Resurgent.Us — Origins
In the beginning…
The Story of Us
When I created Resurgent.Us, I didn’t expect a pandemic. I didn’t expect 40 million unemployed. I didn’t expect an influx of people who needed to build skills, rethink their capabilities, expand horizons, and reinvent themselves. I didn’t know how many of us would need a supportive community.
When I created Resurgent.Us, all I knew is that I needed those things.
It was mid-February 2020, just before all hell broke loose when I clicked the “create” button on the Facebook group. I invited just about everyone I knew — which was hundreds of acquaintances, former and current workmates, family members, and friends, along with about a thousand or so strangers I had just friend requested from YangGang. But we need to back up. There’s a lot of the story to tell before we get to “day 1”.
Yang Gang: The Prologue
Disillusionment with the corruption in politics had been rotting my hope and faith into cynicism for several years. I had voted for Obama twice, and been twice disappointed. I had been expecting to vote third-party for the foreseeable future.
Then along came Andrew Yang.
The dynamic in his movement was inclusive of everyone (including converted Trump supporters), it was unflinchingly patriotic, and it was entrepreneurial. It was exactly what the country needed. For goodness sake, his slogan was #MATH (Make America Think Harder)! As a mathematics and accounting tutor, how can I not love that?
I initially learned about him from some of my favorite podcasts — Sam Harris’ Making Sense, and Joe Rogan’s JRE. The fact that he was a Democrat who was willing to communicate productively with Republicans like Ben Shapiro blew my mind.
A quick aside to all the people rolling their eyes right now about how expensive UBI is: that’s not even close to the totality of what Andrew Yang was about. He had 150 specific, fleshed-out policy proposals.
So I resolved that like him, I would dare. Whatever that meant, and whenever it meant it, I would “lean in”.
And rest assured, we’ll continue to debate both the pros and cons of his Freedom Dividend proposal in-depth in later articles and podcast debates. I don’t expect you to take our word on something that massive and transformative. You’ll want to see a lot of data and studies to match our claims, and rightly so.
Heartbreak
By February 2020, the remaining lower-ranked candidates were dropping out and endorsing Joe Biden. As crushing as it was when Yang suspended his campaign, it was also revealing. If a regular guy like Andrew Yang who has never held any kind of public office could get as far as he did and become one of the last candidates standing, what does that mean?
To me, it was living proof that any of us might not really have the kind of limitations that it seems like we do. Even if he didn’t win, Yang changed the landscape of politics and redefined what it could mean to be an entrepreneur, a politician, a leader, and an American. There’s no excuse for any of us not to act, and create, and lead.
Yang was a validation of Seneca’s words “It is not because things are difficult that we do not dare, it is because we do not dare that they are difficult.” If a lot more of us put ourselves out there and fought for what we believe in the way Andrew did, what might the world look like?
So I resolved that like him, I would dare. Whatever that meant, and whenever it meant it, I would “lean in”.
For starters, this meant appearing on podcasts. My maiden voyage into that vast expanse was on The Daily Discussion, with Connor Derting, who is now a moderator on Resurgent.Us. A few months later, I found myself on The Mindwave Podcast with Jenner Zeno. That’s when things really started to accelerate in a new direction.
Jenner is probably the freest, most open, and theatrical character I have ever met. His show is wildly interesting, and he moves to the beat of his own drum (literally… he’s a sound engineer who makes his own beats). As opposed to my cautious, perfectionist, paralyzed approach to life, Jenner’s “just go for it and figure it out on the way” style was a liberating antidote.
Within about a day of my first podcast with Jenner, I created Resurgent.Us. In just a single conversation with this guy, he had motivated me to take the kind of leap that dozens of millionaire success gurus up to that point hadn’t. I didn’t know what I was doing, but I’d figure it out.
Who We Are and What We’re About
When you make a group, you have to let people know what they’re joining, so I whipped out a quick summary of what I had in mind:
“We are a Humanity First group in that we believe all humans are part of “us” and have intrinsic value which does not depend on the market value of your wages. Governments and markets are tools which exist to serve humans, and not the other way around.
This is a platform to share ideas, friendships, knowledge, encouragement, and audiences with each other for mutual benefit and advancement.
We are independent thinkers who each have our own views, so the group does not officially endorse any particular party, candidate, or policy.”
There’s a lot of YangGang groups out there, and some of them had already started to sour. People turned on each other and attacked one another, reverting back to their previous allegiances now that Andrew Yang was no longer a viable presidential candidate. I didn’t want that to happen with my group. I didn’t want groupthink, an echo chamber, or a hero-worshipping cult, despite how much I admire Andrew.
It has to be about camaraderie that goes beyond beliefs and affiliations.
It’s about the process of trying to improve our understanding and seek our own and each other’s betterment. It’s not about any kind of uniformity of ideological position that any of us have achieved in our intellectual journey at any particular moment. It’s that we are on the journey together, in good faith. I didn’t want us all rooting for the same team. Instead, Resurgent.Us would be a club where we all played by the same rules: mutual respect and an effort to understand and support one another.
It’s as if we’ve somehow managed to hijack the ad-funded, fake news, outrage machine that is social media, and bend it towards something good.
Something I hope will be the shape of things to come is a study group of Aristotle’s Ethics that Rich Casada, Jeph Hargett, and Beth Anne joined me for. We took the free 10-week program hosted by Hillsdale College taught by its President, Professor Larry Arnn, and broadcast our weekly discussions about the lectures live to the Resurgent.Us group.
Attendance wasn’t high, but to have found any people at all who are interested in spending Sunday evenings diving deep into ancient texts and discussions about ethics has felt almost… well, delightfully subversive, I guess. It’s as if we’ve somehow managed to hijack the ad-funded, fake news, outrage machine that is social media, and bend it towards something good.
I’ve also had similar discussions and crossover with Isaac Miller of The Daily Archetype, and I look forward to a lot more of that going forward.
But the charm of our merry little band is that we aren’t limited to philosophy or politics. We’re real people doing real things in our own lives.
An unexpectedly spicy flavor to the group is offered by none other than Captain Caliente, as entrepreneur David Howard is also known. We have a guitar-shredding trucker named Calvin Johnson that moderates, debates, and occasionally posts a jam session. From his Front Porch, Fred Eder takes us boldly where no one has gone before.
I actually owe my presence on Medium directly to Resurgent.Us. It was our own Nick Argall that inspired me by heeding the call to create. His act of sharing his Medium stories to our Facebook group is what made me realize that I could be doing the same, and I could even take it further than that by focusing my efforts on this platform and creating a publication native to Medium.
There’s a lot more, but with more than 400 people currently in the highly active group, I’m not going to be able to mention everyone by name. Suffice it to say, there’s a lot of great people to get to know in our community and a lot of cool stuff that they’re doing.
The Next Evolution
After almost 6 months of getting to know each other, it’s time to expand the group — both in terms of its mission and its size.
To start, Jenner and I have relaunched Resurgent.Us as a Humanity First series on Mindwave Universe. Our first guest was the Democratic nominee for Colorado’s 4th District, combat veteran Ike McCorkle. Have a listen to find out why he got 83% of the vote in the primary.
We’ve also had the opportunity to chat with the Libertarian presidential candidate Jo Jorgensen and her running made Spike Cohen on Mind Wave.
Despite these connections, most of our ambitions have little to do with the political realm, and besides that, we have members all across the political spectrum who have plenty of disagreement but approach one another with curiosity rather than judgment.
What we aim to change is online culture.
At least for our little corner of that world. But there’s no reason it has to stop there.
Instead of the toxic, angry, divided online space that social media has so frequently devolved into, we strive to create a respectful environment where ideas are examined and discussed, creators encourage and support one another, and audiences grow and improve themselves by broadening horizons.
Our future has many more study groups taking free online courses together, a publication on Medium to broadcast our member’s ideas through, and a lot more new members looking for a healthy environment.
If that’s you, welcome.