It's been a busy month.
We’ve been running quiet this month, because we’ve been working on some things.
March 13: Austin EXIT Retreat.
About a dozen of us got an Airbnb southwest of Austin, and checked out a beautiful MAHA community in the Hill Country.
I observe that Austin is gradually being encircled by compounds of Like-Minded People at various stages of radicalization — who will eventually meet the sprawl of multi-family immigrant barracks, which shows no signs of stopping.
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We also got together with about 20 EXIT guys in Dallas, and discussed similar trends: as “the America of America”, Texas is economically dynamic and welcoming to a fault, sucking in a mixed bag of blue-state refugees, illegals, and H1Bs.
Texas’ libertarian identity is being challenged by its own success, in the same way California’s was a generation ago — and, like California, it will be a high-stakes place to play. It’s not all downside: Texas will be one of the last self-contained real economies when the fake money burns off.
We have monthly meetups in Dallas, Austin, and Houston — more three-to-five-day retreats planned to bring together all the Texas Triangle guys and their families.
March 17: Utah GOP Caucus.
EXIT guys secured 17 delegate positions and 5 precinct chairs, and a dozen or so friends of the group reported that they had also been made delegates.
At our local meeting, I was asked to read the county party platform aloud in full, and it was surprisingly good considering how useless the state party is. There are clearly a lot of people in Utah who want good government, even if they are afraid of what it takes to get there.
I was appointed a state delegate By Acclamation (see image) and have since been to a handful of “meet the candidates” events.
Overall, you get the same sense at one of these meetings that you get on X, the Everything App: lots of resentment, lots of despair, and politicians gesturing at those emotions in a vague sense, without a lot of ideas.
It’s remarkable how many of the local politicians are roughly as fake as the national ones — lots of cowboy hats, everybody “grew up on a ranch” — it’s just less polished.
The Republican Party in Utah appears to be largely composed of people who enjoy being taken out to dinner — which is a bad news story if you have to vote for them, but my main takeaway was: these are the people to beat, and they’re not unbeatable.
March 26: Constitutional Action Society Event
Last Thursday, Ben Wilson and I held the first event for the Constitutional Action Society at UVU.
Given the security environment after Charlie Kirk’s assassination, we didn’t publicize it much (or even really talk about our intentions), but word-of-mouth brought about 50 people to hear us speak.
I’ll say more about it soon, but the goal of the society is to encourage voters and candidates to take action in pursuit of the spirit of the Constitution — the freedom, sovereignty, and citizenship that we were raised to believe in — without being hamstrung by bad-faith talmudry from people who do not believe in any of these things.
We believe that our government has apostatized from the spirit of the Constitution at every level, and we need leaders who defy corrupt lawyers and judges to restore that spirit. (Imagine a world in which we were as fundamentalist about the 10th Amendment as we currently are about the 14th — that change alone would be transformative.)
My remarks were focused on Utah: Latter-day Saints have unique doctrinal and historical reasons to reject lawyerly Constitutional exegesis, but our people are paradoxically some of the most timid and procedural “conservatives” in the country. There’s no good reason for this — we are simply afraid of accountability, afraid to be wrong, afraid to act.
Ben discussed our inherited postwar immune response against leadership or action of any kind, and how we can throw it off. His talk deserves a longer treatment, but the upshot is: if you teach a generation that “good people never seek power”, only good people will listen — and you’ll be ruled by imbeciles and sociopaths.
March 27: Bountiful family meetup
Family meetups turn out to be a lot more logistically challenging — if you want the wives to show up and relax and have a nice time, you need a space where the kids can’t break anything and can’t get lost. (This makes house parties challenging.)
Nick had the idea to cook an enormous amount of Mexican food and have dinner in an LDS church gym. The space was free to reserve, and self-contained, and indestructible.
The kids played with field-day stuff on one half of the gym, while the adults socialized and ate on the other half. After a few minutes of ice-breaking, we established that their husbands’ weird online right wing friends are all pretty normal, and it went great.
It might sound like a small thing, but getting a dozen families together (with fifty-some kids between them) is a big lift. But now we have the template, we’ll be doing many more meetups like this.
Scouting for EXIT HQ
We are scouting for club space in the Orem/Provo area. Virtually all the commercial real estate for sale in Utah Valley is the same hideous dentist’s office built in the 1980s, surrounded by strip malls and car dealerships. We’re looking for something different: a place of power.
We are going to build a members-only city club — so we want an older building in a downtown area that could be made beautiful.
There are a handful of sites we like — we are assembling the pitch for sellers and investors.
In the basement, we build an old-school, grimy free-weight gym, with sauna, plunge pools, and showers.
On the ground floor, a socializing space with a parlor for cards and chess, big overstuffed sofas for long conversations, a simple kitchen with clean food. Here, we would host events where BYU kids would be invited to sip a White Monster and listen to some naughty out-of-town speakers who wouldn’t otherwise come through town.
Upstairs we’d have our reading room with shelves full of beloved unapproved books, permanent and open office space for members, conference rooms, and workshop.
We have some due-diligence to perform on locations, remodeling, parking, etc., but we intend to have a pilot space in operation this summer.
Our quarterly focus for Q2 2026 is Genesis: the things we need to do now so that we can look back and say “this is where it all began.”
Our weekly calls this quarter will build on three themes:
Becoming a load-bearing pillar in your community, especially as things become more difficult and responsibilities are abdicated.
Taking calculated risks to seize the opportunities that lie in the coming volatility.
Preparing the founding story of your House that your children will tell their children.
As we’ve reached a critical mass of expertise inside the group, these presentations increasingly come from EXIT founders, historians, investors, and civic leaders. Many of the leaders and mentors we’re looking for are already among us.
(One exception that I’m particularly excited about will be Joost Strydom, CEO of Orania, who will join us on May 19th to discuss the community they have carved out of the wilderness in South Africa.)
If you want to get involved and help us build, apply for membership at exitgroup.us.
I love the HQ idea. We need more of these things and I think higher end clubs and spaces are going to be a growing and successful business.