From Plato to Bernie and AOC – A Brief History of Communism Twenty-four centuries, one idea. It always starts the same way and always ends the same way. 1. Plato, 380 BC. The world is badly made, the wise should redesign it, and the rulers may lie to the people for their own good – he called it the noble lie. Property abolished among the guardians, the family abolished with it. Everything since is a version of it, with progressively worse writing and progressively higher body counts. 2. The millenarian sects. Property abolished, the chosen in charge, purification required – a thousand years before capitalism existed. The idea needs no economy to appear. 3. Rousseau, 1762. Man is good, institutions corrupt him, so institutions must be remade. The General Will – the collective desire of the people, which the correct leader can identify and implement regardless of what individual people actually want. The philosophical foundation of every subsequent revolution that murdered people in the name of their own liberation. Whoever refuses to obey shall be forced to be free. Rousseau personally abandoned all five of his children to the orphanage. He wrote extensively about the correct upbringing of children. This is a pattern. 4. Kant and Hegel. Kant splits the world as we see it from the world as it is. Hegel adds that history is going somewhere. Together they supply the phrase that ends every argument: the wrong side of history. 5. 1789, French Revolution. The idea gets a country. Virtue is the goal, and virtue turns out to need enforcement. Four years from liberation to the guillotine and the Terror. 6. Marx, 1848. The same idea in a scientific costume – now you weren’t arguing for it, you were reading the future. Written by a man who had never worked in a factory, funded by a man who owned one. 7. Lenin, 1917. The vanguard party: a small group of professionals who know what the workers need better than the workers do. Delivered to Russia in a sealed train by a German general who wanted Russia out of the war. He got that, and more. 8. Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot. What it looks like when it wins. Terror as government, and a lie so complete that people lost the ability to tell what they thought from what they had to say. Tens of millions dead in China, a quarter of the population in Cambodia. Not a deviation. The same premise, applied with enthusiasm. Collectivization, the gulag, the Great Leap, the killing fields – roughly a hundred million dead in one century. Each time preceded by intellectuals explaining why this time would be different. 9. The Frankfurt School. The workers in the West refused to revolt, so the explanation changed: the problem is cultural, and Western civilization itself is the oppressor and has to be deconstructed. Everything to be criticized, nothing to be built. 10. Gramsci, Spinelli, Dutschke and 1968. Don’t storm the parliament – get a job in the editorial office. Power in the West rests on consent, and consent is made in schools and newspapers – so take those instead. The long march through the institutions. The generation that failed in the streets became the professors, editors and judges. It worked, which is why elections now change the government but not the direction. 1989 – the system collapses, the archives opened, and in the Western universities almost nobody changed their mind. A faith, not a theory. 11. Bernie and AOC. Same idea, new clothes, and nobody left who has read the source material. Free everything, paid for by the billionaires. Honeymooned in the Soviet Union in 1988 – three years before it collapsed – and came back impressed. Three houses. Net worth in the millions of dollars. Democratic socialists. The reasoning is Plato’s, the aesthetic is TikTok. From Plato to Bernie and AOC: Even communism isn’t immune to decay… What follows 12. The lie is not a side effect. It is the system. 13. Where truth is handed out instead of found, anyone who insists on finding it is in the way. 14. It survives because it protects positions, not beliefs. Ask who is best for the job and every protected position is at risk. Ask who belongs in the room and the same people stay in it for life. 15. The managerial class is the nomenklatura. Same selection, same script, same immunity to results. Only the letterhead changed. 16. Where everything needs permission, permission becomes the currency – and whoever knows the apparatus rules, whoever wins the election. 17. Silence is not ignorance. It is knowledge plus a calculation: speaking costs everything, silence is free. 18. Underneath, it runs on two fuels: envy and fear. Envy supplies the motive – someone else has what you don’t, and the system promises to take it. Fear supplies the compliance – everyone can see what happens to those who say the wrong thing. Neither has anything to do with justice, and neither ever built anything. 19. The idea never learns, because the error is not in the implementation. It is in the premise: that the "wise" can plan the lives of the many better than the many can plan their own. 20. The answer is not a better plan for society. It is refusing to let anyone hold the pen. Reality is not negotiable. Say so out loud, build things that work, and hand them to your children. Tell the truth. Have courage. And build.

Have you noticed the insane pressure to put your kids through college – almost like a blackmail? It is as if it was recruitment into a sect… Because it is. The sect of leftism. Look at how it works. Every sect uses the same toolkit. First, the threat. Without us, you are nothing. Your child will flip burgers, marry badly, disappoint the family. Parents hear it from teachers, from neighbours, from other parents at dinner. Nobody says it outright. Everybody feels it. Second, the price of entry. Years of the child’s life, and often a debt that follows him for decades. A sect that costs nothing is easy to leave. A sect that cost you everything you defend to the end, because the alternative is admitting you were fooled. Third, separation from the family. The child leaves home at eighteen, the age when the mind is most open and the family most absent. He arrives where nobody knows his parents, and everybody knows what to think. Fourth, a new language. He comes home at Christmas with words his parents don’t understand, and a moral vocabulary in which they are the problem. The father who paid for it all is now part of what must be overcome. Fifth, the reward for loyalty. The diploma is not proof of knowledge. It is proof of membership. It opens the doors – jobs, marriages, social standing – that members keep for each other. And the cleverest part: the parents pay for it. Conservative families raise the child, feed him, form him for eighteen years. Then they pay to have him converted. No sect in history has managed that. Now the honest part, which makes the blackmail worse, not better: the threat is partly real. In many professions the diploma is still the gate. That is exactly why it works. Blackmail only works when the hostage is real. The diploma was meant to certify that a young person can think. It now certifies that he thinks correctly. A society that only hires on the second has already stopped needing the first. So what do we do? Not refuse education. Refuse the monopoly. Learning is not the same as college. A young person can master mathematics, physics, history, a trade and three languages without four years of moral re-education. If he must go, prepare him before he goes. Build alternatives that don’t ask for his soul as tuition. Hire people for what they can do, not for which sect stamped their papers. We can make flying cars without them!

How Your Country Will Rot When You Elect Socialists. A step-by-step guide. But first, look north – and then across the ocean. Picture a young couple in Toronto. Two good jobs, no hope of ever buying a home. When she needs surgery, they wait – months. In 2022, a veteran and Paralympic athlete told Canada’s parliament that when she asked the government for a wheelchair ramp, a caseworker offered her assisted dying instead. When truckers protested, the government froze their bank accounts – a court later called that unreasonable. Canada wanted to be America with better manners. It became America’s poorer, sadder cousin. Now picture a baker in Lyon. He gets up at four to bake, and spends his Fridays filling in forms written in a language only the administration speaks. Every year a new rule, a new tax, a new inspection. His son, an engineer, left for London. Half of what the country produces passes through the state, and the baker can’t remember the last time it gave anything back. Not even security – his shop window was smashed last week and his daughter doesn’t go out after 6 PM anymore. That is where the road leads. Here is how you get there – meet the Millers. They don’t exist, but you know them. Step 1 – Kindness. The candidate promises free childcare, frozen rents, free buses. Mrs. Miller votes for him. Who votes against kindness? Step 2 – The faces. Look at who gets appointed. The young, photogenic spokeswoman, chosen because she looks good in the campaign photo – diversity of faces, uniformity of thought. The kindly old man who worries so much about your goods that soon you have few of them left... And behind them, the people who actually decide: the committee – appointed, never elected – filled with activists, each one certain he knows how the Millers should live. Step 3 – The bill. First, the rich were supposed to pay. The factory owner moved to Texas, taking two hundred jobs with him. Then the property tax went up. Then the city borrowed – and the Millers’ grandchildren inherited the debt before they were born. Step 4 – The rules. Their son wanted to build a small house on the family lot. Two years of permits, reviews and fees later, he gave up and moved away. Meanwhile, the landlord with frozen rents stopped fixing anything, and nobody built new apartments – why would they? Homes disappeared. Step 5 – The state grocery store. To fight "greedy supermarkets," the city opened its own. It can’t go bankrupt, so it has no reason to stock what you want. Its subsidized prices drove the family grocer out of business. Then the shelves began to empty. Poland had these stores for forty years. In the end, the shelves held mostly vinegar only. Step 6 – Disorder. The pharmacy on Main Street put the toothpaste behind glass. Then it closed. Shoplifting under a certain amount had stopped being prosecuted, so it stopped being punished, so it stopped being rare. The honest customers paid for the thieves – and then lost the shop. Step 7 – Speech. Their daughter learned at college which words get you reported. Mr. Miller posted a joke and lost his account. Nobody was arrested. Nobody needed to be. Step 8 – The wolf ticket. Then Mr. Miller spoke up at a school board meeting. A week later, someone called his employer. Then his bank closed his account – "reputational risk." Under communism, Poland called it the wolf ticket: no job, no university place, no future. Nobody goes to prison. You just can’t live. Step 9 – Dependency. More neighbors now live on a program. At election time, the candidate promises to "protect your benefits." Nobody votes against their own check. The machine has built its own voters. Step 10 – Shame, and the empty cradle. The school taught the Miller grandchildren that their country was a crime scene to be ashamed of. Their son, in a rented apartment with no house in sight, decided one child was enough. His daughter, grown up, decided none was. The family ceased to exist – another civilization took their place. And all of it happens behind a smokescreen. Every week a new outrage, a new enemy, a new crisis. Conflict and chaos – nurtured, encouraged. Divide people by race, by sex, by class, and they will never unite against the bill. The news is always about the battle, never about the budget. "You never want a serious crisis to go to waste," a White House chief of staff once said. They never do. While you watch the fire, the machine grows: one more agency, one more rule, one more committee. Nobody in this story needs to be a villain, at least theoretically… The Millers are good people. Every step felt like progress. Every step looked kind, or fair, or safe. That is how a country rots: not in a revolution, but one kind policy at a time – each one sending its bill to someone who isn’t in the room. Look north. Look at France. You still have the choice.