This is a transcript. Recording above.
Many on the left (and certain factions of the right) have been freaking out over Trump’s latest Genocidal Madman post.
He says:
“A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again. I don’t want that to happen, but it probably will. However, now that we have complete and total regime change where different, smarter, and less radicalized minds prevail, maybe something revolutionarily wonderful can happen. WHO KNOWS. We will find out tonight. One of the most important moments in the long and complex history of the world. 47 years of extortion, corruption, and death will finally end. God bless the great people of Iran.”
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So there was speculation about whether Trump was going to nuke Tehran, or deploy the space lasers, or demonic UFO zero-point-energy anti-gravity wonder weapons. And of course, nothing happened, because nothing ever happens.
But many are still Deeply Concerned about the President’s Rhetoric.
The evening after he posted this on Truth Social, it looks like the Iranians, mediated by Pakistan, came to the table and at least in principle agreed to a two-week ceasefire. That will depend on whether or not Bibi wants a ceasefire. We will see how it goes, but the Plan Trusters are saying, “See, Trump was crazy like a fox. He freaked you out, he freaked them out, and that is why everybody came back to the table.”
So, during Operation Giant Lance in 1969, President Nixon sent nuclear-armed B-52s to press Soviet airspace for three days.
During this time, Kissinger is on the phone with the Kremlin nonstop, warning them that Nixon was drunk and dangerously unstable and his finger was on the button. In the same year, the North Koreans shot down a spy plane and killed 31 American crewmen — a story you probably did not hear about in history class, and that is part of the point I am going to make here.
The story is: Nixon is loaded. He is furious. He orders a tactical nuclear strike on the North Koreans. But apparently he is incapacitated enough that Kissinger is able to step in, countermand the order, and let Nixon sleep it off. In the morning, he thinks better of it.
There are also accounts that Nixon was basically drunk throughout the entire 1973 Yom Kippur War, which was a three-week period.
Some of these stories should probably be understood as damnatio memoriae, a retrospective discrediting of Nixon by his enemies. But it seems to be true that, number one, Nixon really did drink a lot, and number two, he deliberately cultivated his enemies’ belief that he was a volatile and irrational actor.
Now, what was different back then is that this whole drama took place with Nixon on the Red Phone, one-on-one with the Kremlin, and the public either never heard about it or heard about it years later.
Whereas Trump is playing Drunk Nixon live on the timeline.
But in both cases, the strategy only works if the Russians, or the North Koreans, or the Iranians — who study American leaders much more carefully than the median American voter — have good reason to believe in this irrationality.
There is no way for the American leader to wink at the voters, or even at his staff, to say, “I am running dread game, everything is going to be okay.” And not only that, but you cannot just deploy this tactic when you need it. Nixon needed to be a guy who drank a lot for this tactic to work.
Trump does not drink, but he is definitely mercurial, and in addition to that being a true fact about him, he has also cultivated that as an image.
So if you got got by the most recent Genocidal Madman tweet, that is not, in principle, an absurd thing to believe. He is definitely volatile when it is smart to be volatile, but he is also just volatile all the time.
I cannot be sure that is what he was doing, or what was going through his head, or whether that was a smart thing to do, or even whether it is a good idea in general.
We know various leaders have done it — but, given our information environment, even looking back, it is hard to say a whole lot. For instance, in the 2017 Kim Jong-un “Rocket Man, my button is bigger” thing: we, the public, still do not know — may never know — the exact contours of North Korea’s nuclear program.
We have some basic information about what they were doing, the big visible tests, but we do not actually know how they felt about what Trump said, or even really what they did about it. It does seem like they went back to launching test rockets.
And even looking back as far as the late sixties and early seventies, it is pretty tough to prove the counterfactual in some of these nuclear standoff situations.
We still do not know exactly what the escalation calculus was on either side in 1969 or 1973.We do not really know what Nixon’s real goals were. We do not know actually how drunk he was. Some facts are better corroborated across people with different axes to grind, and maybe that is useful.
But that is the point: you just don’t get to know.
When this latest thing popped off on February 28th, everybody rushed onto Twitter with the Takes: whether this was righteous or wicked, whether it was prudent or foolish — all of this predicated on:
our respective stockpiles and output of munitions
the escalation ladder
the penetrability of Iran’s underground sites
how resilient their leadership bench was to a decapitation strike
where the KC-135s were
whether the transponders were turned on or off
what we know about Iranian sleeper cells
And of course, it was all bullshit. Nobody knew anything. If you were closely monitoring the situation, you were anti-informed — the information you received was worse than useless.
And it was just bizarre to see so many Based and Redpilled guys talk about this war as if the public ought to know or could know, ought to be consulted or even could be consulted in theory about it.
We are all talking about whether or not it is a good idea, and it is like — we do not even know what “it” is.
They do not tell us what they plan to do. They do not tell us what their objectives are. They do not tell us whether they think it is likely to succeed, and what justification they have for that belief. They do not tell us what they think we could gain. They do not tell us what they think we could lose. They do not tell us what we might lose if we do not do anything.
And that is the top-level strategic summary stuff. They are definitely not going to tell you where the submarines are and where the B-52s are, and how many JDAMs we have got and how many Shaheds they have got, and what about the radars.
All that stuff is classified to the gills for the obvious reason that you cannot let the enemy know your mind.
You may or may not have a good plan, but if you have a good plan, the very act of consulting the public about it makes it unworkable. None of this is to argue that any of this was prudent or morally justified — just that all of the information that you or I would use to make that kind of assessment is not available.
And that is fine. A lot of this is entertainment. If you like your unplugged controller, you can keep your unplugged controller.
But it got me thinking about how media-managed mass democracy seems to be changing.
The last war we officially declared — which is, not coincidentally, the last major war we were able to conclusively win — was World War II.
I am going to suggest two reasons why that is the case: why World War II was the last major war, and why, to the extent that subsequent military interventions have been successful, they were successful. First reason is information control, and the second reason is information tempo.
In the 1930s, in the run-up to World War II, the Roosevelt administration had either captured or, to some extent, invented the modern apparatus of narrative control through mass media. The public was not consulted about the attack on Pearl Harbor. They had no time to theorize about what FDR knew and when he knew it — which, if they had had that kind of time, some serious doubts may have arisen.
But instead, on the front page of every morning newspaper, they were given a single data dump that said: here is what happened, here is what it means to you, here is what is going to be done about it.
And from then on, every piece of information they received about the progress and prospects of that war was heavily censored — literally just marketing materials pulled from this curated reserve of facts and stories, or just made stuff up. That was what you got. All you knew was what they told you.
Our entry into World War II — actually, just prior to our entry into World War II, 1940 — was when the government inaugurated the military intelligence classification system, which now codifies and in fact guarantees that the public cannot be provided the means to render informed decisions about foreign policy.
And of course, as we seem to learn more and more every day, foreign policy and domestic policy in the Empire are not easily separable.
As our constitutional conservative autist friends point out, the United States was never intended to be a democracy.
The founders recognized that government by plebiscite is not only undesirable but impossible. And so it was a republic, a representative form of government.
Various politicians and thinkers have been more or less honest about this, but there has always been a hypocrisy and unreality to this idea of popular sovereignty, because our whole system of government was carefully structured around the recognition that the voter is actually stupid — and very much in the way, actively unhelpful when any actual decisions need to be made.
You can understand the structure of the government as basically trying to get as much of the legitimizing function of democratic accountability with as little practical exposure to actual democratic accountability as possible.
The representative, at the time, was a latency buffer to give the system time to think. If all these decisions are being made and disseminated on horseback, and your representative has to ride to Washington and go behind a locked door with no recording equipment to make these decisions, then the system is capable of OODA loops that extend across weeks or even months without the possibility of any disruption from the public, or hostile domestic or foreign agitators of the public.
So if you are not familiar with that term, an OODA loop is a decision-making model used in the U.S. military. It stands for Observe, Orient, Decide, Act.
The speed with which you are able to
Gather relevant intelligence from your surroundings — that is Observe.
Make sense of that intelligence, those facts, and your relationship to them — that is the Orient step
Decide what to do, and then
Act: do what you have decided to do.
The speed with which you can do that, and then iterate — act, then observe the consequences of the action, orient yourself with that, decide again, act again — that is your operational tempo.
This framework is used in the military because it is specifically valuable for contested, competitive decision-making environments.
If I can get through an OODA loop faster than you can, then I can change the terms of the game, change the environment, so that you are deciding and acting on the basis of out-of-date observations and orientation. That is called “getting inside your OODA loop.”
So if you are trying to prosecute a war as a mass democracy, as an elected official, one of the ways your enemy can get inside your OODA loop is by manipulating public opinion — partly because maybe you are worried about the next election, but also conscientious objection, civil disobedience, protests.
The reason I lay that out is that communications and transportation technology have sucked all this friction out of the system that was actually load-bearing for that system — particularly a system predicated on the fiction of popular sovereignty.
You could draw an analogy to the hypocrisy and fakery around immigration. When Europeans had to take a three-month boat ride to get here, and everyone else it was six months or nine months or not at all, you could afford to say things like, “Oh yeah, we want everybody. Anybody who wants to can come here” — because realistically, who was going to come here was heavily, heavily selected.
Now that we have airplanes and literally anybody can come here, one of the biggest political questions of our time is: “okay, did we really mean ‘anybody’”?
And all these conversations about freedom of religion that we had between basically Northern European Protestants and a handful of Catholics — we are having to say, okay, does that actually universalize? Does that actually generalize to every conceivable religious belief on planet Earth?
All these advances in communications and transportation technology are pulling all this really useful friction out of the system and forcing us to confront — maybe it is not even fair to call it hypocrisy — but just that we came up with an inherently local solution, and maybe some of the Founders thought it would generalize, but it turns out not to generalize.
With respect to fighting wars: on horseback, our political system worked. With telegraph and rail and steamships, things got pretty shaky.
That is a non-trivial part of what incited the Civil War: Americans got to know each other, especially Northern and Southern Americans. They realized they did not like each other.
This dissonance of values and custom, that previously only a handful of rich, highly mobile people had had to confront — well, now you are seeing the bad things going on in Charleston being disseminated almost in real time in Connecticut and Boston.
During the war, as much as we talk about how the North had the advantage in rail lines and telegraph lines and logistics, they were also challenged back home by these communication changes.
Suddenly the speed and detail with which wartime hardships could be exposed, or tactical decisions could be second-guessed, or diplomatic maneuvering could be criticized — all of those things were suddenly at an order of magnitude higher resolution and crossing the country in a day instead of a matter of weeks.
And so Lincoln says, not without justification, “We have got to win this war.” Suspends habeas corpus, locks up a lot of journalists, tells the newspapers what to print, and wins the war.
As technology pulls friction, pulls buffer out of the system, these competing political directives are now grinding metal on metal.
The political promises we have made to legitimize the state grind against the actual practical need for the state to get things done.
Lincoln solved that the hard way: the insight that FDR discovered — or that he represented, his team, his philosophy, his government — what they discovered was that this apparatus of narrative generation was actually capturable, and that it was actually cheaper, faster, more efficient to capture that narrative apparatus than it was to fight it and coerce compliance.
And so for basically the whole of the 20th century, we had instantaneous, centralized mass communication, which meant that you could have basically rock-solid, in some sense genuine, popular sovereignty. Genuine popular legitimacy. Genuine popular buy-in — because all the raw materials of that public opinion, all they knew was what you told them.
And all the discourse, all the terms of every debate, was this very clear one or two or three options that you set up. You sometimes tell your kids, “What vegetable do you want with dinner? Do you want the broccoli or do you want the asparagus?”
And apparently it works just about as well with grownups as it does with kids, because for almost a hundred years, Americans really thought of themselves as having these informed opinions and making these choices, doing their duty as a citizen.
The problem that had been caused by the speed and the depth of this communications technology was solved by its centralization. And in fact, the state now had more popular legitimacy than ever.
But you can draw a pretty clear line from our combat effectiveness and operational constraints in World War II to Vietnam, to Afghanistan, to Iraq, and now potentially Iran.
The more the public demanded to be involved in the war effort, the less successful it was.
This dimension of OODA loops helps you see why some U.S. military interventions seem to work and others do not. For an operation to work now, it has to take place within a single news cycle.
Panama, Venezuela, Grenada, Desert Storm — all these things could be presented to the public as basically, “Hey, by the way, we did this and it is over.”
Certain dedicated, semi-professional anti-war constituencies are going to be mad about those things, but basically nobody else is, because the news cycle just moves on.
This is one reason why the U.S. military and intelligence community have really transformed, doctrinally and structurally, toward this very SOF-heavy, very spook-heavy, cloak-and-dagger, in-and-out, overwhelming-force model of warfighting — because they are trying to extract an entire war’s worth of political outcomes out of a single news cycle.
But you can see how that forces the empire to teeter on this very, very tiny balance point. We have got this enormous global apparatus of intelligence and force projection, all built around making sure that problems never get so big that we cannot handle them with a couple of Black Hawks over a weekend — which means we actually have to care what is going on everywhere in the world.
We actually have to be paranoid and invasive, because it is actually not that uncommon or that difficult for some foreign power structure somewhere to get irrevocably too big for us to handle that way.
We are dominant in that kind of engagement, and it looks like we could probably handle ourselves in a strategic nuclear exchange: but everything in that “messy middle” — the architecture on which our political legitimacy is built just does not support that.
And it is not because the voters are directly consulted from moment to moment. It is because the institution cannot lie to the public without lying to itself.
The Iraq War is the best example of this. In the run-up and execution of the Iraq War, the DOD could not maintain a clean separation between its public justifications and its internal planning. The institution had to become dumber in order to stay publicly coherent.
And as the information environment gets more transparent, more decentralized, this need for coherence with the public story — and so this need to get stupid — gets worse.
You can frame all that narrative control and censorship and classification and dirty tricks as a sinister conspiracy to abolish democratic accountability and practice — and certainly it did that — but it is hard to say exactly what the alternatives were.
You can say, “I want a democracy where my voice is heard and I am kept informed and the politicians work for me — that also wins wars.”
And you just cannot have one. Democracies do not win wars, especially not globally networked, instantaneous, real-time democracies.
This certainly is not an endorsement of the war — I think it is going to go badly — but it is a condemnation of spectacle.
You should not take a posture with respect to these things that assumes you are a stakeholder in the decision, that they are looking for your consent, that your assessment matters, that the outcome depends on whether enough people believe the right thing. That whole discourse is a malfunctioning control system.
I make this point a lot, but in The Forest Passage, Ernst Jünger talks about plebiscites and referenda and elections, and how the real purpose of all the propaganda — the reason they want you to participate in these processes — is not to persuade you of a particular set of facts necessarily, but to get you invested in questions that you cannot personally influence, in which you are not actually involved.
Because if all that psychic energy is devoted to the global and the spectacular, and you begin to feel “this is what matters, something must be done about this” — well, the only way to satisfy that psychological need is to pick a team.
But I say it is a malfunctioning control system because that narrative ecosystem is so fragmented, so decentralized, so leaderless that letting you play with your unplugged controller no longer gives you this feeling of buy-in.
“I am a responsible citizen doing my civic duty to become informed about the events I am going to vote on” — it sort of still matters in the sense that free speech still matters a lot to the architecture of political legitimacy.
But for the most part, the Take Economy, particularly on matters of foreign policy where all of the operational details are classified, is just running on inertia. It is spinning on its own internal logic.
It is partly a form of entertainment. It is partly a surrogate activity, a form of masturbation. And obviously, I am not trying to pretend I am above either of those things.
But the more I become aware of this dynamic, the more I can see what is happening, I am thinking two things:
First: this enormous architecture of the empire is just obsolete in a hundred different ways. Its contradictions, its imprecisions — you could call them manufacturing tolerances — there used to be a lot more buffer between the components. Now it is just metal on metal, and it is going to break.
And the second thing I am realizing is that I want to convert as much of this fake stuff that I have — including, to some degree, attention in this fake, jerk-off, Take Economy — into something real. Something that is going to matter as all the fake stuff burns off.
I want to find the domain of action where I am not playing with an unplugged controller.
And that does not mean think small or abandon the political. It just means to acknowledge where you really are and what you really have the power to influence.
We were having a conversation in the EXIT chat about this latest outrage where the guy who stabbed Iryna Zarutska, after however many dozens of arrests and trials, this time was found not competent.
And of course it is wrong and it makes us angry. I have said in detail publicly what I think about all that, how I think we got here.
But the question I ask myself when we are expressing anger is always: what are we doing here? What do we hope to accomplish? Are we building capacity or burning capacity? Does this make us stronger or weaker?
The Take Economy and discussing these outrages, or discussing the difficult realities of our political situation — including, in the Iran case, our entanglements with Israel — those discussions are good when they lead you to organize, when they inspire productive action.
One of the things I hope to accomplish with EXIT is to create that bridge from impotence and rage and demoralization and fantasies about violence to real action and the accumulation of real power.
One of the really bad dynamics that emerges in this Take Economy is that, since nobody is doing anything, nobody has any real power, the status game and the way you signal seriousness is paradoxically by how alienating and how unrealistic and how fantastic your take can be.
The problem with these fantasies is not that they are extreme, or radical or even, in principle, that they involve force: the problem is that they are fantasies.
And the more you indulge them and ruminate on them and insist on them as tribal signifiers, the farther you get from actual power.
I do not know if anybody engineered it that way, if that is the explicit design intent of the take economy, but it is super convenient that that is what it does.
And so we have this situation where the whole country, but particularly young men, are intensely radicalized in their capacity as consumers and observers of the spectacle.
But one of our guys in the civic engagement chat just posted a ballot for the Republican Party primary in his county, and there is no candidate for sheriff.
It is a position of enormous political power, basically right up there with the DA in terms of how much it determines what your actual practical rights are in your community. And even a zero-dollar campaign with a handful of volunteers can impose immense costs and force the enemy to deploy resources — but we are just giving it away.
One of the guys put together a church beautification and garbage cleanup for a downtown cathedral in his area. He was immediately made chair of a GOP party committee and got a job at the courthouse.
All this stuff is lying around. But The Discourse is engineered to keep you talking and thinking about what you feel like doing instead of what you actually can do.
You can understand why people want to live there: when you wake up in “the Desert of the Real”, the scope of your actual opportunities can feel painfully small — especially compared with thinking of yourself as a statesman on the Internet.
When people say Twitter is like a PvP video game, there is a sense in which that is literally true. And especially as the real world gets more volatile and uncertain and difficult to navigate, the seduction of these surrogate activities gets stronger and stronger.
But the way to think about that is that the competition has all the same problems.
This fragmentation, this fear, this disorder, this lassitude — it means that a handful of high-morale, high-trust, dedicated, loyal guys who deserve to be in charge can make themselves the only game in town.
Jünger published his book in 1950, and you could feel his resignation in the face of these immense abstractions.
The concept of the Forest Passage, the thesis of the book, is basically: how do you survive as a human being — how do you keep your soul — in the face of this colossal, superhuman machinery?
But the good news for us is that that machinery is failing.
All those abstractions no longer command any loyalty from ordinary people. It is all just stasis, inertia, incumbency.
While our practical zone of control in the real world may be small, the potential to expand that zone of control — especially for organized people — has never been greater.
And the price is just to put down the simulacra, put down the surrogate activities, take stock of your position in the real world, and get organized.
That includes political organizing: EXIT guys are doing phone banking, fundraising, door-knocking for aligned candidates here in Utah with the Constitutional Action Society.
But it also includes economic organizing: we do an entrepreneurship call, real estate, AI; we have done a machine learning boot camp, a business incubator.
It also includes organizing as families — getting our wives and kids together. The social dimension of who your family spends time with, who your kids grow up around, is a massively important point of leverage.
So that is how we are taking action. That is how we are organizing for power.
We have 325 active guys now. We have monthly meetups in a dozen cities.
And it just could not be more obvious to me that this is where the energy is. These are the guys who are going to figure it out. As everything else falls apart, these are the guys who are going to carry the fire.
But we need to get a lot bigger. We need to find a lot more of that kind of guy.
If you want to get involved, check us out at exitgroup.us.
