On my way to the office this morning, I passed a group of young people protesting, a Palestinian flag draped over their shoulders. And I asked myself a question I can't shake: why does this generation always fall into the same trap? No matter the history. No matter the context. Even the ones from wealthy families, who went to the best schools, who were dealt every good card. Always the same trap. I don't think it's stupidity. I think it's a mechanism. And a mechanism can be taken apart, piece by piece. A. The observation: everything the state touches becomes unaffordable. Look at economist Mark Perry's famous chart, the one people call "the chart of the century." It tracks US prices since 2000. At the top, what explodes: hospital services, college tuition, textbooks, childcare, housing. Increases of +100%, +150%, up to +250%, far above general inflation. At the bottom, what collapses: TVs, software, phones, toys, clothing. A TV today costs a fraction of what it did in 2000, for an infinitely better product. Look at what separates the two groups. It isn't technology. It isn't complexity. It's one variable: how much the state is involved. At the top, sectors that are subsidized, regulated, shielded from competition, where the state funds demand and blocks supply. At the bottom, sectors where companies fight every single morning to serve you better and cheaper. B. The mechanism: why it's systematic. When the state subsidizes demand without freeing supply, prices rise. Every time. Guaranteed student loans, and universities raise tuition. Housing aid plus blocked building permits, and rents skyrocket. Administered healthcare, and bureaucracy eats the budget before it ever reaches the patient. In France it's even more vicious, because the price doesn't disappear: it hides. You never see the hospital bill, you pay it through payroll contributions. You never see the cost of school, you pay it through taxes. Public spending at 57% of GDP, one of the heaviest tax burdens in the world, more than €3.4 trillion in debt. And the result? Overflowing ERs, falling PISA scores, young people who can't afford to live in the city where they work. The market didn't fail in these sectors. It was never allowed in. C. Suffering demands a culprit. A 22-year-old lives all of this in their bones. They can't find a place to live. Their degree either buries them in debt or opens no doors. The future feels blocked. That suffering is real, and I don't deny it for a second. But human beings can't stand suffering without a culprit. They need a face. A scapegoat. And this is where everything is decided: who taught them how to read the world? D. Whoever tells the story picks the villain. Schools are public. Universities are public. Culture runs on grants. Film goes through funding committees. Public broadcasting shapes the narratives. The people handing down the interpretive framework are, overwhelmingly, paid by the very system that creates the problem. Do you really think that system is going to name itself as the culprit? No. It names the capitalist. The boss. The landlord. "The rich." The multinational. The commercial West. Same role, same casting, every time. E. One lens, a thousand causes. And this brings me back to that flag. A generation taught to read every situation through a single lens, oppressor on one side, rich, Western, capitalist, oppressed on the other, will apply that lens everywhere. To housing. To climate. To conflicts on the other side of the world. The cause changes, the lens stays. That's why the trap is always the same: it's not the cause that draws them in, it's the way of thinking that was installed in them. F. The perfect inversion. Here's the irony. Capitalism is the force that drove down the price of almost everything it touched. The state is the force that blew up the price of almost everything it captured. And young people blame the first for the crimes of the second. It's like blaming the firefighter for the fire because you saw him at the scene. G. The ballot box confirms it. In the US, a few weeks out from the midterms, a large share of urban young voters is getting ready to vote Democrat for more state, more spending, more regulation. New York elected a self-described socialist mayor, carried by young voters, on promises of rent freezes and city-run grocery stores. Rent freezes, the policy that has made housing scarcer everywhere it's been tried. The cure that worsens the disease. In France, it's the same play in two acts. Part of the youth votes for the radical left, which promises more state. Another part votes for the center, which promises to "manage" the state well, and has dug the debt deeper than ever. Two different ballots, one shared assumption: the problem is the market, the solution is the state. H. The way out. These young people aren't stupid. They're right to be angry. They're just aiming at the wrong target. The day they understand that their rent, their tuition and their hospital are expensive precisely because the state runs them, their anger will change direction. They'll stop protesting against those who create. They'll start protesting against those who capture. That day, the greatest intellectual scam of our time will be over.

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.

To every American, and to everyone watching France burn from abroad: Do not blame the French people for this. We never asked for it. We never voted for it. And the one time we were clearly asked, we said no. Here are the numbers your media won't show you. 70% of the French say there are too many immigrants in France today. 79% want a tougher immigration policy. 77% disapprove of the government's record on immigration. 83% want foreign criminals and long-term unemployed foreigners sent home. And no, it's not just the old. 69% of French 18 to 24 year olds support suspending legal immigration for three years. This is not a fringe. This is the French people. In 2005, we were asked if we wanted the European Constitution. 55% voted no. Three years later, our politicians passed the same text under another name, through parliament, without ever asking us again. That is modern France in one sentence. The people say no. The elites do it anyway. So who is responsible? The politicians who lied to us. A class of leaders formed in the same schools, the same forums, the same networks, loyal to each other before they are loyal to their nations. In 2017, at Harvard, Klaus Schwab, founder of the World Economic Forum, bragged about his Young Global Leaders program in four words: "We penetrate the cabinets." He added that it was true in France. Emmanuel Macron was one of his Young Global Leaders. It's the same project in Brussels with Ursula von der Leyen and in Paris with Macron. Borders treated as an obstacle. Nations treated as relics. The people treated as a problem to be managed. What you are watching in France is not the French people failing. It is the end of the globalist project, an abject, quasi-communist dream of a world run by unelected planners. It is collapsing everywhere in Europe at once, and the West has to cut this cancer out before it takes the rest of the body with it. The peoples of Europe don't want this. They never did. So when you see our town halls burning, don't say "the French chose this." The French never chose this. They were forced into it. If you're French and you agree, repost this so the world hears it from us. If you're American, look at us carefully. Then choose differently on November 3rd.

My dear American friends, I've shown you where the disease came from and who sells it. Now I want you to look at this email. January 5, 2020, 2:44 in the morning. Peter Thiel writes to Mark Zuckerberg, Nick Clegg, Sheryl Sandberg and Marc Andreessen. It became public years later, in a lawsuit between the state of Tennessee and Meta. The subject line is one word: Millennials. Thiel starts from a number: 70% of Millennials say they are pro-socialist. Read that again. Seven out of ten young adults in the richest, freest, most innovative country in human history say they want the system that ruined every country that tried it. And Thiel, one of the sharpest minds in Silicon Valley, says something important. Don't just dismiss them as stupid or brainwashed. Understand why. His answer: when you're crushed by student debt and housing is unaffordable, you have no capital and no way to build any. And if you have no stake in capitalism, you turn against it. He's right. But follow the thread one step further, because that's where it gets interesting. Who made college unaffordable? Washington flooded universities with easy federal loans, and universities raised their prices year after year, because they could. The same universities that then taught those students, for four years, that capitalism is the problem. Who made housing unaffordable? Zoning rules, permits, environmental reviews, endless regulation that makes it nearly illegal to build. Remember Piketty's famous rise of capital? It was mostly housing. Scarcity created by the state. So here's the full picture. The state creates the scarcity. The universities teach that capitalism caused it. The politicians sell socialism as the cure. The arsonist is selling fire insurance. That's why 70% is not a natural opinion. No generation wakes up one morning wanting central planning. It takes decades of teaching, a captured culture, and an economy rigged to give young people no stake in it. In a healthy country, that number would trigger a serious public investigation into what American universities have been teaching for fifty years. This is not a debate. It's the result of a long, patient operation, exactly the war of position Gramsci described from his prison cell. Now let me tell you what history says happens when an ideology captures a generation and turns it against everything that came before. China, 1966. Mao unleashes the Cultural Revolution and hands it to the youth. Students become Red Guards. Their mission: destroy the "Four Olds," old customs, old culture, old habits, old ideas. Temples, books, art, centuries of history, smashed. In August 1966, at a girls' school in Beijing, students beat their vice principal, Bian Zhongyun, to death. She was one of the first. Teachers across the country were humiliated, tortured, killed by the children they had taught. In 1970, a 16-year-old boy named Zhang Hongbing denounced his own mother for criticizing Mao. She was executed. He spent the rest of his life trying to apologize for it. Children were taught that loyalty to the Party came before loyalty to their parents. Historians estimate the Cultural Revolution killed somewhere between hundreds of thousands and millions of people. The Soviet Union did it first. It turned a boy named Pavlik Morozov into a national hero for denouncing his father. Generations of Soviet children were raised on his story. Cambodia, 1975. The Khmer Rouge declare Year Zero. Teenagers with rifles empty the cities. Wearing glasses was enough to mark you as an intellectual. In four years, roughly a quarter of the population was dead. Every time, the same pattern. Take the young. Teach them that the past is guilty. Teach them that their parents, their teachers, their history are the enemy. Then give them power. So when you see statues pulled down, words banned, books rewritten, and parents treated as obstacles in their own children's schools, understand what you're looking at. It's not the end of the story. It's the opening act. It always starts with the young, and it always starts with good intentions. If the West ever gets its Marxist youth revolution, it won't end in Scandinavia. It will end the way it has ended every single time it was tried for real. And we will have learned nothing. Thiel saw the number. I'm telling you where it leads. The answer is not to hate the young. It's to give them back a stake in the system. Let them build. Let them buy a home. Make college worth its price or skip it. Let them start companies instead of drowning in debt. A generation that owns something defends it. A generation that owns nothing will burn it down. I come from your future. Don't let your children write the next chapter of this story.