It is not a "palace coup" and you do not live in the Soviet Union

In the last two weeks, someone has attempted to remove both candidates for the presidency of the United States.

The first, an assassination attempt that failed only by divine intervention; the second, the successful removal of the sitting president.

It’s futile for us, in the audience, to speculate about exactly what has happened — like the Kennedy assassination, I expect fundamental questions of motive, method, and responsibility will remain controversial 60 years from now.

But what can we know? And what can we do about it?

First: the bad guys are not God.

When you realize that your enemies are able to do some things that they’re not supposed to be allowed to do, it’s easy to conclude that they face no constraints at all.

But the most powerful people in the world did everything they could (which is to say, everything they could get away with) to make sure Trump died on July 13th. They would have succeeded — as Trump says, they should have succeeded — but for an act of Providence.

They did everything they could for years to conceal Joe Biden’s mental deterioration, and then watched helplessly as his brain liquefied on live television four months before the election.

They did everything they could for the last three weeks to hot-swap Biden for anyone but Kamala Harris, but they couldn’t make it work.

For exigent 2020 race-baiting reasons (and perhaps as an insurance policy, which the Biden family is now cashing in), they were stuck with a dramatically repellent and incompetent vice presidential candidate, who alone is legally entitled to the campaign funds and the party delegates.

Apparently this matters, because our enemies are making costly and complex maneuvers as if it matters.

None of these games would be necessary if they were actually in lawless, sovereign control of the system.

Many have compared the shenanigans of the last month with The Death of Stalin, and the clandestine succession battles in (other) communist countries — but if this were the Soviet Union, or even modern Russia, they could have simply arrested Trump, or poisoned him, or shot him in the back, and figured out what to say about it later.

They wouldn’t have sent Joe Biden to the debate in the first place. They wouldn’t have spent a month scrambling for a procedurally justifiable way to ice out Kamala Harris — and they certainly wouldn’t have failed to ice her out.

Interpreting this as a “palace coup” makes little sense, given that Joe Biden wasn’t governing anyway, Kamala Harris does not represent any insurgent political constituency (lol), and neither is obviously more likely to win the 2024 election.

Joe Biden and Kamala Harris have always seemed kind of dopey and venal, but not delusional — they have to know how their poll numbers look. I suspect that if it were possible to ignore the legal constraints of the primary process, even they would prefer another Democrat candidate.

To the extent that there was conflict within the party about this, it was most likely between those who wanted to keep checking the fridge to see if there’s an electable Democrat in there, and those who recognized that it is truly Joever — they’re going to have to run Kamala, and Trump is going to be the next President.

Again we’re up against this problem of “reverse theodicy”.

If our enemies truly possess limitless power and limitless malice, why are they working so hard? What rules are they still playing by — and what can their present frustrations tell us about their vulnerabilities (which are our opportunities)?

They appear to be genuinely concerned about both Biden and Harris’s electability, which means they do not fully control the electoral system or the courts. This is a real election — one that they demonstrably think is worth burning centuries of accumulated prestige and institutional credibility to “fortify”.

They will try to cheat, of course, but they don’t think they can cheat enough to win. Otherwise, they would just wheel Biden off to Delaware until November, declare him to be once again the most popular presidential candidate in American history, and simply dare you to challenge them.

If they thought they could win with Kamala, they would have invoked the 25th Amendment long ago and installed her as President, so that she could prove her ability to handle the basics competently, and at least present herself as a “known quantity” to the public.

They aren’t doing that because they know that Kamala in front of a camera (let alone a foreign leader) is almost as dangerous as Joe Biden. Particularly if they don’t expect her to win re-election, exposing the voters to her as commander-in-chief would mean (more) senseless havoc down-ticket.

All of this is good news.

You do not live in the Soviet Union — not even the Soviet Union under Gorbachev. The American managerial class is far more constrained than Soviet nomenklatura ever were.

Their power is built on a degree of narrative control that cannot survive ubiquitous, decentralized surveillance and communication. They can’t hide the methods by which they stole the 2020 election, or the way Nancy Pelosi makes her money, or the way AIPAC runs both American political parties, or the vast number of American political and cultural figures who are controlled through sexual blackmail.

We’ve spent the last decade watching them get caught red-handed and then experiencing a continual millenarian disappointment as “nothing ever happens”; but what has happened is the depletion of a colossal, centuries-old reserve of institutional soft power: credibility, trust, and willing compliance.

The American spin on the managerial system (as opposed to its implementation in Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union) was that, by controlling highly centralized 20th-century mass media technology, you could obtain willing, enthusiastic compliance, instead of relying on gulags and cattle cars.

The American system lasted longest, but now that the apparatus of thought control is breaking down, the managers need a set of hard power tools that have atrophied, and that they can’t afford to rebuild in the public eye.

They have responded by leaning into increasingly diffuse, deniable forms of coercion.

They can’t help that we can see what they’re doing, but they can at least make it difficult to trace the exact mechanism of coercion, or hold the perpetrators accountable.

They can’t send a cop to smash out your taillight, so they threaten you with journalists. They couldn’t get away with rigging the election, so they infiltrated and prosecuted the protest movement. They can’t confiscate your guns, so they make an example of anyone who uses them.

Even the attempt on the President has the same look: they knew they wouldn’t get away with it, so they made it as fuzzy and deniable as they could. Just like the Epstein assassination, half a dozen warning lights went unheeded, none of which in itself is conclusive, and there’s no one to hold directly accountable but a few nobodies who phoned it in that day. (And the shooter, of course, but dead men tell no tales.)

We watch with disgust as these schemes go unpunished over and over — but consider how we got here.

In 2020, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris were genuinely the best candidates the regime had to offer. The exposure of all this scheming and corruption hasn’t led to a storming of the Bastille, but it has repelled honest, decent, competent people — and now they have to try to hold a distressed multi-trillion-dollar empire together using the most cynical human sludge ever distilled.

“Nothing ever happens” because, historically, the organizing principle that united honest, decent, competent Americans was precisely that set of Anglo liberal institutions that our enemies have captured and vampirized. We are still working out what we all stand for, if we can’t stand for that.

Our enemies are threatened by Donald Trump, not because he was especially radical (or even effective) in his first term, but because he has become an alternative rally point for Real America.

The constitutional “rules based order” turned out to be a god that failed, but the spirit of all those rules — the reason we felt they were worth defending in the first place — was to protect the dynamism and the freedom to be excellent that made us the envy of the world. Trump is on the side of funny people being allowed to be funny, and brilliant people being allowed to go to Mars.

If you’re still disappointed that Nothing Ever Happens, it’s because you’re looking for “revolutionary consciousness” like a Marxist would: “if there is hope, it must lie in the proles”. But the revolts that actually work have always been elite revolts — and that will be the difference between Trump’s first term and his second.

We need to make life good for our smart people. If you want to help build the counter-elite, join us at exitgroup.us.

EXIT News

• On last week’s full group call, we discussed EXIT 2.0:

  • Pop-up clubhouses

  • Supporting local elections

  • Geographic chapters

  • Pivoting from individual startups to larger fundraises for group projects

  • Plans for EXIT HQ in Austin, Texas

• This week, we discussed how to get the families involved:

  • Women’s perilous relationships with social media

  • Online homeschool co-ops

  • More family-friendly meetups

  • Implementing a rallye mondain

• Despite shutting down all flights on the Eastern Seaboard, George Soros failed to thwart the Columbus meetup. Got together for drinks Friday night, then brought the families to the Center of Science and Industry, then ribs at the “Jazz and Ribs Fest”.

• Cocktail hour invites for Salt Lake City (8/16) and Houston (9/13) available below the paywall. EXIT cocktail hours are a great opportunity to meet your local guys, and see if the full group is right for you.