EXIT Podcast

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit blog.exitgroup.usJohn Carter joins us to discuss:* Prospects for Alberta secession* Bilingualism as gibs for Quebec in federal govt* Why Poilievre was crushed by Mark Carney* Chinese money laundering in China through banks and casinos* How the occupational class sells the commons to India, China* Emergent identity groups forming as geographic borders evaporate* The blockbusting of Canada* The role of fraternities and mutual aid societies in post-Westphalian societyEXIT News:* Weekly Calls:* This week (4/28), we heard from Alex Petkas on lessons from the founding of Sparta and Rome. Recording coming soon.* Next week (5/5), we will discuss values-aligned venture capital.* Constitutional Action meeting in American Fork was a great success — we filled up the veterans’ hall with about 100 people. Video soon to come.* We will meet again Saturday, May 30th for a neighborhood beautification project in Utah Valley. Sign up here to join Constitutional Action and receive updates.* Huge thanks to our volunteers, who have already begun assisting with logistics, security, A/V, web design, legal, and more.* Below the paywall, invites for EXIT subscriber cocktail hours in:* Washington, DC (5/16)* New York, NY (5/18)* Boston, MA (5/19) — JCB speaking at a Free State Party event in Manchester, NH.* San Francisco (6/5)* Denver (6/19)

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit blog.exitgroup.us(Note: We posted this recording last week in error and withdrew it. This is a re-release to ensure that subscribers receive a working link in their inbox.)Johann Kurtz is the author of Leaving a Legacy and the Becoming Noble Substack. His work, like EXIT’s, is the restoration of the multigenerational family as a sovereign institution — a Great House. He has left his tech job in London and relocated to Romania to write and consult for high-net-worth families full-time.In this Q&A, we discuss:* Johann’s relocation to Romania, and Eastern Europe as a place to build* How his experience in the elite tech world colors his new project* Why there seems to be so little imagination and ambition among the wealthy* Categories of patronage that are still alive in high-net-worth circles* Strategies that have worked in reactivating patronage relationshipsThe West is in the political and cultural doldrums because wealth has become totally decoupled from vision and ambition. The skills, temperament, and worldview that create great wealth seem almost anticorrelated with the will to change the world.As the world becomes more volatile, much of this fake wealth and status will either evaporate or change hands. We have to build institutions that capture as many of these existing streams of wealth and power as possible, and convert them into something that will matter on the other side.Next week, we will discuss Becoming a Pillar of Your Community: power is built by becoming indispensable to real people with names and faces. To join us on the call, apply here:Below the paywall, Invites for paid subscribers to attend EXIT events in:* Columbus, OH (4/18)* Dallas, TX (4/20)* Chattanooga, TN (4/24)* American Fork, UT (4/30) — Constitutional Action Speaking Event* Washington, DC (5/16)* New York, NY (5/18)* Boston, MA (5/19)* San Francisco (6/5)* Denver (6/27)

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.”EXIT is a fraternity dedicated to shorting managerial systems and building the human institutions that come next. Learn more here: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 cellsAnd of course, it was all b******t. 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. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit blog.exitgroup.us/subscribe

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit blog.exitgroup.usJohann Kurtz is the author of Leaving a Legacy and the Becoming Noble Substack. His work, like EXIT’s, is the restoration of the multigenerational family as a sovereign institution — a Great House. He has left his tech job in London and relocated to Romania to write and consult for high-net-worth families full-time.In this Q&A, we discuss:* Johann’s relocation to Romania, and Eastern Europe as a place to build* How his experience in the elite tech world colors his new project* Why there seems to be so little imagination and ambition among the wealthy* Categories of patronage that are still alive in high-net-worth circles* Strategies that have worked in reactivating patronage relationshipsThe West is in the political and cultural doldrums because wealth has become totally decoupled from vision and ambition. The skills, temperament, and worldview that create great wealth seem almost anticorrelated with the will to change the world.As the world becomes more volatile, much of this fake wealth and status will either evaporate or change hands. We have to build institutions that capture as many of these existing streams of wealth and power as possible, and convert them into something that will matter on the other side.Next week, we will discuss Becoming a Pillar of Your Community: power is built by becoming indispensable to real people with names and faces. To join us on the call, apply here:Below the paywall, Invites for paid subscribers to attend EXIT events in:* Columbus, OH (4/18)* Dallas, TX (4/20)* Chattanooga, TN (4/24)* American Fork, UT (4/30) — Constitutional Action Speaking Event* Washington, DC (5/16)* New York, NY (5/18)* Boston, MA (5/19)* San Francisco (6/5)* Denver (6/27)

[What follows is a transcript. Please excuse errors.]It’s a great day to talk about the Constitution — because today, apparently, we get to hear whether Ketanji Brown Jackson and Amy Coney Barrett think that we should have a country.EXIT is a fraternity dedicated to shorting managerial systems and building the human institutions that come next. Learn more here:They’re ruling today on whether or not a Chinese Communist Party senior official can ejaculate into a cup, have that cup flown to Saipan, impregnate 10 or 20 or 50 surrogates (this is a real thing that happens), have those surrogates give birth on Saipan Island, then immediately fly all 10 or 20 or 50 children back to China as full American citizens. American as you and me.And Justice Jackson has made the elegant argument that if she were to steal a wallet in Japan, that she would be subject to Japanese law, which is, in her words, “in a sense, allegiance.”If you steal a wallet in Japan and you are arrested by the Japanese authorities and sentenced by a Japanese judge, you are essentially Japanese.Amy Coney Barrett says we can’t strike down birthright citizenship for illegal migrants because what if you don’t know who the parents are? How can you prove that they’re not citizens? American citizenship is the default position: everyone’s an American until proven otherwise.Which, of course, these arguments are absurd on their face. It takes like five seconds to figure out how they’re terminally unworkable. But Amy Coney Barrett and Ketanji Brown Jackson don’t have to win an argument.Paid subscribers receive access to full recordings of EXIT Q&As, and invites to EXIT cocktail hours. Free subscribers receive weekly news and updates via email.Kagan and Barrett and Sotomayor and Jackson — our gay race communists — they’re going to vote against restrictions on immigration no matter what, because they don’t believe America should be a country. To the extent that they have any patriotic feeling toward America whatsoever, it’s as a void of nationhood, as the opposite of a nation.A place where anybody can come and be anything, or just more accurately as a vehicle for communism and Barrett is maybe less ideological, but in terms of her emotional orientation, it all leads to the same place. She may not actively hate and want to destroy America, but any of the things that we could do to protect it are going to make her sad: and if it makes her sad, she’s going to vote against it.So, in practical terms, that’s the state of constitutional law in America.You got four judges who are pretty much always going to vote one way. You got four other judges who are pretty much always going to vote the other way, and the bottom line is just which direction makes Amy Coney Barrett feel less sad.A lot of the criticism around this and other Supreme Court decisions has been that these women are stupid. I don’t necessarily think that’s true — or, at least, I don’t think they need to be stupid to behave the way they’re behaving. I don’t think if you sat them down and had this conversation, and you walked them through the logic of why it’s obviously silly to argue that “stealing a wallet in Japan makes you Japanese,” or “everyone’s an American until proven otherwise,” I don’t think they would be confused by the logic. I don’t think they would be flummoxed.Instead, what’s happening here is they’ve got an object level moral outcome that they think is the right outcome, and there has to be some fig leaf of textual interpretation to get to that moral outcome, so they’re just backing into it. They’re just saying whatever they need to say to get to where they want to go.The problem, if you are a textual constitutionalist like Mike Lee or Thomas Massie or Rand Paul, is that all the proper procedures were followed in putting these women in the chair.You are morally and ideologically committed to a captured process, a process that is in the hands of people who don’t care about it.You have no grounds from inside the frame of your own ideology to criticize that. Particularly if you believe that this construct of procedure and law is what makes Americans Americans, it’s what makes you you, then you’re in a really serious situation — because the people in control of this system don’t just lack respect for that procedure; they lack respect for that identity — and they have a completely different notion, in fact, a hostile notion of what America is and who Americans are.So it’s not just that they disagree with you as a matter of ideology: they feel no kinship with you, and so your ideology requires you to subject yourself essentially to foreign occupation people who regard themselves as foreign to you and hostile to your interests.About a month ago, Ben Wilson from How To Take Over the World Podcast came to the EXIT meetup here in Utah Valley, and I was talking about some of the thoughts I had putting together the Ordeal of Incivility for the podcast last month, and we were talking about how this problem:How do you get the constitutionalists to understand the situation?One of the things I’ve learned over the last 10 years of watching these systems fail, and changing my mind, and seeing other people change their minds, is that basically no one — not even a really smart person — lets go of a framework that gets them through the day until they have a new framework that they can similarly inhabit.And if you’re going to break something as load-bearing, as someone’s national identity, along with their entire political worldview (which, for a civic nationalist, constitutionalist, Republican American, those are basically the same thing), and you don’t give them any way to recontextualize all those moral impulses, all the things that made that feel right and feel important for so long — if you take a hammer to all that moral architecture and you leave them nothing, well, they’re going to reject your facts and logic, and they’re going to go back to the moral framework that feels right and feels familiar.That’s just the practical situation, what you can sell people on. But then there’s the deeper question of what’s actually true?What should you sell them on? How do you recontextualize all those moral impulses that made them want to be a constitutional, civic, nationalist conservative in the first place? It seems to be both morally and practically true, that if you disrespect the intuitions that lead people to care about fairness, to care about the rule of law — to care, at least in theory, about neutral and impartial institutions — if you do that, people aren’t going to bow to your superior command of the facts. They’re just going to conclude that there’s something deficient, something wrong with you, and they’re going to be right.This is especially true if you claim to be a big fan of Western civilization, in contrast to, let’s call it Oriental Despotism.It makes an enormous difference to the way you live and the heritage that you come from, that Western Europeans have been able to build things and create things with the expectation of a more-or-less even playing field.It matters a lot that a cop can’t just shake you down at a traffic stop. It matters enormously that if you have a business idea, you can expect that you’re not at the mercy of the ego or the greed of the local bureaucrat that you can expect your paperwork to be processed without a lot of surprise processing fees or whatever.Of course, our whole thing, everything we do at EXIT, is predicated on the theory that power has found a way around all these rules — that bureaucrats, at least at the top, have found a way to milk the system and shake people down.Yes, in theory you have freedom of speech and religion as long as you’re not one of the two-thirds of America that works for a corporation with an HR department — that America’s HR departments are in fact a privately funded political commissariat twice the size of the KGB with three times the funding.But it’s incredibly stupid, both as a matter of messaging and as a matter of fact, to argue that these rules and principles are meaningless, just because they’re not self-enforcing.So to get back to this conversation with Ben, we said, yeah, people need to understand that these rules don’t work the way we thought they did in eighth grade civics class, but they clearly matter.Some people will say, well, that’s just white people. That’s the way white people build governments. That’s the way white people live. That’s obviously not true either. For all our problems, America is still a very different place to start a business. It’s a very different place to speak your mind. It’s a very different place to get into a self-defense altercation than Britain or Canada or New Zealand or Australia or anywhere in Western Europe.It’s also become a popular meme to point out that the Liberian constitution is basically identical to the US Constitution. And of, course, Liberia is totally dysfunctional and you do have to bribe cops, and you don’t have any meaningful rights as a citizen. And I’ve talked about why that’s the case.The text is not self interpreting, it’s not self defending. The words on the page are not guaranteeing your rights.So if you’re a civic nationalist, you have to deal with the Liberia problem.But if you want to say the Constitution doesn’t matter at all, you have to deal with the Canada problem.These people were drawn from essentially identical British stock. They had the frontier experience. All these historical and biological factors that are supposed to have made Americans who they are. And yet their behaviors and their pathologies, especially under these postmodern conditions, are way more like the British and their behaviors and pathologies than they are like us.So the specific circumstances of America’s founding, its self-concept, its system of laws, its Constitution — it’s doing something. It is demonstrably not the case that the American system is something that high-IQ Anglos build the way beavers build dams. They don’t. It’s only here, and it’s just obviously better — not just in terms of what America has been or could be, but what it is right now.So it’s not just bad politics to tell people to discard that: it’s actually wrong.So that got us thinking: if the Constitution isn’t self-enforcing — if it is, in a meaningful sense, in the hands of Ketanji Brown Jackson and Amy Coney Barrett, and until recently, Merrick Garland and Barack Obama — what is it doing?Why is it still better here?And my answer is basically that the Constitution matters as a religion in the minds of the powerful.To the extent that it matters — to the extent that it has ever mattered — it’s always been to the degree that the people in power mutually agree on it and enforce it upon each other. And you could say, well, apparently that’s not a very robust way of governing human behavior — but it’s the only thing that has ever governed human behavior.It’s just as real or just as fake as honor, or any other code of conduct, any other set of expectations that a people have believed in. And of course, it’s really important that the Constitution is a product of the American people. The American people are not a product of the Constitution. But it is a bona fide product of the American people. It is an expression of who we are.Spengler says that the act of writing it down is an admission that it’s fake, or it makes it fake, or something. And yeah, I don’t know about that — I just know I’ve seen Canada, and I’ve seen here, and here’s better.This model also explains pretty cleanly why you can’t just export the document to Liberia or Iraq: it’s an articulation and an expression of a living culture. It’s an expression of a spirit. If a group of people are possessed of that culture and share that spirit, then it’s very easy for them to use that document to meditate on that spirit and to remind themselves and remind each other of what it means.And that may sound loosey-goosey, and not a foundation that you can build a state upon, but empirically it actually seems to work. You can maybe imagine a world in which there was, like, Protestantism about the Constitution, where there was this panoply of sincerely held but divergent views about the Constitution, and you just don’t see that basically at all.Everyone who cares about the Constitution loves Clarence Thomas — because these basic principles of respect for conscience and respect for property are actually not that complicated.But what has happened is that instead of viewing the Constitution and the American system of government as a banner and a spirit and a culture, we’ve come to view it as a text.It’s a series of English words in a particular configuration, and we’ve come to believe that that configuration of words is somehow talismanic and self-reinforcing and solves its own problems. And to some extent, that’s what at least some of the founders believed about it too.Not that they had any illusions about having done perfect work — but there does seem to have been at least some idea that the particular structure of the puzzle box matters, and if you could engineer the incentives and set power against power, that you could solve problems of politics, problems of judgment between human beings.Of course, the constitution can’t do that because text can’t do that.And this was the central insight of the postmodernists that they used to basically deconstruct all of Western civilization.Derrida summed it up with “there is nothing outside the text” — meaning is always contingent upon context that the text itself can’t supply. And so when you try to treat the Constitution as a text with the deadness of the letter, you wind up with the kind of constitutional exegesis that we get.The conservative side is always saying, well, here’s what Madison obviously thought, or here’s what Jefferson obviously thought — and that’s the context they bring to the text. And the liberals say, well, but Madison and Jefferson aren’t God, they were slave holders. And anyway, the Constitution has all these provisions for changing conditions. And on this journey that we’re on, our understanding has evolved, and here’s where we’re at now — and that’s the context that they supply to the text.And liberals actually frequently win these arguments, because conservatives don’t think Madison and Jefferson were God either, and they get really uncomfortable if you try to nail them down to all the things that Madison and Jefferson actually believed and the way that America was actually run back then.So when KBJ says, “if I steal a wallet in Japan, I’m Japanese”, or Barrett says, “if we can’t tell who a person’s parents are, they’re automatically American” — yes, they’re being very tendentious and stupid if what you think they’re trying to do is interpret the text.What they’re really doing is thinking about the way it ought to be.And they probably are — even the dyed-in-the-wool commies — thinking about the idea of America, the promise of America, the ideals upon which it was founded, which we’ve “learned so much about since then.”And they could point out, not without justification, that the founding fathers were the libtard of their time. Both communists and reactionaries make the argument that big-L Libtard liberalism is a development and an outgrowth from small-l classical liberalism, Enlightenment ideals.The leftist, the Communist, would point out that the French Revolution, the American Revolution, were heading in a direction — that history had an arc — and they want to ride that train all the way to the station.Whereas a reactionary would say, yes, everything’s been on this trajectory — and it’s a bad trajectory, and we should have got off at feudalism or we should have got off at agriculture, or somewhere.And where the reactionary is on the firmest ground is when he points out that, yeah, if you brought Washington or Jefferson or Madison to 2026 America, they’d be horrified.But then the leftist, the communist can say, well, let’s take you back in time to 1776 and see how you like it. And virtually every right-wing American, every conservative American, would find things that they just couldn’t stomach about that time.So we can say that liberals are being weaselly about what the specific words mean, like the parsing of the sentences.You know, “you’re reading something into this that the founders never intended”, but they can just say, so what? Are we conducting a seance? Am I an LLM? No, I’m a judge. My job is to exercise judgment.So our criticism of these judges should not be that they are malfunctioning search engines.When Ketanji Brown Jackson argues that stealing a Japanese person’s wallet makes you Japanese, the problem with that is not that it’s “out of harmony with the Founders’ intent.” The problem with that is that it’s retarded. It’s bad judgment, it leads to a bad place.But if one side of the argument is ideologically committed to being a search engine — to being a robot, and restricting themselves to the set of solutions that had been worked out by 1787 — and the other side has human beings who can update their priors, and respond to contingencies, and act like human beings — well, the human beings are going to win.And they win, not only because that’s a brittle position, and forces you to be dumber than you are, but also because it’s a cowardly position.I’ve talked to a lot of constitutionally autistic libertarians, and in almost every case, I’m way more comfortable with the founder’s actual intent than they are. I’m not saying I’d be perfectly comfortable if you sent me back in time to 1776 Virginia, but I’d be way more comfortable than these guys.Their insistence on this Talmudic approach to the text has nothing to do with wanting to larp as 18th century classical liberals, and it has everything to do with avoiding moral responsibility.They just want to be able to say, it’s not my fault. Rules are rules. They fundamentally don’t want to be in charge, and so leftists are happy to oblige them.”You don’t want to be in charge, you want the text to be in charge — but the text can’t be in charge, The text can’t decide — so we’re going to be in charge.”And that’s been the equilibrium of American politics for the last 150 years. And so this originalist versus progressive paradigm is obviously flawed. It’s the wrong way to look at the problem.What we need is constitutional action.We need human beings animated by the spirit of the constitution — who genuinely believe in the ideals and intent of the Constitution — and who have the courage to act and judge.So last week, Ben Wilson and I held the first meeting of the Constitutional Action Society at Utah Valley University here in Orem, Utah.The mission of the Constitutional Action Society is to serve as a shadow political party. It’s not a third party — we’d work within the bipartisan system — but we’re going to field and endorse candidates, we’re going to assess existing politicians on their adherence to our platform, and we’re going to fundraise and phone bank and knock doors on behalf of issues and candidates that we support.We didn’t heavily publicize this first meeting because we had a little concern about the security situation (it’s UVU, it was “No Kings” weekend), but on the basis of one tweet and passing it around to some group chats, we had 50 guys show up.Our delivery was not polished — this was something that we felt we had to do, and so we wanted to move as quickly as possible — but there was enormous energy in the room.It actually reminded me of the early days of EXIT back in 2021, the Bad Old Days: the concept of the group was literally just a few days old and it was very abstract, but people were ready for a solution.I gave about a 15 minute speech and Ben gave his, and afterward we had so many guys saying, “All right, how do I get started? Where do I sign? Put me in.”My speech was an elaboration of some of the things I said in the Ordeal of Incivility, specifically aiming this question of moral responsibility at Latter-Day Saints. Even in Orem, Utah, not everybody in that room was LDS — and the problems we’re addressing are national problems, they have national solutions — but what I said to the Gentiles in the room was basically, “If you want Utah to figure itself out, Latter-day Saints have got to figure themselves out.”So I talked about the Church’s experience with the Constitution in particular: how in 1890, the Supreme Court ruled 9-0 that religious advocacy for polygamy — even if you didn’t personally practice it, or even if you were just a member of a church that practiced polygamy — was sufficient grounds to be disenfranchised: which basically wiped out the entire local government of Utah.And that’s just one example, but we’ve put the paper shield of the Constitution to the test: we’ve run it all the way up the chain, and the Supreme Court told us unanimously that the Constitution didn’t say what it obviously said.So we ought to have learned something from our historical experience with the Constitution, but we also have a unique relationship to text as such.Derrida’s insight that “there is nothing outside the text” is something that Joseph Smith actually picked up as a 14-year-old boy.He’s living through the Second Great Awakening, and he’s trying to figure out which church is right, and he says: “the teachers of religion of the different sects understood the same passages of scripture so differently as to destroy all confidence in settling the question by an appeal to the Bible.”Which our critics will sometimes say is a disparagement of the Bible, but it isn’t at all. We believe the Bible’s the word of God. We just don’t believe that you can lawyer your way to the right answer through an English text. It’s not a limitation of the Bible, it’s a limitation of human language.And Joseph Smith lived and taught that way his entire life. You know, preachers would come and say, you know, like, “debate me IRL, prove me wrong with facts and logic” — and he would literally be like, “how about we wrestle for it?”The whole message of the Restoration is not that we have some new important addendum to the text.He didn’t say, I’ve puzzled out the true meaning of the text. He said, “I saw a pillar of light. I saw God, I talked to God.” And he didn’t say, “trust the text”, or trust my reading of the text.He said, “you have to talk to God.”Which, if it works, is a genuine solution to both the problem of postmodern textual subversion and Nietzsche’s Death of God (which are basically the same problem.)I’ve already made the argument in the last podcast about why latter day saints are so hyper institutional, so hyper conformist — I won’t recapitulate it — but I just want to point out again how remarkable it is that they’re like that, given how little doctrinal justification they have for that position.We hide behind text for the same reason everybody hides behind text: because we don’t want to talk to God. We’re scared of what he might say. We’re scared of being accountable. We’re scared of exercising judgment and being wrong.So we pretend to have this reverence for the text of the Constitution, and it lets us get lawyered and subverted and deconstructed and manipulated in a way that we would never tolerate with the actual word of God.That was my message to Utah: get off your knees. Stop scraping for the approval of people who hate you. Stop being so desperate to be liked. Stop being so afraid to decide. Stop waiting for the church to tell you what to do. You have to talk to God. And then you have to decide, and then you have to be held accountable for those decisions.And the text, instead of being a slavemaster, is a schoolmaster.It’s an inspiration, it’s a reminder. It sharpens your moral intuitions: but ultimately you’re accountable to God and you have to act, and that’s why we call it the Constitutional Action Society.Ben’s message was about the original notion of American citizenship.He showed an image, which I’ll probably use as the banner image for this podcast, of the Salt Lake Dragon, which I guess was the cryptid mascot of Salt Lake City for a minute, for the 24th of July Pioneer Day Parade in 1897.What he points out is that there’s no bollards. There’s no barricades. People have their feet swinging off of second-story balconies. They’re perched on telephone poles. And he asks basically, who gave them permission to sit there? And the obvious answer is “Nobody did.”This is their city. It’s their parade, they’re real citizens.He talks about how his great-grandfather grew up in downtown Salt Lake City, and I might have some of the details wrong, but he was like seven years old and he would walk several times a week to the ZCMI, the general store.And Ben’s point was, why not? It’s his home, it’s his town. A little boy should be able to walk to the store, even in downtown Salt Lake City. It’s not that much to ask.And he contrasts that with an image from a recent Gay Pride parade in Salt Lake City. And of course it’s extremely gay and it’s a foreign imposition, but that’s not the point: the point is that there are barricades and police. The people are on one side and the parade, the official parade selected by the city is on the other. The problem is not just that these people hate us, the problem is that it’s not our city. It’s their city. It’s up to the experts to decide what the parade will be and who’s going to stand where.And the experts have decided that downtown doesn’t belong to you: it belongs to trannies and drug addicts and homeless people.Then he tells a story about his dad, and I won’t go into the details about his dad’s story because it’s not my story — but he’s really making a point about his dad’s generation.This is the first fully postwar generation. The first generation raised from birth under the shadow of the Hitler Mythos.The message of the Hitler Mythos is good guys don’t act, they don’t want, they don’t decide.Good guys might fight, but only to stop the bad guy — to stop him from getting what he wants.Basically all popular media, all popular mythmaking, from 1950 until today, is: Darth Vader wants the Death Star, and we have to stop him. Voldemort wants the Elder Wand and we have to stop him. Thanos wants the Infinity Gauntlet. We have to stop him.The particulars — it doesn’t really matter exactly what the villain wants, because whatever you want, ultimately you want power. You want because you want the power to get the thing you actually want.And of course, wanting power is bad, so the hero doesn’t want anything. He’s just good — and the good thing to do, when there’s a villain, when there’s someone who wants something, is to get in their way.So you can see very quickly how this moral reasoning left to unfold by itself becomes essentially opposition to human life, human consciousness.We didn’t coordinate on our speeches, but the message of both was that good people have to want power.For starters because they’re human beings, and if you’re not allowed to want power, you’re not allowed to want anything. But also because, at the end of the day, someone’s going to be in charge, someone’s going to decide, and if you tell the world good people don’t do that, good people can’t do that, then only bad people are going to do it.And that’s basically how we got where we are: that’s the terminus of the postwar ethos.So we presented a little platform that said, these are the kinds of things we want.We want to institutionalize the homeless and clean up the streets.There’s absolutely no justification for the squalor and the crime and the violence, particularly in downtown Salt Lake City. There’s absolutely no legitimate constituency that it serves. It’s for the drug traffickers, it’s for the corrupt NGOs, and it’s for the cowardly politicians. That’s the reason we do it that way.We’re also going to fire all leftist teachers at every level of education, K through university. Your free-speech rights do not extend to what I pay you to tell my kids. And it’s not something that we’re going to solve by imposing particular rules and saying, “You can’t utter the following words” because again, these are leftists.They’re not going to be bound by the text. They’re going to find any way they can to defy these laws. So they just need to be fired. They need to be removed.We’re going to prosecute and destroy all radical leftist gangs, including Antifa. And this is already the policy of the federal government. But I can tell you from friends in the administration, there is no will inside the administrative state to fulfill the President’s directive. There’s no willingness to press RICO charges. There’s no willingness to follow the money. And it’s pretty clear in my view that Yarvin’s right — it’s because Antifa is an arm of the US federal government. But there’s absolutely no reason that a state could not pursue state level civil and criminal charges against these people.We’re going to prosecute and destroy all drug gangs. We’re going to deport all illegal aliens. We’re not going to tolerate rundown neighborhoods that don’t feel like Utah. If necessary, after the deportations, we’re going to bulldoze them and start over.We’re going to incentivize our young families to buy homes. These kinds of programs are sometimes unpopular among Republicans because they’ve been manipulated by fraudsters, but the bureaucrats are complicit in that — we don’t have to do that. We can actually target the people we want to help and punish people who manipulate the rules.We’re also going to severely punish all forms of anti-white discrimination, including in hiring and admissions. It’s straightforwardly illegal and unconstitutional, even by the terms of the 1964 Constitution. And all we have to do is stop tolerating it: we can do early morning SWAT raids on public administrators who engage in that kind of behavior. We can perp-walk them in front of the courthouse.We’re going to reward Utahns who are healthy and engage in healthy practices, and we’re going to disincentivize unhealthy behaviors: and, ultimately, we’re going to make Salt Lake City the most breathtakingly beautiful city in the United States.All of these objectives and methods are completely harmonious with both the spirit and the letter of the Constitution.There’s absolutely no reason it can’t happen except that powerful people don’t want it to happen. But our whole system of (let’s call it) “Rooseveltian managerial mass democracy” — basically the system of government we’ve lived through since the Depression — is predicated on using the tools of mass media to manufacture consent.There was a story out of Brazil a couple days ago. So Bolsonaro got wrecked, da Silva’s back in charge, and it’s sort of like an Abigail Spanberger situation: they’re wasting no time, they’re passing the most deranged laws you can imagine.And one of them — this is true — is that if you interrupt or express doubt when a woman is speaking during a work meeting, that is now a prosecutable criminal offense in the nation of Brazil.And that really got me thinking because, presumably, if you violate this law, some police officer’s got to come arrest you, or the tax authorities levy a fine (I don’t know exactly how it’s punished), but ultimately the enforcement of that law is backstopped by either direct violence or expropriation. Which, like, the Brazilian police have to enforce.They have to execute this law — and I’m not going to pretend to know a ton about Brazil, but I don’t think Brazilian police are, by and large, committed gay race communists.And of course the same is true here in the States: the vast majority of the military, the vast majority of law enforcement, they don’t actually approve of any of this stuff.But it’s perceptions of legitimacy. It’s habits of obedience. It’s saying, you know, it’s not up to me. I have to do my job. I have to make sure I keep my pension.This mode of governance — media-managed liberal democracy — is more dependent on the ability to control narrative and manufacture consent than almost any other form of government in history.There’s a sort of analog in our foreign policy posture: we’ve built these weapons systems that can put warheads on foreheads, anywhere in the world, on five minutes’ notice. And for that reason, we don’t fortify anything. There’s no anti-aircraft guns on the Pacific Coast. There’s no pill boxes or parapets.You’ve got NORAD, and you got the White House, and everything else in the whole empire is basically guarded with a chain link fence.So, by way of analogy, mass media control narrative control is that force projection. It’s the ability of the state to direct attention, to direct outrage, to justify violence, to delegitimize violence in this very precise, targeted way, that says, “don’t look at that, look at this.”And the whole spasm of social media censorship and political prosecutions from roughly 2017 to 2021 was the state saying, “Oh s**t, our targeting system doesn’t work anymore.” We’re starting to lose the ability to suppress outrage about our bad behavior, and we’re also losing the ability to direct and channel outrage toward our enemies.Now again, these people hate you and they don’t care about the Constitution. If they could get away with ignoring it, they would. Yet the Constitution, even in its weakened and degraded state, apparently shapes those perceptions of legitimacy and habits of obedience to a sufficient extent that it makes a huge difference.Whether you spoke out against the government — even in California versus Australia or New Zealand or Canada — living through COVID in America was a very different experience from living through COVID in the UK.We know a couple things.* We know that all of the explicit machinery of force is in the hands of people who are much more like us than they are like our enemies.* We know that the machinery of force is only accessible to our enemies because of the perception of legitimacy that they still maintain.* And we know — and we know that they know — that that perception of legitimacy is still very much shaped by the Constitution of the United States.So what we’re saying with the Constitutional Action Society is: that’s the thermal exhaust port.The whole system runs, lives, dies on that — and the way you attack that weak point, is you find people who actually want to govern, who want to protect the Constitution and the rule of law — not in this cowardly, cringing, lawyering sense, but in the sense that the average police officer, the average infantryman, the average normal American, intuitively believes.You want politicians who are willing to assert their rights, particularly under the 10th Amendment, which is, in other words, to tell federal authorities, “this is not your jurisdiction.”Of course the roadmap here is not that the federal authorities are going to say, “oh, we’re sorry. We didn’t know we were violating the Constitution” and leave you alone.The roadmap here is you act. You act within your constitutionally and divinely sanctioned authority to clean up the state. You make it beautiful, you make it functional.You make it a place where healthy people want to raise healthy families, and you absolutely ignore all the injunctions, all the stays, all the lawfare, and you just say, “You can come get me when I’m done.”You obey the Constitution as it’s understood in the minds of regular people. You pull off an El-Salvador-style turnaround — and then you say, “go ahead and put me on trial for that. Arrest me for Saving America.”And of course they are going to arrest you.Anyone who attempts this is guaranteed at least a little bit of jail time, but they will be the ones in the position of lawless and naked and illegitimate force. (I don’t mean illegitimate in the libertarian sense in which, you know, “I subjectively feel that you’re wrong, and that really matters a lot, even though I can’t do anything about it” — I mean popular legitimacy.)And they no longer have the narrative monopoly that allowed them to sink Nixon that allowed them to get away with the Kennedy assassination. They’re going to have to put all their cards on the table, and they’re going to have to trust themselves and their safety and their security and their power to an apparatus of violence that is in increasingly, deeply resentful, if not mutinous hands.The only alternative they have is just to let you do it: t let you build something that absolutely humiliates them, that exposes how cynical and fraudulent they’ve been the entire time, that exposes that they could have fixed it anytime they wanted to — they just didn’t want to.So is that going to work? I don’t know, the enemy gets a vote.They’re not going to play fair. They’re going to use every tool of media manipulation and tendentious regulatory enforcement that they still have at their disposal. All we can do is make that job difficult — and difficult to justify to the public — recognizing that there isn’t One Weird Trick, there’s no risk-free way to take your country back.But this is the connective tissue between words and actions that we’ve all been looking for.The whole online right-wing group chat thing has these very strong norms against fed-posting for good reason: because all the smart guys on our side — all the guys capable of leading — understand intuitively that not only are violence and criminality effortless for the system to interrupt, but even if you got away with it, it would not only not weaken the system, it would strengthen it.Because, again, the whole system depends on this perception of legitimacy — and the fed-poster casts himself in the role of the boogeyman, the bad guy that the system exists to protect you from.So everything has to be done within the purview of orderly, legal, lawful, legitimate, authorized force: which is the purview of politics.Again, just to be clear, this does not mean we’re just going to go get badges and guns and do what we want. When I say legitimate, I mean legitimate. We have to obtain political power so that we can do the good work that the Constitution — both in letter and in spirit — authorizes us to do.So that’s the Constitutional Action Society. Again, if you want to get involved, we’re going to be doing a lot of legwork, knocking doors, phone banking, vetting candidates.Right now in most of the country, the field is what it is, so some of the work will involve supporting existing candidates. While we work on fielding our own, we’re also going to be doing some things like beautification, trash cleanup, voter registration. We want to get our message out, and we also want to understand the voters.We want to build organizational muscle and name recognition and buy-in so that during the next election cycle we’re a known quantity, and we can say to a politician or a bureaucrat, with some credibility, “here’s what we can do for you. Or maybe we can do it for your opponent.”We’ve already gotten started: 17 EXIT guys were elected delegates this month. 17 votes is not that many votes, but the purpose of all this is — may Allah forgive me for uttering the word — journalistic, because it’s giving us a view of how the party works. I’ve already heard one report of an EXIT guy who was at a quasi-political dinner party, and when a handful of people let on that they were state delegates, one of the candidates just glommed onto them and wouldn’t stop talking to them.We also get to know the other delegates — and their opinion is both important in itself, but it’s also helping us to get an intuition for the right end of the bell curve of public opinion.So we’re moving fast. We’re throwing a lot of things at the wall. These guys, all other considerations aside are just a really good hang. So come sign up.We’re starting in Utah because that’s where we have the manpower right now. But this is a national problem, it’s a national movement, and as soon as we’ve got the demand signal, we want to set up in your city. So I’ll be posting a link in the show notes.I strongly encourage you to sign up. There’s no explicit affiliation between EXIT and Constitutional Action, but I’ll just say: this is the kind of thing we’re cooking up at the EXIT meetup. These are smart, capable, dedicated guys, and you just can’t spend that much time with them before you say to yourself, we’re going to make it. We’re going to figure it out. These are the good guys. This is who’s going to do it.EXIT membership is fraternal. It’s vetted. You sign up, you have a phone call with me. We talk a little bit about your background, what you’re hoping to accomplish, what made you decide to join, and to a real extent, it’s a vibe check.I don’t have an algorithm, other than “do you believe in the mission” and “could I explain in one sentence why you’re an asset to the group”. We have 15, 20 group calls a week. We talk about entrepreneurship, investing, crypto, AI, tech, real estate, fitness, homeschooling, fatherhood. Then on Tuesday nights we have our full group call, and that’s where we do our member Q&As, we discuss the big picture, I go over the news of the week, the projects we’re working on.That includes Constitutional Action, it also includes our physical HQ, some private education projects, investment showcases, upcoming meetups and retreats. We have monthly meetups in a dozen cities now.So if you want to join Constitutional Action, I’ll post the link in the show notes — and if you want to be involved with the fraternity and work with us on some of these cultural and entrepreneurial projects, you can sign up at exitgroup.us.Thanks for listening. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit blog.exitgroup.us/subscribe

[This is a transcript — please excuse errors. Full audio recording above.]I’m hearing lately that Utah has Gone Woke.The puppet masters of every institution of power in the Utah conservative establishment are actually secret communists. Governor Spencer Cox is a communist. Also Senator John Curtis, Mitt Romney, the Church, possibly even the Utah Republican electorate itself.EXIT is a fraternity dedicated to shorting managerial systems and building the human institutions that come next. Learn more here:Friends I know who know these people would laugh at this; not because Mitt Romney and Spencer Cox and John Curtis are all such swell guys, but because it’s just a total misread of where these guys are coming from, who they are, what they care about. But you can see where an outsider would get the idea.Ever since the church sponsored Prop 8 to ban same-sex marriage in California (and won, by the way), Utah has led the way in capitulating on basically every progressive cause they can think of.So you got the Utah DEI Compact, which they signed, and then, uh, recently reversed. You’ve got the Utah Compromise on LGBT discrimination, the Conservative Climate Caucus, which John Curtis runs Disagree Better, which is Spencer Cox’s project (what if we just got along with the communists, has anyone tried getting along with the communists?)All of our state representatives supported the Respect for Marriage Act, which ratifies by an act of Congress what the Supreme Court had already decided at Obergefell. But you saw how with the Dobbs decision, once Roe v Wade was overturned, the states were able to go back to having abortion law. Well, the Respect for Marriage Act basically says you can’t do that. And most recently you’ve got this redistricting fight where several Utah Republican legislators said, “We need an independent, impartial, bipartisan redistricting commission.”And then, on the basis of that ruling, this liberal female judge basically hands over redistricting to this progressive advocacy group called Mormon Women for Ethical Government, which carves out this like D+50, basically overtly communist congressional district in the middle of Salt Lake City.Paid EXIT Newsletter subscribers get full member Q&A recordings and invites to EXIT cocktail hours — or sign up for free to get weekly news and poasts.And then you’ve got KSL and the Deseret News and Deseret book and BYU, all of which are owned by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, which is obviously the dominant political and cultural elephant in the room.And all these secondary institutions have the usual cast of journalists and MBAs and academics pumping out basically the same commie corporate Memphis that you’d expect from any secular institution.And so you would not be crazy as an outside observer to conclude, like conquests third law says, that “the behavior of any bureaucratic institution can be best understood by assuming it is controlled by a secret cabal of its enemies.”But the puzzle here is that all of this has happened while the state has maintained ironclad Republican dominance — and, in fact, explicitly growing support for Donald Trump.The state went 21 points up for Trump in 2024, which was a wider margin in 2020, which was itself wider than in 2016.Utah may not be the reddest state, the most MAGA state — but it actually is one of the most Republican and least Democrat states in the Union. Only Wyoming and Idaho have a higher proportion of registered Republican voters, and only Wyoming, Alaska, and Idaho have fewer registered Democrats.And so the narrative that you sometimes hear, both inside and outside the state, is that Utah is this rock ribbed, red-blooded MAGA Republican electorate, and it’s just this thin layer of traitors, this again, cabal of communist infiltrators, who’ve been playing the long game their whole lives, and now they’re finally in control.But what’s weird about it is that all of these secret communist infiltrators are actually still doing pretty okay with their voters. Who again, in terms of their party affiliation, in terms of their stance on the issues, are about as Republican as it gets.Governor Spencer Cox, who’s the DEI compact guy and the disagree better guy, his overall approval rating is in the 50s, and his approval rating with Utah Republicans is in the high 60s, low 70s.He’s actually having trouble with Democrats and Independents (who are overwhelmingly secular) because he’s going too MAGA, he’s too hard line.But the weirdest part is that, among latter day saint voters in particular, Mike Lee, John Curtis, and Mitt Romney have the exact same approval rating, 57%.Now, if you’re an online right wing guy and you know who these people are, you’re thinking we are in the middle of a (possibly doomed) life and death struggle for control of America’s institutions, maybe for the future of Western civilization, and Mike Lee and Mitt Romney are very obviously on opposite sides. But apparently Latter-day Saint voters just want everybody to have fun and try their best.And you could say, you know, well, okay, The People Are Retarded: but Utah Republicans are not stupid and they’re not out of touch — at least, not any more stupid or out of touch than any other voters. They’re among the most educated, economically productive, institutionally engaged subpopulations of the Republican party.In fact, while the implicit right wing meme about Utah is that it’s this weirdly libtard red state (no doubt forcibly libtarded by their weird foreign religion), you if look at who these people are demographically — not just racially, but their careers, their education, their families, basically any socioeconomic access you wanna look at — the native population of Utah looks a lot more like Vermont or Connecticut or (until recently) Minnesota, than it looks like any red state.Thich suggests that these are actually demographically, psychologically, culturally, natural Massachusetts libtards — and they’re being forced into these awkwardly right wing positions by their weird foreign religion.And that awkwardness is basically the whole story.In his book, the Ordeal of Civility, John Murray Cudahy describes the psychological turmoil of the Jewish shtetl bumpkin, who moves to Western Europe and has to accommodate himself to liberal Protestant modernity.These are people who haggled with shopkeepers, and they weren’t all that strict about finding a toilet when they had to go, and they didn’t respect or even really understand liberal expectations of privacy.They shamelessly preferred their own people, whether it was family or their co-religionists in ways that European liberals regarded as repugnant, if not criminal. They made emotional scenes in public in ways that were embarrassing to their more assimilated cousins. You could call them Vibrant. They introduced a lot of Vibrancy. Of course, the parallels to contemporary situations are obvious.His thesis is particular to the Jews, but you can find parallels in all kinds of pre-modern cultures and the aggregation of all these individual choices, either to dissolve into the universal solvent of modernity or else to find some accommodation, some way to. Sublimate their identity and make it persistent in view of these overwhelming cultural and economic pressures.And so, for example, the Indians are going through something like the Ordeal of Civility right now, where there’s this small population of successful, relatively assimilated Indians who are having extremely complicated feelings about their relationship to their home country, their current country of residence, and their cousins coming off the boat.But what’s different about the ordeal this time is that in the struggle with the pre-modern shtetl, it’s pretty obvious that liberal modernity is no longer winning or even interested in winning.The mainstream liberal position is now to encourage unassimilated peoples in their clannishness, their ethnonarcissism, their Vibrancy.Assimilation is now a dirty word: it’s an imposition, a tyranny on authentic self-expression, as well as being a critical front in Liberalism’s war on standards of behavior as such.It’s bad to make brown people do anything, but it’s especially bad to make brown people do white people things.Now, this doesn’t exactly mean that Indians and Somalis and Hispanics are not assimilating at all.They’re still assimilating into Western liberal culture — it’s just that that culture hates white people and loves brown people in the abstract.And so you’ll get these really exotic outcomes like a young Chinese woman born in the States from literal Chinese Communist Party royalty, but she talks like a gay white man trying to sound like a black woman, and she’s got all these thoughts about white supremacy and oppression.And of course, she’s not meaningfully Chinese, anymore than the Arab girls are Arab, or the Indian girls are Indian: they’re not Muslim, they’re not Hindu.They all have basically the same things to say about how dinner was like a ritual in my family, like it would happen every night and we would talk to each other, and white people could never understand.Zohran Mamdani is maybe the best embodiment of this phenomenon; he comes from a “market dominant minority” in Uganda: this Indian merchant upper class that was of course shamelessly racist, shamelessly colonial, shamelessly, extractive, never meaningfully on the wrong end of any oppressor/oppressed dynamic (except when Idi Amin expropriated all their property and threw them all out.)And that’s really the proof of this assimilation process, because none of those particularities matter.Zohran’s not Indian in any sense that causes friction with any of the groups that have historically had friction with Indians. He’s not Muslim in any sense that makes it hard for him to deal with his very progressive wife or his very progressive female voters. He’s Indian and Muslim (and maybe even a little bit African, though he has to be careful about how he talks about that) only in the sense that these things make him Not White.And the reason he wants to be Not White — the reason all these people want to be Not White — is that all of Western liberalism’s entitlements, all of the things that it purports to give, are nominally for everybody, but especially for Not White people.And all of Western Liberalism’s requirements — all of the responsibilities and principles and constraints on your behavior — those are for white people.And so of course this means that the liberal machinery of institutional neutrality and fair play and procedural decision making have all just become means by which the former targets of the Ordeal of Civility — the people who were pressured to conform to liberal modernity — can now extract gibs and compliance from the cultures and peoples that internalized those liberal managerial virtues.The trajectory of Western civilization over the next 10 years will be an Ordeal of Incivility:In which we will all find out a) how long societies can remain functional as they abandon liberal managerial values, and b) how quickly and thoroughly the cultures that internalize those values first can put them down again in order to survive.And this confrontation is especially complex for Latter Day Saints, because in one sense, as an ethnos, we’ve always been unambiguously Anglo-American with a little bit of Nordic; but for most of the church’s history, it was regarded by the broader American public as a regression to foreign barbarism. (The Republican Party was ostensibly founded in the 1850s in opposition to the Twin Relics of Barbarism: Polygamy, and Slavery.)The Mormons had been these very tidy, conscientious English Puritans, who had somehow become militant clannish, bride kidnapping, bearded polygamists.And some of that was slander, but the church really was and is illiberal in pretty deep ways that generate these more superficial, visible departures from the Anglo norm:We have very different attitudes toward emotion and intuition, specifically their primacy over text and words and rules. We’re much more willing to defer to personal authority and hierarchy, and allow leaders to exercise judgment and make exceptions. We practice strict endogamy, marrying inside the church.But above all, just the idea that someone on earth could have a supernatural mandate here and now to instantiate God’s will and say what God wants said: these things make a lot of trouble for a political and moral complex that’s built around argument and rational consensus seeking. Even today, that’s part of the reason why we’re not allowed in the tent.But back in the 19th century, before the process of assimilation, before some of the rough edges got rolled off, this political and cultural incompatibility precipitated the Utah War.A lot of people don’t know about this corner of American history, but the federal government imprisoned Church leaders, expropriated all Church property, dismantled the entire elected political system (because it happened to be basically the religious hierarchy) and replaced everybody with federal officials and openly hostile anti-Mormon locals —people who had come to open a saloon or a mine or to provision settlers to California.But an enormous amount of what had been Church property and private property was either directly or indirectly expropriated by the feds.We can compare it to the process of Reconstruction in the post-war South.In the same way that Reconstruction imposed loyalty oaths, and disenfranchised anybody who had held an office in the Confederacy (which was 10 to 15% of the white male population of the South), The Edmunds Tucker Act imposed an anti-polygamy oath and disenfranchised all polygamists, which that was about 20 to 30% of the electorate in the Utah territory.Wives were forced to testify against their husbands, and in Davis v Beeson, a Supreme Court case out of Idaho in 1890, the Court ruled 9-0 that religious advocacy for polygamy — or even membership in a church that advocated polygamy — was sufficient grounds for disenfranchisement.So, a totally naked, unprincipled exercise of power.But in fact, the church decided not to test that legal theory any further:In the same year (1890) they abandoned polygamy and the toponym “Deseret”. They scrubbed all sermons and literature of any anti-federal rhetoric, of which there was a lot, because of the way things had gone down in Ohio and Missouri and Illinois.They adopted a state flag, which had been designed by a Canadian bartender who’d only lived in the territory for a couple of years. And this flag is interesting: it’s got the little Deseret beehive surrounded by sego lilies, this peaceable, harmless, industrious scene on a shield — and the shield is flanked by US flags on either side, hanging from spears, and the American eagle is perched on the shield and looming over it with its wings out.And so the symbolism is very obvious: it’s occupied territory.But the Mormons are trying to get out from under territorial status. They’re trying to become a state so they can appoint their own governor, their own judges and marshals, so they can at least put their own people in these bureaucratic positions.And one of the conditions of statehood was that the federales needed to believe that there were regular political institutions in the state: it couldn’t just be one local political party that was obviously just a proxy for the church.And so it’s funny: in this simultaneous exercise of power and submission, church leaders go to every congregation in Utah, they chopped the congregation in half, and said: “This side of the chapel, you’re gonna be Democrats. Now, this side of the chapel, you’re Republicans.”Now, the Republican party had been the church’s main antagonist in the federal government for half a century. So even though people are technically, you know, registered half and half, the state goes overwhelmingly Democrat in the first elections.So several church leaders have to make this big show of joining the Republican party and saying, “it’s okay to be Republican — in fact, look at me, I’m the Top Dog, and I’m a Republican.”This performance of neutrality is still basically the church’s approach to politics today.And because church leaders serve until death, it actually hasn’t been that long since all this happened, from the point of view of institutional memory.The president of the church who just died, Russell M. Nelson, was born in the 1920s, and grew up under president Heber J. Grant, who himself had been born in the thick of the Utah War, in 1856, and was in the prime of his life in the 1890s when the church was really going through the Ordeal and trying to wrestle back some autonomy by proving to the feds that they’d be good citizens.So it’s literally just one lifetime, one man from here to there.And when President Nelson was a young man in the 1950s, this was another sea change in the Church’s approach. Men in the Church were shaving their beards, putting on business suits and starting to build the identity that we’re all familiar with now: very competent, conscientious, reliable corporate executives and anti-communist G-men.You know, there’s that clip that a lot of the online right wing guys like, with Joe Pesci and Matt Damon and Pesci is a mobster, and he is saying, “we Italians, we got the Church. What do you got?” And Matt Damon’s in his suit with his horn rimmed glasses and he says, “the United States of America”.That totally could have been us — that character easily could have been one of our guys.Ezra Taft Benson, who would become President of the Church in the 1980s, was buddies with J. Edgar Hoover, and a huge booster of the John Birch Society.He wrote books like Civil Rights: Tool of Communist Deception and he wrote an approving foreword to a book called. The Black Hammer: a Study of Black Power, Red Influence, and White Alternatives.And just so you understand, when Ezra Taft Benson was the prophet, it was very difficult to convince members of the church that every word out of his mouth was not a divine pronouncement.The church explicitly had to tell people this — not just about him, but about all of them. And still today, if you ask a member of the Church, “Was Ezra Taft Benson, a prophet, in the same sense as Moses or Elijah”, the answer is almost always yes.And if you want to own them with some of the more Based things that Ezra Taft Benson said, you can make a 2026 moderate, centrist, respectable Latter-day Saint really uncomfortable. And in fact, this is a favorite tactic of liberal exmormons. They keep a big, long list of all the Based things prophets have said, expressly for this purpose.And so they’ve got all these memes where like Dallin. H Oaks (the current prophet) says explicitly that adultery, fornication, prostitution, and homosexuality should carry criminal penalties. And another apostle who passed away a few years ago says, “the biggest threat to the Kingdom in the coming years will come from feminists, homosexuals, and so-called intellectuals.”There’s some horseshoe theory here: we’re all tickled with these memes, and we like owning the centrist, moderate, respectable latter-day saints with them too.So anyway, Ezra Taft Benson is Eisenhower’s Secretary of Agriculture. Despises Communists says the Civil Rights Movement is a communist plot. (He was right about everything.)And so a ton of our guys pile into the FBI and CIA. They’ve served missions, so they speak languages. They generally have families. They piss clean.(As an aside, this is the origin of the Mormon Fed meme — so anytime someone’s like, “Mormons are feds because they’re libtards and communists,” it’s like, come on man.)So in the 1950s, when our recently departed Prophet was entering into adulthood, was when the Mormons as a people had finally made it:We had come all the way through our Ordeal of Civility to the other side, with this new, safe, stable identity: which was to be “more American than Americans.”And that new identity wasn’t just concocted or cynical or “put on.”The church really had been largely descended from America’s most venerable, conscientious, and (at least in their own minds) respectable founding stock: the New England WASP.And theologically, the church’s self concept had always included this idea that America’s founding was a providential eschatological miracle.And so Ezra Taft Benson wasn’t just an anti-communist on the basis of thinking hippies smelled bad: he had concluded that the Left was the fundamental vehicle of eschatological evil in the latter days. (Again, just right about everything.)Anyway, so the Ordeal of Civility in the first place had been not what it was for Third Worlders or shtetl Jews from the Pale of Settlement: this resentful assimilation to a superior alien culture.It was more about recovering from a fall from grace. We’d always been Americans, we’d never felt like anything other than Americans.And in 2012, Mitt Romney was the apex of Mormon assimilation.We had finally made it. Our man was going to the White House.Clean-cut, corporate, patriotic, procedural to the bone, devoted to the Constitution, you know, as as interpreted by whoever happened to be running things at the moment, completely disdainful of bickering and tribalism: our own managerial liberal super soldier.This was “the Mormon moment.” It took a minute to break through Mike Huckabee and the Bible bash from the evangelicals during the primaries, but now, even the Southern Baptists were gonna hold their nose and vote for Our Guy. Wow.But unfortunately, for him and for us, we had just found our way back into the good graces of the Big Gay Empire when it started to fly apart.In fact, it was Mitt Romney himself who taught the GOP base that accommodation and procedural loyalty were no longer workable. The cooperative equilibrium of respectable bipartisan civility that he represented was gone, and maybe had been fake the whole time.But Romney himself just could not internalize this lesson. He was 65, he’d been climbing this ladder his whole life — his vocabulary of success, his definition of who he was as a man, as a Latter-day Saint, as an American, was all wrapped up in this game, and he just couldn’t do it.His postmortem assessment was that he had failed to appeal sufficiently to minority voters — and what he’s really talking about there is the “47% gaffe”, where Mother Jones caught him at a closed door fundraiser saying that Obama was basically guaranteed the votes of 47% of the electorate because they paid no income tax.Of course, this was one of the most honest and authentic things he ever said during the campaign.Democratic politics — both Big-D and little-d — obviously is the politics of redistribution, and in the years since 2012, Democrats have stopped bothering to conceal that.And Romney did lose the election because of dependency and demographics. The electorate that his manicured persona was designed to impress no longer existed.But Romney couldn’t bring himself to ask the deeper questions that that observation should have generated. Instead, he just flagellated himself for having said it out loud. Apparently the day after the leak was published, he stopped eating and sleeping. He started beating the hell out of himself on the elliptical. And he felt very sincerely he had failed his people, failed his team, failed his country. He started asking around to his advisors — two months out from Election Day — if he ought to drop out.And of course, there’s no forgiveness in that game, there was no way for him to backpedal, and so we got another four years of Obama.Now Trump and the Party at large learned the right lesson, and started tacking in the direction of authenticity and realism. But Romney just retreats deeper and deeper into the vision of the America into which he had assimilated.And so he spends the final act of his career more than a decade, as like the nation’s number one hall monitor for liberal procedure and decorum.But you just can’t tell me that Mitt Romney is actually a secret communist. Neither is Spencer Cox, and neither are their Utah Mormon voters (who again, still basically approve of them.)But there’s maybe no American subpopulation that went so hard in the paint on liberal managerial Civic Virtue — and now, as the managerial system implodes under the weight of its own contradictions, nobody is having a harder time coping.Their identity is imploding too. They’re still trying to be more American than Americans, and America is a communist country.Now, the purpose of this history lesson is not to excuse anybody. At a certain point, naivete is a choice and a vice, and the difference between being willfully blind and being complicit is kind of immaterial.We’ve got this baby faced haircut in the state, Blake Moore, who was trying to “reach across the aisle” and be a good bipartisan with this Better Boundaries Commission.Of course, as I said earlier, it failed catastrophically: cost him his seat, and may cost the GOP the House.And now he’s recording videos being like, “well, yes, I got world historically cucked in the most predictable way possible, but, but by golly, I still believe in the process and we needed transparency and if we could just come together — real bipartisanship has never been tried!”So this is the type of guy we’re dealing with.At a certain point, even if they don’t know better, they ought to know better. To be that gullible when you’re a leader, when you’re responsible for other people, is an abdication.So why talk about this at all?For one thing, as Utah politics has entered the discourse, I’m seeing a lot of guys on the outside who are good guys, and we want the same things for America — but because they’re reading this situation wrong, they’re slamming up against questions of identity in a way that’s not productive, it’s not gonna work for these voters.If you want to capture the political energy of Utah, you have to recognize that this is not a low energy system, with people just sort of drifting gently into the liberal background radiation.These are people under immense internal psychological pressure from these mutually contradictory directives — this intense belief and this intense identity and particularity being bent back against itself.We have this wild, illiberal, uncompromising, visionary, ecstatic history, and then we’ve got all these elements of morality and identity that are actually just accommodations to conquest by a cosmopolitan empire.But when that conquest happened, the empire was being run by similarly conscientious, rule-following cousins.It was a society that, at least around the time of the Utah War, every single member of the church had been born and raised into — so confronting reality and making accommodations with that culture barely felt like assimilation at all, because we’d never been anything other than Americans.Again, the parallels to the South are instructive here. Southerners obviously did not see themselves as betraying their country. And likewise, when Latter Day Saints — even those visionary, ecstatic latter day saints — when they thought about America, you know, they had some choice words for federal officials, but they really saw them as something like the Pharisees, like apostates — people who’d been given something precious, a divinely ordained form of government from which they had apostatized. (That word is used explicitly in this context.)So, again, Latter Day Saints becoming uber-loyal turbo-Americans was not a big leap. It was a natural fit. And maybe there was even a sense that, you know, since we’d been invited into the fold, maybe America had come to its senses, and was becoming what it was supposed to be, fulfilling its prophetic destiny.But now, the Empire has invaded and invited the world — and in order to hold together its own internal contradictions, it can no longer tolerate any distinctions of value, any particularities.Which means that maintaining our commitment to accommodation and procedure and loyalty requires us to surrender every other principle.So the compromise being offered to Latter-day Saints now is the same compromise being offered to you and everyone else in the European West:If you go extinct spiritually right now, we’ll delay your physical extinction by a generation. Give the war to your children.The political conflict in Utah, just like everywhere else in the West, is just between the people who are willing to take that deal and the people who are not.So the Ordeal of Civility required new habits of compromise, accommodation, respect for institutions — and the Ordeal of Incivility will require us to shed them. Now interestingly, for people who are pretty used to getting marching orders directly from the top, the Church itself has actually spent the last 10 years leaning hard into this “home centered, church supported” paradigm — which basically means fewer official programs, fewer explicit rules, and (at least in theory) a pretty broad mandate for families to talk to God and figure it out.And while the church is restricting itself to political issues that directly impact its institutional mission, the members of the church are being encouraged to “get involved”, “make our influence felt”, etc. We’re explicitly told to exercise political power in defense of our values, and support candidates who do the same.Now, the hostile interpretation of these facts is that the Church is Libbing Out — or maybe just paralyzed by these mutually irreconcilable commitments to be “good citizens” on the one hand, and “believing in literally anything at all” on the other.But a more charitable interpretation is that these moves are an exercise in signature reduction.So the Church today is this enormous target for lawfare and international diplomatic pressure. It has huge investments, many of which are in land and food production and distribution. Some things that make sense as pure investments, but a lot of things that really only make sense if they’re holding onto state capacity.If you thought that volatile times were coming, in which a lot of political questions would be up in the air, and possibly unfriendly people in control of the US Government again, then maybe it make sense, both from the history of the Utah territory and more recently with Prop eight, to run quiet for a little while.The Kingdom of Deseret was Certifiably Based, but it’s not obvious that the Church taking a strident institutional role in Utah’s politics (let alone the nation’s) has ever been particularly helpful, either for the Church or for the causes that it championed.Going back to this comparison with Civil War Reconstruction, one of the reasons that Southerners were not so fundamentally transformed by their Ordeal is that they were Protestant — which meant that there wasn’t one guy in the Confederate camp who could credibly tell the feds, “I’ll go talk to my people and bring them in line.”But you don’t necessarily have to buy either the charitable or the hostile interpretation of what the Church is doing, because, in a practical sense, they lead to the same place, which is decentralization.People are being explicitly invited (for whatever reason) to stop waiting to be told what to do.Start talking to God, start making your own decisions.And in my opinion, that’s exactly what our people need to hear. I think that’s why they are the way they are right now. They’re desperate for someone to tell them what to do, because they don’t want the responsibility of deciding and maybe deciding wrong.And so it’s always just, “well, Senate procedure doesn’t allow that,” or “the Supreme Court would never approve.”Even in local politics, “I don’t know what the Church’s lobbyists would think” — and you’ll catch this even with like petty interpersonal stuff: people in the Church will really do this Talmud thing where they pick through the Church’s marketing materials, and press releases, and the art on the magazines, to be like, what is the Church trying to tell me?What, what should I be doing? (More importantly, what should I not be doing?)And they’ll literally argue about that on Twitter, exactly like rabbis.Which, in my opinion, is the antithesis of the whole concept of revelation. It’s exactly the kind of thing Jesus told the Pharisees not to do. It’s exactly the kind of thing that Joseph Smith railed against all the preachers for.But if you’re that terrified to act and to take responsibility for your actions, then you’ll look absolutely everywhere for some bird guts to read some, some precedent, some authority, some text that you can scry.That is what the world looks like without revelation.And of course, this doesn’t mean the text doesn’t matter: I believe the Constitution was divinely inspired — not just in the sense that it’s an expression of true principles, but that it was important to write those principles down. But ultimately, they’re just English words. They don’t supply their own interpretation. Nobody on earth — no politician, no judge, no constitutional scholar believes that anything about America today reflects “the Founders’ intent.”It’s very clear to everybody that if you brought Thomas Jefferson or James Madison or George Washington to America today, they would be horrified. The only question about which there is any debate whatsoever, is whether we ought to care about that: whether it’s good or bad.So, if you regard the Constitution as a product of human ingenuity — a human experiment in political science — the best you can say about it is “It had a good run.” Maybe it did what they hoped it would do for a while. It’s not doing that anymore. Even if you say you want to instantiate “the Founder’s intent”, their culture and worldview is so alien from our own that we can’t reconstruct it even if we want to. We actually don’t know how to think like they thought and want the things they wanted.Now, if you believe, as I do, that the Constitution was divinely inspired — that it’s God’s project, and that America still has a prophetic destiny to fulfill — then in order to understand that text and its intent, to try to obey it, you have to figure out what God wants. The words on the page by themselves can’t tell you.So ultimately all you have is discernment. A lot of people believe in God in the abstract, and many even believe in principle that God answers prayers. But it’s a whole other thing to say. “I trust my perception of those answers.” “I trust my ability to understand”. (Or, framed differently, “I trust that God will bless my earnest attempts to understand.”)It’s the fear of this confrontation that is the mechanism by which postmodernism is eating our country, every western liberal country, your church, my church.Because we want to hide out in this maze of Text and law and custom and precedent — we want to offload the moral responsibility for our actions to the preacher, or to Paul, or to James Madison, or to Ketanji Brown Jackson.And that’s the right illustration, because the system you live under has chosen Ketanji Brown Jackson to decide what the Constitution says, and there is just no way that you believe she’s actually qualified to do that.There’s no way that you believe that what she says about the law has anything to do with the Founder’s Intent or good government or justice.So the only reason that anyone would defer to her on these questions is because they just don’t want to decide. They don’t want it to be their responsibility to decide.In Exodus 20, God gives the children of Israel the 10 Commandments, and they hear his voice. He says, “Ye have seen that I have talked with you from heaven.”But when the people see the thunderings, and the lightnings, and the noise of the trumpet, and the mountain smoking, they say to Moses, “Speak thou with us, and we will hear, but let not God speak with us, lest we die.”Later, Moses says, “Would God that all the Lord’s people were prophets, and that the Lord would pour out his spirit upon them!”But if you had the God-given ability to discern truth, then you would be alone with God: and He might tell you to do anything.And you would be accountable for whatever you did or didn’t do — and if you could have understood and you chose not to understand, you’d be accountable for that too.So it’s just much easier to tell yourself, “well, it’s not for me to decide.”And if you’re a guy like Mitt Romney or Spencer Cox, you feel very honest and decent and humble — maybe even noble — when you say, “Justice Jackson, please go up into the mountain. Tell us what the Constitution really says.”It’s her job. It’s not your job.And when she and people like her, inevitably, predictably smash the plane into a mountainside at 700 miles an hour, you can say, “well, that’s who the Constitution put in charge.”“The Constitution is divinely inspired. So therefore, I’m not only not to blame for letting this happen: I’m kind of a hero. What a sacrifice for me, to turn my children’s inheritance into a smoking crater, because that’s what Our Divinely Ordained Constitution demanded.I’m having a little fun there, but I’m pretty sure they actually believe that. I’m pretty sure something like that is actually rattling around in their brains when they do the s**t they do.And the reason I believe that, and this is where I’m trying to get to with all this, is that they’ve got this moral syphilis real bad, but I think we’ve all got it.Even the most Our Guy of our guys, we’re all looking for the right analytical framework, the right ideology, the unified theory of being a right wing guy.Even when we fantasize about accelerationism and bronze-age steppe warlord, whatever — what’s so cathartic about that fantasy is the idea that there will come a permission structure, which is another way of saying someone will tell us what to do.And to be clear, I’m not talking about somebody else, I’m talking about me. I’m talking about everybody.And the only thing that I’ve found that has broken me out of that paralysis is to ask God — and I think you should ask God, in earnest: Does He want you to lose? Does He want your kids to lose? Does he want you to abandon this wicked, sinful world? Leave it to the Bolsheviks, let them have it?Does he want you to just keep your head down, work your job, be a nice guy — and with no preparation and no thought on your part, he will deliver you, as a pure miracle?The answer that I get to all those questions is no, and it’s pretty unambiguous. I don’t have to think about it that hard. We’re supposed to win. Our inheritance is not ours to surrender: it doesn’t belong to us. We have a responsibility to pass it down to our kids.And if we’re supposed to win, and God’s not going to hand it to us, then we have to get way more capable, as quickly as we possibly can.And the good news, maybe, from understanding ourselves as going through this Ordeal of Incivility, is that there’s actually a lot of capability lying around.Last week’s writeup was about the tech billionaires — how any one of the top five of those guys, if you wanted to, could buy the entire California political system in perpetuity, could fund every election. And if Silicon Valley Tech guys as a class did that, they wouldn’t even miss the money, let alone if the conservaboomer, SEC donor wanted powerAnd these are smart, successful, capable people — the reason they don’t have power is that they don’t want it.The same is true, in a different sense, in Utah. You’ve got this incredibly cohesive, incredibly productive, incredibly functional culture that can organize to do absolutely anything in the world except say no.So we are not living in a system where all the loose energy and power has been scooped up and somebody’s guarding all the doors and holding all the keys.But there’s a particular habit of mind that you find with smart, conscientious right wing guys — because they have respect for the natural order, for nature, and nature’s God — that power is efficiently distributed.Even if it’s not in the right hands, it’s in strong hands. The market for power is efficient, money flows to capable people; “if that idea was going to work, somebody would’ve tried it already.”George Orwell wrote a reply to The Managerial Revolution called “Second Thoughts on James Burnham”, in which he diagnoses this tendency:“It will be seen that, at each point, Burnham is predicting a continuation of the thing that is happening. Now, the tendency to do this is not simply a bad habit, like inaccuracy or exaggeration, which one can correct by taking thought. It is a major mental disease and its roots lie partly in cowardice, and partly in the worship of power, which is not fully separable from cowardice…Power worship blurs political judgment because it leads almost unavoidably to the belief that present trends will continue. Whoever is winning at the moment will always seem to be invincible.If the Japanese have conquered South Asia, then they will keep South Asia forever. If the Germans have captured Tobruk, they will infallibly capture Cairo. If the Russians are in Berlin, it will not be long before they’re in London, and so on.”And yeah, Orwell was a little commie-curious, but this is one of the virtues that commies have: they’re genuinely not at all encumbered with the idea that their enemies deserve power.They don’t see anything — not even the laws of physics — as fixed variables that they’re obligated to respect.To come back to this online-right-wing misread of the Utah political situation: a lot of the conspiratorial thinking about Utah (and about America and about the West more broadly) is rooted in a need to explain why we are losing to such weak people.How did Minneapolis get captured by Somalis?How is Utah — this cohesive, functional, overwhelmingly socially conservative, overwhelmingly Republican state — just folding like a cheap suit. They’re flying pride flags — they’re still flying BLM flags.Utahns are smart people. Minnesotans are smart people. Californians are smart people. And so if you have this habit of mind, this tendency toward power-worship, you ask yourself, “How could we possibly be losing?”It must be that there’s some immense insurmountable hidden power — something that, for all our capacities, we just can’t break.It can’t be that all these smart, conscientious, functional people are just, like, jerking off, and not paying attention.It can’t be the case that there’s a couple million really high-octane, dynamic, productive guys, who just don’t want to have an uncomfortable conversation with the wife.It can’t possibly be the case that the power to fix these problems is just lying on the ground — and you actually don’t need Thielbuxx, and you don’t need an ambitious general to declare martial law, before you can fix them.So Curtis Yarvin generated some controversy this past week.He was accused of demoralization because he and Peter MacCormack were talking about the possibility of civil war.He says:“It’s not gonna happen, because people have no balls. They will not resist. All the thought that they will get their muskets and put on their tri cornered hats or whatever — when you go back into the period when people actually did this, you’re just like, these people are completely alien to us. It will never happen. It won’t happen at all.What will happen is exactly what happened in South Africa: which is that they will just acknowledge that they’ve lost all of their power forever, and then they will sit quietly in their houses, and build more and more barbed wire, and electric fences, until they’re finally exterminated in one big pogrom.That’s the future. That’s what will happen to your children.”Now, there’s a couple things going on here.First of all, a lot of this stuff Yarvin does is basically “Coffee’s for Closers”. He’s on a mission of mercy. “You have no balls” means “Go find your balls.”And of course he’s right that there’s not gonna be a White Intifada in 2028 if the election goes the wrong way.But he’s sneaking in the assumption that that would be the right thing to do if, in fact, we had balls.But the most obvious difference between us and the Founders — yeah, maybe a little bit of this is testicular microplastics — but the biggest difference is ubiquitous technical surveillance and 3,000 miles of ocean.If George Washington were here right now, he wouldn’t put on his tri-cornered hat and pick up a musket either, because he was a guy who actually wanted to win.The founding fathers were brave, but they were also canny. There was a lot of subterfuge, there was a lot of politicking. There was a lot of networking. They obviously didn’t call it “opsec”, but they talked and thought about “opsec” a lot.So to bring a couple threads back together:If our enemies were actually not insurmountable, and if we were neither fated nor morally obligated to lose, and if there were no question of courage or will to win — if it were strictly a technical question — how would we acquire the power to win?I recently wrapped up after almost two years trying to get through it. The German version of the Percival Grail myth — and it was hard to get through because it doesn’t obey the storytelling conventions, the narrative arc that you’re accustomed to. A lot of things seem to just happen and it’s not clear what they mean — which is a lot more like real life.And it was sort of interesting to confront those expectations and how like fiction-brained we all are.Anyway, the Knights of the Round Table are looking for the Grail, and it’s this fundamentally spiritual quest. The Grail Castle is never in the same place twice, and a lot of knights try to joust their way, through feats of valor and defeating monsters, to sort of summon or demand the grail.But at the same time, it’s understood by everyone involved that you just have to go into the Forest Perilous and you have to go fight monsters and you have to save princesses in castles.All the Knights of the Round Table are told, “Go in what direction seemeth good to you.”They’re actively seeking out adventure, but they’re taking whatever adventure comes — and this is a necessary-but-not-sufficient condition for the emergence of the Grail and the crowning of the Grail King and the healing of the land.So the story presents this harmony between human enthusiasm and will and dynamism and violence of action, with the humility to see that what they’re seeking is something fundamentally miraculous.They can’t make it happen. And even as they’re just furiously hunting for quests and feats and things to do, the recognition that God is doing something to them and through them — that what they’re actually doing is making themselves available for whatever experience and refinement God intends to send them.And that’s how we have to approach this problem.We don’t actually know what capacities we’re going to need. We don’t know how the environment’s gonna change over the course of our lifetime and our kids’ lifetime. We don’t know what’s gonna work. We just have to take a lot of swings. And, ideally, we want to do it with as many aligned people as we can, because nobody can do it all — and we need to compare notes.The guy who’s working out of Panama is going to have resources and opportunities that the guys in the States don’t have, and vice versa. The tech guys are going to have things to offer the vets, and the vets are gonna have things to offer the business owners, and we’re all gonna benefit from knowing guys who are working in politics.When I started thinking about this idea of the Ordeal of Incivility, it occurred to me that there’s like a very instinctive negative framing associated with that, which is: “We (Westerners) used to be decent, compassionate, trustworthy people, and now we have to harden up and we have to become cruel and we have to become untrustworthy (you know, like the third worlders are.)”But really, it just means that we have to take responsibility for a lot of the social infrastructure that we used to take for granted.Instead of neither having friends nor enemies, you’ve got to figure out who your friends are — and you have to build with them consciously, and you have to organize for power consciously.And yeah, some things that used to go without saying have to be articulated, and maybe that means some uncomfortable conversations — but the adaptations that we have to make to survive this Ordeal have a lot more to do with how we treat our friends than how we treat our enemies.It’s that type of organizing for power — groups of guys who assume responsibility for their communities, who pick up responsibilities that have been abdicated — that’s who is going to build the new world on the other side of the Ordeal of Incivility.So right now, EXIT is working on a private club space in Provo, Utah. We’re developing a cooperative education project that’ll be hosted in the club space. We’re doing civic organizing in several cities, so we’ve got some guys on the ground hosting and attending events, making friends, and we’ve got an intelligence team that’s feeding them information, helping them navigate. We’ve got our ongoing entrepreneurship calls, where our guys are holding each other accountable as they build their businesses.And maybe it sounds like it’s all over the place, but that’s kind of the point.We’re not waiting around for a coherent, theoretical framework. We’re just throwing things at the wall — but it’s working. We’re figuring it out.Our guys are getting better jobs, their businesses are getting traction — they’re showing up to GOP meetings, and it turns out, if you just go to some of these GOP meetings and you tell the boomers, “I love tax cuts and I love Ronald Reagan,” they’ll basically put you in charge of the county.Anyway, you can check us out at exitgroup.us. If you take a look at the member map, it’ll show you what kind of depth we have in your city. I’m also going to post, shortly after this goes live, a weekly EXIT News breakdown that will talk about all the projects we’re working on.It’ll also have cocktail hour invites — so, after the meetup for the members, we always have a cocktail hour for the Substack guys. So you can check and see when we’re getting together in your city.We have regular monthly meetups in Dallas, Austin, Houston, New York, Seattle, Nashville, Atlanta, Columbus, salt Lake City, and Provo. And in the next couple of months, we’re going to get together in Denver, the Bay Area, Philadelphia, Boston, and DC.So check out the member map, check out the website, exitgroup.us. Feel free to reach out on Substack or send me an email. Thanks for listening. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit blog.exitgroup.us/subscribe

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit blog.exitgroup.usJoshua Sheats lives and does business in the US. He believes the 21st century will prove to be another American Century — and after living and traveling all over the world, has concluded that America’s economic freedom and institutional reliability are, if not unique, at least unusual.EXIT is a fraternity dedicated to shorting managerial systems and bui…

Last month, the EXIT guys had an excellent conversation with Devon Eriksen, author of Theft of Fire and professional Very Good Poaster.EXIT is a fraternity dedicated to shorting managerial systems and building the human institutions that come next. Learn more here:We discussed:* The need for science fiction as a prophetic and inspirational tool, driving innovation in technical fields* Devon’s vision for a future humanity that is more powerful and more sophisticated, in contrast to the anti-human apocalyptic trends in publishing* “Woke” media being downstream of the internet’s disruption of traditional media business models that enabled better curation for quality and taste* The importance of auteurs putting their personal reputation and ego on the line to deliver something that they are proud of* A right-wing commentariat that masturbates their audience’s feelings of rage and betrayal rather than helping them build* The need for cultural projects to emerge from organic networks of human taste and personal connection, rather than top-downEvery managerial system that is designed to deliver efficient results at global scale is buckling under the weight of globally democratized communications: what we affectionately call “slop”.Every applicant tracking system at every major corporation is clogged with hundreds of thousands of fake AI applications. X, the Everything App, is overrun with subcons shoveling AI-generated retard bait for a $3 payout. Movies are written for morons on their phones. The illusion of consensus can be effortlessly created with swarms of bots indistinguishable from the median voter (the only voter that matters). The technological tools of mass democracy have already been automated beyond human control. Smart people from every discipline are recognizing this rising tide, and the existential need for human curation: of art, of information, of social networks.The answer to the failure of managerial systems is aristocratic systems: or, if that term is too loaded, we could just say human systems — systems in which individual human judgment (and therefore individual human quality) is a load-bearing structure.By definition these systems don’t scale fast — maybe don’t scale at all. The only way aristocratic systems compete with democratic ones is if the people they produce are overpoweringly effective, so that two can put ten thousand to flight.If we want to build anything that can reach above the tide of slop, we need to be in the business of human cultivation.EXIT is taking a short position in managerial systems, and building the human institutions that will come next. Learn more at exitgroup.usEXIT News* Weekly Full Group Calls, Tuesdays at 9PM ET:* 1/20: Mikkel Thorup from Expat Money, on acquiring productive assets overseas. Recording of this and our conversation with Joshua Sheats coming soon.* 1/27: Book Club with Johann Kurtz on his book, Leaving a Legacy. (This call will take place at 1PM ET/10AM PT to accommodate Johann’s European time zone.)* On 1/27, we will also have an evening call at 9PM ET to discuss a new EXIT Strategic Leadership Call.* 2/3: Brian Patterson on banking in the Caymans for regular fellas.* Member meetups — Members can check their regional channel or contact DB for full details.* 1/24: Utah County meetup: Mobile sauna and cold-plunge on the river — come support Danny’s side hustle.* 1/24: Austin. Cancelled for inclement weather. See chat for rescheduling details.* 1/24: Dallas. Also cancelled. If you are in the Southeast and in need of mutual aid, please contact your file leader and DB immediately.* 1/31: New York City.* 1/31: Ontario (Ice Fishing with Matt G.)* 1/31: Atlanta.* 2/3: Salt Lake City.* 2/7: Washington, DC.* RSVP links for EXIT cocktail hours in New York City (1/31) and Washington, DC (2/7) available here. EXIT cocktail hours are a great way to get to know your local EXIT guys and find out if full group membership is right for you. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit blog.exitgroup.us/subscribe

Last Christmas, I wrote an article titled George Bailey and the Miracle of Kingship:It’s my take on it’s a Wonderful Life, which is my favorite Christmas movie, and it’s one that many of you seemed to get a lot out of.EXIT is a fraternity dedicated to shorting managerial systems and building the human institutions that come next. Learn more here:In the process of writing it, talking about it, hearing your comments, and developing thoughts at EXIT over the last year, a lot of the ideas that we drew out of this movie feel increasingly relevant to the mission of Exit, so I thought I’d revisit it.So, like I did for The Feudal Instinct, this will be a “director’s cut.” I’m going to read the article, but I’m also going to add some elaboration and commentary of things we’ve been developing since last year.So here goes:[This post assumes you’ve seen It’s a Wonderful Life. If you haven’t, definitely watch it tonight.]Mr. Potter is basically right about George Bailey.You can’t run a lending business like a charity ward, particularly one owned by other people for whom you act as a fiduciary agent.If George Bailey gave away money to anyone who asked, he would bankrupt the building and loan.No matter how much profit Bailey selflessly chooses to leave on the table, it isn’t enough to build infinite houses for free.And that’s the first clue as to what is really happening here: George Bailey doesn’t bankrupt the Building & Loan.In fact, he somehow pulls it through the Great Depression (which, in the real world, sank Building and Loan Associations as a category — more on that later) and his large family lives simply but comfortably.Which means that, somewhere off camera, someone at the Bailey B&L is denying loans, foreclosing on deadbeats, and repossessing properties.It may be done very patiently, compassionately, judiciously — but it’s happening. A lending institution exists to make exactly these decisions — they have no other function.We see George make a lot of decisions that aren’t “strictly business” — but he also isn’t giving everything away. So what is he really up to?George Bailey conspicuously gives (the B&L’s) money to the people he thinks deserve it, and who he believes to be good for it.Some of these choices are pretty sensible from the outside (like Ernie Bishop, his taxi driver buddy) — but others are harder to justify (like Violet Bick, who wants the money so she can skip out on a bad reputation).In Potter’s words: “if you shoot pool with some employee around here, you can come and borrow money”.Needless to say, any one of the informal, personal favors that Potter observes in the Bailey Building and Loan — virtually every decision we see Bailey make in his capacity as the president of the B&L — would likely land him in serious trouble today, even without the crisis caused by Uncle Billy’s nepo-hire incompetence.Potter’s objections are, of course, self-interested — but they’re also a reasonably forthright representation of Yankee business norms, as critiqued by an Italian immigrant (writer/director Frank Capra).From Potter’s perspective (which is the prevailing perspective at every company you’ve ever worked at, as well as their regulators), agents responsible for other people’s investments ought to be impartial and procedural, and perform their fiduciary duty to maximize shareholder returns.As seen through this lens, George Bailey is essentially a gangster, using other people’s money to hand out favors to his friends and build a personal patronage network.The film clearly admires George for his leniency to debtors and disregard for profit, but that too is a way of acquiring personal influence at the shareholders’ expense.A lot of people in Bedford Falls owe George Bailey a favor — and the heartwarming climax of the movie is when that favor is called in, and his friends receive him into everlasting habitations.Of course, that’s a reference to the parable of the unjust steward, where a steward is about to be fired by his rich master for mismanaging his funds.The steward says, “Well, I’m about to lose everything. I’m too weak to dig and too proud to beg. So here’s what I’ll do: I’ll go to everybody who owes my master money, and I’ll use my authority to drastically write down their debt — and then when I’m thrown out of the stewardship, I’ll have all these friends and they’ll take care of me.”And that’s essentially what George Bailey is doing throughout the film: he’s using his authority over other people’s money to acquire influence.Whether you think that’s appropriate behavior or not largely depends on whether you think of him as an employee who’s responsible to act in the interest of his employers (the investors) — or a king, responsible to act in the interest of his subjects.From the film’s perspective, George Bailey is clearly the rightful heir to the throne of Bedford Falls, and it’s exactly his unaccountable sovereign power that allows him to save the realm.You don’t hear about Building & Loan associations anymore because they required human trust, loyalty, and coordinated action.Building & Loan Associations operated under a mutual membership structure, in which homeowners paid for their homes through “share accumulation”, in which a significant portion of the monthly payment was a purchase of shares in the B&L.The value of your shares was based on the profitability of the association, and you were obligated to buy and hold your shares to maturity. A B&L depended on strong economic alignment — you need your neighborhood to stay financially healthy, so that all of your neighbors will keep making their payments and maintain the value of your share price.This is what George Bailey means when he says “…The money’s not here. Your money’s in Joe’s house, right next to yours … you’re lending them the money to build, and then they’re going to pay it back to you as best they can. Now what are you going to do? Foreclose on them?”Well, in the real world, in the Great Depression, they did foreclose on each other, and B&Ls largely collapsed, in favor of Savings & Loan Associations (S&Ls) with conventional mortgages as we now understand them (a strictly bilateral contract between the individual debtor and the bank).So, instead of this complex, multivariate, human, relationship-based institution where you have a vested interest in the health of the community and vice versa, now you have a totally transactional, totally trustless, totally automated flow of capital to you as an individual.If the bank’s algorithm says you get a loan, you get a loan. And if it says you don’t, you don’t. If you can make your payments, you keep your house. And if you can’t make your payments, it really doesn’t matter why — there’s no human being in the loop — you just get foreclosed on.And in some ways we can say, well, I understand why that happened.Maybe I don’t want to invest in my community. Maybe I don’t want the value of my home, my investment to be dependent on every schmuck on my street. But the fact is, that dependency existed anyway. There are obvious political reasons we don’t talk about it; but millions and millions of Americans had their equity in their home effectively wiped out through white flight, block busting, and the collapse of America’s inner cities.Now, of course, Frank Capra was himself an Italian immigrant, so he scrambles the messaging a little bit here. But by depicting the dichotomy between Bailey Park and Pottersville, he clearly shows what happens — what did happen — when people lose their common ownership in their communities.The miracle of It’s a Wonderful Life is that George Bailey, by God’s grace, holds his people together through courage, sacrifice, and force of will.When George stands up to Potter, he’s not standing up for infinite free houses for everyone in Bedford Falls — and, importantly, he’s not fighting for a communitarian, democratic, common-property thing, either.George is fighting for his own personal right to decide who gets the loans that don’t make sense on paper, who gets a few extra months to make payments, etc. He wants the power to decide the exception.Which is to say: Bailey and Potter are fighting for sovereignty over Bedford Falls — to decide who lives there, and in what sort of homes, and on what terms. They are explicitly struggling for personal power.The most important question to ask of It’s a Wonderful Life is: why would a selfless, decent man like George Bailey struggle for personal power? And why would the people of Bedford Falls struggle and sacrifice to keep him in power?Answer: because both George Bailey and the people recognize that his sovereignty is their sovereignty.If George had refused to take on the Bailey Building and loan after his father’s death, it would’ve been dissolved — and, for lack of a binding institution, every member’s property would’ve been gobbled up piecemeal by Potter.If George and his wife had not set an example of sacrifice during the bank run, giving away their honeymoon fund to keep the B&L solvent, even the most loyal and stalwart members of the B&L would’ve been cleaned out, and forced to sell their shares — probably for less than the 50% discount Potter initially offered.Without George Bailey as the sovereign, not only is loyalty and good faith not rewarded — it’s actively punished.The holdouts, the people who stand and fight get the worst deal.It matters very much that George Bailey has the power, the personal power, to cut all these informal human deals to prevent the bank from failing, and the personal magnetism to convince people to take less than they’re owed.George’s sovereignty doesn’t compete with the members’ — it’s precisely because he is in charge that they are able to hold on to their own dominionsThis is why the archetypal connection between the righteousness of the king and the health of the land is so resonant and intuitive.People in our corner of Twitter are accustomed to thinking of our present algorithmic, headless, entropic state as a unique dysfunction of managerialism.But it’s actually just the Law of the Jungle — the state of the land without a protector — and it’s one of the oldest stories there is.It’s the story of the Book of Judges. It’s the story of the Fisher King in the Grail myth. It’s the story of post-colonial Africa. It’s the story of the Lion King.In the alternate history of Bedford Falls in which no king emerges, power and sovereignty simply falls to the most cunning and dangerous predator (Potter). And Potter doesn’t actually want to rule Bedford falls in any meaningful sense. He just wants to eat it.Potter is an agent of pure entropy, breaking down and extracting and consuming every competing node of power or value. (This is what Ben Shapiro likes about him: he’s efficient.) The strippers and vagrants in Pottersville are not the product of any affirmative human vision: they show up for the same reason crabgrass shows up in a neglected garden box.That’s also the story of Judea under Roman rule — the Judea into which Christ was born.The priests and scribes derive their authority from their interpretation of the dead law. They build the tombs of the dead prophets and stone the living ones. Why? Because the living prophets are around to defend themselves, to defend their words, to defend the Lord.The words they left behind can’t defend themselves — and, of course, as we’ve learned so painfully over the last century, rule of law really means rule by lawyers.So these lawyers, these priests, these scribes, these interpreters of the law, are enjoying the enormous benefits of the law’s infinite flexibility.These are people who discovered the central insight of postmodernism, 2000 years early: “There is nothing outside the text.” The text does not supply its own interpretation.Now, this is not to say that words don’t have value, but words are a communication between a person and another person. Your understanding of the word of God is wholly dependent on who you think God is — so the coming of Christ into the world is God saying, “Here I Am.” This is who I am.He doesn’t come to abnegate the words of the prophets, or say that they’re not valid: he comes to assert his absolute sovereignty, his authority as the Lawgiver.He doesn’t say the Sabbath doesn’t matter: he says, “the Son of Man is the Lord of the Sabbath.” When Jesus teaches in the temple, they marvel that he teaches “as one having authority, and not as the scribes.”The state of Judea under the scribes and the Pharisees was one in which the kingdom, the sovereignty, the stewardship, had been usurped by parasites and predators.When Simeon holds the baby Jesus in the temple, it says that he was looking for the consolation of Israel, their deliverance. That deliverance was the return of the true King: a Man, a righteous judge to judge Israel, in contrast to the predatory venality of the scribes and the Pharisees.They’re tired of being preyed upon by the cleverest and most ruthless and best connected lawyers.And that’s why the people want George Bailey to decide who lives in Bedford Falls and on what terms.They want to be subject to a human judge and protector, executing a human vision, instead of the blind idiot god of entropy.The desire to be subject to righteous human judgment — to kneel before a Good King — is not just the product of monkey instinct or propaganda. It solves all kinds of spiritual and practical problems.Likewise, George doesn’t want power because he likes wielding it.One of the most interesting scenes in the movie is when Potter totally correctly lays out George’s psychological situation: that he’s “trapped in this small town, frittering his life away, playing nursemaid to a lot of garlic-eaters.”And it’s just so obviously true.Power is not fun unless you’re crooked.But George fights for his father’s throne because, if he doesn’t, the realm will come to ruin. It’s not (strictly) supernatural — things fall apart when they’re run by people who don’t give a s**t.Some friends have said that they never liked It’s a Wonderful Life because they understood it as a movie about giving up on your dreams and embracing the longhouse.In the beginning of the film, George dreams of testing himself against the world as a knight-errant, and he is robbed of the opportunity by circumstance.The war montage in which he fights “The Battle of Bedford Falls” is played as a joke, and the narrator describes him as merely “getting four years older”.There’s a genuine element of tragedy in his being thrust too young into kingship — but that’s the sacrifice that sanctifies the real Battle of Bedford Falls.It would be a longhouse movie, if George Bailey gave up adventure to be a clerk and obediently do his fiduciary duty — but it’s precisely his fight for unaccountable, personal power that makes him heroic.If he had done what he was told, and followed the rules, and listened to the voice of the people — if there had been an empty suit at the head of the B&L — his home would have been destroyed.George Bailey governs Bedford falls in the people’s interest, but not at the people’s pleasure.The moral of It’s a Wonderful Life isn’t that placid domesticity is better than adventure — it’s that power is better than money, and good men should fight for it.I mention this because it is exactly the distinction between genuine patriarchy and servile, “happy wife happy life” family-values conservatism, and this confusion gets in the way of a lot of young men pursuing the kind of power that they could win.A lot of our guys feel that the struggle for space, the quest for sovereignty is fundamentally at odds with family life.You’ll never hear us defend contemporary family norms, but your blood, and your close friends, and the people who know you personally really are the best place (if not the only place) to look for the kind of alignment and loyalty and cohesion that can actually lead to the accumulation of real power and real freedom — which, by the way, are synonymous.There’s no English sentence in which you can talk about “freedom”, where “power” is not just as good a fit. The only type of “freedom” that doesn’t equate to power is permission.In other words, you’re, you’re “free” to go to the bathroom if you have a hall pass because teacher says it’s okay.But the freedom that we’re missing, the freedom that we crave, is power, and we want it for the same reason George Bailey wants it: so that we can rule well — so that the kingdom can be rightly ordered.But as long as you believe that there’s some distinction, or some way to disentangle freedom, or duty, or responsibility from power, you’ll always be psychologically weakened.You’ll always be double-minded (particularly if you’re a Christian) — because you will always have this nagging feeling that you’re doing something impure, and therefore you can’t be entitled to providence — you can’t be entitled to divine help — because you’re seeking “power” (in other words, seeking responsibility, seeking freedom, seeking stewardship.)That above all is the story of our predicament: the righteous man — the man capable of judgment, capable of stewardship — has abdicated his responsibility to rule; maybe out of humility, maybe for less noble reasons. But in any case, now we’re ruled by people who don’t have those compunctions.You live in Pottersville today because there was no George Bailey.To the extent that our managerial system is worse than other historical forms of misrule, it’s because it actually moralizes procedural anarchy. Not only is there no human judgment, no human bonds of loyalty, no human order — but there ought not to be, and anyone who tries to create such an order is both a moral and political criminal.Everything has to be governed by an abstract ideological algorithm so that it’s “fair”, so that it’s “impartial”. If you give your son a job opportunity rather than an Indian who can do it for cheaper, you’re not just being inefficient, you’re being corrupt — maybe even racist. Everyone has to be treated exactly the same.And of course, no human can do that. So we all have to live like machines and be chopped to fit — and it’s almost impossible to overstate how sincerely this moral worldview is held. The average Westerner raised by the television really does believe that loyalty is a vice — that anyone who’s a good person, algorithmically defined, should be someone that you help, and anyone who’s a bad person, algorithmically defined, should be someone that you have no connection to.They really believe that Pottersville is freedom because you’re free to be an alcoholic, you’re free to be a vagrant, you’re free to be a prostitute. Pottersville is the product of a million freely chosen individual transactions.And seeking personal human power is immoral, because personal power can only be exercised immorally. It can only be used to decide exceptions — in other words, to be partial, to exhibit particularity, to exhibit bias, to prefer or to disfavor on the basis of something other than The Rules.And it’s certainly not an accident that this movie, which has so much to teach us about our present moment, was produced by a Sicilian immigrant, who was raised in that thoroughly pre managerial, pre-modern personal worldview.(You could do a very deep meditation on The Godfather for similar reasons.)Now, obviously, we may say that foreigners with those tribal sensibilities are sand in the gears of our way of life — but it’s just dead obvious, at least to me, that all our “managerial virtues”, these liberal virtues (if you want to call them that) are designed for a technological and social environment that just doesn’t exist anymore.The future will be a return to form, where politics, security, economics, and even epistemology are rapidly receding from this massive high point of centralization.And I don’t really have it in me to mourn that loss.So in this new paradigm, the peoples that never went through that ordeal of civility — that never acquired those managerial virtues — are just way, way more adaptive. So even societies that are wildly dysfunctional and antisocial, if they have this internal cohesion, this sense of us, they’re able to just run circles around all these bureaucratic managerial systems.And so it’s not to say that we need to learn to be as dysfunctional and antisocial as Somalis, or even Sicilians. But we are going to have to figure out how to hang together, and cooperate, and make personal human judgements, human decisions, in ways that pre managerial peoples never forgot how to do.And George Bailey represents that synthesis.He’s conscientious, he’s ambitious, he’s productive, he’s pro-social: he’s an Anglo who has unlearned managerialism.But in our world, we weren’t that lucky. No human power emerged to defend the “common wealth”, the reciprocal bonds of loyalty, the shared sovereignty represented by the Bailey Building & Loan. We were left to fight the vast, impersonal cultural and economic forces that threatened our families and property alone.And here we are.It’s a Wonderful Life is a Christmas movie because all stories about The Good King are stories about Christ.George Bailey has to pour himself out over a lifetime to win the trust of a skittish, short-sighted people. And, critically, it’s not just his business dealings with them.The town has gotten to know him through his whole lifetime of being groomed, both morally and intellectually, as the heir to the throne.It matters enormously that George saved Mr. Gower, and saved his brother — and that, even as a child, he defended his dad’s honor and the Building & Loan against Mr. Potter, right to his face, in front of the board of directors.It’s not just that people trust him as a capable administrator, or they view him as a shelling point for a coordination problem.They have to believe in him as a good man because — critically — giving him sovereignty means giving him the power to betray them.The whole point is that he’s not a clerk. They’re willfully and purposely surrendering the right to oversee and audit and judge his decision making. This arrangement does not work unless they do that.It’s not a happenstance that his behavior would be considered criminal by modern standards. It’s exactly its extrajudiciality, its criminality, that makes it work.Our system is failing precisely because it has made that kind of human judgment and discretion against the law.Bailey’s personal virtue and sacrifice is what makes it possible for the people to credibly unite behind him and make their own sacrifices, to take up their own cross — which they desperately want to do, because it’s the only way they can resist the malevolent, inhuman powers that threaten them.The Christmas miracle is the return of the King who will set things right, and judge us with compassion.(To be judged with compassion is not to be infinitely indulged.) It’s a miracle because it is the defeat of the entropy that would otherwise be inevitable — the indifferent Law that would judge us to our destruction.The turning point of human history is God revealing himself, not as an impersonal force or energy or law, but as a Man — with a man’s heart and judgment and particular love.Exit is a fraternity dedicated to shorting managerial systems and building the human institutions that come next.We believe that these managerial systems, in addition to being ugly and anti-human, are in the process of collapse.The institutions that replace them, as the locus of social and political identity, will be much closer to the psychological roots of human connection: what we call the feudal instinct.Basically, we believe in the return of the family as the fundamental unit of human society.Like I said, I personally got a lot out of the feedback from this post last year. I’d love to hear your thoughts on this below.Also, please subscribe to the weekly newsletter where we develop ideas like these, and I also post the week’s news for the group.If you’re a paid subscriber to the Substack, you get access to the full recordings of our member Q&As, as well as invites to our in-person cocktail hours.If you’d like to apply for full Exit membership, and get access to our 15-20 weekly group calls, monthly meetups in over a dozen cities, and the opportunity to network and collaborate on internal projects with the guys, you can apply for membership at exitgroup.us. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit blog.exitgroup.us/subscribe

Patri Friedman is the founder of Pronomos, the leading venture capital firm investing in charter cities, startup societies, and other “future governance” projects — the institutions that will update and supplant the Westphalian system. We recorded a members-only Q&A with him on the project of carving out autonomy and creating new states.EXIT is a fraternity dedicated to shorting managerial systems, and building the personal, human institutions that come next. Learn more here:As we discuss on the call, the task has two components:* Land. Someone has to establish the relationships, agreements, legal frameworks, and public infrastructure for autonomous communities.* People. Someone has to build the communities themselves — groups of people with a shared vision that is sufficiently compelling, and drawing a population of sufficient scale, to draw a critical mass to the new polity.Patri is primarily focused on the land — supporting projects like Prospera, which has established significant practical autonomy on an island off the coast of Honduras.As we discuss on the call, the problem with a “land-first” approach is drawing committed people to the project once you’ve laid the groundwork.Experiments with “special economic zones” and alternative governance have to be conducted in out-of-the-way places, usually in developing countries for whom relatively modest economic incentives are meaningful.Digital nomads are almost always the first to support these projects — and obviously you don’t want to dismiss or alienate early supporters — but such people are defined by their disinterest in planting roots and embarking on the long, difficult work of founding a new community.Articles are never paywalled. Subscribe for free full articles and weekly EXIT news in your inbox. Paid subscribers get access to recorded calls and invites to in-person EXIT cocktail hours.“Pop-up cities”, conferences, parties, etc. have drawn big crowds, but those crowds never seem to distill down to any permanent presence or community, because the crowds don’t actually have that much in common — certainly not the kind of trust that makes people want to raise children together.If you’ve ever tried to build that kind of bond with other people (psychologically normal people, anyway) you realize that it doesn’t just happen — not even with people you like, who share your politics, etc.But a “people-first” approach has its own challenges.Through EXIT, I’ve found the type of people that I know I could build with, but they live in 50+ cities in 9 countries. They’re surrounded by extended families; they have deep friendships, and so do their wives and kids. They feel attachment and responsibility to the place they live.They’re pillars of the community, builders, investors; they’re in it for the long haul. That’s exactly the kind of person you need to build something new, but its precisely those traits that make them difficult to uproot — and it’s not obvious that we should do that, even if we could.We’ve accomplished a lot over the internet — we’ve launched businesses, run incubators and boot camps, organized conferences, raised millions of dollars — but our families can’t get to know each other on Zoom. Our kids can’t have a remote campout, or a remote boxing class, or a remote first kiss.So we have to learn to build in diaspora.The joke in the Network State space is that many of the guys writing essays about founding new cyberpunk nations have not demonstrated the capacity to pull off a successful dinner party.In order to reach the critical mass that allows for genuine autonomy (things like genuine “special economic zones” or “city states”), we have to start with the basic social rhythms that help like-minded people to find each other and create local relationships.Instead of trying to get our guys to detach from their local communities, we want them to lean into their natural impulse to lift where they stand. We want them to merge their local networks and become part of the load-bearing architecture of their communities.The small wins pay big dividends.The average EXIT guy experiences a massive improvement in his quality of life if he just has a handful of families with compatible values that get together once a month.We’ve gotten that far in Salt Lake, DC, New York, Houston, Dallas, Austin, Seattle, Nashville, Denver, Minneapolis. We’re almost there in San Francisco, Las Vegas, Columbus, Indianapolis, Atlanta, and Boston.These small clusters become nucleation points for new professional, civic, and social activities that make our guys stronger. And in the event that their local situation becomes unsustainable, they’ll have enough organizational practice and experience with one another to make an efficient exodus — and they won’t have to do it alone.The only way to get to the epochal, historical moves that we need to make is to bank wins that make sense from where we are right now.We need to connect with all the admirable, excellent, problem-aware guys we can find, and we need to make small, personal bets on each other — creating the shared history that will allow us to rely on each other in coming days, when knowing who your friends are will be a matter of life and death.Your future, and the future of your nation, will not be defined by faceless ideological forces — it will be defined by personal, human relationships: who you know, and who knows you.Join us at exitgroup.us.EXIT News* Weekly Full Group Calls, Tuesdays at 9PM ET:* Last week (11/25), we had an excellent presentation on Albion’s Seed, Anglo-America, and ethnogenesis from an EXIT academic whose domain of study is the throughlines of Anglo-American culture. Recording coming soon.* Last night (12/2), we heard from Devon Eriksen, author of Theft of Fire. It was a great conversation on building an audience, the importance of taste (and ego, and shame) in worthwhile creative pursuits, and the future of Our Thing.* Next week (12/9), we will have an internal call on the political and economic prospects for the US, how we can adjust to headwinds, and what we can build to support each other.* Other Calls:* Paideia Project standing call on Wednesdays and Thursdays, open to all EXIT guys.* Meetups (Members only) — Members can check their regional channel or contact DB for full details.* 12/6: Atlanta, GA. (Cummings area). Christmas party: see #Southeast channel.* 12/12: Nashville, TN.* 12/13: Columbus, OH.* 12/14: Omaha/Des Moines.* 12/15: Dallas, TX.* EXIT cocktail hour for Salt Lake City (12/6) and Dallas/Fort Worth (12/15) available behind the paywall on las week’s post. EXIT cocktail hours are a great way to get to know your local EXIT guys and find out if full group membership is right for you. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit blog.exitgroup.us/subscribe

EXIT is a fraternity dedicated to building family empires. Learn more here:This is a “director’s cut” of my speech at the Old Glory Club/Weaving event in Portland this weekend — a few added digressions and elaborations.Skilos asked me to speak on organizing our guys.Just to give you my resume, back in 2021 I started EXIT, which is a fraternity dedicated to building family empires.Today, we have 270 active members.We’ve raised over two million dollars for EXIT startups and projects. We’ve run business incubators, machine-learning boot camps, we crowdfunded a film, we sponsored Coronation Ball, and we organized Natal Conference two years running, which is a national conference on birth rate decline.We have fifteen group calls a week: we talk about entrepreneurship, homeschooling, civic engagement, local intelligence, fitness, tech, real estate, investing — anything that serves the mission.Articles are never paywalled. Subscribe for free full articles and weekly EXIT news in your inbox. Paid subscribers get access to recorded calls and in-person EXIT cocktail hours.We have monthly chapter meetups in Dallas, Austin, Houston, Salt Lake, Seattle, Nashville, Denver, DC, and New York.We have just over 40 file leaders, who are responsible for a file of 7 or 8 other guys. They check in every month or so to assess needs, and let us know how things are going. In cities where we have critical mass, the file leaders organize the monthly meetup.I vet every guy who comes into the group in a 30-minute phone call, but I don’t have any hard algorithm that I use to assess fit, except, “Could I explain to the group in one sentence why this guy belongs here?”We have a chat, and the rule in the chat is, “Keep it Joe Rogan” — which means if you could say it on the Joe Rogan Experience, you can say it in the chat. I have this rule partly for everyone’s security, but also because it frustrates people with Aspergers. Just as a matter of taste, I don’t really want to hear everybody’s manifesto all the time.And it works. EXIT guys are practical, successful, committed, and high-trust. They hire each other, they build together, they take care of each other. They don’t purity-spiral, they don’t blackpill, they don’t jerk off about whose fault everything is. It’s real in a sense that a lot of online right wing stuff just isn’t.There isn’t any special sauce, organizationally — you could replicate the tech in a couple hours, for free.What is unique is our mission, the kind of guy that that mission attracts, and the grounds on which we build relationships.So I want to talk about why we’ve chosen this target of family empires, what it means, how we’re doing it, and why I think it works.The hardest thing about organizing “our guys” is that phrase: it’s always “our guys”, “our side”, “our thing”. We don’t know what to call ourselves, because we don’t know what makes us “us”.Everything about the present political moment in America, and across the liberal West, is just a failure to answer that question, in a dozen different forms.Whether it’s H1Bs, or Mamdani, or dual citizens, or illegal immigration — the common thread is the collapse of the West’s immune system — our inability to distinguish friends from strangers. Try to think of an active conflict that isn’t, at bottom, about this.As far as I can tell, what unites our guys, our thing, is not exactly agreement on where the boundaries should be, but just the conviction that there has to be a boundary somewhere.So we have this very serious problem that we are, in a sense, up against entropy itself. It is always easier to tear down a boundary, and reap the rewards of defection, than it is to assert or defend a boundary — especially when you’ve got no agreement on where the boundary should be.The psychology of Leftism is still utterly dominant, it’s utterly adaptive, and its only weakness, right now, is that some of us can see where it all leads — which is the extinction of ourselves, our culture, everything that we care about in the world.It sterilizes everyone who adopts it, and it consumes every human institution that can’t resist it — which is, so far, 100% of them.That’s what we have in common — “we” are just the set of people who can see that coming. But that isn’t an organizing principle, because we have no idea what to do about it, or what we’d build instead.So this is going to be a kind of good-news, bad-news talk. I’ll give you the bad news first:You do not have a people.All of our arguments about who a “real American” is are pointless, because a people is a cooperative equilibrium.You may believe, for example, that the most natural place to draw the line on “Real America” is the set of people whose ancestors fought in the Civil War, or who settled the frontier — and I would agree with you, that shared history matters, and it makes us distinct from immigrants who came to a settled and already-prosperous country.The problem is that the people whose ancestors fought in the Civil War or who settled the frontier do not understand themselves as a people. They don’t defend that boundary, or cooperate within it. So maybe they should be a people, but they just aren’t.In fact, the majority of those people have abandoned the habits of mind that make them capable of peoplehood as such. They think of having an in-group and an out-group as a moral failure — for many of them it’s the moral failure, the most serious thing a person can get wrong.The only in-group they recognize is the set of people who don’t believe in having in-groups and out-groups. We can point out that this is circular and stupid, but it doesn’t matter, because Leftism is not an idea, or a hysteria, or a contingent product of propaganda that you can talk people out of.Leftism is the culmination of a world-historical process millennia in the making.It’s a problem that many writers, from Nietzsche, to Junger, to Ellul, to Burnham, to Uncle Ted, have recognized as lying at the very heart of human organization, and our relationship to technology as such. So if we want to resist it, that’s how fundamental our analysis has to be.So if you’ll indulge me in a little theoryceling, Its going to take a minute to explain what has happened to our world, what we’ve decided to do about it, and my theory as to why our approach is working.We have to talk through this because all modern theory of organizing was done by Leftists, and it assumes that you are on the side of that historical process — that your aim is to harness entropy, to consume human institutions and relationships as fuel to expand the machine.If you ask virtually any mainstream political theorist about the origin of the state, of human hierarchy, they will point to what Mancur Olson calls “the stationary bandit”.Olson says that the first states emerged from brigands making regular trips to farms to pillage and enslave — and eventually someone had the idea of just handing over the loot a few times a year as a tribute or a tax.Once these brigands had “ownership” rights to the revenues from the land, they started to think about roads, irrigation, defensive fortifications and so forth to protect what they had rightfully stolen — and that’s why human beings organize in states.By the way, I’m defining “mainstream” pretty broadly here — this is the theory of the state that you’ll generally get from a normie liberal or conservative academic, a communist, a libertarian, even a Nietzschean vitalist. (The vitalists would just say that enslaving Neolithic farmers is based actually.)This is the frame within which our entire political discourse takes place.But this model is conjectural, like most theories derived from prehistoric garbage heaps and shards of pottery — and it’s really based on a quasi-spiritual belief about what humans are.You only craft a theory like this because it’s puzzling to you why anyone would ever leave the egalitarian primitive communism of the longhouse. Why would the weak give to the strong? Why would anyone elevate a ruler or a class above themselves?Well, they just wouldn’t — so naturally we must assume that those leaders took what they wanted at the tip of a spear — and all the documentary evidence we have of a different relationship between rulers and ruled is just propaganda concocted after the fact.You see how it sneaks in this philosophical assumption: that human hierarchy is, by definition, unnatural, adversarial, and oppressive.But I’m going to argue that this view of human nature is not just wrong but obviously wrong, and that it cashes out in a serious misunderstanding of what power is and how it works, which generates all the sicknesses of our postmodern condition.For comparison, if you’re familiar with the study of wolf behavior that gave us the idea of “alphas” and “betas”:The theory goes that wolves in a pack are in a continual state of conflict, with an “alpha” who rises to the top through ruthlessness, and maintains his status continually by intimidating the subordinate wolves, punishing them for attempting to mate, taking their food, etc.But the observations that generated these theories were taken in a Switzerland zoo in 1950, where twenty unrelated wolves were held in a tiny enclosure.Later studies of wild wolf packs revealed that wolves are highly cooperative and prosocial, because they’re basically just families — a breeding pair and their offspring.It turns out that animals whose survival depends on cooperation are actually equipped with instincts to cooperate — just not with unrelated strangers in a prison.This is the kind of mistake that only a modern rationalist academic sperg would make, to regard people and even animals as interchangeable individual utility machines, and ignore the structures that they are built to create and live within.I’m going to suggest that the primal circuit of hierarchy is the same in humans as in wolves — it’s the reciprocal bond and instinctive shared interest between father and son.That hierarchy is obviously built into us.If you’ve been a father, you know that that hierarchy is not exploitative — it’s not characterized by contempt from the superior party, or resentment from the inferior party.It’s the most unequal relationship any of us will ever be in — you’re bigger, stronger, smarter, you have all the money, and still today, basically all the legal rights.But even under those conditions, your desire to see your children powerful and successful and happy is so strong that it’s not always obvious who has the upper hand in the relationship.If you had a good father, you know how earnest the desire is to measure up, to make him proud, to make him laugh — to win honor from him. And if you didn’t have a good father, you know what a hunger, what an absence that is.This reciprocal psychological circuit is what allows us to create harmonious relationships between unequals: to play “honor games”.These are social games that are not defined by power and raw material interest, but by the pursuit of honor and glory and status within the group. The rules are enforced by collective loyalty, and love of the game itself. This is the archetypal game being played in Camelot, or Sherwood Forest, or war movies, or mob movies. This is the game that all young men want to play.That’s in contrast to a “death game”, which is purely transactional and coercive. This is the game of the wolves in the zoo enclosure, or the prison yard — it’s also your relationship with your boss, your landlord, the bank, or the government: just contractual arrangements backed by the threat of force, and — critically — those contracts are always structured and interpreted to the maximum benefit of the stronger party.It’s called a “death game” because the stakes are your ability to provision the basics of life: you follow the rules, or face unemployment, eviction, bankruptcy, prison.For most of you, “real life” is 100% death games — it’s how you earn a living, it’s how you provision all your needs. If you’re unlucky, it’s your marriage.Meanwhile, your relationships with family and trusted friends — the people with whom your ancestors would have played games of honor — are fundamentally recreational.The family comes home at the end of the day from separate lives, lived among strangers, to spend time together, after the work of real life is done, and it’s time to consume.This makes it very difficult for us to be aspirational to one another, or to demonstrate loyalty, or courage, or nobility of spirit, because you never do anything that matters together.But people who are unimpressive in the context of a death game can show extraordinary ability & energy & courage if you can get them playing an honor game.So the basic foundation of human social organization is neither the geriatric longhouse nor the bandit camp — it’s the tribe, the clan, or in modern contexts, a mafia — but always a family, and then a clan of families, bound by personal relationships between their patriarchs.Cooperation and coordination are always hard to maintain, but that’s where the leap is the shortest, where biology is most strongly on your side — so that’s where a people invariably starts.But unlike wolves, we are also capable of abstraction — which means we can stretch this instinct of kinship across other relationships.Ibn Khaldun called this asabiyyah, which literally means kinship between men, and its his explanation for how the early Arabs were able to conquer the far wealthier and more numerous Byzantines. You can say similar things about the Greeks and the Persians, or the Mongols and the Chinese:Brotherhoods playing honor games are orders of magnitude more powerful than armies of slaves and mercenaries playing death games.This is what makes a people a people — it’s their ability to map this vertical circuit of patronage, and this horizontal circuit of brotherhood, on to this identity group so that it feels like a family.So we are cultivate loyalty to a patron, and patriotism for a Fatherland — which generally means the land of your fathers, where your fathers are buried. We are capable of imagining a king as pater patriae, the Father of the Fatherland.When Plutarch explains why the Roman elite were first called patricians, he writes:“Romulus thought it the duty of the foremost and most influential citizens to watch over the more lowly with fatherly care and concern, while he taught the multitude not to fear their superiors nor be vexed at their honours, but to exercise goodwill towards them, considering them and addressing them as fathers[.]”So you can think of history as this continual attempt to access the feudal instinct — the biological circuits of reciprocal loyalty and self-sacrifice — as strong as you can get it, but always at greater scale, and greater heights of abstraction.The story of especially the last three hundred years, for technological reasons, has been the triumph of managerial quantity over aristocratic & human quality, and the consolidation of government into ever larger people groups, in which the feudal instinct is diluted and strained farther and farther from its biological roots.From innumerable clans and tribes, to thousands of feudal states, to a hundred or so nations, to two global empires, to one Rules Based International Order.Some on the Right pine for the big industrial ethnonationalisms of the 19th and 20th centuries — and they were obviously more “real” than the states we live under today — but they have to be understood as basically the last stop in this process of abstraction, stretched across the broadest possible definition of a “family” — and if you make any serious study of that period, it’s obvious that people back then were already feeling that things had started to wobble.There’s always power in numbers, but it comes at a cost: the more people you absorb, the more distant and diverse your “brothers” become, and the harder it is to access these natural feelings of solidarity.The borderless global “civic nation”, then, has to be understood as the total dilution of the feudal instinct, like homeopathic medicine: a universal empire in which the circuits of kinship are fully abstracted, fully ideologized, and nothing is left of the biological substrate on which the state was founded.The state now governs an arbitrary population with nothing particular in common at all, and can no longer justify its existence by protecting the inside from the outside, because there is no inside or outside.So, rather than representing the citizens in external conflict, the state goes to war with conflict itself, interposing itself as the defender of the weaker party in any hierarchy, and breaking down the stronger.This is why you grew up being taught that there is no such thing as an honor game, and every historical example of an honor game is propaganda for suckers.Because, if there are only death games — only transactional calculations of self-interest — then hierarchies can only be corrupt. A death game relationship between unequals is inherently parasitic and exploitative, which gives the state unlimited moral license to abolish the relationship, and replace it with a transaction, mediated by the state.And at the scale of a modern state of millions, all distinctions and particularities generate hierarchies and inequalities — which, in turn generate conflict. So there’s nearly-endless fuel for the new engine of the state’s self-justification.This process eventually reaches down to the most trivial details of our most intimate relationships: so the state, which once supported the primal and instinctive architecture of human connection, now goes to work shredding it.The total state now runs campaigns to get your wife running her own checking account, and working her own job, and managing a chore chart to precisely allocate the domestic labor.Trillions of dollars in taxable wages and taxable consumption, as well as decisive new voting blocs, are unlocked by convincing her that an unequal relationships with a man is inherently exploitative.That’s what Leftism is: The final ideology of the state at infinite scale, fully detached from — and at war with — all human particularities.And now that it attacks the bond between men and women, parents and children, it is at war with human existence itself.And, again, who “we” are, in this room, is just people who see where that’s headed, and want to stop it — at least where our own families and cultures are concerned.I’ve laid out all this theory so that we can talk about how this process is going to continue unfolding, and how we should organize in response.It starts by understanding that the proper project of the Right is ethnogenesis.We have to become a people again, so that we can play honor games, so that we can become excellent and admirable in ways that only brotherhoods playing honor games can be.But honor, like desire, cannot be negotiated.It isn’t going to happen because we dreamed up the right criteria, or the right bylaws, or the right incentive structure. You can’t and shouldn’t trust people just because they’ve read the right books or said the right slurs.In fact, in my experience, it’s a thousand times easier to take a dynamic, productive, action-oriented guy and get him reading the right books, than it is to take a a guy who has read the right books and get him to do anything.It also isn’t going to happen because we rekindled our collective enthusiasm for some historical institution that is already dead and defeated.There’s a whole lot of important work that can be done within the existing political system — we’re working hard to get our guys in the Administration, taking over our local GOPs, city councils, schoolboards, etc. — but all that work is in the interest of protecting and incubating and feeding our thing until it can stand on its own.We have to understand what we are doing as pre-political — essentially biological. It’s rebuilding society on the basis of human judgment and personal relationships, between individual men with names and faces.At EXIT, we do deals, raise money, run work parties, and start businesses because those are the highest-stakes things we can do together that aren’t against the law. They build organizational capacity, demonstrate character and alignment, and won’t get us Waco’d.But even that is only a start — we’re just collecting and developing guys that we have reason to think will be good in a foxhole, & we’re building some shared history — but peoples form in a crisis.All of this work is just getting into position to find out who our friends really are.So you may ask, well, how is this kind of system, built on personal loyalty, supposed to scale? How is it going to compete with Westphalian states with populations in the hundreds of millions?And my answer is, it doesn’t scale. If you think that global managerial liberalism is sustainable forever, then we really have reached the endpoint of human history, and I have no answers for you.But there are at least three reasons to believe that we have reached the end of the line.First, basically every liberal Western state is insolvent. When nobody has any notion of the state as the commonwealth of his people, a patrimony to which his children are entitled, then there’s no reason for any constituency to insist on fiscal discipline. the bag is full of holes. If you don’t spend it, your internal enemies will.Second, liberal Western states are no longer capable of winning wars. The scale of the global empire demands the filing off of all the distinctions and particularities over which we might kill each other — but when a population has as little in common as ours does, it becomes impossible to pacify them internally without rendering them inert externally.People might join the military for free college and healthcare, but they won’t actually kill or die for it.The third reason to believe that this infinitely diluted human connection is unsustainable is the collapse of fertility rates.Having children is not an autonomous, utility-maximizing, rational decision — so the kind of people produced by managerial societies don’t do it. All of the reasons that people give their lives to the task of raising children are buried in those particularities that managerial societies must deconstruct and discard.In a sense, the birth rate crisis is the good news: it’s an indication that human beings are not willing to tolerate endless deracination, they won’t live like zoo animals, they won’t breed in captivity.There are no more bonds left to break; the state is now starving and consuming its own vital organs, and competing power structures are already springing up like tumors.So it’s going to fall apart — the question is, what will replace it?We are all atomized creatures of gay liberal modernity. We’ve had already had most of our particularities amputated. We have no idea what we would kill or die for, or who would kill or die for us.So we have to start over, at the very foundation of human organization — the last truly irrational, truly transactionless, truly human relationship: our relationship with our children.What we have to restore are not nations, but Great Houses — families that are sovereign, living economic and social organisms — the center of their members’ actual economic and social life, not just the people they share the barracks with at the end of a corporate workday.We have to rebuild the illegible-but-binding ties of love and loyalty that once existed within — and critically, between — families; first and foremost because it’s a better and happier and more natural way to live, but also because these are the ties that will survive the decay of the global state.The project of becoming a people again starts with raising our kids to play the honor game: repatriating the economic life of the family, and taking personal responsibility to educate our children, provide them with a living, and help them find admirable partners with whom to carry on the family’s legacy.It also means building parallel institutions of status for our children to grow into, which compete with the best the global state has to offer — which means we have to unite with the most admirable and excellent families we can find — the people with whom we want to play the honor game, the people we want mentoring our kids, and raising our kids’ friends.The ultimate consummation, the victory condition, is to find the families who will raise your kids’ spouses — the families with whom you would want to forge an alliance in blood, which is the natural way for families to become, literally, one people.And if we can achieve that, we’re no longer just trying to get out kids through this civilizational bottleneck — we’re engaged in a multi-generational project of human cultivation.To make all of this happen, we need high-capacity guys to pool capital, build businesses, cultivate social and political influence, and train their children to go to work for the family.They have to become personally aspirational — to draw their wives and children and friends into what they are creating — because, at present, the attraction of truth and beauty is all we have.It’s a tall order, but it seems like every energetic, dynamic right-wing family guy I meet recognizes that something like this has to happen. I talk to guys who grew up in wealthy families, who went to the most prestigious schools in the country, who say, basically, “the rails of elite education just don’t work anymore. The schools don’t lead to jobs, the jobs don’t lead to families — I’m going to lose my kids if I don’t build something for them.”This is the game that the best men on the Right instinctively know they want to play. I don’t have to do that much vetting. The right guys come to me.In the last verses of the Old Testament, Malachi writes:“Behold, I will send you Elijah the prophet before the coming of the great and dreadful day of the Lord:And he shall turn the heart of the fathers to the children, and the heart of the children to their fathers, lest I come and smite the earth with a curse.”I’m going to suggest that we are living through the fulfillment of that promise and that curse.The future belongs to those who show up.EXIT News* Weekly Full Group Calls, Tuesdays at 9PM ET:* This week (11/11) we heard from Nate Hochman on his work with Ron DeSantis, America 2100, and Eric Schmitt. Call was not recorded.* Next Tuesday (11/18), we will have a Q&A with Patri Friedman, founder of Pronomos, the world’s leading VC for charter cities and Special Economic Zones.* The following week (11/25), we will have a pre-Thanksgiving call on Albion’s Seed, Anglo-America, ethnogenesis, etc. from an EXIT academic whose domain of study is the throughlines of Anglo-American culture. * Other Calls:* Paideia Project standing call on Wednesdays and Thursdays, open to all EXIT guys.* New Guy Networking is now on fourth Tuesdays, at 8:30PM ET (just prior to the full group call.)* Meetups (Members only) — Members can check their regional channel or contact DB for full details.* 11/7-11/8 was a record weekend for meetups! EXIT guys got together in Nashville, St. George, Minneapolis, Austin, Washington DC, Columbus, Portland.* 11/14: Seattle.* 11/15: Toronto. The boys are going hunting in rural Ontario.* 11/15: Houston. Going to a shooting range.* 11/17: Dallas.* EXIT cocktail hour for San Diego (11/15) available below the paywall on last week’s post. EXIT cocktail hours are a great way to get to know your local EXIT guys and find out if full group membership is right for you. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit blog.exitgroup.us/subscribe

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit blog.exitgroup.us[Above is the recording of our discussion with Mike Shelby from Forward Observer, on the broader topic of a “Yellow Revolution” somewhere 2026-2028. Below is a narrower discussion of the role of welfare programs, and the tug-of-war over government assistance, in the coming conflict(s).]If the government shutdown is not resolved next week, 42 million people will lose access to food stamps for the month of November.My timeline is now full of inner-city blacks warning of the consequences if payments fail. Many of these seem to be monetized TikTok rage-bait, but others just describe the same things that I expect to see if the spigot gets cut off all at once. It would be remarkable if 42 million people losing food benefits didn’t lead to a surge in violent crime and civil disorder.Obviously the welfare system has created generations of dependents with a deeply perverse attitude toward the people whose largesse they receive, and that system should be abolished or at least deeply reformed — but it’s also a significant structural component of the US economy.EXIT is a fraternity dedicated to building family empires. Learn more here:In general, Nothing Ever Happens because, while an apocalyptic confrontation is brewing, both sides do the math:One side realizes they can’t actually win, some less-confrontational solution is quietly arrived at, and you still have to go to work in the morning.Whatever you think of the food stamp program or its recipients, cutting 42 million people’s monthly income by one-third, with less than two weeks’ notice, would be one hell of a Happening — which would mean that at least one party severely miscalculated their odds of victory.It may not happen next week, but it’s going to happen eventually.The tug-of-war between the Trump Administration and the administrative state won’t stop until something like this settles the question with finality.If it isn’t another government shutdown, the EBT system has documented, open vulnerabilities to cyber-attack, which would be easy to exploit in the event of a serious foreign policy confrontation.And if that doesn’t happen, sooner or later the government’s fiscal problems will either lead to nonpayment of these benefits, or hyperinflation (which amounts to the same thing.)So the consequences of an EBT shutdown are worth examining, because they’re coming one way or another, even if you think this particular standoff will be resolved before the deadline.Articles are never paywalled. Subscribe for free full articles and weekly EXIT news in your inbox. Paid subscribers get access to recorded calls and in-person EXIT cocktail hours.The No Kings protests last week drew an impressive crowd numerically (7 million, by some estimates) — but strained the notion of democratic mobilization as a proxy for warfighting.The crowd was 90% white, 60% female, and the median age was 44. In our recording with Mike Shelby, we discuss how this mobilization is in preparation for a Color Revolution against President Trump, either in 2026 or 2028.But while getting seven million people in the street is a testament to Democrats’ organizational capacity, it’s hard to see how that converts into any sort of hard power.Normies seem to enjoy the “No Kings” framing — but they are, by definition, not serious people, and no actual fighting-age males in the Leftist coalition care about any of that stuff.The political Left is facing the inevitable conclusion of their feminized politics:Nagging and shaming are repellent to all young men capable of violence: so, when nagging and shaming stop working, there is no longer any credible physical backstop to the argument, because all the young men capable of violence have been pushed to one side (or, as with young black men, checked out of the conversation).All the Right has to do is stop caring about the political opinions of gays, grannies, and grandes, and the Left has no more cards to play — which has been the story of the last year or so of American politics.The power of moral blackmail in US partisan politics has absolutely collapsed. It no longer matters how many old people assemble to complain.But the optics of a “bread riot” could change all that.The Left is at its rhetorical best when it reminds people what things were like in the ancien regime (generally either the Great Depression, or Dickensian England): toddlers smeared with coal dust, gaunt farmwives selling their children, bread lines; the working man “owing his soul to the company store”.(Of course, having 13% of the US population on food stamps suggests an economic situation comparable to the Depression — just without the optical problem of poor people physically waiting in lines.)President Trump has, to this point, succeeded in framing the modern American Left as shrill, spoiled, and out of touch — but 42 million people at least rhetorically “going without food” would dramatically change that perception.For Democrats, an EBT failure would remind the poor and lower-middle class what life looks like without mommy government, in the messiest and most disruptive way possible — casting Trump in the role of an uncaring plutocrat, or even an American Yeltsin. (”Sure, things weren’t perfect under Gay Race Communism, but at least things were stable, predictable, etc.”)A Color Revolution is never going to happen because President Trump remodeled the East Wing, or because of some banal inside-baseball power struggle in the executive bureaucracy.A Color Revolution happens when normies run cover for an extended period of radical violent criminality, which metastasizes into armed resistance — which is exactly what an EBT failure would do.The BLM protests really were “mostly peaceful”.20 to 25 million people attended the BLM protests. That’s a huge fraction of the country’s population: about as many as watched Survivor or American Idol at their peak.Almost none of these people were radical communists — they were normies swept up in the Current Thing. They showed up, clapped and chanted, waved their signs, got their faces painted, and were home before sundown. The crowd really was “not, generally speaking, unruly”The purpose of Mostly Peaceful Protests is to provide narrative and physical cover for a surge of criminal violence (which is also largely not performed by radical communists, but by lumpenprole opportunists.)A Mostly Peaceful Protest forces the police to man the picket lines instead of fighting street crime. The crowds jam roads, preventing police from moving resources across the city. Trained protestors use “black bloc” tactics to provide anonymity, so that violent actors are harder to surveil and apprehend.Protest organizers deliberately blur the lines between civilian and criminal/combatant actors, both to make violent direct action appear more legitimate and popular than it is, and to provoke police into mistakenly attacking civilians.The purpose of a Color Revolution is to produce and prolong a Schmittian “state of exception”.A state of exception is a condition in which the ordinary/”lawful” powers and procedures of the state are inadequate to maintain the integrity of the state, so new powers must be asserted. The sovereign is (by definition) the person who decides when such a condition exists, and what to do about it.The state never has sufficient security resources to directly or coercively enforce the law on everyone at once: public order depends on widespread, habitual obedience.A genuine protest — one that is actually adversarial to the government — is always an attempt to break the population’s habitual obedience, in order to generate a security crisis that the government cannot survive. (Anything else is a parade.)This is the concrete meaning of “people power”:* We have the media and organizational capability to jam your city with millions of harmless morons.* The crowd will disrupt the ordinary business of the city, and conceal a wave of violent crime.* People will demand that you do something about it.* We will make it impossible for you, or the police, or the viewers at home, to distinguish civilians from criminal agitators.* You will be powerless to end the crisis within your legal and popular mandate.* If you step outside your mandate, the crowd will get bigger and more violent, the crisis will deepen, you will face defections from your security forces, and then execution or prison.Obviously not all adversarial protests end this way, because the parties usually come to terms long before this happens — but this is the implicit threat of protest.Color revolutions never “overthrow the government” — they just reveal who the real government was all along.A state of exception never destroys sovereign power — it can only expand it. It renders the political situation liquid, so that it can be altered without limit, but only by the sovereign.The Orange Revolution didn’t weaken Viktor Yanukovych as the sovereign in Ukraine — it simply demonstrated that Yanukovych was not, in fact, the sovereign. Who decides the state of exception in Ukraine? Who decides what happens in Ukraine when Ukrainian law has no answers? Empirically, the US State Department.In a failed color revolution, the liquid political situation is exploited by the target of the protests to strengthen his own power. After the 2012 protests in Russia, Vladimir Putin tightened restrictions on public assembly, required NGOs to register as foreign agents, expanded treason statutes, and expanded state censorship authority over the internet.This means that the bar for a “state of exception” is much higher in Russia than it was before, because Putin’s has expanded legal authority (and demonstrated security capacity) to put down a foreign-backed protest movement.You would never incite a color revolution in a state in which you did not believe you were the sovereign — you would never deliberately create a state of exception that you did not expect to control.An American riot is the opposite of a revolution.The Trump Administration has made massive gains by ignoring leftists’ hypocrisy and moralizing — but it can still be converted into real power.An EBT failure creates the following conditions:* Millions of people with a substantial direct financial incentive to fill the streets* Millions of normies with an excuse to believe that criminals are Aladdin, actually (they are desperate to believe this, because it collapses the cognitive dissonance generated by the end of the liberal consensus)* Young muscle pulled back into the Democratic machine, whom they lost after post-BLM demoralization and Gaza fissures* A straightforward rally point for collective civil disobedience (literally “stealing bread to feed your family”)This would put the American Left in the strongest position they’ve had in almost a century.Democrats aren’t actually radicalized about the object-level conflict that is keeping the government shut down (Medicaid for illegals). They want the government shut down, so that they can create a state of emergency and reclaim control of the state.This means that capitulation won’t help: it will simply set the stage for another confrontation in 8 weeks, when the next continuing resolution runs out. They want the chaos, because they believe (not without justification) that they are still the sovereign power.There are two ways Trump could defang this threat:* End the filibuster.Without the filibuster, Republicans could end the shutdown with a simple 51-49 vote. Senate Majority Leader John Thune, Mitch McConnell, and Susan Collins all oppose this (because they are swamp creatures who also want to reassert control).If Trump can pin an ongoing shutdown on the RINOs, they may fold — which would deepen Trump’s control of the GOP, but also raise the stakes of the midterms in 2026.If they take this route, the chaos will merely be postponed until the 2026 midterms.* Get the program funded without Congress.This would be the most audacious and Caesarean move: hold a benefit in Madison Square Garden.Make a generous donation yourself, and then publicly remind Wal-Mart and Coca-Cola that they’ve been suckling the SNAP tit for generations, and tell them to pony up. Tell Crazy Nancy to come out of pocket from her insider-trading money.Post statistics that show all the major corporate recipients of SNAP money, as well as the employers of SNAP-qualified Americans. Display a gauge meter that shows the proportion of donations coming from Democrats and Republicans.This week, a single donor came up with $130M to keep Army salaries paid. The money exists, and Trump can find it.If this keeps the program funded for even an extra week, it removes the justification for collective civil disobedience and keeps civilians off the streets, allowing much more aggressive police action against criminal agitators.Even a smaller victory, like fully funding WIC (a targeted food program for mothers and children, less than one-tenth the size of SNAP) would put the blame for the shutdown squarely where it belongs, and almost certainly force Democrats to back down.A move like this would strengthen Trump’s claim to sovereignty without the need for a messy crackdown.“When there was a crisis and the regular functions of government were suspended, Trump came through for all Americans.” Trump is the one who makes the gibs flow.And once that’s established, he can start to make some sane decisions about who gets them. This would be difficult to pull off — but far more feasible than trying to get Democrats to vote for entitlement reform.Of course, we have no pull with these people, or knowledge of their plans. So while we wait for them to get creative, we need to make arrangements for ourselves and our families.Don’t be in jurisdictions controlled by Democrats. Acquire assets that cannot be seized, destroyed, or inflated away. Become important to the people around you. Build your personal intelligence network. Make contingency plans with your friends and family. Connect with as many like-minded people as you can find.exitgroup.usEXIT News* Weekly Group Calls, Tuesdays at 9PM ET:* Tomorrow (10/28), we will hear from Jeremy Carl, author of Unprotected Class and nominee for Assistant Secretary of State for International Organization Affairs. Call will not be recorded.* Next week (11/4), we’ll have a discussion of Family Traditions and strengthening family identity and culture, in advance of the Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays.* Meetups:* Successful meetups in Nashville, Dallas, Houston, and Oklahoma City last week.* 11/1: Utah Valley meetup. Cocktail hour link below for subscribers.* 11/8: Austin meetup. Members only.* 11/8: Washington, DC meetup. Members only.* 11/8: Portland meetup. I’ll be speaking at Scyldings’ Oregon Weaving event.* 11/14: New York City meetup. Cocktail hour link below for subscribers.* 11/15: San Diego meetup. Cocktail hour link below for subscribers.* EXIT cocktail hours for Utah Valley (11/1), New York City (11/14), and San Diego (11/15) below the paywall for Substack subscribers. EXIT cocktail hours are a great way to get to know your local EXIT guys and find out if full group membership is right for you.

And he shall turn the heart of the fathers to the children, and the heart of the children to their fathers, lest I come and smite the earth with a curse.Malachi 4:6For the last five months, Greg Treat has run our weekly Great Houses call, in which he has laid out a detailed legal, financial, and interpersonal framework for building a great house — a cohesive, influential family that persists beyond the life of the founding patriarch.In the episode, Greg discusses how this is to be done. The podcast series (available for members) goes into significantly deeper detail on specific financial instruments, business and charitable entities, and contractual relationships that can make a Great House legally enforceable.Below, I’ll explain why we are pursuing this.Everything we do at EXIT is aimed at the restoration of the family as the fundamental social and political unit.The family — particularly, the reciprocal love and obligation between father and son — is the primal emotional circuit of loyalty, sacrifice, and obedience that allows men (especially men of unequal status) to organize and cooperate on grounds that are neither transactional nor coercive.Every bond between social unequals makes use of this instinct at some level of abstraction: a relationship of duty to an inferior is patronage, a responsible class is patrician, a king is pater patriae, a general is a “father to his men”, a nation is bound by birth to a common fatherland, and owes that nation a debt of patriotism.Patriarchy is the instinct that allows men to organize & obey intelligently, rather than crudely following incentives — & leaders that capture this instinct effortlessly overpower armies of slaves & mercenaries.But as technology enables greater social scale, this “us-ness” has to be stretched thin over an ever-larger and more heterogeneous population, from clans to tribes to nations — culminating in a global “civic nation” whose members have nothing meaningful in common. So the filial instinct is diluted and abstracted to nothing, like homeopathic medicine. In a global “civic nation”, the fictive “family” of the state has no outside enemies, so it must turn inward to justify its existence.Instead of defending “us” versus “them”, the global state exists to insinuate itself between the weak and the strong — relentlessly searching for conflicts between unequals that it can stamp out.But inequality and conflict are inescapable characteristics of every human connection — so, of necessity, the state has made itself the enemy of human connection as such.On a recent podcast, Curtis Yarvin contrasted the social role of a chauffeur to that of an Uber driver: the relationship between a chauffeur and his wealthy employer is obviously hierarchical and unequal — a “power dynamic” exists which is not present with an Uber driver, with whom the rider may not even exchange words.A wealthy employer can abuse and exploit a household servant in a personal way that is not possible with a gig worker — but it’s precisely the intimacy of the relationship that creates the capacity for betrayal. So a potentially dangerous human relationship gives way to a safe (and sterile) transaction.As Yarvin notes, even the communists admit that something important has been lost here, even if they can’t articulate exactly how or why.And this is the mission of the global state in every human relationship:* Find examples of the stronger party behaving badly (these are always abundant)* Debase the values or standards that generate the hierarchy, to the benefit of the weaker party* Imply that the hierarchy — and thus the relationship itself — is inherently (or “structurally” or “systemically”) abusive* Abolish the relationship and replace it with a transaction, mediated by the stateThis is why “globalism” is a synonym for “gay race communism”.A global state can only exist to eradicate interpersonal hierarchies — and the only way to eradicate interpersonal hierarchies is to eradicate all human values, all human judgment, and all human relationships. It’s the egalitarianism of a Soviet orphanage — or a mass grave.This process is already complete for nations, traditionally defined: citizenship is a straightforward matter of paperwork and fees.Social, civic, and professional institutions face immense pressure under the postwar civil rights regime to make their requirements algorithmic, credentialist, and impersonal. Most of these institutions, having their lifeblood drained, simply wither away — the only social role left to most people at scale is a nakedly transactional job.Marriage is no longer a binding covenant, and the state pumps enormous energy into breaking the instinctively hierarchical character of marriage. But both men and women find egalitarian, transactional “marriage” so viscerally repulsive in practice that the vestigial legal institution is simply dying.What is left in the wreckage of all these human connections is homo economicus, resentfully doing exactly what he is paid to do: slaves and mercenaries and machines.The last genuinely human relationship is the one from which all politics is derived: the relationship between parent and child.The state already insinuates itself deeply in this relationship via CPS, schools, media — but most importantly indirectly, by making children a wedge in marital conflicts.The trans phenomenon is best understood through this lens: what looks like a series of custody battles between various mothers and fathers is, in fact, a custody battle between the state and the citizens.Now, there are almost no bonds left to break, nothing left to consume with enough energy to sustain the global machine.No one inside this system is breeding, or enlisting to fight its wars, or investing in its future, and competing power structures are springing up like tumors throughout these societies (most of them foreign and hostile to us.)What we need now are “strong families”, in a very specific sense.We have to rebuild the illegible-but-binding ties of love and loyalty that once existed within (and, critically, between) families: first and foremost because it’s a far happier and more natural way to live, but also because we will need such ties to survive the decay of the global state, and to build for what replaces it.This doesn’t just mean loving our kids a lot (though it at least means that): it means rebuilding the family as the source of your children’s livelihood and the wellspring of their social identity.The modern home is an institution of consumption.Your real life — the domain of your triumphs and failures, in which you create and contribute — unfolds at work or school, among separate groups of strangers, under the eye of the state.You spend time with your kids for an hour or two before bedtime, once “real life” is over. And of course, you are not at your most impressive while decompressing and consuming — so it’s unsurprising that young people do not find their parents’ lives compelling, and don’t want to grow up to be like them.And once your children “go off to college”, your lives no longer intersect in any practical sense, so you connect as you did when they were growing up — on holidays, as a reprieve from your real life.(This is almost certainly why young people tend to view marriage and family as a capstone achievement, a thing to do when their careers are established in their mid-thirties. In their minds, a family is fundamentally an expensive hobby.)But a Great House is an engine of human cultivation.A Great House repatriates the economic life of the family: the patriarch of a Great House reclaims the responsibility to educate his children, provide them with a living, and find them admirable partners with whom to build family of their own.To be successful, a Great House has to provide a parallel institution of status, which means that it must unite with other families to cultivate and deploy elite talent which competes credibly with the best the global state has to offer. (As traditional talent pipelines degrade, this is an increasing achievable goal.)To make this happen, a lot of high-capacity guys have got to pool capital, build businesses, develop social and civic influence, and deliberately prepare (and indoctrinate) their children to go to work for the Family.They have to become personally aspirational — to draw their wives and children and friends into what they are creating — because, at present, the attraction of truth and beauty is all we have.In other words, we have to restart human civilization from its psychospiritual bedrock. It’s a tall order — but our enemies are at war with God and nature, and we are in league with the stones of the field.exitgroup.usEXIT News* Tuesday night full group calls* This week (9/30), we discussed Orienting ourselves in times of volatility. How do we avoid being hypnotized by spectacle, seize the initiative, and continue to build during chaotic times? Call was not recorded.* On 10/7, we will have a member Q&A with Josh Lisec, co-author (with Jack Posobiec) of Unhumans: The Secret History of Communist Revolutions.* Meetups* 10/10: Nashville. * 10/17-10/18: Canyoneering trip in Zion National Park. Contact Devin or check #utah channel for details.* 10/25: Oklahoma City.* 11/8: Old Glory Club’s Weaving Event in Portland. I will be speaking.* Cocktail hour invites for Nashville (9/27) and Oklahoma City (10/25) available to subscribers here. EXIT cocktail hours are a great way to get to know the guys in your local area and figure out if the group is right for you. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit blog.exitgroup.us/subscribe

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit blog.exitgroup.usOn last night’s EXIT group call, retired Navy veteran and OG EXIT Guy Francis discussed his evacuation from the Augusta area during Hurricane Helene last September, and relief efforts thereafter. Lessons learned:Preparedness isn’t about gear.Francis’ biggest takeaway from the experience is that physical fitness, mobility, and social capital mattered way more than gear. Especially in a city like Augusta, his expensive kit was a security liability as much as a benefit.Most prepper fantasies involve hunkering down to restart civilization, but that’s not even close to the most likely emergency outcome. Pack light, move quick, and get to safety as quickly as possible.Who, not how.Francis’ biggest assets in keeping his family safe and comfortable were a good network and good intelligence. By getting in touch with friends throughout the region, he was able to avoid threats and obstacles, find resources, and make himself useful to others who were in worse shape.The ideal networking situation is to be deeply connected in your local area, and have a broad network that provides optionality and intelligence from outside. We had an extended conversation on the value of an Area Study (more on this later.)Fitness and psychological preparedness.Keeping his family’s morale high was a challenge — Francis plans to do more short-notice camping trips to prepare his children for disruption and discomfort, and require more unplugged time so that they learn to entertain themselves without electronics. Francis also benefited from his MMA and firearms training in being able to interact confidently with unfriendly or untrustworthy strangers. Sustaining a serious injury later taught him not to take basic fitness for granted — the situation would have been much worse without the ability to walk, run, and carry heavy things. (Sometimes these situations are unavoidable — another good reason to cultivate a strong early-warning and local support network.)exitgroup.usEXIT News* On next week’s full-group call (9/2), we’re running a book club on The Forest Passage by Ernst Junger. It’s a quick read, and more important now than when it was written.* New Calls:* Family/Fatherhood and Homeschooling on alternating Thursdays at 7PM ET/4PM PT* Leadership on the second Wednesday of each month at 8PM ET/5PM PT. (This month, 9/10, we will discuss Alexander and Caesar from Plutarch’s Parallel Lives.)* Civic Engagement on third Thursdays at 10PM ET/7PM PT.* Several of the guys will be in DC next week for NatCon. Reach out in the #dc channel to coordinate a meetup.* Caught a couple of the guys in Utah Valley this week. Planning a sauna build before it gets cold — check #utah channel for details.* BBQ meetup in Boise September 1. Check #idaho channel to RSVP.* Canyoneering Trip in Zion National Park (10/17-10/18). We should be getting the results from our lottery any day now. Check #meetups and #utah channel for updates.>THERE IS NOTHING BELOW THE PAYWALL

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit blog.exitgroup.usAndrew Isker (@BonifaceOption) is a Reformed pastor who has planted a church at New Founding’s community in Gainesboro, Tennessee. He went on Tucker Carlson’s show to discuss his church and the new community a few months ago. We discuss:* Building critical mass for an in-person community* Historical precedents for pioneering new Christian communities* Politic…

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit blog.exitgroup.us[Part 1][Part 2][Part 3]This presentation and Q&A is the fourth in a four-part series. Because of the strong reception to the series, we have made this a weekly call, which is recorded for EXIT members.Modern societies are allergic to cults and company towns.Partly out of legitimate concern for unaccountable and abusive power — but also because they compete with and make trouble for larger, even-less-accountable institutions.Cults and company towns are defeated because they arouse the jealousy of the Powers that Be — but that’s always easier to do when they also arouse the resentment and moral outrage of the public.All parallel institutions have the same problem: they exist to generate interference with the cultural and material enforcement mechanisms of dominant institutions. If you aren’t trying to scare the hoes at least a little bit, you don’t need a parallel institution.So, if you want to build a robust parallel institution that serves this purpose, there are at least four things to learn from the history of cults and company towns:* How to achieve meaningful cohesion and group sovereignty (the hardest part)* How to avoid their real, structural problems* How to avoid their public-relations problems* How to gain maximum independence while attracting minimum institutional hostilityIn this episode, Greg discusses a model for setting up a network of interrelated “pillar institutions” which create a degree of genuine multipolarity without giving away the cohesion and unity of a strong community.We discuss various economic and cultural institutions that could serve as the kernel for such a community, and what it will take to get started.exitgroup.usEXIT News:* Weekly Group Calls (Tuesdays 9PM ET/6PM PT)* Last week (7/8) we heard from Andrew Isker (Boniface Option) on his exit from Minnesota, planting a church with New Founding in Tennessee, and cooperation between right-wing guys with conflicting religious commitments.* This Tuesday (7/15), we will have a book club on The Outlaws by Ernst von Salomon. Many parallels to our situation over the last five years, and some darker possible futures. Don’t miss this!* On 7/22, the topic is Pioneers — bring stories of your most excellent ancestors, and we will discuss where the frontiers can be found today..3* Member-led Calls* Drone/EWAR call* Great Houses call* “EXIT Bar Association” call. For EXIT JDs only — reach out in #legal for an invite. Goal is to build a shared list of highly aligned lawyers in all 50 states, so everyone has someone to call in another state if needed.* Calls coming soon:* Fatherhood/Home Education: family traditions, discipline, education, cultivation, and homeschool.* Acquisition Entrepreneurship: Finding, valuing, buying, operating, and improving an existing business.* Civic Engagement: Getting involved with your local political and community institutions.* Member meetups* 7/19: Tubing in New Braunfels. Details in #texas channel.* 7/21: DFW meetup at the usual spot. Details in #dfw channel.* 7/26: Nashville meetup — details TBA. See #tennessee channel.* 7/26: Houston meetup — details TBA. See #texas channel.* 8/9: Family retreat in Holland, MI. See #midwest channel or contact Andrew for details.* 10/17-10/18 — Canyoneering trip at Zion National Park. Descending a slot canyon via rappelling, hiking, swimming, scrambling. Expect a 12-hour day, traversing ~13 miles, mostly downhill. No wives or girlfriends, but sons are welcome if they can keep up. Contact Devin for details.* RSVP links for Dallas (7/21) and Nashville (7/26) cocktail hours 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.

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit blog.exitgroup.us[Part 1][Part 2]In this episode of the Great Houses series, Greg discusses the “feudal instinct” — a different way of viewing the obligations between employers and employees, or patrons and clients.The feudal instinct is the drive to fulfill one’s obligations within the ordo amoris: the concentric obligations to God, family, community, country, etc. People want to follow leaders and serve patrons who empower them to meet those obligations more fully than they could alone.Other concepts:* Designing jobs and compensation schemes that make employees proud to serve the family* Structuring family members’ education and employment so that the family’s wealth edifies them and draws them closer together, rather than pushing them apart* Attaching conditions to employment that non-aligned people would find burdensome, as a selection method for the people you want in your world* Cultivating peers with jurisdictional separation to reduce attack surface and encourage community stability* Giving clients reliable access to the things they want, that they can’t afford to ownThis recorded presentation and Q&A is the third in a four-part series.EXIT News* Tuesday night full-group calls:* Tonight (5/27), we had our book club on Starship Troopers, by Robert Heinlein.* Next Tuesday (6/3), we will discuss the Investment Syndicate thesis.* On 6/10, we will discuss the EXIT fitness call and summer competition.* On 6/17, we will showcase the Tech and AI calls.* On 6/24, we will discuss content creation and publishing.* Member Meetups* Nashville, 5/29. See #tennessee channel for details. Cocktail hour invite below.* San Francisco, 6/8. See #bay-area-and-NorCal channel for details.* Seattle, 6/26. See #PNW channel for details.* Finalizing June dates for DC, Atlanta, and SLC meetups this week.* Cocktail hour invite for Nashville meetup (5/29) and Seattle meetup (6/26) 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.

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit blog.exitgroup.us[Click here to listen to Part 1]In this episode of our Great House series, we address a simplified model of an illegible but enforceable arrangement of patronage between a wealthy family and their clients — or, “How to start a town without a bank”.Starting from the text of John Winthrop’s sermon, A Model of Christian Charity, we discuss how high-trust communities have created legal vehicles that allow for profitable investment, mentorship, and a reasonable assurance of cultural alignment. “Just don’t call it a loan.”This recorded presentation and Q&A is the second in a four-part series.EXIT Investment SyndicateThis week, we will have the opening call of our first EXIT Investment Syndicate. Ten to twelve investors will pool resources to invest in one man and one project as a group.On this inaugural call (Thursday 5/22 at 7PM ET, and Tuesday 5/27 at 10PM ET), investors will vote on the principles and investment thesis that will drive the selection of a project.The following week (7PM ET Thursday 5/29 and 10PM ET Tuesday 6/3), we will consider EXIT men and projects that accord with our chosen thesis.The goal of this project is to connect the EXIT brothers through shared enterprises, generate returns to shareholders, build capacity among our chosen champions, establish a real-world footprint for the group, and provide the cashflow and procedural knowledge to support future champions and projects.We will send reminders for each of these calls in the #announcements channel on the chat, and via email the morning before. EXIT guys: if you are able and willing to support this project as an investor, please check your email for an invite to the calls, or contact me directly.EXIT News* Tuesday night full-group calls:* On last week’s call (5/13), we heard from an EXIT member on his process for building community with Amish-style “work parties”, building a wireless ISP business, and growing culinary mushrooms for fun and profit. For opsec reasons this one was not recorded.* Last night (5/20), we heard about an EXIT member’s tokenized, industrial-scale Bitcoin mining operation.* Next Tuesday (5/27), we will have our book club on Starship Troopers, by Robert Heinlein.* Recent EXIT wins* One of our startup teams just won an 8-figure DoD contract* One of our guys just accepted a CEO role at a biotech company* EXIT guys have accepted senior positions in four executive agencies in the Trump Administration* The Hot Seat call to get our man out of Canada was a success — he has secured visa work in the US* Member Meetups* Austin meetup was a success. Spent the weekend at an Airbnb, ate barbecue, toured a 500-acre MAHA intentional community in the hill country, and got to know some of the wives and kids. Huge thanks to Jonathan for putting it together.* New York City, 5/24. See #new-england channel for details.* Nashville, 5/29. See #tennessee channel for details.* San Francisco, 6/8. See #bay-area-and-NorCal channel for details.* Seattle, 6/26. See #PNW channel for details.* Finalizing June dates for DC, Atlanta, and SLC meetups this week.* Cocktail hour invite for Seattle meetup (6/26) 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.

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit blog.exitgroup.usEvery day, tens of thousands of Americans with irreplaceable engineering and manufacturing expertise are retiring.Globalization and the zero-interest-rate money printer economy have pulled America’s greatest cognitive talents away from building real things in the real world. The infinite pool of cheap foreign labor stunts innovation, and makes it very difficult for smart, dynamic people to have the ground-level experience of manufacturing, since they won’t (and shouldn’t) compete for slave wages.Nate Jebb is the founder of Veritas Professional Services, a business that converts the tribal knowledge of small manufacturing operations into formal procedure, so that these businesses can survive the “silver tsunami” of boomer retirement.Nate is a descendant of early-20th-century captains of industry, but his great-grandfathers’ empires were spent before he was born, so he had to take a job on the factory floor, where he learned the importance of the embodied experience locked up in these retiring workers’ minds.EXIT is overwhelmingly composed of smart young guys stuck in the fake-and-gay B2B SaaS economy, who know that it’s a sinking ship, and who are hungry to do something real. Naturally, Nate’s story was fascinating to us.Veritas’ business model provides a way for smart young guys to get intimate knowledge of manufacturing, without getting stuck trading their time and health for illegal immigrant wages. Definitely a space to watch.EXIT News* Tuesday night full-group calls:* Yesterday (5/13) a well-known anon presented on his process for building community with Amish-style “work parties”, building a wireless ISP business, and growing culinary mushrooms for fun and profit. For opsec reasons this one was not recorded.* Next Tuesday (5/20) we will hear about an EXIT member’s off-grid, industrial-scale Bitcoin mining operation.* The following call (5/27) will be a book club on Starship Troopers by Robert Heinlein.* Our hot seat to get our man out of Canada was a success — he has a line on a work visa in the States. Ruthless efficiency from the boys, very much appreciate your efforts to help a brother in need.* The Great Houses series will conclude this Thursday, 5/15.* Recording of Part 1 (introduction) available here.* Recording of Part 2 (“You can do what you want, but you can’t call it what you want”) will be released shortly.* Recording of Part 3 (“The feudal instinct and covenant”) will be released shortly.* Tomorrow’s call will be Part 4 (“Building families that use — but transcend and outlive — legal institutional structures”)* Member Meetups:* EXIT now has monthly meetups in Salt Lake City, Dallas, Austin, Houston, and Seattle. Next on the list: monthly meetups in NYC, DC, and Nashville.* Houston meetup (5/10) was a success.* Austin meetup will be Friday, 5/16 through Sunday, 5/18. We will be spending a weekend at an Airbnb south of town. Several of the guys are coming from out of town to check out the area. Cocktail hour on Saturday, 5/17 for EXIT members, Substack subscribers, and guests. Details in the #texas channel.

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit blog.exitgroup.usOne of the EXIT guys is an estate planning attorney who helps high-net-worth individuals keep their family empires illegible, enforceable, and aligned.In this call, he introduces the architecture of a mutually-reinforcing family business and family trust, which allows the family to incentivize individual risk-taking to expand the family’s wealth, while insulating the core of the family’s assets.We discuss how to build these structures at varying income levels, the wealthy families that already use them in the wild, and how to use wealth to encourage the moral and spiritual development of the family.This recorded Q&A is an introduction to a four-part series.Coming soon:* You can do what you want, but you can’t call it what you want: Creating durable, enforceable patronage relationships within the modern legal system* John Winthrop’s Model of Christian Charity: how to build a town without a bank* What was a loan in the 1600s?* “Just don’t call it a loan”* The feudal instinct and covenant: Reclaiming the natural psychological architecture of patronage* “You are poorer than a peasant”* Salary and ownership are proxies (for what?)* Inheritance is about Rights and Promises* Institutional interests: Building families that use (but transcend and outlive) legal institutional structures* Cults and company towns* Illegibility* ObsolescenceThe first 30 minutes of each presentation will be released free. Full recording for subscribers only.The future is feudal.The impersonal managerial structures of liberalism are collapsing. The people who thrive in these circumstances will be those who rediscover older and more natural modes of human connection.We will not survive materially or spiritually without human judgment and human institutions: we need each other, and our children will need each other. So we study pre-liberal institutions, to see how the same relationships might be reconstituted in our legal and technological environment.Like everything else that matters, it starts with a small group of guys with a will to make it happen.exitgroup.usEXIT News* On last week’s group call (4/29), we had a hot seat for one of the guys who is looking to get out of Canada. The guys are working to get him employed in a friendlier jurisdiction.* This week, we heard from Nate Jebb at Veritas on what he has learned about manufacturing from retiring boomers. This was an incredible call — recording to follow soon.* Third Great House call this Thursday (5/8). Topic: The Feudal Instinct and Covenant. Recording soon to come for subscribers.* Next week will be our quarterly leadership call for EXIT file leaders and facilitators. We’ll have two — Monday, 5/12 at 7PM CT, and Tuesday, 5/13 at 9PM CT. Details in the #leaders chat.* Member meetups:* Salt Lake City members-only lunch meetup this Friday, 5/9. Details in the #utah channel.* Houston meetup this weekend, 5/10. Details in the #texas channel. * Austin meetup will be Friday, 5/16 through Sunday, 5/18. We will be spending a weekend at an Airbnb south of town. Several of the guys are coming from out of town to check out the area. Cocktail hour on Saturday, 5/17 for EXIT members, Substack subscribers, and guests. Details in the #texas channel.

[Above is my keynote address at NatalCon 2025 this weekend. Full recordings of the event soon to come — please be patient as we get them edited. Below is my response to getting DESTROYED with facts and logic by Lomez later that evening.]I’m very proud of the people we brought together and the conversation they generated this weekend at NatalCon 2025.I’m deeply grateful to our speakers, our sponsors, our volunteers, our attendees, and our crew, and I’m excited to do it again.But — to be honest — the speech that resonated most deeply with me was Jonathan Keeperman’s dinner toast, “Why the Natal Conference should be disbanded as soon as possible, why you need to care less about your kids, and why I am not a Pro-Natalist”.It was such a well-argued speech that I felt it deserved a response — and that I could use that response to explain why this issue is worth raising, and why we will continue to organize around it.I agreed with Keeperman, violently, that building your life and identity and ambitions solely around being a parent is a mistake — because it’s an unhappy way to live, because it’s recursive, and because it burdens your children with the responsibility to justify your existence. It’s rarely aspirational, and young people generally opt out.“The truth is that most parents who give up on their ambitions once they have a family, do so not because they have to but because they want to. They may not tell themselves this, but it’s true.Do not use your kids as an excuse to give up on the things you want to do with your life. This, more than anything, is the best lesson you can teach them.”In addition to being exhausting and boring and miserable for your kids, helicopter parenting militates against having grandchildren, which I would argue is the real finish line for a family-oriented individual — a full turn of the wheel.Each additional child means that you have less individual emotional and educational energy to give them — but it also means that each child is less freighted with Mom and Dad’s expectations and neuroses, less pressured to fulfill everything their parents wanted from their children.And this bias toward endless surveillance and steering of children is discouraging exactly the kind of people who are best-equipped to raise healthy, happy, excellent, admirable families.I disagree with the hard determinism implied by Lomez and many other speakers (“everything is genetics, so don’t worry about nurture”). Even from inside their perspective, if nurture didn’t matter, it would be odd to receive so much social and neurochemical reward from doing it.Probably the synthesis is that you should nurture as much as you feel moved to, and not more — but given that genetic determinism assumes that you’re already doing that anyway, in every domain of your life (and can’t help it), it’s hard to see the point of talking about it.But yes, directionally: relax, have more babies, and embody excellence rather than trying to wring it out of your children.As for the second half of Keeperman’s speech: I of course agree with him that raising families is pre-political, and even pre-rational. If you find yourself justifying it or selling it as one way of life among many, or as a vehicle for some other good, you’ve already lost.I also agree very strongly that children cannot be instrumentalized toward political ends. You don’t have kids to fix the economy — you fix the economy because you have kids.Like all political issues, the goal is to remove your position from the domain of the political — to make it the moral and procedural default.But politics is the realm of social conflict — and we don’t actually get to decide whether the things we care about are under attack. People who have and want children have, in fact, become a political constituency, with identifiable (and substantially disfavored) political interests. Family life should be the moral and procedural default, but it isn’t.We may consider that unfortunate. We may consider it insulting, and distasteful, and maybe even spiritually corrosive to have to defend something as basic as the continuation of human life — but the conflict is here. We can either defend those interests, or give them up.“There were slogans, and incentives, and art created to glorify motherhood, and even ‘maternity capital’ programs to properly incentive would-be parents. The results weren’t increased family flourishing, but cynicism, resentment, and ultimately demographic stagnation.Why? Because Soviet life was miserable, and when politics colonizes biology, it corrupts biology’s essential spontaneity, its intuitive, often irrational authenticity. People feel this, and they rightly reject it. They feel they are being manipulated and they do not like it.This was by far the most powerful passage of Keeperman’s talk for me.And if that’s what he opposes — deploying pro-fertility rhetoric to prop up the ugly, unhappy, empty apparatus of Western liberalism — then of course I oppose it too.But I view natalism in exactly the opposite terms.Natalism is by far the deepest, the most broadly-comprehensible, and the most unanswerable critique of Western liberalism.Drawing the public’s attention to fertility collapse is the easiest and most intuitive way to show them that these managerial systems are fundamentally anti-human and must be destroyed, before they destroy humanity.We don’t have to persuade anyone of our tastes in morality or cosmology or aesthetics. We can simply point to the hard fact that this ideology sterilizes everything it touches — that it is literally, technically, demonstrably incompatible with human life.Liberalism is a centuries-long project to strip human beings of all the competing passions that make them illegible, irrational, immovable, and therefore dangerous to each other and the state.Modern Western(ized) people are nearing the completion of this project. Every “hill to die on” has been taken. They are fully rational, utility-maximizing consumers, all their preferences fungible and negotiable — except when it comes to their kids.For their children, parents remain unapologetically moralistic, hierarchical, partial, particular. They explicitly prefer their children over other children. They expect to decide what is best for their children, above the objections of the state (or, indeed, the children themselves.)In other words, the family is the last natural, pre-liberal human institution — and natalism is the last battle.If we sever this final unmediated, uncommodified connection to one another, human civilization will sleepwalk to extinction for lack of any reason to continue. The same particular loves that make people intransigent and dangerous are also what inspire them to fight instead of fleeing, to build instead of consuming, and to sacrifice to raise families. This is why societies that abolish these particular loves are inherently self-consuming.Humans will not live without love.The reason to host NatalCon next year is not to cajole lifeless people into breeding with treats, or to wring a few more years out of a decrepit and exhausted system. The reason to host NatalCon again is to build and maintain a rally point for people whose children’s future is non-negotiable.natalism.org This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit blog.exitgroup.us/subscribe

This week we had a Q&A with Catherine Pakaluk, professor of economics at The Catholic University of America and author of Hannah’s Children, a study of women with six or more children — what makes them different, how they understand the decision to raise a large family, and what they can teach us about the causes of demographic decline.Topics:* What causes some people to maintain a firm connection between marriage and children?* Why are secular Israelis the only secular population in a developed country that are maintaining replacement fertility?* How does mortality salience affect people’s desire for large families?* What percentage of large families are needed to create a “halo effect” that drives higher fertility in the general population?* How important is mentorship from older women in guiding young women to start families?* How to balance large family with other ambitions?* How can we change the way female employment is structured to incentivize family creation?* How do people with large families get their own children excited to raise families?EXIT News* Natal Conference is officially sold out. See you this weekend in Austin!* NatalCon Agenda (ticket-holders, check Luma for location details):* Thursday:* Final virtual meet-&-greet for ticket-holders this Thursday, 3/27 at 7PM.* Friday:* In-person pre-event mixer with Jack Posobiec and other speakers on Fri 3:30PM.* Dinner and Reception from 6:00PM - 9:30PM* Saturday:* Lunch at 11:00AM* Conference from 12:30PM to 6:00PM* Dinner from 7:00PM to 9:00PM* After-party from 9:30M to 11:30PM* Sunday:* Brunch at 10:00AM* On tonight’s full-group call (3/25) we’ll be discussing preparedness in the Trump Administration. The honeymoon is over, markets are volatile, shadowy quasi-state violence is back — it’s time to adjust our threat model. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit blog.exitgroup.us/subscribe

Last week the EXIT guys had an open-ended Q&A with Dan Hess (More Births) about his quantitative research on birth rate decline.* Areas of volatility/opportunity* Potential corporate policies that could support families* Reactions to the demographic collapse “red pill”* Political consequences of differential rates of abortion* “If you could get an executive order signed, what would you write”We’re having a second virtual meet-and-greet for NatalCon ticketholders this Thursday night, March 20th, at 7PM Central. The following NatalCon 2025 speakers will be present:* ​Peachy Keenan* ​Razib Khan* ​Lyman Stone* ​Yuri Bezmenov* ​Robin Hanson* ​Jessica Flanigan* ​Alex Petkas* ​Malcolm CollinsThese pre-events are a great way to get the lay of the land and make the most of your time at NatalCon, so if you’re planning to come, don’t wait to get your ticket. Get to know the speakers and other attendees, ask questions of the organizers, and make new friends.​If you haven't signed up yet, the first ten signups can use offer code MEET&GREET30 for 30% off your ticket.EXIT News* On Monday night, we concluded the first round of our six month Business Incubator — congrats to contest winners Social CrossTabs on the unanimous first-place decision from our investor-judges. Very impressive presentations from each of our four finalist teams.* On last week’s full group call, we heard from Catherine Pakaluk, author of Hannah’s Children on the kind of women who want to have babies, and where our guys can find them.* We will have a NatalCon virtual meet-and-greet for ticket-holders on Thursday, March 13th. If you’re planning to attend, please get your tickets ASAP so that you can participate — get to know the speakers and attendees so that you can get the most out of the in-person event.* EXIT Houston meetup 6:30PM, Friday March 21st. Members can check in with the #texas channel for details.* EXIT Salt Lake City meetup 12:00PM, Friday March 21st. Members can check in with the #utah channel for details. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit blog.exitgroup.us/subscribe

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit blog.exitgroup.usRecently we invited Lomez (of Office Hours with Lomez) to a Q&A with EXIT guys to discuss his work at Passage Press and what he learned from his many years among the libtards as a lecturer in the English department at UC Irvine.[First 30 minutes are free — full hour recording available for paid subscribers]Questions/Topics:* Life in a “post-apocalyptic” culture, intellectually and aesthetically disconnected from the heights of the past* How to rebuild in the void* How to make better use of craft in writing by learning and internalizing the beats of a good pulp novel* Is patronage actually workable? Is it not happening because the talent is inadequate, because funders lack vision, or something else?* Telling better stories in everyday life* How to take over your local cultural organs* Can art aid in the regeneration of love, eros, and family formation?Lomez will also join us later this month at NatalCon 2025, where he will speak on “Why you should care much less about your kids”. Use offer code LOMEZ for 10% off your ticket at natalism.org.EXIT News* After four months, the EXIT Business Incubator is graduating our first cohort on March 17th, with pitch presentations in front of investor judges who will provide real-world feedback. Their choice of presentation will receive an $1,100 prize.* The Nashville EXIT guys toured the New Founding real estate development in Gainesboro, TN this week. Report to follow.* DFW EXIT had a meetup at a climbing gym followed by a cocktail hour.* I flew in for a Salt Lake City meetup — probably our best-attended yet, with fifteen at the full meetup and ~25 at the cocktail hour.* Cookout and unconference at a member’s home* Tour of a mixed-use real estate development under construction by his company* Dinner at The Gateway* Cocktail hour with Substack subscribers at a luxury hotel downtown* NYC EXIT will meet 3/8 — check the #new-england chat for details.* I will fly out for the Seattle EXIT meetup 3/8 (This Saturday). RSVP link available for subscribers at the bottom of the page here.* We’re preparing an EXIT real estate meetup after Natal Conference to discuss our build in the Texas Hill Country.[nothing below the paywall]

Every time I post about demographic decline, I get about a hundred replies insisting that the cause of demographic decline is actually extremely obvious — so obvious that only an imbecile (or a subversive!) would even wonder about it.“It’s the dating apps, retard” -- or it’s birth control, or it’s women working, or it’s women voting, or it’s mass immigration, or it’s the cost of housing, or it’s the population density, or it’s the propaganda, etc.Then, if the post really goes viral, I get feminists and libs saying it’s the cost of daycare, or student loans, or the expense of pregnancy, or the critical shortage of Good Men.But virtually all of these arguments has a conclusive disproof in some modern country, where the commenter’s hobby-horse is not a problem, but birth rates are still well below replacement.Of course, that’s not to say that none of it matters — everything goes in the pot — but none of these problems, in isolation, explains our predicament.The most extreme proof of this is Rome and Sparta, whose social pathologies, even at the latest stage, didn’t neatly map to the modern culture war — but they still lost the ability to inspire young citizens to raise families, and were eventually overrun by more vital and fertile peoples.Alex Petkas is a classicist and founder of the Cost of Glory Podcast — we brought him on to discuss the family structures of ancient Sparta and Rome, their struggles with declining population, and what they did to reverse the trend.The decline of family formation, in these cases, is something like dying of old age — a confluence of social sicknesses that piles up until the society can no longer perform the basic task of perpetuating itself.“It is not the one thing.”With that understanding, “solving the birth rate” is not a narrow policy issue, and it won’t be corrected by tweaking the incentives or nibbling around the edges: it requires transforming our relationship to our families, society, and the state. That’s what we have to come together to do.Alex will be joining us to deliver a deeper treatment of the subject at NatalCon 2025 — joining 30 other speakers with a wide range of perspective and expertise.Get your ticket today at natalism.org.Couples/+1 TicketsIf you’ve been thinking of bringing a spouse or friend to NatalCon, we’re rolling out special plus-one pricing — select “Two Ticket Special” with offer code COSTOFGLORY to get two tickets for $1,620.We will also have childcare available for both the dinner Friday night, and the full conference on Saturday, so parents with small children can make it a night out.Ticket holders also receive:* Free copies of Hannah’s Children by Catherine Pakaluk, Domestic Extremist by Peachy Keenan, Creating Future People by Jonny Anomaly, and The Pragmatist’s Guide series by Malcolm and Simone Collins* Discounted rooms at the AT&T Conference Center (until rooms are sold out)* Access to attendee networking directory* Pre-event virtual meet-and-greet with speakers This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit blog.exitgroup.us/subscribe

David Kilcullen is one of the world’s foremost experts in counterinsurgency and unconventional warfare.He served for 25 years as an infantry officer in the Australian Army, then with the U.S. State Department, where he was chief strategist in the Counterterrorism Bureau, Senior Counterinsurgency Advisor to Multi-National Force Iraq, and Senior Advisor for Counterinsurgency to the U.S. Secretary of State. He has written The Accidental Guerrilla, Counterinsurgency, Out of the Mountains, Blood Year, and The Dragons and the Snakes.We discuss:* How Trump’s election has altered the trajectory of the empire. Will he take the reins and strengthen American hegemony, or repudiate it?* How China’s demographic issues accelerate the timetable for a confrontation with the US over Taiwan — but may also make them less willing to risk a war (70% of the PLA are only-children in a nation with no old-age safety net.)* How China is carefully monitoring (and encouraging) America’s ongoing immiseration and demoralization through propaganda, trade war, and human and drug trafficking.* How the Houthis use inexpensive saturation attacks to exhaust US Navy countermeasures and maintain their blockade of the Red Sea.* Why the Assad regime collapsed over a ten-day period last month — the geopolitical circumstances that gave Hayat Tahrir al-Sham space to act, and what they built while they waited for the right time to strike.It looks to me like the Trump Administration is attempting to lead a transnational revolution across the various client states of the empire — drying up the flow of money to puppet governments, and forcing the emergence of a looser, more transactional coalition.It isn’t just that Americans are tired of empire — Trump voters increasingly identify the empire as a foreign occupation, and themselves as a not-particularly-favored client. Besides which, it’s unclear whether a global naval empire could be maintained by any nation, now that $10,000 drones have rendered $2B aircraft carriers obsolete.What all this means for us is that global supply chains are going away, either through orderly, deliberate industrial policy, or through war and catabolic collapse. The only real question is who’s going to get paid to rebuild the factories, and when.EXIT has the engineering and operations talent — our project for 2025 is to build a fund that will draw capital into these new enterprises and retrain our guys to build in the real world.Meanwhile, the societies that cannot inspire their people to raise families will face economic stagnation and collapse — especially China, America, the EU, Japan, and Korea. We are hosting Natal Conference to connect with like-minded people and build the systems that will bring our families through the bottleneck.The tea leaves aren’t that hard to read here.There are clear actions you can take to prepare your family and your tribe for what is coming: the most important of which is to connect with like-minded friends are start building.Join us at exitgroup.us.EXIT News:* On last week’s full-group call (2/11), we heard from Lomez on leadership through art and aesthetics. Recording available soon to paid subscribers.* Last night (2/18), we had an EXIT State of the Union:* Discussion of our growing list of expert-led calls in real estate, investing, AI, ham radio, homeschooling, etc.* Updates on NatalCon planning, member discounts on tickets, and requests for volunteers.* Details on the new investment fund.* On next Tuesday’s full-group call (2/25) we will hear from Nate Fischer and Santiago Pliego from New Founding, on their venture fund, talent network, and real estate project in Gainesboro, Tennessee.* Dallas Meetup was Monday night (2/17) — we met for lunch at EXIT’s space at The Hightower, New Founding’s new co-work, then dinner and cocktails at an undisclosed location. The D/FW guys get together once a month — I will be there at least every quarter.* Cocktail hour invites for Salt Lake City (3/1) and Seattle (3/8) available here 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. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit blog.exitgroup.us/subscribe

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit blog.exitgroup.usJust after the inauguration, we invited Bog Beef from Good Ol Boyz to our weekly EXIT full-group call to discuss a topic of mutual interest: the power of patronage.Patronage is just a word for the default state of human organization, where people are in control instead of systems, and power flows from relationships rather than the manipulation of procedural outcomes.20th century “political science” was an extension of the Enlightenment project to rationalize and systematize government — to deliver it from the corruption of human influence.Of course, the problem with this approach is the moral hazard: if you make it illegal and illegitimate to rule, people aren’t going to give up power — your ruling class will simply be selected for a nihilistic attitude toward the law.In this Q&A, Bog Beef discusses the importance of the human relationships within the new Trump insurgency, and the history of patronage in American urban political machines.Recognizing the legitimate role of human judgment in politics should completely change how we think about good government. Rather than fine-tuning the procedural systems, we should be focused on identifying and cultivating leaders.EXIT is in the business of cultivation, because we think we should be in charge.We want to expand the scope of our stewardship and our capacity. We want our guys deploying power virtuously, effectively, and confidently. We want to build empires, and cultivate children with the competence and ambition to inherit them.Join us at exitgroup.us.EXIT News* EXIT now has a meeting space at Hightower Dallas, through our friends at New Founding. Big thanks to the D/FW EXIT crew for closing the deal. We’ll hold regular meetups there, in addition to using it as a coworking space. Dallas guys can check the #texas chat for more information.* Tickets for Natal Conference 2025 are on sale now. March 28th and 29th, Austin, Texas. We’ve just added Steve Turley, Lomez, and Cremieux to the lineup. More to come! Use offer code NATALISM for 10% off at checkout.* On last week’s full-group call (1/28), we heard from Indian Bronson on Family Offices, as well as the Late Unpleasantness over H1Bs. Recording will be available for Substack subscribers, once I have edited out IB’s shocking deluge of slurs.* On this week’s call, we are having a Book Club on The Diamond Age, by Neal Stephenson.* Cocktail hour invites for Dallas (2/17), Salt Lake City (3/1), and Seattle (3/8) 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.

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit blog.exitgroup.usThis week, @MarmotRespecter presented to the guys on how to get a tech job in the “worst tech hiring market in 25 years”.Marmot explains how AI is swamping automated systems and eliminating entry-level tech jobs, making it harder and harder to break in — and what our guys can do about it.* What employers are allowed to check about your resume* Who reads your resume, and how* How to sidestep automated systems and get your resume in human hands* How to get people advocating on your behalf internally* Acquiring credentials versus building a portfolio* How to avoid corporate H1B shenanigans* The future of remote work* How wordcels can get into tech companiesMost of what he describes is applicable to any corporate hiring process.There’s a principle in negotiation called “BATNA” — your “best alternative to negotiated agreement”.This describes the worst outcome you can accept in a negotiation before you’re better off walking away.The more appealing your BATNA is, the more leverage you have in the negotiation, because it is comparatively easy for you to walk away (i.e. EXIT).The more work you put into alternative ways of earning money, the more you can afford to push back on your employer. Some ways to build BATNA are entrepreneurship, creating side revenue streams, cutting costs, and developing new marketable skills — but knowing you can go out and get another job in a pinch is another powerful source of leverage.Regardless of your employment situation, if someone else owns the process, the equipment, the network you need to feed, clothe, house, and educate your family, they control you.That’s why EXIT is bigger than any one tactic: you don’t have to quit your job and join the circus, or live on a homestead, or learn to code, or become a plumber.EXIT is about building sovereignty by exerting greater control over of the means of production. We help our guys launch businesses, but we also connect each other with jobs, share useful skills, invest together, etc.Join us at exitgroup.us.Also:JD Vance wants more babies in the United States.SecDef has seven kids. Elon Musk is shilling NatalCon on the timeline.Now that we have permanently resolved all political questions under the aegis of the Living Constitution, Donald John Trump, it’s time to set our sights on the civilizational struggle of our time.The nation or people that will dominate the 21st century will be the one that figures out how to raise families in a technologically progressive society.China can get the right answers to every other social problem, but if they can’t convince their people that the game should go on, they will inevitably decline and recede.The 2020s will be defined by AI, but the 2030s will be defined by demographics — and, for obvious reasons, the moves that will be decisive in 15 years have to be made now.That’s why we’re hosting Natal Conference, March 28th and 29th, in Austin.You should join us if:* You want to meet values-aligned individuals and families* You want to find solutions to the derangement of modern dating* You want to create good conditions for your children to have children* You want to protect your community’s reproductive and endocrine health* You want to find partners or investors for a natalist business or policy initiative* You want to preserve and grow wealth under conditions of demographic declineYour ticket includes:* Pre-event virtual AMA/webinar with selected speakers* Dinner & symposium Friday March 28th at the Bullock Museum of Texas History* Full-day conference Saturday March 29th with breakfast, lunch, and dinner at the AT&T Conference Center (across the street from the Bullock Museum)* Access to (opt-in) attendee directory* Premium access to newsletters and digital copies of books authored by our speakers, including Domestic Extremist by Peachy Keenan, The Pragmatist’s Guide series by Malcolm and Simone Collins, Creating Future People by Jonny Anomaly, and more​Use offer code NATALISM at checkout for 10% off your ticket.See you in Austin.

This week, Natal Conference cofounder Drew Gorham and I discuss what has changed on the issue of demographic decline since last year’s conference, and what we have planned for NatalCon 2025.I introduce some ideas about what is driving demographic decline — it clearly isn’t just wealth, or housing, or feminism, or birth control, or microplastics, or the declining value of child farm labor.My theory, as I’ve discussed here previously, is that human fertility declines in captivity in much the same way that animal fertility does.The “breakdown of the family” as “the fundamental unit of society” became a cliche in conservative circles in the 1990s, but the relative political power and independence of the family in pre-modern societies allowed family members to invest in one another, and in the family itself.It wasn’t that pre-modern people raised kids at an economic loss for 12 years so they could get six years of productive farm work out of them: the family was a little state unto itself, which belonged to you, and to which you belonged, throughout your lifetime.This is the kind of sovereignty that we talk about at EXIT.The family was a genuine “us”, independent within its sphere — and having more of “us” made each member more productive, more secure, more influential, etc. Families partook in a common project that was, in many ways, transcendent and selfless; but self-interested enough to incentivize day-to-day cooperation and sacrifice.I believe that this is basically the way humans are built and meant to live — and as our social structures abstract further and further away from that, raising families makes less and less intuitive sense to ordinary people.The cultures that survive the demographic bottleneck will be those that find a way to restore this natural mode of human civilization, and make families sovereign again.Since recording, I also got to listen to Lyman Stone’s turn on Modern Wisdom with Chris Williamson (Lyman will be with us at NatalCon 2025.)It was an excellent review of the research on demographic decline, and raised some interesting questions. Topics I’d like to explore with Lyman at the conference:* Is alarmism about fertility decline discouraging fertility? I think doomer anxiety is so prevalent that “one more existential problem” probably doesn’t do much — though catastrophism probably doesn’t encourage people to start families. People aren’t going to have kids to save Social Security or boomers’ home values. Discussing the seriousness of the problem is more about drawing the attention and resources of people who wouldn’t care otherwise — but maybe that, too, is of limited utility. * Do high-intensity parenting norms actually lead to better outcomes for kids? This was a topic of some debate at last year’s NatalCon, with Diana Fleischman taking the hardest line on genetic determinism. I think that if parenting doesn’t matter, it’s pretty weird that all human cultures and the human endocrine system reward it so intensely. The problem with modern parenting is not that it’s high-intensity, but that it’s solitary — each family having to come up with boutique solutions, almost building a little idiosyncratic civilization from the ground up for their children.* What can be done about the fact that so many conservative families end up raising sterile secular liberals? This is one of the central questions around which EXIT is organized. Exit is a matter of survival because we’re dependent on cultural and economic institutions that are sterilizing our kids. (Usually figuratively.) We’re building businesses and organizing parallel social structures — but we’re always looking for new ways to make our families more resistant to the acid bath of modernity.If you want to join us for the conference, early-bird tickets are still on sale at natalism.org. Use offer code NATALISM for 10% off.EXIT News* On last Tuesday’s full group call (12/10) we had our 2024 Year in Review. (More on this next week.)* On tonight’s full-group call (12/17), we will hear from a former lead technical recruiter at a Fortune 500 company on how to get a tech job. We’ll discuss how to defeat or bypass algorithmic gatekeeping, and how AI is changing the tech job market.* Real estate call is this Thursday (12/19).* EXIT will have a sponsor table at the Coronation Ball, January 19th at the Watergate in Washington, DC. We have two seats left; if you are a member and would like to join us, please DM right away. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit blog.exitgroup.us/subscribe

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit blog.exitgroup.usI asked Tanner Guzy to talk to us about his book, The Appearance of Power, and the role of aesthetics in leadership. That conversation took me down the following rabbithole:“If your kids don’t want to grow up to look like you, you have not set the right example”.If everybody grew up wanting to be like their parents, The Libs would be extinct already — the most secular and progressive Millennials have ~0 fertility, and the most religious and conservative decile have about half the babies.The secular-progressive/gay-race-communist memeplex is essentially a psychological sterility plague — which means, almost by definition, that it should be harshly selecting against whatever traits make a person susceptible to it.In the long run that’s probably happening — but in the short run, religious people are producing atheist children much faster than atheists are dying out.Taking those long- and short-term trends together: the people who make it through the depopulation bottleneck will almost certainly be some flavor of dissenting religion and ideology — but for any given dissenting religious individual or family living today, the odds are not good.Conservatives and religious people are having plenty of children, but not nearly enough grandchildren.There are a few possible explanations for this, but the most compelling one (to me, anyway) is that most young people simply don’t find their parents’ lives aspirational.They don’t want the job, the social life, the recreation, the routine of a conservative suburban family.It isn’t that it’s “too expensive” to raise a family — virtually everyone who has ever had kids has been poorer than the average young American. They simply don’t believe it’s worth it.Some pro-family pundits chalk this up to decadence and ease and selfishness, but I don’t think people were really that much more altruistic 100 years ago — and anyway, things stopped getting easier for ordinary people two generations ago, but the fertility rate is still plummeting.I believe reproduction is genuinely less attractive for young people today than it was for our grandparents when they were young — and for much the same reason reproduction is less attractive to zoo animals.As we are increasingly monitored and constrained, within increasingly controlled and unnatural environments, the appeal of life itself — and especially the appeal to perpetuate it through heroic effort and sacrifice — is weaker.The problem isn’t that young people are being brainwashed by the Liberal Media against having children. Liberalism isn’t directly making people sterile — liberalism and sterility are both psychological adaptations to life in captivity.Liberalism — essentially naive conflict avoidance, egalitarianism, harm avoidance, and pleasure seeking — is the ideology of the zoo animal. It’s what you live for when there’s nothing to live for.Under those conditions, why would you go through the expense and hassle of having children?So they can work a job and pay bills and watch TV too? Maybe if they work really hard they’ll get to justify their life’s suffering (and yours) with a week at a resort with a poolside bar.Of course, there will always be people who are willing to brave the risk and sacrifice of parenthood purely for the sentimental enjoyments of domestic life as such — but, empirically, not most people.This is roughly what is offered to young people by conservative pundits and politicians: the promise that dedicating yourself to domestic life is so intrinsically fulfilling that it needs no justification — that, in fact, you should be willing to bear any cost for the privilege.But the problem with subsuming yourself into the vicarious experience of your children (essentially just pleasure-seeking and harm-avoidance in the third person) is that it offers them nothing to emulate. It fails its own implied standard as a model of a life well-lived.Spending your best consuming years raising kids so that they can be consumers is a prototypical self-licking ice cream cone, and young people are right to reject it.If all you want for your kids is to “have it better than you had it”, the straightforward solution is to make sure they have abundant access to contraception and abortion.If you want your kids to have kids, you have to offer them something better.Manosphere guys used to talk a lot about “initiation rituals”, and they would go into the woods to chant, bang drums, do drugs, sit in buckets of ice, etc.But the reason all that stuff was lame is that there was no world with real danger or adventure on the other side — nothing for which you would need masculinity to be credibly prepared, and therefore no meaningful “manhood” into which to be initiated. There is no way to make such experiences “real” when the rest of your life is fake.The Baby Boom in the US is often attributed to the exuberance of victory and material abundance of the postwar era — but the truth is almost the opposite.The Baby Boom mostly took place in the middle of the war, all over Europe (both sides) — and the most dramatic increases took place under rationing regimes, bombings, &/or active military occupation.It wasn’t about availability of housing, or the cost of diapers, or modern medicine, or labor-saving domestic technologies.It was apparently about throwing humans back into simpler and more familiar and more natural conditions of danger and decision — conditions to which their natural temperaments were suited and mutually complementary, so that they could admire and desire one another.People will have children again when they are free again — and that’s the throughline between EXIT and Natalism.If we want our kids to want to perpetuate our culture, we have to live admirable and excellent lives, and surround ourselves with admirable and excellent people. We have to build something sovereign — a society that is really ours, so that it can be really theirs.Fortunately, the present state of universal captivity and domesticity is self-destructing — so our task is to cultivate the resources, skills, virtues, and freedom of action that will prepare our families for the coming turbulence, and equip us to exercise sovereignty on the other side.exitgroup.usEXIT News* On last week’s group call, one of the guys discussed his veterans’ mental health nonprofit, Sterker showcased the fitness call, and we had an extended conversation of EXIT & the Trump Regime.* Tonight (11/19) we will be running a book club on Xenophon’s Anabasis, joined by Alex Petkas from Cost of Glory, and Ben Wilson from How to Take Over the World.* Working groups are back — two-hour blocks to knock out small projects together. Bring something you’ve been putting off, and lets get it done. (Members can check the group calendar or the #announcements channel for the weekly schedule.)* RSVP link for Dallas EXIT Cocktail Hour (12/7) 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.

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit blog.exitgroup.usLast week, we heard from Alex Petkas from the Cost of Glory Podcast. Alex is a former Classics professor from Princeton who is now focused on classical education, especially for men and boys.We discuss:* How are the classics, especially the biographies of great men, are relevant to what we’re trying to accomplish?* What translations are most accurate and accessible?* Can we rebuild the engine of competition and cultivation that produced the greatest Greeks, Romans, and early Americans?* What’s the point of cultivating an energetic and dangerous spirit if there are no non-suicidal outlets for it?* How serious were the Greeks and Romans about their distaste for commerce?* How would a great Classical hero respond if placed in our time and circumstances? Would he self-immolate rather than live under such a system, or would he “play the long game”?* What is Alex’s personal vision for the future of classical education?* How can we get our kids accustomed to playful, proportionate physical and rhetorical violence?* Alex’s thoughts on various Classical scholarsSubstack subscribers get access to the full recording and invites to EXIT cocktail hours, as well as our archive of all prior Q&As.Full members participate in the Q&As, accountability, calls, meetups, and group chat with 225 other individually vetted members.Apply for membership at exitgroup.us.EXIT News* On tonight’s weekly group call (Tuesday, 9PM ET), we will discuss Fustel de Coulanges’ The Ancient Family. It’s a short but fascinating survey of the primordial religious and family practices of the proto-Indo-Europeans, as pieced together from study of Greek, Roman, and Hindu texts.* Last weekend, we got together in Washington DC for the Steve Sailer Noticing event, as well as a cocktail hour on the roof of the Watergate and a barbecue.* This Friday night (10/18), we will host a cocktail hour in Austin, TX in collaboration with Praxis. Invitation available below the paywall for subscribers. +1s welcome.* The DFW guys will be shooting airsoft on Saturday, 11/2. Members can inquire in the #texas channel.* Meetup in San Francisco, Saturday 11/9. This will be a family meetup, so bring the wife and kids. (Event may be postponed in the event of civil war.) Cocktail hour invite for subscribers below.

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit blog.exitgroup.usOn last night’s full-group call, we had a members-only Q&A with Conscious Caracal (Ernst Van Zyl), discussing his work with Afriforum, what is working in Orania, and what he sees as the future of the Afrikaner people.Questions:* What has worked and what hasn’t worked in building Afrikaner solidarity and identity?* How do groups like Orania draw lines around…

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit blog.exitgroup.usOn last Tuesday night’s full group call, we had a members-only Q&A with Auron MacIntyre, discussing his new book The Total State.Questions:* How does Auron’s book compare with Deneen’s Why Liberalism Failed, and how can we synthesize their respective messages into a positive vision of the future?* Are there coherent alternatives to managerial liberalism at scale?* Should states erect barriers to internal migration, or should we encourage The Big Sort?* How do we navigate the tension between publicizing our associations to gain power, and avoiding the Eye of Sauron?* Do you think there’s hope for deep institutional reform that could reverse the excesses of the Civil Rights Act, immigration amnesty, etc.?* Will the Republican Party remain a relevant force when Trump and the conservaboomers leave the scene?* How did you manage your exit from academia, journalism, etc.?* What do you make of Peter Zeihan’s argument that America’s continental geographic advantages will prevent partition?* What will the future of elections look like in the aftermath of Trump’s renegotiation of electoral and discourse norms?* If you could be an advisor to the major power brokers of the emerging counter-elite (Thiel, Musk, Trump, Vance, Andreessen), what would you guide them toward?* What practical actions can guys like us take to prepare for a potential Harris presidency?My takeaway:Scale and inhuman abstraction are the enemy; but fortunately, the managerial system has scaled way beyond its ability to command the loyalty and cohesion of human beings.As the consensus-generating organs of managerial liberalism get clogged with nakedly unprincipled deceit and slop, the scope of human organization will by necessity get tighter, and new things will be free to grow.The way forward is to build sovereign institutions at human scale, predicated on human judgment and initiative. Get to know your neighbors, learn how to get things people need, become useful to useful people.If you want to build that kind of connection with a network of values-aligned guys, apply for membership at exitgroup.us.EXIT News* On Tuesday night’s full group call (8/27), we’ll hear from Zach at shaolin.ai on how he used EXIT to build his machine-learning education business, the future of AI/ML in general, and how our guys can ride the wave instead of losing their job to it.* Shaolin has 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 to Zach in the chat.* Nowhere Summit in Ecuador was a great success. Our friends Ben Wilson (How to Take Over the World) and Alex Petkas (Cost of Glory) put together a terrific event along with our Ecuadorian hosts. I spoke on the state as an extension and abstraction of kinship — I’ll release a recording in the next week or so. We will have very exciting IRL collaborations to announce in the near future.* Solid turnout at the Salt Lake City meetup, with 27 members and their families. Big thanks to the fellas who came in from Idaho, Colorado, Las Vegas, Southern California.* Cocktail hour at the Great America hotel downtown* Unconference at a local park* Hiked in the rain up the Battle Creek Trail* Cookout at a member’s house* I’ll be at Network State Conference on September 22 in Singapore, and checking out Balaji Srinivasan’s Network School thereafter. If you’re planning to be there too, hit me up!* Cocktail hour invites for Houston (9/13), Washington, DC (10/11), and San Francisco (11/8) meetups available for paying subscribers. EXIT cocktail hours are a great opportunity to meet your local guys, and see if the full group is right for you.

The UK government appears to be successfully putting down the protests in the UK, making no concession or even acknowledgement of the protestors’ grievances.People on the Right are very smug about these things when they fail — they love to jump into the Twitter replies and register their satisfaction at being proven right once again.It’s obviously true that the UK is tyrannical and doesn’t care what its people think in principle — but there are people who have been able to make the government care what they think.The prevailing attitude toward politics on the Right is like a Melanesian who realizes that his bamboo airstrip and control tower are failing to summon the Cargo — so he knocks it all over & congratulates himself for being too smart to believe in airplanes.Politics doesn’t work the way you were taught in social studies, but it works — and our side should get a lot more curious about how it works.In this episode, we review David Kilcullen’s latest book, The Dragons and the Snakes, which addresses how the empire’s enemies have learned to fight it and win.In the first section, Kilcullen identifies the evolutionary process that has produced the surviving configuration of America’s enemies after 20 years of the GWOT. He discusses how these actors have been shaped by the present technological and cultural terrain — and especially how they have learned to draw power from global-scale economic and cultural power flows without making themselves a global-scale military threat that justifies American intervention.In the second section, he describes the process of vertical escalation, in which a weaker actor can calibrate its aggressive action to stay below a stronger enemy’s threshold of detection, attribution, or response — especially as practiced by Putin’s Russia.The Russians’ conventional military has been gutted by the shock therapy and corruption of the post-Soviet collapse, but they still have nuclear weapons and a very effective intelligence service — so they have learned to calibrate their conflict with the West to make best use of their peer capabilities, while avoiding a conventional war.He also describes how both the Russians and Americans use deniable methods (“election interference”, color revolutions, migrant warfare, etc.) to sow confusion and exploit internal divisions in their enemies’ political systems.Next, Kilcullen outlines the Chinese adoption of horizontal escalation as described in Unrestricted Warfare — in which a weaker actor fights in domains that their stronger opponent does not recognize as military, and may not even perceive as hostile.This method of warfare is also described as a “conceptual envelopment”, because the weaker opponent holds the stronger enemy to a standoff in the conventional military domain (in China’s case, building credible radars, AA systems, hypersonics, etc. in the South China Sea), but they conduct their real advance on the conceptual “flank” — in this case, buying strategically significant real estate and politicians, replacing Western manufacturing, encouraging mass third-world migration, and dumping fentanyl in the American heartland.As with a conventional flanking maneuver, the goal is to roll the enemy up from the rear, and only push through the front when the battle is effectively over.Kilcullen then suggests some possible ways that the empire might arrest or reverse its decline — but a radical renegotiation of American hegemony looks all but inevitable. We discuss what that might mean for us as ordinary citizens, and as targets of the regime’s hostility.The good news is that the most important preparation for what is coming is having useful friends you can trust — and making them is 100% legal. Join us at exitgroup.us.EXIT News* On last night’s full-group call, we discussed raising children in volatile conditions — specifically, how to negotiate their relationship with technology, with families who don’t share our values, and with hate facts.* Next Tuesday night, we will have a member’s only Q&A with Auron MacIntyre on his book, The Total State.* 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.* 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 for paying subscribers (no paywall on this post — you can access the RSVP links here). EXIT cocktail hours are a great opportunity to meet your local guys, and see if the full group is right for you. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit blog.exitgroup.us/subscribe

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit blog.exitgroup.us(Note: the “free preview” of this episode is the full version, and the full recording is also available for free on Spotify. EXIT meetup invites behind the paywall.)K9 Reaper is a private security contractor and community safety activist in South Africa.As a zoomer, he has no memory of the Before Times — but he has had a front-row seat as things have gone from bad to worse, particularly since the 2021 riots. Copper thieves who would have fled the scene with their hand tools five years ago are now firing on first responders with automatic rifles.The primary vector of state violence in South Africa is a kind of persecution-by-incompetence, in which white South Africans are shut out of the ever-expanding sphere of government investment while their productive efforts are heavily taxed, expropriated, embezzled, and wasted.The starkest symbol of this process is copper cable theft, in which multibillion-dollar energy infrastructure, painstakingly assembled by highly skilled laborers and engineers over decades, is sabotaged and stripped for a $50 payday at an illegal scrapping camp.As in America, the violence is outsourced via race-baiting propaganda aimed at the criminal underclass. But unlike in the States, South Africans enjoy broad latitude in patrolling their communities and violently subduing criminals — partly because the government needs them to maintain basic order, and partly because the government isn’t really competent to stop them.K9 Reaper notes that South African private security forces number 2.7 million, by far the largest such industry in the world — dwarfing both the South African police (~150,000) and the standing army (~100,000, including reservists).As the South African state receded in competence, private security filled the gap in an entirely legal and non-adversarial way, until eventually their role was integrated into regular law enforcement procedure.This process has unfolded gradually over decades, until one day, despite having no constitutionally guaranteed right to firearms or self defense — and in fact facing extreme racial disprivilege under the law — white South Africans have, in practice, more expansive “2A rights” than Americans.Ethnic enclaves like Orania also became possible on the same terms: not because the South African government is so tolerant and liberal, but because they simply don’t have the juice to do much about it.I wouldn’t trade places with them at this point, but it illustrates how declining states leak power, which always presents opportunity.It can be very depressing to discover that your “constitutional rights” are not self-enforcing. On the other hand, it’s liberating to realize that what matters is the practical question: what are you able to do, and who is going to stop you?Start building with us at exitgroup.us.EXIT News* On last Tuesday’s full group call, we discussed preparedness for election shenanigans.* This Tuesday we will have a hot seat and status update from one of the guys who quit his job and launched a healthcare startup last year. He used the group to find sales, IT, legal, and fundraising help, and is coming back to share what he has learned so far.* Side Hustle Summer is officially on as of June 1. Some of the current hustles: book sales, Twitter monetization, paid writing, a consulting product, an online lead-gen tool. If you’d like to participate, check in with DB in the EXIT chat before the week is out.* First planning call for the Grand Canyon hike is this Wednesday night. (Reach out in the chat for details.)* Cocktail hour RSVP links for New York City (6/21) and Columbus (7/19) below the paywall for subscribers. These are a great opportunity to meet your local guys and see if the full group is a good fit for you. Invites to the members-only portion of the meetup will be sent via email.

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit blog.exitgroup.usDavid Kilcullen is among the world’s leading experts in counterinsurgency and unconventional warfare. He served for 25 years as an infantry officer in the Australian Army, then with the U.S. State Department, where he was chief strategist in the Counterterrorism Bureau, Senior Counterinsurgency Advisor to Multi-National Force Iraq, and Senior Advisor for Counterinsurgency to the U.S. Secretary of State. He has written The Accidental Guerrilla, Counterinsurgency, Out of the Mountains, Blood Year, and The Dragons and the Snakes.We reviewed Out of the Mountains in EXIT Podcast #46: How Did The Taliban Win?We asked him to join us for a members-only Q&A on Tuesday night to discuss lessons learned from the Global War on Terror by all involved parties, and how the intelligence, information warfare, and enforcement apparatus built during the GWOT is now being turned toward domestic political conflicts in the West. Our Questions:* If there is civil disorder in the US, how does one avoid being either insurgent, counter-insurgent, or victim?* What caused the domestic US “color revolution” to fail where other election corruption challenges have succeeded?* What has changed since the publication of Out of the Mountains twelve years ago?* As you have observed the war in Ukraine, which of your ideas/models have been vindicated, and which have been challenged? * Could Erik Prince’s “East India Company” strategy of long-term deployed special forces and private contractors have stabilized Afghanistan?* Is mass demonstration a viable course when a protest movement does not have the complicity of the media?* What was the impact of the drug trade on the Afghan occupation?* Thoughts on the possible use of tactical nuclear weapons in Ukraine?* Thoughts on the transition of transnational criminal organizations to regular military and police forces?* What are the ingredients for a successful parallel movement?* How can geographically decentralized, network-state-style groups make good use of their distributed character rather than it being a liability?* What do you foresee from the coming sovereign debt and demographic crises in the West?* How is drone warfare evolving in terms of mass production and deployment?* Can/will opposing forces coopt the tactics of the managerial regime of the US?David spent over 90 minutes with us, not all of which is included in this recording — after which we took another hour amongst ourselves breaking down what it all meant.My main takeaway: Be the Good GuysThis is both a matter of optics and reality: many of the “bad guys” in Western foreign policy narratives are unambiguously good guys in the eyes of ordinary people in the countries in which they operate — and their success is very strongly correlated with the extent to which they are able to build and maintain that impression.In some cases this is because they represent various illiberal values that the people share — but it’s also because they do a lot of ordinary work to make themselves useful. They support widows and orphans, rebuild battle-scarred neighborhoods, clean up after natural disasters, haul trash, employ people (in non-combat jobs), resolve disputes, keep records, etc.This is good news for us, because it means that the right thing to do is also the smart thing to do.Instead of directly antagonizing the system (and the ordinary people who still depend on it), start doing the useful, uncontroversial work that the system has abdicated. Some ideas:* Teach regime-disfavored people marketable skills* Build businesses that can employ regime-disfavored people* Become an unimpeachable source of practical information in domains where mainstream sources are no longer trustworthy* Gather a group to join your local volunteer emergency services* Advocate for sanity in your local schoolboard* Build a homeschool co-op* Organize a litter cleanupOrdinary people care about security and good order way more than they care about any ideological program. A dissident movement that stands for increasing entropy, increasing chaos, increasing conflict — even if only in the short run — will struggle to persuade people with mortgages and mouths to feed.Only a movement that makes itself part of the infrastructure of normal life — especially in ways that expose the regime’s hostility to normal life — can begin to change popular intuitions about who the rightful stewards of peace and civilization are.EXIT News* Side Hustle Summer begins this Saturday, June 1. Come to the final planning calls this week and let us know what you want to do this summer.* On Tuesday’s weekly call (5/28) we will be discussing preparedness for election shenanigans. We’ll discuss what we learned from the last election cycle, how this round may be different, and what we can do to secure the people and places we care about.* Marketing call is moving to Thursday nights. This week, we’ll discuss marketing for an AI coaching tool and a management consulting firm.* A small group of the guys is organizing a Grand Canyon hike this August. (Check the chat for more details.)* Cocktail hour RSVP links for New York City (6/21) and Columbus (7/19) below the paywall for paid subscribers. These are a great opportunity to meet your local guys, and see if the full group is a good fit for you. Invites to the members-only portion of the meetup will be sent via email.

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit blog.exitgroup.usIn this episode, Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry discusses the rallye mondain, a network of parties and dinners that emerged among the French aristocracy in the 1950s, to confront the collapse of arranged marriage.It’s relatively simple: mothers and other relatives monitor their children’s social circles, determine which boys and girls should be connected, and then organize social occasions to make it happen. Invitations are extended privately, and the events have no online presence.Parents spread information about their local rallye by word of mouth: the types of events they organize, the standards of eligibility, the ideological or aesthetic bent of the families involved.The idea that adults should take an active role in crafting their children’s social opportunities isn’t exactly revolutionary, but the received wisdom in the West is that this is an impossible task for parents to execute competently.Most parents take for granted that whatever they place in front of their children will backfire spectacularly and drive them to the opposite extreme out of sheer embarrassment.Which is not a totally unfounded concern: unlike you or I, a cooperative of French aristocratic families can afford to make aesthetic investments, and controls access to an undeniably high-class milieu — but apparently PEG himself still declined his invitation to the rallye as a young man.Another point of difficulty for the rallye is agreeing on how selective to be, and along which axes: some of the families are bluntly concerned with aristocratic lineage; others are gated by income, or aesthetics. Some are elaborate, multi-stage events of training and acculturation; others are just dance parties for rich kids.We relate this to BAP’s thesis (reviewed below) which describes the necessity of existential pressure to force a shared understanding of what constitutes excellence and competence.Once an aristocratic society is liberated from those constraints, individuals and groups fly apart in all directions toward varied definitions of excellence, undisciplined by external reality — and some minority of those trajectories lead somewhere of lasting value — which is his explanation for the phenomenon of “high culture”.From this perspective, the rallye would be the effort of an aristocracy very late in its decline: near exhaustion, groping in a dozen directions, and without the power to generate the life-or-death competitive pressure necessary to ruthlessly demand excellence from the individual or the group.On the whole, it looks like an unusually successful rear-guard action from an elite that is in decline, but still a going concern, with elite privileges to bestow. It’s not obvious that such a program is practicable among ordinary cubicle-dwelling parents who can’t offer their children the same enticements.Until recently, BYU offered a more middle-class selective breeding package.The university did the hard work of selecting the top Latter-day Saint talent from all over the world and dropping them into a PG-13 meat market with other upwardly-mobile, spiritually-aligned Hot Young Singles In Your Area.Young Latter-day Saints with genuine elite potential would often do their undergrad at BYU instead of the Ivy League for several reasons:* No student debt (BYU tuition is going up, but it’s still one-third to one-tenth the cost of its nearest-ranked competitors)* If you don’t intend to drink, BYU offers far more interesting social and cultural opportunities than any comparable school* If you just want to make a lot of money and don’t care about Preftige, BYU is (or was) good enough by itself to get you on a respectable business or engineering track* Latter-day Saints have strong endogamy norms, and BYU is still indisputably the easiest place to make a temple marriage — you attend a student congregation with a throughput of thousands of young singles, and ecclesiastical leadership relentlessly oriented toward getting young men and women married* BYU students are extremely healthy and attractiveSo if you wanted the kind of elite career that could support seven kids on a single income, you’d make a pit stop at BYU to receive your standard-issue blonde waifu and debt-free, good-enough undergraduate diploma — a credible slingshot to a real elite graduate program if you wanted it.I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to call it one of the most beautiful human creations of the 20th century, in terms of the kind of people it produced and the way of life it offered them.And there’s still a lot to be said for it; but as elite employers and academic institutions make increasingly absurd ideological demands, BYU is struggling to credibly offer upward mobility while maintaining its religious integrity, and the current approach of splitting the difference isn’t working.The Church has signaled willingness to abandon BYU’s accreditation rather than surrender its distinctiveness, which is obviously good to hear — but they are facing an increasingly open revolt from faculty and administration, who come from secular universities bringing every modern pathology, and overwhelming air support from the national media. The effort to restore discipline hasn’t worked so far.If BYU can’t offer a meaningful filter for values-aligned dating and professional networking, it will fall to a new equilibrium — offering a middle-of-the-road state school education at a steep discount.But if you want young Latter-day Saints to start single-income families with seven kids, a middle-of-the-road state school can’t get them there anymore.And of course, once elite-potential kids stop picking BYU, it stops being a place to find other elite-potential kids, and the talent pump loses suction altogether.Which means that my tribe is going to have to bootstrap a new way of finding good matches for our kids, without the pedigree of the rallye.That starts with a genuinely admirable and excellent adult culture.If young people don’t find your way of life aspirational, and don’t want to become a grown man or woman in your social world, no amount of isolation or inoculation against the broader culture will matter.This is an extremely difficult problem — sitting your kids in front of Veggie Tales or putting a content blocker on your browser is way easier than making your life a work of art.I suspect that this is why so many parents throw their hands up at the work of culture, and allow their children to be raised by public schools and the internet.They recognize, on some level, that they are not personally excellent in a sense that is competitive with the dominant cultural paradigm — so they bury themselves in defensive irony, embracing that parents just aren’t cool.It’s not your fault that your children don’t respect you and don’t want to grow into your example: all teens are like that, it’s as inevitable as gravity.Fortunately, the dominant cultural paradigm isn’t as hard to compete with as it used to be.I feel no twinge of worry that my children will grow up to regret missing out on Lizzo and Lil Nas X and streaming slop.It’s extremely easy to explain to my kid what I find objectionable about genital mutilation and morbid obesity and infanticide, and even more everyday things like the way they see other kids and grown-ups treat each other.In a purely subtractive sense — the pathologies and unforced errors we avoid — the way of life we have to offer our children is already unambiguously better.The problem that I see among family men, in and out of the church, is that they’re so focused on working and spending time with their families, that by the time their sons are teenagers, they realize have no appealing adult world in which to initiate them.And all that effort to concoct the perfect childhood misfires, because childhood isn’t the point of childhood. You don’t get it by aiming at it.Manosphere guys used to talk about how “modern culture has no rites of passage into manhood” — but efforts to manufacture such rites always fail, because they have no valid object. There is no manhood into which to be initiated — and a debutante ball is incoherent without an adult society into which a young woman can debut.I suspect that this problem will be solved catastrophically in our lifetime.The discipline of survival pressure is already returning, in the form of demographic collapse. Ordinary people may not be dying violently, but they are increasingly dying childless — which, for the survival of cultures, beliefs, ideas, and phenotypes, is exactly equivalent.Getting an education and a job that can support a family, building a successful marriage, and having children are no longer social defaults — they are now existential struggles, and they demand particular types of excellence.As demographic collapse becomes an economic crisis in the 2030s, and states are increasingly incapable of providing basic opportunity and security, we will no doubt rediscover even more basic domains of excellence.The cultures that thrive will be the ones that coalesce around these virtues early and seriously — starting with the fathers. And it won’t be a LARP, because you’re really going to need it.EXIT News* On last Tuesday’s full group call, we had a hot seat for the founder of a healthcare startup to discuss some early scaling moves. He connected with a marketer, a recruiter, an investor, and a founder in a related industry with whom he can collaborate.* This Tuesday night (5/21) we will have a private Q&A with David Kilcullen, author of Out of the Mountains, and one of the world’s foremost experts in counterinsurgency. * We’re going to discuss how counterinsurgency, counterterrorism, and information warfare has evolved since the end of the Global War on Terror — and how lessons learned by all sides in that conflict are now being applied to internal political conflicts in the West.* If you want to refresh your memory on some of Kilcullen’s work, you can listen to EXIT Podcast #46: “How Did The Taliban Win?” in which I review Out of the Mountains. Members should submit questions for the Q&A by Monday night (5/20).* Side Hustle Summer is two weeks away. DB is hosting twice-weekly planning calls to help the guys to pick their project and get started. Reach out to DB or check the #entrepreneurship channel in the chat for more details.* Cocktail hour RSVP links for New York City (6/21) and Columbus (7/19) below the fold for paid subscribers. These are a great opportunity to meet your local guys, and see if the full group is a good fit for you. Invites to the members-only portion of the meetup will be sent via email.

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit blog.exitgroup.usHere’s the recording of this week’s members-only Q&A with Johann Kurtz, author of Becoming Noble.We asked him to come on the weekly EXIT full-group call to discuss his thesis that dissidents should use captured elite institutions as a springboard for their ambitions, even if it is impossible to steer or “subvert” them.We discuss:* Finding the joy in watch…

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit blog.exitgroup.usHere’s the recording of last night’s private Q&A with Clay Martin, former Green Beret and author of Concrete Jungle and Prairie Fire.We cover the following topics:* How to meet and vet the people you want on your A-team* How to control space without triggering hostility from the state* What skills and materials to accumulate* How to teach kids survival skills* Ho…

This week we're talking about:* The “entrepreneurial temperament” and whether it's real (answer: kind of)* Why our guys aren't preparing even though we all expect the world to go to hell* Why the boomer doomer prepper model no longer makes sense* Acceleration and deterritorialization — the increasing impossibility of preparing against one particular future* Looking for meta-adaptations - adaptations that make us better off across all possible outcomes* Why conservatism & reaction are always the losing side by definition* Learning from the technology brothers’ “just build” ethos* Why rebuilding civilization isn't an engineering problem and the technology brothers can't do itLearn more at exitgroup.us This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit blog.exitgroup.us/subscribe

This week, Stormy came to the EXIT group call for a little Q&A on venture capital — what his fund looks for in a founder, what they look for in a project, and how to work the network to get your pitch in the right hands.He also presented an interesting model of the various players in the global financial system — that the DNC is (for Epstein reasons) in thrall to the European banks, who need the US to join them in a central-bank digital currency regime in order to stave off the collapse of the European economy.American banks don’t want this, so they’re peeling off for Trump, along with certain constituencies in the Pentagon.A few days after Stormy’s presentation, JP Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon went to Davos and all but endorsed Trump; CNBC reports this as “U.S. executives in Davos see a Trump victory in 2024, and no cause for concern”.So I had Stormy on the podcast to talk more about his theory, and how we ought to prepare ourselves if it holds. Episode also available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, etc.Trump wins Iowa CaucusVivek and DeSantis are already out, and Trump has a double-digit lead over Haley in New Hampshire. It doesn’t look like the old GOP has any way to prevent a Trump/Biden race, and the fact that the DNC is burning so much political capital to disqualify Trump in court suggests that his lead is above the margin of fraud.The covert, “soft” instruments of political control are failing, and even if they were inclined to let him back in, Trump has signaled that he’s on a war footing against the managerial class. So it’s going to be an existential struggle, and all that’s left are the hard, coercive instruments of power.Texas Military Department seizes sections of borderThe Texas National Guard expelled Border Patrol from Shelby Pass, where federal agents have been breaking down barriers and openly abetting the traffic of illegal immigrants.They tried a media coup first, alleging that Texas had prevented them from rendering aid to a drowning woman. (Turns out they were lying about that, surprise.)So now it goes to the courts — but again it’s a case where the media and institutional power that would normally settle such questions has collapsed, and it’s unclear what comes next.Houthis blockade the Red Sea on the cheapHouthi rebels have choked off the sea artery between Europe and Asia with speedboats and cheap drones. They can’t stop all traffic, but they don’t have to — the insurance companies are doing it for them.The captain of the USS Eisenhower has steamed confidently on the scene, posting videos of tiny zoomer girls ceremonially taking the helm, and young sailors enjoying caramel macchiato and cookies.The message here is that America’s authority over the sea lanes is utterly uncontested — this barely even qualifies as a police action, and nobody should be concerned. But while the US Navy is indeed very capable of bombing the Houthis, Biden admits that the bombings aren’t actually securing the shipping lane.It’s just too cheap to inflict multibillion-dollar losses on the Empire, even without a direct military confrontation of any kind. This blockade will probably be cleared eventually, but it’s hard to see how it doesn’t spawn imitators.EXIT News* Charles Haywood will be taking questions about how he built his shampoo empire on this week’s full-group call. The call will take place Wednesday, at 8PM ET/5PM PT* One of the guys found a major investor for his startup in the group. Congrats!* We welcomed the owner/founder of a B2B business intelligence platform, a corporate lawyer specializing in on-side startups and investment funds, and a crypto expert who debugs smart contracts* The Utah boys are putting together some mini-hackathons for locals interested in tech projects.* The DFW guys got together for a quick lunch meetup.* One of our veterans did a Q&A on life in the military, how to make the most of the benefits, and who he would still encourage to sign up.* DC meetup is on February 2nd (one week from Friday).* Utah Valley meetup is on March 1st.* Seattle meetup is on March 29th.* This week’s working group calendar below the fold. In our working groups we set aside two-hour blocks to work on our personal exit, keep each other on task, and take accountability for our progress.If you want an invite to any of these events, sign up below — or check us out at exitgroup.us. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit blog.exitgroup.us/subscribe

In this episode I give my take on this year’s Natal Conference, why we started it, what we learned from producing it, and what’s coming next.MeetupsIn preparation for NatalCon 2024, we are hosting EXIT/NatalCon meetups every month, in locations all over the country. EXIT members, NatalCon ticketholders, and paid newsletter subscribers get in free, with your plus-one.Day One Video DownloadThe day-one video session will be available for download early next week.Pre-orders for 2024Natal Conference 2024 will be held in Austin TX next December. Exact dates TBD, but subscribe here or at natalism.org for a pre-order discount. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit blog.exitgroup.us/subscribe

BAP’s dissertation argues an ostensibly narrow point: that Socrates had it coming. The execution of Socrates is usually characterized as the persecution of an innocent free-thinker, but BAP says that Socrates (and the teaching of philosophy as such) had radicalized the Athenian youth toward antinomian tyranny — the throwing-off of all law and custom in favor of “the justice of nature”, that might makes right.He traces this back to the philosopher’s discovery of nature as a concept — that there are unchangeable realities (and hierarchies) in the physical world that are outside the purview of law, or custom, or even the gods.The discovery of nature, in turn, emerged as a consequence of an aristocratic breeding program: a quest by conquering minorities to hone themselves, as individuals, into the most physically and psychologically dangerous human specimens. BAP explores the Greeks’ obsession with blood, heredity, nature, and the trial of one’s nature in the agon, the contest.He argues that such a breeding program could only emerge in a warrior aristocracy, ruling an unrelated subject population by force, and experiencing “the pathos of distance”: a feeling of isolation from the customs and beliefs that govern the herd.As the breeding program progresses, it begins to generate characters of such strength, will, cunning, and aloofness that they become dangerous to the integrity of their own societies.This consummates in the person of the philosopher (who breaks free of the society’s customs psychologically) and the tyrant (who breaks free physically). As the warrior culture buckles under the strain of its own success, and the conflicts between the dangerous men it has created, the discipline of the breeding program begins to fail, leading to a “tropical proliferation of human types” — extremely refined and competent human specimens flying off in thousands of directions, pursuing all sorts of objectives.It is precisely in this moment of aristocratic decadence and collapse that genius and high culture are produced, as the aristocratic genius, bred for war, seeks out creative and psychological frontiers.The aristocratic warrior culture no longer meaningfully addresses the concerns of the aristocracy — and so, in an effort to save it, the philosopher abstracts and radicalizes its principles. But this only accelerates the collapse, as it extends the pathos of distance from the weaklings and slaves among the common folk, to everything that is weak and slavish within the aristocracy.The tyrant becomes a kind of radical “hyper-aristocrat”, treating the ruling class itself with the predatory contempt that had previously been deployed outward, toward the matriarchal communism of the peasants.During Socrates’ lifetime, Greece was threatened by a series of tyrants, many of whom he had personally tutored. This led to the execution of Socrates, but also a general persecution of philosophers and philosophy as such.In BAP’s view, Plato’s later invention of “moral philosophy” — the use of philosophy to encourage justice, temperance, and prosociality — was a ruse intended to end the persecution and enthrone philosophers as the arbiters of convention and morality, displacing the priests.This preserved the practice of philosophy and the knowledge of nature for centuries — until Christianity embraced this public-facing Platonic morality and radicalized it, abandoning the concept of nature in favor of moralizing egalitarianism. And so, in BAP’s view, the career of Platonic Christianity has been a long, slow slide back to the totalitarian matriarchal democracy of the longhouse.Why does this matter?BAP’s understanding of our current state of cultural decay is based on two premises:* Excellence is the only thing that justifies human existence. “Mere life” — ordinary life, survival and comfort for its own sake — is of no value, and possibly even negative value.* Excellence is purely a matter of biological material — it is inborn and cannot be taught.I disagree with his maximalism on these points, but surely excellence matters. I don’t want to live in a world without beauty and brilliance and heroism and strength. And I don’t believe excellence is entirely a question of biology and heredity, but obviously those things count for something.And if we agree that far, then we’ve got the same problem: our culture is at war with excellence. Not just a particular category of excellent people, but with excellence as such — with the idea that anything is better or worse than anything else.The way we form families, our de facto breeding regime (and it is a ‘regime’, defined by culture and policy) is a catastrophe — a system as cruel and as sterile as the Spartans’, but with the effect of degrading health and vitality, rather than improving it.But I don’t believe that waiting for the collapse and preparing our bodies for the Thunderdome is a complete solution. If Plato had just waited for Athenian society to collapse so he could join a warband, his project would have failed entirely.Instead, he leaned into his society’s new complexity, searching out unguarded doors and looking for power that could be taken without resistance. That’s exactly what we’re trying to do with EXIT.Also: being a Trad Dad isn’t everything, but you can’t have aristocratic breeding if you don’t breed. As far as I can tell, demographic collapse is the immediate and comprehensive threat to the survival of human excellence. I wanted to bring together smart and capable families to find solutions, which is why I started the Natal Conference.I didn’t have a “pitch” in mind when I decided to review this book, but basically all of my projects revolve around these primal concerns — I want my kids to be excellent, and I want them to have excellent families of their own. I want them to have access to the best possible mentors, playmates, rivals, and partners — which, in 2023, makes me a dangerous extremist.Anyway it’s a great book, and you should buy it. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit blog.exitgroup.us/subscribe

Oppenheimer is an intimate portrait of a sensitive young man who did nothing wrong.I could smell that something was off about this movie, so I went home and did some digging, and it turns out Oppenheimer was very obviously a Soviet spy. The problem is that half the academic and political establishment of the United States was in the tank for the Soviets at the time, so the question of what it meant to be a “traitor” was somewhat complicated.Oppenheimer’s crime was basically that he had Asperger’s and couldn’t lie as effectively as other highly placed American communists. Things that had been perfectly acceptable to say for 15 years under the Roosevelt Administration had become suddenly dangerous to say under Truman and Eisenhower, and he couldn’t handle the pivot.His fall from grace is depicted as a product of irrational and excessive Cold War paranoia, but it was basically the opposite: he gave away the power to murder billions to one of the most bloody-minded regimes in history, and the American government was too compromised and divided to do anything about it.This story struck me as relevant to our interests at EXIT for two reasons:* It’s worth understanding how we got where we are. The institutional power that we’re up against wasn’t built in a day, and it didn’t start with George Floyd, or Obama, or the student movement in the 1960s. Marxists have had significant control over elite American institutions for as long as there have been Marxists, and the Cold War was primarily a covert civil war within those institutions, which the anticommunists lost decisively.* Despite being completely mendacious about the history, the movie is a solid illustration of “manipulation of procedural outcomes” — the ways that nominally impartial processes and “expertise” can be leveraged against the political enemies of the powerful. In this episode, I explain how these processes are deployed against people like us today, and what can be done about it.The single largest point of vulnerability for American’s freedom of speech and association is corporate employment. Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 places the onus on corporate employers (with more than 15 employees) to police their employees’ speech about protected categories of people in any context “relevant to the workplace” — including personal social media activity.But the good news is that punishing dissent within the W-2 system is so cheap and effective that very little thought has been given to punishing dissent outside it. Once you own your income stream, it becomes orders of magnitude more expensive to guarantee your compliance: requiring either sustained mob action, or lawsuits, or criminal charges, none of which are feasible methods to suppress dissent at scale.The best defense against this kind of attack, for ordinary people, is simply “don’t be there”. Don’t have an income that can be cut off with a single phone call to your HR representative. Don’t have a two-income household that makes you dependent on ideologically hostile government schools. Ideally, don’t stake your economic survival on any single point of failure.This summer, four of the EXIT guys have gone full-time on their startups. They started in the accountability calls, workshopping their idea and gathering potential partners. Then they built teams, including software developers, attorneys, accountants, designers, salesmen, and investors. So far, we’ve raised a combined $450,000 across the network to launch these projects.We have the people and the resources to build the future we want. If you’re ready to get to work, join us today at exitgroup.us. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit blog.exitgroup.us/subscribe

Johann Kurtz, author of the Becoming Noble substack, relates his experience in Big Tech, and why he believes dissidents underestimate these companies as a launching point for their ambitions. We discuss:* What megacorporations know that online dissidents don’t* Getting into a top tech company without a STEM degree* Preparing for a highly competitive interview* Finding friends and allies without revealing your power level* The horizons that open up after a few years undercoverYou can read the article that inspired this conversation here: This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit blog.exitgroup.us/subscribe

In this episode, Drew Gorham and I announce the first annual Natal Conference, December 1-2, 2023 in Austin, TX.Declining fertility is the most important issue of our generation — we discuss the economic, political, and cultural consequences of this decline, what may be causing it, what can be done about it, and what we hope to learn from the conference.You can get your tickets now at natalism.org, sign up for our newsletter, and follow the conference on Twitter. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit blog.exitgroup.us/subscribe

EXIT member and shaolin.ai founder Zach Martin and I discuss what the machines have planned for us in 2023.* What creatives and wordcels need to learn to make money with AI* How a large language model like ChatGPT differs from true AI* How NLP opens up new frontiers for machine learning & surveillance* Why ChatGPT probably isn't the Singularity* Launching a business with EXIT This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit blog.exitgroup.us/subscribe

Even among smart dissident types, the default explanation for the Taliban’s victory in Afghanistan is basically just “grit” and “sticktuitiveness” and “giving 110%” (plus maybe “asabiyyah”, which is a $10 dissident word for “teamwork”).But if that was the secret sauce, it doesn’t explain why ISIS collapsed under comparatively light military pressure, never to return; or why Al Qaeda is basically a dead meme.Out of the Mountains doesn’t set out to answer that question — it was published in 2013, when Afghanistan was nearly pacified, al Qaeda was still a going concern, and ISIS was the new hotness in Sunni extremism.In fact, Kilcullen’s thesis is that urbanized, internet-savvy, transnational guerrilla movements will be able to access power flows, and it’s a pretty persuasive thesis — but with a decade of hindsight, it turned out to be the comparatively rural, isolated, local movement that defeated the empire. So what happened?The short answer is that they auditioned to replace the state across the spectrum of control — including punitive violence, but also the pedestrian tasks of recordkeeping and adjudication and governance. They wove their legitimacy into ordinary people’s water rights, their inheritances, their personal disputes — so that even people who were indifferent to the Taliban’s ideological program became invested in the Taliban’s stability and growth.This is also, by the way, exactly how the American diplomatic corps conquered the world — by becoming the broker and underwriter of international agreements that even unaligned (or even unfriendly) countries come to depend on. That authority requires global force projection to be credible, of course, but force projection alone is not enough.In this episode, I explore how non-state groups hide within, and eventually capture, the power flows that make a state a state, and what we can learn from it. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit blog.exitgroup.us/subscribe

My conversation with Clay Martin — Green Beret, preparedness expert, and author of Concrete Jungle, Prairie Fire, Last Son of the War God, and Wrath of the Wendigo.We discuss how to network and prepare without getting Waco'd, how to teach boys what they need to know without getting sued, who you need to know in your local area, and how to be useful in an emergency when you're not a leg-breaker.Power is always a question of who you know — an extended emergency situation just changes which skills and connections are most valuable. At EXIT, you can find experienced entrepreneurs to help you launch an ecommerce business, or a SOF veteran to teach you how to shoot straight and secure your home. You can learn from experienced crypto developers and investors, or get help planting potatoes and raising chickens. Join us at exitgroup.us. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit blog.exitgroup.us/subscribe

Our resident fed @DegreeStudies is back to talk about the Musk Twitter purchase, the RW blackpilling in response to the midterm fiasco, and the desire to lead versus the desire to serve. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit blog.exitgroup.us/subscribe