Below is my speech from Constitutional Action at the American Fork Veterans’ Hall, April 30th.
At last month’s meeting, we presented a historical model for what is happening in Utah, & how we got here — and I made the case that we need a state government willing to defend its citizens and their rights under the Constitution, instead of using the letter of the law as an excuse to ignore the spirit.
The question that I hope it raised in your minds is, how do we get there? Can we get there?
I’m here tonight to tell you that we can.
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I suspect most of you are here because, like me, you feel like you’re going a little bit crazy.
You grew up in a state that was arguably the most cohesive and functional place, in a much more cohesive and functional country.
Now, you’re watching as the Republican state government sells your home out from under you in a hundred procedural ways.
The Republican state legislature and governor appointed a single “expert” (who happened to be a radical leftist activist) to assess the performance of every judge in the state.
This year, through the Better Boundaries initiative, Republicans have handed one of those leftist judges the authority to unilaterally redraw our Congressional districts, creating a radical socialist seat in Salt Lake City.
That seat was just won at the Democratic state convention by Liban Mohamed, thanks to a Somali ethnic political machine that the Republican Party willfully imported, along with tens of thousands of “refugees” and hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants, all protected by de facto sanctuary policies.
After decades of work by Republican lawmakers, Salt Lake City is as violent, depraved, and dysfunctional as any blue state capital, with the flag of the big gay empire hanging from every parapet — and every year, the tumor spreads further into the suburbs.
The Utah Board of Higher Education, hand-picked by the Republican governor, runs the leftist indoctrination factory where Charlie Kirk was assassinated. The State Board of Education — which is elected by the voters and is 88% Republican — employs the same insane Bolshevik teachers as every other public school system in America.
Again, this is the third most Republican state in the country — effectively a one-party state — and they are consciously, deliberately, systematically working to replicate the squalor and corruption of San Francisco or Minneapolis.
Maybe ordinary liberals in the 90s could not have anticipated how bad it would get — but how perverse would you have to be to walk into this with your eyes open?
But when you try to explain this to your friends and neighbors, they have no idea what you’re talking about.
The people who are doing this are world-class at evading responsibility, maintaining a stable decline, and keeping up appearances.
The trajectory of our state looks dramatic if you can remember what life was like ten years ago — but that’s just not how the median voter operates.
They’ll say, sure, Salt Lake County is a mess, but all cities are liberal — you can always move another 15 minutes out into the suburbs. Sure, the schools are bad, but you can apply for a charter school. Sure, there’s a drug problem, but not for you and me, not for our kids, right? Sure, houses are getting unaffordable, but that’s a pretty cool deal if you refinanced at 2.9% five years ago. Nothing a little conservative personal responsibility can’t solve. It’s not that bad, you can fly above it. Maybe you should get offline and touch grass.
And even if you convince your friend that these problems are real, what are they supposed to do? Are we supposed to vote for Republicans harder?
And then you get into a much trickier conversation. At a certain point you have to acknowledge that actually, the Republicans are the ones doing this to us.
Why?
Because the Republican Party’s purpose is to slowly fail.
In frontier America, including in the Utah territory, the federal government employed Indian Agents. These agents were sent to establish official relations with the local Indians — to create a formal channel that the Indians were supposed to follow if they had a grievance with the settlers or the government.
Of course, the intent of federal policy was always to move in and expropriate the Indians — but the Indian Agent’s job was to create the illusion of a diplomatic process — to continually make promises they couldn’t keep, to vent political energy, to prevent alternative constituencies from forming.
Today, that’s the Republican Party’s job: to negotiate the terms of your surrender.
The party recruits ambitious men who want a career in politics. They ensure that those careers depend on the national party infrastructure, the donor networks, and the consultant class. These are people who like making friends, and making money, and being taken out to lunch.
It is extremely cozy — for now — to be a Utah Republican politician who does not make waves. And not only that, the media will fawn over you, and tell you what a hero you are for abetting the rape of your country.
Now, the Plains Indians were in an impossible situation, hopelessly outnumbered and outgunned — but our puzzle is, Heritage Americans are still more than half the country, and the overwhelming majority in Utah. They’re way more than half the police and armed forces. Our Indian Agents tend to be local boys — and from what I’ve seen, we’re not sending our best.
Nothing about this feels inevitable.
How did they convince us to do this to ourselves?
Anti-Soviet dissidents in the Eastern Bloc faced the same confusion. The Soviets repressed the population with military force, but the actual officers and bureaucrats, the functionaries of the regime in East Germany were mostly East Germans; Poles in Poland, Hungarians in Hungary.
In his essay, Power of the Powerless, Vaclav Havel talks about the greengrocer who hangs his “Workers of the World Unite” poster in the shop window — not because he’s a committed Communist, but because it’s simply what you do — and if you didn’t do it, it would be noticed.
Do you remember the black square thing, during BLM?
That whole operation was designed around the scrolling grid of an Instagram feed — the whole grid was supposed to be blacked out, so that if anyone was saying anything else, it would stick out, and you could mob them and berate them for not complying.
According to Havel, the greengrocer is not expressing a political opinion. What he’s saying is: “I, the greengrocer, live here and I know what I must do. I behave in the manner expected of me. I can be depended upon and am beyond reproach. I am obedient and therefore I have the right to be left in peace.”
If that doesn’t sound like Utah.
It’s stunning how much of Havel’s essay, written in the Brezhnev era of the declining Soviet Union, maps to what we experience today, from the hypocritical language of human rights, to the judicial corruption, to the underhanded methods of punishing dissent — by threatening your job or your education, encouraging petty harassment, and so forth. It’s almost one-for-one — except instead of being conquered by Soviet tanks, we somehow voted for this.
How did they convince us to do this to ourselves?
Well, we talked a bit about how that happened last month — how the federal conquest of Utah created an institutional anxiety to conform — a tyranny of the people, by the people.
But the question now is, how do you break people of that?
You’ve tried talking to your friends and neighbors, and you’ve seen how that has gone. It’s easy to get discouraged.
But go read Havel’s essay. Havel was a playwright — he ran little gatherings smaller than this one, under a far more heavy-handed regime, with a much more openly corrupt political and legal system — and he won. Havel was the first elected president of Czechoslovakia.
I’ve spent the last five years — since we started EXIT — studying any parallel movement that I thought might have anything to teach us.
How did Havel go from being an underground essayist, running little reading groups and secret university classes, to taking the Presidency almost unopposed in 1989?
How did Lech Walesa go from being an electrician in an illegal trade union, to executing a 12-million-man general strike that crippled the Soviet government and ended the occupation of Poland?
How did the Founding Fathers go from anon poasters to fielding a conventional army and beating down the most powerful empire on the planet?
Some of you are anon poasters. Maybe you’ve been talking about politics on the internet for a long time, and from here that kind of victory may seem far away.
It feels like ideas don’t matter — it doesn’t matter how clear it is, or how right you are — your grandma is still going to vote for Spencer Cox, and Spencer Cox (or someone just like him, he’s not the point, there’s a thousand of them) is going to make sure that your dispossession is orderly, quiet, and complete.
But if your model of victory is that your grandma needs to get redpilled, you need to understand: that’s just not what politics is — neither transformative politics, nor even ordinary get-out-the-vote politics.
It’s not that ideas don’t matter, or that poasting never leads to power: in fact, almost all parallel movements start with poasting. The Founding Fathers had their pamphleteering, the Soviet dissidents had samizdat, the Ayatollah smuggled cassette tapes.
But the Founding Fathers didn’t win by getting the median American colonist to read their essays on political theory.
They won by mobilizing an energetic and dedicated minority to contest the regime’s legitimacy, and then contest its sovereignty — and that’s what politics is.
Each of these parallel movements began by building fraternal, economic, and social institutions among a small group of like-minded people, to replace the public square that repression had hollowed out.
They formed book clubs, neighborhood watches, mutual aid societies, trade unions, underground universities — they got to know and trust each other by building things that they knew their community needed. That’s what EXIT is doing as a fraternal organization, and Constitutional Action is the logical next step.
You don’t break the greengrocer’s habit of obedience by getting him to read your Substack. You break his habit of obedience by showing him an alternative way of life, by proving to him that he does not have to lie.
That’s what it means to contest the regime’s legitimacy — you contest its status as the default, because the greengrocer, or your grandma, is always going to do the default thing.
And the methods that a movement uses to contest legitimacy are, by definition, moral, lawful, and popular. They have to be, because that’s what legitimacy is.
You have to demonstrate, by doing what the regime purports to do, and promises to do, that all its compromises, all its hypocrisies, all its excuses for inaction, are lies.
President Bukele didn’t just call the Right in El Salvador cowards and hypocrites — he proved that they were cowards and hypocrites by doing in a matter of months what they said could never be done.
They said that attacking El Salvador’s crime and gang problem would be too unpopular, it would collapse the economy, it would trigger international sanctions, it would start a civil war.
Bukele showed the world that those politicians weren’t letting it happen because they were prudent or high-minded or pragmatic — and they sure as hell weren’t thinking about the rights of their citizens — they were just on the take. And now he is the most popular head of state in the world by far. But he couldn’t just say it — he had to prove it.
Lech Walesa was able to mobilize 12 million Polish workers because he showed them what it looked like when an institution actually organized and empowered workers — and by doing that, he showed them just how fraudulent the communists were. He broke the back of the regime’s legitimacy — but not just with a criticism. He had to show them.
I don’t know if you’ve read your county’s Republican Party platform, but it’s actually pretty good.
In Havel’s words: ”If an outside observer who knew nothing at all about life in Czechoslovakia were to study only its laws, he would be utterly incapable of understanding what we were complaining about.”
The Republican Party claims to believe in states resisting Federal power in accordance with the Tenth Amendment. They claim to believe in self-defense, traditional marriage, secure elections, public safety, and parents rights in education. They claim to oppose illegal immigration, birthright citizenship, and benefits for illegal aliens.
Now — you live in a state completely controlled by these people, from top to bottom — but they tell you that the reason you can’t have literally anything that they claim to want is that your Republican politicians are just that principled, that committed to civic virtue.
Of course that’s a joke — but we have to prove it.
So Constitutional Action is developing candidates for office who will act within their constitutional authority, to demonstrate what is possible in this state.
Anti-communists in Eastern Europe had the idea of life in America, or Munich, or Paris, they had smuggled Japanese electronics and Led Zeppelin albums, to prove that life could be different.
This was a mixed blessing, because it also meant that many people who wanted freedom and vitality simply left the country.
But freedom-loving people all over the nation are watching Utah right now — because for us, there is no Munich or Paris — there is nowhere to run. If we cannot hold the line in Utah, we cannot hold the line anywhere.
But this is also our opportunity. We can make Salt Lake City the most beautiful, vital, free city in the country — the example of what is possible to the whole nation. And we can do it by restoring the principles that made America the City on the Hill in the first place.
And in the meantime, we will do the work as citizens.
Friends who are watching Utah right now are ready to publicize corruption as we expose it.
We will clean up the squalor that the state refuses to clean up, and help the people they refuse to help — and we will document what we find, and ask them publicly, in city council meetings and town halls, why they refuse to help.
We want the people to see — and, just as important, we want you to see — the people with names and faces who are suffering in your state — and the people, with names and faces, who are inviting and intensifying that suffering — sometimes for money, sometimes for much less. We will make them look us in the eye.
We will use state public records law to obtain information that Utah Republicans don’t want publicized, about exactly who is being arrested in our state and who is being released, and for what crimes.
We will investigate fraudulent refugee and homeless initiatives connected to elected officials in the state, and expose the channels by which Utah Republicans get paid to betray their people.
We will monitor public schools and libraries to ensure that they act in harmony with the intent of state law, and we will hold administrators publicly accountable when they cover for abusive and anti-American teachers.
We will phone bank and knock doors to oppose the retention of corrupt judges, and to ensure that Blake Moore is not allowed to sell his Congressional seat to the radical left and then buy another one.
The purpose of all this is to punch a hole in the Republican apparatus of managed decline —
To bring state and national attention to incumbents who are used to doing their work in the dark.
And into that gap, we send our own people — leaders who will act to solve the problems we expose.
We will prove that Utah’s actual values can win, and that our people can govern themselves according to those values — that decline is not inevitable.
We will prove, in fact, as the Eastern Europeans did, that it is our enemies who are on borrowed time: that it is the lying — the absurd lying — that cannot go on forever.
And when it breaks — as lies always break — we will have built a city, and a state, and a people who point the way for America, as America once did for the world.
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