What it would mean to win

Here’s how things looked in August 2021, when we started EXIT.

• The President had been removed from office in a rigged election

• J6 protestors were going into their seventh month of detention without trial

• The Biden Administration had announced a vaccine mandate on every corporation with more than 100 employees

• The deficit had grown $5 trillion in a single year, in peacetime, with no end in sight

• Inflation had shot up from a decades-long steady state, with no end in sight

• After ignoring presidential orders for an organized withdrawal for months under Trump, the US military was in the throes of a disastrous rout from Afghanistan

It seemed obvious that the system was beyond reform — but more importantly, nobody with money or influence was even interested in trying.

The Republican establishment had completely abandoned Trump — and Trump had abandoned the J6 detainees.

Trump’s movement looked, as far as we could tell, like yet another failed peasant revolt. (As late as mid-2023, there was serious debate on our side as to whether or not the GOP establishment would succeed in foisting Nikki Haley on the electorate.)

In August of 2021, the Twitter acquisition was still a year out, and Elon Musk was, as far as anyone could tell, still a pretty basic 90s tech libertarian who did not know what time it was.

The big players in “right wing media” were running drop-shipping scams to shear the boomers and not much else.

James O’Keefe was doing good undercover work, but he had just been suspended from Twitter (and would shortly face an FBI raid for leaking Ashley Biden’s diary entries accusing Joe Biden of child molestation.)

Alex Jones was in the middle of the lawsuit that would eventually lead to an unprecedented $1 billion award and bankruptcy.

Under those circumstances, we concluded that no help was coming.

We knew that people like us needed a patronage network, but we couldn’t find any patrons — so we needed to develop our own capacities, build wealth, and change our relationship to our employers and jurisdictions. Since Voice had failed, it was time to attempt Exit.

We would have been very surprised to hear that, three years later, Trump would break through the elite shield wall, winning either the quiet approval or outright endorsement of Bezos, Dimon, Zuckerberg(!), Musk, and a long list of lesser nobility in tech and finance.

It would have been shocking to hear that Twitter would fall under the absolute control of one man who follows our friends and reposts their content approvingly — or that the vice presidential candidate would be an extremely smart white guy who clearly has an alt.

It would have been unthinkable that the CEO of Facebook would acknowledge and apologize for his role in suppressing pro-Trump content during the 2020 election, and then give a coy non-endorsement in which he called Trump “badass” and emblematic of the American spirit.

In short: since we started EXIT, the conflict in American politics has transformed from a doomed populist revolt against elite consensus to a meaningful intra-elite power struggle — pitting various powerful nodes of tech, new media, and finance against the regulatory bureaucracy, academia, and traditional media.

Today, predictions markets and (arguably) financial markets predict a Trump win.

Both campaigns are behaving as if they expect him to win, with Kamala and Walz still making few appearances and Obama surrogates breaking ranks to distance themselves from the campaign.

As in 2016, Trump will likely take office with a Republican House and Senate — but unlike in 2016, he owns the party, and everyone knows it. (Consider the political conditions that forced him to select Mike Pence as a running mate, or court Mitt Romney for a Cabinet post.)

He now has a deeper bench of far more capable (and more sincerely convinced) private-sector executives to staff his administration — not the scrapings of a failing Outer Party, but some of the best organizational talent in the country.

In the melee to resist and depose Trump, the managerial bureaucracy broke the rules of the game whenever it suited them — shattering the popular perception that the status quo is sacred and immovable. They can no longer make any defensible case against deep —even radical — reform.

So, many things look possible now that would have been unimaginable three years ago.

What hasn’t changed?

We still have $175T in unfunded liabilities, and counting. (~$500,000 for every American.) The US government spends $10B it doesn’t have every day — earlier this month, it burned the entire market cap of Chevron in a single day.

Interest payments on the national debt have gone parabolic, outstripping defense spending.

The US military is still in a deep recruitment crisis, it still can’t secure the sea lanes (the sole function that legitimizes its imperial scope), and it is still dependent on manufacturing and resource extraction from its main geopolitical adversary.

In other words, the foundations of American power — the US dollar and the US Navy — are about to be massively written down upon contact with reality.

So, while radical reform is possible, it’s also a matter of survival.

Donald Trump winning the election does not guarantee that the empire will be restored to human control.

But if the empire is not restored to human control this January — or if it turns out Trump doesn't have that iron in him — the empire will certainly collapse.

But if he wins — and wins with a sufficient popular mandate to put down a bureaucratic rebellion — he and his team may find a way to take effective control of the state.

If they can do that, they may be able to turn things around. It would be messy: like Milei in Argentina, the necessary austerity would enrage the permanent government, as well as the media, and fill the streets with leftist parasites, suddenly with nothing better to do than riot in the street.

But the conditions for a reinvention of the American state are better than they’ve been at any time since FDR.

The bureaucracy has irreparably alienated the American military, the police, and the overwhelming majority of civilian gun owners. They maintain control of these people by paying their salaries, but that arrangement is literally on borrowed time.

It’s also worth considering how deeply distortionary and burdensome our current tax and regulatory environment is. Given the trillions of dollars in malinvestment caused by the Civil Rights Act alone, and the wealth generated in the US by populations not subject to USG’s regulatory regime, it’s hard to say just how productive and inventive and dynamic Americans might once again become, with sufficiently deep deregulation.

You may be skeptical that Trump has the will to do this — but it's a matter of survival for him too. His life and future are now irreversibly bound to the future of the American state.

If Trump wins the election, it will be the beginning of the fight, not the end.

We’ll still need to prepare for significant economic turmoil. It may even be more urgent to gain professional leverage and flexibility than it was under Biden.

Mobility, liquidity, and knowing the right people may be even more valuable under the volatile conditions of economic restructuring than they are under conditions of steady decline.

Massive spending cuts, tariffs, trade wars, and deportations will all have winners and losers — those without the freedom to rearrange their own affairs will be unable to capitalize on new opportunities, and left holding the bag as old systems wither.

(If the economy suddenly became 30% less fake and gay, would your email job still exist? Would you be upside down in your mortgage if 5% of the housing demand in your city got deported?)

Besides which, the people who benefited from the old system — here and abroad — aren’t going to take these changes lying down. Expect mass protests, state and local nullification of federal authority, infrastructure sabotage, and increased violence and disruption from all sorts of deniable actors inside the US.

But on the other side of all that, we can find real reason to hope — the prospect that our children might have it better than we did.

If Kamala wins, things are somewhat simpler.

For starters, if they can put Kamala in the White House, they can put literally anybody in there: it would be the total and final victory of managerialism over America, and the end of America as a coherent nation.

But Kamala herself is unlikely to do anything terribly interesting, or to be listened to if she tried. In this version of the future, you can basically extrapolate all the current trendlines out to the horizon, because there will be absolutely no meaningful human agency at work — just the steady consumption of America’s accumulated assets until they are spent.

If that’s the world we’re living in, the prescription is straightforward: minimize your exposure to USG and USD, because they’re going to zero. Get to a safe(r) location in a safe(r) jurisdiction, with as many useful and loyal friends as you can find. Buy Bitcoin (or gold, if you think you’re hard). Prepare as best you can to keep your family and your wealth mobile, agile, and out of trouble.

Your kids probably won't live wealthier or more secure lives than you — but if you're set up right when things fall apart, they may live to be much more sovereign.

In either version of the future, the most valuable asset will be wisely chosen friendships.

No matter what happens next week, the next decade will be volatile to a degree none of us has ever experienced.

But volatility is opportunity. Even in a collapse scenario, there is a buyer for every seller — opportunities to carve out sovereignty that would be totally out of reach under normal conditions.

It makes no sense to prepare against any one particular outcome in great detail, because the set of possibilities is so enormous.

So we have to look for what is meta-adaptive — what preparations will serve us well across the whole domain of possibilities?

The most universally adaptive advantage that humans can have is each other — capable, cohesive, aligned friends. We are taking a short position on the present system, and building for what comes next. Join us at exitgroup.us.

EXIT News

• On last Tuesday’s full group call (10/22), we rolled out our internal Business Incubator, beginning Monday, 11/4. Members can check the chat for more details.

• On tonight’s full-group call (10/29), we will hear from Tanner Guzy on personal aesthetics as part of human cultivation: dress as a signifier of class, culture, tribe, and intention.

• This week, several of the guys will be running working groups to get things done on their projects. Bring some tasks you’ve been putting off.

• Next week's full group call (11/5) will be an election watch party. No concrete agenda, just hanging out and discussing what we see.

• Dallas guys shooting airsoft this Saturday, 11/2.

• EXIT Meetup in the Bay Area, 11/9, assuming travel arrangements are not disrupted by election shenanigans. Subscribers can access the RSVP link here.