"Try that in Texas"

For the last three years, I’ve been on a plane at least once a month, visiting cities all over the country to run EXIT meetups and connect our guys.

After all this road time, I’m starting to put together “the situation on the ground” for a representative cross-section of these United States.

I’ve stayed at a lot of hotels.

The two-star experience is identical wherever you go, right down to the staffing: Indians behind the counter, Central Americans cleaning up. When I tell you it's every single time, brother, I mean it's every single time.

This is the case 20 miles from the southern border. It is also the case in Boston, Seattle, and Sioux Falls. It’s true in red states and blue states, small cities and large cities, dynamic up-and-coming cities, crumbling Rust Belt cities — if a location can support a crappy two-star hotel, that hotel will be staffed in exactly the same configuration, everywhere in America.

You could call it a quirk of the hospitality industry, but I see it in factories, construction, tech — every industry you can conveniently observe from the outside tells the same story:

There is clearly way more immigration than anyone will acknowledge — and far deeper economic capture (which translates to political capture.)

Most importantly, it’s completely unconstrained by geography.

Likewise, I have seen a lot of unattractive people with pink and green undercuts in my travels — but I am about as likely to see them at a gas station in Tennessee as I am at a coffeeshop in San Francisco. (San Francisco is more liberal, but Tennessee is fatter, and it’s not obvious to me which of these variables generates more pink and green undercuts per capita.)

A judge in Montana took a child from her parents and sent her to a treatment facility in Canada because they refused to use “he/him” pronouns, and the Republican governor publicly endorsed the decision.

My hometown in Texas was the epicenter of Jeff Younger’s nationally publicized (and unsuccessful) battle to prevent the chemical castration of his son.

Schools in Utah are still flying the BLM and Progress Pride Flags, though these have been banned effective May 7th. “Stickers, pins, and signage” are not mentioned in the ban, and teachers and administrators (and the Republican governor) are broadcasting their intention to ignore it.

The laws, on the books, are quite different across these jurisdictions — but, as we are all learning to our sorrow, the practical impact of the law is up to the DA and the judge.

Likewise, you can ban institutions from having “diversity officers” but all these people are still on the payroll, believing and doing the same things.

You can tell teachers they’re not allowed to say “critical race theory”, but they’ll still teach critical race theory. If you tell them they’re not allowed to tell kids about gay stuff “as part of instruction”, they’ll just say they’re not instructing anymore when it’s time to tell the kids about gay stuff.

A governor in Oklahoma can make the task of catechizing your kids marginally more annoying for their progressive public schoolteachers — but public schoolteachers are progressive everywhere, and personnel is policy.

The internet works the same in Alabama as it does in Massachusetts, and most people’s lives increasingly take place on the internet.

You can see this vividly in the homogeneity of underclass culture across Western liberal democracies. The host country is irrelevant, and even the migrants’ culture of origin is only a thin overlay on the universal street culture. The aspirations, the status hierarchies, the aesthetics all come from the same TikTok videos.

The Institute for Family Studies cutely describes the “urban family forms” that now prevail in rural America — they’re watching the same weird porn, hiring the same divorce lawyers, acquiring the same niche mental illnesses, and having the same 1.4 kids as everywhere else.

The places, like Utah, that are the most Shire-like are the least politically aware, and are actively tearing down every barrier to the global monoculture. They have no antibodies.

The point of all this is not to discourage — only to say that retreat is not the answer.

It also isn’t to say that there’s no good news, or that nowhere is better or worse than anywhere else — but there is no existing culture or jurisdiction that has successfully held these forces off. They can’t be defeated by quarantine. Whatever survives this will be built by the families and communities that pass through the fire.

Initiatives like school choice matter a great deal, because they allow us to put new wine in new bottles: instead of trying to coerce good behavior out of people who are Marxist at a neurochemical level, we can make them irrelevant and create something better.

Special Economic Zones have similar advantages — done properly, Trump’s “freedom cities” would allow urban politics to be reimagined, under the gentle heading of “deregulation”. Trillions of dollars are locked away in the derangement of American urban planning.

At the personal and family level, the same logic applies.

We’re not going to coerce good behavior out of Fortune 500 companies in thrall to the most comprehensive and sprawling instrument of political coercion ever devised. Instead, we have to build our economic lives so that these people don’t decide whether or not we get to eat.

At the political level, Brazilification is basically a done deal. Maybe Trump will successfully command the tide, but in the meantime, every state government and every city government you interact with is going to be fake and gay, lawless and crawling with parasites. Your family’s security and freedom to operate will not be a question of what the law says on paper, but who the local authorities are and what they think of you. The political will be extremely personal, and we need to build accordingly.

(There’s a continuum of difficulty there — in a place like California, you are likely to be at odds with your municipal, county, and state authorities, as well as the law on paper. But these are still live considerations in Oklahoma and New Hampshire.)

The laws that create these conditions are mostly federal, and Trump hasn’t signaled much interest in challenging them. On the time horizon I care about — the next fifteen years or so, the time it takes for my kids to grow up — I expect that it will remain technically illegal to decide who you will live and work and associate with.

But it isn’t illegal to have lots of useful friends who do things together. Mediterranean times call for Mediterranean business norms.

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EXIT News

• Last week’s full-group call (4/8) was on EXIT acquisitions. Several of us are involved in acquiring distressed or undervalued businesses, and we are comparing notes.

• This week’s full-group call (4/15) was on family traditions, especially around the Easter season. Creating traditions for kids to grow up with is one of the most important vectors for thick culture, because kids are able to absorb these traditions as “real” in a way that is very difficult to do for adults.

• We are closing in on completion of our first manufacturing acquisition. This will be the pilot for a series of investments in manufacturing and reshoring. We will be raising funds to scale this business. More information to come.

• Meetup Schedule:

  • Dallas meetup will be Monday, 4/21. Dinner, followed by cocktail hour.

  • Seattle meetup will be Saturday, 4/26.

  • Austin meetup will be Friday, 5/16 through Sunday, 5/18. We will be spending a weekend at an Airbnb south of town. Cocktail hour on Saturday, 5/17 for EXIT members, Substack subscribers, and guests.

• Cocktail hour invites for Dallas (4/21) and Austin (5/17) available to subscribers below the paywall. EXIT cocktail hours are a great way to get to know the EXIT guys in your area and see if the group is right for you.