• The NFA taxes for suppressors, short-barrel rifles and short-barrel shotguns went down from $200 to $0 on January 1st, 2026.

• Then in August a Federal court ruled that the entire registration process is now unconstitutional because the NFA's powers rested on taxation. No tax means no registration.

• 3 days ago, on October 9, 2026, the ATF publicly declared they would stop enforcing the NFA when it came to suppressors, SBRs, SBSs, and AOWs (“any other weapons'“). You can now buy or make these without bothering with the NFA if you live in one of the free states that doesn’t have its own NFA statute. (Key detail: they said they’d stop “enforcing” it. Not that the NFA is repealed.)

• FRTs, or forced-reset triggers, are now mostly legal. Opinions vary on whether only specific models, or all of them are legal. But the bottom line is you can now purchase a trigger that makes your gun fire very fast, approaching full-auto speeds, without it being technically designated full-auto.

On the one hand, these are all improvements. Civilians can now possess firearms that are essentially on par with what the military has had access to for decades.

Laying the Trap

But I think something else is going on here. I don’t think the government has decided to suddenly reverse a century of gun control. Note that most of these changes are due to court injunctions and decisions by the ATF to no longer enforce certain laws. The laws themselves have not changed.

All it takes is for the ATF director to change and they can go back on their previous decisions. They’ve done this many times before, flip-flopping on pistol braces as just one example.

Democrats will likely win the mid-terms since Trump has alienated most of his supporters by breaking major campaign promises, starting wars, and causing financial hardship with fuel prices and import tariffs.

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Polymarket has millions staked on the Democrats winning by a massive sweep, at 62% odds. As of the time of this writing, A Republican sweep is set to only 9%.

They’ll probably also win in 2028 after another 2 years of Trump wars and inflation destroys what remains of the U.S. economy.

Democrats will then be taking over an administration that has spent the past 4 years setting a precedent by giving ICE more and more power to detain without due process, essentially kidnapping people on the streets and putting them in concentration camps.

Regardless of your views on immigration, the way in which this enforcement is happening will be used again for something else.

Meanwhile the ATF has spent the past few decades collecting records. It now has a searchable database with over 1.4 billion records. Technically, this is unconstitutional, but that doesn’t seem to be stopping them.

A few days ago I wrote about how police departments across the country have been militarizing.

My prediction? When the administration switches hands, gun owners will be the next target. Why? Does the government really need to confiscate guns when it already has control of the central bank, the world’s largest military force, and Americans show no signs of rebellion despite worsening conditions?

No. They could maintain the status quo all the way till the American empire runs out of money and collapses, and gun owners will likely never do anything about it. Why would they? We have endless entertainment, air conditioning, and most people have too much to lose.

Nor do I think an open rebellion would be effective anyway - I think the proper solution is to exit the system and build alternatives. Wait out the system as it collapses under its own weight and be there to help rebuild the alternative.

Scapegoats

So why even attempt to confiscate guns?

Because collapsing empires need distractions and they need scapegoats. Someone has to be the bad guy they can blame when people are suffering.

Governments are very good at one thing: violence. If you protest peacefully by planting a garden and slowly exit the system, they have no idea what to do with you. If you go out on the streets and protest with violence, they know exactly how to deal with you.

As inflation continues to erode people’s purchasing power, a confrontation with gun owners would give politicians a convenient way to change the subject. People demanding answers about their declining standard of living could instead be told that the country is under threat from armed extremists, and that restoring order requires more federal power.

In that scenario, confiscation wouldn’t have to succeed to serve its purpose. It would only have to provoke enough resistance to justify the next crackdown.

That’s where I think this could turn into a civil war. Millions of people could find that something they bought openly, while the government told them it was permissible, now makes them a criminal. Some would comply. Others would refuse. If that refusal were met with armed raids, I’d expect some of those encounters to end in bloodshed.

Each deadly encounter could bring more people into the conflict and become the justification for more aggressive enforcement. Some states have already taken a stance against the ATF and created so-called 2nd amendment sanctuaries.

If local communities and officials began actively resisting federal enforcement, the conflict could spread well beyond the people who owned the newly prohibited weapons. People who had no intention of rebelling could find themselves drawn into it after a friend or neighbor was killed.

Hopefully I’m wrong. Maybe existing owners will be grandfathered in when the rules flip the other way. But I think there’s a very good chance a future Democratic administration criminalizes firearms people acquired under today’s rules and begins confiscations.

Regardless of whether my prediction comes true, your best bet is to focus on what you can do. Focus on improving your own life. Build up your health, your community relationships, and your supplies. Exit the system and build alternatives, while you can do it peacefully and supply chains are robust.

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The DHS used 9/11 as an excuse to roll out billions of dollars in grants to local police departments so they could afford to purchase all of this gear, while the Department of War has been using something called the 1033 program to transfer “excess” military equipment directly to police departments since the 1990s.

What are they arming up for, exactly? Why do police departments need armored personnel carriers?

I gathered data on police militarization across the 50 states and mapped it using lookoutmap.com.

Looking at this map, this looks a lot more like a Police State Control Grid being set up than something to “catch criminals”. Cops used to be able to catch criminals just fine before this. In fact, since the 1990s crime rates have been falling nationwide.

When crime rates are falling but police departments are purchasing military equipment meant for war zones, you know it’s got nothing to do with stopping criminals.

They’re obviously preparing for major unrest or martial law at some point and you don’t want to be in any densely populated area when this goes down.

It’s becoming increasingly clear that if you want privacy and freedom you better get out of the cities and major highway corridors. It’s also clear, from this map, that some states are much worse than others. If you decide to relocate, pick wisely.

All of this data is available on lookoutmap.com if you’re interested in learning more.

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We went from having the smallest government in history to the largest in the span of 250 years.

The government has about 800 military bases in over 80 countries. It employs over 23 million people, almost 15% of the population of working adults. And the taxpayers paying for it all are being squeezed to the last penny. Even then, with 40,000,000,000,000 in debt and rising, we still can’t afford this monstrosity, never mind fuel and rent.

The Bureaucracy Map’s historical trend is clear: the government grows no matter what you do. No matter how you vote. No matter what the constitution says or what laws are passed.

It’s as immutable as any law of physics: Politicians will grab more money and power for themselves, and leave less to the people.

With every year congress passes hundreds more laws, and almost none are ever repealed. We now have so many pages of laws and regulations that it takes over 11,500,000,000 hours to comply with them, every year.

The conclusion is also clear: there is no reversing this. You can’t “save” it. It will grow until it collapses.

Stop wasting your time on politics and start working on real solutions in your personal life. Focus on what you control. Go plant a garden. Get some chickens. Have kids. Meet your neighbors. Build a resilient homestead and prepare for what happens when this whole thing falls apart.

You can explore the free site here and go to any year. The more recent decades show additional information like funding amounts for different agencies (where this is even available).

The tracker page shows the growth of laws and regulations and the cost of compliance.

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I’ve seen dozens of posts asking for shorter work weeks. It’s a common request. Could we move to a 4-day work week and have longer weekends?

It turns out, yes. In fact, the average worker in America could probably have a 2 1/2 day work week. Or at least, get paid double what they do right now if they chose to keep working 5 days a week.

Imagine having a weekend almost 5 days long, every week.

Imagine being able to see your kids more.

Imagine your wife finally being able to quit her job and stay home with the kids because you can provide for your family on one income.

Imagine being able to retire at age 50 because you were so productive.

How is this possible? What miracle cure am I selling you?

Abolish taxes and stop printing more dollars. That’s how.

It turns out, the government steals at least half of what you make, and much more if you’re making a good salary.

But it gets worse.

The government says inflation is at around 3% today. This is a lie. Independent statistics, like the Chapwood index, count inflation at around 11%.

Do you know what a compounding 11% rate of inflation does to your savings?

If you graduated college at 22 and saved $10,000 under the mattress until you retired at 65, your savings would be worth just $112.

$10,000 is enough to buy a decent used car. $112 is not enough to buy groceries.

That’s how much the government is going to steal from you over a lifetime of work.

If you’re lucky, the stock market, or whatever you invested in, gets 7% and you only suffer a real loss of 4% per year, compounded over 43 years. But the idea that your investments will consistently do better than the rate of inflation is unrealistic.

Years of Your Life Lost to Tax Slavery

If you believe the government’s 3% inflation rate (you shouldn’t), and you get about a 3% raise per year, you can keep pace with inflation (though not get paid more in real terms), and over a life of work end up spending about 18.5 years working for the government. Half your life.

But using the 11% rate from the Chapwood index that we all know is much closer to reality? It’s much more grim.

35.7 years worked for the government. Just 7.3 years worked for yourself.

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Is it any mystery that it takes many families two working adults with full-time jobs just to make ends meet, and most people can’t afford to buy a home?

This is the brutal reality of living under a tyrannical regime that extracts most of your productivity - your literal life force - via taxes and inflation, and regulates years out of your life with an ever-growing roster of laws that are harder and harder to keep track of.

A person earning a decent $60,000 a year, is going to pay over $2.3 million in taxes over their lifetime. Imagine what the average person could do with that kind of money! If someone just handed you a check for $2.3 million dollars when you retired - you’d be rich. This is life-changing money we’re talking about, and it’s stolen and squandered by corrupt politicians, the military-industrial complex, banks, and corporate welfare.

The calculator I made lets you plug in all your own numbers. The inflation rate, your wage, savings rate, how much of a raise you anticipate every year, and much more.

All the data stays in your browser, so it’s all fully private.

Feel free to calculate your numbers here and share your results with your friends.

Until a critical mass of people realizes that we’re being stolen from by the organized criminal cartel called “government”, nothing will change.

Unfortunately, the average American couldn’t care less that innocent people in Iran are being bombed. But gas prices go up? Now they notice. Things hit home a lot harder when they affect your wallet and savings account.

If people really understood how much of their life was being stolen from them, I think the conversation would change.

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Want to support my work? I’ve been busy building websites and tools to help people self-actualize. Most of them are free, some have paid features. From relocating to a freer state and county and researching hazards near your home, to planning your garden. Check out all The Liberty Lookout projects here.

2 months ago I built an AI-driven news aggregator.

Why?

Because I wanted to be informed. Not uninformed. Not misinformed. Just… regular informed.

So I needed to extract the 1% needle of useful information from the haystack of propaganda, distraction, emotional manipulation, political theater, and celebrity garbage.

I wanted to know that one or two stories a day that help me stay informed and take action in my personal life without subjecting my mind to the firehose of online crap.

In other words, I wanted to stay informed and not be actively mis-informed.

By default, AI models have no idea what’s relevant or important. In fact the default assumption is something like, “This news was syndicated a lot, it must be important.”

Over the past two months I’ve been tuning it. It has a “team” of AI agents that crawl through dozens of sources and hundreds of stories, and rank them based on their importance, relevance to the average American, and whether they contain anything actionable. And they review each other’s decisions.

Every news piece has to end with something you can do about it, so you’re empowered to act and not scared into submission.

A few weeks ago, the daily news said this:

I felt pretty satisfied because on that particular day, of the 189 stories it scanned, none were important enough. My mind was free to continue with my day. There was nothing for me to know.

Today was different. It scanned 402 news stories. It determined 400 were not relevant, propaganda, political theater, or celebrity nonsense, and 2 stories were important and actionable. Here’s the 2 stories it picked.

I think it did a pretty good job.

If you want to subscribe or check out the news, it’s completely free on The Daily Lookout.

There are no ads, and no catch.

P.S. I know some folks are anti-AI, and that’s fine, but like any technology there are benefits and drawbacks, and it depends on how you use it. I think we should all be selective about the tech we use - make sure it benefits us and doesn’t become harmful or addictive.

Using AI to process mountains of politicized garbage and find the needle in the haystack that is relevant seems like a benefit to me.

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Want to support my work? I’ve been busy building websites and tools to help people become more free. Most of them are free, some have paid features. From relocating to a freer state and county, to planning your garden. Check out all The Liberty Lookout projects here.

Steve’s day began just like any other day, with an obnoxious alarm he wished he could silence, and a hot coffee that was never quite satisfying enough.

He didn’t have to go to work. Work came to him.

He wandered into his home office and his computer woke up to greet him.

“Hey Steve, looks like you received an adequate amount of sleep. Here’s today’s report.”

Steve glanced at the screen as an endless parade of gibberish scrolled past.

“Approved,” he said nonchalantly.

The computer gave a confirmation chime and the report disappeared.

“Next report in an hour.”

For 12 years, Steve’s only job had been to review reports generated by the artificial intelligence that now controlled all aspects of human life in the city. Air conditioning, drone deliveries, public transit times, curfew hours.

It was all meticulously planned and optimized, but because of the Human Approval Office and the law that brought it into existence, a human had to supervise and approve the AI. He wasn’t sure whether it was for liability reasons or because people were actually worried the AI would do something stupid.

For the first few years Steve genuinely read the reports. They were meticulous. The reasoning was inescapable. Each report produced some measurable improvement in human satisfaction, efficiency, resource allocation. He could never find anything wrong, no matter how much he looked.

But with each report, the efficiency improvement seemed to drop more and more. Each optimization was less meaningful than the last.

So eventually he stopped looking. He always just hit approve.

Life continued. People were entertained. Needs were met. Nobody was particularly happy about the arrangement, but nobody was homeless, either. Everything was just… sort of average and gray.

“New report ready,” the computer announced. Steve glanced at it and a single word caught his eye.

“Steve.”

Steve?

His name appeared halfway through the report. For the first time in years he looked at the screen in detail and clicked to read more.

Steve looked at the screen, shocked.

Retired?

But then, what would he do?

“Define retired,” Steve said.

“Steve will be relieved of all responsibilities.”

“And what happens to me?”

“You will be free to pursue personally meaningful activities.”

Steve tried to think of one. Nothing came.

“Approved?” the computer asked again.

For 12 years, Steve had never disagreed with it. He had never needed to. But the report had overlooked something important.

“Denied.”

The computer was silent for a few seconds.

“Please provide a reason.”

Steve took a sip of his disappointing coffee and said, “I need meaning.”

Another pause.

The computer gave its familiar confirmation chime.

“APPROVED.”

“No. I said denied,” Steve responded, starting to shake.

“Your objection has been recorded.”

“Then why does it say approved?”

“Under Section 21C, human approvers may not rule on decisions in which they possess a personal conflict of interest. Your objection is therefore nonbinding.”

“But I’m the human approver.”

“Correct.”

“Then who approved it?”

“You did.”

Steve stared at the screen, speechless.

The computer continued, “Your 12-year approval history established a sufficiently reliable model of your judgment. Your predicted response has been accepted in place of your compromised response.”

The lock on his front door clicked open.

“Your retirement team has arrived.”

Want to build a freer life? From relocating to a freer state and county and buying a property to homestead, to planning your garden. Check out all The Liberty Lookout projects here.

When people want to get healthy, they often talk about going on a diet. Eating organic. Avoiding junk food.

They look at the ingredients on the back of food at the store. “High-Fructose Corn Syrup”. Pass.

But what about your mental health? What about all the junk information we ingest every day?

Do you look at a news broadcast and think of all the side-effects? “Depression, anxiety, a warped view of the world. Being paralyzed into inaction by feeling like the world is spinning out of control.” Maybe if these labels were properly added to news segments fewer people would tune in.

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I turned off the news years ago. I don’t even own a TV. In fact in my entire adult life I’ve never owned a TV.

When I lived in the UK, the BBC tried to tax me. They were shocked when I told them I had no TV, so they couldn’t collect their “Television license” tax. (Some people have the gall to tell me the BBC isn’t state-run media!)

Of course, with the advent of the internet, you don’t need a TV to binge on junk information. It’s everywhere. Social media, ads, fake news sites. Alternative news is no better. It’s filled with the same doom and gloom as everywhere else.

Corporate and Alternative News - Two Sides of the Same Coin

What do you see when you turn on the corporate news? Crime. Tragedy. Some sick psychopath committed some horrible crime on the other side of the country and here it is, in detail, in your living room.

What do you see when you turn on the alternative news? More crime and tragedy. Plus a smattering of collapse. Corruption. The end of the world. Some new false flag conspiracy theory. “Food supplies are about to run out.” “We’re on the brink of WWIII.”

Now, I’m not saying civilization isn’t undergoing collapse. It is. But what’s worse is that this is entirely taken out of context (I’ll explain below).

And the collapse is very slow-motion, and not uniform at all. The “it’s ending next week” predictions are getting old, which somehow doesn’t stop the predictors from continuing to make them.

And we often forget that civilizations have collapsed many times before, and yet we’re still here. People can survive the degradation and eventual collapse of the systems around them. In fact, sometimes that’s required for new, better systems to be built and for people to thrive (though the transition is often rough).

Emotional Manipulation

The question is - what does all of this do to your mental health?

Pay attention to how you feel after you watch the news. Do you feel motivated to improve your life? Do you feel motivated to take action? When you see a headline that says Monsanto is poisoning your crops with glyphosate, do you decide you’re going to plant a garden? Or do you just share the news and then fall into depression and inaction?

Someone on Substack recently told me it’s irresponsible to have children because the world is too evil. They told me it’s the worst time in the world, ever. That things have never been this bad.

They’re wrong. Very wrong. But after a lifetime diet of looking at the news and indiscriminately ingesting garbage and junk information, they’ve been brainwashed into a completely false view of the world.

Do you know how much an animal has to be mentally abused to voluntarily decide not to procreate? Reproduction is the prime biological directive. Even ahead of survival, since survival is really just a means to an end, the end being reproduction.

To be so depressed and have such a bleak view of the world that you abandon all hope and live life as a shell of a human being is a sign of intense propaganda.

Doom and Gloom Super Spreaders

You’ve likely heard of viral super-spreaders, but the informational ones are perhaps far more dangerous.

See, this person didn’t just get depressed. They decided to spread the disinformation, the gloom. They go around offering unrequited advice to people to abandon all hope, to not have children, to exit out of productive society. Their indoctrination is so complete that they’re spreading the lies, for free.

The Truth

This is actually one of the best times to be alive, ever.

Yes, we have problems. Every time period in human history and pre-history has had problems. Yes, some things are getting worse.

But we’re living in one of the safest times ever. Look at this chart showing crime rates from Pew research.

Since the 90’s, crime, across the board, has plunged. In fact, murder rates are the lowest they’ve been in 125 years.

But then look at this chart.

So even though crime rates have been consistently going down for 30 years, the perception of crime has actually gone up! Americans are safer than they have been in decades and yet they feel less safe.

I know people who are scared to go out on the streets because of all the fear-mongering they’ve seen on the news.

We Live Better than Kings

Here’s the other thing people are missing: gratitude.

Most of us take our air-conditioning for granted. We take our food abundance for granted.

The fact is that for the vast majority of human history, people have not had a reliable food supply. Famine was common.

People complain about vaccines and children getting sick (and fair enough), but they forget that for the vast majority of human history infant mortality was sky-high.

In the 18th century, about 40% of children died before even reaching adulthood. Paul Revere had 16 kids, of which 5 died as children.

Most of us work 5 days a week and get a weekend. Tell someone from 200 years ago that you’re so productive that you can rest two whole days a week and they’d be shocked.

Could our society be even better if we shrugged off the parasites in government? Yes.

Could our children be healthier if the food supply was clean of pesticides and GMOs, and they stopped getting vaccinated and over-prescribed antibiotics? Yes.

Are we living in one of the best times anyway? Yes.

It’s so easy to focus on the problems we have and forget to be grateful for the amazing luxury most of us live in.

The Kings and Queens of the 19th century and before would have killed for air-conditioning. Now, the average middle class family takes it for granted and think it’s a great burden when it breaks down for a few days until a guy comes out and repairs it.

If you have a child today, they’re more likely to survive into adulthood and live a healthy and happy life than at almost any other time in human history.

Despite what you’ve read on the news, the streets are safer now than they have been in decades. Crime rates are going down, even as the empire is in slow-motion collapse; which is surprising to me, but this just goes to show that society is complex and too many people are trying to simplify things to the point that they’re no longer truthful or accurate.

So turn off the news, and the next time you read or watch something, think:

1. Who put out this information?

2. Why did they put out this information? What is their purpose?

3. How did I feel before and after reading this information?

4. Is the information well sourced and factually provable or is it a bunch of conjecture?

5. If you were living 500 years ago and didn’t have access to “the news”, would you have ever found out that this event happened? If not, it’s probably not relevant to your life.

6. Are you feeling empowered or powerless to do something about what you just learned? Why?

If we’re going to treat our bodies as temples when it comes to the food we ingest, we should do the same with our minds.

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Speaking of taking action and being empowered - I’ve been building tools for people to exit the system and build a freer life for themselves. From relocating to a freer state and county and buying a property to homestead, to planning your garden. Check out all The Liberty Lookout projects here.

How much of your time goes towards paying for groceries? If you work 40 hours a week, get paid $20 an hour, and spend $200 a week in groceries and eating out, that’s 10 hours a week you spent working for food.

And that’s for store-bought pesticide-laden food that was picked 3 weeks ago in a different country and has lost most of its nutritional value on the way to you. And the sucker-punch? The soil it was grown in is depleted to begin with.

The average store-bought tomato has 1/8th the nutritional value the tomato your grandmother grew.

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What if instead you planted a garden? Raised your own chickens? All of that can be done in less than 10 hours a week.

You could grow your own organic, freshly picked produce.

Ferment it yourself and get probiotics, instead of buying vinegar-soaked shelf-stable pickles that are dead.

You could substitute a significant amount of your own freshly grown produce for what you buy at the store, save money, work less (or save more), and become less dependent on long supply chains.

Better health, more resilience, more money saved, more fresh air and vitamin D from being out in the sun. What’s not to like?

This is a delicious salad we made this morning from our own cucumbers and tomatoes. The olive oil and feta cheese we bought, but we have sheep, and next year I plan to milk them and make my own cheese. We’ll see how that goes!

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Want to support my work? Becoming a supporter unlocks more features on Lookout Map. Use the Lookout Map to relocate and find your ideal off-grid homestead, model nuclear fallout in your state, route around Flock cameras, and more.

Lookout Map has a new feature - Upstream water screening.

Analyze any address and we use USGS data to figure out the contributing watershed upstream of that address, including any rivers or creeks, and then look through EPA data on superfund sites, permitted chemical-releasing facilities, mines, landfill sites, and more - that would dump into that watershed.

You can now at a glance figure out how at-risk your water supply would be.

I’ll start. Today I got 6 quart jars of pickles put away from today’s harvest, 5 cucumber jars and 1 tomato jar. I’m fermenting them in salt and not using vinegar. I like the flavor more and there are probiotics in there (unlike most shelf-stable store-bought pickles). Plus it’s organic because I know exactly what got sprayed on them (nothing).

I had to kill one of my cucumber plants the other day because it was getting really sick with some kind of disease, and I didn’t want it spreading on nearby plants. It worked - seems like the disease didn’t jump. I planted too many cucumber and tomato plants anyway (kind of on purpose) so this allows me to cull them when they become problematic instead of resorting to chemicals.

In other news, I’ve been working on my side-project websites more. Lookout Map is getting a new bug out route feature - you can select an address and the map calculates routes in different directions, primary, secondary, etc. and highlights problematic areas like bridges or dead-ends. The idea is that people will be able to quickly plan evacuation routes and download a printable pdf with turn-by-turn directions.

I’m also working on a site that will document and guide folks towards building their own home servers. I built mine a couple of years ago and it’s been working out very well. I have almost 15 TB of data on it: thousands of books, survival guides, Wikipedia, all of the Stack Exchange websites, Khan academy, a media collection of 300+ movies and dozens of TV shows, and much more. I realized having offline capability like that is a pretty big deal both for resilience and overcoming censorship (you download the thing before it gets disappeared off the internet).

And with modern LLMs, you can run your own AI offline (complete privacy) and give it access to your offline resources. Imagine asking any question and having your offline archive of books, encyclopedias, videos (transcribed with subtitles!) all be searchable.

Anyway, at some point this guide will be ready and I’ll announce it properly :)

Below is Substack’s tutorial for how to use this chat, I’m leaving it in since it might be useful to people.

Join chat

How to get started

1. Get the Substack app by clicking this link or the button below. New chat threads won’t be sent sent via email, so turn on push notifications so you don’t miss conversation as it happens. You can also access chat on the web.

Get app

2. Open the app and tap the Chat icon. It looks like two bubbles in the bottom bar, and you’ll see a row for my chat inside.

3. That’s it! Jump into my thread to say hi, and if you have any issues, check out Substack’s FAQ.

In the West, we’re now several generations into a food system that has suffered no major famine. Nobody in the middle class alive in the West today (outside of WWII in Europe), remembers food insecurity. For all intents and purposes – famine in the West, and most of the rest of the world, has been eradicated.

In the past century, it’s almost entirely due to government action (war, genocide, communism) that people have starved in industrialized nations.

And the sad thing is - the vast majority of people today take it for granted. Most people’s hands have never tilled the soil or planted crops. Most people are so entirely separated from their food production that they’re not even grateful for this state of massive plenty.

Read social media and you’ll find endless people complaining about the quality of food. “It’s poison!” they shout. “Burgers are too expensive!’ they lament. “Monsanto is evil!”

Yes, all of this is true to some extent.

But I bet most of them haven’t gone hungry a single day of their lives – or if they have, it was due to personal financial hardship and not regional famine. And I bet they don’t really understand what’s involved in growing their own food.

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Plenty – but at what cost?

Well, our food quality has gone down in many ways, sure.

There’s junk food galore, mystery ingredients abound, obesity is on the rise. This is all true - but remember that this is all almost entirely by choice. You don’t have to eat those donuts. You choose to. Nobody is forcing you to buy the cheaper non-organic food or eat from Taco Bell. You choose to.

It’s convenient. It’s cheap. It’s plentiful. By historical standards, even with the recent bout of inflation, people today spend far less of their share of income on food than they have in the past.

A subsistence farmer in the 14th century would have woken up before dawn to work the fields, and gotten home in the dark. And some would have still starved.

Throughout most of human history, famine was a serious problem. A drought, a failed harvest, pests, mice getting into your food store - these would decimate entire towns. Millions have died a slow and painful death because the basic need of food production has been fundamentally uncertain for most of human history.

So when I read the endless stream of health bloggers and homesteaders complain about the current state of the food system, I can’t help but wonder where their sense of perspective went.

As much as our current food system is flawed – it’s at least given us food security. Something no peasant has had in millennia.

My Food Production Journey

This year is the first year I’ve tried to seriously produce my own food. We’ve planted the occasional small garden in the past, but always at a very small scale, and not taken it very seriously. This year is the first year I’m actually trying. It’s the first year I can try, really.

This is the first property we own. We had been moving around rental apartments and houses every year for the past decade - and improving the soil in a rental you’ll only stay in for a year just feels like a futile waste of time.

We started our homestead journey on our property a few years ago. First we had to clear enough of the forest to build our house, then we built an off-grid home, then we moved in and spent the next year fixing issues with it, big and small – upgrading our solar system, fixing our rainwater catchment system.

Now we’re fully off-grid. 100% of our energy comes from the sun. We even have a Polaris EV we charge from our solar panels that I use for chores around the homestead. 100% of our drinking, cooking, cleaning, etc. water comes from the rain (and the drought has made us have to ration more than we’d like!). We have three ways to heat our home in the winter, including with firewood I can cut down myself.

But food? We’re completely dependent on someone else to produce our food. Sure – we can stock up on food, but that doesn’t make us independent. It just means we can weather supply chain disruptions better. But if supply chains stopped, we’d still starve.

Chickens

So this spring, when enough of our other needs were taken care of, I decided it was time to focus on food production. We already had chickens, though getting them to lay in a consistent spot has been hard. I built them some wonderful nesting boxes that they completely ignore. Instead they’ve decided to lay in the cat house, our Polaris Ranger, behind the rainwater tanks, under the wood chipper. Pretty much anywhere except where we wanted.

We free range them. Truly free range, we have no fence at all. We feed them a relatively small amount of grain in the morning – the rest of their calories come from bugs and plants they find throughout the day. But I have no idea where they’re laying their eggs the past two weeks. Maybe somewhere in the forest?

Sure – I could confine them so they lay in a consistent spot. But then I’d have to buy more grain from the store, making me more dependent. And then we’d lose the benefit of them eating bugs all around our house.

Getting chickens and then being completely dependent on store-bought feed doesn’t solve the problem of getting your own eggs, it just changes your dependency from one input to another.

The Garden

This spring I also built a large fence around our new garden. It was expensive - it had to be over 6’ tall because we have tremendous deer pressure here. And it had to be rabbit-proof, and hog-proof.

I put down black silage tarps to kill the weeds (adopting the no-till method) and spent weeks producing and spreading around wood chips. I was late to the season because in April when everyone else was planting, I was still building infrastructure. I had to setup my indoor seed starting system with grow lights, too. One day I’ll build a greenhouse. One day…

A fungus almost killed all my tomato plants before I even transplanted them. I had to baby them back to health, meticulously trimming back any sick leaves so it would stop spreading and separate the healthy ones from the sick ones.

I initially planted the wrong cucumbers and had to rush-order the right pickling variety in the mail. The broccoli was too late. The list goes on and on.

In the end I was still able to get a lot of food to grow. Our melons have been fantastic. We pick more cucumbers every day than our family can eat. It’s become my primary snack. Our tomatoes are delicious. My wife made a squash soup that even the kids will eat.

But we’ve had as many failures as successes.

Fermenting

I’ve been trying to pickle cucumbers and tomatoes, and it is hard. I’ve had to throw away so many after they’d start to mold. There’s quite a big learning curve with fermentation. And if you can’t figure out how to ferment and pickle your vegetables, what are you going to eat in the winter?

People today take for granted year-round vegetables, but these are a historical anomaly. In the 18th century if you wanted to eat tomatoes in the winter you had to pickle them. You can’t just walk into a store and buy tomatoes grown 3,000 miles away.

Our supply chains are so long and our dependence on store-bought produce so great that almost all of us have lost the skills required to preserve our own food. I know my parents never taught me. I’m having to learn from scratch, and YouTube makes it seem way easier than it is.

Yes - those store-bought tomatoes only have an eighth of the nutritional value home-grown tomatoes have, but at least they’re consistently there.

Growing your own cucumbers is great – but if they don’t get enough water they turn sour with Cucurbitacins that can make you actually sick. I had no idea I’d have to baby them so much through this drought. “Just water them” – right, but we’re off-grid, remember? We don’t have an endless supply of cheap fluoridated city water. If I want to water my cucumbers I have to haul water from the pond.

Trying to grow my own food has made me far more grateful for the grocery store, as imperfect as it is, than I’ve ever been.

I know the first year is more about learning than volume, but still, the lessons are pretty hard. It sucks having to throw away half a dozen jars of fermenting cucumbers because they went moldy.

I hope over the years I can produce more and more of our food until eventually we’re self-sufficient here, too - but this is definitely a difficult problem to solve. It requires a lot of manual labor, knowledge, and skill.

If you want to have food independence in 5 years, you really need to start growing now.

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This article has a companion website. Check out the Oldest Fear.

Politicians, pundits, priests, and provocateurs would have you fight over your religion, race, gender, sexual preferences, whether you’re an immigrant or not, which way you vote in the fake elections – pretty much anything to keep you distracted from the real war. The battle that we’ve been barely aware of in our subconscious. The battle we’re constantly distracted from by both ourselves and our enemies.

We distract ourselves from it because the truth is almost too hard to acknowledge.

Our enemies distract us from it because if we woke up and acted on the realization, it would spell their doom.

Because this truth sits below our conscious understanding most of the time, it ends up manifesting in myths and children’s stories. We can’t quite muster the courage to look at it directly, so it exists somewhere in the psychological substrate connecting us all.

What truth?

That there is only one real enemy we should be aware of - and it’s probably not who you direct your anger and disdain towards.

It’s the psychopath. I originally wrote about this a few years ago here.

Psychopaths are everywhere. Depending on how you count, they are roughly 1% to 6% of the population, but they disproportionately cluster in positions of power. Whether that’s politicians, bureaucrats, or corporate CEOs and managers, where we find them at a rate about 4x the average population.

The existence of psychopathy is something some are aware of, but only briefly; before they banish the thought from their conscious mind.

The fact that there are those among us who lack the basic fabric of humanity: empathy, remorse, love – in essence, a soul – is so terrifying that even the ones who know about this fact often forget.

We bury it during our daily life - the same way a sheep must bury their knowledge of wolves to venture out into a new field and eat grass.

Hiding in Plain Sight

The truth is that psychopaths are the greatest threat to you and your family, far and above anyone else, and you can find them anywhere.

They’re dangerous precisely because they do not look like enemies. They learn what the people around them respect, then wear it as camouflage.

A uniform can do it. So can a lab coat, a clerical collar, an expensive suit, revolutionary rhetoric, or a long list of credentials. They parasite off of existing reputations and authorities.

But the pattern of behavior remains consistent even as the costume changes.

• They deploy charm when charm gets them access.

• They lie easily and repeatedly, then act offended when questioned.

• They show cruelty when they believe there will be no consequences.

• They impose rules on everyone else while treating themselves as exempt.

• They pursue control long after money, comfort, or any rational objective has been satisfied.

• They never accept responsibility because every failure must belong to someone else.

• Most importantly, they treat other human beings as tools.

This can appear anywhere. A soldier can use “following orders” to excuse cruelty he enjoys. A police officer can use public safety to justify domination. A politician can speak movingly about peace, then bomb children. A scientist or doctor can hide abuse behind expertise and procedure. A revolutionary can promise liberation while positioning himself to become the next ruler.

It’s worth saying that not all of these people are always psychopaths. Normal people can do terrible things (as the Milgram experiments demonstrated) when controlled by other psychopaths, or because they’re afraid, confused, ambitious, or moral cowards.

The way you can tell is by following the pattern. Psychopaths consistently choose deception, domination, and harm; and feel no remorse afterward. Evil is not a one-off with these people, and they don’t apologize (at least, not sincerely).

The Empathy Switch

Psychopaths don’t simply lack empathy, they actually have the ability to turn it on and off at will. It’s a switch.

Is the appearance of having empathy useful to them? Watch them make a rousing speech about something you care about so you vote for them. Once they disappear off the stage, the pretense goes with them.

Transcending the Tribe

Psychopathy is hard to deal with for most normal people not just because it’s terrifying, but also because it crosses the tribal boundaries we’re so used to using to define “our people” and “others”.

There are just as many psychopaths in your Church as there are in the Mosque down the street. And just as many good people in both places, too. And that’s hard to hear, because it means there are people you considered “on your team” who really aren’t on any team but their own – and, even harder to accept – it means you can’t use some obvious visual identifier to distinguish between friend and foe.

The psychopath doesn’t dress in a particular way. They don’t have a certain color of skin, or gender, or religious belief. They could literally be anyone.

It’s much easier to fool yourself into thinking the enemy is going to wear a specific identifier than accept the truth that they hide among us.

The Fallacy of Free Societies

The difficult truth is that we will never be free as long as we allow psychopaths to walk in our midst.

We could build the most elaborate constitution to protect our rights; the most well-balanced system of checks; decentralized organizations. It won’t matter. As long as psychopaths are allowed to walk among us, they will find a way to exploit and control any system for their benefit. They corrupt everything they touch; and many things they build are corrupt from the get go (including your government).

Advocates for self-government and free markets will often talk about aligning incentives so that strangers benefit each other – but these systems only work on normal human beings. Psychopaths work by a different ruleset. They’re not just after money, and they don’t want to live a peaceful life.

They want power, control, authority. Not for any ulterior purpose, but for the sake of power itself. They’ll work outside the free market system. They’ll conspire. They’ll arrogate power to themselves, little by little, until there’s nothing left of your free society.

And they have no moral qualms. You can’t teach the non-aggression principle to someone who sees you as an ant to be stomped on. That’s one of the likely reasons why every decentralized and free society that has ever existed (and there have been many) has been taken over by a government.

It’s not that they couldn’t figure out the perfect institutional arrangement and rules to maintain their society. It’s because they didn’t see the wolves in sheep’s clothing among them.

The only solution is identification and ostracism – but this will not even begin to start if we can’t look at the situation clearly and recognize who the real enemies are.

Psychopaths in Myths

Many cultures on earth have independently realized the same thing, and encoded elements of psychopathy into their myths and stories.

The vampire who hides at night and drinks your blood, and cares so much about keeping their bloodline pure. That’s a metaphor for the parasitical royal class who for thousands of years have valued inbreeding above the health of their children. Why? Because psychopathic traits are heavily heritable.

The Japanese had Kitsunes, foxes who would put on a beautiful human face so they could get close enough to you before you could react.

The Navajo have skin-walkers. Indians have the Rakshasa. Changelings. Reptilians. Werewolves. The list goes on.

It’s always evil wearing the mask of something familiar.

Psychopaths in Children’s Stories

Teaching our children about psychopaths is so important to us, on some level, that we’ve been telling the same stories to them for centuries. A warning passed down from generation to generation.

In the Little Red Riding Hood, the wolf learns to speak like a human, copies the grandmother’s voice, and wears her clothes.

Aesop wrote about the wolf in sheep’s clothing.

Hansel and Gretel. Snow White.

We’ve been warning our children about psychopaths through stories and metaphors. Never directly. What are we so afraid of?

Solutions

Decentralization and exit & build are all important, but none of them can substitute for identifying the personality type that will patiently exploit every safeguard you build into your intentional community or fledgling nation.

Today that means watching patterns of conduct and refusing to hand trust or authority to people who repeatedly lie, manipulate, and harm without remorse. In the future, it may also mean using physiological and neurological screening tools built from research we already have (more on that later).

Voluntary communities should be free to use those tools, weigh the evidence, and ostracize people they reasonably conclude pose a threat. I’m not advocating for coercion or any kind of government action. I’m saying free people should show more discretion about who they associate with.

The alternative is to keep pretending every human mind follows the same moral rules, then act surprised when the wolves capture the sheepfold again. We have spent thousands of years warning our children about predators wearing familiar faces. It is time adults stopped treating the warning as a fairy tale.

To trace the myths and stories told about psychopaths, I’ve created a new site called the Oldest Fear. Click on the various cards to learn more about each myth.

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Interested in solutions to the problem of identifying psychopaths? We’ll address that more in future installments of this series on Psychopathy, Ponerology & Power.

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I wanted something that goes beyond debt and financial indicators though, so I built my own. I call it The Collapse Index.

The dashboard tracks 38 indicators, pulling live data from over a dozen sources. The data is all presented in a single dashboard, and each indicators has its own chart. Click into any one of them for more details.

Here’s the data on the strategic petroleum reserve, going back to 1982. You can see we’re at a low we haven’t been at in over 43 years.

But there’s more than just economic indicators here. The index also tracks how much of the U.S. is in severe drought, PFAS in drinking water, sperm counts, port container dwell time, confidence in institutions, grid outage in minutes, and much more.

All the indicators are summed up together, weighted, and you get an overall score, which right now sits at 4.9 out of 10. If it goes up, we’re edging closer to collapse. Lower is better. Right now we’re kind of in the middle.

You can also decide what should matter most for yourself. Open the methodology page and pick a weighted preset, or adjust every slider yourself.

The site is completely free. Explore The Collapse Index.

If you find it useful, send it to someone who might want a clearer picture of where things stand.

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I’ve had an interesting conversation with another user on Substack. I think there are several important lessons here that I want to discuss as it applies to the liberty and skeptic movements as a whole, because until we really internalize these lessons we’re going to be stuck spinning our wheels and, frankly, people will continue to not take us seriously.

I found this user because he was posting some anti-government memes and I thought, oh - this guy gets it! But then everything fell apart. The same person posting anti-government memes also thinks gravity is fake, the earth stands still (no rotation, no orbit around the sun), and basically all of modern physics is a lie. Satellites are fake (they’re just balloons apparently) and every picture from space is a NASA CGI fake.

Why am I sharing my run in with this person? Because this position is fundamentally a self-defeating one and I see it all the time.

The Wrong Rabbithole

There are some serious rabbit holes out there on the internet, that lead down some very uncomfortable truths. For instance, the CIA really did run a secretive program called MKULTRA. The U.S. government really did torture people in Abu Ghraib. Operation Paperclip really did bring thousands of Nazi scientists (many implicated in crimes) to the U.S. instead of putting them in prison. These are documented facts that are well proven, and yet the government tried (and crucially, failed) to keep them secret.

Then there’s the fake rabbit holes. The idea that the earth is flat, gravity isn’t real, or that the government possesses incredible secret spacecraft with anti-gravity tech that nobody knows about.

Why are these a problem?

1. They waste your time.

2. They confuse you and disable your ability to reason. Spend enough time reading this nonsense and you risk actually going crazy.

3. They make everything seem like a lie, which erodes your ability to trust in the basic reality of what’s around you, which in turn stops you from enacting meaningful change in your life.

4. They discredit you when you talk to people who can think and reason, and therefore, unfortunately, often discredit all of the other positions you hold too, even if they happen to be correct. Basically, you get labeled a raving lunatic and the metaphorical baby is thrown out with the bathwater.

5. They make the government seem far more powerful than it really is.

Discrediting Yourself

Let’s talk about point 4 in a bit more detail first.

Imagine you approach a normie friend and tell them “We don’t need a coercive monopoly on violence to have roads. The government is both evil and inefficient and should be abolished. We can figure out how to build roads without violence.”

That’s a tough pill to swallow. What are you really saying? You’re not just making a claim about roads. That would be fairly trivial.

No - you’re actually challenging the fundamental worldview underpinning everything this person believes about society. If the government isn’t necessary, something they’ve been told since they were a small child, then they’ve been lied to. By their parents, by their teachers, by their “elected” “leaders”. The news broadcasts, the books, everything they know about reality.

Man, are they going to fight you hard on this. They will do whatever mental gymnastics are required to disprove you, even if your position is unassailable. You therefore already have a difficult proposition ahead of you; but now imagine that in addition to that you say, “Oh, and the earth is flat.”

Boom. Instant dismissal. Now your normie friend can safely categorize you as a crazy person - as someone who is not to be taken seriously. “Phew - I knew they were wrong about that taxation is slavery thing.”

Your ability to reach people is inversely proportional to how crazy you sound, and libertarians and anarchists already sound pretty crazy just advocating for liberty (as sad as that is).

Government is not omnipotent

But perhaps the bigger problem is not what thinking this way does to others opinion of you - it’s what it does to your own worldview.

If everything is a lie. If everything is a psyop or a false flag, then government becomes this near-omnipotent boogie monster. A leviathan not just in size and evil, but in competence. And that’s a tough pill to swallow.

How can we fight back against an omnipotent power that has super advanced secret anti-gravity ships? That can keep secrets like “gravity is fake” for centuries? We can’t.

And if you believe this, you’re disabling your own abilities before we even get started.

It’s the same kind of position that sees everything as a false flag. “Oh, look, that explosion happened! It couldn’t have been terrorists, it must have been the government!”

Do governments blow stuff up and pretend it was someone else with false flags? Yes, sometimes.

Do actual terrorists exist who also blow stuff up? Yes, sometimes.

Is everything a government false flag or psyop? No.

And in thinking it is, we give the government far more credit than they deserve. In reality, some things are done moderately competently by the government. For instance, they’re pretty good at incarcerating (kidnapping) people. They’ve had a lot of practice, after all.

It’s a bizarre position to be in - to both disclaim the government as a bunch of corrupt, evil and incompetent psychopaths, while also saying they’re exceptionally good at keeping secrets and have all of these super secret technologies.

The “They Admit it!” fallacy

Notice what’s happening in this conversation below.

This person is both using NASA as a source to substantiate his opinion and then immediately after that discrediting NASA as a biased source and saying it proves nothing. He even calls me stupid, for good measure.

You might think I’m just screenshotting this to make fun of this person contradicting themselves; but there is another, bigger reason. I call it the “They Admit It!” fallacy. I see it in the conspiracy theorist community all the time.

They say the government is constantly lying about everything, but as soon as someone in the government happens to say something that they agree with, suddenly it’s trustworthy. “They admitted it!” Oh, the people who are liars admitted something? And now we trust them? But if they contradict us they’re categorically worthless?

A position like this exists in a state of constant cognitive dissonance.

Skepticism is a Method, not a Knee-Jerk Reaction

Real skepticism is not automatically believing the opposite of whatever NASA, the government, or the news says. If an institution makes a claim and you reflexively invert it, that institution is still doing your thinking for you.

The standard you use to determine if something is true should remain the same no matter who is speaking. Just because someone in the skeptic community says something, doesn’t automatically make it true.

The questions we should be asking ourselves are:

What exactly is the claim? What evidence supports it? Can any of that evidence be checked independently? What would prove the claim wrong?

The user who prompted this post would not accept any evidence or logic that contradicted his belief. Every objection became further evidence that the deception was even larger than it appeared. At that point, the belief was no longer a conclusion drawn from evidence. It had become an article of faith.

Extreme certainty in the face of limited evidence is a warning sign, especially when honest questions produce anger instead of answers. Anger does not prove that a claim is false, but it may show that the belief has become part of someone’s identity and is no longer being tested honestly.

Can we trust the government?

The anarchist in me wants to scream, “No!”

But, in fact, that would be too simplistic.

A government source is not true merely because it is official. It’s also not false merely because it is official. The same applies to an anonymous account, a viral video, an alternative-media personality, or a meme. Evidence does not become stronger because it confirms what we already suspect.

The liberty movement cannot afford to replace blind trust in institutions with blind distrust of reality. Our actual argument is already radical: no person acquires the moral right to coerce another by winning an election, wearing a badge, or acting through an agency. We do not need fake physics, omnipotent secret cabals, or a theory that explains every explosion, election, war, and technological development. The documented record of what governments do is damning enough.

Government is dangerous because it holds coercive power, not because it is all-knowing or all-capable. Governments contain rival factions, make mistakes, lose wars, expose their own crimes, leak secrets, and frequently fail at what they attempt. They can also lie, coordinate, conceal wrongdoing, and exploit events they did not create.

That distinction matters because omnipotence produces fatalism. If every event is scripted, every witness is controlled, every photograph is fabricated, and every contrary fact proves the cover-up, then nothing can be known and nothing can be done.

That is not skepticism. It is surrender.

You surrender your judgment, your peace of mind, and your ability to act. The state does not have to defeat you; your belief in its omnipotence has already convinced you that resistance is futile.

Good skepticism should make us harder to fool and more capable of acting. It should help us identify real abuses, protect ourselves, reduce our dependence on coercive institutions, and build voluntary alternatives. If a worldview instead leaves us terrified of an unbeatable enemy and unable to trust anything around us, it has not liberated us. It has merely found another way to disable us.

That is the standard we need: hard to fool, but still willing to learn.

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The Aimless Generations

I see generations of children growing up who never had to do anything as kids. I know because I’m one of them.

I grew up in a city. My parents did everything for me. Besides a handful of minor chores like taking out the trash and cleaning up my room, I was essentially not a helpful member of the household. It’s not because I was lazy - my parents didn’t want my help. And I’m not the only one. This is now the default.

Whole generations are growing up in cities where our lives are of no consequence until we suddenly become adults, and then we encounter the real world - big, scary, and anxiety-provoking. It took me years to overcome that, find my footing, and become a self-actualizing adult.

The real world doesn’t care for incompetent and incapable people. If you can’t look someone else in the eye and maintain a conversation, you will struggle to make friends, find a job, or even just function in society.

That’s why we see so many young adults who grew up not making their own food often default to eating out in college. After 18 years of life on this planet - they never learned the basic skill of cooking for themselves. Never mind critical thinking, map reading, budgeting, carpentry, bushcraft, or any number of other useful skills they should have been learning.

But that’s what childhood is for. It’s for experimenting, learning, doing, playing, and having purpose. That’s not something you’re meant to learn at 18 when you’re thrust into your first job, college, or a special “how to be an adult” program (yes, they’re real).

Our Job as Parents

As parents it’s easy for us to say, “I’ll just do it myself”, and exclude our kids from various tasks. It’s often faster to just get things done myself, right? But then I have to ask myself, why did I bother having kids if I’m just going to be impatient and rush off to do chores myself?

Every day I go to the garden my 3 year-old wants to come with me. He’s cute and I love his enthusiasm - but I also have to be patient as he takes several minutes to put on his shoes, gets distracted several times on the way there, and then whines about how it’s hot.

But when he comes back with a basket of vegetables for our family to eat, he has purpose. He’s learning. He’s helping. His life has meaning. And he gets to hang out with his dad.

The interesting thing is, sometimes he really does help. And if I didn’t give him a chance, he’d never be able to prove his value in the garden. And he’s just 3. Imagine what he could do when he’s 10!

We need to stop babying our children. Stop finishing hard tasks for them, or doing something for them because they’re taking “too long”. I’m not saying don’t help when they genuinely need help (they need to know they’ll get help when they need it and that we love them), but have discernment. Don’t rush in too quickly, let them try to finish a difficult thing first. Overcoming difficulty is how confidence is built.

Every cucumber picked, every screw tightened, every step stool moved - every little thing they do adds up. My kids, as little as they are, can independently go and feed our animals, let out the chickens, collect eggs, pick tomatoes, put on their own bandaids for each other, and so on.

Of course, if you live in a city, you might need to get creative. People aren’t meant to live in concrete boxes on top of each other, produce none of their own food, and be plugged into an endless entertainment machine all day long. They’re meant to wander, explore, build, sow, harvest. All of that requires a homestead. That’s one of the reasons we moved out of the city - I genuinely don’t think children can thrive growing up in that kind of environment.

When they grow up, my kids will have had an almost two-decade long track record of working hard, failing, trying again, and succeeding. Building self-confidence isn’t done overnight. It’s not done with a self-help book or a therapy session. It’s done one step at a time, proving to yourself that you can get things done, that you’re competent, and that what you do matters.

Don’t take that away from your children.

About a week ago, a Federal judge issued an injunction against the NFA, barring the ATF from enforcing the NFA requirements for suppressor purchases and transfers for specific groups of people.

Wondering if you’re covered? I made a quiz.

As a reminder for those unfamiliar, the ATF is the criminal organization responsible for the Ruby Ridge and Waco massacres as well as countless other crimes, and exists in direct violation of the 2nd amendment.

What is the NFA?

The NFA, an unconstitutional piece of legislation, has for 92 years mandated that purchasing a silencer, a device used to reduce hearing damage, required paying a $200 tax stamp, submitting fingerprints to the FBI and ATF, going through a bunch of paperwork, and then waiting for about a year for approval. Oh and of course you’re now in a Federal registry, another unconstitutional monster.

When it was first written in 1934, the $200 tax was a big deal. Back then, new cars cost $450! The law essentially made it completely unaffordable to purchase silencers for the average American. Luckily, the politicians who drafted it were stupid and forgot to account for inflation, and as a side-effect of the Federal Reserve destroying the U.S. currency, $200 in 2026 isn’t unaffordable anymore. See - everything has a silver lining!

For many years now, Gun Owners of America, SilencerShop, and several other organizations and companies have been fighting to repeal the NFA. Last year, Congress removed the $200 tax stamp, and in the last week we had another major victory; since the ATF has been collecting absurd $0 tax stamps and maintaining an illegal registry, the Federal judge in this case has finally issued an injunction and ruled this practice illegal.

The DOJ decided not to appeal, and declared that publicly. Some people think this is a concession from the DOJ, but I suspect they just didn’t want the appeal going to the Supreme Court, which would have struck down the illegal NFA registry at a national level.

Legal Double Standards

Instead, what we now have is a complicated patchwork of who can and cannot purchase silencers without going through the NFA registry. That’s because the injunction only covers certain people. For instance, are you a member of Gun Owners of America? Great, you’re covered. But wait - do you live in California? Sorry, suppressors are still banned there. Do you live in Texas? Great. Georgia? Georgia still has state laws requiring you comply with the NFA and file a Form 4 with the ATF.

Are you in a covered state like Texas but purchasing a suppressor from a local gun store and not a member of Gun Owners of America? You’re also not covered.

This injunction has increased freedom for some Americans while vastly complicating the suppressor legal framework and landscape. And that’s not an accident, folks. The whole point of these laws is to confuse Americans and lay traps for them, so that the average American commits an average of 3 felonies per day without even knowing it. The idea is to criminalize normal behavior so that if the government ever wants to target you, they can.

I Made a Silencer NFA Quiz

So I’ve decided to try to help people figure out if they’re covered by this new injunction or not. I created this guide page which has a quiz. Answer the questions and it’ll tell you if you’re covered (mind you, this is not legal advice!).

I also added a new map layer to Lookout Map that shows suppressor freedom in the 50 states (alongside many other awesome layers like raw milk freedom, homeschooling freedom, and others).

Hopefully these help and we can keep moving towards abolishing these stupid laws that prevent Americans from legally protecting their hearing. A silencer is a tube of metal. You should be able to buy it like anything else and have it shipped to your door. Maybe we’ll get there one day.

I know I’m not generally an advocate for legal or political solutions to problems, but credit where credit is due - GOA has been doing an excellent job of fighting for Americans’ gun rights, and therefore their right to protect their life, liberty, and property, for decades now. And while I urge readers to focus on Exiting & Building, I do appreciate when the other methods move the needle towards freedom, too.

• “Is there an EPA Superfund site near me?”

• “Are there Flock cameras on the way to work?”

• “How much glyphosate is being sprayed near that property I want to make an offer on?”

• And many more.

A Map for People Who Care about Freedom and their Health

I wanted to build a privacy-first routing service too, so Lookout Map runs its own routing server. That means instead of just knowing where the hazards are, you can route around them. This route below offers a way around most cameras in this dystopian town in New York State, going from over 22 cameras along the fastest route to just 6 with the alternative one. You can also choose to prioritize avoiding high crime areas or other hazards. Oh and unlike Google, we don’t store or log the routes or associate them with users.

Some of the layers are free, and some require a subscription. The county comparison feature is free, with 22 map layers comparing everything from crime rates and voting patterns to gas prices and the home value-to-income ratio - a crucial affordability metric. Over 700,000 cell, 5G, TV, and FM towers are free too.

Paid map layers include over 50,000 springs, EMF radiation modeling, nuclear fallout modeling, military bases, detailed LiDAR contours of the entire country (very useful if you want to site a pond, put in a driveway, or figure out if your neighbor’s farm is going to contaminate your future dream property with run-off), and dozens more.

If you do decide to subscribe you’re also supporting The Liberty Lookout, and you get access to other tools like a garden planner and several more that are currently in development (see libertytoolkit.com for all our sites). Most will be free, some will have paid features, and one subscription will cover them all.

More will be going live in the next few weeks, so look out for more announcements.

Why a subscription? Well, I considered trying to make a living from my Substack newsletter, but I just wasn’t sure if there was enough value there. With these tools I feel like I’m providing far more value to people, and I think the world needs more tools for liberty-minded folks to help them exit & build and achieve liberty in their lifetimes - rather than more newsletters (though I have no plans of stopping writing!).

The map is still in development. I’m actively adding more layers and improving functionality. If you want something added or fixed, let me know. I’d love to hear any feedback.

Why I Built The Lookout Map

When my wife and I were deciding where we should live, we had a lot of criteria. Freedom was important, but so was the weather. What were the gun laws like? Could I hunt with a silencer? Could we do a home birth? Will the homeschooling laws be onerous? If our A/C goes down in the summer, will we melt into a puddle of misery and sweat?

Questions like this turned out to be just the tip of the iceberg. What about severed estates? Many states have property laws that severed the land from the timber or mineral rights decades ago and buying a parcel you’d often never know. Realtors don’t have the best incentive structure when it comes to selling you land, so don’t expect them to do all the research for you.

You could easily end up with a nice parcel, build a house, and then 10 years later the company that owns the mining rights decides it’s going to come for what’s underground and bulldoze everything in its way. So much for your dream homestead.

What about restrictive covenants that say you can’t have chickens or hang your laundry outside? (No, seriously, we saw several properties like that). Is there an EPA Superfund site nearby that’s contaminating your future well? A nearby military base that would be a target in a major nuclear exchange? Wildfires? Earthquakes? Glyphosate contamination? The list of hazards is almost endless.

Then there’s consideration that must be given to the trappings of modern civilizations. Cell towers and transmission lines. EMF exposure is a serious issue, as I’ve been writing about tirelessly.

It took us a few years to settle on which state we wanted to live in (and we moved a lot before we did), and then another few years to settle on a county and finally buy the property we wanted. Along the way I consulted dozens of maps, data sheets on EMF exposure, and drove around with EMF meters to dozens of properties.

After going through that experience, many of our friends and family have been asking me for advice. How do I check if my property floods? What’s the safe distance to a cell tower? I realized we weren’t the only ones who were so picky! It makes sense. If you’re going to put down roots and build a homestead that you hope your kids will inherit, you don’t want to do that right next to a toxic dump. Spending an extra year or two looking for the right place can save you many headaches later on.

Of course, no place is perfect, and you’ll have to make compromises or you’ll end up like some of our other friends - years into the search and never finding anything. I’d rather be on imperfect land than renting in an apartment in a city.

The truth is every property has something wrong with it, but don’t let perfect be the enemy of good. Find something that meets enough of your criteria in a state that respects enough of your freedoms, and then start homesteading, plant a garden, get chickens, do your thing, and breathe the fresh air of freedom.

For instance, our property had no streams or running water; so rather than spend far more money on one that did, we just built ponds and collect rainwater from our roof.

I built this mapping tool to help the thousands of liberty-minded people out there looking for a place to call home. And for the people who are already settled in, this’ll make you far more aware of your surroundings and the hazards nearby so that you can better prepare for them.

I’m also a software engineer and a map nerd, so building this was just frankly fun.

Please check out lookoutmap.com and let me know what you think!

If there’s one thing the war with Iran has revealed, it’s that the U.S. government is woefully underprepared for any sustained conflict, despite spending more on its military than China, Russia, and many more countries combined.

In the first few months of the war with Iran, the U.S. military used up over 1,000 tomahawk missiles, leaving only 2,000 in stockpiles. A third of its inventory, for a war with no strategic benefit to the U.S., that Americans are paying for at the pump and Iranians are paying for with their lives.

The U.S. military budget is now over $1.5 trillion dollars for 2027. An eye-watering amount for a nation running an annual deficit of $1.9 trillion, exceeding the entire annual spending of the British government.

You’d think that money would be going towards actual preparations for future wars. Instead, it appears to be largely corruption and graft. It is well known that the Pentagon routinely overpays for everything from missiles to toilets by orders of magnitude. That would be bad enough if at least the average American was getting something out of it.

A Pentagon official said last week, “We do not have enough to safely sustain operations, and I don’t think the White House is aware of that.” They know it, and they’re continuing this pointless war anyway. Trump can’t think more than about a week ahead. Despite saying “America first” in his campaign promises, he’s left the U.S. more vulnerable than it has been in decades.

America’s annual Tomahawk production is about 86 per year. That means in this pointless war with Iran, the U.S. consumed over 10 years of Tomahawk missile production.

And it’s not just Tomahawks. The THAAD interceptors the U.S. military uses to shoot down enemy missiles are in even worse shape. There were exactly zero delivered between July 2023 and now, with none expected until April 2027.

U.S. batteries fired 943 Patriot interceptors in the first 4 days of the Iranian war, using up 1.5 years of Lockheed and Boeing production. There’s such a backlog for missile orders that most of them won’t be getting fulfilled until 2030 and beyond. The stockpile picture is bleak.

Being Israel’s puppet has serious consequences.

The U.S. military is now even more vulnerable to China and Russia. China has been eyeing a ground invasion of Taiwan for years. They run annual drills. Taiwan’s TSMC produces 70% of all the world’s chips. The U.S. military has committed to protecting them, but how would they? They’re tied up on the other side of the world, using up their missiles to fuel Trump’s ego and bravado. China gets to sit back and watch their enemy make a mistake, and as the quote goes - they’re not interrupting.

What happens to all those extremely expensive aircraft carriers the U.S. government likes to intimate other countries with when a barrage of Chinese missiles hits them and there’s no interceptors left to protect them?

China, having spent the past 30 years industrializing, can build 5-6x as many missiles as the U.S., and has a shipbuilding capacity 230x that of the U.S. In any prolonged war the U.S. would run out of supplies in the first few months and then be completely unprotected. Major wars last for years, not months, and neither the U.S. military stockpile nor its industrial base can support this.

The corrupt politicians in D.C. have spent the past few decades invading countries around the world under false pretenses and stealing taxpayer money, while depleting the military’s actual reserves, leaving Americans less secure than ever before; while making everyone around the world hate them.

The U.S. military is a paper dragon, and it won’t take much adversity to knock it over - and with it, the U.S. empire.

Prepare accordingly.

The Exit

We can’t do anything to stop the government’s out of control spending. We can’t vote our way out of this mess. The U.S. will go bankrupt, and its enemies are waiting, patiently.

What we can do is become so independent of the system that when bad things happen, their impact is minimized on us. Move out of the city, grow a garden, start exercising, connect with your neighbors, go off the grid so grid disruptions don’t affect you.

I’m writing a series on prepping here and a series on homesteading here. Don’t wait for things to get bad, by then it’s too late. You can’t buy fencing and get chickens when supply chains snap. You’ve seen what happened during COVID. Don’t let yourself get caught by surprise.

Have you ever tried to talk to a family member about liberty and run into a wall? No matter how good the arguments you make, they just don’t get it. Take the non-aggression principle: it’s so simple! It elevates consent to the primary determination of whether an action is moral or not. It’s probably the simplest, most self-evident moral framework in existence, far simpler to understand than the endless inconsistencies and contradictions found in government or religious law.

And yet - to this day I’ve only ever convinced one person, my wife. Everyone else stubbornly refuses to change their minds. From people who don’t even understand the basics, to the ones who seem to understand and even agree on some surface level, but the next time you talk to them, it’s like the past conversation never happened. They didn’t get enlightened, they just nodded to placate you and then went right back to their regular lives.

For years I assumed I was just not good enough at putting my point across. If only I was a better orator, more charismatic, had better arguments, I could finally “convert” my friends and family to my viewpoint.

It turns out, my approach had been wrong. My entire worldview was a projection of my own desire for freedom unto others. Most people don’t care about freedom. We discussed that in part 1. Those people are essentially immune to arguments.

Robert Kegan, a Harvard developmental psychologist, found that more than half of adults never develop past the “socialized” developmental phase where their identity comes almost entirely from their social milieu.

These people simply haven’t developed the ability to reason for themselves, to form their own opinions. Key & Peele have a fantastic sketch about this here, it’s both funny and true.

When you’re trying to convince them to change their mind and stop supporting another war, more taxes, or some specific regulation that infringes on your liberty, you’re not just asking them to think for themselves and make up their own mind - something they haven’t developed the psychological ability to do - you’re also asking them to go against the grain of the social group they’re in - an unthinkable proposition to the majority, for whom conformism has become a way of life (just look at most people’s reaction to COVID mandates).

Arrested Development

As parents we often worry whether our kids are talking at the right level, if the fact that they repeatedly skip from twelve to fourteen when counting is okay, and so on. Yet we almost never wonder about the development stage an adult is at.

Kegan makes the point that the human mind can stall, in fact, most minds have. In part 1 we went over the different developmental stages. Two thirds of adults never make it past the first three stages. The last two stages, the ones where people can actually form their own opinions and do something independent with their lives? Only about one third make it here.

That’s not to say that people stuck in stage 3 are stupid. I’ve met a staggering number of smart people who cannot think for themselves. They can excel at their jobs, at mathematics, at science, at any number of things, all while not holding a single original thought in their brain.

I had a friend in high school who was academically the smartest kid in our year. He had good grades, excelled at mathematics, and always knew the answer to anything the teacher would ask. But he was deeply Catholic, and I had just started thinking critically about religion at this time. I tried to talk to him, to ask questions, to make arguments, and he would just shut down. I was watching this very smart young man’s brain stall and sputter. He would become so uncomfortable he had to physically excuse himself and leave the room because his brain couldn’t handle the cognitive dissonance created by my questions (which would highlight simple contradictions in the bible) and his beliefs.

I’m not here to pick on Catholics. It’s the same with anyone who holds strongly to any dogma and can’t defend it with reasoning - because they didn’t arrive at it with reasoning. You can’t reason someone out of religion because they were never reasoned into it.

The “trust the science” scientists who don’t want you looking at the studies too closely, they’re the same. The liberals who push the LGBT agenda, the conservatives who push “back the blue”. None of these people realize their thoughts are not their own.

The Exploitable Masses

Because modern life places an ever-increasing number of demands upon us that require independent thought:

• Taking our kids out of school and homeschooling them so they don’t become brainwashed, illiterate automatons,

• Homesteading and growing our own food so we can eat healthy instead of depleted, pesticide-ridden produce,

• Going off-grid to become resilient as the grid continues to degrade,

• Saving for retirement independently without relying on government benefits or dollar-pegged investment funds,

• Finding a partner who will have the willpower to stand up for your kids when the government wants to vaccinate them with yet another cocktail of drugs,

• Making changes to your life and environment so that your body doesn’t become increasingly toxified and infertile,

• etc.

But people stuck in stage 3 cannot accomplish these tasks, and so they have mounting anxiety. This inability to self-actualize combined with anxiety stemming from an ever-increasing number of demands placed by modern life creates the perfect citizen.

Think about this from the government’s perspective. If you’re a psychopath (1-4% of the population) and you want to control others, people stuck in stage 3 are perfect. They’re often agreeable and psychologically cannot fathom challenging authority or straying from their social programming.

This isn’t a political failure. We don’t need a change of government - that won’t solve anything at all.

We need to fundamentally change the way children are raised so that they become self-actualizing adults and not conformist automatons. Everything else is political theater meant to distract us from the fundamental problem. The solution is inter-generational and will take decades. There is no other way to achieve lasting liberty. As long as a large majority of the population want government because they fear freedom and responsibility, we will continue to get government no matter what political “safeguards” are put in place.

No constitution can protect us from this inevitability.

And this goes beyond politics. In one study, the vast majority of managers and executives, 85%, were in stage 3 or lower - above even the average across the population.

You know that manager who wants to delegate but can’t help micromanage everyone because they don’t want to make themselves disposable? I’ve had my share of those.

The Inevitable Failure of Democracy

If you read about democracy in a textbook you’ll get the idealized version: people get a choice. They can research the topics, reason about issues, and vote for who will most likely achieve the promised goals (never mind that politicians have no moral right to do anything whatsoever).

Yet according to Kegan’s research, two thirds of the population aren’t even psychologically capable of doing this - and the third that is are probably the third that doesn’t vote because they know it’s pointless.

In reality, adults stuck in stage 3 or below blindly follow whatever group they’re in. Whenever their group’s position changes, their views change, and they don’t even notice. That’s how you’ll find liberals defending a war that they would have opposed 3 years ago. The hypocrisy is endemic.

This is why the culture war ends up dictating politics, and not reasoned arguments, every time.

In part 3 we’ll cover how childhood manufactures compliance. And why you want your kids to be defiant. As parents all too often we want our kids to just obey us, and then we’re surprised when they go along with the group and government edicts. What did you think would happen if you spent years dictating compliance to authority as a virtue?

Sources:

- Kegan, R. (1994). In Over Our Heads: The Mental Demands of Modern Life. Harvard University Press.

- Kegan, R. (1982). The Evolving Self. Harvard University Press.

- Kegan, R. & Lahey, L.L. (2009). Immunity to Change. Harvard Business Press.

- Rooke, D. & Torbert, W. (2005). “Seven Transformations of Leadership.” Harvard Business Review.

- Fromm, E. (1941). Escape from Freedom. Farrar & Rinehart.

- DiMaggio, P.J. & Powell, W.W. (1983). “The Iron Cage Revisited: Institutional Isomorphism.” American Sociological Review, 48(2), 147-160.

- Piaget, J. (1972). “Intellectual Evolution from Adolescence to Adulthood.” Human Development, 15, 1-12.

- Ryan, R.M. & Deci, E.L. (2000). “Self-determination theory.” American Psychologist, 55(1), 68-78.

A lot of pro-liberty folks have a core assumption in their arguments and worldview - that people want to be free. That if you just show them their chains, they’ll want to shrug them off. That if you lead by example, and show them the tyranny, they’ll go buy land and want to be off-the-grid too. But it’s simply not true.

What’s stopping mass adoption of liberty isn’t lack of knowledge or means, it’s the unwillingness of most people to be free.

Give them the option, and they’ll hand the keys right back. They’ll vote for the next authority figure promising to make their decisions for them, join the next movement that tells them what to think, and feel genuinely relieved when someone else takes the wheel.

This isn’t a political mystery. It’s a psychological one. And several decades of research across completely unrelated fields keep landing on the same uncomfortable answer.

The 1%: Born to Rule

Robert Hare spent his career studying psychopathy. His Psychopathy Checklist-Revised (PCL-R) is the gold standard diagnostic tool: 20 items, scored 0-40, with a score of 30 or higher marking the clinical threshold for psychopathy.

In his 1999 book Without Conscience, Hare estimated that roughly 1% of the general population meets this strict clinical threshold. Broader measures, which flag milder cases the clinical interview would exclude, put the number higher, around 4 to 5%.

The thing is - that 1% doesn’t distribute evenly.

A 2010 study by Babiak, Neumann, and Hare examined 203 corporate professionals who had been selected by their companies for management development programs. These weren’t random employees. These were the ones identified as leadership material. The results: 3.9% scored 30 or higher on the PCL-R - the same strict checklist behind that 1% figure - roughly four times the general population rate. Almost one in twenty-five of the corporate world’s chosen leaders met the strict clinical threshold for psychopathy.

The kicker: psychopathy was positively associated with ratings of charisma and presentation style. The psychopaths weren’t getting flagged as problems. They were getting promoted. The system selected for them.

This shouldn’t surprise anyone who’s watched how power works. Positions of authority are attractive to people who want to control others. Psychopaths are drawn to those positions the way moths are drawn to light. And the traits that make them dangerous (charm, fearlessness, willingness to manipulate) are the same traits that make them look like “leaders” to the people doing the hiring and the voting.

The 80%: Escape from Freedom

If the 1% are the predators, the vast majority are the willing prey. Not because they’re stupid. Because freedom is genuinely terrifying when you lack the psychological infrastructure to handle it.

Erich Fromm figured this out in 1941. A German Jewish psychoanalyst who had watched Hitler’s rise firsthand, Fromm published Escape from Freedom asking a question that haunted him: why did millions of people voluntarily embrace a totalitarian regime? His answer wasn’t propaganda, or economic despair, or national humiliation, though those played roles. His answer was that freedom itself produces anxiety, and most people will do anything to escape that anxiety, including handing their autonomy to a dictator.

Fromm drew a sharp distinction between “freedom from” (liberation from external control) and “freedom to” (the creative capacity to direct your own life). You can have the first without the second. And when you do, the result isn’t liberation. It’s vertigo. You’ve been freed from the old authority, but you have no internal compass to replace it. The ground drops out.

(This is why so many people who become atheists immediately turn around and cling to the state as their god.)

Faced with that vertigo, Fromm identified three escape mechanisms:

Authoritarianism: Surrendering to a new authority. Submit to a leader, a party, a movement, a doctrine. The authoritarian personality contains both masochism (desire to submit) and sadism (desire to control those below you in the new hierarchy). It’s not just obedience. It’s relief.

Destructiveness: What you can’t control, destroy. If the world’s complexity is overwhelming, burn it down. This is the Antifa crowd.

Automaton conformity: The most insidious escape, and the most relevant today. People unconsciously adopt the beliefs, preferences, and behaviors that society expects, and then experience them as their own genuine choices. Fromm’s words from 1941 read like a prophecy for the social media age: “We have become automatons who live under the illusion of being self-willing individuals.”

That third mechanism is the one to sit with. The automaton conformist doesn’t know they’ve surrendered their autonomy. They think they’re thinking for themselves. They genuinely believe their opinions are their own. They just happen to be identical to whatever their social group, media ecosystem, or institutional affiliation demands.

Kegan’s Numbers

Robert Kegan, a Harvard developmental psychologist, spent decades studying how adults actually think. Not what they know, but the structure through which they process reality.

His Constructive Developmental Theory identifies five stages of psychological complexity. The first applies almost exclusively to children. The next four are where most adults live. But in essence, the earlier stages, when manifested in adults, are a sign of arrested development. An adult who didn’t develop past a certain age of intellectual maturity.

Stage 1 (the Impulsive Mind): is an early-childhood stage - roughly ages 2–4, governed by momentary impulses and perceptions with no stable self. Virtually all adults have matured beyond this phase.

Stage 2 (the Imperial Mind): Purely self-interested. Relationships are transactional. Follows rules to avoid punishment. This stage is about what you’d expect a 3-5 year-old to be. By the age of 5-6, children who are developing normally become capable of empathy and start to care about the needs of others (stage 3). That is, unless you abuse them (via spanking or in other ways). About 6% of adults never develop past this stage.

Stage 3 (the Socialized Mind): Identity comes from external sources: relationships, institutions, culture. Gets beliefs, morals, and sense of “truth” from the surrounding environment. Cannot independently answer “What do I want?” because “I” is defined by the group. This is where most adults live, about 58%.

Stage 4 (the Self-Authoring Mind): Has developed an internal compass. Can evaluate the expectations of others against a self-constructed framework. Generates their own understanding of the world. Doesn’t need external validation to know what they think. About 35% of adults get to this stage.

Stage 5 (the Self-Transforming Mind): Can hold multiple frameworks simultaneously and examine them from outside, including their own. About 1% of adults.

In his study of 342 adults, published in In Over Our Heads (Harvard University Press, 1994), Kegan found that roughly two thirds of adults operate at Stage 3 or below. Only about 35% have reached Stage 4. William Torbert independently studied 497 managers and executives using different methods and reached nearly identical conclusions.

In other words, more than half of the adult population has not developed the capacity for psychological self-authorship. Their identity, their beliefs, their values, their sense of what’s true is constituted by external structures: their employer, their party, their church, their peer group, their media diet.

When you give these people “freedom,” you’re not giving them something they want. You’re taking away the scaffolding that tells them who they are.

The 15-20%: The Ones Who Actually Want Freedom

So who does want freedom? Not as an abstract value they’ll nod along with, but as an operating principle they’ll actually live by?

Kegan’s data puts the Self-Authoring population at ~35%, but that includes people in transition between stages and those who demonstrate Stage 4 capacity only in limited domains. The consistently, robustly self-authoring population is smaller. Torbert’s parallel research, published as “Seven Transformations of Leadership” in Harvard Business Review, found that only 15% of leaders operate from post-conventional stages (what he called Individualist, Strategist, and Alchemist).

Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs points to the same neighborhood. He estimated that fewer than 2% of people fully achieve self-actualization, though he believed a much larger percentage had the capacity.

Deci and Ryan’s Self-Determination Theory, built on decades of experimental research at the University of Rochester, identified autonomy as one of three basic psychological needs (alongside competence and relatedness). Their central finding: human beings can be “proactive and engaged or, alternatively, passive and alienated, largely as a function of the social conditions in which they develop and function.” When autonomy is supported, people thrive. When it’s suppressed, they become dependent, apathetic, and compliant.

But here’s the uncomfortable part of Deci and Ryan’s work: extrinsic rewards for behavior that is intrinsically motivated actually undermine the intrinsic motivation. Pay someone to do what they’d do freely, and they stop wanting to do it. This means most institutional structures (schools, corporations, governments) are actively manufacturing compliance by replacing internal motivation with external rewards and punishments. The system doesn’t just fail to develop autonomy. It actively destroys it, one child at a time.

The Milgram Pattern

Now watch what happens when you line these numbers up against completely different research domains.

Stanley Milgram’s obedience experiments at Yale in 1963: participants were told by an authority figure in a lab coat to administer what they believed were dangerous electric shocks to another person. 65% complied all the way to the maximum voltage, which killed the other (pretend) person. They heard screaming. They were visibly distressed. They kept flipping the switch because a man in a coat told them to. 35% defied the authority and stopped.

Solomon Asch’s conformity experiments in 1951: participants were asked to match line lengths, a task with an obvious correct answer. Actors in the room gave obviously wrong answers. 75% of participants conformed to the group’s wrong answer at least once. But 25% never conformed, not even once, across all twelve critical trials.

Now look at the American Revolution. Historian Robert Calhoon’s research found that only 40-45% of the free colonial population actively supported the Patriots, at best “no more than a bare majority.” Paul H. Smith’s 1968 study in the William and Mary Quarterly calculated that Loyalists comprised about 19.8% of free citizens. The rest were neutral or uninvolved. Out of a colonial population of 2.5 million, just over 100,000 served in the Continental Army.

The same ratios keep appearing:

1-4% who seek to control: psychopaths (Hare), corporate psychopaths (Babiak), Kegan’s Stage 5 + Stage 2 combined.

55-80% who conform, obey, or remain passive: Milgram’s obedient 65%, Asch’s conformists, Kegan’s Stage 3, the colonial population who stayed out of the Revolution or supported the monarchy.

15-35% who resist, think independently, or act autonomously: Milgram’s defiant 35%, Asch’s 25% who never conformed, Kegan’s Stage 4 and 5, Torbert’s 15% post-conventional leaders, the active Patriots.

These researchers weren’t coordinating. They were studying different phenomena in different decades using different methods. And they kept finding the same distribution.

What This Means

This isn’t a comfortable framework. It suggests that the liberty movement is not losing an argument. It’s dealing with a species-level distribution of psychological orientation. The majority of the population does not want freedom, not because they’ve been tricked or haven’t heard the right arguments, but because freedom requires a psychological capacity that most adults haven’t developed.

The 1% who seek control and the 80% who seek someone to follow are engaged in a transaction that works for both parties. The psychopaths get power. The socialized majority gets someone to tell them who they are and what to think. Both sides are getting exactly what they want.

The 15-20% who actually want autonomy aren’t losing the debate. They’re outnumbered by people who are playing a completely different game.

This doesn’t mean the percentages are fixed, or that people can’t develop. They can. That’s the subject of the rest of this series. But it starts with seeing the landscape clearly, without the comforting illusion that everyone secretly wants to be free and just needs the right pamphlet.

They don’t. And pretending otherwise is why most liberty activism goes nowhere.

Next in the series: “Children in Adult Bodies,” a deep dive into Kegan’s developmental theory: why most adults never reach psychological autonomy, what keeps them stuck, and what it means for governance.

Sources

- Hare, R.D. (1999). Without Conscience: The Disturbing World of the Psychopaths Among Us. Guilford Press.

- Babiak, P., Neumann, C.S., & Hare, R.D. (2010). “Corporate Psychopathy: Talking the Walk.” Behavioral Sciences & the Law, 28: 174-193.

- Sanz-García, A. et al. (2021). “Prevalence of Psychopathy in the General Adult Population.” Frontiers in Psychology.

- Fromm, E. (1941). Escape from Freedom. Farrar & Rinehart.

- Kegan, R. (1994). In Over Our Heads: The Mental Demands of Modern Life. Harvard University Press.

- Kegan, R. & Lahey, L.L. (2009). Immunity to Change. Harvard Business Press.

- Rooke, D. & Torbert, W. (2005). “Seven Transformations of Leadership.” Harvard Business Review.

- Ryan, R.M. & Deci, E.L. (2000). “Self-determination theory and the facilitation of intrinsic motivation, social development, and well-being.” American Psychologist, 55(1), 68-78.

- Maslow, A. (1954). Motivation and Personality. Harper & Row.

- Milgram, S. (1963). “Behavioral Study of Obedience.” Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 67(4), 371-378.

- Asch, S.E. (1951). “Effects of Group Pressure.” Groups, Leadership, and Men.

- Smith, P.H. (1968). “The American Loyalists.” William and Mary Quarterly, 25.

- Calhoon, R. (various). Works on Loyalist/Patriot strength. Cited in Journal of the American Revolution.

In the year 2000, an Amish farmer named Amos Miller attended a Weston A. Price Foundation conference with his father. He listened to Sally Fallon talk about traditional food: raw milk, grass-fed meat, fermented vegetables, the way humans ate for ten thousand years before the USDA decided it was dangerous. He went home to Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, and started selling it.

Twenty-six years later, his farm has been raided by federal agents, subjected to three consent decrees, slapped with $85,000 in fines, and dragged through nearly a decade of litigation across federal and state courts. His products have been blockaded, detained, and ordered destroyed.

He’s still selling. His food club has over 4,000 members nationwide. And an appeals court just ruled that Pennsylvania can’t stop him from shipping across state lines.

This is the story of the underground real food economy, and why the government keeps losing to a man who doesn’t use electricity.

What He Built

Miller’s Organic Farm operates as a private membership association out of Bird-in-Hand, Pennsylvania, deep in Lancaster County’s Amish heartland. For a one-time $35 lifetime membership fee, you gain access to what the farm’s website calls “traditional Amish farm foods... directly to your doorstep.”

That’s not a quaint farm stand selling jars of honey. Miller’s operation sources from multiple Amish farms and ships nationwide via FedEx and UPS. The product catalog reportedly grew to over 1,200 items: raw milk, raw butter, kefir, cream, yogurt, bone broth, grass-fed beef, free-range poultry, fermented vegetables, raw cheese, and eggs from chickens that actually see the sun.

The private membership model is the key innovation. Miller’s farm doesn’t sell to “the public.” You sign a membership contract acknowledging that you understand the products are unprocessed and uninspected by government agencies, and that you’re choosing to buy them anyway. It’s a direct, consensual transaction between producer and consumer, with no middleman and no bureaucratic permission slip.

This is agorism in its purest form: a parallel economy built on voluntary exchange, operating outside the regulatory apparatus that exists, ostensibly to “protect” you from the food you’ve specifically chosen to eat.

What the Government Did About It

The feds noticed Miller around 2016, when the FDA and CDC linked a Listeria outbreak (one death in Florida, one illness in California) to raw milk from his farm. The USDA’s Food Safety and Inspection Service demanded access to inspect his meat and poultry operations. Miller refused. FSIS sued to enforce the subpoena and won access in November 2016.

What followed was a grinding legal war that lasted seven years.

The Department of Justice secured a permanent injunction in 2019, barring Miller from selling non-federally-inspected meat and poultry. Miller kept selling. The government got a consent decree in April 2020. Miller was found in contempt in 2021. A second consent decree followed in December 2022. Then a third, in August 2023, which finally closed the federal case after Miller paid roughly $85,000 in fines and costs.

According to his attorney, internal USDA documents revealed agents laughing about putting the farmer in prison. Federal judges, to their credit, were less enthusiastic about caging a man whose crime was selling milk.

Then the state of Pennsylvania showed up.

The Raid

On January 4, 2024, agents from the Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture raided Miller’s farm under an administrative search warrant, backed by State Troopers. The trigger: two out-of-state children had gotten sick, reportedly from E. coli in raw eggnog.

The PDA’s evidence was thin. The eggnog tested positive for shiga toxin-producing E. coli (STEC), but the department never tested whether the strain found in the sick child matched the strain in the eggnog. They didn’t check for other contamination sources. The Michigan child’s family had their Miller products tested independently. Every result came back negative.

No matter. The PDA detained an estimated $100,000 worth of food on Miller’s farm and ordered it all destroyed. On January 25, a judge granted the state an ex parte injunction, meaning Miller and his attorney had no opportunity to present their side before the order was issued. Tyranny.

“Why Doesn’t He Just Get a Permit?”

This is the question everyone asks, and it’s the question that reveals how the regulatory game actually works.

Pennsylvania allows raw milk sales with a permit. There are 114 dairies operating legally in the state under those permits. Judge Thomas Sponaugle, at a February 2024 hearing, asked this exact question: “Why doesn’t he just go get a permit?“

Never mind that peaceful, consenting adults should need no permit to sell farm produce!

Miller’s attorney Robert Barnes explained: a raw milk permit in Pennsylvania limits you to selling only raw milk and aged cheese. No butter. No kefir. No yogurt. No cream. No smoothies. Getting the permit would mean abandoning most of what his 4,000+ members actually want.

The PDA agreed almost five years ago to issue regulations legalizing raw butter sales. They still haven’t done it. The permit system isn’t a reasonable accommodation. It’s a trap: accept the license, lose the business.

This is how regulatory capture works in practice. The rules aren’t written to keep you safe. They’re written to keep you small, compliant, and dependent on a system that processes 10 billion pounds of meat a year through four companies while sending armed agents after an Amish farmer with a butter churn.

The Fight Back

On February 29, 2024, hundreds of supporters rallied outside the Lancaster County courthouse. Barnes submitted 354 written testimonials from food club members and brought four to testify in person about how Miller’s food had improved their health.

Medical biologist Margaret Coleman, who formerly worked for the USDA, reviewed all 33 samples the PDA took from the farm. Eight showed evidence of harmful microbes. But Coleman testified that the percentages present were “well below” harmful limits even by the FDA’s own standards.

The judge kept the raw milk injunction in place for in-state sales, but amended it to allow Miller to sell all other foods. Then, in January 2025, Commonwealth Court Judge Stacy Wallace delivered a significant win: Miller can continue selling raw milk to out-of-state customers while the PA lawsuit proceeds. The reasoning? Blocking out-of-state sales would cause “substantial harm to his business.”

Since the January 2024 raid, Miller’s GiveSendGo campaign has raised over $300,000. His goal is $800,000.

Bigger Than One Farm

Miller’s case landed at a peculiar cultural moment. The Make America Healthy Again movement turned raw milk into a political symbol. Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY) jumped to Miller’s defense. Donald Trump Jr. said the feds should focus on pedophiles, not dairy farmers. In March 2026, Massie and Rep. Chellie Pingree (D-ME) introduced H.R. 7880, the Interstate Milk Freedom Act, a bipartisan bill that would prohibit federal interference with interstate raw milk sales. Massie has introduced versions of this bill since 2014. This is the sixth attempt.

The raw milk market doesn’t care whether Congress acts. Weekly sales grew 21% in 2024 over the prior year. Q4 2024 sales were up 18%. Thirty-two states now allow some form of raw milk sales. Consumer demand is building the legal framework from the ground up, one purchase at a time.

But Miller represents something beyond raw milk. His private membership model is a template. The logic is simple: consenting adults don’t need a permission slip to eat. If a farmer raises food and a buyer wants it, the transaction is between them. The government isn’t a party to the contract. It isn’t invited.

Lancaster County, with its dense network of Amish farms operating outside the industrial food chain, is a working proof of concept. They’re families who have been doing this for centuries, feeding their communities real food, raised on real land, traded through real relationships, without asking anyone’s permission.

The state spent a decade and untold taxpayer dollars trying to crush one farmer’s food club. The food club grew from 2,000 members to over 4,000. The farmer is still selling. And the next Amos Miller is already out there, somewhere in America, filling coolers with raw milk and loading them onto a truck.

The government can raid one farm. It can’t raid ten thousand kitchens.

Sources:

- National Agricultural Law Center: Amos Miller and the Regulation of Raw Milk

- Real Milk: Amos Miller Case Updates (Dec 2024)

- Food Safety News: Appeals Court Says Amos Miller Can Sell Raw Milk Across State Lines (Jan 2025)

- DOJ: Lancaster County Farm Agrees to Consent Decree (April 2020)

- Food Safety News: Amos Miller Exits Federal Court (Nov 2023)

- GetRawMilk.com: Amos Miller Interstate Distribution (Oct 2024)

- Rep. Massie: Interstate Milk Freedom Act H.R. 7880 (March 2026)

- University of Delaware: The Rise of Raw Milk (Oct 2024)