Mr. President, would you still love America if it were a worm?

This week, Chamath Palihapitiya brought Trump to meet his cool tech libtard friends and show them that he is not so bad.

Joe Lonsdale of Palantir suggested on X that the world’s best basketball players might not look exactly like the world’s best physicists, and that this might not be entirely attributable to Systemic Racism.

Balaji Srinivasan launched meritocracy.com, with a blitz of tech CEOs declaring in public that “DEI is over” and they will now be hiring only the most qualified candidates for their positions. (Not that they weren’t doing that before — but for sure now.)

For his part, Trump seems to be working hard to tell the technology brothers what they want to hear.

In 2019 he rejected Bitcoin as a “scam” and a competitor to Big Beautiful American Dollars. Earlier this year he started making noises about how “many people are donating in Bitcoin” and he “might not want to take it away at this point” and it was all very interesting.

Now he says “We want all the remaining Bitcoin to be MADE IN THE USA!!!” and suggests that Bitcoin “may be our last line of defense against a CBDC”.

On the All-In Podcast, Trump demonstrated that he is, essentially, the centrist international technologist’s dream candidate: he doesn’t like taxes or regulation, he doesn’t like war, he doesn’t care about abortion — and most importantly, he’s a genuine civic nationalist with no attachment to the historical American people as such.

He promised them limitless Chinese and Indian immigration as long as candidates can fly here and get a diploma from an American college (any college — even, explicitly, a junior college.)

Obviously, America does not actually have a shortage of junior-college talent.

We already have too many such graduates from too many such institutions. There is no employer who is so hard-up for a paralegal or dental hygienist that they are scouting on the other side of the Pacific. These are not “jobs Americans won’t do”.

And they certainly aren’t jobs that Americans can’t do — which is the accusation that tech CEOs leave unspoken when they clamor for the expansion of the H1B program.

Besides which, these schools are already far too powerful as gatekeepers of the wage economy, far too bloated with subsidized domestic demand, and their curriculum is increasingly decoupled from any real-world productive economic activity.

This policy would very obviously lead to the laundering of migration through academic grants, NGO subsidies, and do-nothing degree programs. It would amount to a backdoor amnesty — making it explicit would be simpler and would avoid pointlessly expanding the university system and empowering domestic enemies.

My most charitable interpretation of this exchange is that sometimes Donald Trump just says shit, and pulls it back if it doesn’t play well.

All of these moves together suggest that Trump and the tech CEOs are trying on the idea of a secular, cosmopolitan, essentially Objectivist coalition.

In this vision, America matters primarily as the midwife and guarantor of a set of universal values that reward competence and bold inquiry; and if those values are in better evidence in people outside the US, then those people are “more American than Americans”.

This is obviously not what Trump ran on as Tribune of the Plebs, but to the extent that he is ideological at all, it is probably more or less what he believes. His tribe — the people he associates with in real life — are dynamic and intelligent cosmopolitan English-speaking elites, whose countries of birth (and residence) are matters of personal trivia.

Trump likes winners, and his patriotism is mostly a straightforward belief in America as a place for winners. This is what people mean when they still say that dynamic foreigners can “become American”. They don’t assimilate culturally, of course — there is nothing to assimilate to, except the post-American “Business English” norms that are already the elite culture in their home countries.

“Becoming American” in this sense has a lot to do with being Gritty and Scrappy and having a Can-Do Attitude. They don’t care about the Federalist Papers or Faulkner, but they are sincerely moved by the Manhattan Project and the Moon landing.

Trump is not a technologist but I think he basically shares this orientation — the Apollo launchpad as an obelisk, in the same vein as the Empire State Building.

Trump’s populist base required him to ground this “coffee’s for closers” mentality locally, which was a healthy thing — it kept him focused on getting the state out of the way of American winners, and pitted him as their champion against the haters and losers, foreign and domestic.

But tech founders are more naturally “his kind of people” than his base — which makes this type of overture politically dangerous.

The H1B issue illustrates how the civic-nationalist idea of America as being fundamentally about opportunity and meritocracy can become incoherent and self-defeating.

Trump may not care about ethnic and religious tribalism, but it cares about him. Any effort to define Americanness algorithmically, “by resume”, is trivially easy for foreign patronage networks to exploit — certainly if the bar is making it through an open-enrollment, pass/fail degree mill.

In Trump’s defense, though: the historical and technological processes that wedded “American values” to a particular people and place are no longer operative, and we are all trying to figure out what that means.

A “nation of immigrants” (who walk into a fully-developed civilization with a generous welfare state) is not the same thing as a nation of pioneers who had to conquer, and build from bare land, and negotiate the terms of coexistence from a state of nature.

Modern immigrants don’t have to do that — but neither do we.

Besides which, the concept of the nation-state itself (a people with shared lineage and history collectively controlling a discrete geographic space) is increasingly technologically incoherent. Ordinary people’s interests and personal loyalties too routinely transcend its boundaries.

If America is an ethnos, what can we do about the fact that there is no common feeling among those people? If America is a set of beliefs and behaviors, what can we do about the fact that most Americans no longer hold those beliefs or exhibit those behaviors?

How long can the American identity endure without the conditions that created it — and how long should we expect to hold our ancestors’ legacy uncontested?

Mr. President, would you still love America if it were a worm?

The bottom line: whatever you imagine America to be, if you want it back, you’re going to have to restore the conditions that created it.

America can’t be eternally defined by the experience of a frontier that closed over a century ago. That history no longer has the power to tell you who you are, because you can’t losslessly inherit the struggle that bound your ancestors together and sharpened their virtues. They won, and now you have different problems.

Trump might buy you some time to prepare and room to maneuver — but unless you share his belief that America is something that can be bought for the price of 60 credits at Los Angeles Community College, you can’t wait around for him to give it back to you.

EXIT News

• New York Meetup was a big success.

  • Grilled borger at an Airbnb in a somewhat adventurous neighborhood in New Jersey with just the EXIT guys.

  • Discussed silversmithing, emergency preparedness, dealing with various foreign policy redpills as a GWOT vet, getting scammed for $100M, building a capital fund for Our Guys, cross-country hiking expeditions, etc.

  • Made some new friends at Sovereign House — all dudes, I am assured. (Seriously, it was a very impressive crew, big thanks to those guys for hosting.)

• On last week’s full group call, we discussed managing the growth of the group (25% growth in the last six months), new member onboarding our plans for the future, and how we can stay connected as we expand.

• This week, we’ll discuss rites of passage and ethnogenesis.

• We are reading to prepare for our discussion of The Total State by Auron McIntyre on July 2nd.

• KEYED Energy went on sale (for real) on Juneteenth. Pre-order a case, help a mildly mentally-ill brother stay married.

• I am planning to attend the second Network State Conference this September in Singapore. The event itself will be worthwhile, but also fascinating just to check out the city itself and dream dreams with the boys.

• Cocktail hour RSVP links for Columbus (7/19), Salt Lake City (8/16), and Houston (9/13) will be posted separately for paid subscribers. These are a great opportunity to meet your local guys and see if the full group is a good fit for you. Invites to the members-only portion of the meetup will be sent via email.