52 - Oppenheimer

This is a preview of our full interview with Auron MacIntyre. The full episode is available to paid subscribers at blog.exitgroup.us.

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.

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.

Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry discusses the rallye mondain, a private network of social events held by French aristocratic families to ensure that their children marry well.Follow him on X at pegobry_en - and check out my retrospective writeup on the EXIT blog:https://blog.exitgroup.us/p/57-peg-on-the-french-aristocracys

On the "entrepreneurial temperament" Acceleration and deterritorialization What we can learn from the techbros What to do when you have no idea what to do

Stormy Waters is a partner at a venture capital firm. He came to the EXIT weekly group call to talk to the boys about what VCs look for in a founder or project, how to pitch, etc. He also gave an interesting take on the volatile financial situation in the coming months and years. Had him on the show to elaborate.Follow him on X at @normandodd_knew.

In this episode I summarize Natal Conference and discuss why we started it, what we learned from producing it, and what's coming next.

Selective Breeding and the Birth of Philosophy is BAP's dissertation, which has been floating around as a PDF for several years, but which you can now pay to read here: https://amzn.to/3QqB7xKIt is a decent summary of the insights that have made BAP one of the most important ideological figures of this generation.

This week, Christopher Nolan reminds that J Robert Oppenheimer was a sensitive young man who did nothing wrong.

Pluribus is a crowd-funded "cancellation insurance" platform, where users can pledge to support their favorite writers and thinkers in the even that they lose a revenue stream (get fired from a day job, banned from Youtube, etc.)Tyler came to EXIT almost two years ago, looking for a team to help him develop the concept, and last week, Pluribus went live. I interview Tyler about why cancellation insurance is essential to free speech, how he built his team, and why he chose to build it with EXIT.