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

[Above is the recording of our discussion with Mike Shelby from Forward Observer, on the broader topic of a “Yellow Revolution” somewhere 2026-2028. Below is a narrower discussion of the role of welfare programs, and the tug-of-war over government assistance, in the coming conflict(s).]

If the government shutdown is not resolved next week, 42 million people will lose access to food stamps for the month of November.

My timeline is now full of inner-city blacks warning of the consequences if payments fail. Many of these seem to be monetized TikTok rage-bait, but others just describe the same things that I expect to see if the spigot gets cut off all at once. It would be remarkable if 42 million people losing food benefits didn’t lead to a surge in violent crime and civil disorder.

Obviously the welfare system has created generations of dependents with a deeply perverse attitude toward the people whose largesse they receive, and that system should be abolished or at least deeply reformed — but it’s also a significant structural component of the US economy.

EXIT is a fraternity dedicated to building family empires. Learn more here:

In general, Nothing Ever Happens because, while an apocalyptic confrontation is brewing, both sides do the math:

One side realizes they can’t actually win, some less-confrontational solution is quietly arrived at, and you still have to go to work in the morning.

Whatever you think of the food stamp program or its recipients, cutting 42 million people’s monthly income by one-third, with less than two weeks’ notice, would be one hell of a Happening — which would mean that at least one party severely miscalculated their odds of victory.

It may not happen next week, but it’s going to happen eventually.

The tug-of-war between the Trump Administration and the administrative state won’t stop until something like this settles the question with finality.

If it isn’t another government shutdown, the EBT system has documented, open vulnerabilities to cyber-attack, which would be easy to exploit in the event of a serious foreign policy confrontation.

And if that doesn’t happen, sooner or later the government’s fiscal problems will either lead to nonpayment of these benefits, or hyperinflation (which amounts to the same thing.)

So the consequences of an EBT shutdown are worth examining, because they’re coming one way or another, even if you think this particular standoff will be resolved before the deadline.

Articles are never paywalled. Subscribe for free full articles and weekly EXIT news in your inbox. Paid subscribers get access to recorded calls and in-person EXIT cocktail hours.

The No Kings protests last week drew an impressive crowd numerically (7 million, by some estimates) — but strained the notion of democratic mobilization as a proxy for warfighting.

The crowd was 90% white, 60% female, and the median age was 44. In our recording with Mike Shelby, we discuss how this mobilization is in preparation for a Color Revolution against President Trump, either in 2026 or 2028.

But while getting seven million people in the street is a testament to Democrats’ organizational capacity, it’s hard to see how that converts into any sort of hard power.

Normies seem to enjoy the “No Kings” framing — but they are, by definition, not serious people, and no actual fighting-age males in the Leftist coalition care about any of that stuff.

The political Left is facing the inevitable conclusion of their feminized politics:

Nagging and shaming are repellent to all young men capable of violence: so, when nagging and shaming stop working, there is no longer any credible physical backstop to the argument, because all the young men capable of violence have been pushed to one side (or, as with young black men, checked out of the conversation).

All the Right has to do is stop caring about the political opinions of gays, grannies, and grandes, and the Left has no more cards to play — which has been the story of the last year or so of American politics.

The power of moral blackmail in US partisan politics has absolutely collapsed. It no longer matters how many old people assemble to complain.

But the optics of a “bread riot” could change all that.

The Left is at its rhetorical best when it reminds people what things were like in the ancien regime (generally either the Great Depression, or Dickensian England): toddlers smeared with coal dust, gaunt farmwives selling their children, bread lines; the working man “owing his soul to the company store”.

(Of course, having 13% of the US population on food stamps suggests an economic situation comparable to the Depression — just without the optical problem of poor people physically waiting in lines.)

President Trump has, to this point, succeeded in framing the modern American Left as shrill, spoiled, and out of touch — but 42 million people at least rhetorically “going without food” would dramatically change that perception.

For Democrats, an EBT failure would remind the poor and lower-middle class what life looks like without mommy government, in the messiest and most disruptive way possible — casting Trump in the role of an uncaring plutocrat, or even an American Yeltsin. (”Sure, things weren’t perfect under Gay Race Communism, but at least things were stable, predictable, etc.”)

A Color Revolution is never going to happen because President Trump remodeled the East Wing, or because of some banal inside-baseball power struggle in the executive bureaucracy.

A Color Revolution happens when normies run cover for an extended period of radical violent criminality, which metastasizes into armed resistance — which is exactly what an EBT failure would do.

The BLM protests really were “mostly peaceful”.

20 to 25 million people attended the BLM protests. That’s a huge fraction of the country’s population: about as many as watched Survivor or American Idol at their peak.

Almost none of these people were radical communists — they were normies swept up in the Current Thing. They showed up, clapped and chanted, waved their signs, got their faces painted, and were home before sundown. The crowd really was “not, generally speaking, unruly”

The purpose of Mostly Peaceful Protests is to provide narrative and physical cover for a surge of criminal violence (which is also largely not performed by radical communists, but by lumpenprole opportunists.)

A Mostly Peaceful Protest forces the police to man the picket lines instead of fighting street crime. The crowds jam roads, preventing police from moving resources across the city. Trained protestors use “black bloc” tactics to provide anonymity, so that violent actors are harder to surveil and apprehend.

Protest organizers deliberately blur the lines between civilian and criminal/combatant actors, both to make violent direct action appear more legitimate and popular than it is, and to provoke police into mistakenly attacking civilians.

The purpose of a Color Revolution is to produce and prolong a Schmittian “state of exception”.

A state of exception is a condition in which the ordinary/”lawful” powers and procedures of the state are inadequate to maintain the integrity of the state, so new powers must be asserted. The sovereign is (by definition) the person who decides when such a condition exists, and what to do about it.

The state never has sufficient security resources to directly or coercively enforce the law on everyone at once: public order depends on widespread, habitual obedience.

A genuine protest — one that is actually adversarial to the government — is always an attempt to break the population’s habitual obedience, in order to generate a security crisis that the government cannot survive. (Anything else is a parade.)

This is the concrete meaning of “people power”:

* We have the media and organizational capability to jam your city with millions of harmless morons.

* The crowd will disrupt the ordinary business of the city, and conceal a wave of violent crime.

* People will demand that you do something about it.

* We will make it impossible for you, or the police, or the viewers at home, to distinguish civilians from criminal agitators.

* You will be powerless to end the crisis within your legal and popular mandate.

* If you step outside your mandate, the crowd will get bigger and more violent, the crisis will deepen, you will face defections from your security forces, and then execution or prison.

Obviously not all adversarial protests end this way, because the parties usually come to terms long before this happens — but this is the implicit threat of protest.

Color revolutions never “overthrow the government” — they just reveal who the real government was all along.

A state of exception never destroys sovereign power — it can only expand it. It renders the political situation liquid, so that it can be altered without limit, but only by the sovereign.

The Orange Revolution didn’t weaken Viktor Yanukovych as the sovereign in Ukraine — it simply demonstrated that Yanukovych was not, in fact, the sovereign. Who decides the state of exception in Ukraine? Who decides what happens in Ukraine when Ukrainian law has no answers? Empirically, the US State Department.

In a failed color revolution, the liquid political situation is exploited by the target of the protests to strengthen his own power. After the 2012 protests in Russia, Vladimir Putin tightened restrictions on public assembly, required NGOs to register as foreign agents, expanded treason statutes, and expanded state censorship authority over the internet.

This means that the bar for a “state of exception” is much higher in Russia than it was before, because Putin’s has expanded legal authority (and demonstrated security capacity) to put down a foreign-backed protest movement.

You would never incite a color revolution in a state in which you did not believe you were the sovereign — you would never deliberately create a state of exception that you did not expect to control.

An American riot is the opposite of a revolution.

The Trump Administration has made massive gains by ignoring leftists’ hypocrisy and moralizing — but it can still be converted into real power.

An EBT failure creates the following conditions:

* Millions of people with a substantial direct financial incentive to fill the streets

* Millions of normies with an excuse to believe that criminals are Aladdin, actually (they are desperate to believe this, because it collapses the cognitive dissonance generated by the end of the liberal consensus)

* Young muscle pulled back into the Democratic machine, whom they lost after post-BLM demoralization and Gaza fissures

* A straightforward rally point for collective civil disobedience (literally “stealing bread to feed your family”)

This would put the American Left in the strongest position they’ve had in almost a century.

Democrats aren’t actually radicalized about the object-level conflict that is keeping the government shut down (Medicaid for illegals). They want the government shut down, so that they can create a state of emergency and reclaim control of the state.

This means that capitulation won’t help: it will simply set the stage for another confrontation in 8 weeks, when the next continuing resolution runs out. They want the chaos, because they believe (not without justification) that they are still the sovereign power.

There are two ways Trump could defang this threat:

* End the filibuster.

Without the filibuster, Republicans could end the shutdown with a simple 51-49 vote. Senate Majority Leader John Thune, Mitch McConnell, and Susan Collins all oppose this (because they are swamp creatures who also want to reassert control).

If Trump can pin an ongoing shutdown on the RINOs, they may fold — which would deepen Trump’s control of the GOP, but also raise the stakes of the midterms in 2026.

If they take this route, the chaos will merely be postponed until the 2026 midterms.

* Get the program funded without Congress.

This would be the most audacious and Caesarean move: hold a benefit in Madison Square Garden.

Make a generous donation yourself, and then publicly remind Wal-Mart and Coca-Cola that they’ve been suckling the SNAP tit for generations, and tell them to pony up. Tell Crazy Nancy to come out of pocket from her insider-trading money.

Post statistics that show all the major corporate recipients of SNAP money, as well as the employers of SNAP-qualified Americans. Display a gauge meter that shows the proportion of donations coming from Democrats and Republicans.

This week, a single donor came up with $130M to keep Army salaries paid. The money exists, and Trump can find it.

If this keeps the program funded for even an extra week, it removes the justification for collective civil disobedience and keeps civilians off the streets, allowing much more aggressive police action against criminal agitators.

Even a smaller victory, like fully funding WIC (a targeted food program for mothers and children, less than one-tenth the size of SNAP) would put the blame for the shutdown squarely where it belongs, and almost certainly force Democrats to back down.

A move like this would strengthen Trump’s claim to sovereignty without the need for a messy crackdown.

“When there was a crisis and the regular functions of government were suspended, Trump came through for all Americans.” Trump is the one who makes the gibs flow.

And once that’s established, he can start to make some sane decisions about who gets them. This would be difficult to pull off — but far more feasible than trying to get Democrats to vote for entitlement reform.

Of course, we have no pull with these people, or knowledge of their plans.

So while we wait for them to get creative, we need to make arrangements for ourselves and our families.

Don’t be in jurisdictions controlled by Democrats. Acquire assets that cannot be seized, destroyed, or inflated away. Become important to the people around you. Build your personal intelligence network. Make contingency plans with your friends and family. Connect with as many like-minded people as you can find.

exitgroup.us

EXIT News

* Weekly Group Calls, Tuesdays at 9PM ET:

* Tomorrow (10/28), we will hear from Jeremy Carl, author of Unprotected Class and nominee for Assistant Secretary of State for International Organization Affairs. Call will not be recorded.

* Next week (11/4), we’ll have a discussion of Family Traditions and strengthening family identity and culture, in advance of the Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays.

* Meetups:

* Successful meetups in Nashville, Dallas, Houston, and Oklahoma City last week.

* 11/1: Utah Valley meetup. Cocktail hour link below for subscribers.

* 11/8: Austin meetup. Members only.

* 11/8: Washington, DC meetup. Members only.

* 11/8: Portland meetup. I’ll be speaking at Scyldings’ Oregon Weaving event.

* 11/14: New York City meetup. Cocktail hour link below for subscribers.

* 11/15: San Diego meetup. Cocktail hour link below for subscribers.

* EXIT cocktail hours for Utah Valley (11/1), New York City (11/14), and San Diego (11/15) below the paywall for Substack subscribers. EXIT cocktail hours are a great way to get to know your local EXIT guys and find out if full group membership is right for you.

Is We Getting Bread Riots (feat. Mike Shelby)

EXIT Podcast (private feed for joe.substack@hootman.org)