(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

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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…

Read more

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…

Read more

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That is literally the difference between you and them.

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

Second: it’s just bad messaging.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

EXIT News

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

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

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

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

    • Crypto Mining - Phase 2 expansion of operational mining facility

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  • 6/4: San Francisco Meetup

  • 6/5: Stanford Meetup

  • 6/6: North Bay Meetup

  • 6/6: Utah Valley Meetup

  • 6/12: Nashville Meetup

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

  • 6/13: Houston Meetup

  • 6/13: Budapest Meetup

  • 6/15: Dallas Meetup

  • 6/19: Atlanta Meetup

  • 6/19: Denver Meetup

  • 6/20: Columbus Meetup

  • 6/27: Salt Lake City Passage Press Event

  • 6/27: St. Louis Meetup

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

Subscriber Events (RSVP below):

RSVP for San Francisco Cocktail Hour 6/4

RSVP for Stanford Cocktail Hour 6/5

RSVP for North Bay Cocktail Hour 6/6

RSVP for Nashville Cocktail Hour 6/12

RSVP for CAS Cleanup Event 6/13

RSVP for Dallas Cocktail Hour 6/15

RSVP for Denver Cocktail Hour 6/19

RSVP for American Fork CAS Event 7/1

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

EXIT News

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

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

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

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

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

  • 5/30: Utah Valley Constitutional Action Beautification Event

  • 6/4: San Francisco Meetup

  • 6/5: Stanford Meetup

  • 6/6: North Bay Meetup

  • 6/6: Utah Valley Meetup

  • 6/12: Nashville Meetup

  • 6/13: Houston Meetup

  • 6/13: Budapest Meetup

  • 6/15: Dallas Meetup

  • 6/19: Atlanta Meetup

  • 6/19: Denver Meetup

  • 6/20: Columbus Meetup

  • 6/27: Salt Lake City Passage Press Event

  • 6/27: St. Louis Meetup

Subscriber Events (RSVP below):

RSVP for Utah Valley Beautification 5/30

RSVP for San Francisco Cocktail Hour 6/4

RSVP for Stanford Cocktail Hour 6/5

RSVP for North Bay Cocktail Hour 6/6

RSVP for Denver Cocktail Hour 6/19

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

exitgroup.us

EXIT News

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

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

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

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

• Events

  • 5/30: Utah Valley Constitutional Action Beautification Event

  • 6/5: San Jose Meetup

  • 6/6: San Francisco Lunch

  • 6/19: Denver Meetup

  • 6/27: Salt Lake City Passage Press Event

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nothing about this feels inevitable.

How did they convince us to do this to ourselves?

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

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

Do you remember the black square thing, during BLM?

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

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

If that doesn’t sound like Utah.

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

How did they convince us to do this to ourselves?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

EXIT News

• Upcoming EXIT Group Calls

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

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

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

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

• Events

  • 5/16: Washington, DC Meetup

  • 5/16: Sandy, UT Hike

  • 5/18: New York City Meetup

  • 5/18: Dallas Meetup

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

  • 5/30: Utah Valley Constitutional Action Beautification Event

  • 6/5: San Jose Meetup

  • 6/6: San Francisco Lunch

  • 6/19: Denver Meetup

  • 6/27: Salt Lake City Passage Press Event

Below the paywall here:

Cocktail hour invites for supporting subscribers in:

• Washington DC (5/16)

• Dallas (5/18)

• New York City (5/18)

• Boston (5/19)

• San Francisco (6/5)

• Denver (6/19)

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

Radical Family Camp, Indianapolis.

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

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

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

Leadership Group.

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

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

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

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

• Tennessee political action group (same)

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

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

15 Meetups in 14 cities.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Subscribe now

Utah GOP Convention.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Constitutional Action, American Fork Veterans’ Hall.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Join Utah Valley Beautification 5/30/26

Provo Family Meetup.

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

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

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

What’s coming in May:

• Weekly Full Group Calls:

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

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

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

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

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

• Constitutional Action Beautification 5/30.

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

Below the paywall:

Cocktail hour invites for supporting subscribers in:

• Nashville (5/8)

• Washington DC (5/16)

• Dallas (5/18)

• New York City (5/18)

• Boston (5/19)

• San Francisco (6/5)

• Denver (6/19)

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

Read more

• Prospects for Alberta secession

• Bilingualism as gibs for Quebec in federal govt

• Why Poilievre was crushed by Mark Carney

• Chinese money laundering in China through banks and casinos

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

• Emergent identity groups forming as geographic borders evaporate

• The blockbusting of Canada

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

EXIT News:

• Weekly Calls:

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

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

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

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

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

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

  • Washington, DC (5/16)

  • New York, NY (5/18)

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

  • San Francisco (6/5)

  • Denver (6/19)

Read more

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

• The Republican Party is useless

• The structure of modern politics inherently favors our enemies

• The only actions available are immoral

• The only actions available will land us in jail

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

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

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

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

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

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

• Heavier state surveillance

• More totalizing narrative control

• Fewer practical constraints on official power

• Their political and legal systems were far more fake

• Prospects of extralegal resistance were even less favorable

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• dispute resolution

• shadow land recording

• parallel credentialing

• election monitoring

• illegible finance, etc.

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

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

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

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

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

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

It will require ordinary, decent people to show up.

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

RSVP for Constitutional Action 4/30

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

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

Subscribe now

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

• Chattanooga, TN (4/24)

• Washington, DC (5/16)

• New York, NY (5/18)

• Boston, MA (5/19)

• San Francisco (6/5)

• Denver (6/27)

Read more

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

In this Q&A, we discuss:

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

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

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

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

• Strategies that have worked in reactivating patronage relationships

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

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

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

He says:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Whereas Trump is playing Drunk Nixon live on the timeline.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• our respective stockpiles and output of munitions

• the escalation ladder

• the penetrability of Iran’s underground sites

• how resilient their leadership bench was to a decapitation strike

• where the KC-135s were

• whether the transponders were turned on or off

• what we know about Iranian sleeper cells

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The speed with which you are able to

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

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

3. Decide what to do, and then

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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