The Ordeal of Incivility

[This is a transcript — please excuse errors. Full audio recording above.]I’m hearing lately that Utah has Gone Woke.The puppet masters of every institution of power in the Utah conservative establishment are actually secret communists. Governor Spencer Cox is a communist. Also Senator John Curtis, Mitt Romney, the Church, possibly even the Utah Republican electorate itself.EXIT is a fraternity dedicated to shorting managerial systems and building the human institutions that come next. Learn more here:Friends I know who know these people would laugh at this; not because Mitt Romney and Spencer Cox and John Curtis are all such swell guys, but because it’s just a total misread of where these guys are coming from, who they are, what they care about. But you can see where an outsider would get the idea.Ever since the church sponsored Prop 8 to ban same-sex marriage in California (and won, by the way), Utah has led the way in capitulating on basically every progressive cause they can think of.So you got the Utah DEI Compact, which they signed, and then, uh, recently reversed. You’ve got the Utah Compromise on LGBT discrimination, the Conservative Climate Caucus, which John Curtis runs Disagree Better, which is Spencer Cox’s project (what if we just got along with the communists, has anyone tried getting along with the communists?)All of our state representatives supported the Respect for Marriage Act, which ratifies by an act of Congress what the Supreme Court had already decided at Obergefell. But you saw how with the Dobbs decision, once Roe v Wade was overturned, the states were able to go back to having abortion law. Well, the Respect for Marriage Act basically says you can’t do that. And most recently you’ve got this redistricting fight where several Utah Republican legislators said, “We need an independent, impartial, bipartisan redistricting commission.”And then, on the basis of that ruling, this liberal female judge basically hands over redistricting to this progressive advocacy group called Mormon Women for Ethical Government, which carves out this like D+50, basically overtly communist congressional district in the middle of Salt Lake City.Paid EXIT Newsletter subscribers get full member Q&A recordings and invites to EXIT cocktail hours — or sign up for free to get weekly news and poasts.And then you’ve got KSL and the Deseret News and Deseret book and BYU, all of which are owned by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, which is obviously the dominant political and cultural elephant in the room.And all these secondary institutions have the usual cast of journalists and MBAs and academics pumping out basically the same commie corporate Memphis that you’d expect from any secular institution.And so you would not be crazy as an outside observer to conclude, like conquests third law says, that “the behavior of any bureaucratic institution can be best understood by assuming it is controlled by a secret cabal of its enemies.”But the puzzle here is that all of this has happened while the state has maintained ironclad Republican dominance — and, in fact, explicitly growing support for Donald Trump.The state went 21 points up for Trump in 2024, which was a wider margin in 2020, which was itself wider than in 2016.Utah may not be the reddest state, the most MAGA state — but it actually is one of the most Republican and least Democrat states in the Union. Only Wyoming and Idaho have a higher proportion of registered Republican voters, and only Wyoming, Alaska, and Idaho have fewer registered Democrats.And so the narrative that you sometimes hear, both inside and outside the state, is that Utah is this rock ribbed, red-blooded MAGA Republican electorate, and it’s just this thin layer of traitors, this again, cabal of communist infiltrators, who’ve been playing the long game their whole lives, and now they’re finally in control.But what’s weird about it is that all of these secret communist infiltrators are actually still doing pretty okay with their voters. Who again, in terms of their party affiliation, in terms of their stance on the issues, are about as Republican as it gets.Governor Spencer Cox, who’s the DEI compact guy and the disagree better guy, his overall approval rating is in the 50s, and his approval rating with Utah Republicans is in the high 60s, low 70s.He’s actually having trouble with Democrats and Independents (who are overwhelmingly secular) because he’s going too MAGA, he’s too hard line.But the weirdest part is that, among latter day saint voters in particular, Mike Lee, John Curtis, and Mitt Romney have the exact same approval rating, 57%.Now, if you’re an online right wing guy and you know who the