Civil war, but the other side is a fungus

Hearing a lot of buzz about the impending civil war on the TL, because the Deep State will “stop at nothing” to ensure that Trump does not take office.

It is certainly true that there are powerful constituencies within the state doing everything in their power to ensure that Trump is not elected, with little regard for the law and less regard for “institutional integrity”.

But the way these constituencies act in concert has more in common with an anthill than an explicit criminal conspiracy. The degree to which the system can seem intelligent is frequently uncanny — but it’s swarm intelligence, not human intelligence. No one is calling the shots at the top — which dramatically changes what they can and can’t do to stop him.

This explains many mysteries of the Regime’s inscrutable will.

If They have been shambling toward war with Russia for the last fifteen years, why didn’t They make any preparations for the logistical and infrastructural costs of fighting such a war? Likewise China — why antagonize them while making zero effort to restore America’s industrial base?

If They get to hand-pick the Democratic candidate with zero input from the voters, why would They choose one of the least popular figures in the party? If They can just steal the election from under Donald Trump, why are They scrambling, putting billions of dollars on the line as if it matters?

If the plan was to sink his campaign with lawfare, why would they needle him with these penny-ante, obviously frivolous suits that make him more popular and don’t actually interfere with his ability to campaign?

If They could just whack him, why isn’t he whacked?

It isn’t just that the parties are individually stupid. These are decisions that even a very stupid executive would not make, if he were really in charge. The system’s behavior is more like a slime mold, blindly crawling toward nutrients — or zombies piling up against a wall until one can climb over the top.

All of these decisions make good sense as the response of individual actors to individual incentives within their narrow bureaucratic fiefs.

Lots of people got rich off NATO expansion — no one in the system was incentivized to prepare for the war. Alvin Bragg and Letitia James were never capable of defeating or neutralizing Trump, but that was never their objective.

Kamala Harris’s nomination makes sense as the aggregate will of a handful of warring bureaucratic constituencies within the DNC, but she obviously isn’t who you’d choose if you were God-Emperor Obama and you could anoint the candidate most likely to win.

Taken together, the agglomeration of these incentives means that “The Regime” clearly has a hard-on for President Trump — but it isn’t able to make a fist and smash him, the way a person could, if they were in personal control of the most powerful military and surveillance machine in history.

Likewise, “The Regime” “hates” you — but it can’t actually go to war with you.

Right-wingers intuitively understand that there will never be a day when the People learn the truth about how evil the government is, and rise up as one to overthrow it. It will never happen because however much it might be in our collective interest, it will never be in our individual interest. Nobody wants to be the first through the door.

But this intuition hasn’t made its way to our thinking about our enemies’ difficulties — so we still imagine a day when their hostility spontaneously organizes into coherent, Prussian industrial murder.

But that isn’t how it’s going to work.

COVID was the high water line of managerial liberalism’s control over the American people.

If you were a boomer-doomer prepper in the 90s, waiting to be deloused in a FEMA camp and microchipped with the Mark of the Beast, COVID was the vindication of all your worst fears — sort of.

Just as you would have predicted, government bureaucrats revealed themselves to be bottomlessly tyrannical, and venal, and soulless, and the American people pretty much went along with it like cattle.

The Illuminati had us right where they wanted us, injected with the demonic sterility plague and cowering in our homes, unable to buy or sell.

But then what happened?

Well, the various tyrannies and absurdities went on in a haphazard way for several more months, enforced unevenly according to the ego and cussedness and status anxiety of local bureaucrats — but the cabal never sprang their trap and permanently consolidated totalitarian control over the citizens.

Instead, every institution of American public life torched decades (if not centuries) of accumulated credibility and good will, only for the herd to eventually get bored and confused, and trundle back to normal life a few months later.

Likewise: looking naively at the propaganda, the mass mobilization, the property damage, and the money that changed hands over the BLM hysteria, you might be tempted to think that The Regime was plotting an actual Bolshevik Reign of Terror — but it never materialized.

There was no heroic confrontation in which the tyrants were thwarted — the mob just mindlessly discharged its will to destroy, and then went back to sleep. The long term consequences, as with COVID, were that a handful of hustlers got a payday, at the cost of a catastrophic loss of institutional trust.

There was no vision, malign or otherwise, governing these events — not even the crude Leninist ambition to seize personal power. Just the slime mold, groping in the dark.

The system is “hostile” in the sense that a fungus is hostile.

Its best weapons are entropy — in a sense, the system is entropy.

It isn’t going to send an elite black ops kill team after Trump — instead it surrounds him with DEI security, goads its most unstable constituents to violence, and hopes for the best.

It doesn’t “rig elections” from the top. Instead, it simply incentivizes a legal framework in which voter fraud is easy to do and hard to prosecute, and then tells every local election official that they have to Do Whatever It Takes to stop Literal Hitler.

This is a very robust configuration, because it is fully distributed and deniable — you can’t decapitate it, or put it on trial. Its mechanisms of coercion are so subterranean and diffuse and convoluted that it can be difficult to convince an ordinary person that they even exist.

The weakness of such a configuration is that it isn’t agile, or precise, or forward-thinking. It adapts to threats in an evolutionary sense, but it doesn’t anticipate them. If you step out of its path, it doesn’t chase you.

So how will an enemy like that behave in the election?

The system is not holding some cache of secret weapons in reserve in the event that Trump wins the election. The tools they have are the tools we’ve seen them deploy: propaganda, schizo assassins, riots, ballot chicanery.

The propaganda apparatus is falling apart as traditional media gets eaten by independent sources.

Riots could discredit Trump as an incumbent, but they can’t help Harris now.

Schizo assassins were always a hail-mary, and it looks like Trump’s security team has hardened things up.

So what’s left to them is ballot chicanery — but most of the swing states have tighter electoral security than they did in 2020, as well as a more vigilant (not to say radicalized) local Republican apparatus.

Besides which, Kamala has to deal with the fact that the voters have seen her agenda in action, while voters in 2020 could convince themselves that Biden represented a return to the mellow, good-times Clintonian DNC of the 90s.

If all that doesn’t work (it seems like it might not work), what’s next?

There is a sense in which “the regime” as a whole is implacably, self-destructively hostile to Trump — but the various institutions and personalities who compose the regime are not. To say that the individual bureaucratic functionary would “stop at nothing” to keep Trump out of the White House is to misunderstand them badly.

Many of them obviously have no moral compunctions about violating the Constitution in general, or specifically having Trump imprisoned or killed — but they’re cowards and conformists, not fanatics. They’re not ready to die for TDS.

Besides which, they’ve spent the last decade doing everything they can to alienate and demoralize the police and military who would presumably carry out their orders in a civil war.

The evidence of that weakness is most obvious in the Red Sea, where a very primitive force has successfully stood off a carrier strike group for the last year on one of the world’s busiest shipping lanes.

If the US military has judged that it can’t afford the PR and morale hit to knock out the Houthis, the idea that they’ve got enough suction to get Americans shooting at each other is fanciful.

So the most likely outcome is that he wins, and they just stonewall him like they did last time (and try to leave him holding the bag on the impending fiscal collapse.)

It’s not that the situation isn’t dangerous.

If Trump wins, there will definitely be riots in blue cities, and probably a lot of property damage — but it’s not obvious what tools they will be able to deploy to dislodge him that they haven’t already deployed.

And if they find a way to dump enough ballots on Kamala, the United States of America is over as a coherent political entity. Immigration alone will swamp the boat, besides the state’s insurmountable fiscal, foreign policy, and demographic problems.

But the threat of violence is unlikely to come directly from agents of the state acting on orders. It will come instead from the various opportunistic infections that the dying state allows to fester. What makes our situation dangerous is the state’s weakness, not its strength.

Regardless of which way the election goes, the way to prepare is the same.

Get to a jurisdiction where your civil and property rights will be respected. Get together often with useful friends. Secure assets that are difficult to inflate away or expropriate.

We’re building for what comes next. Join us at exitgroup.us.

EXIT News:

• On last week’s full-group call (10/15), we discussed Fustel de Coulanges’ The Ancient Family, and what the organization of primitive families and states means for those trying to create a new vision of the state.

• On this week’s call (10/22), we’ll be discussing the details of our new business incubator.

• Salt Lake lunch meetup (members only) on 10/25 — check the Utah channel for details.

• The DFW guys are shooting airsoft on 11/2 — inquire within.

• Last weekend was our Austin cocktail hour — we’ll be doing these monthly from now on, stay tuned.

• We’re moving the cocktail hour invites to a separate post — meantime, if you’re a subscriber you can access the RSVP for the San Francisco meetup (11/9) here.