This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit blog.exitgroup.us Will Tanner of The American Tribune joins EXIT to explain why three Cavalier civilizations — Rhodesia, the English landed gentry, and the Virginia planter class — produced leaders of extraordinary caliber with remarkably little social friction. He walks us through the Virginia cursus honorum that proved and developed elites, how these elites built social capital through hos…
October 16, 202639 min
Crowns in the Gutter (Q3 Review/Q4 Preview)
Every quarter at EXIT, we have a review and preview, looking back on what we did in the last quarter and what we’re going to do next. We’re coming up on 350 guys, and the group’s getting big enough that it’s starting to get hard to keep track of everything that’s going on. My right-hand guy, DB, who’s a former community organizer, has this habit: Whenever somebody in the group does something impressive in the real world, he says, “You bring honor to the group.” When he first started doing it, I thought it was a little cheesy. But the more we develop this thing and realize what we’re actually doing here, the more I realize that we have to talk openly about what we honor. If you want guys to play honor games, care about their reputation, and conduct themselves in conformity to some ideal—to LARP in the sense that the Founding Fathers LARPed as Romans—then you have to tell them what that ideal is. You have to tell them when they’re hitting it. Secondarily, it had the benefit this quarter of allowing me to search for the phrase “bring honor” in the group chat. It immediately pulled up dozens of great things the guys have done in the last quarter. Of the 340 or 350 guys in the group, 50 or so have become involved at some level in their community’s politics. We had a lot of guys get made delegates back in the spring. Several have been appointed to leadership or communications positions in their county GOP, and virtually all of these organizations are basically nursing homes. If you’re 35, 40, 45, even 50, you’re the young blood, the new hotness. They want you around. They want to hear what you think, and they want to plug you into positions of responsibility that they’re not interested in doing anymore. Especially in these comms roles, which can be heavily facilitated by AI, you can wind up exercising a quasi-executive authority: you get to decide what gets said by your county GOP, or at least have a lot of influence over how it gets said. That can be a significant source of power in its own right. One of the guys lives in a very conservative small town, almost an intentional community. He started noticing vagrants at the town’s only public park. Like a lot of our guys, he’d been checking in and taking accountability on our civic engagement call. We’ve been encouraging guys to do area studies—really, network mapping—as part of their civic engagement and preparedness: taking stock of where local power flows, who you know, and what your reputation is with various people. It’s a small enough town that he knows the mayor and the police chief. He also has a very large traditional Catholic family. He called up all his brothers and sisters, and they called their friends, and they got 20 or 30 people to come to a city council meeting. For this little town, that was absolutely unheard of: a shock-and-awe level of political signal. It wasn’t as though there were some pink-haired constituency actively trying to keep these vagrants in the park. Nobody knew whose job it was or what the protocol was, and nobody wanted to stick their neck out. That’s how a lot of these things go. There are a lot of bad things happening in our community, in your community, that there’s no sinister constituency for. If you’ll speak up and create the permission structure for action, you can get things done that pretty much everybody wants done. The sheriff went down to the park, got the vagrants on a bus, and this little town lived to fight another day. Things like this really are where power resides: who decides what is acceptable in the parks, schools, and libraries you pay taxes for. To the degree that it’s not you, that’s the degree to which you are under occupation. We have guys all over the country talking about how their parks are unusable, how they’ve pulled their kids out of the schools, how the libraries are having drag queen story hour and Banned Books Month, which is basically porn they wouldn’t include in the schools. Of course, this group’s called EXIT. We believe in strategic disengagement from institutions that create these vulnerabilities. But the purpose of that disengagement is to build capacity and leverage, to go back in, reenter those systems, and recapture them. By engaging with his distributed, like-minded community, this guy got some tools and ways of talking and thinking that he could bring back to his real-world community. He flexed this civic muscle in a way that every politically involved person in that town now knows about. Another guy, who’s been running our community engagement call, which is less explicitly political, put together a Fourth of July parade for his neighborhood. As I understand it, it was a few classic cars and motorcycles people had, and Radio Flyer wagon parade floats. He had dozens of people on his street contribute and get engaged, and they were excited to do it again. They wanted to make it a tradition. Now that street has a culture, a “thing we do around here” that it didn’t have before. He was the guy who got to decide the texture and color of that story the neighborhood now tells itself about itself. We’ve had about a dozen guys get involved in the Trump administration at various levels. Some have joined ICE and can now give us this rich, ground-level picture of what deportation operations actually look like, what the command structure’s doing, and what the narrative is among actual ICE agents. I can’t say too much about it, but there have been at least two items in the news that, if you’re an online Trump person, you would’ve heard about. EXIT guys in the administration have been working on them for several years and have finally been able to execute and announce them through official cabinet-level channels. One of our guys got the president of an Ivy League university to resign this quarter. Several quit their jobs and went full-time on their startups. One got significant purchase interest for his intelligence startup. Another successfully defended his dissertation on the appropriate application of AI in pedagogy: what helps kids learn and what makes it harder for them to learn. Now he’s going to be running our AI youth build-a-thon here in Utah on November 21. We observe that Utah public schools, like a lot of public schools in America, like having the freedom to assign kids essentially fake work. They’re very hostile to AI because it allows kids to outsource the form-filling and worksheets. We consider this an extremely important crown in the gutter. Millions of parents want their kids to have an appropriate relationship with AI. Obviously, they don’t want to let them outsource everything and vegetate. But it’s increasingly clear, if you have a career in almost any field, that some proficiency with these tools is going to be essential to earning a living. Over the last couple of years, I’ve watched the job market go from extremely hot in late 2021, with 0% interest rates and VC money flying everywhere, to this weird new situation where you can build data centers, be a quasi-entrepreneurial AI contractor, or maybe grab a piece of all this defense-base, reindustrialization, command-economy cheddar floating around. But everybody trying to work a regular job, the kind of jobs that existed 10 years ago, is having a really difficult time. We’re running this educational initiative through the Natalism nonprofit because this basic ability to earn a living is going to be one of the biggest bottlenecks to family formation. Our headline sponsor for the event is OpenAI. They’re providing the tokens free of charge. We’re looking to get 200 or so kids, middle school to high school age, in two cohorts on a Saturday. One stipulation of OpenAI’s sponsorship is that we can’t sell tickets. To cover the startup costs, which are looking like $13,800, we’re asking people to go to projectpaideia.com/sponsor , and help sponsor one of these kids to learn about AI. For future events, we may provision the tokens differently so it can be self-sustaining and we can sell tickets. For this one, we’ve got to raise the capital. We want to get all our kids using these tools effectively and, just as importantly, not using them in harmful ways. It looks like this technology is what my friend Greg Treat calls an aristocratic technology: it provides highly asymmetric benefits to people who have the aptitude to use it. It empowers individuals and disempowers giga-scaled institutions, which suggests that you’re going to be able to take responsibility for more of your own life, but you’re also going to have to take more responsibility for your own life. Yes, you’ll have to be more entrepreneurial and think more about fundamental questions of value in your work, because anyone who can feed you this clock-in, clock-out work product to execute on is going to be feeding that work product to an AI instead. But that extends way beyond the job market. It extends to your cybersecurity, your physical security, your psychosecurity. One consequence of AI for mass media is that all kinds of digital simulacra—the manufacture of consensus, the sense of virality, the sense that everyone is inhabiting a common narrative—are now effortless to manufacture with total verisimilitude, indistinguishable from the real thing. There’s going to be this stark division between people who can control these tools and people who are controlled by them. We’re getting these kids together in an environment where the adults teach, facilitate, and create the conditions and space for the kids to build, but the kids do all the building. They’ll have a handful of team sprints, and at the end they’ll present what they made in small groups. A lot of the EXIT guys have already come through as sponsors or helped with event planning, marketing, or securing the venue. This is the kind of thing people talk about. It sounds like a great idea, but as an individual, I personally would’ve had no idea how to pull it off. You get enough high-quality guys in a room together, and these things figure themselves out. Other news from Q3: A couple of the guys planted EXIT’s banner atop the highest mountain in Idaho. We’re in charge in Idaho now. Remain calm. Do not attempt to interfere. Constitutional Action had seven beautification events this quarter: two in Utah, one in New York, one in Nashville, one in Seattle, one in Dallas, and one in Montana. We do these cleanups partly to attract like-minded people, partly to build organizational capacity, but also to show people what’s going on in their community and how easy it would be to fix if the people in charge wanted it fixed. We went to this beautiful public park, Memory Grove. It’s a veterans memorial a thousand feet from the Utah State Capitol, and it’s very nicely kept at eye level. But on this hillside, just beyond the tree line, you’ve got drug dens, needles, knives, and open latrines. If you’re in the governor’s office or the statehouse, you can look right at it from the building. We pulled four truckloads of this garbage out into the open where people could see it. They were appreciative, but they were also shocked. They were stunned that all this was happening just out of sight from where their kids were playing. Once you recognize that this is the third most Republican state in the union, overwhelmingly dominated by the Republican Party, you’re almost forced to confront some interesting questions. Who are these people? Who’s really in charge? The voters obviously don’t want this, and they’ve said so at every turn. Why aren’t the voters getting what they want? We also did a 250th-anniversary barbecue at the Theater in the Pines, a beautiful outdoor amphitheater. About 100 people came out. Kai Schwemmer, the political director of National College Republicans, spoke to us. My Constitutional Action co-founder, Ben Wilson, and I presented a vision of what’s possible in America if our political leaders view the Constitution as an inspiration to act rather than an excuse for inaction, which is absolutely what it is here in Utah. Last month, Mike Shelby from Forward Observer came out and presented on counter-organizing against the radical left here in Utah, once again filling the American Fork Veterans Hall with patriots. He asked that I paywall it on Substack because a lot of it will serve as material for other things he’s working on. Subscribers can access that recording here . On our Tuesday night member Q&A, we had calls with Auron MacIntyre, Patrick Casey, Will Tanner, Kaiser von Loengramm, Scott Greer, the Woolshire fellas, and Jeremy Kauffman. We had our investment showcase, where several guys with startup opportunities gave their five-minute pitches to an audience of 85 or so EXIT guys. We had book clubs on Albion’s Seed, The Aeneid, A Handful of Hard Men (about the Rhodesian SAS), The Ancient City, and Scott Greer’s White Pill. I realized something important this quarter as we celebrated the five-year anniversary. (August 5, 2021, was when we started the group.) As much as I value getting things done in the real world, most of our big wins—and certainly the biggest outlier wins—have come from guys collaborating from all over the country. In hindsight, that makes a lot of sense. When you have this limited supply of high-quality guys scattered across the country, the odds that all the ingredients you need for this big outlier serendipity, for lightning to strike, will happen to be located in the same place are pretty low. I’ve really been pushing the guys to come to the calls. A lot of people have Zoom fatigue, but I’ve been doing a lot of Zoom over the last five years, way more than I did at my Square job. I think people aren’t bothered by Zoom. They’re bothered by having conversations they don’t care about with people they don’t like. So that’s what we got done in Q3. Our theme was “Making hay while the sun shines.” Summer was winding down, and it got us thinking about all these ephemeral opportunities, these burning platforms we’re on. Smart people sometimes face that with a lot of anxiety: “Oh no, everything’s changing. Everything’s unpredictable. What can I do?” One thing we talked about at the 250th-anniversary barbecue was the extent to which all these old systems—the ones propping up the dollar, house prices, and your fake email job, all the guarantors of normalcy—are also keeping us stuck. They’re preventing power relationships from being relitigated, preventing all sorts of things from being built, figuratively and literally. If you can accept that this state of things is ephemeral and think, “What can I do? What capacity can I build? What resources can I accumulate that will be relevant on the other side of all this volatility?” then you can start to think of this as liberating. You can make hay while the sun shines. In the fourth quarter, we’re talking about crowns in the gutter. What stewardship, what responsibility, what authority is being abdicated so that we can either contest it and win or take it unopposed? That’s the upside of living in a profoundly dysfunctional time. There’s all kinds of responsibility being abdicated everywhere you look. One of our friends, Fugitive Caesar, spent the last two weeks banging pots and pans, trying to get guys who have jobs connected with guys who need jobs. He was doing it in this loosey-goosey, attention-grabbing, unorthodox way, and a bunch of people had a problem with it. Connecting needs and resources is a lot of what we do, and we’ve learned a lot about it over the last five years. But the most important thing I’ve learned is that all the respectable people who know the rules and know how to handle this exactly the right way aren’t doing it. Somebody’s got to pick up the stick and figure it out. A bunch of people were literally like, “No, you can’t post unvetted opportunities. What if someone gets kidnapped and raped and eaten by Albanian drug traffickers?” Give me a freaking break. Anyway, the point is that all sorts of important jobs that could make a guy a load-bearing pillar in his family, friend group, or community are currently not being done by anybody. This quarter we’re thinking: how can we get guys picking up crowns in the gutter? We had our third annual EXIT retreat in Austin this weekend. I think we’re going to make it twice a year and have another one in March or April. As part of these retreats, we always have a strategy session. What abilities have we cultivated in the last six months to a year? What do we expect to see coming in the next six months to a year? What’s going to change? What do we think the weather and the zeitgeist will be like, and how can we take advantage? If these predictions seem obvious to you, that’s good. We don’t necessarily want to get cute. We want to respond to what’s obviously happening, what’s right in front of us. The biggest item is the AI revolution. For me, Opus 4.6 was the big inflection point where I thought, “I have to use this all the time now.” A lot of our code guys got there earlier. Grok Bot feels like another step change. I’ve automated all sorts of things in the last couple of weeks. What we’re observing is that the guys getting the best use out of AI also seem to be getting the best use out of EXIT. It’s the guys who have the greatest emotional and intellectual clarity about what they want. Or, if they don’t know what they want, they’re willing to have a lot of conversations and try a lot of blind alleys so they can figure it out experientially: “I tried that. That wasn’t it. So what is it?” That’s one reason accountability calls are so effective. If you keep showing up, you’re going to sign up to do things, then not do them, and then have to chew on and articulate why you didn’t do them. You’re always signing up for things that are, in principle, attainable. You have to look at yourself in the mirror and say, “I could have done that, and I didn’t do it. Why didn’t I want it the way I thought I wanted it?” That process only sharpens with AI. You have the genie in your phone and on your computer, and you can have a velocity of design, testing, and iteration that giant corporations with dedicated R&D departments couldn’t pull off 20 years ago. It’s this muscle of wanting, this precision and clarity of wanting, this appetite for experimentation that seems to make people successful. There’s almost certainly an extent to which that characteristic is spiritual or genetic, something that’s not teachable. But I’ve seen it happen, including in myself, that you can take someone who seems unfruitful and help them refine and sharpen a vision until they hold it with enough clarity that they can taste it. They can feel that anticipatory eros that drives them to do the necessary work. As a strategic objective, we’re working on tools for guys inside the group, and people who may be interested in the group, to clarify a vision they could pursue with the group’s help. That would make them more effective at using all kinds of meta-adaptive resources, omni-tools. A curated human network is an omni-tool. Money is an omni-tool. AI is an omni-tool, a sort of liquid intelligence. The bottleneck seems to be knowing what to ask for. We talk a lot at EXIT about human cultivation: cultivating ourselves, our posterity, our communities, which is culture in the original sense. That’s what we’ve lost. If you and the people around you aren’t being cultivated into any particular thing for any particular purpose, then there is no culture. We’ve organized the main lines of effort for the next quarter into self-cultivation, cultivation of the fraternity, and cultivation of our outside communities. Self-cultivation AI upskilling will be a primary line of effort. We also have our ongoing six-month fitness challenge, which will conclude in the new year, and we’re continuing our book clubs. It’s never been more important to stay grounded in history as the present moment drags you deeper into algorithmic feeds that are increasingly effortless to falsify. Part of the task of self-cultivation is to stay human and read books. The final line of effort in self-cultivation is our investment fund. We’ll continue encouraging guys to participate in the entrepreneurship accountability calls, the investment and real estate calls, and get advice, encouragement, and psychological support from the guys. But we also want them explicitly investing together. The reason is that you can’t buy fraternity. A lot of well-intentioned efforts toward fraternity in recent years have taken the view that if we get together people who check the right boxes—our kind of people, who look the right way or vote the right way—and tell them they’re a fraternity, they will be a fraternity. That’s obviously not the case. There’s a rhyme with what the rationalists were up to in the 2010s: “Religion is clearly this very useful social technology. What if we just had a religion? What if we told ourselves we were in a religion?” But all the things that make religion meaningful in your life, all the sociological problems it solves, it solves precisely by making people irrational, immovable, and self-sacrificing. Other people can count on them, which means big, complex, robust institutions can grow, made of these building blocks of reliable relationships and reliable people. By analogy, if you want fraternity, it’s in the name: you want fictive brotherhood. You want people whose fortunes, interests, futures, and souls are aligned with yours indissolubly, the way a brother’s are. There’s no buying that with money. What you can do is find baseline-competent, values-aligned guys who want to play games of honor. You can create a walled garden or green zone in which excellence, loyalty, and good faith are explicitly rewarded with trust and opportunities. A place where your reputation matters to you in both a concrete and a spiritual sense, where it’s worth cultivating because these are people whose respect is worth having. We’re talking about building a place where it’s possible to live in covenant. In our last long-form piece, “Mom Is Working for Moloch,” we put forward the thesis that fertility decline, particularly women’s increasing disinterest in raising a family, is largely the result of the destruction of these thick, illegible, reputational human domains of life where all the incentives for raising a family live. It does not make rational economic sense for a deracinated, disembodied productivity unit to breed. There’s no way to incentivize that as a transaction. People will only raise families in covenant, meaning in an illegible, personal, eternal milieu, playing an eternal game. If you create an infinite transactional marketplace, infinite buyers and sellers, where the commodities of sex and intimacy can be traded frictionlessly, where there are no penalties for defection and no reason to care about reputational capital, some people are willing to live that way. But empirically, they aren’t willing to breed that way. If you want civilization to continue, you have to restore the capacity for human beings to live in covenant. It has to make sense to play very long games, infinite games, eternal games, theoretically unbounded games. I don’t just want what’s good for me out of this transaction. I don’t just want what’s good for you. I want what’s good for your grandkids and my grandkids. That’s the task of fraternity. The only way to create brotherhood on purpose is to get people to place bets on each other and forge this shared history. You could think of it as a reputational commonwealth. I care about my honor in the group. I care about your honor in the group. I care about the honor of the group itself to the outside world. The more I’ve placed bets on you and you’ve placed bets on me, and those bets have paid off, the more we together have an interest in seeing this thing succeed. Our interests converge in the limit. That’s no longer theoretical. I’m watching it happen. That’s why we want guys building and investing together. Short of a combat situation, which you can’t manufacture, staking your fortune, some piece of your livelihood, is basically the most intense, dicey way to figure out who your friends are. I’ve observed this personally. The guys who went in with me on NatalCon and split a $120,000 s**t sandwich with me because it was our first event and we didn’t know what we were doing. The guys who stayed up late grinding spreadsheets and got on planes with me to assess this beeswax processing facility we were trying to buy. On a certain level, I know who those guys are. I know how they handle pressure. I know how they take feedback and give feedback. I know in a concrete sense what they’ll sacrifice to behave honorably and keep faith. I had known these guys well before we contemplated doing any of this. I wouldn’t recommend that anybody jump into something like that, even within a curated community. That’s the whole point: you can’t buy fraternity. You have to build it. But there are ways to make it easier to build. That’s the question I’m always trying to answer with these strategic initiatives. How are we building a shared history? What can we do to shorten the gaps people have to cross to place a reasonable bet on another person and start building? How do we build actual fraternity? The challenge we’ve had from the beginning is that we’ve got all these guys online, all over the country. They’re great guys, and they like talking to each other, but there are fundamental limitations to what you can do virtually. I’ve realized this is not a new problem. It’s been a problem for European aristocracies since there have been European aristocracies. Because they governed these big landmasses, they were of necessity separate from one another. They solved that problem with feasting, hunting trips, and debutante balls. These practices often get criticized in modern culture as wasteful, extravagant, and undemocratic. But if you belong to a far-flung people and want to maintain and keep building your shared history, making sure your children find their spouses, rivals, and mentors in this distributed social milieu, then you need to travel. You need to make some provision of resources and hospitality for people to come visit you. If that’s your ambition, what you aspire to do and be, then feasting, entertaining, and hospitality are totally legitimate line items in the budget. Our guy Jonathan puts a ton of effort into making a great EXIT retreat in Austin every year. The guys in Dallas are putting on their second annual Manifest Destiny Ball the first week of November. They explicitly patterned this after the rallyes mondains, which Pascal Gobry came to tell us about a couple of years ago. These French aristocratic families spare no expense putting together a circuit of great parties so their children can meet and socialize with the kind of people they’d like them to marry. It’s one step of abstraction up from arranged marriage. We’re not telling you who to marry or what set of people to marry. We want to make sure you have strong, lifelong relationships with this broad set of people, this type of person we’d like you to eventually marry. This will be my family’s first time attending. We’re sponsoring the event, so we’ll have our banner hung with the other families. Every family has a banner with its crest and words, and they’re beautifully done. You can say it’s a LARP, but everything good starts as LARP. They called it the Manifest Destiny Ball because they wanted a celebration of American identity looking forward, looking to new frontiers. We’re throwing a Halloween party with Passage Press on the 29th in New York. We’ve got at least two Christmas parties in the pipe. We’re collaborating with Delphika for a great American weekender here in Salt Lake. The point of all this is to create the space for that shared history. Work, entrepreneurship, and civic action are important. But if you want to get the families together and have them build a shared history, which we do, you’ve got to do some feasting. Cultivating community We’ve talked about self and the fraternity. Now, how do we build a shared history with our neighbors? How do we build a shared history with our city? How do we cultivate a reputation for good faith and competence with them? How do we expand the green zone, the walled garden, to include at least some of the people we live around? Our friend Clay Martin wrote a great book, Prairie Fire, in which he picks apart this prepper mentality: “I have money. I’m going to buy my country bugout, my dacha in the woods, and stockpile my food and ammo. When the dust settles and things calm down, I’m going to go into that country town with my Goldbacks and silver bars and buy up the place. People will give me everything I need because I’ll have the ability to pay for it.” Clay, among many other impressive things, is a former Green Beret. So, within the special forces, he’s a specialist in dealing with insurgency and counterinsurgency: coming into a country and knowing how to work with the locals. He says, “If you don’t build any relationships within your community, the moment you walk down Main Street with your Silver Eagles or your Bitcoin wallet or whatever you think you’re going to buy things with, they’re just going to shoot you and take it.” Even if you don’t think we’ll experience that degree of dysfunction, the principle still applies. As things get more uncertain and volatile — however uncertain or volatile you think they’ll get — the well-being of the people around you and their good opinion of you will matter more. We’re accustomed to these big, faceless managerial rails that deliver everything we need seamlessly to our doorstep. If you’re taking a short position on those systems, which we are — that’s the EXIT thesis — then you’ll need a new way to get all the things you used to get on those automated, managerial, trustless rails. To the extent we can, we want to make sure we’re individually and collectively well-known and well-liked in our communities for doing important things people need. Like a lot of things we do, we’re not banking on one particular timeline, one particular eschaton. This is all stuff you’ll be glad you did no matter what. You’ll be glad you built these skills, made these friends, and built these relationships in your community. In the interest of lowering that activation energy, making it easier for people to cross the chasm and get started, we’re rolling out a template for area studies, specifically with an eye toward community engagement. Mike Shelby, from Forward Observer, a former Army intelligence guy and an EXIT man, wrote The Area Intelligence Handbook, which I recommend to absolutely everybody. It lays out a framework for exploring and documenting your human geography, physical geography, and the world around you that immediately affects you, primarily, in his use case, as a preparedness tool. Our twist on this area-study format is locating those crowns in the gutter so our guys can win honor in their communities, acquire reputational capital. We want to help them refine and clarify their vision for what they want to do and what they’re interested in, then support them in conducting an area study of their community to figure out where the levers are that will allow them to instantiate that vision. Then we’ll connect them with the resources of our strategic leadership team, a group of 25 or so guys inside EXIT who help facilitate what we call quests. To make it easier for guys to take these leaps, the leadership group helps with anything that can be done remotely: emailing volunteers, working with a municipality, putting together resource lists and how-to guides so guys aren’t going in blind and know what to do. As we iterate on this process and our guys develop their capacity as leaders and organizers, maybe they get put in a position of responsibility in their local community. That opens up further quests, new opportunities for the guys to organize and build. We’ve got the midterms coming up Going back to the inflection points we considered at our Austin retreat, in addition to the opportunities and volatility created by AI, we’ve got the midterms coming up. We talked at some length about contingency planning and what we’d do in either case. The conclusion was that you have the technological situation, the entrepreneurial situation, the opportunity to be productive and make money. Then you have the political situation and its various threats and opportunities. If the GOP wins the midterms, we get right back to making hay while the sun shines. We continue upskilling our guys in AI, getting them involved in some of this defense contracting, having our glove up for all this money still sloshing around, as well as the opportunity to train and become familiar with technology that’s clearly going to become more important as time goes on. If the Democrats win the midterms and some of those opportunities are reversed or dry up, and the psychological energy of our friends and allies is more anxious, more fearful, then we immediately go to work metabolizing that energy to get ready for 2028. A lot of our guys with AI chops have interesting ideas for disrupting campaign management. It’s still pretty low-tech. The tools and intelligence haven’t caught up, and there’s a real opportunity to catch some of our opponents with their pants down. The ongoing, unfolding psychological and spiritual crisis That brings me to the last point we discussed at the retreat: people’s demoralization over the political situation, their anxiety over seemingly intractable economic and social problems, the growing ghettoization and unreality of all the channels we use to get information about the outside world. People have a lot going on, and they’re not handling it particularly well. A lot of people are coming unglued personally. A lot of families are strained. If you’re on Twitter, you can see every day how much effort goes into jamming a wedge into all these fault lines: men and women, the young and the old, religious fault lines. It’s a constant flood of provocation. I was telling the guys at the retreat that I’m not, by nature or temperament, particularly serene or low in neuroticism. I’m actually a pretty anxious person. But because I have this job, which I owe to my friends who helped build this with me, I never feel like a spectator. I never feel like I’m watching helplessly as things happen to me. I think that’s what’s messing people up. They feel, and they’re deliberately being made to feel, that the situation is hopeless and completely outside their control. They’re perversely consuming that content as entertainment, and they feel guilty about it. But they also have this idea that these unfolding events are important and they should know something about them. It’s almost self-hypnosis, almost literally like a deer in the headlights, fixated on this thing coming right for you. I remember exactly how that felt. But these guys who believed in the mission, believed in me, put me to work. They gave me a quest. I knew what I had to do, and suddenly I could metabolize bad news into action. It didn’t sit like a rock in my gut anymore. That’s what I want for everybody, but particularly those guys. I want to do for them what they did for me: put them in the driver’s seat, give them the space and resources to iterate so they can find the quest. That’s Q4: crowns in the gutter. All kinds of opportunities, all kinds of good things to do. If you want to get involved, check out exitgroup.us . You can apply there and set up a call with me. We’ll talk about your situation and what you want to get done. Assuming there’s a fit, we’ll get you engaged with the welcome wagon guys right there on the call, get you in touch with your regional EXIT guys, assign you a file leader, and figure out which calls you need to join and who you need to talk to. Then you’ve just got to show up. Come to a call, come to a meetup — let the guys know in the chat what you want to accomplish, and get to work. EXIT News * Weekly Full Group Call * This week (10/13) we heard from Joshua Sheats on his efforts to build a Great House, his homeschool curriculum, etc. * Next week (10/20), we will welcome The Good Ol’ Boyz (Bog Beef & Maarek) to discuss the future of the GOP and finding opportunities for our friends. * The following week (10/27) we will welcome Ronald Dodson , CEO and portfolio manager of Dallas North Capital Partners, and author of The Eyes of Apelles, to discuss reading global risk: what the current geopolitical landscape means for markets, and how men can position their families and businesses for what’s coming. * EXIT Events: * 10/17, Dallas: Constitutional Action Beautification Event. EXIT and Constitutional Action are getting together to clean up a neglected cemetery in Oak Cliff. Sign up here to join us. * 10/29, New York: EXIT + Passage Press Halloween Party. Join EXIT and Passage Press for a Halloween party at Pubkey in Manhattan. RSVP here . * 11/07, Dallas: Manifest Destiny Ball. EXIT families across Texas are getting together for a black-tie event to celebrate our heritage and look toward our common future. (Members only.) * 11/13, Salt Lake City: The Great American Weekender. In collaboration with Delphica, Frontier Magazine, and IM-1776, EXIT is hosting a weekend salon here in Salt Lake City. RSVP here . * 11/21, Orem: Paideia Buildathon. We are hosting a youth AI buildathon — getting teens to build their own games, websites, etc. Sponsored by OpenAI. Admission is free . Sign up here . * Monthly private dinner meetups for EXIT members (members can check chat.exitgroup.us or monthly internal newsletter for details): * 10/17, Houston, TX * 10/17, Columbus, OH * 10/19, Dallas, TX * 10/24, St. Louis, MO * 11/07, Orem, UT * 11/13, Nashville, TN * 11/14, Houston, TX * 11/14, Seattle, WA * 11/14, McCall, ID * 11/16, Dallas, TX * 11/20, Atlanta, GA * 11/20, Washington, DC * 11/21, Columbus, OH * Events with Friends of EXIT: * 10/19, Nashville: Peter Thiel Lecture Series with Pamphleteer. Dr. Bennett will be attending the fourth and final lecture of the series. RSVP here . * 10/21, New York: Michael Anton book signing event. Reign (formerly Sovereign House) is hosting Michael Anton to discuss and sign his new book, Studies in Machiavellian Political Philosophy. RSVP here . * 10/24, Atlanta: 1903 Club Exclusive Dinner Featuring Andrew Isker. Andrew will be speaking on his new book, “The Seed of Abraham.” Private four course dinner. Jacket required, ties encouraged. RSVP here . * 12/19, Atlanta: 1903 Club Exclusive Dinner Featuring Jeff Deist. RSVP here . This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit blog.exitgroup.us/subscribe
October 10, 202629 min
Free State Party with Jeremy Kauffman
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit blog.exitgroup.us Jeremy Kauffman is the founder of the Free State Party in New Hampshire. He organizes libertarians in New Hampshire through schools, community centers, homeschool pods, and other parallel structures, while encouraging them to engage in politics through the Republican Party. He presided over a recent (hilarious) campaign to disband the Libertarian Party. We had him on the EXIT Q&A to discuss practical power, coalition politics, narrative strategy, and multi-generational community-building. Topics: * “Playing the heel” and expanding the Overton Window so that others can quietly accumulate power * Managing relationships between establishment Republicans and libertarians * Free State Party’s policy priorities, and concessions his people have won in New Hampshire politics * Picking winnable fights in state/local politics * Mobilizing small numbers of dedicated, competent people to outsized effect * Building density of like-minded families to build healthy peer groups EXIT News * Weekly Full Group Call * This week (10/6) we heard from Douglass Mackey on facing prosecution for memes, declining a pardon, and courage under fire. * Next week (10/13), we will welcome Joshua Sheats to discuss his efforts to build a Great House, his homeschool curriculum, etc. * The following week (10/20) we will welcome The Good Ol’ Boyz (Bog Beef & Maarek) to discuss the future of the GOP and finding opportunities for our friends. * EXIT Events: * 10/09, Austin: Annual EXIT Retreat. Jonathan has reserved an Airbnb in the Texas Hill Country for our third annual Austin weekend. Steak dinner, private tour of a MAHA intentional community southwest of town, hiking at Pedernales Falls State Park. (Members only.) * 10/17, Dallas: Constitutional Action Beautification Event. EXIT and Constitutional Action are getting together to clean up a neglected cemetery in Oak Cliff. Sign up here to join us. * 10/29, New York: EXIT + Passage Press Halloween Party. Join EXIT and Passage Press for a Halloween party at Pubkey in Manhattan. * 11/07, Dallas: Manifest Destiny Ball. EXIT families across Texas are getting together for a black-tie event to celebrate our heritage and look toward our common future. (Members only.) * 11/13, Salt Lake City: The Great American Weekender. In collaboration with Delphica, Frontier Magazine, and IM-1776, EXIT is hosting a weekend salon here in Salt Lake City. RSVP here . * 11/21, Orem: Paideia Buildathon. We are hosting a youth AI buildathon — getting teens to build their own games, websites, etc. Sponsored by OpenAI. Admission is free. Sign up here . * Monthly private dinner meetups for EXIT members (members can check chat.exitgroup.us or monthly internal newsletter for details): * 10/10, Houston, TX * 10/10, Phoenix, AZ * 10/16, Atlanta GA * 10/16, Washington, DC * 10/17, Columbus, OH * 10/19, Dallas, TX * 10/24, St. Louis, MO * Events with Friends of EXIT: * 10/10, Knoxville: FORUM event + Football watch party. Join Mass Deportation Coalition and FORUM for a discussion of immigration policy with Ryan Neuhaus and Greg Bovino, followed by a watch party for the Vols game. RSVP here . * 10/10, St. Louis: American Fiction Event. Join Oyarsa for an evening of readings feat. Theodore Judson of ARK Press, author of Fitzpatrick’s War and The Timerman , and John Jay Stancliff of Farthest Heaven, author of FEDBOOK. RSVP here . * 10/19, Nashville: Peter Thiel Lecture Series with Pamphleteer. Dr. Bennett will be attending the fourth and final lecture of the series. RSVP here . * 10/21, New York: Michael Anton book signing event. Reign (formerly Sovereign House) is hosting Michael Anton to discuss and sign his new book, Studies in Machiavellian Political Philosophy . RSVP here . * 10/24, Atlanta: 1903 Club Exclusive Dinner Featuring Andrew Isker. Andrew will be speaking on his new book, “The Seed of Abraham.” Private four course dinner. Jacket required, ties encouraged. RSVP here . [nothing below paywall — paywall is for access to full video conversation]
October 2, 20265 min
Counter-Organize & Win, feat. Mike Shelby
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit blog.exitgroup.us Mike Shelby is a former military intelligence officer, contractor, author, EXIT man , and Founder and CEO of Forward Observer , a private intelligence service. The second edition of his book, The Area Intelligence Handbook , is scheduled for release later this month. Starting this quarter, EXIT is collecting area studies from all over the country — starting with Mike’s book as a template — to identify targets for prosocial action between now and 2028. Last month, Constitutional Action hosted Mike at the American Fork Veteran’s Hall, to discuss how ordinary Americans can bring their friends and neighbors together to push back against radical leftist organizing in their communities. Notes: 0:00 Welcome & Constitutional Action intro 5:35 Counter-organizing framework 11:55 Low-intensity conflict explained 16:00 Viet Minh organizing strategy 21:31 Three sources of power 25:39 Conditioned power & motivation 29:25 The Campaign 41:45 Next Steps We had about 80 people turn out to hear Mike speak, and signed up 38 new members of Constitutional Action. (You can join us at constitutionalaction.org .) At Mike’s request, his presentation is paywalled in full. Become a paid subscriber now to receive this and other EXIT content, including full recordings of our Tuesday night Q&As. Upcoming Q&A guests include Curtis Yarvin, Jeremy Carl, Blake Masters, Ron Dodson, Kevin DeAnna, and more. If you want to join us in building fraternity and organizing for power in your community, you can apply for full membership at exitgroup.us . EXIT News * Weekly Full Group Call * This week (9/29), we had our Q3 Review/Q4 Preview and discussed the overall vision of EXIT. * Next week (10/6) we will hear from Douglass Mackey on facing prosecution for memes, declining a pardon, and courage under fire. * The following week (10/13), we will welcome Joshua Sheats to discuss his efforts to build a Great House, his homeschool curriculum, etc. * EXIT Events: * 10/09, Austin: Annual EXIT Retreat. Jonathan has reserved an Airbnb in the Texas Hill Country for our third annual Austin weekend. Steak dinner, private tour of a MAHA intentional community southwest of town, hiking at Pedernales Falls State Park. (Members only.) * 10/17, Dallas: Constitutional Action Beautification Event. EXIT and Constitutional Action are getting together to clean up a neglected cemetery in Oak Cliff. Sign up here to join us. * 10/29, New York: EXIT + Passage Press Halloween Party. Join EXIT and Passage Press for a Halloween party at Pubkey in Manhattan. * 11/07, Dallas: Manifest Destiny Ball. EXIT families across Texas are getting together for a black-tie event to celebrate our heritage and look toward our common future. (Members only.) * 11/13, Salt Lake City: The Great American Weekender. In collaboration with Delphica, Frontier Magazine, and IM-1776, EXIT is hosting a weekend salon here in Salt Lake City. RSVP here . * 11/21, Orem: Paideia Buildathon. We are hosting a youth AI buildathon — getting teens to build their own games, websites, etc. Sponsored by OpenAI. Admission is free. Sign up here . * Monthly private dinner meetups for EXIT members (members can check chat.exitgroup.us or monthly internal newsletter for details): * 10/3 Orem, UT * 10/9, Nashville, TN * 10/10, Houston, TX * 10/10, Phoenix, AZ * 10/16, Atlanta GA * 10/16, Washington, DC * 10/17, Columbus, OH * 10/19, Dallas, TX * 10/24, St. Louis, MO * Events with Friends of EXIT: * 10/08, Singapore: Network State Conference . Third annual Network State Conference in Singapore with Balaji Srinivasan. Streamable. RSVP here . * 10/10, Knoxville: FORUM event + Football watch party. Join Mass Deportation Coalition and FORUM for a discussion of immigration policy with Ryan Neuhaus and Greg Bovino, followed by a watch party for the Vols game. RSVP here . * 10/10, St. Louis: American Fiction Event. Join Oyarsa for an evening of readings feat. Theodore Judson of ARK Press, author of Fitzpatrick's War and The Timerman , and John Jay Stancliff of Farthest Heaven, author of FEDBOOK. RSVP here . * 10/19, Nashville: Peter Thiel Lecture Series with Pamphleteer. Dr. Bennett will be attending the fourth and final lecture of the series. RSVP here . * 10/21, New York: Michael Anton book signing event. Reign (formerly Sovereign House) is hosting Michael Anton to discuss and sign his new book, Studies in Machiavellian Political Philosophy . RSVP here . * 10/24, Atlanta: 1903 Club Exclusive Dinner Featuring Andrew Isker. Andrew will be speaking on his new book, “The Seed of Abraham.” Private four course dinner. Jacket required, ties encouraged. RSVP here . [nothing below paywall]
August 15, 202621 min
John Del on Yeoman Patriarchy
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit blog.exitgroup.us John Del is a writer at Steadermen and Junior Ganymede ; a long-time EXIT man, fourth in a six-generation natalist project, and patriarch of a family of “debt-free tattooless virgins who love Jesus and their Dad.” Basically, he has some extremely important problems figured out , and we wanted to talk about how. Topics: * The myth of “adolescent rebellion” * Homes as center…
July 24, 202626 min
Member Q&A: Orania CEO Joost Strydom
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit blog.exitgroup.us Today is Pioneer Day — a perfect occasion to release our extended conversation with Orania CEO Joost Strydom. People discouraged with the political situation in the West will often lament that “there are still libtards in South Africa” — but Orania demonstrates how much can be built even under a regime as corrupt, and incompetent, and openly hostile as S…
July 10, 202631 min
EXIT Q&A: Alex Petkas, Cost of Glory
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit blog.exitgroup.us Alex Petkas of The Cost of Glory Podcast and The Classical Society joins us to discuss Lycurgus, the primordial lawgiver of Sparta, and what we can learn from him about the birth (or rebirth) of a nation. Alex’s Presentation (free to listen): * Why Madison invoked Lycurgus in Federalist 38 to defend a Constitution penned behind closed doors * Lycurgus’ sacrificial leader…
May 29, 202637 min
Why Great Men Crave Volatility (feat. Ben Wilson)
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 strike We 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 Meetup Subscriber 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 Event Links 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 Event Below 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
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