The Liberalism They Wore

On imposture and the exit tax

Jan 22, 2026

I have been thinking deeply about my previous life as a jet-setting executive. I saw the world. But I lost myself. Attending conferences. Business meetings. All over the world. I fell victim to a lifestyle that had no grounding. No connection back to the real. Anywhere was everywhere. All you needed was Wi-Fi and your laptop. It was exhilarating. But there’s nothing there.

This isn't a screed about globalism per se. I will not join our fascist brothers and sisters within the human race in suggesting to the contrary, a notion that the world should do anything other than live together and trade in relative harmony, with reasonable ways for people to migrate throughout the world, to follow dreams, to follow careers, to learn new languages, and to explore different ways of living inside the human condition. I think all that is good. The notion that the world we prefer is an angry man asking for your papers at each checkpoint to protect the integrity of the community—whatever the fascists think that means—is ludicrous.

The fascist answer to modern alienation is the checkpoint. The border guard. The demand for papers. They looked at the emptiness of the globalized self—the person who belongs nowhere because they could belong anywhere—and concluded that the solution was to trap people in place. To make movement itself suspect. To rebuild the walls that commerce and technology had dissolved.

This is wrong. Not because movement is sacred, but because the diagnosis is wrong. The emptiness I felt at thirty thousand feet, laptop open, attending my fourth conference that month in my third time zone—that emptiness wasn’t caused by the absence of borders. It was caused by the absence of commitment. I wasn’t unmoored because I could go anywhere. I was unmoored because I had no reason to stay.

The fascist sees a person without roots and says: We must make it impossible to leave. The humanist sees the same person and asks: What would make staying meaningful?

These are not the same question. One builds walls. The other builds something worth staying for.

⁂

I lost years to that life. I don’t regret seeing the world—the world is worth seeing. But I regret what I failed to build while I was busy being everywhere. The relationships that atrophied. The community I never joined. The slow, difficult work of being known somewhere, which requires the prior condition of being there.

⁂

And here is where the thread becomes uncomfortable to pull.

The loudest voices now calling for walls, for checkpoints, for the restoration of national identity against the cosmopolitan tide—these are not people rooted in place. Peter Thiel holds multiple citizenships and bought a bolthole in New Zealand. Elon Musk was born in South Africa, made his fortune in America, and would relocate to Mars if he could. Marc Andreessen’s interests span continents, and his capital knows no borders. Bari Weiss built her career in the institutions of coastal liberalism before deciding those institutions were the enemy.

These are cosmopolitan elites. Their interests are international in scope. They are not bound to any nation by necessity—only by preference, and preferences can change. Patriots do not move to Singapore and renounce their citizenship when the tax burden becomes inconvenient. Patriots do not keep a passport collection and a property portfolio designed for optionality. These people have exit options. They always have exit options. That is the defining feature of their class.

And yet: they have become the funders, the intellectuals, the cheerleaders of a movement that claims to speak for the rooted, the left-behind, the people who cannot leave. They have embraced a politics of blood and soil while holding no soil and sharing no blood. They have funded the checkpoints they will never have to pass through.

Many of them pretended to be liberals for quite some time. They attended the right parties. They made the right donations. They spoke the language of openness, innovation, and disruption. But when the moment came—when they were asked to choose between democracy and their class interests—they chose their class. And then, with the audacity that only the truly rootless can muster, they claimed to be defending civilization.

History will not remember them as liberals. History will remember them as what they are: cosmopolitan elites who funded fascism because it was good for their portfolios, and who will be on the last plane out when the consequences arrive.

⁂

And it must also be said of this class of our fellow citizens—nothing more than a passport to them, to be sure—that we can now see their commitment to human rights and freedom within a liberal politics was nothing more than convenience. They were selling those ideas because they thought they were popular. Human rights and freedom? Who doesn’t like that? It was good branding. It opened markets. It made the investor decks sing. It kept the regulators friendly and the protestors at bay.

But they never believed it. That’s what we know now. The liberalism was a costume, not a conviction. They wore it while it was useful and discarded it the moment something else seemed more advantageous.

When fascism was on the menu, they were first to put in their pre-orders.

Not reluctantly. Not after agonized deliberation. Not holding their noses against the smell. They showed up hungry. They wanted this. Or at least, they wanted what this could give them: a state that would discipline labor, crush regulation, and make the trains run on time for their benefit. The democratic accountability they had praised in investor letters and TED talks? An obstacle, it turned out. An inefficiency. A friction to be removed.

The ones who saw it coming—who warned that these people were not what they presented themselves to be—were dismissed as hysterics. As people who didn’t understand the nuances. As partisans who couldn’t see that the real threat was always somewhere else, always on the other side, always among people who wanted too much change rather than people who wanted to end change altogether.

And now here we are. The masks are off. The pre-orders have been filled. And the cosmopolitan elite who spent decades performing liberalism are revealed as what they always were: people whose only loyalty is to their own optionality.

⁂

These people do not love America. I can tell you this because I used to be in the rooms where they spoke freely. They talk amongst themselves about the burden of the exit tax and ways to get around it. They compare notes on residency requirements and flag theory and which jurisdictions offer the most favorable treatment for people of their means. America, to them, is a platform—useful while it remains competitive, disposable when it doesn’t.

I used to share their skepticism about America’s global taxation of its citizens. It seemed punitive. An overreach. A relic of a less mobile age. I have done a complete reversal on this position in the past year alone. I have been, to use a word I do not use lightly, radicalized—in favor of it.

Because I now see it for what it is: a sorting mechanism. A test. Who is actually willing to stay in the room and be part of this country? Who will accept the obligations of citizenship, not merely its conveniences? The exit tax is the price of leaving. And the people who spend their time scheming to avoid it are telling you exactly what their citizenship means to them.

I am not leaving. I am not considering living in other parts of the world. I am sure I could find work—lucrative work—in Asia, in Europe, in the Middle East. I have highly sought-after skills in financial technology and business strategy. The global market for such skills is robust. And being a vocal Trump critic, until very recently, made cashing in on those skills domestically rather more difficult than it needed to be.

But that is precisely the point. I chose to limit my economic earning potential so that I could speak truth to power. I chose to stay in the room. I chose to be a citizen in the full sense of the word, not merely a passport holder with options.

⁂

Some of my former friends thought this was absurd. Leaving the industry. Starting a Substack, of all things. Thinking myself qualified to opine on world affairs such that people should take me seriously. To them, it revealed a self-absorbedness. Perhaps an unhealthy paranoia about the world ending. Perhaps a midlife crisis dressed up in political conviction. Whatever the fuck they thought about me—I have moved past caring.

I only bring it up now for the purposes of casting derision in their general direction.

Because I turned out to be right about everything. Or nearly everything. The threat was real. The emergency was real. The people I warned about did exactly what I said they would do. And the former friends who rolled their eyes and stayed on the conference circuit and kept their options open—they are now watching the country they declined to fight for slide toward authoritarianism, from the comfort of wherever they’ve positioned themselves to observe it.

Isn’t that something?