This week: Biden declares war on Nazi Germany; Clay Martin Q&A

Biden goes to war

Biden’s State of the Union was mainly interesting as an illustration of exactly how and why the Western system of media-managed democracy is collapsing.

His talk had two broad themes: first, the standard Democratic promise of free cheese for the voters at the expense of “millionaires and billionaires”.

Of course, directly enslaving the nation’s billionaires would not even cover the existing deficit, let alone all the new programs he proposed — but it doesn’t matter. The consequences come after the election. (And Trump can’t unwind this problem for the same reason.)

This isn’t exactly Biden’s fault; if he told Americans what is actually going on in the country (impending fiscal collapse) and what needs to happen (a decade or more of deep spending cuts and tax increases), he would be crushed in 2024.

The second theme of the talk suggests how the government intends to get itself out of this mess: he compared the present state of America to both 1861 and 1941, and himself to FDR, explicitly placing his government on a wartime footing against its domestic political enemies.

The US government can no longer meet its obligations to the citizens — so it will focus on maintaining the loyalty of its clients at the expense of its enemies (who, being Nazis, can never be “appeased” but must be crushed.)

FDR’s managerial regime overcame the other two managerial empires of the 20th century through superior marketing.

While the Nazis piled up bins of wedding rings stolen from sobbing women at gunpoint, and the Soviets stalked through Ukraine stealing wheat and shooting cows, FDR merely banned the “hoarding” of gold, and offered to buy it from American citizens at the statutory price of $20.67 per ounce. Then he raised the statutory price of gold to $35 per ounce.

People knew it was a shakedown, but only in the abstract. Ever since, USG has mastered every form of boring, complicated, deniable, dilutive, and superficially legal theft.

Inflation dilutes citizens’ economic stake in the country and transfers wealth to government clients — banks, contractors, and welfare recipients.

“Fair Housing” was the de facto ethnic cleansing and internal displacement of millions of Americans from the inner cities, to reward Democrat clients and consolidate their urban political machines.

“Equal Employment Opportunity” abolished private control of industry — demanding that employers hire internal political officers with authority to direct the company contrary to its shareholders’ interests, to the benefit of the Democrat ethnic and sexual coalition.

Mass migration dilutes citizens’ voting rights, the benefit they derive from government spending, and their stake in the commons. The fact that Biden was able to crow about “job growth” when none of the new jobs went to native-born Americans must be understood as an expropriation — a propaganda coup at citizens’ expense.

So what comes next?

As the fiscal situation spirals further out of control, the state will eventually find it impossible to buy its clients’ loyalty in funny-money — they need some real assets to distribute.

This suggests that the expropriation will need to get a bit more concrete — and they’ve been beta-testing a few methods:

• Selective lockdowns: Enemy businesses get shut down, while clients get declared “essential” or are paid to do nothing.

• Asset freezes: Dissidents have their bank accounts frozen. Holding your money hostage is in some ways more powerful than stealing it, because it offers both a carrot and a stick to keep you compliant.

• Squatting: The state doesn’t have to literally steal your house — they can reward their clients by refusing to evict squatters.

• Manipulation of contract law: Dissident businessmen suddenly find that their contracts don’t mean as much as they thought.

• Selective auditing: Dissident organizations being “prioritized” for an IRS audit (while clients understand that they are not being prioritized).

• Frivolous civil proceedings: Dissidents might find themselves the target of a $1.5B defamation judgment, or ordered to pay $450M for civil fraud.

• Crypto controls: As the US bond market collapses, regulators will likely attempt to force citizens to hold hyperinflating dollars by blocking crypto offramps.

Immediately after Biden announced a 1941-style mobilization against the enemies of Freedom and Democracy (you), he said that “political violence has absolutely no place in America”.

USG is off their game in many ways, but they still control the most effective propaganda apparatus on the planet. They intend to make sure that the sheep-shearing is peaceful and orderly, honoring the forms and procedure that your grandma expects from her government, all the way to the end of the line.

But the structure of the problem suggests a solution.

The government’s bureaucratic character, and its dependence on the appearance of legality, was a source of great strength in the 20th century — but it also generates certain weaknesses.

If you don’t live in a blue jurisdiction with a blue mayor, judge, police chief, or DA, you are orders of magnitude more expensive to target with lawfare, lockdowns, and other flavors of anarchotyranny.

If you have an X account and you don’t have an HR lady, you have de facto free speech.

If your kids are never alone with a representative of the state, there is no attack vector for CPS to kidnap and mutilate them.

If you build a business below EEOC thresholds, you control it. (This is one reason tech guys have remained relatively free, while ‘Big Tech’ has not — tech startups offer the best returns for small, nimble teams of big-brains.)

If you hold crypto, your wealth can only be seized by direct violence, not underhanded procedural means.

If you have high-value, transferable skills, you have leverage against any jurisdiction or employer that wants to tell you what to do or what to think.

If you maintain illegible political connections in your city and county, you are free in all sorts of ways, regardless of the letter of the law. (As a friend recently put it to me: if you had to use a gun in self defense, would you rather try your luck as an ordinary citizen in a “constitutional carry” state — or as a sheriff’s deputy in a blue state?)

These conditions of legal theater won’t last forever — which is why we have to make the best use of them.

Now is the time to make your family and your property hard to reach.

It’s not about what you’re free to do on paper — it’s about what you are actually able to do, without penalty, in practice. This is the kind of sovereignty we are building together at EXIT.

We started as a distributed network, helping each other build businesses, professional connections, and marketable skills — now it’s time to get together in person to build local influence, educate our kids together, and prepare for emergencies.

Clay Martin Q&A

Tonight on our weekly full-group call, we will have a private Q&A session with Clay Martin, author of Concrete Jungle, which many in our sphere regard as the definitive treatment of urban SHTF survival. (For a refresher, check out my interview with Clay.) He spends a lot more time talking about networking and intelligence-gathering than he does about buying the right gear. Come prepared with questions.

If you’d like to join us on the call, sign up today at exitgroup.us.

Or subscribe for access to the Seattle Meetup (3/29), Austin Meetup (4/26), and Boston Meetup (5/24), below the fold.