EXIT Podcast

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On last night’s full-group call, we had a members-only Q&A with Conscious Caracal (Ernst Van Zyl), discussing his work with Afriforum, what is working in Orania, and what he sees as the future of the Afrikaner people.

Questions:

* What has worked and what hasn’t worked in building Afrikaner solidarity and identity?

* How do groups like Orania draw lines around…

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit blog.exitgroup.us

On last Tuesday night’s full group call, we had a members-only Q&A with Auron MacIntyre, discussing his new book The Total State.

Questions:

* How does Auron’s book compare with Deneen’s Why Liberalism Failed, and how can we synthesize their respective messages into a positive vision of the future?

* Are there coherent alternatives to managerial liberalism at scale?

* Should states erect barriers to internal migration, or should we encourage The Big Sort?

* How do we navigate the tension between publicizing our associations to gain power, and avoiding the Eye of Sauron?

* Do you think there’s hope for deep institutional reform that could reverse the excesses of the Civil Rights Act, immigration amnesty, etc.?

* Will the Republican Party remain a relevant force when Trump and the conservaboomers leave the scene?

* How did you manage your exit from academia, journalism, etc.?

* What do you make of Peter Zeihan’s argument that America’s continental geographic advantages will prevent partition?

* What will the future of elections look like in the aftermath of Trump’s renegotiation of electoral and discourse norms?

* If you could be an advisor to the major power brokers of the emerging counter-elite (Thiel, Musk, Trump, Vance, Andreessen), what would you guide them toward?

* What practical actions can guys like us take to prepare for a potential Harris presidency?

My takeaway:

Scale and inhuman abstraction are the enemy; but fortunately, the managerial system has scaled way beyond its ability to command the loyalty and cohesion of human beings.

As the consensus-generating organs of managerial liberalism get clogged with nakedly unprincipled deceit and slop, the scope of human organization will by necessity get tighter, and new things will be free to grow.

The way forward is to build sovereign institutions at human scale, predicated on human judgment and initiative. Get to know your neighbors, learn how to get things people need, become useful to useful people.

If you want to build that kind of connection with a network of values-aligned guys, apply for membership at exitgroup.us.

EXIT News

* On Tuesday night’s full group call (8/27), we’ll hear from Zach at shaolin.ai on how he used EXIT to build his machine-learning education business, the future of AI/ML in general, and how our guys can ride the wave instead of losing their job to it.

* Shaolin has wrapped their second 6-month machine learning boot camp cohort. Next class begins in September. EXIT guys get a steep discount — so if you’re a member and you’re considering reskilling, reach out to Zach in the chat.

* Nowhere Summit in Ecuador was a great success. Our friends Ben Wilson (How to Take Over the World) and Alex Petkas (Cost of Glory) put together a terrific event along with our Ecuadorian hosts. I spoke on the state as an extension and abstraction of kinship — I’ll release a recording in the next week or so. We will have very exciting IRL collaborations to announce in the near future.

* Solid turnout at the Salt Lake City meetup, with 27 members and their families. Big thanks to the fellas who came in from Idaho, Colorado, Las Vegas, Southern California.

* Cocktail hour at the Great America hotel downtown

* Unconference at a local park

* Hiked in the rain up the Battle Creek Trail

* Cookout at a member’s house

* I’ll be at Network State Conference on September 22 in Singapore, and checking out Balaji Srinivasan’s Network School thereafter. If you’re planning to be there too, hit me up!

* Cocktail hour invites for Houston (9/13), Washington, DC (10/11), and San Francisco (11/8) meetups available for paying subscribers. EXIT cocktail hours are a great opportunity to meet your local guys, and see if the full group is right for you.

The UK government appears to be successfully putting down the protests in the UK, making no concession or even acknowledgement of the protestors’ grievances.

People on the Right are very smug about these things when they fail — they love to jump into the Twitter replies and register their satisfaction at being proven right once again.

It’s obviously true that the UK is tyrannical and doesn’t care what its people think in principle — but there are people who have been able to make the government care what they think.

The prevailing attitude toward politics on the Right is like a Melanesian who realizes that his bamboo airstrip and control tower are failing to summon the Cargo — so he knocks it all over & congratulates himself for being too smart to believe in airplanes.

Politics doesn’t work the way you were taught in social studies, but it works — and our side should get a lot more curious about how it works.

In this episode, we review David Kilcullen’s latest book, The Dragons and the Snakes, which addresses how the empire’s enemies have learned to fight it and win.

In the first section, Kilcullen identifies the evolutionary process that has produced the surviving configuration of America’s enemies after 20 years of the GWOT. He discusses how these actors have been shaped by the present technological and cultural terrain — and especially how they have learned to draw power from global-scale economic and cultural power flows without making themselves a global-scale military threat that justifies American intervention.

In the second section, he describes the process of vertical escalation, in which a weaker actor can calibrate its aggressive action to stay below a stronger enemy’s threshold of detection, attribution, or response — especially as practiced by Putin’s Russia.

The Russians’ conventional military has been gutted by the shock therapy and corruption of the post-Soviet collapse, but they still have nuclear weapons and a very effective intelligence service — so they have learned to calibrate their conflict with the West to make best use of their peer capabilities, while avoiding a conventional war.

He also describes how both the Russians and Americans use deniable methods (“election interference”, color revolutions, migrant warfare, etc.) to sow confusion and exploit internal divisions in their enemies’ political systems.

Next, Kilcullen outlines the Chinese adoption of horizontal escalation as described in Unrestricted Warfare — in which a weaker actor fights in domains that their stronger opponent does not recognize as military, and may not even perceive as hostile.

This method of warfare is also described as a “conceptual envelopment”, because the weaker opponent holds the stronger enemy to a standoff in the conventional military domain (in China’s case, building credible radars, AA systems, hypersonics, etc. in the South China Sea), but they conduct their real advance on the conceptual “flank” — in this case, buying strategically significant real estate and politicians, replacing Western manufacturing, encouraging mass third-world migration, and dumping fentanyl in the American heartland.

As with a conventional flanking maneuver, the goal is to roll the enemy up from the rear, and only push through the front when the battle is effectively over.

Kilcullen then suggests some possible ways that the empire might arrest or reverse its decline — but a radical renegotiation of American hegemony looks all but inevitable. We discuss what that might mean for us as ordinary citizens, and as targets of the regime’s hostility.

The good news is that the most important preparation for what is coming is having useful friends you can trust — and making them is 100% legal. Join us at exitgroup.us.

EXIT News

* On last night’s full-group call, we discussed raising children in volatile conditions — specifically, how to negotiate their relationship with technology, with families who don’t share our values, and with hate facts.

* Next Tuesday night, we will have a member’s only Q&A with Auron MacIntyre on his book, The Total State.

* Shaolin AI has successfully wrapped their second 6-month machine learning boot camp cohort. Next class begins in September. EXIT guys get a steep discount, so if you’re a member and you’re considering reskilling, reach out.

* I will be speaking at Nowhere Summit next month in Ecuador, hosted by our friends Ben Wilson (How to Take Over the World) and Alex Petkas (Cost of Glory).

* Cocktail hour invites for Salt Lake City (8/16), Houston (9/13), and Washington, DC (10/11) available for paying subscribers (no paywall on this post — you can access the RSVP links here). EXIT cocktail hours are a great opportunity to meet your local guys, and see if the full group is right for you.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit blog.exitgroup.us/subscribe

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit blog.exitgroup.us

(Note: the “free preview” of this episode is the full version, and the full recording is also available for free on Spotify. EXIT meetup invites behind the paywall.)

K9 Reaper is a private security contractor and community safety activist in South Africa.

As a zoomer, he has no memory of the Before Times — but he has had a front-row seat as things have gone from bad to worse, particularly since the 2021 riots. Copper thieves who would have fled the scene with their hand tools five years ago are now firing on first responders with automatic rifles.

The primary vector of state violence in South Africa is a kind of persecution-by-incompetence, in which white South Africans are shut out of the ever-expanding sphere of government investment while their productive efforts are heavily taxed, expropriated, embezzled, and wasted.

The starkest symbol of this process is copper cable theft, in which multibillion-dollar energy infrastructure, painstakingly assembled by highly skilled laborers and engineers over decades, is sabotaged and stripped for a $50 payday at an illegal scrapping camp.

As in America, the violence is outsourced via race-baiting propaganda aimed at the criminal underclass. But unlike in the States, South Africans enjoy broad latitude in patrolling their communities and violently subduing criminals — partly because the government needs them to maintain basic order, and partly because the government isn’t really competent to stop them.

K9 Reaper notes that South African private security forces number 2.7 million, by far the largest such industry in the world — dwarfing both the South African police (~150,000) and the standing army (~100,000, including reservists).

As the South African state receded in competence, private security filled the gap in an entirely legal and non-adversarial way, until eventually their role was integrated into regular law enforcement procedure.

This process has unfolded gradually over decades, until one day, despite having no constitutionally guaranteed right to firearms or self defense — and in fact facing extreme racial disprivilege under the law — white South Africans have, in practice, more expansive “2A rights” than Americans.

Ethnic enclaves like Orania also became possible on the same terms: not because the South African government is so tolerant and liberal, but because they simply don’t have the juice to do much about it.

I wouldn’t trade places with them at this point, but it illustrates how declining states leak power, which always presents opportunity.

It can be very depressing to discover that your “constitutional rights” are not self-enforcing. On the other hand, it’s liberating to realize that what matters is the practical question: what are you able to do, and who is going to stop you?

Start building with us at exitgroup.us.

EXIT News

* On last Tuesday’s full group call, we discussed preparedness for election shenanigans.

* This Tuesday we will have a hot seat and status update from one of the guys who quit his job and launched a healthcare startup last year. He used the group to find sales, IT, legal, and fundraising help, and is coming back to share what he has learned so far.

* Side Hustle Summer is officially on as of June 1. Some of the current hustles: book sales, Twitter monetization, paid writing, a consulting product, an online lead-gen tool. If you’d like to participate, check in with DB in the EXIT chat before the week is out.

* First planning call for the Grand Canyon hike is this Wednesday night. (Reach out in the chat for details.)

* Cocktail hour RSVP links for New York City (6/21) and Columbus (7/19) below the paywall for subscribers. These are a great opportunity to meet your local guys and see if the full group is a good fit for you. Invites to the members-only portion of the meetup will be sent via email.

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit blog.exitgroup.us

David Kilcullen is among the world’s leading experts in counterinsurgency and unconventional warfare. He served for 25 years as an infantry officer in the Australian Army, then with the U.S. State Department, where he was chief strategist in the Counterterrorism Bureau, Senior Counterinsurgency Advisor to Multi-National Force Iraq, and Senior Advisor for Counterinsurgency to the U.S. Secretary of State. He has written The Accidental Guerrilla, Counterinsurgency, Out of the Mountains, Blood Year, and The Dragons and the Snakes.

We reviewed Out of the Mountains in EXIT Podcast #46: How Did The Taliban Win?

We asked him to join us for a members-only Q&A on Tuesday night to discuss lessons learned from the Global War on Terror by all involved parties, and how the intelligence, information warfare, and enforcement apparatus built during the GWOT is now being turned toward domestic political conflicts in the West.

Our Questions:

* If there is civil disorder in the US, how does one avoid being either insurgent, counter-insurgent, or victim?

* What caused the domestic US “color revolution” to fail where other election corruption challenges have succeeded?

* What has changed since the publication of Out of the Mountains twelve years ago?

* As you have observed the war in Ukraine, which of your ideas/models have been vindicated, and which have been challenged?

* Could Erik Prince’s “East India Company” strategy of long-term deployed special forces and private contractors have stabilized Afghanistan?

* Is mass demonstration a viable course when a protest movement does not have the complicity of the media?

* What was the impact of the drug trade on the Afghan occupation?

* Thoughts on the possible use of tactical nuclear weapons in Ukraine?

* Thoughts on the transition of transnational criminal organizations to regular military and police forces?

* What are the ingredients for a successful parallel movement?

* How can geographically decentralized, network-state-style groups make good use of their distributed character rather than it being a liability?

* What do you foresee from the coming sovereign debt and demographic crises in the West?

* How is drone warfare evolving in terms of mass production and deployment?

* Can/will opposing forces coopt the tactics of the managerial regime of the US?

David spent over 90 minutes with us, not all of which is included in this recording — after which we took another hour amongst ourselves breaking down what it all meant.

My main takeaway: Be the Good Guys

This is both a matter of optics and reality: many of the “bad guys” in Western foreign policy narratives are unambiguously good guys in the eyes of ordinary people in the countries in which they operate — and their success is very strongly correlated with the extent to which they are able to build and maintain that impression.

In some cases this is because they represent various illiberal values that the people share — but it’s also because they do a lot of ordinary work to make themselves useful. They support widows and orphans, rebuild battle-scarred neighborhoods, clean up after natural disasters, haul trash, employ people (in non-combat jobs), resolve disputes, keep records, etc.

This is good news for us, because it means that the right thing to do is also the smart thing to do.

Instead of directly antagonizing the system (and the ordinary people who still depend on it), start doing the useful, uncontroversial work that the system has abdicated. Some ideas:

* Teach regime-disfavored people marketable skills

* Build businesses that can employ regime-disfavored people

* Become an unimpeachable source of practical information in domains where mainstream sources are no longer trustworthy

* Gather a group to join your local volunteer emergency services

* Advocate for sanity in your local schoolboard

* Build a homeschool co-op

* Organize a litter cleanup

Ordinary people care about security and good order way more than they care about any ideological program. A dissident movement that stands for increasing entropy, increasing chaos, increasing conflict — even if only in the short run — will struggle to persuade people with mortgages and mouths to feed.

Only a movement that makes itself part of the infrastructure of normal life — especially in ways that expose the regime’s hostility to normal life — can begin to change popular intuitions about who the rightful stewards of peace and civilization are.

EXIT News

* Side Hustle Summer begins this Saturday, June 1. Come to the final planning calls this week and let us know what you want to do this summer.

* On Tuesday’s weekly call (5/28) we will be discussing preparedness for election shenanigans. We’ll discuss what we learned from the last election cycle, how this round may be different, and what we can do to secure the people and places we care about.

* Marketing call is moving to Thursday nights. This week, we’ll discuss marketing for an AI coaching tool and a management consulting firm.

* A small group of the guys is organizing a Grand Canyon hike this August. (Check the chat for more details.)

* Cocktail hour RSVP links for New York City (6/21) and Columbus (7/19) below the paywall for paid subscribers. These are a great opportunity to meet your local guys, and see if the full group is a good fit for you. Invites to the members-only portion of the meetup will be sent via email.

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit blog.exitgroup.us

In this episode, Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry discusses the rallye mondain, a network of parties and dinners that emerged among the French aristocracy in the 1950s, to confront the collapse of arranged marriage.

It’s relatively simple: mothers and other relatives monitor their children’s social circles, determine which boys and girls should be connected, and then organize social occasions to make it happen. Invitations are extended privately, and the events have no online presence.

Parents spread information about their local rallye by word of mouth: the types of events they organize, the standards of eligibility, the ideological or aesthetic bent of the families involved.

The idea that adults should take an active role in crafting their children’s social opportunities isn’t exactly revolutionary, but the received wisdom in the West is that this is an impossible task for parents to execute competently.

Most parents take for granted that whatever they place in front of their children will backfire spectacularly and drive them to the opposite extreme out of sheer embarrassment.

Which is not a totally unfounded concern: unlike you or I, a cooperative of French aristocratic families can afford to make aesthetic investments, and controls access to an undeniably high-class milieu — but apparently PEG himself still declined his invitation to the rallye as a young man.

Another point of difficulty for the rallye is agreeing on how selective to be, and along which axes: some of the families are bluntly concerned with aristocratic lineage; others are gated by income, or aesthetics. Some are elaborate, multi-stage events of training and acculturation; others are just dance parties for rich kids.

We relate this to BAP’s thesis (reviewed below) which describes the necessity of existential pressure to force a shared understanding of what constitutes excellence and competence.

Once an aristocratic society is liberated from those constraints, individuals and groups fly apart in all directions toward varied definitions of excellence, undisciplined by external reality — and some minority of those trajectories lead somewhere of lasting value — which is his explanation for the phenomenon of “high culture”.

From this perspective, the rallye would be the effort of an aristocracy very late in its decline: near exhaustion, groping in a dozen directions, and without the power to generate the life-or-death competitive pressure necessary to ruthlessly demand excellence from the individual or the group.

On the whole, it looks like an unusually successful rear-guard action from an elite that is in decline, but still a going concern, with elite privileges to bestow. It’s not obvious that such a program is practicable among ordinary cubicle-dwelling parents who can’t offer their children the same enticements.

Until recently, BYU offered a more middle-class selective breeding package.

The university did the hard work of selecting the top Latter-day Saint talent from all over the world and dropping them into a PG-13 meat market with other upwardly-mobile, spiritually-aligned Hot Young Singles In Your Area.

Young Latter-day Saints with genuine elite potential would often do their undergrad at BYU instead of the Ivy League for several reasons:

* No student debt (BYU tuition is going up, but it’s still one-third to one-tenth the cost of its nearest-ranked competitors)

* If you don’t intend to drink, BYU offers far more interesting social and cultural opportunities than any comparable school

* If you just want to make a lot of money and don’t care about Preftige, BYU is (or was) good enough by itself to get you on a respectable business or engineering track

* Latter-day Saints have strong endogamy norms, and BYU is still indisputably the easiest place to make a temple marriage — you attend a student congregation with a throughput of thousands of young singles, and ecclesiastical leadership relentlessly oriented toward getting young men and women married

* BYU students are extremely healthy and attractive

So if you wanted the kind of elite career that could support seven kids on a single income, you’d make a pit stop at BYU to receive your standard-issue blonde waifu and debt-free, good-enough undergraduate diploma — a credible slingshot to a real elite graduate program if you wanted it.

I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to call it one of the most beautiful human creations of the 20th century, in terms of the kind of people it produced and the way of life it offered them.

And there’s still a lot to be said for it; but as elite employers and academic institutions make increasingly absurd ideological demands, BYU is struggling to credibly offer upward mobility while maintaining its religious integrity, and the current approach of splitting the difference isn’t working.

The Church has signaled willingness to abandon BYU’s accreditation rather than surrender its distinctiveness, which is obviously good to hear — but they are facing an increasingly open revolt from faculty and administration, who come from secular universities bringing every modern pathology, and overwhelming air support from the national media. The effort to restore discipline hasn’t worked so far.

If BYU can’t offer a meaningful filter for values-aligned dating and professional networking, it will fall to a new equilibrium — offering a middle-of-the-road state school education at a steep discount.

But if you want young Latter-day Saints to start single-income families with seven kids, a middle-of-the-road state school can’t get them there anymore.

And of course, once elite-potential kids stop picking BYU, it stops being a place to find other elite-potential kids, and the talent pump loses suction altogether.

Which means that my tribe is going to have to bootstrap a new way of finding good matches for our kids, without the pedigree of the rallye.

That starts with a genuinely admirable and excellent adult culture.

If young people don’t find your way of life aspirational, and don’t want to become a grown man or woman in your social world, no amount of isolation or inoculation against the broader culture will matter.

This is an extremely difficult problem — sitting your kids in front of Veggie Tales or putting a content blocker on your browser is way easier than making your life a work of art.

I suspect that this is why so many parents throw their hands up at the work of culture, and allow their children to be raised by public schools and the internet.

They recognize, on some level, that they are not personally excellent in a sense that is competitive with the dominant cultural paradigm — so they bury themselves in defensive irony, embracing that parents just aren’t cool.

It’s not your fault that your children don’t respect you and don’t want to grow into your example: all teens are like that, it’s as inevitable as gravity.

Fortunately, the dominant cultural paradigm isn’t as hard to compete with as it used to be.

I feel no twinge of worry that my children will grow up to regret missing out on Lizzo and Lil Nas X and streaming slop.

It’s extremely easy to explain to my kid what I find objectionable about genital mutilation and morbid obesity and infanticide, and even more everyday things like the way they see other kids and grown-ups treat each other.

In a purely subtractive sense — the pathologies and unforced errors we avoid — the way of life we have to offer our children is already unambiguously better.

The problem that I see among family men, in and out of the church, is that they’re so focused on working and spending time with their families, that by the time their sons are teenagers, they realize have no appealing adult world in which to initiate them.

And all that effort to concoct the perfect childhood misfires, because childhood isn’t the point of childhood. You don’t get it by aiming at it.

Manosphere guys used to talk about how “modern culture has no rites of passage into manhood” — but efforts to manufacture such rites always fail, because they have no valid object. There is no manhood into which to be initiated — and a debutante ball is incoherent without an adult society into which a young woman can debut.

I suspect that this problem will be solved catastrophically in our lifetime.

The discipline of survival pressure is already returning, in the form of demographic collapse. Ordinary people may not be dying violently, but they are increasingly dying childless — which, for the survival of cultures, beliefs, ideas, and phenotypes, is exactly equivalent.

Getting an education and a job that can support a family, building a successful marriage, and having children are no longer social defaults — they are now existential struggles, and they demand particular types of excellence.

As demographic collapse becomes an economic crisis in the 2030s, and states are increasingly incapable of providing basic opportunity and security, we will no doubt rediscover even more basic domains of excellence.

The cultures that thrive will be the ones that coalesce around these virtues early and seriously — starting with the fathers. And it won’t be a LARP, because you’re really going to need it.

EXIT News

* On last Tuesday’s full group call, we had a hot seat for the founder of a healthcare startup to discuss some early scaling moves. He connected with a marketer, a recruiter, an investor, and a founder in a related industry with whom he can collaborate.

* This Tuesday night (5/21) we will have a private Q&A with David Kilcullen, author of Out of the Mountains, and one of the world’s foremost experts in counterinsurgency.

* We’re going to discuss how counterinsurgency, counterterrorism, and information warfare has evolved since the end of the Global War on Terror — and how lessons learned by all sides in that conflict are now being applied to internal political conflicts in the West.

* If you want to refresh your memory on some of Kilcullen’s work, you can listen to EXIT Podcast #46: “How Did The Taliban Win?” in which I review Out of the Mountains. Members should submit questions for the Q&A by Monday night (5/20).

* Side Hustle Summer is two weeks away. DB is hosting twice-weekly planning calls to help the guys to pick their project and get started. Reach out to DB or check the #entrepreneurship channel in the chat for more details.

* Cocktail hour RSVP links for New York City (6/21) and Columbus (7/19) below the fold for paid subscribers. These are a great opportunity to meet your local guys, and see if the full group is a good fit for you. Invites to the members-only portion of the meetup will be sent via email.

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit blog.exitgroup.us

Here’s the recording of this week’s members-only Q&A with Johann Kurtz, author of Becoming Noble.

We asked him to come on the weekly EXIT full-group call to discuss his thesis that dissidents should use captured elite institutions as a springboard for their ambitions, even if it is impossible to steer or “subvert” them.

We discuss:

* Finding the joy in watch…

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit blog.exitgroup.us

Here’s the recording of last night’s private Q&A with Clay Martin, former Green Beret and author of Concrete Jungle and Prairie Fire.

We cover the following topics:

* How to meet and vet the people you want on your A-team

* How to control space without triggering hostility from the state

* What skills and materials to accumulate

* How to teach kids survival skills

* Ho…

This week we're talking about:

* The “entrepreneurial temperament” and whether it's real (answer: kind of)

* Why our guys aren't preparing even though we all expect the world to go to hell

* Why the boomer doomer prepper model no longer makes sense

* Acceleration and deterritorialization — the increasing impossibility of preparing against one particular future

* Looking for meta-adaptations - adaptations that make us better off across all possible outcomes

* Why conservatism & reaction are always the losing side by definition

* Learning from the technology brothers’ “just build” ethos

* Why rebuilding civilization isn't an engineering problem and the technology brothers can't do it

Learn more at exitgroup.us

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit blog.exitgroup.us/subscribe

This week, Stormy came to the EXIT group call for a little Q&A on venture capital — what his fund looks for in a founder, what they look for in a project, and how to work the network to get your pitch in the right hands.

He also presented an interesting model of the various players in the global financial system — that the DNC is (for Epstein reasons) in thrall to the European banks, who need the US to join them in a central-bank digital currency regime in order to stave off the collapse of the European economy.

American banks don’t want this, so they’re peeling off for Trump, along with certain constituencies in the Pentagon.

A few days after Stormy’s presentation, JP Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon went to Davos and all but endorsed Trump; CNBC reports this as “U.S. executives in Davos see a Trump victory in 2024, and no cause for concern”.

So I had Stormy on the podcast to talk more about his theory, and how we ought to prepare ourselves if it holds. Episode also available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, etc.

Trump wins Iowa Caucus

Vivek and DeSantis are already out, and Trump has a double-digit lead over Haley in New Hampshire. It doesn’t look like the old GOP has any way to prevent a Trump/Biden race, and the fact that the DNC is burning so much political capital to disqualify Trump in court suggests that his lead is above the margin of fraud.

The covert, “soft” instruments of political control are failing, and even if they were inclined to let him back in, Trump has signaled that he’s on a war footing against the managerial class. So it’s going to be an existential struggle, and all that’s left are the hard, coercive instruments of power.

Texas Military Department seizes sections of border

The Texas National Guard expelled Border Patrol from Shelby Pass, where federal agents have been breaking down barriers and openly abetting the traffic of illegal immigrants.

They tried a media coup first, alleging that Texas had prevented them from rendering aid to a drowning woman. (Turns out they were lying about that, surprise.)

So now it goes to the courts — but again it’s a case where the media and institutional power that would normally settle such questions has collapsed, and it’s unclear what comes next.

Houthis blockade the Red Sea on the cheap

Houthi rebels have choked off the sea artery between Europe and Asia with speedboats and cheap drones. They can’t stop all traffic, but they don’t have to — the insurance companies are doing it for them.

The captain of the USS Eisenhower has steamed confidently on the scene, posting videos of tiny zoomer girls ceremonially taking the helm, and young sailors enjoying caramel macchiato and cookies.

The message here is that America’s authority over the sea lanes is utterly uncontested — this barely even qualifies as a police action, and nobody should be concerned. But while the US Navy is indeed very capable of bombing the Houthis, Biden admits that the bombings aren’t actually securing the shipping lane.

It’s just too cheap to inflict multibillion-dollar losses on the Empire, even without a direct military confrontation of any kind. This blockade will probably be cleared eventually, but it’s hard to see how it doesn’t spawn imitators.

EXIT News

* Charles Haywood will be taking questions about how he built his shampoo empire on this week’s full-group call. The call will take place Wednesday, at 8PM ET/5PM PT

* One of the guys found a major investor for his startup in the group. Congrats!

* We welcomed the owner/founder of a B2B business intelligence platform, a corporate lawyer specializing in on-side startups and investment funds, and a crypto expert who debugs smart contracts

* The Utah boys are putting together some mini-hackathons for locals interested in tech projects.

* The DFW guys got together for a quick lunch meetup.

* One of our veterans did a Q&A on life in the military, how to make the most of the benefits, and who he would still encourage to sign up.

* DC meetup is on February 2nd (one week from Friday).

* Utah Valley meetup is on March 1st.

* Seattle meetup is on March 29th.

* This week’s working group calendar below the fold. In our working groups we set aside two-hour blocks to work on our personal exit, keep each other on task, and take accountability for our progress.

If you want an invite to any of these events, sign up below — or check us out at exitgroup.us.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit blog.exitgroup.us/subscribe