This week: why I'm leaving my beautiful Appalachian redoubt for a blue tech hub

The news sucks this week.

I tried writing about the Haiti thing, and it turns out communist journos and NGOs running cover for insanely gruesome displays of wartime cannibalism just isn’t that interesting.

The BBC says the impending extinction of Koreans is because they won't let Korean women be bisexual.

The dollar is still headed for collapse, the blind idiot state still lurches toward nuclear war (but some say that would be fine actually.)

What else is new?

For the last two years my kids have lived in a beautiful green holler in the Appalachian foothills.

My boys run through our woods playing soldier all day long. They have learned to gather eggs and stand up to the rooster. There’s a little black potbelly pig who wanders into our yard every morning to be fed along with the dog. In many ways it’s a beautiful place to grow up.

But my kids also have their own dialect, because they only talk to each other, all day long. Our neighbors are wonderful people, but no one on our street is under 65. My kids’ church friends live 45 minutes away. Our driveway is a quarter mile long.

We take them to the park in town sometimes, but the local kids are not all right. Every time we pile into the minivan we get to hear third-hand accounts of drugs, neglect, savage custody battles. These single-serving friends talk in snappy, Sorkiny quips because Netflix is the babysitter their mom can afford.

Rich libs make sure their kids can recite the libtard catechism, but they also make them play soccer and eat organic carrot sticks and put the tablet away at the dinner table. I suspect the gender stuff actually goes worse in Trump country than in blue states, on the basis of obesity and endocrine dysfunction alone.

Someday I hope we can deliver the noble Amerikaner from bondage — but my kids cannot be teenagers here.

So last week I loaded up my beater commuter sedan and drove 23 hours to Texas.

Here’s my thesis:

My kids have to grow up around smart, strong, healthy families. When I pitch this, some people look at me like I’m trying to build a moon base — but it’s not that much to ask, and it’s not that complicated. We just have to pick the right place and snap the line.

I thought it would be really tough to narrow down, but the answer was pretty obvious.

With apologies to my friends who are pursuing such projects, I don’t believe the answer to our predicament is a rural wildlife preserve for trads. If you run and hide, and try to maintain some static vision from the past, you’re going to get eaten by the laws of thermodynamics. We have to build new things in dynamic places that attract bright people.

When I came to Austin last year for Natal Conference, I couldn’t believe how much was going on. There are on-side people working in crypto, AI, biotech, manufacturing, network-state projects, etc.

But unlike every other tech hub in America, it isn’t ruled from top to bottom by communists. Austin itself is obviously rough, but you can drive 25 minutes from downtown in any direction and find yourself back in America.

The Right Wing Patronage Network that Frog Twitter wants to see is already quietly growing among a handful of local investors (whom I dare not name — not until after they’ve seen my pitch deck.) If you are waiting on Based Billionaires to rise up and retake the culture by funding your revisionist podcast, Texas is really the only spot.

The brains and the money are here; the land is still cheap (Austin is barely halfway into forming its second highway loop), and Texas is one of the only Red jurisdictions with enough political and economic weight to push back on both their own urban libtard constituencies, and the Feds.

If things go well in America, they will go well in Texas. If America capsizes, Texas will be the best place to get to a lifeboat. I’ve poked at this model every way I can think of, and obviously there are no risk-free bets — but nowhere else makes more sense.

All we have to do now is build the thing.

Once I get my family squared away, we start building a place to get together. We’ve been dreaming about this ever since we got started in 2021 — an island of owned space in which to work, socialize, and bring our families together.

As more people are drawn to what we build, the private club expands to become a private neighborhood, and we get new kinds of serendipity as we build homeschool co-ops and scout troops together, our wives bump into each other at the grocery store, we hire each other’s kids, etc.

Obviously, not everyone can or should relocate. Many of you have family obligations, professional lives, and ideological commitments elsewhere — besides which, frankly, not all of you are invited to the caliphate — but it will serve as a proof of concept for a network of projects. We’re going to learn a lot about real estate and community development that we will record, and pass along, and deploy in other places.

As institutional trust collapses and AI floods every unrestricted communication channel with impenetrable noise, the future will be built on human judgment. We need to be surrounded by people we know and trust to navigate what is coming. Essentially this means restarting civilization from the family up. Get involved at exitgroup.us.

EXIT News

• On last week’s Tuesday night group call we heard from Clay Martin on preparedness for what is coming in 2024 — full recording is available for subscribers here.

• On tonight’s call, we’re discussing the plans for Texas in greater detail, along with some other member projects.

• Thanks to strong intake over the last few months, we’re introducing a daytime entrepreneurship call on Wednesdays at 1PM ET. If you’re putting kids to bed during the evening calls (or you live in Europe), come check it out.

• If you want a more spontaneous, less project-based time to get to know the guys, we are now holding “big idea” discussion group mixers every Wednesday night. (all these links are posted daily for members on the #announcements channel and on the Google calendar)

• Seattle meetup (3/29) is ten days away. Cocktail hour meetup link is below the fold for subscribers, along with Austin (4/26), and Boston (5/24).; members-only invites coming via email.