There's something fascinating about Macron, and a question that keeps coming back: is he cynical, or does he actually believe what he says? My take: he believes it. And that's far more worrying. Look at his path. His father was a neurology professor at a public hospital. His mother was a physician for the French social security system. His grandmother, a public school principal, partly raised him. Then the elite track: Henri-IV, Sciences Po, ENA (the school that trains France's top civil servants), the Finance Inspectorate, deputy chief of staff at the Élysée, Minister of the Economy, President. From birth to power, he never really left the orbit of the State. People will say: "He was a banker at Rothschild." Sure, for four years. But investment banking isn't entrepreneurship. You advise deals between large institutions. You don't risk your own capital. You never lie awake wondering how you'll make payroll. It's a world of networks, access and files. An extension of the high civil service, not its opposite. He never started a company. Never hired anyone with his own money. Never watched a customer walk to a competitor. Never got a tax audit and wondered if his business would survive it. For him, the reality of building something simply doesn't exist. It's not contempt. It's a blind spot. The image that comes to mind is a beautifully machined gear, spinning perfectly, that doesn't mesh with anything. It spins in a vacuum. His whole worldview works like that. Inside his world, everything is coherent. Every step follows logically. The reasoning is brilliant. But the axioms are wrong. And when you reason flawlessly from false premises, you reach false conclusions with flawless rigor. The most interesting part is what happens when reality knocks on the door. When you fail, you have two options. You can say: "I was wrong. What I've believed for fifteen or twenty years is false." That's brutal. It's an identity collapse. Or you keep the cognitive dissonance and explain the failure some other way: people didn't understand, we didn't explain it well enough, the reform didn't go far enough, the opposition blocked it. It's the exact same mechanism as "that wasn't real communism." The model is never wrong. It just was never applied properly. Reality is wrong, the theory is right. And meanwhile, the country burns. That's why "cynical or disconnected?" is the right question. You can reason with a cynic. He follows his interests, so if you change his incentives, you change his behavior. A disconnected believer, you can't. Every failure becomes more proof that you need to push further in the same direction. I think this explains much of the madness of European leadership. Not a bunch of villains plotting in a back room. Possibly sincere people, shaped in the same mold, raised on the same ideas, plugged into a system that is a flat denial of common sense. People so cut off from reality that their sincerity is what makes them dangerous. Macron is the purest embodiment of it. When you build a company, reality corrects you every single week. A customer who doesn't pay, a product that doesn't work, a competitor who moves faster. You don't get a choice: adapt or die. The State never dies. It never gets the bill. And people who have only ever known the State end up believing reality is just one opinion among many. The problem isn't that he lies. The problem is that he can't see.

Two days ago I wrote about the trap this generation keeps falling into. 1.5M of you read it. The most common reply: "OK, but who builds the trap?" Fair question. Here's my answer. And let me be clear from the start: there is no secret room. No puppet master. What exists is far more banal and far more durable: a machine of incentives, where every person in the chain is paid to keep the same story alive. Nobody has to coordinate. The money does it for them. Let's start at the bottom of the machine, with the person nobody ever looks at. PART ONE: THE MACHINE, LINK BY LINK A. The NGO bureaucrat. His salary depends on the problem existing. He isn't paid to solve it. He's paid to document it, denounce it and campaign about it. An NGO that actually solved housing would have to lay itself off. So the incentive is never "fix." It's "mobilize." And nothing mobilizes like a villain. B. The program officer. The person who decides which NGO gets funded. He has to show "impact" to his board, and impact means reports, campaigns, reach, people in the street. A group that quietly builds 200 homes produces a boring report. A group that fills a square produces a great one. C. The fiscal sponsor. The plumbing. Many activist groups have no legal structure of their own, so their money flows through an umbrella nonprofit that receives and redistributes it. This is legal and common, and it makes the money nearly impossible to trace from donor to banner. D. The university administrator. Subsidized tuition didn't buy better teaching. It bought administration: entire offices whose job is to read every interaction between students as a power relation. Remove the lens and the office has no reason to exist. E. The academic. Careers run on grants and peer committees. Publish inside the dominant frame and you rise. Publish outside it and you're "problematic." Nobody has to forbid anything, because everyone can read the incentives. F. The subsidized artist. Film, theater and festivals are funded by committees that reward the "right" themes. The capitalist villain isn't a creative choice. It's a funding criterion nobody writes down. G. The public broadcaster. Paid by the taxpayer, never by the viewer. It never has to win you over. It has to please the people who renew its budget. Guess which villain it will never investigate. H. The teacher. Usually sincere, usually underpaid, trained in the same universities as everyone else. He passes on the lens he received, in good faith. That's what makes it so effective: the people transmitting it believe it. I. The international institution. Agencies and programs built around permanent crises. When a crisis ends, so does a budget. The narrative of eternal oppression becomes, quite literally, a business model. J. The politician. The last link, the one who cashes in. The machine produces anger. The politician harvests it and sells, as the cure, more of what caused the disease. Ten links, and not one of them needs to be evil. Each one just follows its interest. That's what makes the machine so hard to stop: you can't arrest an incentive. PART TWO: NOW THE REAL NAMES The European Commission. Between 2021 and 2023, more than €7.4 billion of EU money went to NGOs, in internal policy areas alone. In 2025 the EU's own Court of Auditors concluded that nobody, not even Brussels, has a reliable overview of where it all goes. When MEPs looked into the LIFE environmental program, the Commission itself admitted that some NGO work programmes it had funded contained "undue lobbying activities." In plain terms, public money paid activists to lobby the institutions that pay them. The auditors found nothing illegal, and that's exactly the point. It's all legal: the state paying people to ask the state for more state. Open Society Foundations. Less a puppet master than a patron. By its own records, it gave Jewish Voice for Peace $875,000 between 2017 and 2022, a group active in the Columbia protests, and it has funded the US Campaign for Palestinian Rights. Does it pay kids to pitch tents? There's no evidence of that. It does something more powerful. Year after year, it funds the organizations that produce the frames, the slogans, the trainings and the talking points. You don't need to pay the protester when you pay for the lens. The fiscal sponsorship networks. The money doesn't have to go to the group on the poster. It goes to an umbrella, which passes it on. That's how fact-checkers can honestly say "no direct grant to the student group" while the ecosystem around it is funded. Both statements are true. That's the design. The French state. €1,714 billion of public spending in 2025, 57.3% of GDP, the highest in Europe. Public debt hit €3,595 billion at the end of June, 119% of GDP, a record since INSEE started measuring. Interest alone runs around €79 billion this year. On top of the bill sit public universities, public broadcasting, a centralized curriculum and culture funded by committees. In France the machine isn't an ecosystem. It's an administration. New York City. In June, a Rent Guidelines Board with six of its nine members appointed by the mayor voted to freeze rents on about a million stabilized apartments. That included the first two-year freeze in the city's history. One board member resigned, saying the board had been rebuilt to deliver the freeze. The first leases under it took effect on October 1st. Watch what happens to maintenance, to new construction, to the vacancy rate. Every city that has run this experiment got the same result. And when it fails, the machine will already have its culprit ready: the landlord. THE LOOP Now put it together. The state funds demand and blocks supply, so prices explode. The young suffer. The state then funds the NGOs, universities, culture and media that explain to them why they suffer. Those institutions point at the market. The young vote for more state. More state funds more NGOs, and the loop closes. The flag on those kids' shoulders the other morning wasn't the start of anything. It was the output, the last screen of a machine that runs all day, every day, on your taxes. You can't arrest an incentive. But you can cut its funding, and you can teach people to see it. That's what this account is for.