My dear American friends, in my last two posts I showed you where France stands and how our economy got there. Today I want to go deeper, because the economics were only the symptom. Here is my message to every American: you have been infected by a virus that took decades to incubate in your country. Everything you've watched get worse, year after year, is the damage. MAGA, whatever you think of it, is the immune response. But a body can't fight what it can't name. So today I'm going to name it and show you where it came from. It starts in an Italian prison cell. Antonio Gramsci co-founded the Italian Communist Party in 1921. In 1926 Mussolini locked him up, and he spent the rest of his life in prison filling notebooks. He was trying to answer one question: why did the revolution never come to the West? Marx had promised the workers would rise. They didn't. They went to church, saluted the flag, and wanted their kids to do better than them. Gramsci's answer changed everything. In the West, he said, power doesn't sit in the army or the factories. It sits in culture: schools, universities, churches, newspapers, theater, the family. He called it hegemony. As long as ordinary people believe in their own civilization, you can't overthrow it. So you don't storm the palace. You fight a "war of position." You take the institutions one by one, patiently, until the culture thinks like you do. Then political power falls into your hands like ripe fruit. A German student leader, Rudi Dutschke, later gave the strategy its famous name: the long march through the institutions. Now watch France become the laboratory. In 1945 the French Communist Party came out of the Resistance as the biggest party in the country, with more than a quarter of the vote. General de Gaulle needed them to govern, so communists entered the cabinet. Look at what they got. Public Health went to a communist, François Billoux. Labor went to a communist, Ambroise Croizat, who built our national social security system and put it under boards dominated by the communist-led CGT union. Industrial Production went to another communist, Marcel Paul, who nationalized electricity and gas and gave the union control of their enormous social funds. Education was redesigned by a commission led by two communist intellectuals, Paul Langevin and Henri Wallon, whose plan became the bible of French school reformers for decades. The communists were thrown out of government in 1947. It didn't matter. They kept exactly what Gramsci told them to keep: the unions, the schools, the universities, publishing, film, theater. For a generation, being a French intellectual and being on the far left were almost the same thing. Jean-Paul Sartre, the most famous thinker in the world, defended the Soviet Union while it was filling the gulags. Then came May 1968. Students occupied the Sorbonne, millions of workers went on strike, and for a few weeks the country stopped. De Gaulle won the elections that followed in a landslide. He won the ballot box. He lost the culture. Within a year he was gone, and the generation of 68 spent the next fifty years climbing to the top of every French institution: media, ministries, courts, schools, publishing houses. Their slogan was "It is forbidden to forbid." Authority, tradition, family, nation: all of it became suspect. Then came the export phase. This is where you come in. A group of French philosophers, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze, Jean-François Lyotard, gave the movement its intellectual weapons. Foucault taught that every institution, every norm, every piece of knowledge is a disguised structure of power. Derrida taught that every text, every concept, every hierarchy can be "deconstructed" until nothing stable is left. Lyotard announced the end of grand narratives, which in practice meant the end of the great narrative of the West itself. In France these men were famous. In America they became gods. Starting with a 1966 conference at Johns Hopkins where Derrida made his American debut, your English, history and law departments imported them wholesale. Your academics even gave it a name: French Theory. On your campuses it mutated. Mixed with the Frankfurt School exiles like Herbert Marcuse, who argued that tolerance should be withdrawn from the right, it produced critical race theory, gender theory, intersectionality. The old Marxist split between bourgeois and proletarian was replaced by a new one: oppressor and oppressed, assigned by skin color, sex and identity. That's the cultural strain of the virus. There's a second strain, and it attacked your energy and your ambition. In 1968 an Italian industrialist, Aurelio Peccei, co-founded the Club of Rome. In 1972 it published The Limits to Growth, built on a computer model from MIT, warning that if humanity kept growing, civilization would collapse. It sold millions of copies. Its core idea, that growth itself is the problem, became gospel. In France it gave birth to the degrowth movement. Progress went from a promise to a sin. Look what it did to us. The country that built a nuclear fleet in fifteen years shut down Superphénix, its advanced breeder reactor, in 1997, as part of a deal with the Greens. In 2015 it passed a law to cut nuclear's share of our electricity. In 2019 it cancelled ASTRID, our next-generation reactor program. In 2020 it closed Fessenheim, a working plant. We sabotaged our own greatest achievement because we were told that building things was dangerous. Put the two strains together and you get what you call woke. One teaches children to be ashamed of their past. The other teaches them to fear their future. Guilt behind, fear ahead. A civilization that hates where it comes from and dreads where it's going has nowhere left to go. And here's the irony. France infected America, and now America is sending it back to us. Our own politicians complain about "American woke ideas" invading French universities, without realizing those ideas were born in Paris. The virus made a round trip and came home stronger. That's why France is the most advanced case in the West. We have every symptom at once: a state that runs health, schools, culture and energy. Unions that block every reform. Universities where you can't say what everyone thinks. Self-hatred. Fear of growth. We are what the disease looks like when nothing fights it. The West is at a turning point. Every country is infected, some more than others. What you're living through, the fights over schools, over speech, over energy, over what it means to be American, is the fever. The fever is not the disease. The fever is your body fighting back. So understand this. The battle in front of you isn't just Republican versus Democrat. It's a battle for the institutions Gramsci told his heirs to capture: schools, universities, media, culture. It took them eighty years to win them. You won't take them back in one election. But you can take them back. You have something we never had: a country founded on the idea that the individual comes before the state. Free speech written into your First Amendment. Builders who still believe the future can be better than the past. Name the virus. Fight it where it lives. Don't let it do to you what it did to us. I come from your future. It's not too late to change yours.

I’m French. I want to talk to Americans who are about to vote Democrat. Not to insult you. To warn you. I come from your future. In France we did everything your progressive politicians promise. Free healthcare, free college, generous welfare, strong unions, heavy regulation, high taxes on the rich, a state that takes care of everything. Public spending close to 57% of GDP, one of the highest on the planet. On paper, it’s the dream. Here’s what it looks like from the inside. France hasn’t passed a balanced budget since 1974. Our debt is above 3,300 billion euros. Interest on that debt is becoming one of the biggest items in the national budget. Our hospitals are collapsing despite record funding. Our schools rank lower every year. Young people with degrees can’t afford an apartment in the city they were born in. Our best engineers leave for London, Zurich and San Francisco. And the rich you wanted to tax? They left too, and took the jobs with them. The promise was protection. The result is stagnation. The worst part is that nobody in France voted for decline. Every single step sounded generous, compassionate, reasonable. One more program. One more regulation. One more tax to fund it. Each step alone makes sense. Fifty years of them, and you wake up in a country that can no longer build a nuclear plant on time or keep its streets safe. I love America because it’s the one place on earth where people still believe they can build something from nothing. I came to Silicon Valley as a self-taught kid and it changed my life. That spirit is the most precious thing your country has. Before you vote, ask yourself one question: is the program you’re voting for making America more like America, or more like France? Trust me. You don’t want to be France.