The Groves and High Places

Constitutional Action Beautification Event, Provo Canyon Trail

The thesis of Constitutional Action is that we should be inspired to action by the spirit of the Constitution, rather than enslaved to (our enemies’ interpretation of) the letter.

We believe the Republican Party exists to divert political energy and keep Americans inert — so our mission is to seek executive power, and demonstrate what could be accomplished if we removed our fraudulent and self-dealing political class.

It starts with taking action as citizens to expose what they’ve swept under the rug, and show the people that these politicians do not represent our interests.

EXIT is a fraternity dedicated to shorting managerial systems, and building the human institutions that come next. Learn more here:

In this case, proverbially strait-laced Provo, home of Brigham Young University, now hosts eyesore junkie dens and sprawling homeless encampments.

On May 31st, forty volunteers gathered at Provo Canyon, and we removed four dormant camps while documenting two active ones. (You can get in trouble for removing the wrong kind of garbage.)

We didn’t have to go far: the camps were just beyond the treeline, a two-minute walk from the trailhead where families walk every day.

The camps were right next to (and in some cases intersecting) active Provo city maintenance and construction work — the city clearly knows these people are here, and has done nothing.

The strangest thing about the camps was that they were either literal “altars” of rock, or else bowl-like “nests” stuffed with decade-spanning archaeological strata of garbage.

In the Book of Kings, whenever a righteous king takes power in Judah, his immediate enemy is “the groves” (asherim) and “the high places” (bamot):

These are hidden sites of self-mutilation, ritual prostitution, and child sacrifice in the name of Ba’al, Molech, and Asherah — the gods of the tribes that Israel neglected to eradicate in the conquest of Canaan.

Weak kings allow these altars to fester in the wilderness; truly wicked kings bring the whoredoms into the cities, and eventually into the holy place of the temple.

It struck me, as we pulled down the rocks and bagged the garbage, that the homeless camp is an altar to our enemies’ gods.

Their most sacred principle is the abolition of distinction, the worship of entropy — and the shrine of their cult is a midden heap, ideally somewhere that was once beautiful.

You can tell this is true because of the vigorous legal protections that these shrines enjoy in enemy territory.

The vagrants play the role of both sacrificial victim and sacred cow, whose damage and detritus (and self-destruction) must be preserved at all costs.

If you didn’t understand that our enemies’ religion is entropy, it would be difficult to explain their zeal for homeless encampments.

They obviously don’t care about the vagrants themselves, whose misery they actively nourish and sharpen by every policy means available.

None of it makes sense until you understand that the real object of worship is misery and squalor itself. It felt good to pull those altars down.

We are also learning a lot about organizing concerned citizens.

It turned out to be pretty involved coordinating vehicles, load-balancing work crews, maintaining real-time comms across sites — it was a good exercise of “dual-purpose capacity”.

Next time we run an event at this scale, we will have our operations lead stay at base camp directing traffic, crew leads trained with handheld radios, and dedicated runner and vehicle teams.

We also got to work together and problem-solve on the fly, recognizing each other as people who showed up to meet a need in their community.

Our next cleanup will be this weekend, at Memory Grove Park.

Memory Grove is a veterans’ memorial in the shadow of the State Capitol, which has been an active homeless encampment for years, and a source of violent crime and drug offenses near Temple Square.

Our overwhelmingly Republican legislature can literally see the camps from their offices. Their mundane bureaucratic excuses make no sense — loitering and camping in public city parks is straightforwardly illegal, and they could enforce the law at any time. They want it this way. We’d like to hear them explain why.

Constitutional Action is going to clean up what we legally can, and present the rest to the judgment of the public.

You can sign up to join the Memory Grove cleanup here — or, if you want to support the next Constitutional Action event (covering snacks and PPE for volunteers, equipment rental, dump fees, event venues, etc.), you can make a contribution here. (Thanks to American Conservation Coalition for sponsoring this cleanup.)

The EXIT Leadership Group is currently working on a new target list to expand Constitutional Action outside Utah.

The cities where we have the greatest operational depth are Dallas, Houston, Seattle, Nashville, DC, and New York. If you know of a place that could use a cleanup, let us know.

Our next event will be a celebration of America’s Semiquincentennial, and a look at The Next 250 Years.

One of the consequences of the Constitutional Action thesis is that our nation’s present difficulties are not, in fact, inescapable political reality.

As Nayib Bukele revealed in El Salvador, things can get massively better in very little time if you are not ruled by thieves and gangsters. But El Salvador remains a small and poor country: what could the United States accomplish with that kind of transformation?

We want to explore what is possible with the restoration of human government to the United States of America — with leaders loyal to the spirit of freedom embodied in the Constitution. You can register for free here:

EXIT is a fraternity dedicated to shorting managerial systems, and building the human institutions that come next. You can apply for membership at exitgroup.us.

EXIT News

• Weekly Full Group Calls (Tuesday nights, 9PM ET/6PM PT)

  • This week (6/2) we heard from Kevin Daley and Davis Hunt on political action in Nashville. Davis is the founder of Pamphleteer, and has organized excellent events to connect aligned people, including the Erik Prince Q&A with IM-1776.

  • Next week (6/16) we will hear from EXIT man and author of the Steadermen Substack John Del about parenting teenagers. He’s made it through the gauntlet successfully, and we want to know what did differently, and what he has learned.

• EXIT Member Events (see group chat for details):

  • 6/12: Nashville Meetup

  • 6/13 Constitutional Action Cleanup Event in Salt Lake City

  • 6/13: Houston Meetup

  • 6/13: Budapest Meetup

  • 6/15: Dallas Meetup

  • 6/19: Atlanta Meetup

  • 6/19: Denver Meetup

  • 6/20: Columbus Meetup

  • 6/27: Salt Lake City Passage Press Event

  • 6/27: St. Louis Meetup

  • 7/1: Constitutional Action Event (“The Next 250 Years”) in American Fork

Subscriber Events (RSVP below):