Catholic (but not a model one), italophile, crotchety. Dogs change lives for the better. Instant block if you come at me with profanity. #mementomori
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I wish to inform you that the term “bouncing back” will no longer be available to be used to describe recovery for individuals over the age of 60. Henceforth the approved term will be “slowly rolling.”
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“Free people solve problems because they have something to lose when problems persist. Collectivists manage problems because they have something to lose when problems end.”
Here's the conclusion to close the series:
That's why I believe people have finally understood the big picture.
The origin of the problem in the West, and really across the whole Western world, was never just bad economics, bad politicians or bad luck. It was that mental communism had infiltrated everything. The lie had infiltrated everything. Into our schools, our media, our institutions, our budgets, our vocabulary. A civilization built on truth, property and individual responsibility slowly started running on a borrowed operating system that promised everything and delivered decline.
But a lie has one fatal weakness: reality doesn't negotiate. You can print money, but you can't print prosperity. You can rename crime, but people still get robbed. You can forbid words, but you can't forbid people from seeing what's in front of them. Sooner or later the gap between the narrative and reality becomes too wide to hide. That's the moment we're living in. In Buenos Aires, in Santiago, in Bogotá, in La Paz, and soon everywhere else, people are looking at the gap and refusing to pretend anymore.
The lie couldn't last forever. And it's collapsing everywhere at once.
What comes next, I believe, is a world far more respectful of what actually works. Free markets, because they are the only system that rewards people for serving each other. Private property, because a man who owns nothing is a man who can be told anything. The natural order, because human nature isn't a design flaw to be engineered away. Respect for legitimate authority and for order, because freedom without order is just chaos with better marketing. And beauty, because a civilization that stops building beautiful things has already stopped believing in itself.
I know how this sounds. For years, being optimistic about the West felt naïve. Not anymore. The people who lived through communism warned us that the system runs on lies and dies of truth. They were right. And truth is coming back.
I've rarely been this optimistic about the future.
BellaT retweeted
If we want the world to get better, we'll have to accept one thing: some people really are exceptional, and they really do create value.
I've explained how the system works. Now I'm going to tell you why Elon Musk is under attack.
It isn't because of his tweets or his positions. It runs deeper than that. Elon Musk is under attack because he exists.
In a world built on egalitarianism, the exceptional individual is an anomaly. Worse, he's a threat. Left free, he creates gaps: he produces more value, he moves faster, he climbs higher. Every gap he creates proves that the egalitarian project rests on a lie, the lie that we're all interchangeable.
Kurt Vonnegut saw it back in 1961 in a chilling short story, Harrison Bergeron. In an America made perfectly equal, the strong are weighed down, the beautiful are masked, and the most intelligent have their thoughts scrambled by piercing noises so that nobody rises above anybody. That isn't some distant dystopia. It's the ultimate logic of this system. If equality of outcome is the goal, then excellence is the enemy.
Here's a truth almost nobody dares to say: humanity moves forward through geniuses.
Look across the centuries. Aristotle founds logic. Gutenberg prints and sets knowledge free. Copernicus and Galileo move the Earth. Descartes and Pascal give reason its method. Newton writes the laws of the universe. Pasteur defeats microbes. Darwin explains life. Turing invents computing. Every time, one mind, a single one, tips history over.
In 1905, special relativity was in the air, and others were getting close. But general relativity, without Einstein, we might still be waiting for. And the digital revolution as we lived it, from the personal computer to a phone in every pocket, wouldn't look the way it does without Steve Jobs.
We almost always admire these geniuses once they're dead. Galileo had to recant on his knees. Semmelweis, who understood that washing hands was enough to save mothers, died in an asylum, mocked by his peers. Turing, who helped win the war, was convicted and then chemically castrated. Van Gogh sold almost nothing in his lifetime.
And then there's Nikola Tesla. The man who invented the electric world we still live in: the alternating current that powers our homes, the induction motor, the foundations of wireless transmission. He dreamed of sending energy freely across the planet. When J.P. Morgan stopped funding him, his Wardenclyffe tower was abandoned, then demolished. He ended his life alone, buried in debt, in a New York hotel room, feeding pigeons. He was found dead in January 1943, at 86. The man who electrified the world died with almost nothing.
The irony of history: his name is now written on millions of cars, the cars of the company Elon Musk took to the top. As if history wanted to pay its debt.
The system has always hated those who surpassed it, and it only celebrates them once they can no longer bother it.
It's hard to accept, but it's reality. It doesn't mean geniuses have more rights than anyone else. Before the law, before justice, and in their dignity, all people are equal, and they must stay that way. It means that some individuals, through their talent, their courage, and their risk-taking, create a thousand times, a million times, a billion times more value than ordinary people. And they don't keep that value for themselves. All of humanity benefits from it.
Elon Musk is one of those men.
He revived space exploration when governments had turned away from it. He forced the entire auto industry into a new century. With Starlink, he brought the internet to the most isolated corners of the planet. Every time, he was told it was impossible. Every time, he risked everything, and every time, he won.
He is the first person in history to cross a trillion dollars. People want him to apologize for it. I say the opposite: he deserves it, and he deserves much more. The value he's creating for humanity, with reusable rockets, the electrification of the world, and the road to Mars, is beyond any comparison with what he owns.
His fortune wasn't taken from anyone. It was created where there was nothing.
That's exactly what the system can't forgive him for.
In their worldview, nobody should be above anybody. Success is suspect, wealth is theft, excellence is an injustice to be corrected. Elon Musk is living, dazzling, unbearable proof that their model is wrong: a free man with talent and courage can create more value than all their administrations combined. As long as he exists, their story doesn't hold. So he has to be destroyed. The lawsuits, the investigations, the press campaigns, and the regulatory threats all come from there.
But here's what makes me deeply optimistic.
The system is cracking. It bet that people would end up preferring equality in mediocrity to freedom in excellence, and it lost. People saw the rockets come back and land. They saw what a single man could accomplish when nobody stopped him from acting. And they understood they had been lied to.
What's coming is a new world, built on real meritocracy. Not a world where the same people inherit the same seats, but a world where everyone gets to play. The child of a factory worker, a farmer, or an immigrant can get in the game, and if he's good, he rises fast. Very fast. As high as his talent takes him.
The equality worth defending is equality of opportunity, not equality of outcome. The first sets geniuses free. The second smothers them.
We think it's normal for a soccer player to earn a fortune because he's exceptional with a ball. We think it's suspicious for an engineer to get rich by bringing rockets back from space. The world will be better the day kids have Elon Musk posters on their bedroom walls, the way they have posters of Messi and Ronaldo.
Humanity never moved forward thanks to people who wanted nobody to stand out. It moved forward thanks to those who dared to outrun everyone.
Elon Musk is one of them. And this time, history won't wait until he's dead to recognize it.
🤖 Made with AI
BellaT retweeted
"Perseveri e si rafforzi il tuo cuore nella convinzione che Io sono sempre con te, anche se nel momento della lotta tu non Mi senti” v1499 Misericordia Divina ~ San Giovanni da Capistrano
BellaT retweeted
🚨🚨 THE ILLEGITIMACY PLAYBOOK / THE DEMOCRACY FILES: A PRIMER 🚨
I will be using this thread to track all drops, so bookmark it.
I spent most of yesterday backing everything (now 312 gigabytes) up in various sources and getting the materials out to others. I also produced an AI video (below) to explain the whole thing to others are not on 𝕏 - feel free to distribute.
Here's the primer:
USAID, the foreign aid agency, had a democracy office. Inside the agency, it was called DRG.
Officially, DRG administered "democracy assistance." They'd go inside countries they thought were sliding into authoritarianism and help the opposition there. That assistance included election monitoring, judicary support, independent media, and civil society building.
You may have heard the term "color revolution." The model comes from Serbia in 2000, where trained student activists brought down Milosevic with the help of Western governments, after sustained protests. With the help of USAID's democracy office, this model was implemented in many other countries to topple governments: Georgia's "Rose Revolution" in 2003, Ukraine's "Orange Revolution" in 2004, and many more.
Then last year, DOGE shut down USAID. But the USAID democracy office didn't stop. They formed a group called the Democracy Renewal Group, the same initials as their office (USAID Democracy, Human Rights, Governance). Their goal: apply their own playbook to the United States itself.
This goal became a plan, called Renew American Democracy (RAD). It invoked the "4 B's" framework. Block - use lawfare and protests to make life harder for the Trump administration. Bridge & Belong - control dialogue and win people over. The final and most important B is Build. Build means redesigning the American government itself, and the crisis is the opening.
In their own words:
"We can take that breakdown moment and leverage it for a big structural reform, you know, refounding moment." - Danielle Reiff, DRG lead.
Calls show DRG working alongside DSA on ideas of creating a different government, one that does away with the Constitution itself.
DRG does not run the Block operations. They hand it to UDA, the United Democracy Alliance. One organizer calls it a "huge galaxy": lawsuits, street protests, non-cooperation. They list No Kings, Indivisible, MoveOn, 50501, and many other mega-activist NGOs among their members.
Another organizer calls UDA Erica Chenoweth's project. Chenoweth is the Harvard professor behind the three-and-half-percent rule of regime change: get that share of a country's populace onto the streets, and historically, the movement wins.
The UDA is very "hush-hush." They have no website, no roster, no filings.
Then come the red lines: things the Trump administration could do, such as calling the Insurrection Act on protesters, that would mean that the federal government, in their words, "crosses the threshold into illegitimacy." Nobody voted on those lines. There was no public debate. These red lines were developed within secretive working groups, and in a paper addressed to governors and staff.
In the words of Reiff/DRG:
"So that if there is a red line crossed in terms of a Constitutional crisis, like everyone's already pre-organized. And so Mike Smith actually said, he goes, oh, you guys have the day after tomorrow plan."
Cross a line, and the paper's options include states refusing to lend their resources to federal officials, and governors convening what it calls a "Third Continential Congress."
Running the UDA's Insurrection Act working group: Rear Admiral Mike Smith (RET) of National Security Leaders of America (NSL4A). NSL4A is also credited with operationalizing UDA, the blocking operations. NSL4A consists of about 1,600 ex-officers, spies, diplomats. They're turning red lines into indicators and running a situation room to monitor them throughout the midterms and beyond.
The NSL4A's lawyers told them to stop recording meetings in case of subpoenas. But the rest of the network continued to record. DRG works in conjunction with Renew to Thrive (R2T), which ended up accidentally publishing 400+ calls and thousands of documents. These calls and documents were never meant for our eyes, but it's them, on tape.
Thousands of NGOs and billions of dollars are involved in this endeavor. Most of them believe they're saving democracy. The problem is that people who spent their careers deciding when other countries' governments had lost their legitimacy wrote that test for ours, in private, and planned for what comes after.
Who decides when your government is legitimate?
Excellent analysis and the best explanation of why asking government to fix what it broke is insane.
🚨 I spend an enormous amount of time trying to understand the chaos we're living through. Not the headlines. The machine behind them. 🚨
If you want to understand what Elon Musk is really fighting, and who is really fighting him, this is the clearest map I can give you.
Expensive houses. Expensive schools. Expensive healthcare. Taxes that rise every year while everything gets worse. Borders nobody voted to open. Speech rules nobody voted for.
Most people look at this and blame capitalism. The market failed, they say, so the state has to step in and fix it.
They have it exactly backwards. What they want to fix it with is what broke it. This isn't chaos, and it isn't capitalism. It has a direction, a method, and a hundred-year history. Let me reverse-engineer it.
In 1926, Mussolini's regime threw Antonio Gramsci, co-founder of the Italian Communist Party, into prison. From his cell he asked the question that would shape the next century: why did the revolution win in Russia but fail in the West, where Marx said it was inevitable?
His answer: in Russia, the state was everything, so seizing it was enough. In the West, the state was only the outer wall. Behind it stood the real fortress: the church, the family, the school, the press, the culture. Western workers never revolted because the culture held them.
So the conclusion was simple. Don't storm the palace. Capture the culture. Win the institutions and you never have to win the argument, because you decide which arguments are allowed.
In 1967, the German student leader Rudi Dutschke gave it a slogan: the long march through the institutions. Paris supplied the intellectual software, and I've already apologized for my country's part in that.
Then came the most patient operation in modern history. The students of the 60s became the professors of the 80s. Their students became the journalists, judges, civil servants and HR directors of the 2000s. Their students now run the foundations, the NGOs and the agencies. No single step looked like a revolution. That's exactly why it worked.
The method was communist. The ambition became global. And it grew like a cancer. A cancer never attacks the body head-on. It hijacks the body's own cells and feeds on the body's own resources. This system never had to defeat the West. It just had to make the West pay for it.
In America, the machine found a political home: the Democratic Party. Not the millions of decent people who vote for it. The apparatus. The donor networks, the activist groups, the consultants, the captured agencies that keep moving in the same direction whoever wins.
In Europe, it found something even better. The EU's founders, Schuman, Adenauer, De Gasperi, were Catholic anti-communists who wanted to make war impossible. But they built exactly what the long march dreams of: power that never has to face a voter. A Commission nobody directly elects holds the right to propose laws for 450 million people. Chat Control. The digital euro. Speech rules written in Brussels. Nobody stormed anything. They just drafted it.
Add the World Economic Forum, the UN agencies and the global foundation circuit, and you have the full map. You don't need a secret meeting when everyone went to the same schools, reads the same papers, funds the same NGOs and flies to the same conference in Davos every January. It's not a conspiracy. It's a class with shared incentives. That's harder to fight, because there's no headquarters to raid.
And the billionaires? Most people who became the richest in the world got absorbed. They built something real, then traded it for an aura. Bill Gates is the perfect example: he built the software that ran the world, then became the bankroller of global health bureaucracies and the funder of newsrooms covering his own causes. Laurene Powell Jobs bought The Atlantic. Benioff bought Time. You're not buying a business. You're buying the right to be called good by the people who decide who is good. That's the corruption. Not suitcases of cash. Money for aura, grants for loyalty, NGOs for policy. All legal. All invisible.
Here's the proof it's one system and not a hundred separate problems. Look at what happened to prices over the last 25 years. Everything exposed to markets and technology got cheaper: TVs, software, phones, clothing. Everything controlled by institutions exploded: college, healthcare, childcare. And housing, where you need a committee's permission to build anything. Same country, same economy, same decades. The difference isn't the product. It's who controls it.
Taxes go up and services get worse, because the money doesn't reach the services. It feeds the layers. Immigration happens at a scale no electorate clearly chose, because for a system that lives on managing problems, more problems means more budget. And a two-income family today can't buy the house their parents bought on one salary. That's real poverty, manufactured by a machine that is rewarded for looking good, never for being good.
MAGA isn't the cause of the chaos. It's the immune response. Brexit, the farmers' revolts, the votes shaking every European capital: same thing. The body finally noticed the tumor.
So what we're living through is not a normal political cycle. It's a fight to the death between two models. One runs on the perception of goodness. The other runs on reality.
And it had to be the richest man in the world. Anyone smaller would have been bought, sued or cancelled. Every billionaire before him took the deal. Elon walked out of the club and turned the lights on.
He bought Twitter for $44 billion, opened the Twitter Files and gave the world back a public square where any narrative can be checked in real time. He went inside the government and helped shut down USAID. Now Politico announces that the Democrats' gavels are coming for him. His answer: he'll find out who is really pulling the strings and go after them, not just their puppets.
He has one line he keeps coming back to: he cares about the reality of goodness, not the perception of it. That sentence is the whole war.
Now the part that makes me certain of how it ends.
A lie is expensive to maintain. It needs gatekeepers, censors, fact-checkers, friendly journalists, a budget, and constant repairs every time reality contradicts it. The truth costs nothing to maintain. It just keeps being true.
AI is driving the cost of checking anything toward zero. Any budget, any study, any statistic, any promise, audited in seconds by anyone with a phone. Yes, AI can generate lies at scale too. But producing a lie is cheap. Defending it against a billion instant audits is impossible.
That's what acceleration really means. It doesn't pick sides. It speeds up feedback loops. Systems aligned with reality compound. Systems built on lies hit the wall faster. And you cannot build rockets, design chips or cure diseases with a false model of the world. Physics doesn't read op-eds. The more intelligence we pour into the world, the more expensive every lie becomes.
You cannot scale a lie. You can only scale what's true.
We are close to the collapse of the old order and the birth of a new one. Not the one from the WEF's own 2016 video, "you'll own nothing and you'll be happy." The opposite. An order built on truth-seeking, efficiency, science, private property and free markets. You will own things. You will build things. And you'll be happy, because it will be real.
Gramsci's long march took a century. Its collapse will take years.
History will remember this moment. A man walked into the most powerful machine ever built, refused the deal everyone else took, and chose reality over perception.
I have never been more optimistic.
BellaT retweeted
Prayer Request #1.
As the midterms approach and beyond, I respectfully ask everyone to please pray:
II Chronicles 7:14 - "if My people, who are called by My name, will humble themselves and pray and seek My face and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven, and I will forgive their sin and will heal their land."
Please consider praying this offering each morning and evening, as our Christian duty calls us to offer prayers to our Lord for the sake of our nation.
I am very grateful to each of you. Thank you and many blessings to you all.
Peace and be prepared.
Forget politics for the next nine days. Remember your death. Join the novena. #Catholic #mementomori
All Souls Novena youtu.be/9JuImzITeSA?si=NbXA… via @YouTube
Be like Poland and Hungary.
“Why do you support reimmigration?”
Dominik Tarczyński:
“Because I want my future daughter to be alive… not raped and killed.
Is that enough?”
Poland: Zero illegal migrants.
None. Zero.
Not because they’re afraid.
Because they’re smart.
Because they’re brave.
Because they actually give a shit about their own families.
Western Europe calls this “far-right”…
while their own daughters pay the price.
Be like Poland. 🇵🇱🔥
Doesn’t he just look like your average “climate warrior.” Boy did he screw up this time - burning that building put tons of CO2 into the air.
🇫🇷 It is now known that the left-wing extremist responsible for burning down the historic Limoges Town Hall has been on France's terror watchlist.
34-year-old Hodei Ciarra was detained today by the elite police unit RAID.
According to the French outlet Le Parisien, he had already been registered by French intelligence as a "Fiché S" (a designation for individuals deemed a serious threat to national security) due to his ties to radical ultra-left and eco-activist movements.
If you are not following this man, do so before you vote.
C’est quand même fascinant de voir cette jeune femme passer à la télé et affirmer son bullshit avec un aplomb total. Aucune hésitation, aucune nuance. Je suis quasiment persuadé qu’elle était convaincue que personne n’irait vérifier.
Et c’est ça le plus intéressant. Pas l’erreur, la certitude. Une partie de cette génération a été biberonnée à une grille de lecture où l’on est du bon côté par définition. Et quand on est du bon côté, on n’a plus besoin de vérifier. Le réel devient un détail, presque une provocation.
Après la Seconde Guerre mondiale, la psychologie sociale s’est obsédée sur une seule question : comment des gens normaux ont-ils pu participer à l’horreur ?
Asch a montré que trois quarts des participants niaient au moins une fois ce qu’ils voyaient de leurs propres yeux dès que le groupe affirmait le contraire. Milgram a montré que près de deux tiers allaient jusqu’à infliger ce qu’ils croyaient être une décharge potentiellement mortelle, simplement parce qu’une autorité leur assurait que c’était justifié. Browning, dans Des hommes ordinaires, a montré que des pères de famille de Hambourg sont devenus des exécuteurs sans fanatisme particulier, par conformisme, pour ne pas se désolidariser du groupe. Arendt a appelé ça la banalité du mal : le pire ne vient pas de monstres, il vient de gens qui ont cessé de penser par eux-mêmes parce qu’ils étaient certains d’avoir raison.
Toute proportion gardée, évidemment, ce n’est pas la même chose. Mais le mécanisme, lui, est identique : une conviction morale absolue qui dispense de regarder le réel. Gad Saad appelle ça l’empathie suicidaire, une empathie tellement déconnectée des conséquences qu’elle finit par détruire ce qu’elle prétend protéger.
Les gens qui ont causé les pires catastrophes de l’histoire étaient rarement des sadiques. C’étaient des gens persuadés d’être du bon côté. C’est pour ça qu’une génération qui considère la vérification comme une trahison morale n’est pas un sujet anodin. À long terme, le mécanisme produit les mêmes effets, quelle que soit la cause qu’il sert.
An important read
The fusion of global socialism and Islamism is aiming to dismantle Western capitalism, cripple its energy grids and erase its cultural foundations.
This relies on the weaponisation of the climate crisis agenda and unrestricted, large-scale illegal migration into Western nations. The foreign-born population in the European Union grew from roughly 31 million in 2005 to around 64 million by 2025-26.
However, the total combined international migrant stock in Europe and North America reached around 155 million by 2024 - roughly 94 million in Europe and 61 million in North America.
This diaspora from Africa, Middle Eastern Islamic countries and South America reflects a spreading tide, overwhelming Western political, economic and institutional structures. Backed by bodies like the United Nations, the climate change agenda and illegal migration have have hollowed out Western industrial supremacy. This destabilisation has positioned China and the BRICS bloc to step into the vacuum left behind.
By forcing a rapid transition away from reliable hydrocarbon fuels - coal, oil, and natural gas - Western economies faced crippling costs and energy insecurity, while transferring industrial potential to China and India.
Unchecked migration has eroded domestic stability, public services and national cohesion, aided by UN humanitarian relief. This is also justified under multiculturalism, Environmental, Social, Governance (ESG), Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) and 'stakeholder capitalism'. Corporate governance is no longer in step with market demand or anyone's national interest.
Critics label this broadening crisis as a modern take on international technocracy (or Bolshevism). Wealth redistribution, resource management and social policy are now dictated by non-elected, global bureaucratic elites rather than elected governments.
This is not a bottom-up movement. It's a fusion of the Western globalist power elite - including dominant asset managers like BlackRock and Vanguard - with entrenched socialist ideologues and international bodies like the UN and the World Health Organization.
Key figures reinforce this strategy: UN Secretary-General António Guterres, and WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus.
Network pipelines like the World Economic Forum have also cultivated rising political stars, like Emmanuel Macron in France and Jacinda Ardern in New Zealand. They are integrated into WEF internationalist governance models well before they assume national leadership.
BellaT retweeted
DOUCE FRANCE… CHER PAYS DE MON ENFANCE… 🇫🇷🥐
broissant.co 🙏🏽
BellaT retweeted
Le nostre città ostaggio di bande di delinquenti che spaccano vetrine, saccheggiano negozi e seminano il caos. A Milano, tra i 200 fermati, l’80% è minorenne e quasi tutti sono stranieri.
È il risultato del modello culturale promosso dalla sinistra, fatto di accoglienza indiscriminata, tolleranza e giustificazioni continue di fronte alla violenza.
Non è il nostro modello. Continueremo a batterci per garantire sicurezza, rispetto delle regole e pene certe per chi delinque.
BellaT retweeted
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.
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.
Guess who tops the list? @StephanieSidley
Exactly.
J’ai entendu dire que la France était finie, qu’il était trop tard pour la sauver.
Mais la France est toujours aussi belle, enviable même. Sa grandeur n’a pas disparu, elle ne demande qu’à renaître.
Nous avons surmonté en un an un problème cent fois plus grave, sans avoir les moyens dont dispose la France.
La France pourrait y arriver en une semaine.