in re-education camps — but apparently he’s not alone.

The Utah Democratic Party clearly thinks it isn’t that serious — they ignored multiple requests for comment. They’re comfortable with this candidate representing them in Provo — and why wouldn’t they be? Is anyone going to hold them accountable?

The Utah media also thinks it isn’t that serious.

You would think that an antifa group with 80 members, including a major-party candidate for the legislature, publicly advocating the assassination of the President, and privately calling for the murder of children, in Provo Utah, would be news — but as of this recording, not a word from KSL, the Deseret News, the Salt Lake Tribune, or the Daily Herald.

For that matter, the Utah GOP seems to think it’s not that serious. No statement from the governor, the Utah Republican Party, the city of Provo, the sheriff’s department — radio silence from the conservative establishment.

Now, when our friend Kai Schwemmer was appointed Deputy Clerk in Utah County, the knives came out immediately. His associations with America First influencers was covered in every Utah news outlet. More than eighty Republican women, including eleven mayors, ten state reps, and three state senators signed a petition calling for his removal. Schwemmer was stripped of his responsibilities the same day.

These people aren’t actually asleep at the wheel — they can mobilize within hours when they have a problem. They just don’t have a problem with communists advocating mass murder.

No open letter. No press conference. No hand-wringing about “losing public confidence”.

With one exception. When Senator Mike Lee saw the Chronicle’s reporting, he tagged the FBI Director and the Attorney General, saying quote: “This far-left group has violent ambitions. Those ambitions culminate in bloodshed. Please bring them to justice, before they kill.” Later, he wrote, “Someone knows who these people are. They must be found and stopped.” And the following day: “We all wish the threats against Charlie Kirk had been taken more seriously.”

We at Constitutional Action could not agree more. We hoped that, if anything good could come from the murder of Charlie Kirk, that it would be that Americans, and Utahns in particular, would wake up to the seriousness of our situation: that they would understand that hundreds of thousands of people, including many in their own state, would celebrate if they were murdered in front of their family for their politics.

But that didn’t happen. Utah’s Republican establishment doesn’t want to acknowledge that a cancer of violent leftism is growing on their watch — because that would require that they demonstrate virtues other than politeness. It would require them to take bold actions that would make them unpopular in the media, and at parties, and make it harder to get a book deal.

We don’t think these people are ever going to get it. You can’t wake someone up who is pretending to be asleep. They need to be removed from their positions, and replaced with Utahns who are a match for this moment.

And here’s how you can help that along:

1. Call or email the Utah Republican Party, the Governor’s office, and your own state representative and state senator. Ask them one plain question: have you listened to the POPAI audio, and what is your public statement?

2. Ask the same question of every Republican who signed the Schwemmer letter. If they could find their voice over a clerk’s streaming career, they can find them now.

3. Ask Attorney General Derek Brown and the Utah County Attorney’s office whether they are reviewing this.

4. If you live in House District 62, or know someone who does, the election is November 3rd. Ballots are already out. Make sure every voter you know in South Provo hears about this.

And finally, share this segment.

The Utah establishment media have decided this isn’t a story. Fine. Help us get the word out.

You can also join us for our post-election meeting on Veteran’s Day, November 11th, where we’ll discuss the fallout from the midterms, and how Constitutional Action is getting ready for war in the 2028 Republican primary.

You can also follow Constitutional Action on X, Youtube, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.

If you’d like to support our reporting, public awareness events, or our nationwide neighborhood cleanups, please consider becoming a contributing member at constitutionalaction.org.

Consensus is that we’re getting a Blue Wave next week.

Many elements of the Online Right are in revolt over the war in Iran, the pace of deportations, as well as ongoing slights from GOP mouthpieces against young white men — personified in the crowning of Vivek Ramaswamy in the Ohio Republican gubernatorial primary.

I don’t know how much this online phenomenon will matter to the outcome of the midterms: it seems like the headwinds are probably, mostly, a function of gas prices, inflation, and the bottom falling out of the labor market. “Kitchen table issues”.

But because many of these guys are my friends, it seems worthwhile to explain why I think we should still organize and vote within the GOP in the races where it counts, even though I basically agree that these people are controlled opposition, their job is to create the illusion of a legitimate political process, and they need to be destroyed.

I’m not a Plan Truster.

We’ve all been hoping that the drumbeat of escalations — Trump’s conviction, the various legal and violent threats, narrowly surviving an assassination attempt, the murder of Charlie Kirk — would persuade the Administration that there is nothing to gain from coloring inside the lines.

Friends have been saying variations of this for over a decade at this point — and enough those friends are now in the Administration that I don’t think the failure of action is rooted in anything sinister or conspiratorial. The mood in DC is that they’re doing “everything that can be done”.

And maybe they’re right: they’re in a better position to know than I am. Maybe they have reason to believe that if they ordered the kind of decisive action that we have all been hoping for, they would simply not be obeyed (and might be arrested.)

In any case, it doesn’t look like this administration is going to invoke a state of exception or renegotiate the fundamental structure of American politics — which means that the ostentatious provocations and petty norm-breaking are counter-productive, and will only be used to justify reprisals from our enemies, who do believe that they can invoke a state of exception and be obeyed.

This is where the “Panican” arguments are on the strongest ground:

Whatever you believe about the decision-makers’ intentions, or “whose side they’re on”, it doesn’t look like they’re going to overcome the entrenched interests that they were elected to overcome.

The GOP is still controlled opposition; they still prostitute themselves to every foreign interest that can afford them (notably though not exclusively the Israelis), and they are still far more aligned with “the bipartisan consensus” than with the coalition that elected Donald Trump. The transformative change that we wanted — and that seemed necessary to avert the Bad Timeline — doesn’t seem to be coming.

I know many patriots who have worked themselves and their families to exhaustion trying to change that, so I find the sneering and accusations of disloyalty disgusting — but if Trump was “the Flight 93 candidate”, it’s worth remembering what happened to Flight 93. Sometimes things don’t go the way you hoped.

I’d like to be wrong, and there are almost certainly many reasons for optimism (or pessimism) that I’m not seeing. One of the consequences of entering this much higher-stakes, more-volatile phase of politics is that spectators like me just Don’t Get to Know.

But here’s where the critical and pessimistic approach to the Trump Administration becomes ridiculous:

• Arguing that a Kamala Harris Administration would have been remotely equivalent (let alone preferable).

• Arguing that we have any leverage to “punish” the GOP in any productive way (at this time).

The best defense I can make of these arguments is that they’re womanish expressions of emotion, meant to be taken seriously but not literally.

To address the first argument:

We have friends who would be rotting in prison in a Kamala Administration.

A simple continuation of Biden immigration policy would have meant more than 7 million more illegal immigrants in the country, if you credit the official statistics — and they wouldn’t have simply maintained course and speed, they would have accelerated.

If you think the Trump Administration has failed to respond with sufficient energy to the threat of leftist violence, how would things be improved by having DOJ and DNI actively collaborating with Antifa, as they did during the Biden Administration?

All potential sources of financial support for friendly organizing (particularly crypto) would be targeted for increased federal scrutiny, as they were under Biden and Obama.

It would still be explicitly legal (and in fact mandatory in major corporate settings) to discriminate against young white men and Americans, and to punish even anodyne “dissident” speech.

The immigrant fraud mafias would have billions more to send to Democratic (and Republican) politicians.

What element of organizing for power do you imagine would be easier under these circumstances?

Having ordinary politics foreclosed to you doesn’t actually make radical political action easier.

For the last thirty years, analysis has been the bottleneck for the unimaginable volume of surveillance data at the government’s disposal. AI tools will make threat-detection trivial at every level, from identifying (or creating) violent actors to social media censorship and doxxing.

The radical elements — the plausibly violent elements — would be the first to face infiltration and crackdowns, empowered by both these new tools, and the new crisis narrative that both parties have spent the last decade nurturing.

All of these are reasons to be glad that Republicans retook power in 2024, even if you are disappointed with how it has gone, or fear the measures taken are inadequate. All of these problems will be an order of magnitude more intense in the event of a 2028 Democratic victory.

(And, it goes without saying, you would still have had slavery to foreign interests, and a moribund job market, and inflation, and war.)

As for the second argument:

There is no world in which MAGA stays home, the Democrats retake the government, and the Republican Party tacks right to “win you back”.

The GOP establishment can always find new voters, and they would prefer to. They want to lose, they want to be the outer party — that’s what “controlled opposition” means.

The establishment GOP — including many who are currently bandwagoning with the Trump Administration — are dying for an excuse to put all this unpleasantness behind them and come back into the fold of respectable politics. That’s why they are deliberately alienating and dividing the base.

It’s also why they are refusing to cooperate with the Administration’s efforts to consolidate power with efforts like the SAVE Act: they believe a second Reconstruction is coming, and they want to make sure they’re on the right side of the new regime.

If the “MAGA-not-Republican” voter decides to stay home (as they did prior to 2016), our enemies in the Republican establishment will not panic — they will celebrate. They will enthusiastically declare the movement dead, cheer as the radicals are purged and “faith in Our Institutions restored”, and pick up the votes (really, the donors) they need from the center.

The only way to break that intransigence — if it can be broken — is to force them into a winning coalition that isn’t going away.

To the extent that the 2016 and 2024 MAGA coalitions wrung concessions out of the Republican establishment, it wasn’t by throwing elections to the Democrats, but by convincing the careerist quislings that Trump was the permanent future of the party.

I feel the same anger my friends do at the open subversion of our interests: but if you think the Republicans are traitors who are deliberately throwing the game, you obviously cannot hurt them by throwing it first.

When you feel powerless, it’s tempting to settle for emotional catharsis — “if nothing I do matters, then at least I can give them a piece of my mind.” But no matter what you believe about what has happened over the last two years (or why), it isn’t remotely over — and we should never decouple our actions from our aims.

First: we can punish establishment Republicans and force them to tack right — in the primaries.

The Vivek Ramaswamy campaign is a perfect example of what not to do. Ramaswamy received the anointing from the Trump Administration and the Ohio GOP, and all credible GOP contenders obediently dropped out.

The only candidate “crazy enough” to reject that consensus was Casey Putsch, whose campaign floundered because he wanted to emote more than he wanted to win. Now, Ohio voters face a hideous choice in what should have been a safely Republican seat.

I’m not telling you that you have to suck it up and vote for Vivek — I’m just telling you that you no longer have any real leverage to punish him, or the Republicans who anointed him.

In 2028, we need to field serious candidates in every possible Republican primary — especially the safe seats where they aren’t used to spending money, seats that the GOP (and Trump world) would like to hand out to insiders on the basis of seniority and loyalty.

This is the mission of Constitutional Action, which we have created in Utah to replace the cowardly Republican establishment with leaders willing to act.

Whatever else may happen, we will be entering the “post-Trump era”.

Ohio was essentially a fief bestowed on Vivek to reward him for getting in line early (and to get him out of Washington). We can and should scramble these kingmaker arrangements where possible — that’s where actual grassroots political leverage comes from.

The best proof of this is the Democratic Party, which understands power and wants to win. Primaries are savagely contested by the radicals, but no one in the DSA would dream of throwing an election to a Republican on accelerationist grounds. The radical right somehow discovered a political idea so insane and retarded and unworkable that even communists won’t touch it.

But that will take a lot more work than sitting out, and we’ll need every day of the next two years to get ready. We’ll all have to learn how to act normal, and not take any bait, and swallow our pride to appeal to a middle that we’re accustomed to regarding with contempt. But if the Democrats can get that done with literal covens of lunatics and mutants and demoniacs, I have faith that we can figure it out.

Second: no matter what you believe is coming, time and freedom of action are invaluable.

Every time I talk about Republican politics, I get someone in my replies saying, “Oh, you want me to vote for the controlled opposition? You want me to vote for liberalism going the speed limit? You want me to vote for slow decline?”

And my answer is Yes, obviously. Liberalism going the speed limit is better than liberalism that doesn’t have to go the speed limit. Slow decline is better than fast decline. We have work to do, and we need time and space to do it in.

Defeat and decline doesn’t necessarily create any exploitable volatility — at least, not on an acceptable timescale. The collapse of the South African government — which had made all sorts of concessions that infuriated their right flank — did not “shake things up” or empower the hardliners. It triggered a rout of their popular base (some 20% of white South Africans fled the country) and drove the rest into the wilderness for thirty years. Defeat is defeat.

If you talk to those people today (or, more often, their children), it’s obvious that almost any concession that would have allowed them to continue to build parallel institutions within the old prosperity and freedom for even five more years would have been worthwhile.

Noah didn’t pray for the rain to come early so that he could enjoy being vindicated. Whatever you think is coming, we need time to build friendships, gather resources, organize our communities, and prepare our families. We should not throw away the time and freedom we’ve been given out of pique.

EXIT is a fraternal organization that is shorting managerial systems and building the human institutions that comes next. We work together on entrepreneurial, social, and civic projects to build practical liberty and collective sovereignty.

Learn more at exitgroup.us

EXIT News

• Weekly Full Group Call

  • This week (10/27) we heard from , CEO and portfolio manager of Dallas North Capital Partners, on reading global risk: what the current geopolitical landscape means for markets, and how men can position their families and businesses for what’s coming.

  • Next week (11/3) is election night. We’ll be watching the results come in together and having an open-ended conversation.

  • The following week (11/10) we will welcome from Constitutional Action and How to Take Over the World.

• EXIT Events:

  • 11/07, Dallas: Manifest Destiny Ball. EXIT families across Texas are getting together for a black-tie event to celebrate our heritage and look toward our common future. (Members only.)

  • 11/14-11/15, Salt Lake City: The Great American Weekender. In collaboration with Delphica, Frontier Magazine, and IM-1776, EXIT is hosting a weekend salon here in Salt Lake City. RSVP here.

  • 11/21, Orem: Project Paideia Build-a-thon. We are hosting a youth AI buildathon — getting teens to build their own games, websites, etc. Sponsored by OpenAI. Admission is free. Sign up here.

• Monthly private meetups for EXIT members (members can check chat.exitgroup.us or monthly internal newsletter for details):

  • 11/07, Orem, UT

  • 11/13, Nashville, TN

  • 11/13-11/15, McCall, ID (EXIT Member Weekend)

  • 11/13, Phoenix (Networking for Preparedness.)

  • 11/14, Houston, TX

  • 11/14, Seattle, WA

  • 11/14, McCall, ID

  • 11/16, Dallas, TX

  • 11/20, Atlanta, GA

  • 11/20, Washington, DC

  • 11/21, Columbus, OH

  • 12/12, Blue Ridge, TX (UFC Watch Party)

  • 12/18, Washington, DC

  • 12/21, Dallas, TX

• Events with Friends of EXIT:

  • 12/19, Atlanta: 1903 Club Exclusive Dinner Featuring Jeff Deist. RSVP here.

They pay exorbitant taxes — among the highest in any “red state” — for neighborhoods where it’s impossible to raise a family, schools that psychologically abuse children, a justice system that plays catch-and-release with violent criminals, libraries full of leftist trash, parks that are unsafe for their children to play in.

And when they appeal to their Republican leaders for relief, they’re told that doing anything to stem the tide of dysfunction would be contrary to the Constitution and “Utah Values”.

That’s why we started Constitutional Action, to recruit leaders who will treat the Constitution as a mandate for action, rather than an excuse for inaction.

Ben Wilson and I believe that Utahns are ready for something better. — but as long as the median Utah voter gets their news from KSL, the Salt Lake Tribune, the Deseret News, and the Daily Herald, we will never reach them.

So now we’ve created Constitutional Action News. We want Utahns to know what is really going on in their state, and to catch the vision that they do not have to live like this.

There is nothing inevitable about Utah falling into the same dysfunction as California, Minnesota, or Colorado: it is a decision being made over and over again, every day, by weak and cowardly political leaders wearing GOP lapel pins.

This weekly show will focus on Utah issues as we build momentum here — but these stories will be relevant no matter where you live, because what is happening in Utah is happening everywhere. We are facing a national crisis, and it will require a national movement.

In this first episode, we explain how the project began, our plans to field candidates in Utah, and why outrage has become such a dependable business model for the conservative movement.

We discuss:

• Why expensive housing has become a way to buy distance from disorder, with young families paying the price.

• How disparate-impact rules obstruct the enforcement of standards of behavior and competence.

• The case for excluding radical leftists from public institutions.

• Tyler Robinson and the right to a speedy trial.

Top Story: A Salt Lake shooting that became just another news item, and what that says about the level of dysfunction we’ve learned to tolerate.

Subscribe now for Episode 2, where we report on a local patriot who infiltrated and exposed a violent leftist cell in Provo, Utah whose membership includes a candidate for statehouse.

Subscribe now

You can also follow Constitutional Action on X, on Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.

If you’d like to support our reporting, public awareness events, or our nationwide neighborhood cleanups, please consider becoming a contributing member at constitutionalaction.org.

He walks us through the Virginia cursus honorum that proved and developed elites, how these elites built social capital through hos…

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Every quarter at EXIT, we have a review and preview, looking back on what we did in the last quarter and what we’re going to do next. We’re coming up on 350 guys, and the group’s getting big enough that it’s starting to get hard to keep track of everything that’s going on.

My right-hand guy, DB, who’s a former community organizer, has this habit:

Whenever somebody in the group does something impressive in the real world, he says, “You bring honor to the group.” When he first started doing it, I thought it was a little cheesy. But the more we develop this thing and realize what we’re actually doing here, the more I realize that we have to talk openly about what we honor.

If you want guys to play honor games, care about their reputation, and conduct themselves in conformity to some ideal—to LARP in the sense that the Founding Fathers LARPed as Romans—then you have to tell them what that ideal is. You have to tell them when they’re hitting it.

Secondarily, it had the benefit this quarter of allowing me to search for the phrase “bring honor” in the group chat. It immediately pulled up dozens of great things the guys have done in the last quarter.

Of the 340 or 350 guys in the group, 50 or so have become involved at some level in their community’s politics.

We had a lot of guys get made delegates back in the spring. Several have been appointed to leadership or communications positions in their county GOP, and virtually all of these organizations are basically nursing homes.

If you’re 35, 40, 45, even 50, you’re the young blood, the new hotness. They want you around. They want to hear what you think, and they want to plug you into positions of responsibility that they’re not interested in doing anymore.

Especially in these comms roles, which can be heavily facilitated by AI, you can wind up exercising a quasi-executive authority: you get to decide what gets said by your county GOP, or at least have a lot of influence over how it gets said. That can be a significant source of power in its own right.

One of the guys lives in a very conservative small town, almost an intentional community.

He started noticing vagrants at the town’s only public park. Like a lot of our guys, he’d been checking in and taking accountability on our civic engagement call. We’ve been encouraging guys to do area studies—really, network mapping—as part of their civic engagement and preparedness: taking stock of where local power flows, who you know, and what your reputation is with various people.

It’s a small enough town that he knows the mayor and the police chief. He also has a very large traditional Catholic family. He called up all his brothers and sisters, and they called their friends, and they got 20 or 30 people to come to a city council meeting. For this little town, that was absolutely unheard of: a shock-and-awe level of political signal.

It wasn’t as though there were some pink-haired constituency actively trying to keep these vagrants in the park. Nobody knew whose job it was or what the protocol was, and nobody wanted to stick their neck out. That’s how a lot of these things go.

There are a lot of bad things happening in our community, in your community, that there’s no sinister constituency for. If you’ll speak up and create the permission structure for action, you can get things done that pretty much everybody wants done. The sheriff went down to the park, got the vagrants on a bus, and this little town lived to fight another day.

Things like this really are where power resides: who decides what is acceptable in the parks, schools, and libraries you pay taxes for.

To the degree that it’s not you, that’s the degree to which you are under occupation. We have guys all over the country talking about how their parks are unusable, how they’ve pulled their kids out of the schools, how the libraries are having drag queen story hour and Banned Books Month, which is basically porn they wouldn’t include in the schools.

Of course, this group’s called EXIT. We believe in strategic disengagement from institutions that create these vulnerabilities. But the purpose of that disengagement is to build capacity and leverage, to go back in, reenter those systems, and recapture them.

By engaging with his distributed, like-minded community, this guy got some tools and ways of talking and thinking that he could bring back to his real-world community. He flexed this civic muscle in a way that every politically involved person in that town now knows about.

Another guy, who’s been running our community engagement call, which is less explicitly political, put together a Fourth of July parade for his neighborhood.

As I understand it, it was a few classic cars and motorcycles people had, and Radio Flyer wagon parade floats. He had dozens of people on his street contribute and get engaged, and they were excited to do it again. They wanted to make it a tradition.

Now that street has a culture, a “thing we do around here” that it didn’t have before. He was the guy who got to decide the texture and color of that story the neighborhood now tells itself about itself.

We’ve had about a dozen guys get involved in the Trump administration at various levels. Some have joined ICE and can now give us this rich, ground-level picture of what deportation operations actually look like, what the command structure’s doing, and what the narrative is among actual ICE agents.

I can’t say too much about it, but there have been at least two items in the news that, if you’re an online Trump person, you would’ve heard about.

EXIT guys in the administration have been working on them for several years and have finally been able to execute and announce them through official cabinet-level channels.

One of our guys got the president of an Ivy League university to resign this quarter. Several quit their jobs and went full-time on their startups. One got significant purchase interest for his intelligence startup. Another successfully defended his dissertation on the appropriate application of AI in pedagogy: what helps kids learn and what makes it harder for them to learn.

Now he’s going to be running our AI youth build-a-thon here in Utah on November 21.

We observe that Utah public schools, like a lot of public schools in America, like having the freedom to assign kids essentially fake work. They’re very hostile to AI because it allows kids to outsource the form-filling and worksheets.

We consider this an extremely important crown in the gutter. Millions of parents want their kids to have an appropriate relationship with AI. Obviously, they don’t want to let them outsource everything and vegetate. But it’s increasingly clear, if you have a career in almost any field, that some proficiency with these tools is going to be essential to earning a living.

Over the last couple of years, I’ve watched the job market go from extremely hot in late 2021, with 0% interest rates and VC money flying everywhere, to this weird new situation where you can build data centers, be a quasi-entrepreneurial AI contractor, or maybe grab a piece of all this defense-base, reindustrialization, command-economy cheddar floating around. But everybody trying to work a regular job, the kind of jobs that existed 10 years ago, is having a really difficult time.

We’re running this educational initiative through the Natalism nonprofit because this basic ability to earn a living is going to be one of the biggest bottlenecks to family formation.

Our headline sponsor for the event is OpenAI.

They’re providing the tokens free of charge. We’re looking to get 200 or so kids, middle school to high school age, in two cohorts on a Saturday. One stipulation of OpenAI’s sponsorship is that we can’t sell tickets. To cover the startup costs, which are looking like $13,800, we’re asking people to go to projectpaideia.com/sponsor, and help sponsor one of these kids to learn about AI.

For future events, we may provision the tokens differently so it can be self-sustaining and we can sell tickets. For this one, we’ve got to raise the capital.

We want to get all our kids using these tools effectively and, just as importantly, not using them in harmful ways. It looks like this technology is what my friend Greg Treat calls an aristocratic technology: it provides highly asymmetric benefits to people who have the aptitude to use it. It empowers individuals and disempowers giga-scaled institutions, which suggests that you’re going to be able to take responsibility for more of your own life, but you’re also going to have to take more responsibility for your own life.

Yes, you’ll have to be more entrepreneurial and think more about fundamental questions of value in your work, because anyone who can feed you this clock-in, clock-out work product to execute on is going to be feeding that work product to an AI instead. But that extends way beyond the job market.

It extends to your cybersecurity, your physical security, your psychosecurity.

One consequence of AI for mass media is that all kinds of digital simulacra—the manufacture of consensus, the sense of virality, the sense that everyone is inhabiting a common narrative—are now effortless to manufacture with total verisimilitude, indistinguishable from the real thing.

There’s going to be this stark division between people who can control these tools and people who are controlled by them.

We’re getting these kids together in an environment where the adults teach, facilitate, and create the conditions and space for the kids to build, but the kids do all the building. They’ll have a handful of team sprints, and at the end they’ll present what they made in small groups.

A lot of the EXIT guys have already come through as sponsors or helped with event planning, marketing, or securing the venue. This is the kind of thing people talk about. It sounds like a great idea, but as an individual, I personally would’ve had no idea how to pull it off. You get enough high-quality guys in a room together, and these things figure themselves out.

Other news from Q3:

A couple of the guys planted EXIT’s banner atop the highest mountain in Idaho. We’re in charge in Idaho now. Remain calm. Do not attempt to interfere.

Constitutional Action had seven beautification events this quarter: two in Utah, one in New York, one in Nashville, one in Seattle, one in Dallas, and one in Montana. We do these cleanups partly to attract like-minded people, partly to build organizational capacity, but also to show people what’s going on in their community and how easy it would be to fix if the people in charge wanted it fixed.

We went to this beautiful public park, Memory Grove. It’s a veterans memorial a thousand feet from the Utah State Capitol, and it’s very nicely kept at eye level. But on this hillside, just beyond the tree line, you’ve got drug dens, needles, knives, and open latrines. If you’re in the governor’s office or the statehouse, you can look right at it from the building.

We pulled four truckloads of this garbage out into the open where people could see it. They were appreciative, but they were also shocked. They were stunned that all this was happening just out of sight from where their kids were playing.

Once you recognize that this is the third most Republican state in the union, overwhelmingly dominated by the Republican Party, you’re almost forced to confront some interesting questions. Who are these people? Who’s really in charge? The voters obviously don’t want this, and they’ve said so at every turn. Why aren’t the voters getting what they want?

We also did a 250th-anniversary barbecue at the Theater in the Pines, a beautiful outdoor amphitheater. About 100 people came out. Kai Schwemmer, the political director of National College Republicans, spoke to us. My Constitutional Action co-founder, Ben Wilson, and I presented a vision of what’s possible in America if our political leaders view the Constitution as an inspiration to act rather than an excuse for inaction, which is absolutely what it is here in Utah.

Last month, Mike Shelby from Forward Observer came out and presented on counter-organizing against the radical left here in Utah, once again filling the American Fork Veterans Hall with patriots.

He asked that I paywall it on Substack because a lot of it will serve as material for other things he’s working on. Subscribers can access that recording here.

On our Tuesday night member Q&A, we had calls with Auron MacIntyre, Patrick Casey, Will Tanner, Kaiser von Loengramm, Scott Greer, the Woolshire fellas, and Jeremy Kauffman.

We had our investment showcase, where several guys with startup opportunities gave their five-minute pitches to an audience of 85 or so EXIT guys. We had book clubs on Albion’s Seed, The Aeneid, A Handful of Hard Men (about the Rhodesian SAS), The Ancient City, and Scott Greer’s White Pill.

I realized something important this quarter as we celebrated the five-year anniversary.

(August 5, 2021, was when we started the group.) As much as I value getting things done in the real world, most of our big wins—and certainly the biggest outlier wins—have come from guys collaborating from all over the country. In hindsight, that makes a lot of sense.

When you have this limited supply of high-quality guys scattered across the country, the odds that all the ingredients you need for this big outlier serendipity, for lightning to strike, will happen to be located in the same place are pretty low.

I’ve really been pushing the guys to come to the calls. A lot of people have Zoom fatigue, but I’ve been doing a lot of Zoom over the last five years, way more than I did at my Square job. I think people aren’t bothered by Zoom. They’re bothered by having conversations they don’t care about with people they don’t like.

So that’s what we got done in Q3.

Our theme was “Making hay while the sun shines.”

Summer was winding down, and it got us thinking about all these ephemeral opportunities, these burning platforms we’re on. Smart people sometimes face that with a lot of anxiety: “Oh no, everything’s changing. Everything’s unpredictable. What can I do?”

One thing we talked about at the 250th-anniversary barbecue was the extent to which all these old systems—the ones propping up the dollar, house prices, and your fake email job, all the guarantors of normalcy—are also keeping us stuck. They’re preventing power relationships from being relitigated, preventing all sorts of things from being built, figuratively and literally.

If you can accept that this state of things is ephemeral and think, “What can I do? What capacity can I build? What resources can I accumulate that will be relevant on the other side of all this volatility?” then you can start to think of this as liberating. You can make hay while the sun shines.

In the fourth quarter, we’re talking about crowns in the gutter.

What stewardship, what responsibility, what authority is being abdicated so that we can either contest it and win or take it unopposed?

That’s the upside of living in a profoundly dysfunctional time. There’s all kinds of responsibility being abdicated everywhere you look.

One of our friends, Fugitive Caesar, spent the last two weeks banging pots and pans, trying to get guys who have jobs connected with guys who need jobs. He was doing it in this loosey-goosey, attention-grabbing, unorthodox way, and a bunch of people had a problem with it.

Connecting needs and resources is a lot of what we do, and we’ve learned a lot about it over the last five years. But the most important thing I’ve learned is that all the respectable people who know the rules and know how to handle this exactly the right way aren’t doing it. Somebody’s got to pick up the stick and figure it out.

A bunch of people were literally like, “No, you can’t post unvetted opportunities. What if someone gets kidnapped and raped and eaten by Albanian drug traffickers?” Give me a freaking break.

Anyway, the point is that all sorts of important jobs that could make a guy a load-bearing pillar in his family, friend group, or community are currently not being done by anybody.

This quarter we’re thinking: how can we get guys picking up crowns in the gutter?

We had our third annual EXIT retreat in Austin this weekend.

I think we’re going to make it twice a year and have another one in March or April. As part of these retreats, we always have a strategy session. What abilities have we cultivated in the last six months to a year? What do we expect to see coming in the next six months to a year? What’s going to change? What do we think the weather and the zeitgeist will be like, and how can we take advantage?

If these predictions seem obvious to you, that’s good. We don’t necessarily want to get cute. We want to respond to what’s obviously happening, what’s right in front of us.

The biggest item is the AI revolution.

For me, Opus 4.6 was the big inflection point where I thought, “I have to use this all the time now.” A lot of our code guys got there earlier. Grok Bot feels like another step change. I’ve automated all sorts of things in the last couple of weeks.

What we’re observing is that the guys getting the best use out of AI also seem to be getting the best use out of EXIT. It’s the guys who have the greatest emotional and intellectual clarity about what they want. Or, if they don’t know what they want, they’re willing to have a lot of conversations and try a lot of blind alleys so they can figure it out experientially: “I tried that. That wasn’t it. So what is it?”

That’s one reason accountability calls are so effective. If you keep showing up, you’re going to sign up to do things, then not do them, and then have to chew on and articulate why you didn’t do them. You’re always signing up for things that are, in principle, attainable. You have to look at yourself in the mirror and say, “I could have done that, and I didn’t do it. Why didn’t I want it the way I thought I wanted it?”

That process only sharpens with AI.

You have the genie in your phone and on your computer, and you can have a velocity of design, testing, and iteration that giant corporations with dedicated R&D departments couldn’t pull off 20 years ago. It’s this muscle of wanting, this precision and clarity of wanting, this appetite for experimentation that seems to make people successful.

There’s almost certainly an extent to which that characteristic is spiritual or genetic, something that’s not teachable. But I’ve seen it happen, including in myself, that you can take someone who seems unfruitful and help them refine and sharpen a vision until they hold it with enough clarity that they can taste it. They can feel that anticipatory eros that drives them to do the necessary work.

As a strategic objective, we’re working on tools for guys inside the group, and people who may be interested in the group, to clarify a vision they could pursue with the group’s help.

That would make them more effective at using all kinds of meta-adaptive resources, omni-tools. A curated human network is an omni-tool. Money is an omni-tool. AI is an omni-tool, a sort of liquid intelligence. The bottleneck seems to be knowing what to ask for.

We talk a lot at EXIT about human cultivation: cultivating ourselves, our posterity, our communities, which is culture in the original sense. That’s what we’ve lost. If you and the people around you aren’t being cultivated into any particular thing for any particular purpose, then there is no culture.

We’ve organized the main lines of effort for the next quarter into self-cultivation, cultivation of the fraternity, and cultivation of our outside communities.

Self-cultivation

AI upskilling will be a primary line of effort. We also have our ongoing six-month fitness challenge, which will conclude in the new year, and we’re continuing our book clubs. It’s never been more important to stay grounded in history as the present moment drags you deeper into algorithmic feeds that are increasingly effortless to falsify. Part of the task of self-cultivation is to stay human and read books.

The final line of effort in self-cultivation is our investment fund. We’ll continue encouraging guys to participate in the entrepreneurship accountability calls, the investment and real estate calls, and get advice, encouragement, and psychological support from the guys. But we also want them explicitly investing together.

The reason is that you can’t buy fraternity.

A lot of well-intentioned efforts toward fraternity in recent years have taken the view that if we get together people who check the right boxes—our kind of people, who look the right way or vote the right way—and tell them they’re a fraternity, they will be a fraternity. That’s obviously not the case.

There’s a rhyme with what the rationalists were up to in the 2010s: “Religion is clearly this very useful social technology. What if we just had a religion? What if we told ourselves we were in a religion?” But all the things that make religion meaningful in your life, all the sociological problems it solves, it solves precisely by making people irrational, immovable, and self-sacrificing. Other people can count on them, which means big, complex, robust institutions can grow, made of these building blocks of reliable relationships and reliable people.

By analogy, if you want fraternity, it’s in the name: you want fictive brotherhood. You want people whose fortunes, interests, futures, and souls are aligned with yours indissolubly, the way a brother’s are. There’s no buying that with money.

What you can do is find baseline-competent, values-aligned guys who want to play games of honor. You can create a walled garden or green zone in which excellence, loyalty, and good faith are explicitly rewarded with trust and opportunities. A place where your reputation matters to you in both a concrete and a spiritual sense, where it’s worth cultivating because these are people whose respect is worth having.

We’re talking about building a place where it’s possible to live in covenant.

In our last long-form piece, “Mom Is Working for Moloch,” we put forward the thesis that fertility decline, particularly women’s increasing disinterest in raising a family, is largely the result of the destruction of these thick, illegible, reputational human domains of life where all the incentives for raising a family live.

It does not make rational economic sense for a deracinated, disembodied productivity unit to breed. There’s no way to incentivize that as a transaction. People will only raise families in covenant, meaning in an illegible, personal, eternal milieu, playing an eternal game.

If you create an infinite transactional marketplace, infinite buyers and sellers, where the commodities of sex and intimacy can be traded frictionlessly, where there are no penalties for defection and no reason to care about reputational capital, some people are willing to live that way. But empirically, they aren’t willing to breed that way.

If you want civilization to continue, you have to restore the capacity for human beings to live in covenant. It has to make sense to play very long games, infinite games, eternal games, theoretically unbounded games. I don’t just want what’s good for me out of this transaction. I don’t just want what’s good for you. I want what’s good for your grandkids and my grandkids.

That’s the task of fraternity.

The only way to create brotherhood on purpose is to get people to place bets on each other and forge this shared history. You could think of it as a reputational commonwealth.

I care about my honor in the group. I care about your honor in the group. I care about the honor of the group itself to the outside world. The more I’ve placed bets on you and you’ve placed bets on me, and those bets have paid off, the more we together have an interest in seeing this thing succeed. Our interests converge in the limit.

That’s no longer theoretical. I’m watching it happen. That’s why we want guys building and investing together. Short of a combat situation, which you can’t manufacture, staking your fortune, some piece of your livelihood, is basically the most intense, dicey way to figure out who your friends are.

I’ve observed this personally.

The guys who went in with me on NatalCon and split a $120,000 shit sandwich with me because it was our first event and we didn’t know what we were doing. The guys who stayed up late grinding spreadsheets and got on planes with me to assess this beeswax processing facility we were trying to buy.

On a certain level, I know who those guys are. I know how they handle pressure. I know how they take feedback and give feedback. I know in a concrete sense what they’ll sacrifice to behave honorably and keep faith.

I had known these guys well before we contemplated doing any of this. I wouldn’t recommend that anybody jump into something like that, even within a curated community. That’s the whole point: you can’t buy fraternity. You have to build it. But there are ways to make it easier to build.

That’s the question I’m always trying to answer with these strategic initiatives. How are we building a shared history? What can we do to shorten the gaps people have to cross to place a reasonable bet on another person and start building?

How do we build actual fraternity?

The challenge we’ve had from the beginning is that we’ve got all these guys online, all over the country. They’re great guys, and they like talking to each other, but there are fundamental limitations to what you can do virtually.

I’ve realized this is not a new problem. It’s been a problem for European aristocracies since there have been European aristocracies. Because they governed these big landmasses, they were of necessity separate from one another. They solved that problem with feasting, hunting trips, and debutante balls.

These practices often get criticized in modern culture as wasteful, extravagant, and undemocratic. But if you belong to a far-flung people and want to maintain and keep building your shared history, making sure your children find their spouses, rivals, and mentors in this distributed social milieu, then you need to travel. You need to make some provision of resources and hospitality for people to come visit you.

If that’s your ambition, what you aspire to do and be, then feasting, entertaining, and hospitality are totally legitimate line items in the budget.

Our guy Jonathan puts a ton of effort into making a great EXIT retreat in Austin every year. The guys in Dallas are putting on their second annual Manifest Destiny Ball the first week of November. They explicitly patterned this after the rallyes mondains, which Pascal Gobry came to tell us about a couple of years ago. These French aristocratic families spare no expense putting together a circuit of great parties so their children can meet and socialize with the kind of people they’d like them to marry.

It’s one step of abstraction up from arranged marriage. We’re not telling you who to marry or what set of people to marry. We want to make sure you have strong, lifelong relationships with this broad set of people, this type of person we’d like you to eventually marry.

This will be my family’s first time attending. We’re sponsoring the event, so we’ll have our banner hung with the other families. Every family has a banner with its crest and words, and they’re beautifully done. You can say it’s a LARP, but everything good starts as LARP.

They called it the Manifest Destiny Ball because they wanted a celebration of American identity looking forward, looking to new frontiers. We’re throwing a Halloween party with Passage Press on the 29th in New York. We’ve got at least two Christmas parties in the pipe. We’re collaborating with Delphika for a great American weekender here in Salt Lake.

The point of all this is to create the space for that shared history. Work, entrepreneurship, and civic action are important. But if you want to get the families together and have them build a shared history, which we do, you’ve got to do some feasting.

Cultivating community

We’ve talked about self and the fraternity. Now, how do we build a shared history with our neighbors? How do we build a shared history with our city? How do we cultivate a reputation for good faith and competence with them? How do we expand the green zone, the walled garden, to include at least some of the people we live around?

Our friend Clay Martin wrote a great book, Prairie Fire, in which he picks apart this prepper mentality: “I have money. I’m going to buy my country bugout, my dacha in the woods, and stockpile my food and ammo. When the dust settles and things calm down, I’m going to go into that country town with my Goldbacks and silver bars and buy up the place. People will give me everything I need because I’ll have the ability to pay for it.”

Clay, among many other impressive things, is a former Green Beret. So, within the special forces, he’s a specialist in dealing with insurgency and counterinsurgency: coming into a country and knowing how to work with the locals. He says, “If you don’t build any relationships within your community, the moment you walk down Main Street with your Silver Eagles or your Bitcoin wallet or whatever you think you’re going to buy things with, they’re just going to shoot you and take it.”

Even if you don’t think we’ll experience that degree of dysfunction, the principle still applies. As things get more uncertain and volatile — however uncertain or volatile you think they’ll get — the well-being of the people around you and their good opinion of you will matter more.

We’re accustomed to these big, faceless managerial rails that deliver everything we need seamlessly to our doorstep.

If you’re taking a short position on those systems, which we are — that’s the EXIT thesis — then you’ll need a new way to get all the things you used to get on those automated, managerial, trustless rails. To the extent we can, we want to make sure we’re individually and collectively well-known and well-liked in our communities for doing important things people need.

Like a lot of things we do, we’re not banking on one particular timeline, one particular eschaton. This is all stuff you’ll be glad you did no matter what. You’ll be glad you built these skills, made these friends, and built these relationships in your community.

In the interest of lowering that activation energy, making it easier for people to cross the chasm and get started, we’re rolling out a template for area studies, specifically with an eye toward community engagement.

Mike Shelby, from Forward Observer, a former Army intelligence guy and an EXIT man, wrote The Area Intelligence Handbook, which I recommend to absolutely everybody. It lays out a framework for exploring and documenting your human geography, physical geography, and the world around you that immediately affects you, primarily, in his use case, as a preparedness tool.

Our twist on this area-study format is locating those crowns in the gutter so our guys can win honor in their communities, acquire reputational capital.

We want to help them refine and clarify their vision for what they want to do and what they’re interested in, then support them in conducting an area study of their community to figure out where the levers are that will allow them to instantiate that vision.

Then we’ll connect them with the resources of our strategic leadership team, a group of 25 or so guys inside EXIT who help facilitate what we call quests. To make it easier for guys to take these leaps, the leadership group helps with anything that can be done remotely: emailing volunteers, working with a municipality, putting together resource lists and how-to guides so guys aren’t going in blind and know what to do.

As we iterate on this process and our guys develop their capacity as leaders and organizers, maybe they get put in a position of responsibility in their local community. That opens up further quests, new opportunities for the guys to organize and build.

We’ve got the midterms coming up

Going back to the inflection points we considered at our Austin retreat, in addition to the opportunities and volatility created by AI, we’ve got the midterms coming up. We talked at some length about contingency planning and what we’d do in either case.

The conclusion was that you have the technological situation, the entrepreneurial situation, the opportunity to be productive and make money. Then you have the political situation and its various threats and opportunities.

If the GOP wins the midterms, we get right back to making hay while the sun shines. We continue upskilling our guys in AI, getting them involved in some of this defense contracting, having our glove up for all this money still sloshing around, as well as the opportunity to train and become familiar with technology that’s clearly going to become more important as time goes on.

If the Democrats win the midterms and some of those opportunities are reversed or dry up, and the psychological energy of our friends and allies is more anxious, more fearful, then we immediately go to work metabolizing that energy to get ready for 2028. A lot of our guys with AI chops have interesting ideas for disrupting campaign management. It’s still pretty low-tech. The tools and intelligence haven’t caught up, and there’s a real opportunity to catch some of our opponents with their pants down.

The ongoing, unfolding psychological and spiritual crisis

That brings me to the last point we discussed at the retreat: people’s demoralization over the political situation, their anxiety over seemingly intractable economic and social problems, the growing ghettoization and unreality of all the channels we use to get information about the outside world. People have a lot going on, and they’re not handling it particularly well.

A lot of people are coming unglued personally. A lot of families are strained. If you’re on Twitter, you can see every day how much effort goes into jamming a wedge into all these fault lines: men and women, the young and the old, religious fault lines. It’s a constant flood of provocation.

I was telling the guys at the retreat that I’m not, by nature or temperament, particularly serene or low in neuroticism. I’m actually a pretty anxious person. But because I have this job, which I owe to my friends who helped build this with me, I never feel like a spectator. I never feel like I’m watching helplessly as things happen to me.

I think that’s what’s messing people up. They feel, and they’re deliberately being made to feel, that the situation is hopeless and completely outside their control. They’re perversely consuming that content as entertainment, and they feel guilty about it. But they also have this idea that these unfolding events are important and they should know something about them. It’s almost self-hypnosis, almost literally like a deer in the headlights, fixated on this thing coming right for you.

I remember exactly how that felt.

But these guys who believed in the mission, believed in me, put me to work.

They gave me a quest. I knew what I had to do, and suddenly I could metabolize bad news into action. It didn’t sit like a rock in my gut anymore.

That’s what I want for everybody, but particularly those guys. I want to do for them what they did for me: put them in the driver’s seat, give them the space and resources to iterate so they can find the quest.

That’s Q4: crowns in the gutter. All kinds of opportunities, all kinds of good things to do.

If you want to get involved, check out exitgroup.us. You can apply there and set up a call with me. We’ll talk about your situation and what you want to get done. Assuming there’s a fit, we’ll get you engaged with the welcome wagon guys right there on the call, get you in touch with your regional EXIT guys, assign you a file leader, and figure out which calls you need to join and who you need to talk to.

Then you’ve just got to show up. Come to a call, come to a meetup — let the guys know in the chat what you want to accomplish, and get to work.

EXIT News

• Weekly Full Group Call

  • This week (10/13) we heard from Joshua Sheats on his efforts to build a Great House, his homeschool curriculum, etc.

  • Next week (10/20), we will welcome The Good Ol’ Boyz (Bog Beef & Maarek) to discuss the future of the GOP and finding opportunities for our friends.

  • The following week (10/27) we will welcome , CEO and portfolio manager of Dallas North Capital Partners, and author of The Eyes of Apelles, to discuss reading global risk: what the current geopolitical landscape means for markets, and how men can position their families and businesses for what’s coming.

• EXIT Events:

  • 10/17, Dallas: Constitutional Action Beautification Event. EXIT and Constitutional Action are getting together to clean up a neglected cemetery in Oak Cliff. Sign up here to join us.

  • 10/29, New York: EXIT + Passage Press Halloween Party. Join EXIT and Passage Press for a Halloween party at Pubkey in Manhattan. RSVP here.

  • 11/07, Dallas: Manifest Destiny Ball. EXIT families across Texas are getting together for a black-tie event to celebrate our heritage and look toward our common future. (Members only.)

  • 11/13, Salt Lake City: The Great American Weekender. In collaboration with Delphica, Frontier Magazine, and IM-1776, EXIT is hosting a weekend salon here in Salt Lake City. RSVP here.

  • 11/21, Orem: Paideia Buildathon. We are hosting a youth AI buildathon — getting teens to build their own games, websites, etc. Sponsored by OpenAI. Admission is free. Sign up here.

• Monthly private dinner meetups for EXIT members (members can check chat.exitgroup.us or monthly internal newsletter for details):

  • 10/17, Houston, TX

  • 10/17, Columbus, OH

  • 10/19, Dallas, TX

  • 10/24, St. Louis, MO

  • 11/07, Orem, UT

  • 11/13, Nashville, TN

  • 11/14, Houston, TX

  • 11/14, Seattle, WA

  • 11/14, McCall, ID

  • 11/16, Dallas, TX

  • 11/20, Atlanta, GA

  • 11/20, Washington, DC

  • 11/21, Columbus, OH

• Events with Friends of EXIT:

  • 10/19, Nashville: Peter Thiel Lecture Series with Pamphleteer. Dr. Bennett will be attending the fourth and final lecture of the series. RSVP here.

  • 10/21, New York: Michael Anton book signing event. Reign (formerly Sovereign House) is hosting Michael Anton to discuss and sign his new book, Studies in Machiavellian Political Philosophy. RSVP here.

  • 10/24, Atlanta: 1903 Club Exclusive Dinner Featuring Andrew Isker. Andrew will be speaking on his new book, “The Seed of Abraham.” Private four course dinner. Jacket required, ties encouraged. RSVP here.

  • 12/19, Atlanta: 1903 Club Exclusive Dinner Featuring Jeff Deist. RSVP here.

We had him on the EXIT Q&A to discuss practical power, coalition politics, narrative strategy, and multi-generational community-building.

Topics:

• “Playing the heel” and expanding the Overton Window so that others can quietly accumulate power

• Managing relationships between establishment Republicans and libertarians

• Free State Party’s policy priorities, and concessions his people have won in New Hampshire politics

• Picking winnable fights in state/local politics

• Mobilizing small numbers of dedicated, competent people to outsized effect

• Building density of like-minded families to build healthy peer groups

EXIT News

• Weekly Full Group Call

  • This week (10/6) we heard from Douglass Mackey on facing prosecution for memes, declining a pardon, and courage under fire.

  • Next week (10/13), we will welcome Joshua Sheats to discuss his efforts to build a Great House, his homeschool curriculum, etc.

  • The following week (10/20) we will welcome The Good Ol’ Boyz (Bog Beef & Maarek) to discuss the future of the GOP and finding opportunities for our friends.

• EXIT Events:

  • 10/09, Austin: Annual EXIT Retreat. Jonathan has reserved an Airbnb in the Texas Hill Country for our third annual Austin weekend. Steak dinner, private tour of a MAHA intentional community southwest of town, hiking at Pedernales Falls State Park. (Members only.)

  • 10/17, Dallas: Constitutional Action Beautification Event. EXIT and Constitutional Action are getting together to clean up a neglected cemetery in Oak Cliff. Sign up here to join us.

  • 10/29, New York: EXIT + Passage Press Halloween Party. Join EXIT and Passage Press for a Halloween party at Pubkey in Manhattan.

  • 11/07, Dallas: Manifest Destiny Ball. EXIT families across Texas are getting together for a black-tie event to celebrate our heritage and look toward our common future. (Members only.)

  • 11/13, Salt Lake City: The Great American Weekender. In collaboration with Delphica, Frontier Magazine, and IM-1776, EXIT is hosting a weekend salon here in Salt Lake City. RSVP here.

  • 11/21, Orem: Paideia Buildathon. We are hosting a youth AI buildathon — getting teens to build their own games, websites, etc. Sponsored by OpenAI. Admission is free. Sign up here.

  • Monthly private dinner meetups for EXIT members (members can check chat.exitgroup.us or monthly internal newsletter for details):

    • 10/10, Houston, TX

    • 10/10, Phoenix, AZ

    • 10/16, Atlanta GA

    • 10/16, Washington, DC

    • 10/17, Columbus, OH

    • 10/19, Dallas, TX

    • 10/24, St. Louis, MO

• Events with Friends of EXIT:

  • 10/10, Knoxville: FORUM event + Football watch party. Join Mass Deportation Coalition and FORUM for a discussion of immigration policy with Ryan Neuhaus and Greg Bovino, followed by a watch party for the Vols game. RSVP here.

  • 10/10, St. Louis: American Fiction Event. Join Oyarsa for an evening of readings feat. Theodore Judson of ARK Press, author of Fitzpatrick’s War and The Timerman, and John Jay Stancliff of Farthest Heaven, author of FEDBOOK. RSVP here.

  • 10/19, Nashville: Peter Thiel Lecture Series with Pamphleteer. Dr. Bennett will be attending the fourth and final lecture of the series. RSVP here.

  • 10/21, New York: Michael Anton book signing event. Reign (formerly Sovereign House) is hosting Michael Anton to discuss and sign his new book, Studies in Machiavellian Political Philosophy. RSVP here.

  • 10/24, Atlanta: 1903 Club Exclusive Dinner Featuring Andrew Isker. Andrew will be speaking on his new book, “The Seed of Abraham.” Private four course dinner. Jacket required, ties encouraged. RSVP here.

[nothing below paywall — paywall is for access to full video conversation]

Read more

Starting this quarter, EXIT is collecting area studies from all over the country — starting with Mike’s book as a template — to identify targets for prosocial action between now and 2028.

Last month, Constitutional Action hosted Mike at the American Fork Veteran’s Hall, to discuss how ordinary Americans can bring their friends and neighbors together to push back against radical leftist organizing in their communities.

Notes:

0:00 Welcome & Constitutional Action intro
5:35 Counter-organizing framework
11:55 Low-intensity conflict explained
16:00 Viet Minh organizing strategy
21:31 Three sources of power
25:39 Conditioned power & motivation
29:25 The Campaign
41:45 Next Steps

We had about 80 people turn out to hear Mike speak, and signed up 38 new members of Constitutional Action. (You can join us at constitutionalaction.org.)

At Mike’s request, his presentation is paywalled in full.

Become a paid subscriber now to receive this and other EXIT content, including full recordings of our Tuesday night Q&As. Upcoming Q&A guests include Curtis Yarvin, Jeremy Carl, Blake Masters, Ron Dodson, Kevin DeAnna, and more.

Subscribe now

If you want to join us in building fraternity and organizing for power in your community, you can apply for full membership at exitgroup.us.

EXIT News

• Weekly Full Group Call

  • This week (9/29), we had our Q3 Review/Q4 Preview and discussed the overall vision of EXIT.

  • Next week (10/6) we will hear from Douglass Mackey on facing prosecution for memes, declining a pardon, and courage under fire.

  • The following week (10/13), we will welcome Joshua Sheats to discuss his efforts to build a Great House, his homeschool curriculum, etc.

• EXIT Events:

  • 10/09, Austin: Annual EXIT Retreat. Jonathan has reserved an Airbnb in the Texas Hill Country for our third annual Austin weekend. Steak dinner, private tour of a MAHA intentional community southwest of town, hiking at Pedernales Falls State Park. (Members only.)

  • 10/17, Dallas: Constitutional Action Beautification Event. EXIT and Constitutional Action are getting together to clean up a neglected cemetery in Oak Cliff. Sign up here to join us.

  • 10/29, New York: EXIT + Passage Press Halloween Party. Join EXIT and Passage Press for a Halloween party at Pubkey in Manhattan.

  • 11/07, Dallas: Manifest Destiny Ball. EXIT families across Texas are getting together for a black-tie event to celebrate our heritage and look toward our common future. (Members only.)

  • 11/13, Salt Lake City: The Great American Weekender. In collaboration with Delphica, Frontier Magazine, and IM-1776, EXIT is hosting a weekend salon here in Salt Lake City. RSVP here.

  • 11/21, Orem: Paideia Buildathon. We are hosting a youth AI buildathon — getting teens to build their own games, websites, etc. Sponsored by OpenAI. Admission is free. Sign up here.

  • Monthly private dinner meetups for EXIT members (members can check chat.exitgroup.us or monthly internal newsletter for details):

    • 10/3 Orem, UT

    • 10/9, Nashville, TN

    • 10/10, Houston, TX

    • 10/10, Phoenix, AZ

    • 10/16, Atlanta GA

    • 10/16, Washington, DC

    • 10/17, Columbus, OH

    • 10/19, Dallas, TX

    • 10/24, St. Louis, MO

• Events with Friends of EXIT:

  • 10/08, Singapore: Network State Conference. Third annual Network State Conference in Singapore with Balaji Srinivasan. Streamable. RSVP here.

  • 10/10, Knoxville: FORUM event + Football watch party. Join Mass Deportation Coalition and FORUM for a discussion of immigration policy with Ryan Neuhaus and Greg Bovino, followed by a watch party for the Vols game. RSVP here.

  • 10/10, St. Louis: American Fiction Event. Join Oyarsa for an evening of readings feat. Theodore Judson of ARK Press, author of Fitzpatrick's War and The Timerman, and John Jay Stancliff of Farthest Heaven, author of FEDBOOK. RSVP here.

  • 10/19, Nashville: Peter Thiel Lecture Series with Pamphleteer. Dr. Bennett will be attending the fourth and final lecture of the series. RSVP here.

  • 10/21, New York: Michael Anton book signing event. Reign (formerly Sovereign House) is hosting Michael Anton to discuss and sign his new book, Studies in Machiavellian Political Philosophy. RSVP here.

  • 10/24, Atlanta: 1903 Club Exclusive Dinner Featuring Andrew Isker. Andrew will be speaking on his new book, “The Seed of Abraham.” Private four course dinner. Jacket required, ties encouraged. RSVP here.

[nothing below paywall]

Read more

(My speech honoring Charlie Kirk: Delphica Society “Continuum Salon”, September 10th, Dallas.)

If you’re extremely online, you learn not to get too emotionally involved in the news.

Any awful thing you can think of is always happening somewhere — if you allow yourself to be provoked by whatever atrocity is held under your nose, they can find whatever they need to make you feel however they want you to feel, about anything.

But the murder of Charlie Kirk was different. The killer wasn’t some random crazy person, he wasn’t radicalized by hallucinations of Jodie Foster, or talking to his dog — he was radicalized by a broad milieu of radical communist transsexuals whom we’ve all encountered, and who were very open about calling for exactly this kind of violence, before and after, in public and private.

Of course there have always been crazies, and even little groups of crazies — but in the aftermath of the shooting, we saw that, actually it was this enormous swath of the American population — millions at least — with whom there was nothing left to say.

One-third of Democrats under 30 were willing to tell a pollster that they thought his murder was justified.

In a sense, you could say that it’s this weightless, highly-online phenomenon:

They probably won’t do anything that requires them to do any jail time or get blood on their hands — but there they really wanted him killed, and they’re glad somebody did it — both because he deserved it, and because an example needed to made, specifically for you and me.

Charlie believed the Bible — and his own common sense — about sex and sexuality, which made him an existential enemy of the most extreme, antisocial, and violent wing of the Left.

He also said that the Civil Rights Act was a mistake — which is what most of the elite coverage focused on, because it put him at odds with the founding myth of the postwar moral order.

Those were the sins that justified his murder.

We all saw this together.

And we all thought, “boy, if that’s enough to get you killed, where does that leave me?” What would these people do if they ever regained control of the state?

I remember at the time thinking — really just hoping — that we would then see, together, the stakes and the seriousness of our situation: that everyone who had been marked for death — from the President to the commentariat to your boomer uncle — would find a war footing.

Obviously, that didn’t happen — and I’ve been thinking about why.

It’s strange that we are commemorating Charlie’s death one day before the 25th anniversary of 9/11, because in some ways it felt the same — that there was this “us”, that had been attacked, and “we” were going to do something about it.

So much has changed since then that it feels like it happened to someone else, in some other country — but mapping the space from there to here can help us understand why the year since Charlie’s death didn’t go the way we had hoped, and what we ought to do next.

The thing people bring up most about those first few days is that George W. Bush had a 90% approval rating, but that doesn’t even begin to cover what it was like. Americans were absolutely glued to a single experience — not just seeing the same events, but having the same internal experience — and knowing they were having the same experience — in a way that’s hard to imagine today, even if it happened to you.

We were of course being told what to think about it — but it felt like nobody needed to be told. The machinery of narrative control — the editorial decisions of what movie to show us, and how, and when — were completely invisible to us.

And then what happened?

Well, some of the kids a few years older than me signed up for Afghanistan, but everybody else was encouraged to go shopping. We got the Patriot Act, and the absurdities of Homeland Security — and then the war in Iraq.

Our punitive tribal instincts cooled, and then collided awkwardly with our procedural liberal self-concept, and locked us into these conflicts, not only with no plan to win, but no clear idea of what winning would even look like.

So, first, Americans’ impulse for common feeling was cynically and stupidly wasted, and they became permanently skeptical of anything that feels like that.

But second, and probably more importantly — the media technology changed.

It simply isn’t possible anymore to monopolize attention like that — to show everyone the same thing, and make them feel the same thing.

That’s why the early years of Twitter were so exhilarating: because we all felt that, on some level, these people controlled the country because they controlled the narrative — and all of a sudden, just by being funny, you could demolish that power.

You actually got to watch in real time as the old guardians of political and cultural orthodoxy were dethroned and made ridiculous by anons with anime avatars.

Starting in 2020, the empire struck back — we got a full-court press of censorship, doxxing, a summer of anarchy in the cities, lockdowns for the rest of us, and the COVID purge of the military, the executive bureaucracy, and the Fortune 500.

And I think they really were worried.

They watch the same movies we do, where in the climactic final battle, the villain’s mask falls, and his crimes are revealed to the world, and the spell is broken, and he is overthrown — but they obviously should not have been worried about that.

The fantasy is that the old, bad narrative that the villain used to oppress, is replaced by the new, good narrative that we use to overthrow him.

But it turns out that the same technology that allowed us to effortlessly spin counternarratives and shatter consensus, now allows our enemies to spin counter-counternarratives, and strangle any new consensus in the crib. Everything’s a psyop, everyone’s a fed.

Which is why Charlie Kirk’s murder -- which we hoped would galvanize and unite us against the people who would consent to our murder -- instead produced a circular firing squad of paranoia and recrimination from the dumbest and most cynical voices on the Right.

Deconstructing the official story, and loudly refusing to be taken in, was what made us feel like we were winning ten years ago, made us feel powerful.

And it really did change things: there are all sorts of things that our enemies could do five or ten or twenty years ago, that they cannot do to us anymore, because their ability to command consensus really has been broken.

The problem is that they’re still in charge of the formal architecture of power — and in order to actually dislodge them, we would need to build an alternative consensus — and so far, it doesn’t look like that’s possible.

We didn’t capture the narrative domain — it’s more like we mined it, or contaminated it, and now we’re lobbing bombs at each other from our entrenched positions.

I say “we” — it’s not clear that “we” did this, or that it could have gone any differently — it may just be that the nature of political conflict has changed with the technology.

Either way, conditions have changed, and the question is, how do we win under these conditions?

Well, for one thing, it seems pretty clear that big unifying parasocial media narratives are just over.

All of our political abstractions, all of our ideological commitments — they can’t unify us any more, because you just can’t get everyone looking at one thing and feeling one way anymore.

I would invite you to consider the possibility that those giga-scaled loyalties — on both sides — are a product of technological conditions that no longer exist.

So if we want to build anything, or do anything big or important, we’re going to have to find our friends — not some category of person that checks a certain set of boxes, but people with names and faces, people with whom we can build a shared history.

And that’s what Charlie did.

He was of course gifted in, and famous for, mass communication.

But in the last year, as I’ve met people who worked with him, what they invariably talk about is how hard he worked to make friends and build relationships and get people working together across the broadest possible coalition.

And over and over I have encountered these enormous “Charlie Kirk shaped holes” — relationships in which he was an essential connector, critical things that still aren’t getting done, because Charlie was the way they got done.

He was unmatched in his ability to bridge the gap between the young and the old, the normies and the vanguard.

He was one of the only figures on the political Right who succeeded in — or who even seemed to care about — transmuting online outrage into real-world ground game. And that was all about networks of young people who knew Charlie, or knew people who knew Charlie.

His empire, his legacy, was literally the friends he made along the way.

It wasn’t just that he was a friendly guy — and he certainly wasn’t naive about people, or politics, or media — he just knew that was what it was going to take to win, and he wanted to win.

So when I think about what we’ve learned in the last year, how we can honor Charlie’s memory, and what should come next, it all points in the same direction.

We need to come together to build things: in fact, to build a shared history, because for better and worse, that’s what is real now, that’s what is going to matter.

We have to start working together on projects with stakes — entrepreneurial projects, civic action, social gatherings — because we’re it. It’s not going to start in any other way.

We’re not going to find our real friends in any other way. We’re not going to surface leadership in any other way.

So I’m really glad that you’re all here, and I hope that while you’re here you will look for a way to place a bet, with modest but meaningful stakes, on someone else in this room — to start building something together — for our country, and for Charlie.

EXIT News:

• Constitutional Action completed beautification events in Dallas and Salt Lake in August.

  • 9/12: Join us for a Veterans’ Memorial cleanup in Seattle.

  • 9/17: Join us for a live presentation on Counter-Organizing with Mike Shelby in American Fork, Utah.

• Paideia will host our first Youth AI Hackathon, 11/14 (date changed) in Orem, UT. Tickets on sale soon.

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

  • This week (9/8) we heard from Jeremy Kaufmann of the Free State Project on his efforts to teach libertarians how to win.

  • Next week (9/15) we will have a follow-up investment showcase preliminary to the rollout of the next round of the EXIT investment group.

• EXIT Member Events (members can check the group chat for details):

  • 9/11, Nashville, TN: EXIT member meetup

  • 9/12: Seattle, WA: Constitutional Action Beautification Event (https://luma.com/bs82jmnm)

  • 9/12, Houston, TX: EXIT member meetup

  • 9/12, Dallas, TX: Family Barbecue

  • 9/17, American Fork, UT: Counter-Organizing with Mike Shelby (https://luma.com/511feime)

  • 9/18, N. Georgia, GA: EXIT member meetup

  • 9/19, Columbus, OH: EXIT member Meetup

  • 9/21, Dallas, TX: Monthly EXIT Dinner

  • 9/25-9/26, Salt Lake City, UT: Delphica Event (link coming soon)

  • 10/3 Orem, UT: EXIT Member Meetup

    EXIT Newsletter is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Last week, we discussed the Lindsay Clancy hysteria as a political perpetual-motion machine.

Today, we’ll discuss why the dysfunctions revealed in this controversy are structural and terminal.

For both ideological and practical reasons, liberal mass democracies have to treat all Voter Units as if they were interchangeable and equivalent. Women want and expect an equal “seat at the table” in democratic politics — but they can’t (and don’t want to) have their words and actions interpreted the same way that men’s words and actions are interpreted.

You might guess that contradictions like these would make trouble for liberal democratic systems — but paradoxically, at least in the short run, they appear to strengthen them: women can be permanently politically mobilized precisely because the aims are self-contradictory, and therefore eternally out of reach.

The Revolution has achieved a stable superposition: both perpetually marching from victory to victory, and perpetually betrayed by our inadequate public commitment to it. The work is never done. This is a feature, not a bug.

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The phenomenon is best illustrated by the aftermath of Obergefell v. Hodges.

Prior to 2015, the goal of the Gay Rights Movement was Gay Rights: a discrete minority demanding a discrete set of accommodations. There were various paraphilic subtribes, of course, but these were largely a concern for leftoid academics or pornographers.

In Obergefell, the Supreme Court basically accepted this framing of who “gays” were as a political bloc, and what they wanted, and gave them everything: full legal parity, on every axis of comparison that had ever been publicly discussed.

But the Gay Rights Movement was/is a multibillion-dollar industry, with armies of lawyers, organizers, fundraisers, lobbyists, etc. These people were not just going to give themselves a pat on the back, pack up the political machine, and sign up for a JavaScript boot camp.

Fortunately for them, there are infinite ways to define an interest group, and an infinite number of axes of possible comparison.

That’s why you saw such an explosive profusion of sexual “identities” in the wake of Obergefell.

Unlike the Gay Rights Movement, these new blocs no longer made concrete demands of the political system: the game was now Visibility and Normalization. (In other words, the deconstruction of ordinary people’s default intuitions about perverts.)

Instead of being a discrete minority for whom accommodations could be made within the “heteronormative” frame, this swarm of blocs was now irreconcilably at odds with sexual normalcy as such.

This was probably not a conscious decision made by the Big Gay Steering Committee: there was simply nowhere else to take The Movement.

Trans identity became the vanguard of the Omnicause precisely because it creates a radical, vague, and unanswerable social demand right along a natural male/female fault line:

It produces a group of people who obviously look and act like male perverts, who demand to be treated as if they were women (and receive sexual access to women, particularly young women), while taking advantage of moral and theoretical frameworks that protect more popular and entrenched constituencies.

Trans identity cannot be “interrogated” without attacking load-bearing pillars of both queer and feminist theory. You’d have to settle on some notion of “how a Real Woman thinks/feels/behaves” — in other words, some standard of behavior to which women might be held — which neither of these larger blocs can tolerate. (This is one reason the “TERF war” is so vicious.)

So the trans movement created an army of men, many of whom are intelligent, whose self-concept and destiny are irreversibly linked with their political program (especially if they have mutilated themselves) — and whose political demands are not merely “unrealistic” but actually self-contradictory and impossible to fulfill, even in theory.

Their appetite for the sexual performance of femininity is fundamentally male. They cannot simultaneously experience “acceptance” and the sexual frisson of transgression. You can’t make them happy, and you also can’t dismiss their demands within the logic of liberal egalitarianism.

All liberal causes celebres are like this now, because they have to be. There is nowhere else for The Movement to go.

It isn’t just this or that NGO that faces an incentive to persist beyond its usefulness. The permanent revolution for equality is the fuel of the postwar liberal order itself.

All prior societies had some notion of “us” which assumed a hostile “them”: the house of Islam, and the house of War.

Having conquered the planet, subdued and domesticated every credible “them”, the state now exists to protect its citizens from each other: to interpose itself against the strong on behalf of the weak (in order to take the strong party’s stuff, and convert the weak party into a dependent.)

In other words, liberal managerial states now exist to deconstruct and dismantle hierarchical human relationships, and convert them into legible transactions mediated by the state — and all human relationships are irreducibly hierarchical.

Having eaten all the low-hanging fruit (explicit, formal, constructed hierarchies), it now reaches down into the biological substrate: the relationship between man and woman, mother and child.

The Lindsay Clancy case demonstrates the extent to which this process of deconstruction has already unfolded: millions of women now understand not only their husbands, but their children as oppressors — even when largely liberated from the complaints of prior generations of feminists (domestic chores, legal and financial subordination, etc.)

The inequalities that remain to be deconstructed are irreducible and biological: which, again, makes the potential energy for political mobilization stronger, not weaker.

That is the sense in which this dysfunction is structural to managerial liberalism. Now, let’s discuss why this process is terminal: why managerial liberal societies aren’t going to fix it, and can’t survive it — at least, not as managerial liberal societies.

The Wall Street Journal says that families are rapidly evacuating America’s cities.

The New York Times notes (with barely suppressed glee) that Utah’s birth rate is collapsing faster than any other state, moving from the most fertile state in the Union to sixth place.

We’ve discussed in other places the consequences that birth rate collapse will have if left unaddressed by advanced societies — even those, like China and Japan, that have avoided many of liberalism’s other dysfunctions.

Suffice to say: the Global Financial System — the Money Printer, the Carrier Strike Groups, the S&P500, the Bipartisan Consensus, the value of your money, and almost every asset you might buy with money — is all existentially dependent on the assumption of long-term economic growth.

It doesn’t have to be radical growth: a society with a flat population — experiencing modest growth through capital investment and technological progress — could keep these systems from going upside down. (Assuming their political system was capable of controlling spending and landing the plane, which ours is not.)

But nations with radical population decline cannot make up the gap through those investments — so the logic that drives long-term investment decisions inverts, and planners’ assumptions break catastrophically.

This is the reason that liberal technocrats care (or ought to care) about fertility collapse.

It is not necessarily anything you and I should care about — except insofar as we want to be on the right side of the volatility it will create.

The point is that it’s happening, and they’re powerless to stop it — which means that the endless march of nihilism and neurosis and self-mutilation has a terminus, which is good news.

But it’s worth talking through the mechanism. Why can’t the organs of liberal narrative generation bring themselves to care about this issue?

You will notice from the mainstream articles on fertility collapse — in order to broach this topic at all, the journalists have to present it through the eyes of various Raheims and Feiloakitaus and Guzmans and Escobedos (you know — people who shouldn’t go extinct, people whose difficulties actually matter).

For these families, birth rate decline is framed as a “cost-of-living crunch”, and a “threat to the tax base”.

In other words: the fertility crisis is endangering Money For Dem Programz, and the only prescription is More Money For Dem Programz.

What we really need is for men to do more housework (like in Denmark, TFR 1.47), or to institute free universal daycare (like in Lithuania, TFR 1.17) or cash incentives (like in South Korea, TFR 0.72).

Conservative outlets like the Deseret News, meanwhile, scratch their heads. What can be done about this colossal, existential, civilizational crisis? Has anyone tried repainting the monkey bars? What about “relaxing zoning restrictions” (so we can build more Soviet barracks for immigrants?)

Joe Rogan predictably argues that we just need open minds and open borders, man.

The Manhattan Institute says we should deregulate childcare and Let the Free Market Work: optimistic projections in the most heavily regulated states suggest we could bring TFR from 1.27 to as high as 1.37. (Wow!)

In M.I.’s defense, you could maybe imagine a suite of interventions with little impacts like this that add up to something meaningful: the problem is that when you add up the other side of the ledger — the political (and upstream cultural) changes that would have to occur for all of those interventions to be attempted at the same time — demographic decline starts to look like yet another Coup Complete Problem.

And that’s roughly the shape of Birth Rate Discourse: mostly ideologues, cynically deploying the issue to stump for whatever they already wanted — with a handful of honest, flummoxed conservatives throwing spaghetti at the wall, promising earnestly that their quest for a solution need not trouble any load-bearing liberal priors.

But of course, the failure of family formation in the West threatens virtually all load-bearing liberal priors.

First, it’s a spiritual and aesthetic critique of the world liberalism has created. A civilization that fails to create healthy families — in which people are so constrained and unhappy that they don’t want to create families — is not worth conserving.

But second, even if you dismiss that spiritual critique and insist on propping up a system that is demonstrably hostile to human life, demographic decline will destroy the managerial liberal system as a straightforward matter of arithmetic. (Life, uh, finds a way.)

Demographic collapse tells us that human society can’t just infinitely circle the drain: the people capable of running the machinery may be willing to live as psychically gelded interchangeable productivity units, but they aren’t willing to breed that way. This is good news.

But that’s why Birth Rate Discourse is so completely retarded, when it is not actively sinister.

All these commentators know, if they’ve thought about it for more than ten minutes, that demographic collapse is going to break structures to which they are deeply psychologically committed, and there’s nothing they can do about it.

Since they cannot confront that reality, they have no choice but to keep spraying squid ink and hope the discourse remains shallow — lying at least to you, and probably also to themselves.

And that strategy works, even if not all of them are doing it consciously: if you can’t make the problem go away, you can at least pollute the topic with obvious stupidity and get intelligent people to tune out.

(We ran two conferences on birth rate decline — and even we, when we see the words “birth rate” in a headline, invariably think, “Well, here comes a load of horseshit”.)

So here goes — here’s why this topic is so difficult to talk about intelligently in public:

The biggest predictor of fertility decline appears to be the education and employment of women.

In my experience, only the hard-left and hard-right are really willing to say this out loud, and both throw it in your face as if it ends the conversation — as if it either provides an obvious solution, or renders the whole subject unspeakable.

Of course, it does neither.

The only societies that are not in terminal, existential demographic decline are in Sub-Saharan Africa or the Islamic world. (The lone exception, Israel, is a national socialist state on a permanent war footing: the Israelis still have a very clear “us” and “them”.) Even these are merely 10-50 years behind the global trend, and declining at far greater speed than nations that started sooner.

The (unserious) implication from the Right is that if society could just get back to Putting These Broads in Their Place, then everything could get back to normal.

But positive-TFR countries aren’t modestly poorer, or modestly more conservative.

Our hyper-modern barrenness is not a function of “too many lady CEOs” or “too many lady PhDs”.

When we say that demographic collapse correlates with women’s education and employment, we mean that it correlates at the level of “escaping subsistence agriculture” and “having indoor plumbing” and “being taught to read”.

And maybe this should go without saying, but nobody — not even the Basedest truecel MGTOW — has any serious interest in maintaining Cameroonian sexual norms. Nor could they, even if they wanted to. (Nor can the Cameroonians, apparently.)

Besides being impractical and unserious, framing the problem of birth rate decline this way hands feminists the easiest possible straw man: If civilization is going to end unless I submit to life as a toothless illiterate slave gumming taro paste, then I guess civilization is just gonna have to end, man.

“I choose the bear,” and so forth.

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Cards on the table: I am enough of a cucked, henpecked, longhoused Wife Guy that I don’t want my wife and my daughters to be toothless illiterate slaves gumming taro paste.

But if we take this correlation between women’s autonomy and fertility at face value — if we simply ask, “What is life like in countries with a sustainable TFR” — that really is, ballpark, the kind of world we would have to create in order to right the demographic ship.

Besides which, a naive interpretation of the correlation between women’s education/employment and fertility implies an absurdity: that if you give women any practical or legal autonomy whatsoever, having children is (almost literally) the very last thing they will willingly choose to do.

Does that make sense historically, or biologically — or even just intuitively, if you’ve had any passing personal contact with women?

Historically, women who were substantially wealthier and more literate and more autonomous than Afghan or Namibian women have managed to raise children in large numbers — not just psychologically exotic “trad wives”, but at scale, and as a rule.

Colonial New England was one of the most literate and educated societies in world history up to that point (Puritan women were not as educated as Puritan men, but better and more broadly educated than men anywhere else in the world) and also one of the most hyperfecund, with births per woman approaching biological limits.

Intuitively, I’ve known a lot of modern women who feel conflicted about the demands of family life — but they overwhelmingly like and want children.

In the feminist interpretation of the Birth Rate Crisis, raising and nurturing children is a thing that some women, we must admit, seem to sincerely desire; but it’s this vaguely embarrassing and vulgar “biological urge”: something that you want, if at all, against your will, and against your better judgment. (It is frequently expressed, in so many words, as something that the body wants. Not me — my dumb body, my Heckin’ Meat Suit.)

Motherhood is generally described as if the most difficult parts of the first three years were the whole experience — the discomfort of the third trimester, the pains of childbirth, sleepless nights, diaper changes — essentially just physical toil, domestic servitude. The only reason anyone would “want” that is a kind of animal “false consciousness”.

Anyway, it’s definitely a different and less-legitimate category of desire than, say, the instinct to solve problems, or the craving for novel experience, or the hunger for status and recognition (the kinds of itches that a job scratches.)

These are somehow “non-biological” urges. These are the Real You — and the moment you let a woman do those higher, deeper, more meaningful things, she loses all interest in family life.

Of course, all of that is silly.

Professional aspirations are just as easy to explain in evolutionary biology terms — just as reducible to “hormones” and “primate psychology” — as family-forming instincts are.

Besides which, every job — but especially the classically meaningful and desirable “childhood dream” job — is frontloaded with drudgery and shit tests, and usually for much longer than three years. (Ask a doctor, or architect, or professor, or marine biologist.)

And that’s the fun jobs. The vast majority of jobs put you through the shit tests and then don’t culminate in any thrills, let alone ecstatic transcendent meaning. They’re just jobs, the whole way through.

I knew a woman in the wage cage who was making a little bit more money than me — maybe $90K.

She would come into the office crying after dropping her two kids off at the (expensive, snooty) daycare, and then picking them up with unexplained bruising and various novel behavioral issues. She was pregnant with her third.

It wasn’t worth my job to ask too many questions, but on the basis of some napkin math, she was making a poverty wage after the cost of daycare, and kid #3 was practically going to zero her out.

And she wasn’t jumping out of airplanes or curing cancer or creating beauty — she was doing some narrow, arcane, defense-industry finance thing that would take ten minutes to explain to you. She didn’t seem inordinately happy to be doing it. She talked a lot about missing her kids.

In my travels since, I have learned that this woman’s situation is on the more “privileged” end. For the average woman, the job is less cozy, and the ratio of daycare-expense-to-salary stops penciling out at two kids instead of three.

That would be enough to explain the Birth Rate Crisis all by itself.

In a two-income paradigm, the average American family can afford something like 1.4 kids — so that’s how many kids they have.

Of course, Mom working also imposes all kinds of stressors on the family, not the least of which is her Biological Urge™ to be with a man who brings home the bacon.

Some families have fewer children than they otherwise would; many fall apart under the strain — but increasingly, in dread of these seemingly irreducible problems, the family simply does not form at all.

The question is: why is Mom working?

The feminist answer is that “narrow arcane defense-finance whatever” is actually a higher, nobler, more fundamentally human vocation than raising a family, and all women everywhere can feel this to be true in their bones, and choose it whenever the choice is offered to them.

The rightist answer, basically, is that women are stupid and wicked.

I don’t think my co-worker was stupid or wicked — but the way she was living obviously did not reflect her preferences and aspirations.

My answer is that Mom is working for Moloch.

In his 2014 essay Meditations on Moloch, uses the name “Moloch” to personify “collective action problems”, or “multipolar traps”: situations in which all actors behave rationally as individuals, but reach an outcome that none of them wants.

I won’t recapitulate the whole essay, but just go read it if you haven’t, because he basically lays the intellectual groundwork for our whole thing (insofar as our thing is a critique of headless procedural liberalism.)

A collective action problem exists when some collective good depends on all participants choosing to forgo some short-term individual interest — to “cooperate” rather than “defect”.

Alexander personifies these problems as “Moloch” (a bloodthirsty child-murdering Carthaginian demon) because in high-stakes collective action problems, mass defection can produce outcomes that are literally inhuman — that even the most vicious and stupid tyrant would recognize as contrary to his own interest, even if he didn’t care about anyone else’s.

The solution is to get people thinking like human beings again: to think about the long-term, to internalize the consequences of their behavior.

This suite of problems can only be solved by a human decision-maker with a “God’s eye view”, above and outside the system, not subject to its incentives or accountable to its internal controls.

He leaves the conclusion up to the reader, but he really walks you right up to it. (“Yes, this category of problem appears to be eating everything that makes human life worth living — but on the other hand, What If You Get a Bad King?”)

Anyway, the Birth Rate Crisis is one of these Molochian problems.

The work that women performed in pre-modern societies — and the power and status and compensation they received in return — was largely informal, personal, and illegible. In raising their own children and maintaining the weft of their communities, they contributed enormously to a common reserve of “social capital”.

Feminists now call this kind of thing “uncompensated emotional labor” — but of course pre-modern women were neither slaves nor martyrs. They fully expected to be compensated: in loyalty, in reciprocal obligation, in status, in honors, in protections.

This kind of thing may sound ephemeral now because it is ephemeral now, for reasons we’ll examine — but in pre-modern societies all of these things were real assets with observable material consequences. They just weren’t cleanly commodified — pegged to a dollar value or a written legal obligation.

Your mother generally could not call an attorney and a policeman to extract your obligations to her in a discrete sum from your checking account — but that doesn’t mean that you did not have a material obligation, or that your obligation to her was not enforceable.

Her work, her compensation, and her assurance of receiving that compensation, all existed in the human domain of relationships, reputation, and trust.

In other words, they existed in the world that managerialism is eating — which it has already eaten, almost entirely.

The overwhelming majority of all pre-modern human activity — not just “women’s work” — was illegible and informal in this way.

Even the most cleanly transactional behaviors — selling vegetables, or paying for labor — were multilateral iterated games with people you had known your whole life, and would know your whole life.

Whatever cash or barter changed hands was not separable from (and may have been unimportant in comparison with) the relationship and reputational consequences of the interaction.

This doesn’t mean that pre-modern societies were “fair”, but they were deeply attentive to reciprocal obligation. A naive analysis of explicit legal rights and responsibilities, or flows of hard currency, will provide a radically misleading picture of who had what power, what people expected from each other, and what they actually got.

In particular, women got (and continue to get) a much greater proportion of what they want via illegible social means — so examining only explicit, legible power exaggerates (and in some cases even inverts) the power differential in historical gender relations.

But Moloch is in the business of eradicating all these relational assets — converting them into explicit transactions that can be booked as revenue, analyzed, and taxed.

There is enormous wealth and political power in market-making and price discovery — finding ways to convert unmet needs and unused resources into legible economic and political value.

On its face, connecting people is good — buyers want to find sellers, sellers want to find buyers.

But at global scale, this process of market-making has two consequences:

1. It requires us to chop various complex human desires and goods into their constituent parts, and talk about them like merchants — and many things that we care about (especially in relations between men and women) do not survive that kind of cold vivisection.

2. It connects us to an effectively infinite marketplace — not just for work and goods, but for friends and lovers. We now play far fewer iterated games in which it is costly to defect.

In other words, everything we want from each other is (or can, at any moment, become) a commodity and a one-off transaction.

There’s always another buyer or seller; Plenty of Fish in the Sea.

The personal, reputational, human consequences of defection are no longer enforceable: the only way to make your counterparty behave is with explicit economic, or contractual, or statutory power — so whichever party has more of that kind of power gets what he or she wants.

Under those circumstances, it is individually rational for women (and increasingly men) to commodify every aspect of their “sexual market value”, and drive a hard bargain on every axis.

It is rational to convert whatever illegible (social/reputational/sexual) power you have into explicit (economic and political) power any way you can, since that’s the only kind of power that matters.

It is also rational for public institutions to encourage this kind of cynicism about love and family, since they are in direct competition with it.

A woman who works in a high-trust social milieu for the people she cares about does not generate GDP, or taxable income, or consumer demand.

If I’m a manager at Globohomocorp and one of my employees gets married or pregnant, it may be better for her and better for society in the long run, but right here and now in Q3, it’s a pain in my ass.

If I’m the CEO of Globohomocorp, I like the fact that there’s twice as many workers competing for my job openings. I also like the fact that there’s twice as many earners to buy what we sell — and they need to buy more, because all kinds of services that the informal “human economy” used to provide are no longer available, so inferior commodity equivalents must now be bought with money.

If I’m a real estate developer, I like that the market-clearing price for a house assumes two incomes. I like that families compete savagely for “nice neighborhoods” with “good schools”, because two-income families are unworkable without state daycares, and they don’t want to drop their kids off at a gladiator school.

If I’m a leftist ideologue, I like that 90% of American kids have to attend government schools where I get to set the curriculum. (Homeschooling is legally very straightforward in the US — these schools are “compulsory” only as a matter of family economics.)

If I’m the IRS, I like that this enormous bolus of payroll and income and spending and capital gains is now legible and taxable.

If I’m a political operative (left or right), I love the energy unleashed by the collapse of informal human institutions, and people’s sense that they are adrift in a sea of insuperable political forces. I am strongly incentivized to wave the bloody shirt and shriek about Who Is To Blame for all this, buying votes and attention at the cost of accelerating the cycle of defection and betrayal.

There doesn’t have to be any conspiracy to make the world worse: all of these institutions, just by “doing their job”, eat the civilizational seed-corn stored up over millennia and convert it into Shareholder Value.

The problem is that families (and therefore human life and civilization) cannot work like that. Families have to be a personal, high-trust, iterated game.

The rewards and protections that justify the effort of raising a family do not survive vivisection and commodification — they are irreducibly human and relational.

If you don’t believe that your spouse, your children, and the community to which they will contribute, are in a meaningful sense yours — that you have some claim on them, some right to them — it is difficult to understand why anyone would go to the trouble.

And in managerial societies, in the name of individual autonomy and non-discrimination, all such arrangements are explicitly illegal. Everyone must play the game as an individual buyer and seller, in the infinite market in which they have no leverage and the costs of defection are zero.

Women’s education and employment is a proxy for induction into the Global Massively Multiplayer Defect/Defect Equilibrium.

Women in the developing world are not discovering PowerPoint with ecstatic religious awe, and losing all interest in family life. They are leaving the human milieu in which the covenant of family life makes sense, and entering a managerial milieu in which it does not.

The traditional value of “women’s work” was generated in the domain of local, human, interpersonal obligation. But that realm has become a commons in which no one is able to impose any binding obligations on anyone else — so effort invested in that domain no longer pays off — so women (quickly followed by men) stop investing.

This is the rational move for them: that’s why it’s a collective action problem.

Accordingly, we get rising GDP and household income, alongside collapsing social cohesion, rampant mental illness, badly socialized and miseducated children, and fertility collapse.

’s recent essay observes that young people endure a kind of “dark poverty”:

Boomers and spiritual boomers love to pull up charts and graphs that “show” that today’s young people are “objectively” better off. But the charts look that way because we have burned priceless (but invisible and illegible) goods in exchange for the goods that show up in metrics dashboards: Goodhart’s Law, at civilizational scale.

[P]revious generations received an enormous stock of social capital: trusted neighbors, functional public schools, a productive courtship culture, predictable career arcs, and a public square in which children could roam and adults could be relied upon. That stock, once given for free, has now been substantially liquidated.

The young must do so out of incomes that rose modestly while the prices of the essential elements of life rose radically. Price indexes measure the individual cost of discrete goods, but they are not intended to convey the total cost of personally repurchasing a destroyed commons.

(I am again tempted to restate the whole article, it’s excellent.)

Your great-grandparents could make it work in a 1000 square foot starter home because they knew their children would have the run of the whole neighborhood, and come home for dinner and bed.

Young families now pay a $300K mortgage premium to live in the Good School District to ensure that their children won’t be the victim of a violent crime. That used to come free with your American citizenship.

TVs are cheaper, and you may have more dollars to spend — even, arguably, in “real terms”. But all the things you need — especially if you want to raise a family — are either many multiples more expensive, or simply not available at any price.

And every step of this liquidation of the commons has registered to our sociological sense organs as “growth”: rising wages, cheaper flatscreens, ever more bachelor’s degrees.

When you liquidate the illegible social capital of a community and try to repurchase it at retail, you get the Clancy house: a small army of enormously expensive “caregivers”, powerless to prevent a psychospiritual catastrophe.

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Young people simply will not breed under these conditions, and the sense organs of managerial society are not even capable of parsing this as a problem.

This is not an incidental policy problem for which the right technocrat could provide the right data-driven solution. It is a problem with data-driven solutions as such.

Managerial liberalism is defined by its rejection of illegible human bonds. Everything must have a price, so that anyone is free to buy it, and the state can judge the transaction to be transparent and fair.

What we would call “loyalty” or “honor” or “covenant” can only exist in a managerial society as meaningless ideals — the kind of thing that you are free to daydream about at church.

The moment these ideals enter the “real world” of money and power, they can only be understood as “prejudice” or “corruption”: not only a bad thing, but the bad thing — the enemy that the system exists to eradicate.

But the family is an inherently covenantal relationship, and it inherently involves the real world. Human beings will not raise families as a transaction — so a society that cannot honor covenants cannot have families, and very rapidly will cease to be a society at all.

One way or another, human institutions are coming back.

It’s unclear how long this deconstruction will continue: but in secular terms, the only societies that make it to the other side will be those who make it possible to find trustworthy counterparties and play iterated, cooperative games.

Put in spiritual terms: the societies that make it to the other side will be those that restore honor and loyalty as social realities, so that it is possible for ordinary people to make and keep covenants again.

It’s not clear what mature institutions of this kind will look like, but it seems like it has to start with like-minded people getting together at human scale, to build things with stakes that matter, and place bets on each other. On the strength of a shared history between human beings with names and faces, we have to restore the primal human circuits of patronage and fraternity for our children to inherit.

Learn more at exitgroup.us

EXIT News:

• National GOP Convention in Dallas, 9/10: I will be speaking about the legacy of 9/11 and the Charlie Kirk assassination at the Continuum Salon, presented by Delphica Society after the convention. Join us.

• Constitutional Action completed beautification events in Dallas and Salt Lake in August.

  • 9/12: Join us for a Veterans' Memorial cleanup in Seattle.

  • 9/17: Join us for a live presentation on Counter-Organizing with Mike Shelby in American Fork, Utah.

• Paideia will host our first Youth AI Hackathon, 11/14 (date changed) in Orem, UT. Tickets on sale soon.

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

  • This week (9/1) we talked to The Woolshire about building their made-in-USA wool business.

  • Next week (9/8) we will hear from Jeremy Kaufmann of the Free State Project on his efforts to teach libertarians how to win.

  • The following week we will have a follow-up investment showcase preliminary to the rollout of the next round of the EXIT investment group.

• EXIT Member Events (members can check the group chat for details):

  • 9/5, Orem, UT: EXIT member meetup

  • 9/8, New York, NY: EXIT member meetup & Michael Anton signing event

  • 9/10, Dallas, TX: Delphica speaking event for GOP Convention (https://luma.com/delphica-p5rk)

  • 9/11, Nashville, TN: EXIT member meetup

  • 9/12: Seattle, WA: Constitutional Action Beautification Event (https://luma.com/bs82jmnm)

  • 9/12, Houston, TX: EXIT member meetup

  • 9/12, Dallas, TX: Family Barbecue

  • 9/17, American Fork, UT: Counter-Organizing with Mike Shelby (https://luma.com/511feime)

  • 9/18, N. Georgia, GA: EXIT member meetup

  • 9/19, Columbus, OH: EXIT member Meetup

  • 9/21, Dallas, TX: Monthly EXIT Dinner

  • 9/25-9/26, Salt Lake City, UT: Delphica Event (link coming soon)

  • 10/3 Orem, UT: EXIT Member Meetup

This week was a pretty extreme wake-up call on the state of women online.

We learned that there are a shockingly large number of women who not only identify with a child murderer, but are ostentatiously, publicly performing that identification: posting videos of themselves sobbing while clutching infants, captioned “Same, Lindsay”.

They’re posting AI videos of Lindsay Clancy — a woman who sent her husband on an errand so that she could strangle their three children to death — receiving the warm embrace of the Sisterhood. Some are even running the “no uterus, no opinion” playbook but for actual infanticide. (I will not post examples, they’re easy to find.)

Clearly, this is not a feeling about which they are furtive or ashamed. It is baffling to imagine them setting up their camera so that they can publicly “break down”, Just Like Lindsay, to an audience of millions.

The obvious thing to do here is to luxuriate in our outrage at this Certified Woman Moment, and try to outdo one another in our revulsion and contempt.

But first of all, women have always been women, and this kind of performance would have been unthinkable twenty years ago — and second, this thing feels a lot like demoralization propaganda, whether there is any coordinated human agency behind it or not.

Women are competing to express their solidarity and intransigence, and men competing to express their impotent despair.

(Publicly seething about what Ought to Be Done to such women is the same thing — loudly advertising the chasm between what you would like to do, and what you actually have the power to do. Women are revolted by this not because it is mean, but because it is weak.)

This is one reason we have the Joe Rogan Rule at EXIT: “If you could talk about it on the Joe Rogan Experience, you can talk about it in the chat.”

“Fedposting” — which is to say, kvetching — is mutually exclusive with productive action. A social group can tolerate one or the other, but not both.

Our commentators obligingly point and sputter because it attracts attention (and money, if you’re big enough), but it comes at the cost of emboldening our enemies and discouraging our friends.

This is not to say that we should be above taking a moral position — obviously I feel the same visceral horror and incomprehension at what the foids are getting up to — but we can’t stop there. We have to figure out what this is, and what can be done about it. Why is it happening now?

The difficulties of modern motherhood on which all of this is being blamed are either generations old by now (suburban atomization, “intensive parenting”, irresponsible disbursement of psychiatric medications), or have gotten dramatically less burdensome as this psychosocial problem has gotten worse (the physical chores of homemaking, the gendered division of household labor, the “stigma” of mental illness, etc.)

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But on a superficial level, it is obvious why it’s happening: the parasocial rewards for having a public freakout have gone stratospheric.

Social media algorithms select for (and cultivate) narratives that trigger exactly the reciprocal feedback loop of outrage that we observe here — in which two opposing perspectives are so alien to one another that each side vigorously amplifies the enemy’s messaging, to show their friends how repugnant and absurd the enemy is.

The characters that generate the greatest raw emotional amplitude from friend and enemy become perceived by both enemy and friend as the spokesmen of the tribe.

Donald Trump won the 2016 election on exactly this brand of “earned media” — and it would be impossible to explain to a time traveler from 2012 how thoroughly he has conquered the Republican Party. (You, anon, are not immune to propaganda.)

Every outrage of this kind should be understood as a phenomenon of the palantir.

That’s not to say that they’re “not real”; but they are hyperstitional, a self-generating feedback loop. The viewers validate the performance, but they also absorb and are influenced by it; and some are more influenced by it than others.

You view the apparent popularity of these sentiments with horror — but the social media audience performs no moral judgment of public narratives. All they can see is that the sentiment is popular.

The thing that generates extreme emotions is viral — which means it is ubiquitous and winning, which means it is important and high-status and good.

The body of women upvoting these videos, sending money, showing up outside the courthouse, are not seriously ruminating on a desire to crush a toddler’s windpipe.

The horrific implications that you see as dead-obvious are not dead-obvious to them. They are not thinking about this the way you are thinking about it.

There will likely be a handful of copycat cases, but nowhere near what you’d expect if you took the sheer quantity of these “cries for help” at face value.

What these women are thinking is: “being a mom is Seriously Super Hard, and I am being Super Brave, look how Brave I’m being.”

That’s really all it is. The best defense you can make of this behavior is that it is sincerely, completely superficial and self-involved.

A social media hysteria has given them moral and social permission to complain in maximally dramatic terms, and to participate in a chorus of mutual validation.

There’s an echo in the “I choose the bear” discourse from a few months back.

Millions of women claimed that they would rather be alone in a room with a bear than alone with a man — and men responded with shock, in the mistaken belief that women were saying that they would actually literally rather be alone in a room with a bear.

This was not helped by the fact that many women, in the interest of making their point more vividly, said, “You’re not hearing me — I literally actually would rather be alone in a room with a literal bear and I’m not kidding”.

These women mean what they say, but not in the way that you mean things when you say them.

One of the emotional engines of this controversy is the perception that Lindsay Clancy was “crying out for help” and was “failed by the system” — that she wasn’t Heard or Taken Seriously.

But of course, her situation was being taken as seriously as such a situation could possibly be taken. There was a small army of doctors and therapists (and her husband, and a nanny) actively monitoring her.

If she had expressed a desire or plan to kill her children, they would have been immediately removed from her custody — but she didn’t.

The reason psychiatrists don’t institutionalize people or snatch their children when they report feeling depressed — or even when they report having certain categories of scary thoughts — is that they want people to speak up when they’re having trouble.

The only intervention that would have stopped this is for someone to suspend her parental rights or institutionalize her, with no judicable evidence (across a battery of clinical encounters) that she intended to harm her kids.

Obviously, these thousands of women are not actually suggesting that they are literally, actively experiencing what Lindsay Clancy experienced, or actually demanding the only intervention that would have made any sense (to have their children confiscated by the state.)

Maybe it’s waste of time to spell out that these demands have no practical content, but whatever: they have no practical content. Women are Using Language Differently. They want to Feel Heard. It’s Not About the Nail.

For most of human history, this has not been an insurmountable problem.

Every married couple experiences the same translation friction at much lower stakes; it is not that hard in a personal, human relationship to learn to take your wife “seriously but not literally”.

The problem is that it doesn't scale. Western liberal societies are procedural — they run on words as code. They cannot take women seriously-but-not-literally.

(The postmodernist insight was that words simply don’t work as code, period — but they really don’t work that way when women are political actors.)

Women cannot have their words taken seriously “just like men”, and also be Seen and Heard and Understood — because to treat them as if they talk and think like men is to misread them, to fail to understand them.

This impasse is like a divide-by-zero error, a need that can neither be fulfilled nor dismissed — which is to say, a political perpetual-motion machine. (Egalitarianism is the dominant force of our age precisely because it creates these bottomless, unanswerable political demands.)

The feminine default of “affiliative communication” is not the problem (women have been around forever), but it is intended for human relationships at human scale.

It is maladaptive to the hyper-scaled, atomized, parasocial milieu of managerial societies.

(Obviously male psychology is also painfully maladaptive to managerial society in various ways — we are trying to explain the current gendered freakout.)

The pat right-wing response to this is “well, women just aren’t cut out for this, we should exclude them from politics” — but as our societies grow more technical, legible, and impersonal, the managerial milieu expands to consume, displace, and politicize every domain of human life.

Women have never been more powerful in legible, transactional terms, but they feel more powerless and alone than ever, because the human, personal world in which their power has its natural expression no longer exists. Various political interpretations of those feelings may be incoherent, but the feelings themselves are real.

That’s the “cry for help” at the core of this hysteria.

Millions of Western women are profoundly unhappy; and it’s not because they were offered the Trad Life in earnest and rejected it out of pique. It does not exist. (Raising a couple kids alone in the suburbs on half the median household income is not the Trad Life.)

Their lives are profoundly isolated — and all normal people (but especially women) ground their sense of life’s meaning in a social context. When they are asked to do something difficult, they need social scripts that tell them they’re doing a good job, and people they care about are proud of them, and it will all be worth it.

When you are alone in the suburbs and trying to make ends meet on 1.75 incomes, a baby can make those feelings of isolation and drudgery more acute. And a man is only a man — he will struggle to provide a satisfying frame, a “world of two”, for a woman to inhabit.

The Tiktok mommies are telling you all this, of course. They are pretty good at talking about their feelings. They mean what they say!

Women need human community — and that problem is bigger than any of us.

You should not take their unhappiness personally, and you definitely should not cast yourself as the villain in their story. (You should never cast yourself as the villain in any story. We are on the side of love, and Love Wins.)

But this cry for help, which is intended to rally a community of known human beings with names and faces, is instead being answered by an intensely-selected parasocial mob of shriekers and lunatics, organized as a quasi-political bloc.

None of these women can help — or care about — the women they are ostensibly “validating” online. They can only express their own pathologies and resentments and disappointments, with the social camouflage of coming to another woman’s rescue.

This is why there is no effusion of empathy toward the husband or the murdered children. They are not saying “I am her”, they are saying “she is me” — which is to say, “this triple infanticide is about me, actually.”

But even these women are not really mad at you, or even at men as a class — they’re mad at Dad, or some boyfriend or ex-husband. And maybe that guy’s a real piece of shit, who knows.

To inhabit their frame and play the heel is to deepen the demoralization on both sides, and to vindicate an adversarial political frame. To say that men and women just have irreconcilable interests, and one “side” will have to win, is to deny the massively negative-sum character of this problem.

Nobody is “winning” here, which is the good news.

It means that you can want both men and women to be much happier — and to get much more of what they really want — than they currently do. But it can’t happen within our present technical political milieu.

I’m going to make this a two-parter — next week we’ll discuss why gendered political dysfunction is structural and terminal.

It isn’t just generating grotesque public behavior: it is fundamentally incompatible with civilization, because it disrupts family formation at scale. Managerial liberal societies can neither resolve nor survive these problems and remain managerial liberal societies.

Our task is to build the human institutions that come next.

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EXIT News:

• National GOP Convention in Dallas, 9/10: I will be speaking at an event presented by Delphica Society after the convention. More details to follow on this.

• Constitutional Action completed its first beautification event in Dallas. Events scheduled in the next month in Salt Lake City and Seattle.

• Paideia will host our first Youth AI Hackathon, 10/15-10/16 in Orem, UT. Tickets on sale soon.

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

  • This week (8/18) we heard from Kaiser Von Lohengramm, who has written extensively on the value and meaning of America’s founding myths. Full recording coming soon for paid subscribers.

  • Next week (8/25) we will welcome the Highly Respected Scott Greer to discuss his new book Whitepill.

  • The following week (9/1) we will talk to The Woolshire about building their made-in-USA wool business.

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• EXIT Member Events (members can check the group chat for details):

  • 8/29, Salt Lake City, UT: Constitutional Action Beautification Event

  • 9/5, Orem, UT: EXIT member meetup

  • 9/8, New York, NY: EXIT member meetup & Michael Anton signing event

  • 9/10, Dallas, TX: Delphica/EXIT speaking event for GOP Convention

  • 9/11, Nashville, TN: EXIT member meetup

  • 9/12, Seattle, WA: Constitutional Action Beautification Event

  • 9/12, Houston, TX: EXIT member meetup

  • 9/18, Atlanta, GA: EXIT Member Meetup

  • 9/19, Columbus, OH: EXIT Member Meetup

  • 9/21, Dallas, TX: EXIT Member Meetup

  • 9/25, Salt Lake City, UT: Delphica/EXIT event

Basically, he has some extremely important problems figured out, and we wanted to talk about how.

Topics:

• The myth of “adolescent rebellion”

• Homes as center…

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Today marks the five-year anniversary of EXIT.

On the first week of August 2021, I was in my sixth year working an extremely fake job at a defense contractor.

I had just finished an even-faker-than-normal COVID MBA. The main thing I got out of it was a manufacturing logistics class that genuinely made me a little bit better at Starcraft.

I had spent almost my entire “career” tweeting, because there was nothing to do.

I worked for a while on the facility that held the F-35 production line: it’s a mile long, and I would just walk and tweet — keeping up a brisk pace so it looked like I was on my way somewhere — back and forth, for my entire 9/80 workday.

There was a period of about eight months in which I knew that I was going to be doxxed, and that there was basically no way I wasn’t going to get fired.

I knew, in the abstract, that I was going to lose my job, and probably that whole “career path” — and maybe corporate employment in general — but I remember that time as kind of dreamlike. What was there to do about it? Nothing.

I had no marketable skills or experience. None of the credentials I had accumulated were relevant to any real-world outcome that anyone would pay money for — it only mattered inside the world from which I was about to be expelled.

I supposed I could delete all my tweets and hope the bad guys would leave me alone — but posting felt like only remotely real thing I did all day, the only thing to which anyone organically responded. And anyway, they weren’t going to leave me alone.

When I finally got doxxed, on the evening of August 1, 2021, things came into focus.

The job had been extremely fake, but the money was real — the groceries were real, the house was real, my kids’ health insurance was real.

Enraging the Libtards had always felt like a game, because they are ridiculous people — but their animosity was very real. They posted my address, and pictures of my house, and my wife and kids.

They crowed about how I would lose the house, and maybe my family. They left me schizophrenic, heavy-breathing voice mails. We stashed a handgun on top of the refrigerator.

I spent that week not really eating or sleeping, trying frantically to take stock of any conceivable productive assets, and wishing I had taken the question seriously sooner.

It turned out that I had been right: the internet is real life.

Dozens of people reached out with offers to help — either with a job, or a connection, or with material encouragement to start a business (“start selling something, and I will buy it”).

Some of these were online friends I had known pseudonymously for years, but most were strangers. They cared about me on a human level — but really they recognized that this problem was coming for them, too.

The systems that mediated our access to the material world — the games that determine whether you “get” to have an education, a job, a mortgage, health insurance, etc. — had become totally game-like: abstract, unreal, arbitrary.

The detachment of these systems from reality means two things:

• They grow increasingly dysfunctional as “success in playing the game” stops being a signal of competence in producing any real-world outcome.

• Your place inside these systems becomes increasingly tenuous — when the rules are unmoored from any material reality, they can be changed on you at any time.

In August of 2021, the country was just beginning to emerge from COVID and the BLM riots, and we were in the thick of the corporate vaccine mandate rollout.

We had learned that the entire global economy could be stopped on command for months with no break in the system’s stride. Lies that had killed and immiserated millions could be exposed with no consequences. Nothing Matters; Nothing Ever Happens.

We didn’t have any clear theoretical explanation for how this was possible, or even any words to describe it, except “fake and gay”.

We just knew that it was extremely fake and gay.

All you can do, under those conditions, is to build an Exit.

You have to figure out how to create value in the real world, where competence matters and your access is not adjudicated from moment to moment by people who hate you.

This doesn’t mean abandoning your fake-and-gay job/skills/assets, and running away to eat roots and berries in the woods: it means the careful transmutation of all those resources into things that will remain productive as the fake-and-gay system declines.

When friends suggested a “subscription community” to address this problem together, I groaned — but the problem was real, and the goodwill and confidence of my friends was real. 75 guys signed up in the first two weeks; they were willing to walk with me for a while, and work on a solution with me. That was what I had.

And goodwill is a rapidly perishing asset. If I didn’t quickly turn it into something that was worth doing apart from their desire to see me “get back on my feet”, I would end up both broke, and humiliated among the only people whose good opinion still meant anything to me.

So I have spent the last five years working to make this thing real.

For the first year, I called every guy in the group every thirty days to take inventory of needs and resources, and to understand what he wanted to accomplish with his membership.

Since then, EXIT connections have directly raised millions of dollars in investment and sponsorship for member projects. Startup teams created within EXIT are comfortably in the tens of millions. (We have to be careful about discussing specifics, but the guys can keep me honest.)

We have placed dozens of guys in better jobs, or helped them reskill, or start a business. EXIT members have launched civic action projects in ten states; we have monthly in-person meetups in a dozen cities.

But none of that is exactly what EXIT is. EXIT is a fraternity, not a startup incubator or investment fund or political action committee. Fraternity is the goal — values-aligned men who have built shared history and trust, who place bets on one another and see those bets pay off over time.

But these are some of the concrete, legible artifacts of that shared history.

As I take stock of what has worked over the last five years, I’m realizing that I still underrate how Real the internet is.

Like everything else, EXIT is unequal: some guys contribute more and get more out of it than others.

Some of EXIT’s Top Guys live close to each other, and they’ve been able to build remarkable things together IRL — but a surprising number are in rural Middle America, or in foreign countries where we are unlikely to have critical mass for a long time.

My leading theory is that these far-flung guys recognize that “no one is coming to save them” in their little town, so they’re aggressive about using the weekly EXIT calls to skill up, build professional relationships, and hold themselves accountable — and it turns out that you can get an enormous amount done over Zoom.

Our most successful startup teams, most of the job placements, and virtually all of the transformative career changes that EXIT has facilitated, have happened over the internet, across coasts.

Several of our guys have become locally politically influential this way, using the group to build an area study, identify “crowns in the gutter”, and build strategies to claim them.

Long-term, the goal is to scale up 100X, so that every major American city has a dozen or more EXIT guys within 15 minutes of each other, and every EXIT guy has access to barbecues, poker nights, homeschool co-ops, co-works, and local kingmaker political blocs.

But we don’t have to wait for that. The internet is real life.

“The friends we made along the way” are real. Getting on a call with smart friends can help you puzzle out what you’re good for — and then, together, we can figure out how to get the people and things we care about off the various burning platforms that we all occupy.

I know it works because my friends did that for me — before I really believed in it — and now I do it for them.

The State of EXIT, Five Years In:

• 325 members, with critical mass (>10 members) in Salt Lake City, Houston, New York, Dallas, Austin, Washington DC, Seattle, San Francisco, and Columbus. About 40% of the membership lives in these metros.

• 15-20 member-led calls per week:

  • Tuesday night full-group call, where we discuss EXIT goings-on, introduce new guys, and host outside members for Q&As (recent guests include Auron MacIntyre, Joost Strydom, Johann Kurtz, John Carter, Mike Shelby). We typically have 60-80 attendees per week.

  • Accountability calls: Entrepreneurship, fitness, credential-development calls (ham radio licenses, cybersecurity certifications, etc.), real-time working groups, dating, etc.

  • Knowledge-sharing calls: AI, tech/crypto, real estate, investing, acquisition entrepreneurship, drones/EWAR, homeschool/fatherhood, etc.

  • Networking/social calls: Reading groups, history discussions, regional e-meetups, EXIT Bar Association

• 10-12 meetups per month: Lunch and dinner meetups, speaker series, range days, cultural events, family barbecues, etc.

• Leadership Group: We have a small opt-in group of ~25 members who help with strategic initiatives and planning for EXIT at large.

• File leaders: Every member is assigned a file leader, who serves as their local point of contact with the group. File leaders ensure that members are informed and know how to make use of the group.

• Group chat: Main channel for 1:1 matchmaking, networking and intel-sharing to the full group.

• Major initiatives:

  • Paideia Hackathon. Gathering families for a weekend of learning and building with AI. To be held in Utah Valley, October 17th. Subscribe for updates.

  • Natal Conference III. Our third national conference on demographic decline, planned for Q1 2027. Goal for this conference will be to bring together aligned families and young people at an accessible price point. Stay tuned for updates at natalism.org.

  • Constitutional Action. Advocating for Americans to view the Constitution as a spur to righteous action, rather than an excuse for inaction. Speaking and training events to prepare citizens for civic action, as well as beautification and voter-registration events. Learn more at constitutionalaction.org.

  • EXITville retreat. Annual members-only weekend retreat in Austin, October 9-12. Touring an intentional community outside Austin and learning how these projects come together — financing, marketing, land development, etc.

  • Investment Syndicate. We are assembling a $30M fund to invest in a portfolio of values-aligned projects. More information soon to come.

If you apply for membership, you’ll be asked to schedule a call with me.

Everyone who comes into the group has an intake conversation to assess alignment and fit, and we either approve your membership or refund your dues.

Once approved, you’ll be introduced to our welcoming committee, who will get you started with 2-3 one-on-one connections right off the bat, and help you figure out which calls and meetups to attend.

You’ll give us a paragraph or two about yourself in the #introductions channel, and then you’ll be assigned your file leader and invited to the monthly New Guy Call, where you’ll be introduced in a room with a mix of 15-20 new and experienced members.

From there, it’s up to you how you want to engage. Just like the gym, you get what you put in — but if you can commit to attend one call a week, we can help you find what you’re looking for.

Apply at exitgroup.us

EXIT News

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

  • This week (8/4), we heard from Will Tanner of the American Tribune, accomplished writer, EXIT man, and expert on the Rhodesian conflict.

    • After the call, Friendjamin facilitated an excellent review and discussion of How to Talk to Anyone.

  • Next week (8/11), we will talk with Sam Paepke, former White House liaison for the Small Business Administration, and now Leadership Development Manager at the Conservative Partnership Institute — an organization dedicated to placing values-aligned people in the Trump Administration, in GOP campaigns, and in conservative think tanks.

    • After we hear from Mr. Paepke, Greg Treat will give us a status report on the long-awaited EXIT investment fund. We will also have a history call hosted by Thucydides.

  • The following week (8/18) we will hear from Kaiser Van Lohengrimm, who has written extensively on the value and meaning of America’s founding myths.

    • After Mr. Van Lohengrimm, we will hear from EXIT man Ryan on the accessibility of federal and state military procurement gibs.

• EXIT Member Events (members can check the group chat for details):

  • 8/7, Utah County, UT: EXIT 5th Anniversary Party

  • 8/7, Dallas, TX: Constitutional Action Beautification Event

  • 8/14, Nashville, TN: EXIT member meetup

  • 8/15, Columbus, OH: EXIT member meetup

  • 8/15, Houston, TX: EXIT member meetup

  • 8/17, Dallas, TX: EXIT member meetup

  • 8/21, Atlanta, GA: EXIT member meetup

  • 8/29, Salt Lake City, UT: Constitutional Action Beautification Event

  • 9/12, Seattle, WA: Constitutional Action Beautification Event

In a sense it is a conservative holiday, a celebration of roots and rootedness: we revere our ancestors who conquered and settled this land for us. It makes you want to plant your feet, thinking of all the blood and sweat that brought you here, and what it took to build. You feel that you have no right to surrender it.

But when you think of those pioneers’ example, it is (obviously, by definition) one of pulling up roots, either under duress or merely for greener pastures. In many cases, these pioneers were the first in their line to leave their village or parish — let alone their nation — in centuries.

The standard Old Right reflex is to nail this paradox to the Ellis Islanders’ door — “sure, maybe the Irish and Italians are rootless transients, but real Americans would never.”

I’ve got ancestors on both sides of this.

My dad’s family is basically 100% Irish — some Ellis Islanders, but also Scots-Irish who were in the Ohio River Valley before the Whiskey Rebellion.

On my mother’s side, I have a handful of English and Danish Mormon pioneers, but most of her lines are Anglo-American going back at least to the 18th century.

My earliest American ancestor came to Jamestown in 1610. I have ancestors in New York when it was Nieuw Amsterdam; one was among the first surveyors of the South Carolina backcountry; three served in the Virginia House of Burgesses, and one in the Culpeper Minutemen.

(One of my fuzzier Virginia lines extends back to John Rolfe and Pocahontas, so technically “we” have been here for millennia. I write to you from STOLEN LAND.)

Those Anglo-Norman Virginia lines are the easiest to follow back, because they were wealthy and literate and deeply concerned with bloodlines.

I can watch them bounce around the British Isles, fighting wars, claiming land and titles, all the way back to the Norman Conquest, and from there back to Odin and Aeneas and King David.

Of course, that’s a curated selection of thousands of ancestors — you don’t have to go very far back to reach a time where a democratic headcount of my ancestors would yield mostly permanent land-bound peasants.

But — maybe this should go without saying — being bound to the land was for peasants.

All my fun ancestors, as far back as you’d care to look, have been “rootless cosmopolitans” to the maximum extent permitted by their technology. They loved fast ships and sleek horses and distant correspondences.

Some were conquerors; some were what we might today call “refugees”, fleeing war or persecution. Often they were both at the same time.

They were of course more deeply rooted socially than any modern people — European aristocracies maintained an elaborate infrastructure of hospitality and hunting and feasting at great cost, in order to secure ties of friendship and marriage across long distances and years apart.

But Europeans — at least, the ones in the history books — have been radically mobile and individualistic by contemporary standards since Herodotus; and that vitality and dynamism was only sharpened by the Transatlantic crossing and the taming of the frontier.

(Modern Europeans are of course staid and communal in a way that makes this difficult to imagine — but they, too, were permanently shaped by the flight of this European type to the frontiers.)

I am deeply grateful that my ancestors, rich and poor, were seafarers and pioneers who did not romanticize stasis, so that I was not born in a mausoleum.

I recently heard this spirit described as the “tragic flaw” in the American character: our undoing in these frictionless times.

I’m not sure what I think about that — but there’s no question that it is our character.

Much discourse on the American Right is dedicated to distinguishing Heritage Americans from immigrants on the virtue of our Ancient Tenure Upon the Land, and the Graves of our Fathers — as if that’s what gives us the right to it — but of course that’s nonsense.

We live in the most beautiful and abundant land on the planet because our ancestors had the courage and ingenuity and will to claim it — very recently, in the scheme of things — and we will only keep it if we find the courage and ingenuity and will to claim it again.

Of course, this forecloses any moralistic argument against mass migration today — but how are those moralistic arguments working out for us so far?

“Indigeneity” is an enemy concept, invented specifically to argue for your expropriation. (The “indigenes” of any country are just “whichever tribe conquered or wandered into the land the day before Europeans showed up”.)

Playing into that framing will not persuade anyone. You’re not going to get leftists to Imagine If the Roles Were Reversed.

It only serves to alienate us from the heritage that actually built our nation: a restless, ranging, endlessly dynamic spirit that has been with us as long as there has been any “us” to talk about.

To my mind, the best way to honor my pioneer ancestors is to recognize that the dirt is not magic.

America is its people, and our ancient heritage is not a closed frontier — it is the Frontier itself.

Today is Pioneer Day — a perfect occasion to release our extended conversation with Orania CEO Joost Strydom.

People discouraged with the political situation in the West will often lament that “there are still libtards in South Africa” — but Orania demonstrates how much can be built even under a regime as corrupt, and incompetent, and openly hostile as S…

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This is my favorite scene in The Lord of the Rings movies.

The four hobbits are riding home to the Shire, having come through hell and back. Frodo has saved the world at terrible personal cost. Pippin is now a knight, wearing his mail and tunic bearing the White Tree of Gondor. Merry is still dressed as an Esquire of Rohan.

All of them are in outlandish clothes, and laden with exotic treasures of dwarves, elves, and men. They have been utterly transformed by their journey.

But Everard Proudfoot (a contrivance of the film) has not been transformed by their journey. He spent the last year in the Shire, with its ordinary rhythms and expectations, and he thinks they are fucking weird.

It’s a big change from the books of course, where Saruman has brought the conflict home, and the hobbits have to drum him out.

I like both versions of the story — but what I like about the scene in the movie is that Everard Proudfoot represents the totality of their victory. They truly saved the Shire — completely intact, exactly as they left it.

If we win the way we hope to win, all the people who think we are weird and disreputable will have no reason to change their minds. (In fact — as in the film — the way we win may confirm all their suspicions.)

But imagine trying to get Everard Proudfoot to vote to save the world.

A few weeks ago, my wife got her hair done by the Median Utah Voter.

Lately I’ve been using the term “median voter” instead of the n-word (normie) — but in this case I mean it literally.

White, married, middle-class, homeowner, “some college”, late fifties. She lives in a safe neighborhood, where she still sees most of her neighbors at church.

She couldn’t afford her house if she had to buy it now, but she doesn’t have to buy it now. Her husband is closing in on retirement; they saved responsibly, she mostly just cuts hair to have something to do.

She’s not political, except in the ambient sense that she watches the TV news sometimes, and feels bad about the things she’s supposed to feel bad about. She doesn’t like to see people being nasty to each other.

She voted for Trump in 2020 and 2024 (though probably not in 2016), because she’s a Conservative, but she doesn’t like him personally — or at least, she doesn’t like “the way he talks about people.”

When she sees Trump (and Trump surrogates) being harsh and insulting on TV, she thinks about how she tries to treat people — the kind of people she meets in her real life, in her safe neighborhood.

The Mexican guy who fixed her water heater was polite and efficient, and gave her a good price. She did a service project for a refugee charity last Christmas, and seeing those families smile as they got their care packages made her feel really good.

Nothing (in her real life) justifies being Nasty, or Hurting People.

You’re not going to convince this woman of The Big Picture.

There’s no bar graph you can show her that will convince her that her neighborhood is dangerous (it isn’t), or that the contractor who installed her water heater is a threat (he isn’t), or that the refugees at the charity are about to make a fire with her Beautiful Oak Door — they aren’t (at least, not any time soon).

She lives in the real world; she Touches Grass. She isn’t going to care about any of the stuff you care about until she sees it right in front of her physically, and by then it will be way, way too late.

Of course, her moral attention can be redirected parasocially, but not by you — not in the totalizing way that activates a person politically. She’s not going to update her worldview — which, again, is very much wrapped up in her moral attitude toward dozens of real relationships in her real life — because you showed her a meme, or a statistic, or even a lurid atrocity video.

The state and national political system exists to keep this woman happy.

Housing getting more affordable would be a source of stress, with very little upside for her; house prices going steadily up makes her feel cozy.

Immigrants are clearly neutral-to-net-positive in her (personal, real) life; she doesn’t live in any of the places or do any of the activities where they cause problems. She doesn’t see how deportations help her in any material sense, but they definitely feel icky to see on television.

She wants to hear that poor kids aren’t hungry at school, and that teachers are earning a decent living, and that seniors (like her, soon) are taken care of in their old age — and the impact of any of these questions on her taxes, as the middle-aged middle-income Median Voter, are (by design) modest, diffuse, and difficult to trace.

Utah has a particularly bad case — but all over the country, This is What Democracy Looks Like: appearances are well-maintained, with a craftsman’s concern for the taste of women and the elderly.

How are you going to convince the person for whom the whole system is built that all is not well in Zion?

Well, unprompted, while she was doing my wife’s hair, the Median Voter gave us the answer.

In her basement, Utah’s Median Voter keeps three eighteen-gallon Roughneck storage totes full of toys.

Her children are now in their thirties. One is gay; one is a 36-year-old email job professional with no boyfriend and no serious prospects; one lives at home, intermittently employed.

These toys have not been touched in twenty years — but she can’t bear the thought of taking them to DI (that’s “Deseret Industries”, Utah’s Goodwill equivalent.) She doesn’t even have a niece or nephew who could take them.

She is comfortable in all the ways that a liberal consumer society can make her comfortable — but simultaneously in such pain that it is surfacing unbidden with strangers at work.

And she feels guilty about it, because she loves her children and does not want to burden them with her expectations.

The feeling that they owe something to her, even after they are grown (and that she has ongoing obligations to them) is an emotional instinct that her generation has collectively denied and suppressed.

She is not a Liberal — she is not pretending to be happy about all this — but she has no frame for any of these problems outside the conservative language of individual choice and accountability. She made choices, and her children made choices, and here we are. Barren.

(Much of her pain is no doubt rooted in the nagging feeling that this is All Her Fault somehow, though it’s not obvious what she is supposed to have done differently. She made sure they all made it to church, etc.)

This is the sense in which the war has already come to the Shire.

Faceless economic and cultural forces for which she has no name have salted her earth.

She could trace the genealogy of her children’s relationships — the particular friends and experiences at various state/quasi-state institutions that brought them to where they are — but she has no theory that metabolizes those experiences into questions of Policy.

But she knows it’s increasingly impossible (by which we mean “prohibitively difficult/undesirable at scale”) to raise a family, even in happy shiny Utah. She has watched her children struggle with the nakedly discriminatory credential mills and HR departments, and the impossibility of getting a mortgage.

But for all this there is the moral reflex to “take responsibility”: just work harder, do better, tighten your belt, stop buying avocado toast, etc.

The shattering of families into individual consumption units inhabiting a common barracks — the breaking and commodification of the relationship between man and woman, parent and child — released a tremendous amount of economic and political energy.

There was a powerful profit incentive to get conservative families of her generation thinking (or at least talking) as if loyalty was a vice, a sin against Freedom and Personal Responsibility.

If you enumerated all these economic and cultural obstacles to healthy family formation, she would likely nod along, but she sees them as something like bad weather, something that Just Happens — or maybe an aggregate of people just making “bad choices” (including, painfully, herself).

She has no vocabulary to think of these things as policy decisions made by People With Names And Addresses.

So here’s my bet: I think the Median Voter actually cares deeply about her children and (putative) grandchildren.

She is not callous. She is not excited to die broke in a cruise ship or high-end assisted living facility. She just needs to be convinced of the following:

• She is allowed to care whether her children succeed in raising healthy families — far from being “not her business”, it is her only business

• These questions are not purely moral or apolitical — it is not actually All Her Fault, or her children’s fault

• Her family did not get here because of inexplicable cultural weather patterns — it was the result of deliberate public policy decisions which can be redecided.

Malachi’s prophecy — the seal at the end of the Old Testament — is literally true:

If the Median Voters — the cozy Everard Proudfoots of the world — understand themselves as atomized individuals, they will never take action until the earth is smitten with a curse, and the barbarians are literally, physically at their doorstep.

(Again, the individualist frame was inculcated with the express purpose of lowering these defenses.)

The only way to make them see what is coming — what is, in fact, already happening — is to turn their hearts to their children.

This thesis is perhaps particularly acute in Utah, where the Median Voter is particularly materially comfortable, and rhetorically primed to care about family — but I believe it’s the political key to the whole country.

For fathers whose hearts are turned to their children, all American political controversies become blindingly straightforward, not only in terms of “which side is right” but “what extremes of action are justified”.

It’s not just the morally correct frame, it’s also the most politically achievable frame: no other grounds for political cooperation is half as broad (near-universal) or as deep (one of the last things people will kill and die for) as our common interest in our grandchildren.

Once you have this frame — that the family is the fundamental unit of society, and that your first duty is the cultivation of your children and grandchildren — ideological considerations melt away, and it becomes simple to figure out who your friends are, and what you need to build together.

You won’t get the Median Voter to build any of this with you — but, as demonstrated by Bukele, and the fall of the Soviet Union, and many other historical “preference cascades” — if you can show her a concrete alternative, she will happily choose it.

EXIT is the fraternal arm of this effort — connecting men who share this understanding, to take a short position in the managerial system and build the human institutions that come next — the businesses, friendships, and shared history that turn families into Great Houses.

Constitutional Action is the civic arm — taking up responsibilities that the managerial state has abdicated, defending American families in their rights against bad-faith lawyering from people who despise them, and securing the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity.

And in early 2027, we will host the third annual NatalCon, bringing together like-minded families to discuss how we can build new institutions (or recapture old ones) to build a society in which our grandchildren can thrive.

EXIT News

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

  • Next week (7/21) will hear from Auron MacIntyre, a one-time schoolteacher and anon poaster who now hosts a show and column at The Blaze. We’ll discuss the progress of the Trump Administration, the prospects for young Americans, and the slow decay of managerialism.

  • The following week (7/28), our Q&A will feature Patrick Casey, writer and host of Restoring Order.

  • The week after (8/4), we will hear from Will Tanner of the American Tribune, accomplished writer, EXIT man, and expert on the Rhodesian conflict.

• EXIT Member Events (members can check the group chat for details):

  • 7/16: Nashville Speaking Event

  • 7/17: Atlanta Speaking Event

  • 7/18: Columbus Member Meetup

  • 7/20: Dallas Member Meetup

• Subscriber Events (RSVP below):

RSVP for Nashville Speaking Event 7/16

RSVP for Atlanta Speaking Event 7/17

RSVP for Dallas Meetup 7/20

Alex’s Presentation (free to listen):

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

• Lycurgus’ sacrificial leader…

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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

  • 7/11: Washington DC Member Range Day

  • 7/16: Nashville Speaking Event

  • 7/17: Atlanta Speaking Event

  • 7/18: Columbus Member Meetup

  • 7/20: Dallas Member Meetup

Subscriber Events (RSVP below):

RSVP for Nashville Beautification 7/11

RSVP for Nashville Speaking Event 7/16

RSVP for Atlanta Speaking Event 7/17

RSVP for Dallas Meetup 7/20

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

RSVP for Dallas Cocktail Hour 6/15

RSVP for Denver Cocktail Hour 6/19

RSVP for American Fork CAS Event 7/1