Tonight, France burned. America, you should be watching very carefully. Today, October 17, 2026, more than half a million people marched across France against the cost of living. By 8pm, around 400 had been arrested. In Paris, police turned water cannons on the crowds at Place de la République, and one march was stopped 150 meters from the Élysée Palace. Of the 195 people arrested in the capital by the afternoon, only one actually lived in Paris. Mobs forced their way into the city halls of Marseille and Lille. In Lyon, a tourism office was set on fire. In Rennes, barricades burned. Near Limoges, a highway was blocked and police cars were torched. And then came Limoges. A crowd of very young people stormed the city hall, a protected historic monument built in the 1880s. They flipped police cars in front of it and set them ablaze, then set the building itself on fire. The flames took the roof, the wedding hall, and the civil registry, the office that records every birth, every marriage, every death in the city. Tonight, the bell tower that has crowned Limoges for nearly 150 years collapsed. The mayor's response: "It's a monument that is burning, not the Republic." That is the problem in one sentence. Our leaders still think words can put out fires. None of this came out of nowhere. For twenty years, the French political class has excused everything. Every riot was "anger." Every burned car was a "social symptom." Every attack on police was "a reaction to provocation." And the hard left, La France Insoumise, which officially backed today's mobilization, built its electoral machine on an alliance with political Islamism: refusing to condemn, refusing to name, trading secularism and public order for votes. In France we have a word for it. Islamo-gauchisme. Islamo-leftism. Tonight you saw where that culture of excuse ends. A country where a mob can burn down a town hall, and the state arrives after the roof has already fallen in. My dear American friends, I say this with love, as someone who has lived among you and owes you a great deal: your midterms are on November 3rd. And the same alliance is growing inside your Democratic Party. The same far-left wing that treats disorder as protest and police as the enemy. The same activists who refuse to draw a line between legitimate dissent and those who openly despise the West. The same politicians who think tolerance means tolerating everything, including the people who want to burn it down. It always starts with excuses. Then comes impunity. Then come the flames. Same causes, same effects. If you create the conditions we created, you will get exactly what we got tonight. France was the country of the Enlightenment, of cathedrals and town halls that stood for centuries. Tonight, one of them collapsed live on social media while the government called for calm. My dear American friends, the only advantage you have over us is that you've been warned. Vote like your city hall depends on it. Because one day, it will.

"That's not democracy. That's a purchase order." Cute line, Elizabeth. Let's read the Democratic purchase orders out loud. Start with yours. 2020, your presidential campaign is collapsing after Iowa and New Hampshire. A super PAC called Persist PAC shows up to rescue you. 96% of its money came from one Silicon Valley megadonor. One check. $14.6 million. Donors hidden until after Super Tuesday. You'd spent the whole primary telling everyone super PACs were corruption. Then you took the purchase order. Now the rest of the catalog. George and Alex Soros: $103.7 million this cycle alone, $102 million of it dumped into a single Democratic super PAC. Majority Forward, the dark money nonprofit tied to your own Senate leader Chuck Schumer: $102 million. Donors? Secret. House Majority Forward: $61.7 million. Donors? Also secret. Michael Bloomberg: around $1 billion on his own 2020 primary, $100 million for Biden in Florida, and still writing eight-figure checks in 2026. Reid Hoffman: $11.5 million into one super PAC for one Texas Senate race. Bill Gates: reportedly around $50 million to a pro-Harris group in 2024. Pritzker, Moskovitz, Steyer, Hastings: millions upon millions, cycle after cycle. Kamala Harris: over $1 billion raised in under three months. Lost anyway. Musk's money is disclosed, public, and on the front page of the New York Times article you just linked. Which, by the way, says $276 million, not "nearly $300 million." Schumer's money sits in an anonymous nonprofit nobody can see inside. So which one is the purchase order, Elizabeth? For twenty years, billionaire money was "saving democracy." Now it's "buying Congress." The only thing that changed is whose name is on the check.

Democrats discovered billionaires in politics were a threat to democracy the exact day one stopped writing them checks. When Michael Bloomberg spent around $1 billion of his own money in the 2020 primary, then another $100M to help Biden in Florida, nobody called it an attack on democracy. When George Soros put $125M into a single Democratic super PAC and became the largest political donor of the 2022 cycle, it was "civic engagement." When Reid Hoffman, Dustin Moskovitz, JB Pritzker and Tom Steyer wrote eight- and nine-figure checks cycle after cycle, it was "saving democracy." When Bill Gates reportedly gave around $50M to a pro-Harris group in 2024, silence. In 2020, dark money groups spent over $500M backing Democrats, more than double what went to Republicans. In 2024, Kamala Harris raised more than $1 billion in under three months. Democrats outspent Republicans and lost. So the problem was never billionaires in politics. The problem is a billionaire who doesn't fund your side. And here's what nobody in DC wants to say out loud: old billionaire money is quiet money. It funds the foundations, NGOs, think tanks and consultants that make up the permanent establishment. It doesn't challenge the system. It is the system. It freezes the picture: same insiders, same incumbents, same experts, every single cycle. You can like or hate Musk's spending, but at least it's out in the open. If you really want money out of politics, start with your own party's donor list.

Bernie Sanders says the top 1% owns more than the bottom 93%, that fewer than a thousand billionaires got $2.2 trillion richer last year, and that it's "obscene." It's the most seductive and most wrong economic argument of our time. Let me explain why. First, wealth distribution follows a power law. Always. Everywhere. Books, music, startups, followers on X, goals in soccer. A small minority captures most of the value. That's not a bug of capitalism. It's the mathematical signature of every system where value gets created. So the only question that matters isn't "how big is the rich's slice?" It's "is the cake growing, and is the slice of the poorest growing with it?" And the answer is yes. In 1990, more than one human in three lived in extreme poverty. Today it's about one in ten. During exactly the period when billionaires multiplied. Bernie shows you the slice. He never shows you the cake. Second thing he won't tell you: past a certain level, wealth stops being consumption. It becomes capital allocation. Elon Musk isn't sleeping on a pile of cash. He owns stakes in Tesla, SpaceX, xAI. Jeff Bezos owns Amazon stock. That "$2.2 trillion" isn't sitting in a checking account. It's factories, rockets, data centers, millions of jobs. Nobody can eat $100 billion. You can only decide where to invest it. Once you understand that, the whole debate changes. The real question becomes: who allocates capital better? The people who built Amazon, SpaceX and Nvidia? Or politicians? A 5% wealth tax isn't "taking money from the rich." It's taking investment decisions away from people who proved they can create value and handing them to people who proved the opposite. Because the fundamental difference between an entrepreneur and a politician is consequences. The entrepreneur invests his own money. If he allocates badly, he loses everything. The market corrects him brutally, no appeal. That's why most startups die: the system kills bad decisions. The politician invests other people's money. If he allocates badly, nothing happens. Worse, he gets a bigger budget to "fix the problem." Milton Friedman put it better than anyone. There are four ways to spend money. Your money on yourself: you care about price and quality. Your money on others: you care about price. Others' money on yourself: you care about quality. Others' money on others: you care about nothing. Government is the fourth box. By design. Perfect example: California high-speed rail. Approved in 2008 for about $33 billion. Current estimated cost: over $100 billion. Passengers carried: zero. No entrepreneur would have survived that. The politicians who pushed it built careers on it. And when allocation has no consequences, it eventually finds a buyer. A politician who controls billions without accountability becomes the most profitable target in the world for anyone who wants to steer that money. The irony is that the left that rails against billionaires is itself funded by billionaires. George Soros is one of the biggest Democratic donors in history. The Gates Foundation shapes public health policy across the planet. Politicians don't fight billionaires. They pick their own. The ones who fund the state over the ones who compete with it. So if we actually want fewer poor people, we have to stop judging ideas by their intentions and start judging them by their results. And the results are brutally clear. China, 1978: Deng Xiaoping opens the economy to markets. More than 800 million people escape extreme poverty. The largest retreat of misery in human history. Not through redistribution. Through the freedom to build. India, 1991: liberalization. Same movie. South Korea and North Korea: same people, same language, same starting point in 1953. One became one of the most advanced economies on earth. The other has famines. Poland and Ukraine: comparable living standards in 1990. Today the average Pole is more than three times richer than the average Ukrainian. Argentina: a year and a half of liberalization, and the poverty rate falls from over 50% to around 30%. No country in history escaped poverty by punishing the people who build. Every single one did it by letting them build. And if you want to see what Bernie's program looks like in real life, you don't have to imagine it. It exists. It's called France. We've been running it for 45 years. Mass nationalizations in 1981. Two years later, Socialist president Mitterrand has to reverse course into austerity. Retirement at 60. The 35-hour workweek. A wealth tax for 35 years. Hundreds of wealthy households left every year for Belgium, Switzerland, London, taking their capital, their companies and their future taxes with them. Macron finally scrapped it in 2018. Hollande's 75% tax: raised a few hundred million, drove talent out, abandoned after two years. One of the highest tax burdens in the OECD. Public spending around 57% of GDP, a record in the developed world. Last balanced budget: 1974. Public debt: over €3.4 trillion. Mass unemployment for four decades. If taxing the rich and growing the state made people prosperous, France would be the richest country on the planet. It isn't. GDP per capita in France is barely more than half of America's. It's lower than Mississippi, the poorest state in the US. Not a single global tech giant. Our best engineers build Silicon Valley instead. I've been going back and forth between Paris and San Francisco for years. I see it every week. And California is about to replay the movie. Prop 40, on the ballot November 3rd, would take 5% of billionaires' net worth. Even Gavin Newsom, a Democratic governor, opposes it. The state's own nonpartisan budget analyst warns that income tax revenue could drop every year if the wealthy leave. Larry Page, Sergey Brin and Peter Thiel have reportedly already started moving their assets out. You don't fight poverty by shrinking the top. You fight it by growing the cake. Bernie wants a society where nobody has too much. I want a society where nobody has too little. The first has been tried everywhere and produces equality in stagnation. The second lifted a billion people out of misery. Choose.

To my American friends, from a Frenchman. From a European. Before you vote in the midterms, let me give you some perspective, because we've already lived the movie you're being sold. The Soviet Union promised equality and delivered gulags, famine, bread lines, and a state that lied about everything. Solzhenitsyn spent his life documenting it. Tens of millions dead, and an entire people taught that truth was whatever the Party said it was. Nobody votes for that on day one. You vote for "a little more state," "a little more redistribution," "a little more control over what you can say." It's a slope, not a cliff. France is what the middle of that slope looks like. One of the heaviest tax burdens in the developed world. Public spending around 57% of GDP. A state that touches everything and fixes nothing. Schools set on fire during riots. Insecurity so normal that people stop reporting it. Engineers, founders and doctors leaving every year for London, Dubai, Lisbon, or your country. And worst of all, a whole generation that no longer believes tomorrow can be better than today. That's what kills a country. Not one bad law. The death of hope. I build my company between Paris and San Francisco. I know exactly where ambition is welcomed and where it's punished. You have something we don't: Elon Musk on your side. Please, listen to him. A man who voted Democrat most of his life didn't switch sides on a whim. He saw something coming. We in Europe are already living it. Don't hand back even part of the keys. We did. Look at us.