In October 2012, Air Force public affairs published a feature titled “Who says cops have no sense of humor?” about Senior Airman Christopher Armitage, a security forces member at Fairchild Air Force Base who checked identification at the main gate four days a week and performed stand-up comedy in downtown Spokane on Monday nights. The article described an airman who had performed more than a dozen shows and turned down a paid Seattle gig because his duties came first. In the piece, Armitage traced his stage composure to his years on the wrestling mat: “Before matches, I’d be so nervous until I stepped on the mat and shook hands — then my adrenaline would start pumping and I was in my zone — nothing else mattered.”
The service had covered him twice before that. In December 2011, a feature titled “Security forces Airmen at Fairchild show their giving spirit” reported on a donation program Armitage organized for a state-funded preschool serving low-income families, gathering nearly 250 pounds of clothing, food, and toys in ten days. A month later, when his squadron fielded tasers, Armitage volunteered to take the shot himself and told the base reporter why: “If I’m going to be willing to shoot someone with it, I want to know what they’re in for.”
Fourteen years later, Armitage is a constitutional scholar and the founder and publisher of The Existentialist Republic, a civic affairs publication with more than 54,000 subscribers covering constitutional law, federalism, and democratic accountability, ranked by Substack among its rising publications in U.S. politics.
Armitage originated the soft secession framework in an October 2025 essay arguing that states possess constitutional authority to refuse federal overreach and build functioning governments of their own. Days after the essay ran, Mother Jones editor in chief Clara Jeffery published “It’s Time for Soft Secession,” and KQED’s Forum devoted an episode to the concept with Jeffery and UCLA law professor Jon Michaels. In March 2026, The Nation published “How to Defend Democracy One State at a Time,” a Laura Flanders and Friends conversation featuring Armitage alongside Housing Justice for All executive director Sumathy Kumar. The Brookings Institution has cited his work, NPR and PBS have covered it, and he appeared live with radio host Thom Hartmann in December 2025.
His legal commentary has appeared at Verfassungsblog, JURIST, and the Brennan Center’s State Court Report, and his working papers, including Sophist Originalism: The Fraud at the Heart of the Federalist Society and The Constitutional Architecture of State Opposition, are available on SSRN. His books include The American Reformation, Toppling Tyrants: A Field Guide to Dismantling American Fascism, and, with clinical psychologist D. Carl Brown, Conservatism: America’s Personality Disorder.
Armitage is a U.S. Air Force veteran who deployed twice from Fairchild, served in law enforcement, and earned a Master of Science in Homeland Security. His athletic record began before his service record: a nationally ranked amateur wrestler before enlisting, he went on to compete as a mixed martial artist, earn a black belt in krav maga, and teach as a combatives instructor. That training informs his writing on police use of force, a subject he knows as both student and instructor. He describes the connection between the two careers directly: “Standing post teaches you how institutions actually operate at the point of contact with the public, and stand-up teaches you how to hold an audience while telling them something true. I have been combining those two skills ever since.”
His current writing appears at TheExistentialistRepublic.com, and more about his work is at ChristopherArmitage.com.
