Erik Prince wants you to recolonize Africa with the fellas.
Erik Prince, former CEO of Blackwater, spoke to a crowd of two hundred or so at a gastropub in Sylvan Park last Wednesday night. The event (hosted by IM-1776) was governed by the Chatham House Rule, but he mostly played the hits anyway: the need for private enterprise to solve the competence crisis in global governance and security.
Prince has noted elsewhere that the American colonies themselves were created as for-profit enterprises by (essentially) private military contractors, and that colonialism basically stopped working when it stopped being managed by the East India Company.
He attributes the global mass migration problem to a hunger for “Western governance”, which he believes could be supplied very inexpensively by a handful of tough guys embedded locally — and problems like cartel violence resolved through bounties and letters of marque offered to American GWOT vets looking for adventure.
Getting from here to there will take a global political and military realignment.
Prince believes it will emerge from the commercial off-the-shelf precision strike bricking about a trillion dollars worth of 3GW hardware (ships, tanks, jets, etc.) all over the world.
It no longer takes an industrial behemoth to break the US Navy’s grip on the sea lanes, or demolish an armored column in Eastern Europe — and industrial behemoths are expensive, bloated, slow, vulnerable, demoralizing, etc.
So Prince, like Balaji Srinivasan, expects that the 20th century will prove to have been the high point of global centralization, with the future holding hundreds or thousands of smaller states, optimized for efficiency and competence.
This vision of neo-feudal techno-libertarian mercenary city-states appeals very strongly to a certain breed of right-wing technology brothers, who are already coalescing around a handful of hot cities in red states — particularly Austin, Dallas, Nashville, and Miami. (Something like half of the attendees at the IM-1776 event were from out of town, and a few cities were dramatically overrepresented.)
I was surprised to meet so many people who had moved to these cities with the same thesis that is bringing me to Austin later this summer.
We all basically believe that globalization is going to collapse, the US government is headed for military and fiscal catastrophe, and some form of soft balkanization or partition is inevitable.
You don’t want to be in Gavin Newsom or Letitia James’s jurisdiction when that happens — but you also don’t want to be stuck in an economically and demographically moribund red state, where all the money and power is held by woke carpetbaggers in a handful of blue cities.
So it’s not an accident that this is new coalition is gathering on the emerging periphery of the South. These are credible cosmopolitan cities in economically robust red states — places where the fake and gay financialized economy has drawn plenty of “elite human capital” working on cutting-edge tech projects, but you could still get food and fuel and build things locally, if global supply chains got shaky.
In other words, if you wanted to build the Byzantium to America’s Rome, these are the places you would start.
One can imagine a future in which Texas and other states staff up to enforce their own immigration laws, accept tax payments in crypto, and fight to reshore manufacturing, and gradually gain the leverage to refuse orders from Washington.
State legislatures are becoming more polarized, which encourages ideological concentration, which intensifies the polarization.
Elon Musk just moved a quarter of a trillion dollars in business to Texas to get away from a California law that allows schools to conceal trans grooming behavior from parents. Abortion bans in red states are (inshallah) scaring away some libs.
This is all to the good — we can’t live together, and the more families migrate individually and voluntarily, the fewer will have to migrate under duress later on.
Trump came to Nashville to cement an alliance.
Like the Erik Prince event, BTC Nashville was a gathering for this new alliance of Trumpist conservatives and techno-libertarians, and Trump began his remarks by shouting out Michael Saylor and the Winklevoss twins alongside Kid Rock, Billy Ray Cyrus, Thomas Massie, and Rand Paul.
He made a handful of dramatic campaign promises:
A Bitcoin Presidential Advisory Council staffed with industry-friendly experts to make regulations simpler, fairer, and more transparent.
Terminate “Operation Choke Point 2.0” — basically the federal government’s efforts to debank crypto firms
Halt all efforts to develop a Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) and defend the right to self custody
Fire SEC chairman Gary Gensler (biggest cheer of the night)
Commute Ross Ulbricht’s life sentence to time served
Turn USG’s Bitcoin holdings from criminal forfeiture into a “Strategic Bitcoin Reserve” with a pledge to hodl indefinitely
Double US electricity output, making the US the cheapest place to mine crypto and develop AI models
Who knows how much of this he’ll follow through with, but even a modest pro-crypto stance almost demands a hawkish posture toward inflation, which is good news for everyone.
As you’d expect, he clearly isn’t much interested in the technical details — he signed off with, “Have a good time with your bitcoin and your crypto and everything else you're playing with" — but he clearly understands the spirit of the movement. It’s about finding a new frontier and carving out real sovereignty that the state can’t touch.
Which is, of course, what we’re all about at EXIT. We help our guys start businesses, connect with like-minded people, and build the communities they want their kids to grow up in. Join us at exitgroup.us.
EXIT News
On Saturday, Josh Abbotoy gave me a tour of New Founding’s Highland Rim development 90 minutes outside Nashville. He showed us around a beautiful little town and several green, hilly, well-watered plots in the country. It looks like they are offering deep-rural redoubts as well as more suburban and commercial development. Very exciting project — if rural Tennessee is more your speed than the Texas hill country, it’s definitely worth getting in touch with them.
Shaolin AI has successfully wrapped their second 6-month machine learning boot camp cohort. Next class begins in September. EXIT guys get a steep discount, so if you’re a member and you’re considering reskilling, reach out.
On this week’s full group call, we discussed the events in Nashville — the contacts we made, and what we learned.
I will be speaking at Nowhere Summit next month in Ecuador, hosted by our friends Ben Wilson (How to Take Over the World) and Alex Petkas (Cost of Glory).
Cocktail hour invites for Salt Lake City (8/16), Houston (9/13), and Washington, DC (10/11) available below the paywall. EXIT cocktail hours are a great opportunity to meet your local guys, and see if the full group is right for you.
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