Transcript
Speaker: Hey everybody, welcome to the Exit Podcast.
Speaker: This is Dr. Bennett.
Speaker: This week I finished reading Out of the Mountains by David Kilcullen.
Speaker: From the cover it looks like it's this pretty narrow treatment of a particular new type of guerrilla warfare.
Speaker: Basically networked, urbanized, non-rural guerrilla warfare.
Speaker: But really it's just a book about power.
Speaker: It's about how power is being renegotiated in the face of new communications and transportation technology all over the world, including here.
Speaker: And some of that power is being renegotiated through violent insurgency, which is a lot of what he describes.
Speaker: But what I found so interesting about it is that even those violent insurgencies are predicated on a full spectrum of economic, social, political capacities
Speaker: that don't involve violence, that don't involve breaking the law, but that all of these groups, he calls them non-state armed groups, that all these groups need to succeed.
Speaker: So Kilkillon's thesis is that these guerrilla fighters, these groups, are coming out of these places into highly urbanized, very dense, highly networked environments, partly because people everywhere are just flooding to cities, especially in the developing world.
Speaker: So conflict happens where the people are, but also because the wilderness and the mountains just don't provide the security that they used to.
Speaker: with satellites and cell phones and drone overwatch, it's just a lot easier for a state to come and find you in your cave in the mountains.
Speaker: But in the crowding and the noise and criminality and electromagnetic interference in a large city, these irregular fighters have a much easier time.
Speaker: Partly because these dense, chaotic, vertical environments are just harder for modern surveillance tools to penetrate, but also because cities are home to all kinds of things that states need to protect.
Speaker: Big capital investments, sensitive infrastructure,
Speaker: and lots and lots of innocent civilians.
Speaker: So if you're out in the middle of nowhere in Afghanistan, everything about you sticks out.
Speaker: You're the only thing moving, you're the only thing throwing off an electromagnetic signature, you're the only car on a country road, and if they need to drop a smart bomb on you, they don't have to worry much about collateral damage.
Speaker: But if you're a face in an enormous crowd and your headquarters is on the middle of the fourth floor of a nine-story apartment building in Baghdad, anyone who wants to come get you has to choose their tools very carefully and think a lot about the rules of engagement.
Speaker: If the state wants to control your movement or your communications, they've got to simultaneously control the movement and communications of thousands of other people who are just trying to get to work and do their jobs.
Speaker: The more these groups insinuate themselves into the state's power flows, the people, the money, the goods, the information, the
Speaker: all of which converge in the city, the harder they are for the state to target without damaging stuff that the state itself needs.
Speaker: And since most of these third world cities are growing explosively, the government is usually too weak to monitor and absorb all these power flows.
Speaker: So power leaks out.
Speaker: And it nourishes these alternative institutions.
Speaker: If the state can't adequately pay and monitor police, the police start taking bribes and reporting to criminals.
Speaker: If the state can't keep a neighborhood safe, protection rackets emerge to fill the void.
Speaker: And these non-state armed groups are more than just explicit anti-government insurgents.
Speaker: It's also partisan political machines, criminal gangs, even tight cultural groups like soccer hooligans.
Speaker: And if there's enough power leakage,
Speaker: These groups don't just hide in the city's power flows, they actually begin to seize control of them.
Speaker: They start to take on the character of a proto-state or a parallel state.
Speaker: The Taliban is obviously up against this.
Speaker: There's a tweet making the rounds right now about a Taliban fighter complaining that they now have to sit at a desk from 8 to 4 and
Speaker: Answer emails.
Speaker: He says,
Speaker: If you don't go, you're considered absent, and the wage for that day is cut from your salary.
Speaker: We're not used to that, but it was especially difficult in the first two or three months.
Speaker: There was another thing I dislike, and that's how restricted our lives are now.
Speaker: Unlike anything we experienced before, the Taliban used to be free of restrictions.
Speaker: But now we sit in one place behind a desk and a computer, 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
Speaker: Life's become so wearisome.
Speaker: You do the same things every day.
Speaker: Being away from the family has only doubled the problem.
Speaker: In our ministry, there's very little work for me to do, therefore, I spend most of my time on Twitter.
Speaker: We are connected to speedy Wi-Fi and internet.
Speaker: Many Mujahideen, including me, are addicted to the internet, especially Twitter.
Speaker: Well, one sympathizes.
Speaker: But what's interesting about it to me is the challenge of creating order before the existing order has collapsed or been overthrown or has passed the torch.
Speaker: In almost all of these cases of a weakening central government, there's at least one institution, usually several,
Speaker: that have either been consciously getting ready to take the wheel or just because of the activities they were already engaged in happened to be ready when the time came.
Speaker: And it's a delicate dance because they have to exert power, but they can't exert it in ways that trigger the immune system of the larger authority, whatever that is.
Speaker: If it's the narcos, they don't want to attract the attention of the Colombian government or the Mexican government in the early days.
Speaker: And then once they had captured, essentially, or at least severely compromised the Colombian and Mexican governments, it was a question of not getting the attention of DEA.
Speaker: But they obviously still have to compete with other drug cartels and other power bases, and so they're playing this game of chicken constantly, where they need to be coercive enough and cruel enough and theatrical enough to intimidate their local rivals, but not so cruel and theatrical that it makes the news, at least not our news here in the States.
Speaker: And he frames this as particularly the problem of these underground non-state armed groups, but he kind of glosses over the fact that states have to do this too.
Speaker: I mean, the reason why there's rubber bullets and tear gas and water cannons is so that the state can deploy coercive force in a way that doesn't make the news.
Speaker: It looks as clean and boring and telegenic as possible.
Speaker: Basically, you don't want to see any bodies and you want to see as little blood as possible.
Speaker: So a bullet is worse than a nightstick.
Speaker: A nightstick is probably worse than a rubber bullet.
Speaker: A rubber bullet is probably worse than a water cannon.
Speaker: Water cannons are definitely worse than like loudspeakers and heavy metal music.
Speaker: Whatever you use to deter and repulse and punish...
Speaker: can't create any kind of visceral visual stimulus that can be passed around in the media.
Speaker: Sort of like beating somebody with an orange inside a sock so it doesn't leave a bruise.
Speaker: The latest and greatest is this active denial system, which is basically a truck-mounted microwave to cook protesters with, which, you know, maybe it gives you cancer in 20 years, but it won't leave a mark that you can post on social media.
Speaker: But how careful the state has to be about this kind of thing largely depends on how much control that institution has over the media.
Speaker: You might remember back in 2020,
Speaker: when the media was up in arms over Trump deploying nerve gas against American citizens in violation of the Geneva Convention because the police used tear gas in the Floyd riots.
Speaker: Now, Kilcullen doesn't articulate this himself, but he's describing the ways that both states and non-state groups obtain and maintain power under conditions of
Speaker: Information warfare, psychological warfare.
Speaker: But since he's writing to and presumably himself from this kind of blue-pilled State Department international relations think tank class, he's telling stories in pretty clear good guy, bad guy terms.
Speaker: The narcos are bad.
Speaker: The terrorists are bad.
Speaker: These parallel states like Hezbollah are bad.
Speaker: The protesters in Tunisia and Libya and Syria and Egypt are good, but obviously there was a huge involvement of both radical Islamists and criminal gangs in those movements.
Speaker: So really what he's describing there, the distinction that he's making, is just what does it look like to operate with Western media air support and what does it look like to operate without Western media air support or with a hostile media.
Speaker: He frames media attention and specifically the broadcasting of atrocities as this weapon
Speaker: that any disenfranchised people can pick up and deploy.
Speaker: And just by virtue of posting the bloody shirt, the dead protesters, the starving children on social media, it'll automatically generate outrage, popular outrage, which will then weaken the regime and cause everyone to band together and fight.
Speaker: Of course, that's not what happens.
Speaker: To the extent that it's about popular coordination at all, the social media companies decide how much of that to allow.
Speaker: And they do so under the explicit direction of U.S. intelligence and law enforcement.
Speaker: More importantly, the media uses those images to provide U.S. and NATO politicians with top cover to declare a no-fly zone or freeze the regime's assets overseas or even in some cases authorize military intervention.
Speaker: It's about providing optionality to policymakers, and they don't have to exercise that option.
Speaker: Everybody knows there's been slave markets in Libya since 2011.
Speaker: The media has reported on it.
Speaker: The Bahraini secret police got up to the same shenanigans that the Tunisian and Egyptian secret police did.
Speaker: but somehow the popular will just didn't materialize in a US ally.
Speaker: There's an obscenely brutal proxy war going on between Iran and Saudi Arabia in Yemen right now, but that doesn't rise to the level of
Speaker: any kind of action.
Speaker: Now obviously I'm not saying that it should, I'm just saying the media gets to decide what rotting carcass they're going to hold under your nose to horrify you and disgust you.
Speaker: So anyway, I'm really interested in how some of these groups have operated without friendly media top cover because I think that's essentially our situation.
Speaker: And obviously you and I aren't going to do anything violent or illegal, but actually most of the ways these groups build power
Speaker: are neither violent nor illegal.
Speaker: Kilcolin calls his model the theory of competitive control in which the state and various other institutions compete, not exactly for resources or territory, but for compliance from the population.
Speaker: Each of them has a normative system, a set of rules or consequences that they want the population to abide by.
Speaker: and they use a variety of tools to secure that compliance, some of which are on the coercive end, some of which are persuasive or positive incentives.
Speaker: The goal of these groups is to create an environment that's profoundly safe on the inside of their rule set to all the people who are following the rules, and profoundly unsafe on the outside.
Speaker: Pablo Escobar had his system of incentives called plata o plomo, which means silver or lead, which was, it's not rocket science, it's you can either accept the bribe or I'll kill you.
Speaker: But basically it's just reflective of his understanding that a system of competitive control can't be strictly coercive.
Speaker: It can't just be do it or I'll kill you.
Speaker: And people's attitudes toward Escobar, average people, their attitude toward him was complicated because he actually did a fairly good job, at least in the beginning, of targeting the violence to people in the game while spreading out the beneficence as broadly as possible.
Speaker: And he was able to convince, you know, not everybody, but a lot of people that basically the Colombian government was attacking him and therefore responsible for all this violence because they were stooges of American foreign policy, trying to deal with an American drug problem.
Speaker: And like, yeah, Escobar's drugs were causing a lot of problems in the U.S., but if I'm a Colombian and he's building schools in my neighborhood—
Speaker: Sound to them a little bit like an activist trying to get you to throw away your iPhone because of what's happening in lithium mines in Africa or China or something.
Speaker: So again, an effective system of competitive control is about keeping the inside of your system very, very safe and orderly and predictable and secure.
Speaker: and the outside very crazy and dangerous.
Speaker: So if, for example, you're trying to run an organized crime syndicate in a relatively low crime, relatively safe environment with strong institutions, number one, you're not really making the inside of the bubble much safer than it already is.
Speaker: And number two, the only way you can make the outside of the system meaningfully unsafe is to basically threaten people, to be the danger that you'll protect them from if they comply.
Speaker: So competitor institutions have a really hard time growing in a well-governed state because all they have to offer is extraction and punitive violence, which is very obviously parasitic and brittle.
Speaker: One of the more interesting portraits he paints is that of Christopher Koch, head of the Shower Posse gang in Kingston, Jamaica.
Speaker: In Kingston, the two major political parties are locked in this totalizing struggle where when one party wins an election, they actually go into the neighborhoods controlled by the other party and they bulldoze houses, turn off the water in the sewer, they have mass forced evictions.
Speaker: And so the geography of the city is like this tic-tac-toe board where they've walled off their own friendly enclaves, and there are seams in the structure of the city where the party lines are drawn, and those seams are constantly moving as the elections change.
Speaker: So this guy, Christopher Koch, he's a warlord, he's a drug trafficker, he's like, from our perspective in the States, definitely what you would call a criminal, but he's also an integral component of the political system.
Speaker: The reason his actions are criminal is because his role in distributing the state's benefits and handing down the state's punishments is off the books.
Speaker: But he's definitely an agent of the state.
Speaker: In fact, he's, in some sense, a part owner of the state.
Speaker: It's very much like a feudal relationship.
Speaker: Christopher Koch's job as one of these dons connected to the Jamaican Labor Party is to get out the vote for the JLP in exchange for his neighborhoods getting favorable public housing, government benefits, lucrative government contracts, which, in many cases, is the only kind of work that's available in Kingston.
Speaker: And so he's in this interesting position of actually outsourcing the violence of redistribution to the state, because obviously it's the state that collects taxes and imprisons tax cheats to the extent that anybody's prosecuted for tax evasion in Jamaica.
Speaker: It's also, in most cases, the state that does the bulldozing and the evictions and the shutting off of the water and the sewer.
Speaker: So Christopher Koch threatens people and sells drugs, yeah, but the majority of his day-to-day power
Speaker: is actually gained by being the good guy in his community.
Speaker: He's handing out benefits, punishing evildoers and criminals, and acting as a shield between the civilians and the other partisan gangs.
Speaker: But it's interesting who actually does catch direct violence from the Don in this normative system.
Speaker: And when we say a normative system, we mean a set of rules and their consequences.
Speaker: So any government, any non-state groups exercising power over a community, they have some normative structure.
Speaker: They have, these are the things that you are forbidden to do, and these are the penalties if you do them.
Speaker: Or these are the things you must do, and here's what happens if you don't.
Speaker: Anyway, the only crimes that carry a direct death sentence from the dawn are welching on a loan,
Speaker: informing to the police, or going rogue as one of the Don's enforcers.
Speaker: So when one of his deputized shooters goes off the reservation and hurts somebody that they're not supposed to hurt.
Speaker: And you can see the common thread linking all of those crimes, all those people who get whacked, is that they strike at the Don's legitimacy.
Speaker: And obviously if the Don fails to punish those kinds of violations, he won't stay the Don for very long.
Speaker: These power flows are almost like a fact of the terrain, and if you don't occupy and protect them, then somebody else, maybe somebody worse, will take them.
Speaker: And I'm not making a value judgment about this person in particular, but you can imagine a decent person in that seat saying,
Speaker: Well, it's not that I like whacking people who cross me, but if I don't, the people who depend on me for protection will doubt whether I mean what I say.
Speaker: And there'll be a very chaotic and violent struggle where all these power claims will have to be re-litigated.
Speaker: And Kilcullen makes a pretty compelling case that these non-state groups don't survive unless they have at least the ability to credibly execute violence.
Speaker: But in Kingston, something started to happen in the 1970s where
Speaker: The violence and the criminality drove lots of people from Jamaica into the States.
Speaker: And normally they couldn't afford to take their entire family out of the country, so they went a lot like Latin American migrants do.
Speaker: They find a job in the States and then send money back to their family in Kingston.
Speaker: So now you've got this flow of American dollars into Kingston.
Speaker: And basically what all these dons said is, we want a piece of those remittances.
Speaker: We want a piece of that money coming in, or else we're going to harm your family that's still in Jamaica.
Speaker: And so what had been a partisan street gang, a paramilitary arm of the local government, actually begins to transform in
Speaker: into a transnational crime syndicate.
Speaker: Because they're exercising power not only over Jamaican expatriates, but to the extent that they're involving those expatriates in drug smuggling and violent crime in the U.S., they're starting to project power into the U.S. and attracting the attention of the DEA and the FBI.
Speaker: And of course, locally, American dollars spend real good in Jamaica, so this flow of remittances allows them to buy heavy weapons, pay more extravagant bribes, and actually outgrow the local political establishment that used to be their main power source.
Speaker: Because that had been how they got all the benefits that they then distributed to their populations, essentially through political patronage.
Speaker: But with these outside cash flows coming in, it's suddenly a lot like the drug cartels in Mexico.
Speaker: They just have more money, more resources than the government, and
Speaker: And it's really interesting.
Speaker: He frames the anti-corruption efforts in Kingston that followed as this high-minded good governance thing.
Speaker: But what he's describing, removing the threat of election violence, reducing urban organized crime, professionalizing and depoliticizing the police,
Speaker: is essentially exactly the same thing that the Don is doing, his like capital crimes that he's whacking people over.
Speaker: The state is telling these gangs, you're not allowed to demand bribes because those bribes really ought to be taxes and fines paid to the state.
Speaker: And you're not allowed to beat up criminals because the prosecution of violence rightly belongs to the state.
Speaker: And the Kingston government used to be fine with guys like Christopher Koch operating as a paramilitary arm of the state.
Speaker: But the problem is now he's too big for his britches and causing trouble with the neighbors.
Speaker: So it's just centralization of power.
Speaker: And frankly, just like in Columbia, it's being done at the behest of U.S. intelligence and law enforcement and with massive logistical support from them, who basically told the Jamaican authorities, you need to get these people under control or we will.
Speaker: But what's interesting is, even with DEA breathing down their neck, the Jamaican authorities really dragged their feet extraditing this guy, partly because
Speaker: For the obvious reason that it'll mean war in the streets, his people will defend him.
Speaker: But why will so many people defend him?
Speaker: If he's just this parasitic, drug-dealing gangster, why wouldn't the ordinary people in his community celebrate the police coming in and taking out the trash with the support of American money and American weapons?
Speaker: There are actually situations and places in the world where American law enforcement intervention actually is welcomed, and I'll talk about one of those examples in a minute.
Speaker: But for one thing, his rival political party, the People's National Party, is full of people just like him who, the moment he's gone, are going to move in and start settling scores.
Speaker: He really is standing between his people and a huge amount of violence.
Speaker: In other words, the world outside his bubble is extremely dangerous.
Speaker: He's also nested himself within the legitimate, necessary power flows of the Jamaican political system.
Speaker: Or, I mean, as legitimate as anything is in the Jamaican political system.
Speaker: But he goes and gets out the votes that keep the JLP in power.
Speaker: He'd throw these big block parties where he'd hand out school supplies and take care of people's problems.
Speaker: He'd get people jobs and good public housing.
Speaker: And, of course...
Speaker: The tax base that he's drawing all those resources from would still be there when he was gone, but if you knew where you stood with Christopher Koch, you'd be reluctant to take your chances on the next guy, especially because he would absolutely definitely be the same kind of guy.
Speaker: even if he acted in a more official capacity as an agent of the state.
Speaker: So when the Jamaican government comes for him, his people barricade the neighborhood with trucks from his construction company, they take over the main hospital, they close the airports, and essentially shut down Kingston for several weeks.
Speaker: while the Jamaican army mortars its own people.
Speaker: Again, to enforce a U.S. extradition request.
Speaker: And anything that shuts down all economic activity in a city for a matter of weeks is an extraordinarily disruptive step to take.
Speaker: Enough to potentially upend the government of a country like Jamaica.
Speaker: So again, Christopher Koch lasted as long as he did because he had made himself an integral part of the political and economic system of the country,
Speaker: And you couldn't extricate him without essentially putting the capital of the country on life support for a month.
Speaker: There's just no way that would have ever happened without substantial investment and security guarantees from the U.S. And John P. Sullivan calls this state of affairs a criminal insurgency.
Speaker: A global form of neo-feudalism linked together by cyberspace, globalization, and a series of concrete, ungoverned zones.
Speaker: Of course, they're not ungoverned.
Speaker: They're just governed by these warlords.
Speaker: But he argues that this system of neo-feudalism will spread to more and more cities as communications and transportation technology allow...
Speaker: Even these street gangs in impoverished third world countries, let alone terrorist movements and transnational corporations to blur the lines between crime and war and the lines between foreign and domestic to act across jurisdictions in ways that states aren't technically legally allowed to do under the present system.
Speaker: Like it's supposed to matter an awful lot whether an American intelligence agency is working inside or outside the United States.
Speaker: with citizens or non-citizens.
Speaker: That's why we have a CIA and a separate FBI.
Speaker: And it's supposed to matter tremendously whether an action is a military action or a police action.
Speaker: But basically, the speed of communication and transportation has rendered those boundaries incoherent.
Speaker: So, at the same time, in response to that, when you hear feds talk about international law enforcement cooperation or international intelligence cooperation,
Speaker: They're basically just assuring everyone that they have no intention of letting those rules stop them.
Speaker: And they kind of have to.
Speaker: These threats jump back and forth across these boundaries so quickly now that security forces like these have to scale up or just surrender to these upstart power structures that are more agile.
Speaker: And Kilcullen says that these big states, in fact big empires like the United States,
Speaker: have scaled to the point that they're at because that's the scale you need to field these insurmountable weapons like tanks and strategic bombers and surveillance satellites.
Speaker: So that's Joe Biden telling you, we're going to smoke you with a predator drone anyway, so you might as well hand in your AR-15.
Speaker: That's how, according to them, the state keeps everyone in line.
Speaker: But in Kilcullen's view, the circumstances of the urban littoral, these urban areas close to the water, make the big industrial weapons that used to keep everyone in line a lot harder to use.
Speaker: He talks about how cities are very tall and narrow and crowded.
Speaker: And so something like an M1 Abrams tank has a hard time navigating and targeting inside an urban environment.
Speaker: Helicopters have trouble finding a place to land.
Speaker: Soldiers have to go from house to house to find the bad guys.
Speaker: And basically, he argues that a modern army can't really deploy within a city without massively disrupting the life of the city.
Speaker: These types of weapons are just too destructive and disruptive.
Speaker: And so I guess he's making a case that like the value contained in leaving the city intact is so great that it doesn't make a lot of sense to just blow holes in it until you find the bad guys.
Speaker: But crowded cities near the water have been around for a long time, and this problem is relatively new.
Speaker: And by way of a counterexample, the IDF, that's literally what they do.
Speaker: They burrow through apartment blocks, through people's bedrooms, through their living rooms, so they don't have to expose themselves on the street level or assault a guarded entrance.
Speaker: which of course in an impoverished urban environment like Gaza or the West Bank hurts a lot of feelings and doesn't make them any friends.
Speaker: But again, you come back to the media attention thing.
Speaker: The IDF really genuinely seems not to need to make a lot of friends in Gaza or the West Bank or even the Western press.
Speaker: Similarly, they profile openly at airports.
Speaker: They judge you by what you look like.
Speaker: And if you look like you might be a terrorist, you get some extra screening.
Speaker: And that actually seems to be pretty effective.
Speaker: you can almost view the approach of Israeli state security as an example of what a modern state might look like if they really didn't have to consider the opinion of a hostile media.
Speaker: Anyway, that's the first big principle of this system.
Speaker: You want to make the world really safe for people who follow the rules and really unsafe for people who refuse to follow the rules.
Speaker: And ideally, for propaganda purposes, you want to be seen making the world safer.
Speaker: If you live in a particularly dangerous environment, you may not need to take any direct coercive action at all.
Speaker: The threat of withdrawing your protection all by itself is coercion enough.
Speaker: And that's one of the advantages of being in a scary, chaotic, contested environment.
Speaker: All you have to do is tell people there's a big scary world outside your bubble and things would be very dangerous for them if they didn't have you.
Speaker: You're sort of outsourcing all of your disincentives to the environment.
Speaker: There's a scene in Django Unchained where the German white guy who's befriending the escaped slave says, I must admit I'm at a bit of a quandary when it comes to you.
Speaker: On the one hand, I despise slavery.
Speaker: But on the other hand, I need your help, and if you're not in a position to refuse, all the better.
Speaker: So because this guy has no good options, Schultz is able to extract compliance, for lack of a better term, just on the basis of like, come with me if you want to live, I'm the only friend you've got.
Speaker: Now, is that actually morally significant?
Speaker: Does that actually make Schultz the good guy?
Speaker: Or is he just a guy with good optics?
Speaker: Well, I'll leave that to the reader, but it certainly makes him look like the good guy, which in the context we're talking about of media war changes pretty much everything.
Speaker: And the second big principle, which is related, is what Kilcullen calls the fish trap.
Speaker: A fish trap is basically just a net, the finer the better, with a barbed entrance.
Speaker: So the barbs point inside and it's really easy to swim in and hard to swim out.
Speaker: When you're in a system of competitive control, you're always trying to peel people off from somebody else's system, whether that's a gang trying to initiate a new member to break the law or law enforcement trying to turn an informant.
Speaker: The process is basically the same in both directions.
Speaker: You want to make it really easy to come into your sphere and you want to make it hard to escape.
Speaker: And that can involve the cliche Hollywood ways that a gang will initiate somebody, requiring them to commit a brutal crime or get a face tattoo, something that makes them no longer welcome in polite society or compromised in some way so that it's really dangerous for them to leave the system.
Speaker: And that can get pretty gruesome.
Speaker: There's death squads in Yugoslavia that would force civilians to kill all their neighbors of other ethnic groups, both so that they would feel morally complicit in the militia's actions
Speaker: and so that the militia became vital for the village's protection, because the people of the other ethnic group in the other towns would know what you'd done.
Speaker: And those kinds of tactics are especially common for the groups that are the most nakedly parasitic and coercive.
Speaker: Because for people like that to be your best option, the rest of your world has to be just so insanely screwed up.
Speaker: Kilcullen tells a story about al-Qaeda in Iraq, how they would come into a Sunni neighborhood and start extorting people and cutting their fingers off for smoking cigarettes and that kind of thing.
Speaker: Pretty much all the Sunnis hated them, but they would go into a Shia neighborhood and they would kidnap a kid and torture him to death and then leave them in the street for the Shias to find.
Speaker: And the purpose of doing that was to convince the Shias to mob up so that they could then come back to the Sunnis, who had no other reason to get in line behind them, and basically say, well, look, now if we're not here, the Shia militias are going to come murder everybody.
Speaker: And in fact, that was largely true.
Speaker: These terrorist groups and death squads had a symbiotic relationship where the threat of sectarian violence increased both sides' control of their own population.
Speaker: Now, Kilcullen was apparently one of the architects of the 2007 surge in Iraq, so take it with a grain of salt.
Speaker: But he argues that the surge provided coercive capacity...
Speaker: to credibly protect the city's population, both from the Shia militias and from Al-Qaeda.
Speaker: And then because Al-Qaeda hadn't built any organic buy-in into their system, any reason why you should support them other than do it or I'll kill you, once they took away that threat, they were fairly brittle and it was pretty easy to break up their network.
Speaker: And supposedly, since then, that's become the orthodox response to an urban insurgency.
Speaker: You just flood the zone with soldiers on every street corner
Speaker: And the goal of that is both to eliminate the insurgent as a threat to the population and also eliminate the demand for the insurgent by eliminating all the other threats in the environment.
Speaker: So if the only thing the insurgent provides is violence, then the army can come in and basically solve the problem of violence.
Speaker: Just take that off the table.
Speaker: Most governments can't actually afford to do that on the kind of timescales that they would need to, but Uncle Sam can.
Speaker: So why doesn't that work all the time?
Speaker: Well, there are much more subtle versions of the fish trap that aren't so coercive and maybe aren't even unethical.
Speaker: For instance, in post-Soviet Afghanistan, the Taliban started keeping parallel records of people's property ownership.
Speaker: So particularly in a lot of these rural parts of the country, either the records had been destroyed by war or there were some sort of conflicting claims because people moving around and squatting and things like this.
Speaker: But if you came to the Taliban and you presented your land claim or your assets, whatever they were,
Speaker: they would adjudicate between you and any potential competing claimants.
Speaker: And if they determined that you had a legitimate right to the land, they would go record it in their secret illegal ledger, basically a shadow county recorder's office, and it would be their job to back up and validate your claim on that property the same way that any legitimate state does.
Speaker: They also did a lot of what we would call civil or commercial law, where they're issuing birth certificates, resolving inheritances and divorces, and especially settling questions like water rights.
Speaker: So how is this a fish trap?
Speaker: Well, basically, it meant that there were farmers and shepherds all over Afghanistan whose property rights only exist as long as the Taliban is in control of their area.
Speaker: If you hold the water rights for your farm on the basis of the Taliban's authority and the Taliban's records, you'd better hope they stay in power because especially if those water rights are disputed, one of the ways that an upstart warlord or even the national government might incentivize your tribal enemies is
Speaker: is by taking up the other end of whatever dispute you're involved in.
Speaker: So when the Taliban tells your son to pick up a rifle, they don't have to sell you on their ideological catalog because he doesn't have to go fight for the global caliphate.
Speaker: He's just fighting for the family farm.
Speaker: Everybody understood the Taliban to be ruthless and extreme, even by the standards of the region, but they gained this very strong reputation for being even-handed and predictable, which turns out to be a lot more important than being likable.
Speaker: Kilcullen tells how in one province, the Afghan government had been complicit in drug trafficking, child prostitution, routine ransom kidnappings for many years, and it was right next to the capital, so you couldn't really make a case that it was a lack of state capacity.
Speaker: But the Taliban makes a public declaration that all that stuff was against the law now.
Speaker: Taliban law.
Speaker: And then they publicly executed four kidnappers and left them swinging from a tree in the provincial capital.
Speaker: Again, 40 minutes outside of Kabul.
Speaker: One witness said, It proves the Taliban have no problem with ordinary Afghans.
Speaker: They only have a problem with those Afghans who work in high government positions who run crime in the city.
Speaker: Kilcullen writes, Via placards on the executed kidnappers' bodies, they sent a message of consistency, predictability, and order by which they distinguished themselves from corrupt officials.
Speaker: The locals clearly understood this.
Speaker: In contrast, Afghans whom I asked about their perceptions of the national police or the government court system just laughed and said that government courts take months to resolve the smallest dispute, cost thousands of dollars in bribes, and render judgments that always favor the most influential power brokers who can simply ignore the judgment anyway if they don't like it.
Speaker: By contrast, the Taliban come from the local area, so they understand the issues people are dealing with.
Speaker: Their justice is free of charge.
Speaker: Judgments are rendered quickly, sometimes in as little as half an hour.
Speaker: And unlike the Afghan national police, who are often seen as corrupt and in the pay of local elites, people expect that the local Taliban underground cell will consistently enforce the court's judgment.
Speaker: And just to reiterate, these are underground cells in areas that are thoroughly controlled by the Afghan national government.
Speaker: So this isn't like a deep Taliban stronghold.
Speaker: This is a place where they're essentially bandits.
Speaker: But they're bandits who punish the criminals that the Kabul government won't.
Speaker: And these law enforcement actions have nothing to do with trying to seize the territory or the resources of that region in the near term.
Speaker: They're about the people, trying to establish normative control over the people and threaten people who break the Taliban's rules.
Speaker: and essentially showing ordinary people, you'll be safer with us because we are going to punish these people who are hurting you.
Speaker: Back to the quote, Many people don't like the Taliban, a businessman from Kandahar told me, but at least you know what you're getting.
Speaker: They're consistent and fair.
Speaker: You know what to expect from them.
Speaker: So these very vivid scenes of vigilante justice against pedophiles and kidnappers won them a lot of friends, as well as a fair amount of redistribution the same way that Escobar and Christopher Koch did.
Speaker: There's not a whole lot of wealth to redistribute in Afghanistan, but ironically the flow of Western aid and development money, which was intended to strengthen the Kabul government and the U.S. occupation, had the opposite effect.
Speaker: Because the Kabul government was too weak and corrupt to actually absorb and monitor all these power flows, they leaked out all over the country and they nourished this whole ecosystem of competitor institutions, most importantly the Taliban.
Speaker: Obviously the most extreme final example of this phenomenon is all those pictures of Taliban fighters patrolling in brand new American Bradley fighting vehicles with
Speaker: M4 carbines and night vision goggles, which of course goes well beyond the weakness and incompetence and corruption of the Afghan government.
Speaker: But back to this question of being likable and winning hearts and minds, one of the things that Kilcullen points out about the Taliban's popularity was that it didn't grow in areas where they had done the most propagandizing, or where they had already had maybe the most affinity with the local religious leadership.
Speaker: They gained the moral and popular support of the people in those places where they developed the greatest military strength, where it was the least practical to contest their rule.
Speaker: And there's a really cynical way to look at that, right?
Speaker: Which is, you know, people are just sheep and cowards and bandwagoners and they'll do what they're told.
Speaker: And maybe there's some truth to that, but I think it's more like most people aren't political.
Speaker: Their aspirations and desires are not political, and so the thing they most want government to do is dispose of political questions for them.
Speaker: People will take a political system where those questions are settled, even if they're much less than ideal, over a world where they're constantly in flux.
Speaker: And that's in the Declaration of Independence.
Speaker: Why is that?
Speaker: Because for an ordinary person, chaos is tyranny.
Speaker: They have no ability and no desire to influence the broader course of events, so a constantly changing political system, especially a dramatically changing political system like a civil war or revolution,
Speaker: is one where they have no idea how to get what they want in the world, and where they're constantly being blindsided by punishments that seem capricious and they don't even know necessarily which power structure they're coming from.
Speaker: And that's also, by the way, why conservatives in America are liberals driving the speed limit.
Speaker: They don't actually care where the cultural rules settle, they just want them to settle.
Speaker: And so they're constantly saying, now, wait a minute, you said you just wanted to be able to visit your boyfriend in the hospital and file your taxes jointly.
Speaker: I thought we had a deal.
Speaker: And I'm actually extremely sympathetic to that perspective.
Speaker: It's just we're up against an ideology that is opposed to the concept of equilibrium that can't possibly equilibrate.
Speaker: And that's why people love a good dictator, like an effective dictator.
Speaker: They tell everyone in the system, I am the guarantor of the deal.
Speaker: And as long as I'm around, nobody's going to change it on you.
Speaker: That's one of my favorite quotes from Lee Kuan Yew.
Speaker: Whoever got, I'm going to try not to do it in his accent.
Speaker: Whoever governs Singapore must have that iron in him or give it up.
Speaker: This is not a game of cards.
Speaker: This is your life and mine.
Speaker: I've spent a whole lifetime building this and as long as I'm in charge, nobody's gonna knock it down.
Speaker: Now the greatest weakness of guys like this is that this mindset is difficult to transmit to their sons.
Speaker: But if you could solve that problem, I don't think sane people, healthy people would ever wanna be governed any other way.
Speaker: So anyway, the U.S. really did flood Afghanistan with troops and equipment and surveillance.
Speaker: I mean, they had great situational awareness with respect to where the Taliban was and what they were doing.
Speaker: And it's not like the Taliban were a match for U.S. troops in combat.
Speaker: It was not even close.
Speaker: So why was the Taliban so much more powerful and so much more lasting than a death squad or Al-Qaeda in Iraq?
Speaker: In my opinion, it's because they genuinely offered something to the people, even the people who disagreed with their ideological program.
Speaker: If all they had was coercion, then these outside shows of force would be able to knock them loose.
Speaker: Now, on the other hand, if all they had was the persuasive and moralistic reasons for people to support the regime, and they were unable or unwilling to use coercion, then it's not just that the bad guys will beat you, it's that the mass of ordinary innocent people won't trust you to keep them safe.
Speaker: So they didn't rise to power through the force of their arguments.
Speaker: People found their arguments more and more persuasive as they grew stronger.
Speaker: And we've seen that here with the culture war.
Speaker: The whole thing has been the story of normal, conventional, conformist people gradually flipping as they notice which direction the wind's blowing.
Speaker: At least in my church, it's exactly the same people who, when I was a kid, would have been measuring girls' skirts to make sure they were sufficiently modest for the church dance or worrying a lot about explicit content labels on CDs and R-rated movies.
Speaker: It's in many cases the exact same people who are now enforcing the rules in the new regime.
Speaker: They basically just like to enforce rules.
Speaker: And there's a sense in which for these people, morality is indistinguishable from propriety.
Speaker: They're essentially the same thing.
Speaker: These are the people you went over with stability, and it turns out that's most people.
Speaker: And while they can be really annoying to deal with if you're on the wrong end of them, the good news about those people is that you don't have to convince them of anything, ever.
Speaker: You just have to win.
Speaker: But you do have to win across the spectrum.
Speaker: You have to win in the coercive domain.
Speaker: You have to win in the governance domain.
Speaker: It certainly helps to be effective in the propaganda domain, but that's primarily about building a vanguard.
Speaker: You certainly don't have to convince everybody all the time.
Speaker: And the proof of that is that America in the 20th century lost wars.
Speaker: Basically, all of America's enemies during that time were on the back foot in the propaganda game.
Speaker: If America has a single insurmountable domain advantage, even more so than 11 carrier strike groups, it's narrative control.
Speaker: The ability to control the flow of information and maybe more importantly, to influence the interpretation of the information.
Speaker: Now, is that advantage receding from its zenith?
Speaker: It does seem to be.
Speaker: It seems like social media is allowing a lot of people to at least complicate or poke holes in the narratives that the U.S. would prefer to see out there.
Speaker: But the problem is that there's no serious competitor paradigm, no serious alternative ideology, much less a serious competitor in terms of a normative system of control across the spectrum.
Speaker: People who are...
Speaker: ready to govern and collect taxes and hang criminals.
Speaker: So when you publicly catch the government or the NGO complex or the media in a lie, you are successful in weakening a lot of people's loyalty to those institutions.
Speaker: But that's definitely not the same as replacing them.
Speaker: I think Moldbug is right about this when he talks about the need for a dissident information source, and he was talking about Twitter when I heard him say this,
Speaker: but how a dissident information source, an alternative information source, has to be absolutely, unimpeachably correct all the time.
Speaker: in order to become a serious competitor or a successor to a mainstream source.
Speaker: Like Tom Cruise was right about some things, about the way psychiatry works, but that hasn't translated to anybody taking Tom Cruise more seriously in any kind of generalized way.
Speaker: Certainly not to Scientology becoming any kind of mainstream load-bearing knowledge institution.
Speaker: Same thing with Alex Jones.
Speaker: Alex Jones is something like a poet or a shaman or something.
Speaker: We all go to the mainstream media for general information and those of us who distrust it obviously read it more critically, but we still read it first.
Speaker: You know, maybe you take the mainstream media narrative and you adjust from that baseline like, okay, what lies are they telling about this particular story?
Speaker: But that's still the baseline.
Speaker: That's where you start.
Speaker: And I mean, with Alex Jones, that problem's tenfold.
Speaker: Like you have to figure out what the hell he's talking about first.
Speaker: And instead of parsing it for a lie, you're like, okay, in what sense is this craziness maybe kind of true?
Speaker: And again, that doesn't touch the American empire in terms of governance or coercive power.
Speaker: American diplomats in the 20th century did an incredible job of taking over the world the same way the Taliban took over Afghanistan.
Speaker: They placed themselves as the impartial broker and recorder of the entire international system.
Speaker: And so all of these agreements between all of these countries are underwritten by U.S. power.
Speaker: As long as there's no credible alternative, no credible challenger to the United States international order,
Speaker: an increase in foreign policy turmoil actually makes the US stronger because while it doesn't make the inside of their bubble any safer, it makes the world outside their bubble much much more dangerous.
Speaker: Europe was a lot more aggressive and frankly rebellious toward
Speaker: the US government back when the big enemies of the international system were Iraq and Iran and North Korea.
Speaker: But with Russia invading Ukraine, at least potentially, at least theoretically trying to renegotiate the power balance in Europe, all of a sudden everybody's lined up behind Biden like it's September 12, 2001, because it turns out that the American security umbrella has actually been pretty cozy for Europe, particularly the European leadership, but also the population.
Speaker: They don't want the deal renegotiated.
Speaker: And even if they don't think Putin has any serious ambitions deeper into Europe, just the idea that the security umbrella could be called into question, that somebody might need help and not get it, is enough to make a lot of people circle the wagons.
Speaker: And viewing the system through this lens, things that don't make a ton of sense from a pure ideological perspective actually make a lot of sense.
Speaker: Like the fact that you've got normie, centrist, D.C.
Speaker: liberal types waving a flag with Nazi runes on it.
Speaker: Like, it's weird.
Speaker: Here at home, the number one domestic extremist terror threat is neo-Nazis, right?
Speaker: Meanwhile, they're watching actual neo-Nazis in an open military occupation overseas.
Speaker: and they're cheering and clapping like it's a Marvel movie.
Speaker: Because that ideological conversation, that propaganda conversation is just completely irrelevant.
Speaker: Here in America, a neo-Nazi is someone who is on the side of disruption and chaos and unpredictability and change.
Speaker: But in Ukraine, the neo-Nazis are on the side of everything going back the way it was, everybody following the rules, and everything staying predictable and safe, and everybody knowing where they stand.
Speaker: Now, it's not just that.
Speaker: NATO does have a significant propaganda advantage in that Putin shot first.
Speaker: And as long as you can keep the conversation focused very narrowly on that, you can argue that all the other stuff is immaterial.
Speaker: Whichever party escalates the situation to violence is the aggressor and therefore the bad guy, regardless of whatever preceded the act of violence.
Speaker: Of course, the Russians would argue that what the United States is doing is a classic case of kick the dog until it bites and then shoot it.
Speaker: If Ukraine has demonstrated anything, it's that Russia isn't capable of projecting power, even to the extent of the old boundaries of the Warsaw Pact.
Speaker: But still, there's this very easy argument to make that they picked a fight with somebody smaller than they were that they thought they could bully.
Speaker: And so the United States is the big brother stepping in to protect the innocent, the weak.
Speaker: And that's ultimately how the big dog always launders their big dog status to remain the good guy.
Speaker: The US government over the last century or so has just mastered that art of perception.
Speaker: The art of making sure the fight happens and making sure they're in a position to win that fight without appearing to be the aggressor and furthermore taking all the spoils in second and third order economic effects so they don't look like spoils.
Speaker: In the world wars, the US wasn't trying to conquer and loot Europe.
Speaker: They were coming to the rescue of poor little Belgium and Poland
Speaker: And they just happened to end up occupying Europe and monopolizing the world's undamaged industrial capacity and essentially buying Europe out from under starving people for chocolate bars and nylons and soap.
Speaker: You see the same phenomenon in the approach to family law or anti-discrimination law.
Speaker: They're not ruthlessly eliminating all of the associations and institutions whose power they can't capture.
Speaker: They're coming to the rescue of the oppressed, the downtrodden, people who just want a seat at the table.
Speaker: And this works because it's a really simple argument.
Speaker: Putin can make the case for encirclement and provocation, just like the Germans did, that the big guy wanted a fight, and the only way for the little guy to survive that fight was to strike when and where he had the advantage.
Speaker: And very smart books have been written in hindsight about how, you know, the Kaiser wasn't the monster he was made out to be, but
Speaker: That's a much more complicated case than you invaded, nobody invaded you, you started the fight, you're the bad guy.
Speaker: So in this game of information war, psychological war, it really pays to not be the one who threw the first punch.
Speaker: And it works right down to the individual tactical level.
Speaker: Kilcullen describes two modes that an individual soldier can protect themselves in a hostile environment.
Speaker: There's direct protection and indirect protection.
Speaker: So direct protection is cover, body armor, heavy plating on an armored vehicle, things that allow you to get hit and survive.
Speaker: Whereas indirect protection is speed, lethality, stealth, situational awareness, rapid target acquisition.
Speaker: which is the ability to find and kill the bad guy before he finds and kills you.
Speaker: While indirect protection is maybe sexier, Kilcullen argues that it's much, much more disruptive and destructive to an urban environment because it means you have to shoot first and ask questions later.
Speaker: You have to create lines of sight and thwart ambushes by blowing holes in expensive things and
Speaker: He frames that like the main issue is that states can't afford to damage their own cities, but again, they really can.
Speaker: The danger is in giving a hostile media something to grab onto and deploy against you.
Speaker: Which I think is one of the most important insights for any group that's trying to be independent, that doesn't have the protection and connivance of the media.
Speaker: It becomes really important to be able to absorb a lot of punishment and do your best to make sure that you're the one waving the bloody shirt.
Speaker: You're the one presenting the evidence before the world of all the wrongs that you've endured.
Speaker: Now, obviously, that's still an uphill battle because the media can just choose not to tell your story.
Speaker: But certainly it's easier than unambiguously shooting first.
Speaker: And you can see how much that matters in the story of the battles at Waco and Ruby Ridge.
Speaker: Those situations were so complicated.
Speaker: There was so much going on and so many people making decisions that you could argue were unwise or rash or deceptive or exploitative or aggressive.
Speaker: But it's amazing how...
Speaker: On both sides of the argument, whenever someone's trying to assign blame and say who the bad guy of the story was, it's amazing how much the moral question hinges in ordinary people's minds on who shot first.
Speaker: When the truth is, in both of those cases, the gravity of the situation, and I don't mean the seriousness of the situation, but like the pull of the incentive gradient, the gravity was pulling toward a shootout.
Speaker: And by the time it finally went down, both sides were prepared and intending to
Speaker: to have that shootout.
Speaker: And so the question of who actually shot first is, it's not maybe entirely down to luck, but it certainly doesn't seem like you can just say, well, it's that one guy's fault.
Speaker: None of this would have happened if that guy hadn't fired the first shot.
Speaker: And that leads to maybe a deeper point about the state's propaganda advantage.
Speaker: It's actually not the case that America's media and cultural dominance means the state can do just literally whatever it wants.
Speaker: And the media will take whatever happened and magically spin it into whatever the story needs to be.
Speaker: The state certainly doesn't act like that's the case, or they would just arrest us because they don't like us.
Speaker: They'd take away our guns because they don't think we should have them.
Speaker: They'd shoot Snowden with a heart attack gun.
Speaker: You can certainly believe that they're bad guys who do bad things, but they actually have to take some effort to engineer these situations, right down to developing crowd-control microwave weapons to create the necessary perceptions.
Speaker: So it's not just a question of having the capital and the technology.
Speaker: That's a skill.
Speaker: That's a skill that they've developed.
Speaker: Other people could learn to do that.
Speaker: But it's interesting to think about why they have to do that.
Speaker: Why does the globe-straddling empire that controls all of the media outlets, why do they have to manage perception?
Speaker: Well, it goes back to the theory of competitive control.
Speaker: They have to make a world that is safe on the inside and unsafe on the outside.
Speaker: And that can't happen unless everybody understands what the rules are and what they need to do to be safe.
Speaker: And even those of us who consider ourselves dissident, we still feel the protection of the rules of that system.
Speaker: A lot of our people talk like we're all right on the cusp of being Waco just because the government hates us.
Speaker: But nobody acts like they really believe that.
Speaker: We all own the guns that the state allows us to own.
Speaker: We talk shit about the government in the ways that we're pretty sure we're allowed to talk shit about the government.
Speaker: The truth that we all quietly recognize is that we know exactly what makes us different from David Koresh.
Speaker: We know exactly the lines that his group transgressed that we choose not to transgress, and that's how we keep ourselves from being surrounded by the ATF.
Speaker: I'm not saying that what happened to them was fair or morally correct.
Speaker: What I'm saying is that they unambiguously broke rules that the rest of us acknowledge.
Speaker: We know what the difference is between us and them.
Speaker: It's not about right and wrong.
Speaker: It's about consistency and predictability.
Speaker: Now that's starting to get more complicated, of course, as they increasingly bend and break and selectively enforce the rules out in the open, or at least as we increasingly see them do it.
Speaker: Maybe that's social media.
Speaker: I don't know.
Speaker: But if they can fine Alex Jones a billion dollars for talking shit about the government, maybe the line isn't exactly where we thought it was.
Speaker: And that does seriously destabilize the system by making people feel unsafe inside it.
Speaker: And by inside it, just to be clear, I don't mean everybody who lives here.
Speaker: I mean inside the rules.
Speaker: It makes people who thought that they were following the rules and doing what they needed to do to be safe...
Speaker: feel like that actually isn't going to keep them safe.
Speaker: And so every time they do something like that, the media has the task of contextualizing what the state is doing in such a way that they're actually not violating their own rules.
Speaker: The reason they have to do that is not so that everybody thinks they're the good guys.
Speaker: Like, there's no future where the secret, classified Epstein documents are unveiled and we all realize the government is actually super evil and we rise up as one to overthrow them.
Speaker: That's not what they're trying to avoid.
Speaker: They're not trying to look like the good guys.
Speaker: They're trying to tell the civilians, the apolitical people, listen, the rules haven't changed.
Speaker: This guy broke rules that you already knew about.
Speaker: So you're still safe.
Speaker: We're going to leave you alone.
Speaker: And one of the reasons, if not the reason, why this classical liberal human rights egregore has eaten almost everything is
Speaker: is that it provides a rule set that is essentially optimized for encompassing as many people as it possibly can.
Speaker: Like the theoretical underpinning is the only reason you could be excluded from this system is if you're trying to exclude someone else.
Speaker: That's why non-discrimination is so central to this system of control.
Speaker: They have to be the side that takes no sides.
Speaker: And you can see how that cashes out in America's role in international systems as well.
Speaker: That's the reason why the United States governs the planet without being a territorial empire.
Speaker: The State Department is always playing the referee, peacekeeping, breaking up fights because that's the source of their legitimacy.
Speaker: Our umbrella encompasses everybody.
Speaker: We keep everybody safe and we don't play favorites.
Speaker: Anyone can get on our good side and everybody knows how to get on our good side.
Speaker: And I don't know if it's inevitable that a system like that would dominate under these conditions of media warfare, but it certainly seems to be hyper-adaptive to those conditions.
Speaker: It's just the apex predator of this power ecosystem.
Speaker: Kilcullen spends quite a lot of time on the Arab Spring, and particularly the various governments' response to social media.
Speaker: The regimes that were the most successful in managing the demonstrations and the riots and suppressing revolutionary sentiment were the ones that left the internet on...
Speaker: and used it to disrupt, misinform, hack, track, and so fear among the activists.
Speaker: Egypt, Tunisia, and Libya all made the decision at various points to shut down the internet altogether, and they really didn't account for how much the average citizen, the non-politically active citizen, had come to regard internet access as maybe not a fundamental right in the sense that Westerners think we have fundamental rights, but it was an expectation.
Speaker: And basically, the act of shutting down the internet told those people, you thought you knew what you had to do to be left alone, but it turns out you're not going to be left alone.
Speaker: And it actually created this strong sentiment of identification and solidarity with the protesters.
Speaker: We saw something like that with the COVID mandates here.
Speaker: There were a lot of people who really believed that if they kept their head down and stayed competent and did their job, they'd be left alone.
Speaker: And the messaging from the top on this was, no, here's some new stuff you got to do or else you're fired.
Speaker: And by the way, you're not fired just from here, but you're fired at every Fortune 500 company.
Speaker: You're no longer welcome in the upper echelon of wage labor in America.
Speaker: And I've talked to a lot of these guys, a lot of them joined exit around that timeframe.
Speaker: And the common denominator was actually not any kind of principled objection to the vaccine itself.
Speaker: In fact, many of them came after the vaccine mandate had been rescinded.
Speaker: It was an objection to having the rules changed.
Speaker: All these quiet, competent, conservative guys had basically no appetite for picking a fight at work over gay marriage or affirmative action or any of that stuff.
Speaker: They said, well, you know, I don't like the official company line on this stuff, but I don't really have to agree with it.
Speaker: I can just cash the checks.
Speaker: That's no big deal.
Speaker: But it was like, no, now the condition of your employment, the employment upon which you based your educational plans, your student loans, the job that you uprooted your family for, the work that you put in above and beyond on the expectation of future promotion and advancement, the availability of your benefits and your retirement, all of that, that's all being renegotiated now and you have no leverage.
Speaker: So you can either accept the new terms or you can try to find a comparable position outside the system.
Speaker: Good luck.
Speaker: And a lot of these guys, when they came into the group, said to me, you know, they haven't actually asked me to do anything that I materially disagree with yet.
Speaker: I just know they're going to.
Speaker: I know it's never going to stop.
Speaker: And so I might as well start building an alternative.
Speaker: And that is the power of screwing with people's sense of security and predictability, their sense that the rules are stable.
Speaker: And these guys are right.
Speaker: It's not going to stop.
Speaker: The ideological commitments of the state are on a collision course with basically anybody who believes in anything.
Speaker: So while it's not true that there's going to be some day where everybody wakes up, it is the case that more and more and more people are being sheared off or really expelled from the safe zone as the requirements to stay compliant become more and more onerous.
Speaker: And those requirements have to become more onerous to maintain the system's narrative legitimacy as the biggest tent, the most inclusive, the side that takes no sides.
Speaker: As they try to incorporate more and more people who are just fundamentally incompatible with each other, they're increasingly having to chop people up to fit.
Speaker: So religious attachments have to be dissolved.
Speaker: Family attachments have to be dissolved.
Speaker: With ethnic attachments, they talk out both sides of their mouth, right?
Speaker: On the one hand, we're all going to be this beige soup by 2070, and isn't that beautiful?
Speaker: But on the other hand, certain ethnic groups are more equal than others.
Speaker: But in any case, the process of dissolving all allegiances that might compete is not going to stop.
Speaker: And if you're already outside the bubble, or let's be honest, we're in the outer layers of the bubble, right?
Speaker: Like Snowden is meaningfully outside the bubble.
Speaker: Assange is outside the bubble.
Speaker: You and I are still definitely in the bubble.
Speaker: But if you're in our position, what you want is for a few more cracks to appear.
Speaker: You want it to get a little bit more dangerous inside the bubble and a little less dangerous outside.
Speaker: And this is what people vaguely have in mind when they talk about the creation of parallel institutions.
Speaker: They want you to have somewhere to go when you get kicked out.
Speaker: But the problem is, if those institutions are meaningfully in conflict with the state, with the dominant normative system, eventually the state's going to get allergic, and it's going to attack those institutions.
Speaker: But they have to start getting built before the state declines to a point where it's safe for them to be built.
Speaker: These institutions have to be ready before they're needed, and they have to survive until they're needed.
Speaker: So let's imagine that you live in a country that's like America is now, but you know that it's going to become a country like Jamaica is now, with criminal gangs and partisan violence and
Speaker: extreme corruption, warlordism, privatized security, etc.
Speaker: We call it Jamaicification.
Speaker: If you anticipate that and you start acting like a warlord or a criminal right now, you're going to be immediately detected and destroyed by a normative system that is still very effective at policing its boundaries.
Speaker: But think about all the non-criminal, all the legitimate power flows that these groups are built on.
Speaker: It's not illegal to run a get out the vote campaign.
Speaker: It's not illegal to lobby on behalf of a constituency.
Speaker: It's not illegal to bring back benefits to them.
Speaker: It's not illegal to own a construction company, lots of heavy equipment.
Speaker: It's not illegal to provide lots of jobs.
Speaker: It's not illegal to run an import export business or telecommunications infrastructure.
Speaker: And all of these things are necessary to the functioning of the state.
Speaker: All these power flows have legitimate purposes.
Speaker: It's just that in these disordered societies, those power flows have been captured and exploited by someone who isn't the state.
Speaker: So these power flows become like the internet in the Arab Spring.
Speaker: They're legitimate power flows, a legitimate flow of information that's necessary to the functioning of normal society.
Speaker: which makes it really challenging for the state to cut the blood flow to these competitor institutions without also harming healthy tissue, so to speak.
Speaker: Kilcullen tells stories of humanitarian flights that routinely run drugs and weapons in the Middle East and Africa.
Speaker: And all the NGOs know this, but those planes are also the only planes that bring first aid kits and tampons and bags of beans, so they let them through.
Speaker: And this, fundamentally, is the genius of Chris Ruffo.
Speaker: It's not that Chris uses the right words or has the right carefully crafted normie appeal.
Speaker: I mean, he's great.
Speaker: That's all great.
Speaker: But the genius of Chris Ruffo is that he has targeted a power flow that the state needs to control, and he's daring them to admit that they just don't want to give it to the people.
Speaker: Education funding is an enormous power flow, and not only because it's just a lot of money, but because it shelters an army of activists and professional sinecures.
Speaker: So it's a way of throwing benefits to the state's favored constituencies.
Speaker: It's a way of getting a lot of ideological work done that the market won't support, which in turn finances this massive second-order ecosystem of
Speaker: of activists in academia who run the otherwise useless degree programs that all of these activists come from.
Speaker: And that's to say nothing of the deeper power, the more lasting power of having effectively a monopoly on the raising of middle-class American schoolchildren.
Speaker: Which, by the way, that's how they make good on the threat of being on the right side of history.
Speaker: They say, don't you want to be on the right side of history?
Speaker: What they mean is we're going to write the history books and we're going to teach your kids that history and they're going to despise you.
Speaker: So you'd better get in line or your kids are going to disown you.
Speaker: Anyway, Rufo is just saying, hey, this is government of the people, by the people, for the people, right?
Speaker: We believe people ought to have maximum choice, right?
Speaker: And the teachers work for us, right?
Speaker: The voters, the taxpayers.
Speaker: And of course, that's bullshit, but it's load-bearing bullshit.
Speaker: And so he's giving them a choice.
Speaker: He's saying, you can either admit that that's bullshit and you just don't want parents to make those choices, right?
Speaker: Or you can give right-wing homeschool Christian MAGA moms $900 billion and let them decide where they want to put it.
Speaker: And you can imagine a world in which this massive left-wing academic ecosystem just shrivels and dies while simultaneously the state nourishes this massive private right-wing Christian academic ecosystem.
Speaker: That might actually happen, I think, in some jurisdictions.
Speaker: And in others, they'll probably be able to get away with admitting that they just don't think parents should be making those choices because we trust the experts.
Speaker: But anyway, Rufo is effectively looting the state.
Speaker: He is capturing and redistributing a power flow.
Speaker: And in the act of redistributing it, he's added immensely to his own personal power in exactly the same way that Christopher Coke in Jamaica did.
Speaker: It's not his money, right?
Speaker: It's the taxpayer's money, but we sure love him for going and getting it for us.
Speaker: And I mean that sincerely.
Speaker: He's a hero.
Speaker: And what he's doing is not unethical.
Speaker: It's not illegal.
Speaker: It's not corrupt.
Speaker: But it's the same kind of thing that this gangster in Jamaica does.
Speaker: And as the state gradually loses more and more credibility and control, more power flows like this are going to become up for grabs.
Speaker: And somebody's going to take them.
Speaker: Elon's in a pretty interesting situation from this perspective.
Speaker: He's made himself essential in at least three massive flows of power from the state and from the market.
Speaker: First you got SpaceX.
Speaker: Elon Musk is the only game in town for putting anything into orbit cost effectively.
Speaker: If there were to be any kind of massive disruption to America's space assets that required rapid replenishment, let's say during a war, Elon Musk would be 100% indispensable to the regime.
Speaker: He's also bought Twitter, which if you buy my theory that media top cover matters more than aircraft carriers, that's a pretty big deal.
Speaker: He's also making a play to be the number one internet service provider in most places in the world.
Speaker: And then he owns Tesla, which is hoovering up all this green energy money besides developing a lot of the tech that's going to define the next generation of warfare in terms of self-driving autonomous weapons.
Speaker: So I guess that's four lanes, not three.
Speaker: But anyway, he came by it all honestly.
Speaker: I think it's pretty clear that the regime dislikes him in general, views him as a threat.
Speaker: If they don't, they're morons.
Speaker: But you have to think through, if they really wanted to get to him, how hard would they have to work?
Speaker: How much institutional capital would they have to burn?
Speaker: How many important people's sense of security and predictability would they have to screw with in order to screw with him?
Speaker: Anyway, the point is, he's not powerful because he's got money.
Speaker: He's powerful because he's captured power flows.
Speaker: They can't disrupt him without disrupting themselves.
Speaker: Jeff Bezos is in a similar situation, not through Amazon proper, but through AWS.
Speaker: He's dug in like a tick in both DOD and the intelligence community's IT infrastructure.
Speaker: The problem right now for these guys is that they're in the same situation that the Kingston gangs were before this flow of outside remittances started coming in from America.
Speaker: The government is dependent on them, but they're also completely dependent on the government.
Speaker: And I don't just mean that they're dependent on long-term government contracts and investment from government clients.
Speaker: I mean their ownership of their stuff and their physical security.
Speaker: That's all contracts in American courts and American bank accounts with American dollars in them.
Speaker: They're much more like the shooters or the muscle in that ecosystem in Jamaica.
Speaker: They have some privilege and some delegated power, but that means they're under much more extreme scrutiny to prevent them walking off with it.
Speaker: And, you know, the state's already looking sideways at Elon.
Speaker: just for dipping his toes into the political and cultural game by buying Twitter.
Speaker: And they're going to look for a reason to burn him, but they can't be seen just outright robbing him because it would mean too many other billionaires and industrialists looking around like, I don't know, Elon was a lot like me.
Speaker: I'm not that different.
Speaker: But Elon is building all of this politically relevant power outside of the political domain.
Speaker: And that's another thing that these Arab Spring activists had going for them.
Speaker: They had substantial air gapping between political actions, militant actions, and economic actions.
Speaker: You had a lot of westernized, poli-sci, NGO nerd types running social media accounts and making signs and passing around petitions.
Speaker: But it was these apolitical soccer ultras, soccer hooligans, who did most of the fighting with the police.
Speaker: These were guys who fought the cops on a typical weekend anyway, so they understood police riot control tactics.
Speaker: They knew what would and wouldn't get them arrested, what would and wouldn't get them charged.
Speaker: Just like cops know that they can't just shoot demonstrators, even in Egypt, soccer hooligans learn how to exercise force within the bounds of the rules.
Speaker: And it's really important that they develop that skill by being drunk and disorderly after soccer games, not as part of some explicit anti-government movement.
Speaker: That made them incredibly valuable to the political guys.
Speaker: It's important that everybody played their role by the rules of their particular game.
Speaker: The political guys played the political game and the leg breakers played the leg breaker game and never the twain should meet until the very last minute when the government was collapsing and the police were joining the protesters and the optics game didn't matter anymore.
Speaker: And obviously none of these groups were alone.
Speaker: They had the cooperation of U.S. intelligence and social media platforms.
Speaker: They were openly coordinating with extremist groups and criminal gangs, accessing material on missile launchers and manufacturing weapons, all kinds of things that if you and I tried to do anything anywhere near that on mainstream social media, we'd immediately catch a ban, plus a visit from the FBI.
Speaker: And that's ultimately how the control is maintained.
Speaker: People aren't controlled with tanks and F-15s and Tomahawk missiles anymore.
Speaker: They're controlled through surveillance and telecommunications technology.
Speaker: If the state knows exactly who's a threat and exactly where they are and how to get to them, then they don't need a missile or a bomb.
Speaker: They don't even need to kill you or beat you up.
Speaker: They don't even need to threaten you.
Speaker: They can just find something wrong with your taxes or, you know, in the case of our friend AJ, sue you for defamation for a billion dollars or lock you up.
Speaker: And, you know, you will have well and truly broken the rules and it won't upset any of their solid citizens because they'll make the case that you're different.
Speaker: You had it coming.
Speaker: The essence of the CIA color revolution phenomenon is basically that.
Speaker: By monopolizing telecommunications and surveillance technology, the U.S. government gets to decide which states have access to these tools and which get targeted by these tools.
Speaker: In other words, they decide which states stay in control of their own citizens.
Speaker: It's the ability of the state to surveil and target enemies and then to recontextualize whatever bad thing happened to them so that either it looks like you were the bad guy and had it coming or...
Speaker: It was a tragic accident or whatever.
Speaker: That's the stuff that keeps people up at night.
Speaker: And that's why guys like Biden and Swalwell love to talk about F-15s and nukes and predator drones and all that stuff, because that stuff's genuinely never going to happen.
Speaker: That threat's ridiculous, and they hope that it makes the whole scenario ridiculous.
Speaker: But the fact is, you can be targeted with much more precision than that in a way that doesn't require the messy and expensive narrative control that that kind of targeting would require.
Speaker: And again, I don't think any of us are currently interesting or important enough for even that kind of public character assassination response to be cost effective.
Speaker: So hopefully that remains academic.
Speaker: But let's sum up.
Speaker: What can we learn from all this as people who want to be more independent and more sovereign without dying in a fire?
Speaker: Well, here's what I see.
Speaker: You need to be essential to as many people as possible.
Speaker: You need to be a job creator and you need to be locally, politically influential.
Speaker: We need sheriffs and judges and state reps who are in their seats because of what we've done.
Speaker: And that can mean money.
Speaker: But in a lot of these races, a little bit of ground game, even the ability to bring 10 people together for a weekend can flip a race.
Speaker: We need to provide critical services that keep normal life running in ways that can't be easily replaced in our absence.
Speaker: We need to cultivate dual purpose capabilities, skills and resources and networks that have political application, but that we acquire apolitically.
Speaker: We need to develop the ability to absorb hostility and violence in ways that make us look righteous instead of weak.
Speaker: We need to engineer situations where we get to be the good guys and look like the good guys.
Speaker: We need to start building bubbles that are safe on the inside and let the outside become progressively more dangerous on its own, as it certainly will.
Speaker: Start collecting the smart, high agency people who are getting chewed up and spit out as the system degrades and build capacity to help them in ways that are really difficult for the state to find a problem with.
Speaker: And I think anything more advanced than that is going to take decentralization of the internet.
Speaker: It's going to require us to be able to share accurate reporting, to communicate and coordinate, to record ownership of money and other assets outside the reach of the state.
Speaker: And if we can engineer a situation in which decentralized encrypted communications technology becomes part of the everyday suite of tools that normal people expect to be able to use, which means they can't be taken away without causing quite a lot of disruption, then we really will have a situation where dissidents will have access to the same tools of activism that the Arab Spring activists had against their governments.
Speaker: Without the cooperation of a foreign intelligence service and that will substantially decrease the state's ability to metabolize power flows in general across the board They've put so many of their eggs in this basket of being able to reliably surveil people and track people and screw with their money on the internet That a world in which they can't do that is almost certainly going to mean more corruption more crime more guerrillas more pirates more bandits
Speaker: but also the prospect of a meaningful frontier for those of us who wanna build something new.
Speaker: Anyway, I hope you found this interesting.
Speaker: This is basically what I'm about.
Speaker: I see these old systems as failing at their most basic task to provide a space where people can live and work and raise families.
Speaker: That's minimum viable for human civilization.
Speaker: And since that increasingly can't happen in the old system, I want to create new systems where it can happen.
Speaker: And everything we do at Exit is oriented around solving that problem.
Speaker: So if you care about that and want to help us build something, check us out at exitgroup.us.
Speaker: Thanks for listening.
