My dear American friends, yesterday I showed you an email. Today I want to show you what comes after, because history has already written this chapter many times, and every time in blood.
Every Marxist revolution goes after the same first target. Not the army, and not the rich. It goes after the people who think.
Lenin understood it early. In 1922 he put Russia's leading philosophers, scientists and writers on ships and expelled them. Many of those who stayed were shot or sent to the camps. In 1940, in the forest of Katyn, Stalin's secret police executed around 22,000 Polish prisoners: officers, but also doctors, lawyers, engineers, teachers and priests. A nation's educated class was killed one by one, each with a bullet in the back of the head.
Mao perfected the method.
In 1956 he launched the Hundred Flowers campaign. "Let a hundred flowers bloom." He invited China's intellectuals to speak freely and to criticize the Party. They believed him, and they spoke. A year later the trap closed. The Anti-Rightist Campaign branded more than half a million people as enemies. Professors, writers, engineers and doctors lost their careers and their families, and many were sent to labor camps they never left.
Mao was proud of it. In 1958 he compared himself to the First Emperor of China, who was infamous for burying 460 scholars alive. Mao boasted that the Communists had buried 46,000.
His masterpiece came in 1966, with the Cultural Revolution. This time he didn't need the police. He used children.
Schools were closed and students became Red Guards. Their teachers were dragged onto stages for "struggle sessions." Their heads were shaved, placards were hung around their necks, and they were forced to kneel while crowds beat and spat on them. In August 1966 Lao She, one of the greatest writers in modern Chinese literature, was beaten by Red Guards. The next day he was found drowned in a lake in Beijing. That same month, at a girls' school in Beijing, students beat their vice principal Bian Zhongyun to death.
Then the revolution entered the home. Children learned a slogan: "Father and mother are dear, but not as dear as Chairman Mao." Sons denounced fathers and daughters denounced mothers. Zhang Hongbing was 16 when he reported his own mother, and she was executed. A child turning on his parents was celebrated as the highest form of virtue.
Once the Red Guards had done the dirty work, Mao discarded them too. From 1968 on, around 17 million young people were sent to the countryside to "learn from the peasants." A whole generation lost its education, its youth and often its sanity. The revolution devours its own children, every single time.
Cambodia, 1975. The Khmer Rouge emptied the cities in days. Glasses, soft hands, speaking French: any of these could mark you as an intellectual, and being an intellectual could get you killed. In four years roughly a quarter of the population was dead.
Look at the pattern, because it never changes. First, convince the young that the world is rotten and the old are guilty. Second, silence or destroy the people who could contradict the story. Third, break the family so that the only loyalty left is to the cause. Fourth, give the young power. Fifth, when they've finished the dirty work, throw them away.
I am not telling you America is China in 1966. I'm telling you the first steps look familiar. Careers are destroyed over a single opinion. Professors sign ideological pledges just to get hired. Children are taught to see their parents as bigots and their country's history as nothing but a list of crimes. Political violence is excused online, and sometimes even celebrated. Every year it gets a little more radical, and every year the people who warn about it are called alarmists.
This is not a left versus right debate. Reasonable people can disagree about tax rates, healthcare or trade, and that's politics. What I'm describing is something else. It's an ideology that has killed tens of millions of people in the last century, and it always starts by promising justice to the young. We should call it what it is: evil.
You fight evil by refusing to become it. Teach real history. Defend free speech, especially for the people you disagree with. Protect the teachers and parents who refuse to bow. Above all, give young people something to own, build and defend, so that no one can sell them the fire.
I come from a continent that has already lived this story. Please don't let your children write the next chapter.
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.