[What follows is a transcript. Please excuse errors.]
It’s a great day to talk about the Constitution — because today, apparently, we get to hear whether Ketanji Brown Jackson and Amy Coney Barrett think that we should have a country.
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They’re ruling today on whether or not a Chinese Communist Party senior official can ejaculate into a cup, have that cup flown to Saipan, impregnate 10 or 20 or 50 surrogates (this is a real thing that happens), have those surrogates give birth on Saipan Island, then immediately fly all 10 or 20 or 50 children back to China as full American citizens. American as you and me.
And Justice Jackson has made the elegant argument that if she were to steal a wallet in Japan, that she would be subject to Japanese law, which is, in her words, “in a sense, allegiance.”
If you steal a wallet in Japan and you are arrested by the Japanese authorities and sentenced by a Japanese judge, you are essentially Japanese.
Amy Coney Barrett says we can’t strike down birthright citizenship for illegal migrants because what if you don’t know who the parents are? How can you prove that they’re not citizens? American citizenship is the default position: everyone’s an American until proven otherwise.
Which, of course, these arguments are absurd on their face. It takes like five seconds to figure out how they’re terminally unworkable. But Amy Coney Barrett and Ketanji Brown Jackson don’t have to win an argument.
Kagan and Barrett and Sotomayor and Jackson — our gay race communists — they’re going to vote against restrictions on immigration no matter what, because they don’t believe America should be a country. To the extent that they have any patriotic feeling toward America whatsoever, it’s as a void of nationhood, as the opposite of a nation.
A place where anybody can come and be anything, or just more accurately as a vehicle for communism and Barrett is maybe less ideological, but in terms of her emotional orientation, it all leads to the same place. She may not actively hate and want to destroy America, but any of the things that we could do to protect it are going to make her sad: and if it makes her sad, she’s going to vote against it.
So, in practical terms, that’s the state of constitutional law in America.
You got four judges who are pretty much always going to vote one way. You got four other judges who are pretty much always going to vote the other way, and the bottom line is just which direction makes Amy Coney Barrett feel less sad.
A lot of the criticism around this and other Supreme Court decisions has been that these women are stupid. I don’t necessarily think that’s true — or, at least, I don’t think they need to be stupid to behave the way they’re behaving. I don’t think if you sat them down and had this conversation, and you walked them through the logic of why it’s obviously silly to argue that “stealing a wallet in Japan makes you Japanese,” or “everyone’s an American until proven otherwise,” I don’t think they would be confused by the logic. I don’t think they would be flummoxed.
Instead, what’s happening here is they’ve got an object level moral outcome that they think is the right outcome, and there has to be some fig leaf of textual interpretation to get to that moral outcome, so they’re just backing into it. They’re just saying whatever they need to say to get to where they want to go.
The problem, if you are a textual constitutionalist like Mike Lee or Thomas Massie or Rand Paul, is that all the proper procedures were followed in putting these women in the chair.
You are morally and ideologically committed to a captured process, a process that is in the hands of people who don’t care about it.
You have no grounds from inside the frame of your own ideology to criticize that. Particularly if you believe that this construct of procedure and law is what makes Americans Americans, it’s what makes you you, then you’re in a really serious situation — because the people in control of this system don’t just lack respect for that procedure; they lack respect for that identity — and they have a completely different notion, in fact, a hostile notion of what America is and who Americans are.
So it’s not just that they disagree with you as a matter of ideology: they feel no kinship with you, and so your ideology requires you to subject yourself essentially to foreign occupation people who regard themselves as foreign to you and hostile to your interests.
About a month ago, Ben Wilson from How To Take Over the World Podcast came to the EXIT meetup here in Utah Valley, and I was talking about some of the thoughts I had putting together the Ordeal of Incivility for the podcast last month, and we were talking about how this problem:
How do you get the constitutionalists to understand the situation?
One of the things I’ve learned over the last 10 years of watching these systems fail, and changing my mind, and seeing other people change their minds, is that basically no one — not even a really smart person — lets go of a framework that gets them through the day until they have a new framework that they can similarly inhabit.
And if you’re going to break something as load-bearing, as someone’s national identity, along with their entire political worldview (which, for a civic nationalist, constitutionalist, Republican American, those are basically the same thing), and you don’t give them any way to recontextualize all those moral impulses, all the things that made that feel right and feel important for so long — if you take a hammer to all that moral architecture and you leave them nothing, well, they’re going to reject your facts and logic, and they’re going to go back to the moral framework that feels right and feels familiar.
That’s just the practical situation, what you can sell people on. But then there’s the deeper question of what’s actually true?
What should you sell them on? How do you recontextualize all those moral impulses that made them want to be a constitutional, civic, nationalist conservative in the first place? It seems to be both morally and practically true, that if you disrespect the intuitions that lead people to care about fairness, to care about the rule of law — to care, at least in theory, about neutral and impartial institutions — if you do that, people aren’t going to bow to your superior command of the facts. They’re just going to conclude that there’s something deficient, something wrong with you, and they’re going to be right.
This is especially true if you claim to be a big fan of Western civilization, in contrast to, let’s call it Oriental Despotism.
It makes an enormous difference to the way you live and the heritage that you come from, that Western Europeans have been able to build things and create things with the expectation of a more-or-less even playing field.
It matters a lot that a cop can’t just shake you down at a traffic stop. It matters enormously that if you have a business idea, you can expect that you’re not at the mercy of the ego or the greed of the local bureaucrat that you can expect your paperwork to be processed without a lot of surprise processing fees or whatever.
Of course, our whole thing, everything we do at EXIT, is predicated on the theory that power has found a way around all these rules — that bureaucrats, at least at the top, have found a way to milk the system and shake people down.
Yes, in theory you have freedom of speech and religion as long as you’re not one of the two-thirds of America that works for a corporation with an HR department — that America’s HR departments are in fact a privately funded political commissariat twice the size of the KGB with three times the funding.
But it’s incredibly stupid, both as a matter of messaging and as a matter of fact, to argue that these rules and principles are meaningless, just because they’re not self-enforcing.
So to get back to this conversation with Ben, we said, yeah, people need to understand that these rules don’t work the way we thought they did in eighth grade civics class, but they clearly matter.
Some people will say, well, that’s just white people. That’s the way white people build governments. That’s the way white people live. That’s obviously not true either. For all our problems, America is still a very different place to start a business. It’s a very different place to speak your mind. It’s a very different place to get into a self-defense altercation than Britain or Canada or New Zealand or Australia or anywhere in Western Europe.
It’s also become a popular meme to point out that the Liberian constitution is basically identical to the US Constitution. And of, course, Liberia is totally dysfunctional and you do have to bribe cops, and you don’t have any meaningful rights as a citizen. And I’ve talked about why that’s the case.
The text is not self interpreting, it’s not self defending. The words on the page are not guaranteeing your rights.
So if you’re a civic nationalist, you have to deal with the Liberia problem.
But if you want to say the Constitution doesn’t matter at all, you have to deal with the Canada problem.
These people were drawn from essentially identical British stock. They had the frontier experience. All these historical and biological factors that are supposed to have made Americans who they are. And yet their behaviors and their pathologies, especially under these postmodern conditions, are way more like the British and their behaviors and pathologies than they are like us.
So the specific circumstances of America’s founding, its self-concept, its system of laws, its Constitution — it’s doing something. It is demonstrably not the case that the American system is something that high-IQ Anglos build the way beavers build dams. They don’t. It’s only here, and it’s just obviously better — not just in terms of what America has been or could be, but what it is right now.
So it’s not just bad politics to tell people to discard that: it’s actually wrong.
So that got us thinking: if the Constitution isn’t self-enforcing — if it is, in a meaningful sense, in the hands of Ketanji Brown Jackson and Amy Coney Barrett, and until recently, Merrick Garland and Barack Obama — what is it doing?
Why is it still better here?
And my answer is basically that the Constitution matters as a religion in the minds of the powerful.
To the extent that it matters — to the extent that it has ever mattered — it’s always been to the degree that the people in power mutually agree on it and enforce it upon each other. And you could say, well, apparently that’s not a very robust way of governing human behavior — but it’s the only thing that has ever governed human behavior.
It’s just as real or just as fake as honor, or any other code of conduct, any other set of expectations that a people have believed in. And of course, it’s really important that the Constitution is a product of the American people. The American people are not a product of the Constitution. But it is a bona fide product of the American people. It is an expression of who we are.
Spengler says that the act of writing it down is an admission that it’s fake, or it makes it fake, or something. And yeah, I don’t know about that — I just know I’ve seen Canada, and I’ve seen here, and here’s better.
This model also explains pretty cleanly why you can’t just export the document to Liberia or Iraq: it’s an articulation and an expression of a living culture. It’s an expression of a spirit. If a group of people are possessed of that culture and share that spirit, then it’s very easy for them to use that document to meditate on that spirit and to remind themselves and remind each other of what it means.
And that may sound loosey-goosey, and not a foundation that you can build a state upon, but empirically it actually seems to work. You can maybe imagine a world in which there was, like, Protestantism about the Constitution, where there was this panoply of sincerely held but divergent views about the Constitution, and you just don’t see that basically at all.
Everyone who cares about the Constitution loves Clarence Thomas — because these basic principles of respect for conscience and respect for property are actually not that complicated.
But what has happened is that instead of viewing the Constitution and the American system of government as a banner and a spirit and a culture, we’ve come to view it as a text.
It’s a series of English words in a particular configuration, and we’ve come to believe that that configuration of words is somehow talismanic and self-reinforcing and solves its own problems. And to some extent, that’s what at least some of the founders believed about it too.
Not that they had any illusions about having done perfect work — but there does seem to have been at least some idea that the particular structure of the puzzle box matters, and if you could engineer the incentives and set power against power, that you could solve problems of politics, problems of judgment between human beings.
Of course, the constitution can’t do that because text can’t do that.
And this was the central insight of the postmodernists that they used to basically deconstruct all of Western civilization.
Derrida summed it up with “there is nothing outside the text” — meaning is always contingent upon context that the text itself can’t supply. And so when you try to treat the Constitution as a text with the deadness of the letter, you wind up with the kind of constitutional exegesis that we get.
The conservative side is always saying, well, here’s what Madison obviously thought, or here’s what Jefferson obviously thought — and that’s the context they bring to the text. And the liberals say, well, but Madison and Jefferson aren’t God, they were slave holders. And anyway, the Constitution has all these provisions for changing conditions. And on this journey that we’re on, our understanding has evolved, and here’s where we’re at now — and that’s the context that they supply to the text.
And liberals actually frequently win these arguments, because conservatives don’t think Madison and Jefferson were God either, and they get really uncomfortable if you try to nail them down to all the things that Madison and Jefferson actually believed and the way that America was actually run back then.
So when KBJ says, “if I steal a wallet in Japan, I’m Japanese”, or Barrett says, “if we can’t tell who a person’s parents are, they’re automatically American” — yes, they’re being very tendentious and stupid if what you think they’re trying to do is interpret the text.
What they’re really doing is thinking about the way it ought to be.
And they probably are — even the dyed-in-the-wool commies — thinking about the idea of America, the promise of America, the ideals upon which it was founded, which we’ve “learned so much about since then.”
And they could point out, not without justification, that the founding fathers were the libtard of their time. Both communists and reactionaries make the argument that big-L Libtard liberalism is a development and an outgrowth from small-l classical liberalism, Enlightenment ideals.
The leftist, the Communist, would point out that the French Revolution, the American Revolution, were heading in a direction — that history had an arc — and they want to ride that train all the way to the station.
Whereas a reactionary would say, yes, everything’s been on this trajectory — and it’s a bad trajectory, and we should have got off at feudalism or we should have got off at agriculture, or somewhere.
And where the reactionary is on the firmest ground is when he points out that, yeah, if you brought Washington or Jefferson or Madison to 2026 America, they’d be horrified.
But then the leftist, the communist can say, well, let’s take you back in time to 1776 and see how you like it. And virtually every right-wing American, every conservative American, would find things that they just couldn’t stomach about that time.
So we can say that liberals are being weaselly about what the specific words mean, like the parsing of the sentences.
You know, “you’re reading something into this that the founders never intended”, but they can just say, so what? Are we conducting a seance? Am I an LLM? No, I’m a judge. My job is to exercise judgment.
So our criticism of these judges should not be that they are malfunctioning search engines.
When Ketanji Brown Jackson argues that stealing a Japanese person’s wallet makes you Japanese, the problem with that is not that it’s “out of harmony with the Founders’ intent.” The problem with that is that it’s retarded. It’s bad judgment, it leads to a bad place.
But if one side of the argument is ideologically committed to being a search engine — to being a robot, and restricting themselves to the set of solutions that had been worked out by 1787 — and the other side has human beings who can update their priors, and respond to contingencies, and act like human beings — well, the human beings are going to win.
And they win, not only because that’s a brittle position, and forces you to be dumber than you are, but also because it’s a cowardly position.
I’ve talked to a lot of constitutionally autistic libertarians, and in almost every case, I’m way more comfortable with the founder’s actual intent than they are. I’m not saying I’d be perfectly comfortable if you sent me back in time to 1776 Virginia, but I’d be way more comfortable than these guys.
Their insistence on this Talmudic approach to the text has nothing to do with wanting to larp as 18th century classical liberals, and it has everything to do with avoiding moral responsibility.
They just want to be able to say, it’s not my fault. Rules are rules. They fundamentally don’t want to be in charge, and so leftists are happy to oblige them.
”You don’t want to be in charge, you want the text to be in charge — but the text can’t be in charge, The text can’t decide — so we’re going to be in charge.”
And that’s been the equilibrium of American politics for the last 150 years. And so this originalist versus progressive paradigm is obviously flawed. It’s the wrong way to look at the problem.
What we need is constitutional action.
We need human beings animated by the spirit of the constitution — who genuinely believe in the ideals and intent of the Constitution — and who have the courage to act and judge.
So last week, Ben Wilson and I held the first meeting of the Constitutional Action Society at Utah Valley University here in Orem, Utah.
The mission of the Constitutional Action Society is to serve as a shadow political party. It’s not a third party — we’d work within the bipartisan system — but we’re going to field and endorse candidates, we’re going to assess existing politicians on their adherence to our platform, and we’re going to fundraise and phone bank and knock doors on behalf of issues and candidates that we support.
We didn’t heavily publicize this first meeting because we had a little concern about the security situation (it’s UVU, it was “No Kings” weekend), but on the basis of one tweet and passing it around to some group chats, we had 50 guys show up.
Our delivery was not polished — this was something that we felt we had to do, and so we wanted to move as quickly as possible — but there was enormous energy in the room.
It actually reminded me of the early days of EXIT back in 2021, the Bad Old Days: the concept of the group was literally just a few days old and it was very abstract, but people were ready for a solution.
I gave about a 15 minute speech and Ben gave his, and afterward we had so many guys saying, “All right, how do I get started? Where do I sign? Put me in.”
My speech was an elaboration of some of the things I said in the Ordeal of Incivility, specifically aiming this question of moral responsibility at Latter-Day Saints. Even in Orem, Utah, not everybody in that room was LDS — and the problems we’re addressing are national problems, they have national solutions — but what I said to the Gentiles in the room was basically, “If you want Utah to figure itself out, Latter-day Saints have got to figure themselves out.”
So I talked about the Church’s experience with the Constitution in particular: how in 1890, the Supreme Court ruled 9-0 that religious advocacy for polygamy — even if you didn’t personally practice it, or even if you were just a member of a church that practiced polygamy — was sufficient grounds to be disenfranchised: which basically wiped out the entire local government of Utah.
And that’s just one example, but we’ve put the paper shield of the Constitution to the test: we’ve run it all the way up the chain, and the Supreme Court told us unanimously that the Constitution didn’t say what it obviously said.
So we ought to have learned something from our historical experience with the Constitution, but we also have a unique relationship to text as such.
Derrida’s insight that “there is nothing outside the text” is something that Joseph Smith actually picked up as a 14-year-old boy.
He’s living through the Second Great Awakening, and he’s trying to figure out which church is right, and he says: “the teachers of religion of the different sects understood the same passages of scripture so differently as to destroy all confidence in settling the question by an appeal to the Bible.”
Which our critics will sometimes say is a disparagement of the Bible, but it isn’t at all. We believe the Bible’s the word of God. We just don’t believe that you can lawyer your way to the right answer through an English text. It’s not a limitation of the Bible, it’s a limitation of human language.
And Joseph Smith lived and taught that way his entire life. You know, preachers would come and say, you know, like, “debate me IRL, prove me wrong with facts and logic” — and he would literally be like, “how about we wrestle for it?”
The whole message of the Restoration is not that we have some new important addendum to the text.
He didn’t say, I’ve puzzled out the true meaning of the text. He said, “I saw a pillar of light. I saw God, I talked to God.” And he didn’t say, “trust the text”, or trust my reading of the text.
He said, “you have to talk to God.”
Which, if it works, is a genuine solution to both the problem of postmodern textual subversion and Nietzsche’s Death of God (which are basically the same problem.)
I’ve already made the argument in the last podcast about why latter day saints are so hyper institutional, so hyper conformist — I won’t recapitulate it — but I just want to point out again how remarkable it is that they’re like that, given how little doctrinal justification they have for that position.
We hide behind text for the same reason everybody hides behind text: because we don’t want to talk to God. We’re scared of what he might say. We’re scared of being accountable. We’re scared of exercising judgment and being wrong.
So we pretend to have this reverence for the text of the Constitution, and it lets us get lawyered and subverted and deconstructed and manipulated in a way that we would never tolerate with the actual word of God.
That was my message to Utah: get off your knees. Stop scraping for the approval of people who hate you. Stop being so desperate to be liked. Stop being so afraid to decide. Stop waiting for the church to tell you what to do. You have to talk to God. And then you have to decide, and then you have to be held accountable for those decisions.
And the text, instead of being a slavemaster, is a schoolmaster.
It’s an inspiration, it’s a reminder. It sharpens your moral intuitions: but ultimately you’re accountable to God and you have to act, and that’s why we call it the Constitutional Action Society.
Ben’s message was about the original notion of American citizenship.
He showed an image, which I’ll probably use as the banner image for this podcast, of the Salt Lake Dragon, which I guess was the cryptid mascot of Salt Lake City for a minute, for the 24th of July Pioneer Day Parade in 1897.
What he points out is that there’s no bollards. There’s no barricades. People have their feet swinging off of second-story balconies. They’re perched on telephone poles. And he asks basically, who gave them permission to sit there? And the obvious answer is “Nobody did.”
This is their city. It’s their parade, they’re real citizens.
He talks about how his great-grandfather grew up in downtown Salt Lake City, and I might have some of the details wrong, but he was like seven years old and he would walk several times a week to the ZCMI, the general store.
And Ben’s point was, why not? It’s his home, it’s his town. A little boy should be able to walk to the store, even in downtown Salt Lake City. It’s not that much to ask.
And he contrasts that with an image from a recent Gay Pride parade in Salt Lake City. And of course it’s extremely gay and it’s a foreign imposition, but that’s not the point: the point is that there are barricades and police. The people are on one side and the parade, the official parade selected by the city is on the other. The problem is not just that these people hate us, the problem is that it’s not our city. It’s their city. It’s up to the experts to decide what the parade will be and who’s going to stand where.
And the experts have decided that downtown doesn’t belong to you: it belongs to trannies and drug addicts and homeless people.
Then he tells a story about his dad, and I won’t go into the details about his dad’s story because it’s not my story — but he’s really making a point about his dad’s generation.
This is the first fully postwar generation. The first generation raised from birth under the shadow of the Hitler Mythos.
The message of the Hitler Mythos is good guys don’t act, they don’t want, they don’t decide.
Good guys might fight, but only to stop the bad guy — to stop him from getting what he wants.
Basically all popular media, all popular mythmaking, from 1950 until today, is: Darth Vader wants the Death Star, and we have to stop him. Voldemort wants the Elder Wand and we have to stop him. Thanos wants the Infinity Gauntlet. We have to stop him.
The particulars — it doesn’t really matter exactly what the villain wants, because whatever you want, ultimately you want power. You want because you want the power to get the thing you actually want.
And of course, wanting power is bad, so the hero doesn’t want anything. He’s just good — and the good thing to do, when there’s a villain, when there’s someone who wants something, is to get in their way.
So you can see very quickly how this moral reasoning left to unfold by itself becomes essentially opposition to human life, human consciousness.
We didn’t coordinate on our speeches, but the message of both was that good people have to want power.
For starters because they’re human beings, and if you’re not allowed to want power, you’re not allowed to want anything. But also because, at the end of the day, someone’s going to be in charge, someone’s going to decide, and if you tell the world good people don’t do that, good people can’t do that, then only bad people are going to do it.
And that’s basically how we got where we are: that’s the terminus of the postwar ethos.
So we presented a little platform that said, these are the kinds of things we want.
We want to institutionalize the homeless and clean up the streets.
There’s absolutely no justification for the squalor and the crime and the violence, particularly in downtown Salt Lake City. There’s absolutely no legitimate constituency that it serves. It’s for the drug traffickers, it’s for the corrupt NGOs, and it’s for the cowardly politicians. That’s the reason we do it that way.
We’re also going to fire all leftist teachers at every level of education, K through university. Your free-speech rights do not extend to what I pay you to tell my kids. And it’s not something that we’re going to solve by imposing particular rules and saying, “You can’t utter the following words” because again, these are leftists.
They’re not going to be bound by the text. They’re going to find any way they can to defy these laws. So they just need to be fired. They need to be removed.
We’re going to prosecute and destroy all radical leftist gangs, including Antifa. And this is already the policy of the federal government. But I can tell you from friends in the administration, there is no will inside the administrative state to fulfill the President’s directive. There’s no willingness to press RICO charges. There’s no willingness to follow the money. And it’s pretty clear in my view that Yarvin’s right — it’s because Antifa is an arm of the US federal government. But there’s absolutely no reason that a state could not pursue state level civil and criminal charges against these people.
We’re going to prosecute and destroy all drug gangs. We’re going to deport all illegal aliens. We’re not going to tolerate rundown neighborhoods that don’t feel like Utah. If necessary, after the deportations, we’re going to bulldoze them and start over.
We’re going to incentivize our young families to buy homes. These kinds of programs are sometimes unpopular among Republicans because they’ve been manipulated by fraudsters, but the bureaucrats are complicit in that — we don’t have to do that. We can actually target the people we want to help and punish people who manipulate the rules.
We’re also going to severely punish all forms of anti-white discrimination, including in hiring and admissions. It’s straightforwardly illegal and unconstitutional, even by the terms of the 1964 Constitution. And all we have to do is stop tolerating it: we can do early morning SWAT raids on public administrators who engage in that kind of behavior. We can perp-walk them in front of the courthouse.
We’re going to reward Utahns who are healthy and engage in healthy practices, and we’re going to disincentivize unhealthy behaviors: and, ultimately, we’re going to make Salt Lake City the most breathtakingly beautiful city in the United States.
All of these objectives and methods are completely harmonious with both the spirit and the letter of the Constitution.
There’s absolutely no reason it can’t happen except that powerful people don’t want it to happen. But our whole system of (let’s call it) “Rooseveltian managerial mass democracy” — basically the system of government we’ve lived through since the Depression — is predicated on using the tools of mass media to manufacture consent.
There was a story out of Brazil a couple days ago. So Bolsonaro got wrecked, da Silva’s back in charge, and it’s sort of like an Abigail Spanberger situation: they’re wasting no time, they’re passing the most deranged laws you can imagine.
And one of them — this is true — is that if you interrupt or express doubt when a woman is speaking during a work meeting, that is now a prosecutable criminal offense in the nation of Brazil.
And that really got me thinking because, presumably, if you violate this law, some police officer’s got to come arrest you, or the tax authorities levy a fine (I don’t know exactly how it’s punished), but ultimately the enforcement of that law is backstopped by either direct violence or expropriation. Which, like, the Brazilian police have to enforce.
They have to execute this law — and I’m not going to pretend to know a ton about Brazil, but I don’t think Brazilian police are, by and large, committed gay race communists.
And of course the same is true here in the States: the vast majority of the military, the vast majority of law enforcement, they don’t actually approve of any of this stuff.
But it’s perceptions of legitimacy. It’s habits of obedience. It’s saying, you know, it’s not up to me. I have to do my job. I have to make sure I keep my pension.
This mode of governance — media-managed liberal democracy — is more dependent on the ability to control narrative and manufacture consent than almost any other form of government in history.
There’s a sort of analog in our foreign policy posture: we’ve built these weapons systems that can put warheads on foreheads, anywhere in the world, on five minutes’ notice. And for that reason, we don’t fortify anything. There’s no anti-aircraft guns on the Pacific Coast. There’s no pill boxes or parapets.
You’ve got NORAD, and you got the White House, and everything else in the whole empire is basically guarded with a chain link fence.
So, by way of analogy, mass media control narrative control is that force projection. It’s the ability of the state to direct attention, to direct outrage, to justify violence, to delegitimize violence in this very precise, targeted way, that says, “don’t look at that, look at this.”
And the whole spasm of social media censorship and political prosecutions from roughly 2017 to 2021 was the state saying, “Oh shit, our targeting system doesn’t work anymore.” We’re starting to lose the ability to suppress outrage about our bad behavior, and we’re also losing the ability to direct and channel outrage toward our enemies.
Now again, these people hate you and they don’t care about the Constitution. If they could get away with ignoring it, they would. Yet the Constitution, even in its weakened and degraded state, apparently shapes those perceptions of legitimacy and habits of obedience to a sufficient extent that it makes a huge difference.
Whether you spoke out against the government — even in California versus Australia or New Zealand or Canada — living through COVID in America was a very different experience from living through COVID in the UK.
We know a couple things.
We know that all of the explicit machinery of force is in the hands of people who are much more like us than they are like our enemies.
We know that the machinery of force is only accessible to our enemies because of the perception of legitimacy that they still maintain.
And we know — and we know that they know — that that perception of legitimacy is still very much shaped by the Constitution of the United States.
So what we’re saying with the Constitutional Action Society is: that’s the thermal exhaust port.
The whole system runs, lives, dies on that — and the way you attack that weak point, is you find people who actually want to govern, who want to protect the Constitution and the rule of law — not in this cowardly, cringing, lawyering sense, but in the sense that the average police officer, the average infantryman, the average normal American, intuitively believes.
You want politicians who are willing to assert their rights, particularly under the 10th Amendment, which is, in other words, to tell federal authorities, “this is not your jurisdiction.”
Of course the roadmap here is not that the federal authorities are going to say, “oh, we’re sorry. We didn’t know we were violating the Constitution” and leave you alone.
The roadmap here is you act. You act within your constitutionally and divinely sanctioned authority to clean up the state. You make it beautiful, you make it functional.
You make it a place where healthy people want to raise healthy families, and you absolutely ignore all the injunctions, all the stays, all the lawfare, and you just say, “You can come get me when I’m done.”
You obey the Constitution as it’s understood in the minds of regular people. You pull off an El-Salvador-style turnaround — and then you say, “go ahead and put me on trial for that. Arrest me for Saving America.”
And of course they are going to arrest you.
Anyone who attempts this is guaranteed at least a little bit of jail time, but they will be the ones in the position of lawless and naked and illegitimate force. (I don’t mean illegitimate in the libertarian sense in which, you know, “I subjectively feel that you’re wrong, and that really matters a lot, even though I can’t do anything about it” — I mean popular legitimacy.)
And they no longer have the narrative monopoly that allowed them to sink Nixon that allowed them to get away with the Kennedy assassination. They’re going to have to put all their cards on the table, and they’re going to have to trust themselves and their safety and their security and their power to an apparatus of violence that is in increasingly, deeply resentful, if not mutinous hands.
The only alternative they have is just to let you do it: t let you build something that absolutely humiliates them, that exposes how cynical and fraudulent they’ve been the entire time, that exposes that they could have fixed it anytime they wanted to — they just didn’t want to.
So is that going to work? I don’t know, the enemy gets a vote.
They’re not going to play fair. They’re going to use every tool of media manipulation and tendentious regulatory enforcement that they still have at their disposal. All we can do is make that job difficult — and difficult to justify to the public — recognizing that there isn’t One Weird Trick, there’s no risk-free way to take your country back.
But this is the connective tissue between words and actions that we’ve all been looking for.
The whole online right-wing group chat thing has these very strong norms against fed-posting for good reason: because all the smart guys on our side — all the guys capable of leading — understand intuitively that not only are violence and criminality effortless for the system to interrupt, but even if you got away with it, it would not only not weaken the system, it would strengthen it.
Because, again, the whole system depends on this perception of legitimacy — and the fed-poster casts himself in the role of the boogeyman, the bad guy that the system exists to protect you from.
So everything has to be done within the purview of orderly, legal, lawful, legitimate, authorized force: which is the purview of politics.
Again, just to be clear, this does not mean we’re just going to go get badges and guns and do what we want. When I say legitimate, I mean legitimate. We have to obtain political power so that we can do the good work that the Constitution — both in letter and in spirit — authorizes us to do.
So that’s the Constitutional Action Society. Again, if you want to get involved, we’re going to be doing a lot of legwork, knocking doors, phone banking, vetting candidates.
Right now in most of the country, the field is what it is, so some of the work will involve supporting existing candidates. While we work on fielding our own, we’re also going to be doing some things like beautification, trash cleanup, voter registration. We want to get our message out, and we also want to understand the voters.
We want to build organizational muscle and name recognition and buy-in so that during the next election cycle we’re a known quantity, and we can say to a politician or a bureaucrat, with some credibility, “here’s what we can do for you. Or maybe we can do it for your opponent.”
We’ve already gotten started: 17 EXIT guys were elected delegates this month. 17 votes is not that many votes, but the purpose of all this is — may Allah forgive me for uttering the word — journalistic, because it’s giving us a view of how the party works. I’ve already heard one report of an EXIT guy who was at a quasi-political dinner party, and when a handful of people let on that they were state delegates, one of the candidates just glommed onto them and wouldn’t stop talking to them.
We also get to know the other delegates — and their opinion is both important in itself, but it’s also helping us to get an intuition for the right end of the bell curve of public opinion.
So we’re moving fast. We’re throwing a lot of things at the wall. These guys, all other considerations aside are just a really good hang. So come sign up.
We’re starting in Utah because that’s where we have the manpower right now. But this is a national problem, it’s a national movement, and as soon as we’ve got the demand signal, we want to set up in your city. So I’ll be posting a link in the show notes.
I strongly encourage you to sign up. There’s no explicit affiliation between EXIT and Constitutional Action, but I’ll just say: this is the kind of thing we’re cooking up at the EXIT meetup. These are smart, capable, dedicated guys, and you just can’t spend that much time with them before you say to yourself, we’re going to make it. We’re going to figure it out. These are the good guys. This is who’s going to do it.
EXIT membership is fraternal. It’s vetted. You sign up, you have a phone call with me. We talk a little bit about your background, what you’re hoping to accomplish, what made you decide to join, and to a real extent, it’s a vibe check.
I don’t have an algorithm, other than “do you believe in the mission” and “could I explain in one sentence why you’re an asset to the group”. We have 15, 20 group calls a week. We talk about entrepreneurship, investing, crypto, AI, tech, real estate, fitness, homeschooling, fatherhood. Then on Tuesday nights we have our full group call, and that’s where we do our member Q&As, we discuss the big picture, I go over the news of the week, the projects we’re working on.
That includes Constitutional Action, it also includes our physical HQ, some private education projects, investment showcases, upcoming meetups and retreats. We have monthly meetups in a dozen cities now.
So if you want to join Constitutional Action, I’ll post the link in the show notes — and if you want to be involved with the fraternity and work with us on some of these cultural and entrepreneurial projects, you can sign up at exitgroup.us.
Thanks for listening.
