The Most Important Issue For Democratic Senators Right Now

If you haven't been following their statements and travel plans, you could be forgiven for thinking that the most important issue for Democratic U.S. Senators now was our current trade war, or President Trump's efforts to end the Ukraine War. Instead, it has been the Trump Administration's deportation of illegal alien gang members to El Salvador. 

Mr. Abrego Garcia was illegally abducted by the Trump Admin and, by their own admission, wrongly deported to El Salvador. He shouldn’t have to spend another second away from his family.

I'm flying to El Salvador tomorrow morning to check on his condition and discuss his return.

— Senator Chris Van Hollen (@ChrisVanHollen) April 15, 2025

Inconveniently for Sen. Van Hollen, while he was in El Salvador, news broke that Mr. Abrego Garcia has been accused of beating his wife repeatedly. 

EXCLUSIVE: Jennifer Vasquez, the wife of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, testified that her husband beat her multiple times between 2019 and 2021.

'I have multiple photos/videos of how [violent] he can be and all the bruises he has left me,' she told authorities.https://t.co/pdOdt0i52f

— Jon Michael Raasch (@JMRaasch) April 16, 2025

As Vice President Vance has explained, the Democrats' complaints about due process are really an attempt to prevent the Trump Administration from rolling back the last leg of demographic transformation imposed on America by the Biden Administration. 

None of these people can articulate a deportation standard that:
1) would satisfy left-wing critics of the administration's immigration policy;
2) would satisfy their intuitions about what "due process" is required;
3) would be workable given resource constraints; and
4) would…

— JD Vance (@JDVance) April 16, 2025

And as our friend Kevin Dolan notes in his guest post below ("Try That In Texas"), there's an awful lot of demographic transformation to roll back. Before we get to that, a brief market note, in light of Fed Chairman Powell's comments today. 

Powell Is Not Going To Save You

In our last post ("Betting Against The Bounce"), we wrote about why we added short exposure during Monday's rally, namely, the extent of the tariff relief announced last Friday had been overstated. 

$AAPL $PVH $SEDGhttps://t.co/NuIDcVTLXb

— Portfolio Armor (@PortfolioArmor) April 15, 2025

It looks like going short again on Monday was the right decision. The twin hopes of bulls during this bear market have been a Trump put on tariffs and a Fed put on interest rates. Today, bulls found out that there's no Fed put. In the next month or two, when the government rolls out the semiconductor tariffs, bulls will find out that there's no Trump put either. 

Between now and then, you have time to hedge. Consider doing so.

To find the optimal hedges to give you the level of protection you need at the lowest possible cost: https://t.co/CE1xSWLwcH

— Portfolio Armor (@PortfolioArmor) April 16, 2025

You can download our optimal hedging app by aiming your iPhone camera at the QR code below (or by tapping here, if you're reading this on your phone). Our app can help you find the least expensive hedges given your risk tolerance and time frame.

And if you want to swing for the fences on some opportunistic trades, you can subscribe to our trading Substack/occasional email list below. 

Thursday Morning Update

Added a few short positions on today's weak bounce. 

Now on to Kevin Dolan's eye-opening post. 

Authored by Kevin Dolan at Exit

"Try that in Texas"

For the last three years, I’ve been on a plane at least once a month, visiting cities all over the country to run EXIT meetups and connect our guys.

After all this road time, I’m starting to put together “the situation on the ground” for a representative cross-section of these United States.

I’ve stayed at a lot of hotels.

The two-star experience is identical wherever you go, right down to the staffing: Indians behind the counter, Central Americans cleaning up. When I tell you it's every single time, brother, I mean it's every single time.

This is the case 20 miles from the southern border. It is also the case in Boston, Seattle, and Sioux Falls. It’s true in red states and blue states, small cities and large cities, dynamic up-and-coming cities, crumbling Rust Belt cities — if a location can support a crappy two-star hotel, that hotel will be staffed in exactly the same configuration, everywhere in America.

You could call it a quirk of the hospitality industry, but I see it in factories, construction, tech — every industry you can conveniently observe from the outside tells the same story:

There is clearly way more immigration than anyone will acknowledge — and far deeper economic capture (which translates to political capture.)

Most importantly, it’s completely unconstrained by geography.

Likewise, I have seen a lot of unattractive people with pink and green undercuts in my travels — but I am about as likely to see them at a gas station in Tennessee as I am at a coffeeshop in San Francisco. (San Francisco is more liberal, but Tennessee is fatter, and it’s not obvious to me which of these variables generates more pink and green undercuts per capita.)

A judge in Montana took a child from her parents and sent her to a treatment facility in Canada because they refused to use “he/him” pronouns, and the Republican governor publicly endorsed the decision.

My hometown in Texas was the epicenter of Jeff Younger’s nationally publicized (and unsuccessful) battle to prevent the chemical castration of his son.

 

Schools in Utah are still flying the BLM and Progress Pride Flags, though these have been banned effective May 7th. “Stickers, pins, and signage” are not mentioned in the ban, and teachers and administrators (and the Republican governor) are broadcasting their intention to ignore it.

The laws, on the books, are quite different across these jurisdictions — but, as we are all learning to our sorrow, the practical impact of the law is up to the DA and the judge.

Likewise, you can ban institutions from having “diversity officers” but all these people are still on the payroll, believing and doing the same things.

You can tell teachers they’re not allowed to say “critical race theory”, but they’ll still teach critical race theory. If you tell them they’re not allowed to tell kids about gay stuff “as part of instruction”, they’ll just say they’re not instructing anymore when it’s time to tell the kids about gay stuff.

A governor in Oklahoma can make the task of catechizing your kids marginally more annoying for their progressive public schoolteachers — but public schoolteachers are progressive everywhere, and personnel is policy.

The internet works the same in Alabama as it does in Massachusetts, and most people’s lives increasingly take place on the internet.

You can see this vividly in the homogeneity of underclass culture across Western liberal democracies. The host country is irrelevant, and even the migrants’ culture of origin is only a thin overlay on the universal street culture. The aspirations, the status hierarchies, the aesthetics all come from the same TikTok videos.

The Institute for Family Studies cutely describes the “urban family forms” that now prevail in rural America — they’re watching the same weird porn, hiring the same divorce lawyers, acquiring the same niche mental illnesses, and having the same 1.4 kids as everywhere else.

The places, like Utah, that are the most Shire-like are the least politically aware, and are actively tearing down every barrier to the global monoculture. They have no antibodies.

The point of all this is not to discourage — only to say that retreat is not the answer.

It also isn’t to say that there’s no good news, or that nowhere is better or worse than anywhere else — but there is no existing culture or jurisdiction that has successfully held these forces off. They can’t be defeated by quarantine. Whatever survives this will be built by the families and communities that pass through the fire.

Initiatives like school choice matter a great deal, because they allow us to put new wine in new bottles: instead of trying to coerce good behavior out of people who are Marxist at a neurochemical level, we can make them irrelevant and create something better.

Special Economic Zones have similar advantages — done properly, Trump’s “freedom cities” would allow urban politics to be reimagined, under the gentle heading of “deregulation”. Trillions of dollars are locked away in the derangement of American urban planning.

At the personal and family level, the same logic applies.

We’re not going to coerce good behavior out of Fortune 500 companies in thrall to the most comprehensive and sprawling instrument of political coercion ever devised. Instead, we have to build our economic lives so that these people don’t decide whether or not we get to eat.

At the political level, Brazilification is basically a done deal. Maybe Trump will successfully command the tide, but in the meantime, every state government and every city government you interact with is going to be fake and gay, lawless and crawling with parasites. Your family’s security and freedom to operate will not be a question of what the law says on paper, but who the local authorities are and what they think of you. The political will be extremely personal, and we need to build accordingly.

(There’s a continuum of difficulty there — in a place like California, you are likely to be at odds with your municipal, county, and state authorities, as well as the law on paper. But these are still live considerations in Oklahoma and New Hampshire.)

The laws that create these conditions are mostly federal, and Trump hasn’t signaled much interest in challenging them. On the time horizon I care about — the next fifteen years or so, the time it takes for my kids to grow up — I expect that it will remain technically illegal to decide who you will live and work and associate with.

But it isn’t illegal to have lots of useful friends who do things together. Mediterranean times call for Mediterranean business norms.

exitgroup.us

 

EXIT News

• Last week’s full-group call (4/8) was on EXIT acquisitions. Several of us are involved in acquiring distressed or undervalued businesses, and we are comparing notes.

• This week’s full-group call (4/15) was on family traditions, especially around the Easter season. Creating traditions for kids to grow up with is one of the most important vectors for thick culture, because kids are able to absorb these traditions as “real” in a way that is very difficult to do for adults.

• We are closing in on completion of our first manufacturing acquisition. This will be the pilot for a series of investments in manufacturing and reshoring. We will be raising funds to scale this business. More information to come.

• Meetup Schedule:

  • Dallas meetup will be Monday, 4/21. Dinner, followed by cocktail hour.

  • Seattle meetup will be Saturday, 4/26.

  • Austin meetup will be Friday, 5/16 through Sunday, 5/18. We will be spending a weekend at an Airbnb south of town. Cocktail hour on Saturday, 5/17 for EXIT members, Substack subscribers, and guests.

• Cocktail hour invites for Dallas (4/21) and Austin (5/17) available to subscribers below the paywall. EXIT cocktail hours are a great way to get to know the EXIT guys in your area and see if the group is right for you.