I’m hearing lately that Utah has Gone Woke.

The puppet masters of every institution of power in the Utah conservative establishment are actually secret communists. Governor Spencer Cox is a communist. Also Senator John Curtis, Mitt Romney, the Church, possibly even the Utah Republican electorate itself.

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Friends I know who know these people would laugh at this; not because Mitt Romney and Spencer Cox and John Curtis are all such swell guys, but because it’s just a total misread of where these guys are coming from, who they are, what they care about.

But you can see where an outsider would get the idea.

Ever since the church sponsored Prop 8 to ban same-sex marriage in California (and won, by the way), Utah has led the way in capitulating on basically every progressive cause they can think of.

So you got the Utah DEI Compact, which they signed, and then, uh, recently reversed. You’ve got the Utah Compromise on LGBT discrimination, the Conservative Climate Caucus, which John Curtis runs Disagree Better, which is Spencer Cox’s project (what if we just got along with the communists, has anyone tried getting along with the communists?)

All of our state representatives supported the Respect for Marriage Act, which ratifies by an act of Congress what the Supreme Court had already decided at Obergefell. But you saw how with the Dobbs decision, once Roe v Wade was overturned, the states were able to go back to having abortion law. Well, the Respect for Marriage Act basically says you can’t do that.

And most recently you’ve got this redistricting fight where several Utah Republican legislators said, “We need an independent, impartial, bipartisan redistricting commission.”

And then, on the basis of that ruling, this liberal female judge basically hands over redistricting to this progressive advocacy group called Mormon Women for Ethical Government, which carves out this like D+50, basically overtly communist congressional district in the middle of Salt Lake City.

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And then you’ve got KSL and the Deseret News and Deseret book and BYU, all of which are owned by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, which is obviously the dominant political and cultural elephant in the room.

And all these secondary institutions have the usual cast of journalists and MBAs and academics pumping out basically the same commie corporate Memphis that you’d expect from any secular institution.

And so you would not be crazy as an outside observer to conclude, like conquests third law says, that “the behavior of any bureaucratic institution can be best understood by assuming it is controlled by a secret cabal of its enemies.”

But the puzzle here is that all of this has happened while the state has maintained ironclad Republican dominance — and, in fact, explicitly growing support for Donald Trump.

The state went 21 points up for Trump in 2024, which was a wider margin in 2020, which was itself wider than in 2016.

Utah may not be the reddest state, the most MAGA state — but it actually is one of the most Republican and least Democrat states in the Union. Only Wyoming and Idaho have a higher proportion of registered Republican voters, and only Wyoming, Alaska, and Idaho have fewer registered Democrats.

And so the narrative that you sometimes hear, both inside and outside the state, is that Utah is this rock ribbed, red-blooded MAGA Republican electorate, and it’s just this thin layer of traitors, this again, cabal of communist infiltrators, who’ve been playing the long game their whole lives, and now they’re finally in control.

But what’s weird about it is that all of these secret communist infiltrators are actually still doing pretty okay with their voters. Who again, in terms of their party affiliation, in terms of their stance on the issues, are about as Republican as it gets.

Governor Spencer Cox, who’s the DEI compact guy and the disagree better guy, his overall approval rating is in the 50s, and his approval rating with Utah Republicans is in the high 60s, low 70s.

He’s actually having trouble with Democrats and Independents (who are overwhelmingly secular) because he’s going too MAGA, he’s too hard line.

But the weirdest part is that, among latter day saint voters in particular, Mike Lee, John Curtis, and Mitt Romney have the exact same approval rating, 57%.

Now, if you’re an online right wing guy and you know who these people are, you’re thinking we are in the middle of a (possibly doomed) life and death struggle for control of America’s institutions, maybe for the future of Western civilization, and Mike Lee and Mitt Romney are very obviously on opposite sides. But apparently Latter-day Saint voters just want everybody to have fun and try their best.

And you could say, you know, well, okay, The People Are Retarded: but Utah Republicans are not stupid and they’re not out of touch — at least, not any more stupid or out of touch than any other voters. They’re among the most educated, economically productive, institutionally engaged subpopulations of the Republican party.

In fact, while the implicit right wing meme about Utah is that it’s this weirdly libtard red state (no doubt forcibly libtarded by their weird foreign religion), you if look at who these people are demographically — not just racially, but their careers, their education, their families, basically any socioeconomic access you wanna look at — the native population of Utah looks a lot more like Vermont or Connecticut or (until recently) Minnesota, than it looks like any red state.

Thich suggests that these are actually demographically, psychologically, culturally, natural Massachusetts libtards — and they’re being forced into these awkwardly right wing positions by their weird foreign religion.

And that awkwardness is basically the whole story.

In his book, the Ordeal of Civility, John Murray Cudahy describes the psychological turmoil of the Jewish shtetl bumpkin, who moves to Western Europe and has to accommodate himself to liberal Protestant modernity.

These are people who haggled with shopkeepers, and they weren’t all that strict about finding a toilet when they had to go, and they didn’t respect or even really understand liberal expectations of privacy.

They shamelessly preferred their own people, whether it was family or their co-religionists in ways that European liberals regarded as repugnant, if not criminal. They made emotional scenes in public in ways that were embarrassing to their more assimilated cousins. You could call them Vibrant. They introduced a lot of Vibrancy. Of course, the parallels to contemporary situations are obvious.

His thesis is particular to the Jews, but you can find parallels in all kinds of pre-modern cultures and the aggregation of all these individual choices, either to dissolve into the universal solvent of modernity or else to find some accommodation, some way to. Sublimate their identity and make it persistent in view of these overwhelming cultural and economic pressures.

And so, for example, the Indians are going through something like the Ordeal of Civility right now, where there’s this small population of successful, relatively assimilated Indians who are having extremely complicated feelings about their relationship to their home country, their current country of residence, and their cousins coming off the boat.

But what’s different about the ordeal this time is that in the struggle with the pre-modern shtetl, it’s pretty obvious that liberal modernity is no longer winning or even interested in winning.

The mainstream liberal position is now to encourage unassimilated peoples in their clannishness, their ethnonarcissism, their Vibrancy.

Assimilation is now a dirty word: it’s an imposition, a tyranny on authentic self-expression, as well as being a critical front in Liberalism’s war on standards of behavior as such.

It’s bad to make brown people do anything, but it’s especially bad to make brown people do white people things.

Now, this doesn’t exactly mean that Indians and Somalis and Hispanics are not assimilating at all.

They’re still assimilating into Western liberal culture — it’s just that that culture hates white people and loves brown people in the abstract.

And so you’ll get these really exotic outcomes like a young Chinese woman born in the States from literal Chinese Communist Party royalty, but she talks like a gay white man trying to sound like a black woman, and she’s got all these thoughts about white supremacy and oppression.

And of course, she’s not meaningfully Chinese, anymore than the Arab girls are Arab, or the Indian girls are Indian: they’re not Muslim, they’re not Hindu.

They all have basically the same things to say about how dinner was like a ritual in my family, like it would happen every night and we would talk to each other, and white people could never understand.

Zohran Mamdani is maybe the best embodiment of this phenomenon; he comes from a “market dominant minority” in Uganda: this Indian merchant upper class that was of course shamelessly racist, shamelessly colonial, shamelessly, extractive, never meaningfully on the wrong end of any oppressor/oppressed dynamic (except when Idi Amin expropriated all their property and threw them all out.)

And that’s really the proof of this assimilation process, because none of those particularities matter.

Zohran’s not Indian in any sense that causes friction with any of the groups that have historically had friction with Indians. He’s not Muslim in any sense that makes it hard for him to deal with his very progressive wife or his very progressive female voters. He’s Indian and Muslim (and maybe even a little bit African, though he has to be careful about how he talks about that) only in the sense that these things make him Not White.

And the reason he wants to be Not White — the reason all these people want to be Not White — is that all of Western liberalism’s entitlements, all of the things that it purports to give, are nominally for everybody, but especially for Not White people.

And all of Western Liberalism’s requirements — all of the responsibilities and principles and constraints on your behavior — those are for white people.

And so of course this means that the liberal machinery of institutional neutrality and fair play and procedural decision making have all just become means by which the former targets of the Ordeal of Civility — the people who were pressured to conform to liberal modernity — can now extract gibs and compliance from the cultures and peoples that internalized those liberal managerial virtues.

The trajectory of Western civilization over the next 10 years will be an Ordeal of Incivility:

In which we will all find out a) how long societies can remain functional as they abandon liberal managerial values, and b) how quickly and thoroughly the cultures that internalize those values first can put them down again in order to survive.

And this confrontation is especially complex for Latter Day Saints, because in one sense, as an ethnos, we’ve always been unambiguously Anglo-American with a little bit of Nordic; but for most of the church’s history, it was regarded by the broader American public as a regression to foreign barbarism. (The Republican Party was ostensibly founded in the 1850s in opposition to the Twin Relics of Barbarism: Polygamy, and Slavery.)

The Mormons had been these very tidy, conscientious English Puritans, who had somehow become militant clannish, bride kidnapping, bearded polygamists.

And some of that was slander, but the church really was and is illiberal in pretty deep ways that generate these more superficial, visible departures from the Anglo norm:

We have very different attitudes toward emotion and intuition, specifically their primacy over text and words and rules. We’re much more willing to defer to personal authority and hierarchy, and allow leaders to exercise judgment and make exceptions. We practice strict endogamy, marrying inside the church.

But above all, just the idea that someone on earth could have a supernatural mandate here and now to instantiate God’s will and say what God wants said: these things make a lot of trouble for a political and moral complex that’s built around argument and rational consensus seeking. Even today, that’s part of the reason why we’re not allowed in the tent.

But back in the 19th century, before the process of assimilation, before some of the rough edges got rolled off, this political and cultural incompatibility precipitated the Utah War.

A lot of people don’t know about this corner of American history, but the federal government imprisoned Church leaders, expropriated all Church property, dismantled the entire elected political system (because it happened to be basically the religious hierarchy) and replaced everybody with federal officials and openly hostile anti-Mormon locals —people who had come to open a saloon or a mine or to provision settlers to California.

But an enormous amount of what had been Church property and private property was either directly or indirectly expropriated by the feds.

We can compare it to the process of Reconstruction in the post-war South.

In the same way that Reconstruction imposed loyalty oaths, and disenfranchised anybody who had held an office in the Confederacy (which was 10 to 15% of the white male population of the South), The Edmunds Tucker Act imposed an anti-polygamy oath and disenfranchised all polygamists, which that was about 20 to 30% of the electorate in the Utah territory.

Wives were forced to testify against their husbands, and in Davis v Beeson, a Supreme Court case out of Idaho in 1890, the Court ruled 9-0 that religious advocacy for polygamy — or even membership in a church that advocated polygamy — was sufficient grounds for disenfranchisement.

So, a totally naked, unprincipled exercise of power.

But in fact, the church decided not to test that legal theory any further:

In the same year (1890) they abandoned polygamy and the toponym “Deseret”. They scrubbed all sermons and literature of any anti-federal rhetoric, of which there was a lot, because of the way things had gone down in Ohio and Missouri and Illinois.

They adopted a state flag, which had been designed by a Canadian bartender who’d only lived in the territory for a couple of years. And this flag is interesting: it’s got the little Deseret beehive surrounded by sego lilies, this peaceable, harmless, industrious scene on a shield — and the shield is flanked by US flags on either side, hanging from spears, and the American eagle is perched on the shield and looming over it with its wings out.

And so the symbolism is very obvious: it’s occupied territory.

But the Mormons are trying to get out from under territorial status. They’re trying to become a state so they can appoint their own governor, their own judges and marshals, so they can at least put their own people in these bureaucratic positions.

And one of the conditions of statehood was that the federales needed to believe that there were regular political institutions in the state: it couldn’t just be one local political party that was obviously just a proxy for the church.

And so it’s funny: in this simultaneous exercise of power and submission, church leaders go to every congregation in Utah, they chopped the congregation in half, and said: “This side of the chapel, you’re gonna be Democrats. Now, this side of the chapel, you’re Republicans.”

Now, the Republican party had been the church’s main antagonist in the federal government for half a century. So even though people are technically, you know, registered half and half, the state goes overwhelmingly Democrat in the first elections.

So several church leaders have to make this big show of joining the Republican party and saying, “it’s okay to be Republican — in fact, look at me, I’m the Top Dog, and I’m a Republican.”

This performance of neutrality is still basically the church’s approach to politics today.

And because church leaders serve until death, it actually hasn’t been that long since all this happened, from the point of view of institutional memory.

The president of the church who just died, Russell M. Nelson, was born in the 1920s, and grew up under president Heber J. Grant, who himself had been born in the thick of the Utah War, in 1856, and was in the prime of his life in the 1890s when the church was really going through the Ordeal and trying to wrestle back some autonomy by proving to the feds that they’d be good citizens.

So it’s literally just one lifetime, one man from here to there.

And when President Nelson was a young man in the 1950s, this was another sea change in the Church’s approach. Men in the Church were shaving their beards, putting on business suits and starting to build the identity that we’re all familiar with now: very competent, conscientious, reliable corporate executives and anti-communist G-men.

You know, there’s that clip that a lot of the online right wing guys like, with Joe Pesci and Matt Damon and Pesci is a mobster, and he is saying, “we Italians, we got the Church. What do you got?” And Matt Damon’s in his suit with his horn rimmed glasses and he says, “the United States of America”.

That totally could have been us — that character easily could have been one of our guys.

Ezra Taft Benson, who would become President of the Church in the 1980s, was buddies with J. Edgar Hoover, and a huge booster of the John Birch Society.

He wrote books like Civil Rights: Tool of Communist Deception and he wrote an approving foreword to a book called. The Black Hammer: a Study of Black Power, Red Influence, and White Alternatives.

And just so you understand, when Ezra Taft Benson was the prophet, it was very difficult to convince members of the church that every word out of his mouth was not a divine pronouncement.

The church explicitly had to tell people this — not just about him, but about all of them. And still today, if you ask a member of the Church, “Was Ezra Taft Benson, a prophet, in the same sense as Moses or Elijah”, the answer is almost always yes.

And if you want to own them with some of the more Based things that Ezra Taft Benson said, you can make a 2026 moderate, centrist, respectable Latter-day Saint really uncomfortable. And in fact, this is a favorite tactic of liberal exmormons. They keep a big, long list of all the Based things prophets have said, expressly for this purpose.

And so they’ve got all these memes where like Dallin. H Oaks (the current prophet) says explicitly that adultery, fornication, prostitution, and homosexuality should carry criminal penalties. And another apostle who passed away a few years ago says, “the biggest threat to the Kingdom in the coming years will come from feminists, homosexuals, and so-called intellectuals.”

There’s some horseshoe theory here: we’re all tickled with these memes, and we like owning the centrist, moderate, respectable latter-day saints with them too.

So anyway, Ezra Taft Benson is Eisenhower’s Secretary of Agriculture. Despises Communists says the Civil Rights Movement is a communist plot. (He was right about everything.)

And so a ton of our guys pile into the FBI and CIA. They’ve served missions, so they speak languages. They generally have families. They piss clean.

(As an aside, this is the origin of the Mormon Fed meme — so anytime someone’s like, “Mormons are feds because they’re libtards and communists,” it’s like, come on man.)

So in the 1950s, when our recently departed Prophet was entering into adulthood, was when the Mormons as a people had finally made it:

We had come all the way through our Ordeal of Civility to the other side, with this new, safe, stable identity: which was to be “more American than Americans.”

And that new identity wasn’t just concocted or cynical or “put on.”

The church really had been largely descended from America’s most venerable, conscientious, and (at least in their own minds) respectable founding stock: the New England WASP.

And theologically, the church’s self concept had always included this idea that America’s founding was a providential eschatological miracle.

And so Ezra Taft Benson wasn’t just an anti-communist on the basis of thinking hippies smelled bad: he had concluded that the Left was the fundamental vehicle of eschatological evil in the latter days. (Again, just right about everything.)

Anyway, so the Ordeal of Civility in the first place had been not what it was for Third Worlders or shtetl Jews from the Pale of Settlement: this resentful assimilation to a superior alien culture.

It was more about recovering from a fall from grace. We’d always been Americans, we’d never felt like anything other than Americans.

And in 2012, Mitt Romney was the apex of Mormon assimilation.

We had finally made it. Our man was going to the White House.

Clean-cut, corporate, patriotic, procedural to the bone, devoted to the Constitution, you know, as as interpreted by whoever happened to be running things at the moment, completely disdainful of bickering and tribalism: our own managerial liberal super soldier.

This was “the Mormon moment.” It took a minute to break through Mike Huckabee and the Bible bash from the evangelicals during the primaries, but now, even the Southern Baptists were gonna hold their nose and vote for Our Guy. Wow.

But unfortunately, for him and for us, we had just found our way back into the good graces of the Big Gay Empire when it started to fly apart.

In fact, it was Mitt Romney himself who taught the GOP base that accommodation and procedural loyalty were no longer workable. The cooperative equilibrium of respectable bipartisan civility that he represented was gone, and maybe had been fake the whole time.

But Romney himself just could not internalize this lesson. He was 65, he’d been climbing this ladder his whole life — his vocabulary of success, his definition of who he was as a man, as a Latter-day Saint, as an American, was all wrapped up in this game, and he just couldn’t do it.

His postmortem assessment was that he had failed to appeal sufficiently to minority voters — and what he’s really talking about there is the “47% gaffe”, where Mother Jones caught him at a closed door fundraiser saying that Obama was basically guaranteed the votes of 47% of the electorate because they paid no income tax.

Of course, this was one of the most honest and authentic things he ever said during the campaign.

Democratic politics — both Big-D and little-d — obviously is the politics of redistribution, and in the years since 2012, Democrats have stopped bothering to conceal that.

And Romney did lose the election because of dependency and demographics. The electorate that his manicured persona was designed to impress no longer existed.

But Romney couldn’t bring himself to ask the deeper questions that that observation should have generated. Instead, he just flagellated himself for having said it out loud.

Apparently the day after the leak was published, he stopped eating and sleeping. He started beating the hell out of himself on the elliptical. And he felt very sincerely he had failed his people, failed his team, failed his country. He started asking around to his advisors — two months out from Election Day — if he ought to drop out.

And of course, there’s no forgiveness in that game, there was no way for him to backpedal, and so we got another four years of Obama.

Now Trump and the Party at large learned the right lesson, and started tacking in the direction of authenticity and realism. But Romney just retreats deeper and deeper into the vision of the America into which he had assimilated.

And so he spends the final act of his career more than a decade, as like the nation’s number one hall monitor for liberal procedure and decorum.

But you just can’t tell me that Mitt Romney is actually a secret communist. Neither is Spencer Cox, and neither are their Utah Mormon voters (who again, still basically approve of them.)

But there’s maybe no American subpopulation that went so hard in the paint on liberal managerial Civic Virtue — and now, as the managerial system implodes under the weight of its own contradictions, nobody is having a harder time coping.

Their identity is imploding too. They’re still trying to be more American than Americans, and America is a communist country.

Now, the purpose of this history lesson is not to excuse anybody. At a certain point, naivete is a choice and a vice, and the difference between being willfully blind and being complicit is kind of immaterial.

We’ve got this baby faced haircut in the state, Blake Moore, who was trying to “reach across the aisle” and be a good bipartisan with this Better Boundaries Commission.

Of course, as I said earlier, it failed catastrophically: cost him his seat, and may cost the GOP the House.

And now he’s recording videos being like, “well, yes, I got world historically cucked in the most predictable way possible, but, but by golly, I still believe in the process and we needed transparency and if we could just come together — real bipartisanship has never been tried!”

So this is the type of guy we’re dealing with.

At a certain point, even if they don’t know better, they ought to know better. To be that gullible when you’re a leader, when you’re responsible for other people, is an abdication.

So why talk about this at all?

For one thing, as Utah politics has entered the discourse, I’m seeing a lot of guys on the outside who are good guys, and we want the same things for America — but because they’re reading this situation wrong, they’re slamming up against questions of identity in a way that’s not productive, it’s not gonna work for these voters.

If you want to capture the political energy of Utah, you have to recognize that this is not a low energy system, with people just sort of drifting gently into the liberal background radiation.

These are people under immense internal psychological pressure from these mutually contradictory directives — this intense belief and this intense identity and particularity being bent back against itself.

We have this wild, illiberal, uncompromising, visionary, ecstatic history, and then we’ve got all these elements of morality and identity that are actually just accommodations to conquest by a cosmopolitan empire.

But when that conquest happened, the empire was being run by similarly conscientious, rule-following cousins.

It was a society that, at least around the time of the Utah War, every single member of the church had been born and raised into — so confronting reality and making accommodations with that culture barely felt like assimilation at all, because we’d never been anything other than Americans.

Again, the parallels to the South are instructive here. Southerners obviously did not see themselves as betraying their country. And likewise, when Latter Day Saints — even those visionary, ecstatic latter day saints — when they thought about America, you know, they had some choice words for federal officials, but they really saw them as something like the Pharisees, like apostates — people who’d been given something precious, a divinely ordained form of government from which they had apostatized. (That word is used explicitly in this context.)

So, again, Latter Day Saints becoming uber-loyal turbo-Americans was not a big leap. It was a natural fit. And maybe there was even a sense that, you know, since we’d been invited into the fold, maybe America had come to its senses, and was becoming what it was supposed to be, fulfilling its prophetic destiny.

But now, the Empire has invaded and invited the world — and in order to hold together its own internal contradictions, it can no longer tolerate any distinctions of value, any particularities.

Which means that maintaining our commitment to accommodation and procedure and loyalty requires us to surrender every other principle.

So the compromise being offered to Latter-day Saints now is the same compromise being offered to you and everyone else in the European West:

If you go extinct spiritually right now, we’ll delay your physical extinction by a generation. Give the war to your children.

The political conflict in Utah, just like everywhere else in the West, is just between the people who are willing to take that deal and the people who are not.

So the Ordeal of Civility required new habits of compromise, accommodation, respect for institutions — and the Ordeal of Incivility will require us to shed them.

Now interestingly, for people who are pretty used to getting marching orders directly from the top, the Church itself has actually spent the last 10 years leaning hard into this “home centered, church supported” paradigm — which basically means fewer official programs, fewer explicit rules, and (at least in theory) a pretty broad mandate for families to talk to God and figure it out.

And while the church is restricting itself to political issues that directly impact its institutional mission, the members of the church are being encouraged to “get involved”, “make our influence felt”, etc. We’re explicitly told to exercise political power in defense of our values, and support candidates who do the same.

Now, the hostile interpretation of these facts is that the Church is Libbing Out — or maybe just paralyzed by these mutually irreconcilable commitments to be “good citizens” on the one hand, and “believing in literally anything at all” on the other.

But a more charitable interpretation is that these moves are an exercise in signature reduction.

So the Church today is this enormous target for lawfare and international diplomatic pressure. It has huge investments, many of which are in land and food production and distribution. Some things that make sense as pure investments, but a lot of things that really only make sense if they’re holding onto state capacity.

If you thought that volatile times were coming, in which a lot of political questions would be up in the air, and possibly unfriendly people in control of the US Government again, then maybe it make sense, both from the history of the Utah territory and more recently with Prop eight, to run quiet for a little while.

The Kingdom of Deseret was Certifiably Based, but it’s not obvious that the Church taking a strident institutional role in Utah’s politics (let alone the nation’s) has ever been particularly helpful, either for the Church or for the causes that it championed.

Going back to this comparison with Civil War Reconstruction, one of the reasons that Southerners were not so fundamentally transformed by their Ordeal is that they were Protestant — which meant that there wasn’t one guy in the Confederate camp who could credibly tell the feds, “I’ll go talk to my people and bring them in line.”

But you don’t necessarily have to buy either the charitable or the hostile interpretation of what the Church is doing, because, in a practical sense, they lead to the same place, which is decentralization.

People are being explicitly invited (for whatever reason) to stop waiting to be told what to do.

Start talking to God, start making your own decisions.

And in my opinion, that’s exactly what our people need to hear. I think that’s why they are the way they are right now. They’re desperate for someone to tell them what to do, because they don’t want the responsibility of deciding and maybe deciding wrong.

And so it’s always just, “well, Senate procedure doesn’t allow that,” or “the Supreme Court would never approve.”

Even in local politics, “I don’t know what the Church’s lobbyists would think” — and you’ll catch this even with like petty interpersonal stuff: people in the Church will really do this Talmud thing where they pick through the Church’s marketing materials, and press releases, and the art on the magazines, to be like, what is the Church trying to tell me?

What, what should I be doing? (More importantly, what should I not be doing?)

And they’ll literally argue about that on Twitter, exactly like rabbis.

Which, in my opinion, is the antithesis of the whole concept of revelation. It’s exactly the kind of thing Jesus told the Pharisees not to do. It’s exactly the kind of thing that Joseph Smith railed against all the preachers for.

But if you’re that terrified to act and to take responsibility for your actions, then you’ll look absolutely everywhere for some bird guts to read some, some precedent, some authority, some text that you can scry.

That is what the world looks like without revelation.

And of course, this doesn’t mean the text doesn’t matter: I believe the Constitution was divinely inspired — not just in the sense that it’s an expression of true principles, but that it was important to write those principles down. But ultimately, they’re just English words. They don’t supply their own interpretation.

Nobody on earth — no politician, no judge, no constitutional scholar believes that anything about America today reflects “the Founders’ intent.”

It’s very clear to everybody that if you brought Thomas Jefferson or James Madison or George Washington to America today, they would be horrified. The only question about which there is any debate whatsoever, is whether we ought to care about that: whether it’s good or bad.

So, if you regard the Constitution as a product of human ingenuity — a human experiment in political science — the best you can say about it is “It had a good run.”

Maybe it did what they hoped it would do for a while. It’s not doing that anymore. Even if you say you want to instantiate “the Founder’s intent”, their culture and worldview is so alien from our own that we can’t reconstruct it even if we want to. We actually don’t know how to think like they thought and want the things they wanted.

Now, if you believe, as I do, that the Constitution was divinely inspired — that it’s God’s project, and that America still has a prophetic destiny to fulfill — then in order to understand that text and its intent, to try to obey it, you have to figure out what God wants. The words on the page by themselves can’t tell you.

So ultimately all you have is discernment. A lot of people believe in God in the abstract, and many even believe in principle that God answers prayers. But it’s a whole other thing to say. “I trust my perception of those answers.” “I trust my ability to understand”. (Or, framed differently, “I trust that God will bless my earnest attempts to understand.”)

It’s the fear of this confrontation that is the mechanism by which postmodernism is eating our country, every western liberal country, your church, my church.

Because we want to hide out in this maze of Text and law and custom and precedent — we want to offload the moral responsibility for our actions to the preacher, or to Paul, or to James Madison, or to Ketanji Brown Jackson.

And that’s the right illustration, because the system you live under has chosen Ketanji Brown Jackson to decide what the Constitution says, and there is just no way that you believe she’s actually qualified to do that.

There’s no way that you believe that what she says about the law has anything to do with the Founder’s Intent or good government or justice.

So the only reason that anyone would defer to her on these questions is because they just don’t want to decide. They don’t want it to be their responsibility to decide.

In Exodus 20, God gives the children of Israel the 10 Commandments, and they hear his voice. He says, “Ye have seen that I have talked with you from heaven.”

But when the people see the thunderings, and the lightnings, and the noise of the trumpet, and the mountain smoking, they say to Moses, “Speak thou with us, and we will hear, but let not God speak with us, lest we die.”

Later, Moses says, “Would God that all the Lord’s people were prophets, and that the Lord would pour out his spirit upon them!”

But if you had the God-given ability to discern truth, then you would be alone with God: and He might tell you to do anything.

And you would be accountable for whatever you did or didn’t do — and if you could have understood and you chose not to understand, you’d be accountable for that too.

So it’s just much easier to tell yourself, “well, it’s not for me to decide.”

And if you’re a guy like Mitt Romney or Spencer Cox, you feel very honest and decent and humble — maybe even noble — when you say, “Justice Jackson, please go up into the mountain. Tell us what the Constitution really says.”

It’s her job. It’s not your job.

And when she and people like her, inevitably, predictably smash the plane into a mountainside at 700 miles an hour, you can say, “well, that’s who the Constitution put in charge.”

“The Constitution is divinely inspired. So therefore, I’m not only not to blame for letting this happen: I’m kind of a hero. What a sacrifice for me, to turn my children’s inheritance into a smoking crater, because that’s what Our Divinely Ordained Constitution demanded.

I’m having a little fun there, but I’m pretty sure they actually believe that. I’m pretty sure something like that is actually rattling around in their brains when they do the shit they do.

And the reason I believe that, and this is where I’m trying to get to with all this, is that they’ve got this moral syphilis real bad, but I think we’ve all got it.

Even the most Our Guy of our guys, we’re all looking for the right analytical framework, the right ideology, the unified theory of being a right wing guy.

Even when we fantasize about accelerationism and bronze-age steppe warlord, whatever — what’s so cathartic about that fantasy is the idea that there will come a permission structure, which is another way of saying someone will tell us what to do.

And to be clear, I’m not talking about somebody else, I’m talking about me. I’m talking about everybody.

And the only thing that I’ve found that has broken me out of that paralysis is to ask God — and I think you should ask God, in earnest: Does He want you to lose? Does He want your kids to lose? Does he want you to abandon this wicked, sinful world? Leave it to the Bolsheviks, let them have it?

Does he want you to just keep your head down, work your job, be a nice guy — and with no preparation and no thought on your part, he will deliver you, as a pure miracle?

The answer that I get to all those questions is no, and it’s pretty unambiguous. I don’t have to think about it that hard. We’re supposed to win. Our inheritance is not ours to surrender: it doesn’t belong to us. We have a responsibility to pass it down to our kids.

And if we’re supposed to win, and God’s not going to hand it to us, then we have to get way more capable, as quickly as we possibly can.

And the good news, maybe, from understanding ourselves as going through this Ordeal of Incivility, is that there’s actually a lot of capability lying around.

Last week’s writeup was about the tech billionaires — how any one of the top five of those guys, if you wanted to, could buy the entire California political system in perpetuity, could fund every election. And if Silicon Valley Tech guys as a class did that, they wouldn’t even miss the money, let alone if the conservaboomer, SEC donor wanted power

And these are smart, successful, capable people — the reason they don’t have power is that they don’t want it.

The same is true, in a different sense, in Utah. You’ve got this incredibly cohesive, incredibly productive, incredibly functional culture that can organize to do absolutely anything in the world except say no.

So we are not living in a system where all the loose energy and power has been scooped up and somebody’s guarding all the doors and holding all the keys.

But there’s a particular habit of mind that you find with smart, conscientious right wing guys — because they have respect for the natural order, for nature, and nature’s God — that power is efficiently distributed.

Even if it’s not in the right hands, it’s in strong hands. The market for power is efficient, money flows to capable people; “if that idea was going to work, somebody would’ve tried it already.”

George Orwell wrote a reply to The Managerial Revolution called “Second Thoughts on James Burnham”, in which he diagnoses this tendency:

“It will be seen that, at each point, Burnham is predicting a continuation of the thing that is happening. Now, the tendency to do this is not simply a bad habit, like inaccuracy or exaggeration, which one can correct by taking thought. It is a major mental disease and its roots lie partly in cowardice, and partly in the worship of power, which is not fully separable from cowardice…

Power worship blurs political judgment because it leads almost unavoidably to the belief that present trends will continue. Whoever is winning at the moment will always seem to be invincible.

If the Japanese have conquered South Asia, then they will keep South Asia forever. If the Germans have captured Tobruk, they will infallibly capture Cairo. If the Russians are in Berlin, it will not be long before they’re in London, and so on.”

And yeah, Orwell was a little commie-curious, but this is one of the virtues that commies have: they’re genuinely not at all encumbered with the idea that their enemies deserve power.

They don’t see anything — not even the laws of physics — as fixed variables that they’re obligated to respect.

To come back to this online-right-wing misread of the Utah political situation: a lot of the conspiratorial thinking about Utah (and about America and about the West more broadly) is rooted in a need to explain why we are losing to such weak people.

How did Minneapolis get captured by Somalis?

How is Utah — this cohesive, functional, overwhelmingly socially conservative, overwhelmingly Republican state — just folding like a cheap suit. They’re flying pride flags — they’re still flying BLM flags.

Utahns are smart people. Minnesotans are smart people. Californians are smart people. And so if you have this habit of mind, this tendency toward power-worship, you ask yourself, “How could we possibly be losing?”

It must be that there’s some immense insurmountable hidden power — something that, for all our capacities, we just can’t break.

It can’t be that all these smart, conscientious, functional people are just, like, jerking off, and not paying attention.

It can’t be the case that there’s a couple million really high-octane, dynamic, productive guys, who just don’t want to have an uncomfortable conversation with the wife.

It can’t possibly be the case that the power to fix these problems is just lying on the ground — and you actually don’t need Thielbuxx, and you don’t need an ambitious general to declare martial law, before you can fix them.

So Curtis Yarvin generated some controversy this past week.

He was accused of demoralization because he and Peter MacCormack were talking about the possibility of civil war.

He says:

“It’s not gonna happen, because people have no balls. They will not resist. All the thought that they will get their muskets and put on their tri cornered hats or whatever — when you go back into the period when people actually did this, you’re just like, these people are completely alien to us. It will never happen. It won’t happen at all.

What will happen is exactly what happened in South Africa: which is that they will just acknowledge that they’ve lost all of their power forever, and then they will sit quietly in their houses, and build more and more barbed wire, and electric fences, until they’re finally exterminated in one big pogrom.

That’s the future. That’s what will happen to your children.”

Now, there’s a couple things going on here.

First of all, a lot of this stuff Yarvin does is basically “Coffee’s for Closers”. He’s on a mission of mercy. “You have no balls” means “Go find your balls.”

And of course he’s right that there’s not gonna be a White Intifada in 2028 if the election goes the wrong way.

But he’s sneaking in the assumption that that would be the right thing to do if, in fact, we had balls.

But the most obvious difference between us and the Founders — yeah, maybe a little bit of this is testicular microplastics — but the biggest difference is ubiquitous technical surveillance and 3,000 miles of ocean.

If George Washington were here right now, he wouldn’t put on his tri-cornered hat and pick up a musket either, because he was a guy who actually wanted to win.

The founding fathers were brave, but they were also canny. There was a lot of subterfuge, there was a lot of politicking. There was a lot of networking. They obviously didn’t call it “opsec”, but they talked and thought about “opsec” a lot.

So to bring a couple threads back together:

If our enemies were actually not insurmountable, and if we were neither fated nor morally obligated to lose, and if there were no question of courage or will to win — if it were strictly a technical question — how would we acquire the power to win?

I recently wrapped up after almost two years trying to get through it. The German version of the Percival Grail myth — and it was hard to get through because it doesn’t obey the storytelling conventions, the narrative arc that you’re accustomed to. A lot of things seem to just happen and it’s not clear what they mean — which is a lot more like real life.

And it was sort of interesting to confront those expectations and how like fiction-brained we all are.

Anyway, the Knights of the Round Table are looking for the Grail, and it’s this fundamentally spiritual quest. The Grail Castle is never in the same place twice, and a lot of knights try to joust their way, through feats of valor and defeating monsters, to sort of summon or demand the grail.

But at the same time, it’s understood by everyone involved that you just have to go into the Forest Perilous and you have to go fight monsters and you have to save princesses in castles.

All the Knights of the Round Table are told, “Go in what direction seemeth good to you.”

They’re actively seeking out adventure, but they’re taking whatever adventure comes — and this is a necessary-but-not-sufficient condition for the emergence of the Grail and the crowning of the Grail King and the healing of the land.

So the story presents this harmony between human enthusiasm and will and dynamism and violence of action, with the humility to see that what they’re seeking is something fundamentally miraculous.

They can’t make it happen. And even as they’re just furiously hunting for quests and feats and things to do, the recognition that God is doing something to them and through them — that what they’re actually doing is making themselves available for whatever experience and refinement God intends to send them.

And that’s how we have to approach this problem.

We don’t actually know what capacities we’re going to need. We don’t know how the environment’s gonna change over the course of our lifetime and our kids’ lifetime. We don’t know what’s gonna work. We just have to take a lot of swings. And, ideally, we want to do it with as many aligned people as we can, because nobody can do it all — and we need to compare notes.

The guy who’s working out of Panama is going to have resources and opportunities that the guys in the States don’t have, and vice versa. The tech guys are going to have things to offer the vets, and the vets are gonna have things to offer the business owners, and we’re all gonna benefit from knowing guys who are working in politics.

When I started thinking about this idea of the Ordeal of Incivility, it occurred to me that there’s like a very instinctive negative framing associated with that, which is: “We (Westerners) used to be decent, compassionate, trustworthy people, and now we have to harden up and we have to become cruel and we have to become untrustworthy (you know, like the third worlders are.)”

But really, it just means that we have to take responsibility for a lot of the social infrastructure that we used to take for granted.

Instead of neither having friends nor enemies, you’ve got to figure out who your friends are — and you have to build with them consciously, and you have to organize for power consciously.

And yeah, some things that used to go without saying have to be articulated, and maybe that means some uncomfortable conversations — but the adaptations that we have to make to survive this Ordeal have a lot more to do with how we treat our friends than how we treat our enemies.

It’s that type of organizing for power — groups of guys who assume responsibility for their communities, who pick up responsibilities that have been abdicated — that’s who is going to build the new world on the other side of the Ordeal of Incivility.

So right now, EXIT is working on a private club space in Provo, Utah. We’re developing a cooperative education project that’ll be hosted in the club space. We’re doing civic organizing in several cities, so we’ve got some guys on the ground hosting and attending events, making friends, and we’ve got an intelligence team that’s feeding them information, helping them navigate. We’ve got our ongoing entrepreneurship calls, where our guys are holding each other accountable as they build their businesses.

And maybe it sounds like it’s all over the place, but that’s kind of the point.

We’re not waiting around for a coherent, theoretical framework. We’re just throwing things at the wall — but it’s working. We’re figuring it out.

Our guys are getting better jobs, their businesses are getting traction — they’re showing up to GOP meetings, and it turns out, if you just go to some of these GOP meetings and you tell the boomers, “I love tax cuts and I love Ronald Reagan,” they’ll basically put you in charge of the county.

Anyway, you can check us out at exitgroup.us. If you take a look at the member map, it’ll show you what kind of depth we have in your city. I’m also going to post, shortly after this goes live, a weekly EXIT News breakdown that will talk about all the projects we’re working on.

It’ll also have cocktail hour invites — so, after the meetup for the members, we always have a cocktail hour for the Substack guys. So you can check and see when we’re getting together in your city.

We have regular monthly meetups in Dallas, Austin, Houston, New York, Seattle, Nashville, Atlanta, Columbus, salt Lake City, and Provo. And in the next couple of months, we’re going to get together in Denver, the Bay Area, Philadelphia, Boston, and DC.

So check out the member map, check out the website, exitgroup.us. Feel free to reach out on Substack or send me an email. Thanks for listening.

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The Ordeal of Incivility

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