I don't know if you realize what just happened. Elon Musk is completely bypassing the State. For 100 years, we've been told the problem is capital. That it must be captured, taxed, redistributed. With an army of intermediaries standing between those who create wealth and the people: ministries, agencies, commissions, bureaucrats. Musk is doing the opposite. He's taking his capital and giving it directly to the people. One SpaceX share to every kid in America. Not a handout. Not a subsidy. A piece of the machine that's taking humanity to Mars. And he says it himself: this is the first of many. Mises understood this back in 1944: the bureaucrat creates nothing. He administers what others created, following rules that have no connection to the value produced. The day value flows directly from the one who creates it to the one who receives it, the bureaucrat has no function left. That's what's being born right now. A new liberal world order, where the very concept of the State will make less and less sense. The world we're entering is a world of abundance. AI, robots, energy, space. And that abundance won't come through the State, for one simple reason: we have a century of proof that it doesn't work. Redistribution was version 1.0. Direct distribution of capital is 2.0. While France is still debating how to tax builders even more, America is handing stock to its kids. Pick your side.

You've probably seen the video. A young Frenchwoman in Paris, in tears, begging looters to stop. "Why are you doing this? That's not what we stand for." Some accounts are mocking her. "She voted for it." I won't. Because what you see on her face is not stupidity. It's a disease that has infected the entire West, and it has a name: suicidal empathy. The term comes from Gad Saad, an evolutionary behavioral scientist at Concordia University in Montreal. A man who fled the Lebanese civil war as a child, and who knows what it looks like when a society falls apart. His new book, Suicidal Empathy: Dying to Be Kind, is the follow-up to The Parasitic Mind. Here is the thesis, and why it concerns every one of us. Empathy is one of the best things about us. It evolved for a reason: to care for our children, our kin, our tribe. It was calibrated for a world where the people you felt for were the people around you, and where empathy always came paired with its counterweight: the instinct to protect your own and to recognize a threat. Suicidal empathy is what happens when that mechanism misfires. When it fires at the wrong targets, in the wrong amounts, with no brake. When we feel more for the criminal than for his victim. More for the stranger who breaks the rules than for the citizen who follows them. More for how compassionate we look than for what our compassion actually produces. Where does it come from? Four layers. First, biology. Empathy is a spotlight, as the psychologist Paul Bloom put it. It lights up the one face in front of you and leaves everything else in the dark. The crying migrant on the boat is visible. The thousands of future victims of a broken system are statistics. A spotlight is a terrible tool for running a country. Second, our own civilization. The West is the civilization that put the victim at the center of its morality. Christianity taught us to care for the stranger, the poor, the weak. It was one of the greatest moral revolutions in history. But cut off from its other half, justice, responsibility, the duty to protect your own, it turns into something else. Third, ideology. In The Parasitic Mind, Saad described idea pathogens, ideas that hijack our reasoning. Suicidal empathy is the emotional counterpart: an ideology that hijacks our compassion. It sorts the world into oppressors and victims, then demands unlimited empathy for whoever ranks as the victim, whatever they do. Fourth, status. In the age of social media, empathy has become a display. Posting "refugees welcome" costs nothing and earns applause. The bill goes to someone else: the working class, the suburbs, the women walking home at night. The results are everywhere. Criminals treated as victims of society. Sexual assaults by migrants met with lenient sentences. Self-defense branded as aggression. Borders treated as cruelty. Saad's conclusion is simple: a society dies when it would rather display infinite tolerance than use its survival instinct. Now the part I'll add myself, and that few people dare to say. On average, women score higher than men on measures of empathy. It's one of the most consistent findings in psychology, across cultures, and it makes perfect evolutionary sense: for most of human history, the survival of children depended on it. It's a strength. But it means an ideology that weaponizes empathy will hit women harder. And the data shows it: in country after country, young women have moved sharply to the left of young men, especially on immigration. This is where men have a responsibility. Not to mock. Not to lecture. Not to say "she deserved it." Empathy has always needed a counterweight, and that counterweight was the protective instinct: the one that draws lines, says no, and stands between the threat and the people it loves. Men abandoned that role. They were told it was toxic, and many believed it. So they stayed silent at the dinner table, at work, with their partners, sisters, daughters and friends. That has to end. Men have to have this conversation, honestly and with respect: compassion that cannot say no is not compassion. It's surrender. And the first to pay for it are women. Many women already understand this better than anyone. Some of the bravest voices in this fight are women, precisely because they are the first to feel the danger in the street. A civilization rests on a balance: compassion and strength, openness and borders, mercy and justice. When one side swallows the other, the foundations crack. What we are watching in Europe is what happens when empathy has no counterweight left. Look at that young woman again. She isn't the enemy. She's what this ideology made of a generation that was told kindness would be enough. Our job is to make sure she's the last generation that has to learn it this way.

Many in the comments are saying: "The French voted for this." Fine. Now ask yourself a better question. Why is it the same story in every Western country at once? France, Germany, Sweden, the UK, Belgium, Canada. Different languages, different histories, different voters. Same outcome. Same open-border policies, sold in the same beautiful packaging: progress, inclusion, integration, "our values." When dozens of peoples who never coordinated end up with the exact same policy, it wasn't the peoples who decided. It was the class that governs all of them. Same schools, same forums, same networks. For decades, they have systematically lied to Europeans about what was happening and what it would cost. They tried it with you too, America. You came close. What saved you was your Constitution, and a handful of people like Elon Musk and the All-In crew who refused to stay quiet when silence would have been easier. But don't celebrate too early. The West is not a country. It's a civilization. Athens, Rome, Jerusalem, and every nation that inherited or built on what came out of them: Europe, the United States, Canada, Australia, Israel, and allies like Japan who share its institutions and its fate. If Europe falls, you don't get to watch from across the ocean. You lose half your civilization, your oldest allies, the cradle of everything you believe in. Nobody on either side of the Atlantic has any interest in waking up to an Islamist Europe. So understand that this fight has two levels. There is the national fight. Every people has to win its own battle at home, at the ballot box, in its own institutions, under its own laws. No one can do it for us. You can't vote in France, and we can't vote in Ohio. And there is the civilizational fight. The West is under attack on two fronts at once. From the inside, by a soft communism that hates its own history and wants to dissolve nations into a managed mass. From the outside, by Islamism, which sees our weakness and fills the vacuum. And the two have found each other: Islamo-leftism, where the far left defends the very ideology that would crush it first. The national fights are the battles. The civilizational fight is the war. And here's what the other side exploits: your kindness. Western civilization produced something rare in human history: a moral instinct to extend compassion to strangers. To the refugee, the outsider, the weakest. It's one of the most beautiful things we ever built. The globalist class turned it into a weapon against us. Gad Saad has a name for this: suicidal empathy. Empathy that no longer asks who it protects and who pays the price. Empathy that cares more about how it looks than about what it causes. Empathy so detached from reason that it ends up sacrificing your own people, the girl attacked on her way home, the worker priced out of his neighborhood, the town that no longer recognizes itself, just to signal virtue toward strangers. And every time you object, they don't answer your argument. They question your heart. "Where is your compassion?" That's the trap. They know a decent people will hesitate before being called cruel. They've been running that play for thirty years. Now add the money. A few left-wing billionaires understood long ago that you don't need to win elections if you can shape the institutions around them. The Gates Foundation became one of the largest funders of the World Health Organization. George Soros's Open Society Foundations have spent billions funding NGOs, advocacy groups and legal networks, with Europe as a major focus. Unelected, unaccountable, and extremely well organized. And it's not only private money. Brussels funds NGOs with taxpayers' money, and those same NGOs then lobby Brussels for the policies it already wanted. A closed loop. Citizens pay for it. Nobody ever asked them. This is the supranational machine: Brussels, the galaxy of NGOs orbiting it, the foundations feeding them, and the political class moving freely between all three. It answers to no voter in any country. It does enormous damage. And it can't be voted out, because no one ever voted it in. And if you want to know where its center of gravity is, look at Washington. The Democratic Party is its political headquarters. Not because every Democrat is a globalist, but because that's where the whole network converges: the big foundations, the NGO galaxy, the international organizations, the legacy media, the platforms. Same donors, same people rotating from one to the other, same worldview. Brussels is the branch office. Covid showed it in real time. Within weeks, almost the entire Western world adopted the same playbook. Same measures, same messaging, same "trust the science." Anthony Fauci became the face of the official line far beyond America's borders. The Gates Foundation, co-founder of the global vaccine alliances and one of the WHO's largest funders, sat at the center of global health policy. And anyone who questioned the line was branded a spreader of misinformation. The lab-leak hypothesis was a "conspiracy theory" right up until it became a respectable one. And in 2024, Mark Zuckerberg admitted in writing that senior Biden administration officials had repeatedly pressured Meta in 2021 to censor Covid content, including humor and satire. Government, foundations, international organizations, platforms. All moving in the same direction, at the same time, and no voter ever consulted. That's the machine. Covid was the moment it stopped hiding. That machine is what has to be taken apart. Defund the NGOs living off public money. Bring decisions back to elected national parliaments. Make every foundation that shapes public policy as transparent as a political party. Compassion is a Western virtue. Letting it be used against us is not. So let's not fall into the trap. The trap is Western nations turning on each other. Americans mocking Europeans, Europeans sneering at Americans, each country telling itself "they deserve what's happening to them, they voted for it." I'm pro-border. I'm pro-nation. I believe every people has the right to decide who enters its home and to defend its own culture. That will never change. But what we face today is not one nation attacking another. It's an attack on the civilization all our nations belong to. And a civilization under attack cannot afford to let its members watch each other burn. When you see France on fire, don't say "they chose this." Understand how it happened. Understand who did it. And understand that the same people are working on you. The West has to stand together against this, fully, without ambiguity, and its peoples have to understand each other. National pride and civilizational solidarity are not opposites. They are the same fight at two scales. A Frenchman voting to take back his borders and an American voting on November 3rd are on the same front, in the same war, for the same civilization. We lose it separately, or we win it together.

My friends, here's the funny thing: we think we're living in a complex system. They talk to us about multiple crises, multifactorial causes, endless "context." But step back, and the fight we're watching today is almost biblical in its simplicity. It's the eternal fight. Freedom versus control. The individual versus the mass. The one who creates versus the one who confiscates. Capitalism versus communism. And today, communism is infecting the West. Deeper in some countries than others, but everywhere. Not with tanks. Not with gulags. In a far more insidious way. Antonio Gramsci understood this back in the 1930s, from a prison cell in Mussolini's Italy. The revolution had failed in the West because the people didn't want it. So he changed strategy: stop trying to seize power by force, and conquer the culture instead. Win the schools, the universities, the press, the arts. Impose your words, your assumptions, your morality. Make your ideas the "common sense" of the age. Once the culture is conquered, political power falls on its own, like ripe fruit. In 1967, Rudi Dutschke gave it a slogan: the long march through the institutions. Fifty years later, look at the result. The universities. The legacy media. The schools. The senior civil service. The NGOs. HR departments. A huge share of the institutions that govern our lives has been captured. And yet the peoples never wanted this. They were never asked. And the one time they were asked, they said no. That is the paradox of our time: entire nations governed by ideas their own peoples reject. So look at the map. France. The United Kingdom. Germany. Sweden. Belgium. The Netherlands. Ireland. Canada. Different languages, different histories, different voters. The same chaos. The same paralysis. The same ruling class reciting the same catechism. So stop looking for explanations everywhere. Stop looking for scapegoats. It's not the Jews' fault. It's not the boomers' fault. It's not the fault of the Muslim neighbor who works and raises his kids in peace. It's not the fault of the twenty-year-old who was never taught anything else. Yes, some of them may be caught up in the effects of this system. Some may have benefited from it, voted for it, repeated its slogans. But never focus on the effects. Focus on the root cause. Attack the root cause, and the effects disappear on their own. You don't cure a fever by fighting the thermometer. You cure it by killing the infection. And the scapegoat is exactly the trap Marxism sets for us. Divide, designate a culprit, turn people against each other, so that everyone fights the symptoms and nobody touches the disease. Let's not hand them that gift. The enemy is ideas. Marxism and all its offspring: class struggle turned into identity struggle, self-hatred turned into virtue, guilt turned into a political program. And the people who carry those ideas into power, we beat them on the very ground where they won: at the ballot box, in the institutions, in the culture. With votes, with arguments, with work. We take back what they took, institution by institution, exactly the way they did it. In 1848, Marx ended his Manifesto with a call: "Workers of the world, unite!" Today, I answer him: Peoples of the West, unite. Not against a people. Not against a religion. Against an idea that has already left tens of millions dead and now wants to finish the job on our soul. And when we win, get ready. Because what's waiting on the other side is an abundance the West has never known. AI, energy, science: we hold the most powerful tools in human history. The only thing holding us back is this mind virus that teaches us to be ashamed of succeeding. The day it falls, everything comes back. The return of merit. The return of courage. The return of hierarchy, the kind that rewards excellence instead of punishing it. The return of a society where the goal is no longer to complain about each other, but to impress each other. We will build beautiful things again. The cathedrals of our time. Cities people actually want to live in. Works worth passing down. We will throw immense celebrations again, the celebrations of proud, joyful, living peoples who no longer need to apologize for existing. But all of it goes through one thing: killing the disease that's eating us alive. Mental communism. The woke mind virus. Self-hatred dressed up as virtue. Our ancestors built Athens, Rome, Chartres, the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution, the conquest of space. We will not be the generation that let it all go. We will be the generation that took it all back.