Ben Wilson runs the How To Take Over The World podcast. He is also an OG EXIT Man, and my co-founder at Constitutional Action — which began over steaks at the Utah Valley EXIT meetup.Ben’s podcast focuses on great men of history, and the lessons we can draw from their lives in achieving our own ambitions.EXIT is a fraternity dedicated to shorting managerial systems, and building the human institutions that come next. Learn more here:Too often, the study of history devolves into materialist analysis — human outcomes unfolding deterministically, according to iron physical and economic laws. It locks analytical thinkers into the belief that nothing can change, nothing can be done, that individual human agency is irrelevant.Like so many things, history can be either a tool that makes you powerful, or an excuse that makes you weaker.Ben has spent years gathering practical insight from history as the biography of heroes and villains — asking in every episode, “How did this extraordinary man find solutions to the problems of his time? What did he see that no one else saw? What did he do that no one else was doing?”In this podcast, we discuss the opportunities that lie in volatility.Ben uses the examples of Napoleon, Alexander Hamilton, and John D. Rockefeller to illustrate:* Why great men crave volatility: because it shatters moribund hierarchies and opens the way for new growth* How great men use volatility: how they exploit new frontiers and patiently prepare for opportunities* How great men survive volatility: how they measure risk, maintain discipline, and choose when to strikeWe also discuss our plans for Constitutional Action: why we have to build now for the political and social changes that we can all see coming, and why Constitutional Action is the way to contest the regime’s legitimacy.EXIT News* Weekly Full Group Calls (Tuesday nights, 9PM ET/6PM PT)* This week (5/26) we heard from EXIT man Nick on Boomer Whispering — how to find common ground and build what we need to build with our boomers (we love our boomers, we have the best boomers) in politics and business.* Next week (6/2) we will have our Investment Showcase, with EXIT men presenting startups and projects for which they are seeking investment. (EXIT makes no endorsement of any of these projects, presentations are for educational and entertainment purposes only, everyone must do their own research and risk assessment.)* The following week (6/9) we will hear from Kevin Daley and Davis Hunt on political action in Nashville. Davis is the founder of Pamphleteer, and has organized excellent events to connect aligned people, including the Erik Prince Q&A with IM-1776.* EXIT Member Events (see group chat for details):* 5/30: Utah Valley Constitutional Action Beautification Event* 6/4: San Francisco Meetup* 6/5: Stanford Meetup* 6/6: North Bay Meetup* 6/6: Utah Valley Meetup* 6/12: Nashville Meetup* 6/13: Houston Meetup* 6/13: Budapest Meetup* 6/15: Dallas Meetup* 6/19: Atlanta Meetup* 6/19: Denver Meetup* 6/20: Columbus Meetup* 6/27: Salt Lake City Passage Press Event* 6/27: St. Louis MeetupSubscriber Events (RSVP below): 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
May 22, 202643 min
Fellow Creators the Creator Seeks
The Free State Party invited me to speak at their event in Manchester, New Hampshire this week.It was a chance to pitch what we’re doing and why to a crowd that was values-aligned, but not steeped in exactly the same memetic environment.The “elevator pitch” for this thing is difficult, because you have to question so many premises and dispute so many definitions.I could feel that they liked certain things that I was saying, but I was not quite establishing the connective tissue that made it all hang together: Managerialism [“what is that”], and therefore natalism [“what is that”], and therefore Great Houses [“what is that”], and therefore fraternity [“what is that”], and therefore entrepreneurship [“oh, ok”].People recognize that family formation has collapsed, politics are out of control, they don’t live in the country they thought they did. It’s a relatively short walk from there to “liberalism as runaway civilizational entropy”.But then to point to “where it all went wrong,” and what can be built that will survive the crisis, you have to cover some pretty difficult ground.It’s not enough to say “we have to go back to 1950” (or 1650, or 600 BC) — that can’t be done.In order to build for the future, you have to think about what civilization is doing, and why it has gone awry, and what is worth trying to save as we pass through this catastrophic historical bottleneck.Preparing for the Free State Party event was a great exercise, because it forced me to re-examine the chain of thought that brought us here — but because I hadn’t accurately mapped out the conceptual distance between us ahead of time, I don’t think I was able to communicate to that room exactly what I intended.So the above podcast is my attempt to do that plumbing a little more carefully. I still don’t have a pithy, 30-second pitch that gets people nodding along — and maybe that’s just not possible for this — but the essence is that we have to rebuild the engine of civilization, starting with family and fraternity.The prompt they gave me was to discuss “iteration”: which is distinct from replication.Our goal cannot be to rewind and replicate some prior civilization — nor can you replicate your own genetics or attitudes or worldview with any fidelity (and it would not be worth doing if you could.)Instead, you have to cultivate people who cultivate themselves — fellow creators. (This is the actual meaning of the word “culture” — yet another term that has to be redefined.)You have to recognize the children you raise, not as extensions of yourself, but as conscious, embodied expressions of what you love and value: works of living art. And then you have to build the economic, cultural, and political machinery that allows them to build families that reflect their highest loves and ideals (which, again, will not be — and should not be — exactly your own. The art is to beget artists.)This deliberate approach to life and culture — life as art — is a matter of survival, because family formation has become an expensive and increasingly unusual “lifestyle choice”. You have to supply some compelling vision, or your children simply won’t do it.In other words: your family (and humanity at large) is going to consciously orient toward a shared vision of glory and beauty, or it is going to end.EXIT is a fraternity dedicated to shorting managerial systems, and building the human institutions that come next.EXIT News* Weekly Full Group Calls (Tuesday nights, 9PM ET/6PM PT)* This Tuesday (5/19), we had our Member Q&A with Joost Strydom, CEO of Orania. A deeply inspiring discussion of the community they have built, against all odds, in South Africa. Full recording coming soon.* Next week (5/26) we will hear from EXIT man Nick on Boomer Whispering — how to find common ground and build what we need to build with our boomers (we love our boomers, we have the best boomers) in politics and business.* The following week (6/2) we will have our Investment Showcase, with EXIT men presenting startups and projects for which they are seeking investment. (EXIT makes no endorsement of any of these projects, presentations are for educational and entertainment purposes only, everyone must do their own research and risk assessment.)* Events* 5/30: Utah Valley Constitutional Action Beautification Event* 6/5: San Jose Meetup* 6/6: San Francisco Lunch* 6/19: Denver Meetup* 6/27: Salt Lake City Passage Press EventLinks to EXIT cocktail hours in San Francisco (6/5) and Denver (6/19) available to supporting subscribers here.EXIT cocktail hours are the best way to get to know the guys in your area, and decide if full membership in 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
May 14, 202614 min
We Have to Prove It (Constitutional Action, American Fork Veterans' Hall, 4/30/2026)
Below is my speech from Constitutional Action at the American Fork Veterans’ Hall, April 30th.At last month’s meeting, we presented a historical model for what is happening in Utah, & how we got here — and I made the case that we need a state government willing to defend its citizens and their rights under the Constitution, instead of using the letter of the law as an excuse to ignore the spirit.The question that I hope it raised in your minds is, how do we get there? Can we get there?I’m here tonight to tell you that we can.EXIT is a fraternity dedicated to shorting managerial systems and building the human institutions that come next. Learn more here:I suspect most of you are here because, like me, you feel like you’re going a little bit crazy.You grew up in a state that was arguably the most cohesive and functional place, in a much more cohesive and functional country.Now, you’re watching as the Republican state government sells your home out from under you in a hundred procedural ways.The Republican state legislature and governor appointed a single “expert” (who happened to be a radical leftist activist) to assess the performance of every judge in the state.This year, through the Better Boundaries initiative, Republicans have handed one of those leftist judges the authority to unilaterally redraw our Congressional districts, creating a radical socialist seat in Salt Lake City.That seat was just won at the Democratic state convention by Liban Mohamed, thanks to a Somali ethnic political machine that the Republican Party willfully imported, along with tens of thousands of “refugees” and hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants, all protected by de facto sanctuary policies.After decades of work by Republican lawmakers, Salt Lake City is as violent, depraved, and dysfunctional as any blue state capital, with the flag of the big gay empire hanging from every parapet — and every year, the tumor spreads further into the suburbs.The Utah Board of Higher Education, hand-picked by the Republican governor, runs the leftist indoctrination factory where Charlie Kirk was assassinated. The State Board of Education — which is elected by the voters and is 88% Republican — employs the same insane Bolshevik teachers as every other public school system in America.Again, this is the third most Republican state in the country — effectively a one-party state — and they are consciously, deliberately, systematically working to replicate the squalor and corruption of San Francisco or Minneapolis.Maybe ordinary liberals in the 90s could not have anticipated how bad it would get — but how perverse would you have to be to walk into this with your eyes open?Supporting newsletter subscribers receive access to our full library of paywalled member Q&As, and invites to local EXIT cocktail hours. You can also subscribe for free to get EXIT updates in your inbox.But when you try to explain this to your friends and neighbors, they have no idea what you’re talking about.The people who are doing this are world-class at evading responsibility, maintaining a stable decline, and keeping up appearances.The trajectory of our state looks dramatic if you can remember what life was like ten years ago — but that’s just not how the median voter operates.They’ll say, sure, Salt Lake County is a mess, but all cities are liberal — you can always move another 15 minutes out into the suburbs. Sure, the schools are bad, but you can apply for a charter school. Sure, there’s a drug problem, but not for you and me, not for our kids, right? Sure, houses are getting unaffordable, but that’s a pretty cool deal if you refinanced at 2.9% five years ago. Nothing a little conservative personal responsibility can’t solve. It’s not that bad, you can fly above it. Maybe you should get offline and touch grass.And even if you convince your friend that these problems are real, what are they supposed to do? Are we supposed to vote for Republicans harder?And then you get into a much trickier conversation. At a certain point you have to acknowledge that actually, the Republicans are the ones doing this to us.Why?Because the Republican Party’s purpose is to slowly fail.In frontier America, including in the Utah territory, the federal government employed Indian Agents. These agents were sent to establish official relations with the local Indians — to create a formal channel that the Indians were supposed to follow if they had a grievance with the settlers or the government.Of course, the intent of federal policy was always to move in and expropriate the Indians — but the Indian Agent’s job was to create the illusion of a diplomatic process — to continually make promises they couldn’t keep, to vent political energy, to prevent alternative constituencies from forming.Today, that’s the Republican Party’s job: to negotiate the terms of your surrender.The party recruits ambitious men who want a career in politics. They ensure that those careers depend on the national party infrastructure, the donor networks, and the consultant class. These are people who like making friends, and making money, and being taken out to lunch.It is extremely cozy — for now — to be a Utah Republican politician who does not make waves. And not only that, the media will fawn over you, and tell you what a hero you are for abetting the rape of your country.Now, the Plains Indians were in an impossible situation, hopelessly outnumbered and outgunned — but our puzzle is, Heritage Americans are still more than half the country, and the overwhelming majority in Utah. They’re way more than half the police and armed forces. Our Indian Agents tend to be local boys — and from what I’ve seen, we’re not sending our best.Nothing about this feels inevitable.How did they convince us to do this to ourselves?Anti-Soviet dissidents in the Eastern Bloc faced the same confusion. The Soviets repressed the population with military force, but the actual officers and bureaucrats, the functionaries of the regime in East Germany were mostly East Germans; Poles in Poland, Hungarians in Hungary.In his essay, Power of the Powerless, Vaclav Havel talks about the greengrocer who hangs his “Workers of the World Unite” poster in the shop window — not because he’s a committed Communist, but because it’s simply what you do — and if you didn’t do it, it would be noticed.Do you remember the black square thing, during BLM?That whole operation was designed around the scrolling grid of an Instagram feed — the whole grid was supposed to be blacked out, so that if anyone was saying anything else, it would stick out, and you could mob them and berate them for not complying.According to Havel, the greengrocer is not expressing a political opinion. What he’s saying is: “I, the greengrocer, live here and I know what I must do. I behave in the manner expected of me. I can be depended upon and am beyond reproach. I am obedient and therefore I have the right to be left in peace.”If that doesn’t sound like Utah.It’s stunning how much of Havel’s essay, written in the Brezhnev era of the declining Soviet Union, maps to what we experience today, from the hypocritical language of human rights, to the judicial corruption, to the underhanded methods of punishing dissent — by threatening your job or your education, encouraging petty harassment, and so forth. It’s almost one-for-one — except instead of being conquered by Soviet tanks, we somehow voted for this.How did they convince us to do this to ourselves?Well, we talked a bit about how that happened last month — how the federal conquest of Utah created an institutional anxiety to conform — a tyranny of the people, by the people.But the question now is, how do you break people of that?You’ve tried talking to your friends and neighbors, and you’ve seen how that has gone. It’s easy to get discouraged.But go read Havel’s essay. Havel was a playwright — he ran little gatherings smaller than this one, under a far more heavy-handed regime, with a much more openly corrupt political and legal system — and he won. Havel was the first elected president of Czechoslovakia.I’ve spent the last five years — since we started EXIT — studying any parallel movement that I thought might have anything to teach us.How did Havel go from being an underground essayist, running little reading groups and secret university classes, to taking the Presidency almost unopposed in 1989?How did Lech Walesa go from being an electrician in an illegal trade union, to executing a 12-million-man general strike that crippled the Soviet government and ended the occupation of Poland?How did the Founding Fathers go from anon poasters to fielding a conventional army and beating down the most powerful empire on the planet?Some of you are anon poasters. Maybe you’ve been talking about politics on the internet for a long time, and from here that kind of victory may seem far away.It feels like ideas don’t matter — it doesn’t matter how clear it is, or how right you are — your grandma is still going to vote for Spencer Cox, and Spencer Cox (or someone just like him, he’s not the point, there’s a thousand of them) is going to make sure that your dispossession is orderly, quiet, and complete.But if your model of victory is that your grandma needs to get redpilled, you need to understand: that’s just not what politics is — neither transformative politics, nor even ordinary get-out-the-vote politics.It’s not that ideas don’t matter, or that poasting never leads to power: in fact, almost all parallel movements start with poasting. The Founding Fathers had their pamphleteering, the Soviet dissidents had samizdat, the Ayatollah smuggled cassette tapes.But the Founding Fathers didn’t win by getting the median American colonist to read their essays on political theory.They won by mobilizing an energetic and dedicated minority to contest the regime’s legitimacy, and then contest its sovereignty — and that’s what politics is.Each of these parallel movements began by building fraternal, economic, and social institutions among a small group of like-minded people, to replace the public square that repression had hollowed out.They formed book clubs, neighborhood watches, mutual aid societies, trade unions, underground universities — they got to know and trust each other by building things that they knew their community needed. That’s what EXIT is doing as a fraternal organization, and Constitutional Action is the logical next step.You don’t break the greengrocer’s habit of obedience by getting him to read your Substack. You break his habit of obedience by showing him an alternative way of life, by proving to him that he does not have to lie.That’s what it means to contest the regime’s legitimacy — you contest its status as the default, because the greengrocer, or your grandma, is always going to do the default thing.And the methods that a movement uses to contest legitimacy are, by definition, moral, lawful, and popular. They have to be, because that’s what legitimacy is.You have to demonstrate, by doing what the regime purports to do, and promises to do, that all its compromises, all its hypocrisies, all its excuses for inaction, are lies.President Bukele didn’t just call the Right in El Salvador cowards and hypocrites — he proved that they were cowards and hypocrites by doing in a matter of months what they said could never be done.They said that attacking El Salvador’s crime and gang problem would be too unpopular, it would collapse the economy, it would trigger international sanctions, it would start a civil war.Bukele showed the world that those politicians weren’t letting it happen because they were prudent or high-minded or pragmatic — and they sure as hell weren’t thinking about the rights of their citizens — they were just on the take. And now he is the most popular head of state in the world by far. But he couldn’t just say it — he had to prove it.Lech Walesa was able to mobilize 12 million Polish workers because he showed them what it looked like when an institution actually organized and empowered workers — and by doing that, he showed them just how fraudulent the communists were. He broke the back of the regime’s legitimacy — but not just with a criticism. He had to show them.I don’t know if you’ve read your county’s Republican Party platform, but it’s actually pretty good.In Havel’s words: ”If an outside observer who knew nothing at all about life in Czechoslovakia were to study only its laws, he would be utterly incapable of understanding what we were complaining about.”The Republican Party claims to believe in states resisting Federal power in accordance with the Tenth Amendment. They claim to believe in self-defense, traditional marriage, secure elections, public safety, and parents rights in education. They claim to oppose illegal immigration, birthright citizenship, and benefits for illegal aliens.Now — you live in a state completely controlled by these people, from top to bottom — but they tell you that the reason you can’t have literally anything that they claim to want is that your Republican politicians are just that principled, that committed to civic virtue.Of course that’s a joke — but we have to prove it.So Constitutional Action is developing candidates for office who will act within their constitutional authority, to demonstrate what is possible in this state.Anti-communists in Eastern Europe had the idea of life in America, or Munich, or Paris, they had smuggled Japanese electronics and Led Zeppelin albums, to prove that life could be different.This was a mixed blessing, because it also meant that many people who wanted freedom and vitality simply left the country.But freedom-loving people all over the nation are watching Utah right now — because for us, there is no Munich or Paris — there is nowhere to run. If we cannot hold the line in Utah, we cannot hold the line anywhere.But this is also our opportunity. We can make Salt Lake City the most beautiful, vital, free city in the country — the example of what is possible to the whole nation. And we can do it by restoring the principles that made America the City on the Hill in the first place.And in the meantime, we will do the work as citizens.Friends who are watching Utah right now are ready to publicize corruption as we expose it.We will clean up the squalor that the state refuses to clean up, and help the people they refuse to help — and we will document what we find, and ask them publicly, in city council meetings and town halls, why they refuse to help.We want the people to see — and, just as important, we want you to see — the people with names and faces who are suffering in your state — and the people, with names and faces, who are inviting and intensifying that suffering — sometimes for money, sometimes for much less. We will make them look us in the eye.We will use state public records law to obtain information that Utah Republicans don’t want publicized, about exactly who is being arrested in our state and who is being released, and for what crimes.We will investigate fraudulent refugee and homeless initiatives connected to elected officials in the state, and expose the channels by which Utah Republicans get paid to betray their people.We will monitor public schools and libraries to ensure that they act in harmony with the intent of state law, and we will hold administrators publicly accountable when they cover for abusive and anti-American teachers.We will phone bank and knock doors to oppose the retention of corrupt judges, and to ensure that Blake Moore is not allowed to sell his Congressional seat to the radical left and then buy another one.The purpose of all this is to punch a hole in the Republican apparatus of managed decline —To bring state and national attention to incumbents who are used to doing their work in the dark.And into that gap, we send our own people — leaders who will act to solve the problems we expose.We will prove that Utah’s actual values can win, and that our people can govern themselves according to those values — that decline is not inevitable.We will prove, in fact, as the Eastern Europeans did, that it is our enemies who are on borrowed time: that it is the lying — the absurd lying — that cannot go on forever.And when it breaks — as lies always break — we will have built a city, and a state, and a people who point the way for America, as America once did for the world.EXIT News* Upcoming EXIT Group Calls* 5/19: Joost Strydom, CEO of Orania, will join us to discuss how they built a parallel polis in South Africa. (2PM ET/11AM PT)* Please note that this will be an afternoon call, to accommodate Mr. Strydom’s time zone. At the regular time (9PM ET/6PM PT) we will have a postgame members-only conversation, and discuss the establishment of the EXIT HQ/Clubhouse in Utah Valley.* 5/26: Nick Weil will discuss the art of the Boomer Whisperer* 6/2: Investment Showcase — an opportunity for EXIT entrepreneurs to give a report on their progress. (If you’d like to be included in the showcase, please reach out ASAP.)* Events* 5/16: Washington, DC Meetup* 5/16: Sandy, UT Hike* 5/18: New York City Meetup* 5/18: Dallas Meetup* 5/19: Manchester, NH Meetup and speaking event with Free State Party* 5/30: Utah Valley Constitutional Action Beautification Event* 6/5: San Jose Meetup* 6/6: San Francisco Lunch* 6/19: Denver Meetup* 6/27: Salt Lake City Passage Press EventBelow the paywall here:Cocktail hour invites for supporting subscribers in:* Washington DC (5/16)* Dallas (5/18)* New York City (5/18)* Boston (5/19)* San Francisco (6/5)* Denver (6/19)EXIT cocktail hours are the best way to get to know the guys in your area, and decide if full membership in 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
May 1, 202632 min
John Carter of Mars: Canada's descent into post-national gangsterism
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)
April 16, 202628 min
Q&A: Johann Kurtz on reconnecting wealth, vision, and ambition (Re-release)
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)
April 10, 202625 min
You Don't Get To Know
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
April 7, 202628 min
Q&A: Johann Kurtz on reconnecting wealth, vision, and ambition
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)
April 3, 202637 min
Constitutional Action
[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
March 11, 202651 min
The Ordeal of Incivility
[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
January 30, 202637 min
How to Short the US Government (with Joshua Sheats)
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…
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