"You reduce crime by eliminating poverty." This is one of the greatest intellectual confusions of our century. It sounds compassionate. It feels obvious. And the moment you actually test it, it falls apart. Let's look at the data. First, the correlation is real. Nobody serious denies that poorer areas have more crime. In Sweden, kids from the poorest 20% of families are about 7 times more likely to be convicted of a violent crime than kids from the richest 20%. But correlation is not causation. So Swedish researchers did something brilliant: they compared siblings. Same parents, same home, same upbringing, but different family income at different points in their childhood, because parents' income moves over time. Result, on more than 500,000 children (Sariaslan et al., British Journal of Psychiatry, 2014): once you account for what's shared inside the family, the effect of income on violent crime goes from 7x to nothing. The hazard ratio drops to 0.95. No effect. Finland ran the same test on 650,000 people. Same result: the income-crime link disappears when you compare siblings. What predicts crime isn't the bank balance. It's what travels inside families. Second test: what happens when poverty spikes for everyone at once? 2008. US unemployment doubled from 5% to nearly 10%. 15% of Americans officially poor. If poverty creates crime, crime should have exploded. Instead it fell. Year after year. Robbery, the most "economic" crime of all, dropped 10% in 2010 alone. Criminologists literally said they were stumped. Same story in the Great Depression: 25% unemployment, and crime went down in many cities. Third test: take families out of poverty and see. The US government ran a randomized lottery called Moving to Opportunity. Thousands of families in public housing got vouchers to move to low-poverty neighborhoods. For boys, violent arrests dropped at first, property crime arrests went up, and over time the effects faded. New zip code. Same behavior. Fourth: the claim that police don't matter. This one is just false. Chalfin et al. (American Economic Review: Insights, 2022): each additional police officer prevents about 0.1 homicides. And per capita, the lives saved are twice as many among Black victims as among white victims. The people who suffer most from "police don't matter" are the poorest neighborhoods. So what does predict crime? The Dunedin study followed 1,000 children from birth to age 32. Self-control measured between ages 3 and 11 predicted adult criminal convictions, even after controlling for social class and IQ (Moffitt et al., PNAS, 2011). Cognitive ability matters too: across 700,000 Swedish men, lower cognitive scores at 18 track with violent convictions, and the link barely moves when you control for childhood socioeconomic status (Frisell et al., 2012). And here's the part nobody quotes: in Dunedin, kids whose self-control improved over time did better than predicted. Behavior can change. Which means responsibility is real. Why does this matter? Because "poverty creates crime" isn't just wrong. It's toxic. It turns criminals into victims. The man who robbed you becomes a symptom of "the system," and you, the real victim, become a footnote in someone else's narrative. It merges two completely different things. "You're poor, we'll help you" is one policy. "You're poor and you committed a crime, so we'll excuse you" is another. Fusing them insults the millions of poor people who work, raise their kids, and never hurt anyone. The vast majority of poor people are not criminals. That alone kills the theory. It removes responsibility. Build a political system on "your circumstances made you do it" and you destroy the one thing that actually changes behavior: the certainty that you own your choices. Every excuse the state manufactures is an incentive. And it feeds the state forever. If every crime is a social failure, every crime justifies a new program, a new budget, a new agency. Crime becomes the business model of bureaucracy. The alternative is simple and old. A lighter state that protects instead of explains. The same rules for everyone, from the projects or from a gated community. Certain, swift punishment for anyone who commits a crime. And never, ever telling someone their crime was written in their social condition. Treating someone as responsible is respecting them. Excusing someone because they're poor is the most condescending thing you can do to them.

Hello @NYTimesPR Anyone home? Can you explain why the NYT calls Dr. Ben Carson a Mr. and why you call unlicensed Abdul el-Sayed a Dr? I know you have a style book, but why don’t you follow it?

Funny thing I notice every time I talk to French people who've never lived in the US. They see Americans as the bad guys. "They lobby Brussels." "They crush our companies." "They take all the value." Here's the truth: Americans aren't the problem. They're just playing the game. And they play it extremely well. You write absurd rules? They'll play by your absurd rules. They have more capital, more talent, more speed, better execution. So they win. Every single time. That's not imperialism. That's competition. The only ones responsible for Europe's situation are Europeans. More precisely, our inability to get rid of the central planners who keep stacking absurd regulation on top of absurd regulation, and the bureaucrats like Macron who think building a tech ecosystem means writing plans, hosting summits and launching useless commissions. You don't create startups with a five-year plan. You create them by getting out of the way. Silicon Valley wasn't built at a summit. It was built by people who were allowed to take risks, fail, raise money and hire fast. As long as these people run Europe, nothing will happen. Absolutely nothing. Stop blaming Washington. Look in the mirror.

Five years ago, an important miscarriage of justice occurred. The story began in April 2018 when David Sabatini, an MIT, Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI), and Whitehead Institute scientist and professor began a consensual intimate relationship with Dr. Kristin Knouse, a principal investigator with her own lab at the Whitehead. By January 2020, David sought to end the relationship, but Knouse apparently did not want it to end. When David thereafter started a new relationship and Knouse learned about it, she began a secretive campaign to destroy him by attempting to end his career as a scientist. She did so by damaging his name, reputation, and that of his family with false sexual harassment and other claims, thereby making him unemployable. Knouse conspired with Dr. Ruth Lehmann, the then- and still current Director (i.e., President) of the Whitehead Institute, in her efforts to destroy Sabatini. The record presented in court demonstrated that Dr. Lehmann committed to Knouse in October of 2020 that she would fire David. Dr. Lehmann made this commitment to Knouse before any investigation of the facts had taken place. Seven months after committing to fire him, in March of 2021, Dr. Lehmann, on behalf of the Whitehead, hired the law firm of Hinckley, Allen, Snyder (HAS) to undergo an investigation of David. By July 2021, HAS shared a draft of its conclusions with MIT, HHMI, and the Whitehead, but not with David or his lawyers. On the morning of August 19, 2021, David for the first time received the more than 200-page investigative report and a calendar invite for a meeting the following day with Dr. Lehmann, the president of HHMI, and the HR directors of both institutions. The report was riddled with errors and unsupported claims about David and his relationship with Knouse. When David's lawyer immediately thereafter reached out to Whitehead counsel to ask whether David was about to be fired, they confirmed that he would be terminated at the meeting. On the advice of his lawyer, David immediately resigned from HHMI and the Whitehead rather than attend the meeting. HHMI did not accept his resignation, choosing instead to fire him. MIT put David on leave and ultimately revoked his tenure. David thereafter resigned from MIT. On August 20, 2021, one day after sending David the HAS report and before David had the opportunity to dispute the facts and the conclusions of the investigation, Dr. Lehmann emailed all employees at the Whitehead informing them that David had violated a number of Whitehead policies "including policies concerning sexual harassment." The Lehmann public email, David's resignation and firing, and Dr. Lehmann's claims about David's sexual harassment exploded into a major global scandal covered in mainstream, social, and scientific media around the world as it had all of the requisite ingredients: An attractive target with David, one of the most important scientists of his generation in line for the Nobel Prize, a purported inappropriate sexual relationship with a younger female colleague, and a political and institutional environment where punishing a man for sexual harassment advanced the career and reputation of the person and/or institution that destroyed the career and reputation of the accused, regardless of the validity of the allegations. As a result of Knouse's claims, Lehmann's sham investigation, and the media onslaught that followed, David lost all sources of income and his reputation was destroyed. All prizes he had been previously been awarded were withdrawn. He was removed from all scientific advisory and other honorary roles other than as a member of our family foundation's (the Pershing Square Foundation's) scientific advisory board. When I initially learned of the news about David in the summer of 2021, I hired him as a consultant to the Pershing Square Foundation as I believed our small foundation team would benefit greatly by his insights (and he now had the time to help us), and he needed the money to support his family. At my request and under a confidentiality agreement, David provided us with many hundreds of pages of documents including texts and other communications with Knouse, the investigative report, and David's responses to the allegations so that we could do our own evaluation of Knouse's claims. I and a member of our family office's legal team carefully reviewed the documents. After a careful review of the empirical documents -- in particular the texts between Knouse and David -- it became abundantly clear that Knouse's actions were that of an angry and jilted lover, not those of a sexually harassed junior colleague. And the investigative report appeared designed to deliver a pre-ordained conclusion rather than a dispassionate fact-based analysis. The impact of the firings and the destruction of his career and reputation on David and his family was extraordinarily devastating, so much so that we became increasingly concerned that he might commit suicide. [In order to make sure that David's important scientific research would continue, in February 2023, in partnership with an anonymous donor, we funded $25 million to support David launching a new lab. As you might expect, I was reviled in the press, in scientific journals, and on social media for doing so and for supporting a so-called sex offender.] On October 20, 2021, David filed suit against Knouse alleging defamation and tortious interference in his career and his contractual arrangements. Thereafter, Knouse brought counterclaims against David. Today, nearly five years to the date of the filing of the suit, he has finally received justice. Today, a 13-person jury (seven men and six women) of David Sabatini's peers (12 jurors plus an alternate) unanimously determined that David proved that Kristin Knouse defamed him, tortiously interfered with his contractual relationships (his entire career as a scientist), and tortiously interfered with his prospective advantageous relationships (his future employment). The jury awarded him nearly $10 million in damages including interest. The jury rejected all of Knouse's claims including her claims that David engaged in quid pro quo sexual harassment and created a sexually hostile work environment. While five years is a very long time to live under a reputational cloud, justice was finally served today for David, but not completely in my view. To this day, Dr. Ruth Lehmann remains Director of the Whitehead Institute. Dr. Lehmann worked alongside Dr. Knouse to destroy David Sabatini, an acclaimed scientist and professor. She did not follow due process before she intentionally destroyed David's career and reputation. Dr. Lehmann nearly killed David with her actions, as had we not rescued David by finding him employment, supporting him publicly to buffer the reputational damage, and supporting his recovery, he could have ended his life and left his son without a father before the world understood what had transpired here. And the reputational damage was not just to David. David's brother, Bernardo Sabatini, is one of the most important neuroscientists in the world. To this day, he has had to deal with a large cloud over his family name and reputation. Recently, when the new CEO of our brain institute mentioned that Bernardo Sabatini was on our board, he was asked: "Wasn't he involved in some kind of sex scandal?" For obvious reasons, the character of the person who runs a scientific institute is of utmost importance. Among other failures here, Dr. Ruth Lehmann committed to Knouse that she would fire David many months before an investigation was even launched and without consideration of the empirical facts. How can one trust research produced by a scientific institute if its leader is not committed to observing the empirical facts before reaching conclusions that have life-threatening import? We have unfortunately seen massive amounts of scientific fraud which has harmed innumerable human lives and wasted billions of dollars of research funding and time. For her ethical breaches here, Dr. Lehmann should be fired from the Whitehead. Based on her actions in this case, she is in no position to serve as the leader of an important scientific institute. I speak with some perspective on how scientific and other institutions should be led. Including the recent launch of the Ackman Oxman Institute, we have funded approximately $1 billion of scientific research and institutions over the last decade or so, and this experience has given us the opportunity to meet the leadership of many of the most important scientific institutions in the world. To put it plainly, we would not give a dollar to a scientific institute whose leader compromised basic moral principles as has happened here. At an absolute minimum, the board of the Whitehead should immediately launch a detailed and independent investigation of Dr. Lehmann's actions in the Sabatini case. I would encourage the investigation, among other considerations, to carefully exam all of the correspondence between Lehmann and Knouse, as well their correspondence with the HAS law firm on among other areas, the various drafts of the Sabatini investigative report. Alternatively, Dr. Lehmann could resign, minimize further distraction for the Whitehead, and save institutional time and resources that would be better spent on research that benefits humanity.

Over the last two days I went on Fox News and Newsmax to warn Americans about what's happening in France. Today, the images speak for themselves. October 17, 2026. In Marseille, France's second-largest city, a mob smashed through the doors of City Hall and stormed the lobby chanting "It's the revolution, we're taking the Bastille." Shortly before, rioters had trashed a municipal police station, breaking windows and throwing smoke bombs inside. Shops on the main avenue were vandalized and barricades were set on fire. In Paris, masked black bloc crews fired mortar fireworks at police at Place de la République while tear gas filled the square. There were 166 arrests nationwide by midday and more than 600 protests across the country, after weeks of blockaded high schools. The Yellow Vests are back. Now here's what every American needs to understand. What are these people demanding? More: higher wages, higher pensions, more public spending, more state. That's in a country where the government already spends more than half of everything the economy produces. This isn't an accident. It's where 45 years of socialism lead. Since 1981, left or right, every French government has grown the state. Macron is just the final, most polished version of the same system. Socialism doesn't create prosperity. It creates dependency. When people rely on the state for everything, every disappointment turns into anger at the state. And the state cannot allocate capital. It doesn't risk its own money, and it never goes bankrupt when it's wrong. It just borrows more and taxes more. Productivity stalls, wages stagnate and prices rise. Then people take to the streets demanding even more state. The loop feeds itself until it breaks. America, watch closely. If the Democrats fully embrace socialism, this is the trailer for what comes next. History is accelerating. It took France decades to get here. It won't take you nearly as long. Vote for less government, never more.

Today I'm going to explain why socialism can never work, even if you're 8 years old. Not with statistics. Not with the body count, even though it runs into the tens of millions. With a school playground and a bag of marbles. By the end, you'll understand what Mises, Hayek and the whole Austrian School proved more than a hundred years ago, and what the Soviet Union then spent seventy years confirming. Picture a schoolyard. Thirty kids. Marbles. There are clay marbles, glass marbles, agates, big shooters, and a few cat's eyes that everybody fights over. Nobody ever decided what a shooter is worth. And yet every kid knows: a shooter is worth about five glass marbles. An agate, three. A clay marble, almost nothing. Who set those prices? Nobody. They appeared on their own, through trading. Every trade is a kid saying: "I want that thing more than what I've got in my hand." Thousands of little trades like that end up creating a "marble exchange rate" that everyone knows, even though nobody ever wrote it down anywhere. And that rate is alive. A new kid shows up in September and he's crazy about agates? The price of agates goes up. The other kids notice, and that night they dig through their drawers at home to bring more in. Nobody asked them to. The price told them. Keep that in mind. That's the whole story. Now a new teacher arrives. She's kind. She means well. And she finds it deeply unfair that Kevin has 200 marbles while Lily has 3. So she collects every marble in the playground and announces: "From now on, I manage the marbles. I'll distribute them fairly, for the good of everyone." On paper, it's beautiful. Watch what happens. First problem: she doesn't know who wants what. Lily loves blue marbles. Tom doesn't care about marbles at all, he just wants to play soccer. Emma has collected cat's eyes since kindergarten. None of this is written down anywhere. It lives in the heads of thirty kids, and often the kids themselves only discover it at the moment someone offers them a trade. So the teacher distributes "fairly." And everyone ends up with marbles they don't want. Second problem: nobody knows what anything is worth anymore. Before, the exchange rate would have told her that cat's eyes were rare and precious. Now that trading is banned, there is no rate. She's blind. How many agates should she order for next year? How many shooters? No idea. She guesses. She guesses wrong. Next year there are crates of clay marbles nobody wants and not a single cat's eye. Third problem: nobody makes an effort anymore. Why bring marbles from home if they end up in the big common bag? Why take care of them if they're not really yours? After a month, there are fewer marbles in the playground than on day one. Fourth problem, the most important one: the kids start trading again. In secret. Behind the gym. Because Lily still wants her blue marbles, and Tom would happily hand his over for half a cookie. Trading is natural. You can ban it, but you can't stop people from wanting things. So the teacher has to choose. Either she lets it happen and her system collapses. Or she starts watching. She searches pockets. She hands out punishments. She appoints "monitors" whose job is to report anyone caught trading. She hasn't turned evil. She simply has no choice anymore. The plan cannot survive without coercion. And guess who ends up with the nicest marbles? Not Lily. Not Emma. The monitors. The kids who are close to the teacher. That's it. You now understand socialism. Now replace the playground with a country. The thirty kids with hundreds of millions of people. The marbles with millions of different products: steel, wheat, bolts, medicine, size 10 shoes. And the teacher with a planning bureau in Moscow. That is exactly what the Soviet Union was. The bureau was called Gosplan. What I just told you isn't a hunch. It's a handful of the strongest arguments in the history of economic thought. Carl Menger, 1871, founder of the Austrian School: value isn't in the object. It's in the head of the person who wants it. A shooter has no "objective" value. It's worth whatever a kid is willing to give up to get it. Sounds obvious, but it undercuts the foundation of Marxism, which claims value comes from the amount of labor that went into something. Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk, another Austrian, took Marx apart on exactly this point back in 1896. Ludwig von Mises, 1920: that's the second problem, calculation. In an essay called "Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth," he shows that if the state owns all the means of production, there's no market for factories, machines or raw materials. So no prices for them. So no way to know whether it's smarter to put that steel into railroads, tractors or bridges. Without prices, the planner isn't evil. He's blind. Mises wrote this just three years after the Russian Revolution. Friedrich Hayek, 1945: that's the first problem, knowledge. In "The Use of Knowledge in Society," he explains that the information that runs an economy doesn't exist in any one place. It's scattered across millions of heads: the baker who knows his oven runs cold, the farmer who can feel the rain coming, the truck driver who knows the shortcut. No bureau can collect all of that. His example is brilliant. A source of tin dries up somewhere in the world. The price of tin rises. And everywhere, millions of people start using less tin, without knowing why, without anyone explaining anything to them. The price carried the information to the entire planet. Hayek compares the price system to a telecommunications system. The price is the marble exchange rate. Hayek again, 1944, "The Road to Serfdom": that's the fourth problem, coercion. A central plan requires the plans of millions of people to be subordinated to a single one. And since people don't go along willingly, they have to be forced. One chapter of the book is titled "Why the Worst Get on Top": in a system where power decides everything, the people who love power most end up winning. The playground monitors. Which is exactly what Solzhenitsyn said: socialism cannot be implemented without the aid of coercion. It's not an accident along the way. It's mechanical. It's not that bad people took over a good system. It's that the system needs force to hold together. The Soviets themselves joked about it. An old joke goes like this: a nail factory is given a quota in number of nails, so it produces millions of tiny, useless nails. Gosplan switches the quota to weight, and the factory produces a single one-ton nail. It's a joke, but it's also the calculation problem summed up in two sentences. Now you're going to tell me: "Sure, but it's 2026. We have AI. A supercomputer can do the teacher's job." That's the fashionable argument, and it misses the point entirely. The problem was never computing power. The problem is that the information doesn't exist before the trade. Lily herself didn't know how much she cared about blue marbles until someone offered to swap. Preferences change every day. People lie to the planner to get more. And above all, no algorithm can plan for what hasn't been invented yet. Gosplan would never have ordered the iPhone. And no, Sweden and Denmark are not counterexamples. They're market economies, with private property, free prices and companies that go bankrupt, plus a big welfare state on top. You can debate the right level of taxes. But that's not the socialism Mises and Hayek were talking about: the state owning and planning production. So, for the 8-year-old, here's the summary. Nobody knows better than you what you want. Prices are how millions of people talk to each other without ever meeting. Get rid of prices and everyone goes deaf and blind. And when people refuse to follow the plan, there's only one option left: force them. And for the 80-year-old grandpa who remembers the Berlin Wall, I don't even need to explain. He saw both sides. Socialism doesn't fail because it was badly implemented. It fails because it asks one brain to do the work of millions of brains. And when it fails, all it has left is force.

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.

It's not jokes about gym shorts that the commissars don't like. It's jokes themselves. And people who tell jokes. And people who laugh at jokes. Because they divert energy from the Revolution. Which must absorb all the human energy there is. Always.

En France, on a inventé le Concorde. En 1969, il décollait et atteignait Mach 2 symbole de la grandeur gaullienne, conçu pour défier les Américains. En 1972, le TGV 001 battait le record mondial à turbine (318 km/h). En 1981, le TGV électrique reliait Paris à Lyon à 260 km/h. En 2007, il pulvérisait encore le record mondial sur rail : 574,8 km/h. Dans les années 70, le plan Messmer lançait le plus grand programme nucléaire civil de l’Histoire : 58 réacteurs, jusqu’à 70-80 % de notre électricité, une indépendance énergétique que le monde entier nous enviait. Dassault, Sud-Aviation, EDF, Framatome, la SNCF : nos ingénieurs étaient les meilleurs. On avait dix à vingt ans d’avance sur presque tout le monde. Puis 1981, Mitterrand. Nationalisations massives (banques, acier, chimie, électronique, aéronautique). Semaine de 39 heures. Lois Auroux. Charges sociales qui explosent. Syndicats tout-puissants. Fiscalité punitive. Droit du travail rigidifié. En moins de cinquante ans, le socialisme a transformé un pays d’ingénieurs conquérants en un pays de grèves, de délocalisations et de stagnation relative. L’industrie est passée d’environ 28 % du PIB à 11 %. Le Concorde a été abandonné. Notre nucléaire a été presque démantelé pendant des décennies faute de choix politique mortifère. Ce n’est pas le destin, c’est le prix d’une idéologie qui a préféré redistribuer et réglementer plutôt que construire et innover. A bon entendeur.

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.

Perhaps there are reasons of style policy involved, but reading New York Times coverage of Dr. El-Sayed, and remembering Times 2016 coverage of renowned brain surgeon Ben Carson makes you wonder: Did Carson ever get an MD?

@KDilanianMSNOW - basically- “For the umpteenth time I reported something that’s not true - and all of my ‘errors’ always go against one party… but kudos to me anyway for issuing a correction after my bosses told me to.”

Oh, “Donald Trump is taking Snap and Medicaid benefits from people all across the country.” Pritzker Yep! He is removing benefits from people who are NOT eligible! Pritzker mischaracterizes to the point that what he’s saying is a lie. Horrible man, horrible person.

A serious "Heterodox Academy" post, ripped directly, w. one paraphrase, from a mail by my buddy and writing partner Bob Maranto: ***Please do tell anyone who might be interested that we at the University of Arkansas have an amazing - 5th ranked - doctoral program in education policy...and are bringing in new students/junior scholars! If you are a heterodox sort of person, we are the best place to get a PhD and get an academic or academic adjacent job afterward. We have an 80% completion rate, a 100% placement rate, four years funding guaranteed, and lots of fun! Feel free to pass our one-pager along to prospects. Applications due in early January. Glad to answer any questions. Below are instructions for our annual town hall for prospective students coming up this THURSDAY night (10/15) 6-7:30 CENTRAL time, 7-8:30 EST. Bob Maranto 21st Century Chair in Leadership maranto@uark.edu Department of Education Reform, University of Arkansas Our virtual town hall to answer questions will be Join Zoom Meeting uark.zoom.us/j/88654506497?p… Meeting ID: 886 5450 6497

If you want to know why America is polarized, it’s the fault of the media. Yesterday, the Free Beacon, a conservative outlet, caught Abdul Sayed in a lie when Abdul denied his family had a connection to the Muslim Brotherhood. The FB showed a tweet by his own sister saying their mother belonged to the MB. The revelation that Abdul lied about his family ties to a radical Islamic terrorist group was ignored by NBC, ABC, CBS’s nightly news shows. The NYT and WP haven’t covered it. This should be a screaming front page story. Instead, the MSM runs cover for Abdul. The American people just want to know the truth about their politicians. Instead, the media are helping Abdul cover up the truth. Abdul has a lot to hide. It’s a tragedy the MSM is part of the team helping him hide it.

Update: @FDRLST’s @briannalyman2 asked CBS NY for comment. They confirmed having the full text exchange and choosing to leave “our body our choice” out of the story. (This means NYT likely got the same info from Jane Doe’s camp and made the same choice.) thefederalist.com/2026/10/09…

ANOTHER CORNELL SEVEN DROP 🚨 Defendant Winston Lee’s attorney, Teny Rose Geragos, is going after NY AG Letitia James AND Gov. Kathy Hochul. In a new filing, the defense alleges the two turned the criminal investigation into a “public political stunt” ahead of the election. Geragos wants James REMOVED, grand jurors questioned about potential bias, and communications between Hochul's and James's offices exposed. Full breakdown coming soon via @LAmag.

RT @emilysavesusa: Shits ridiculous. Fancy grocery store I go here at least 3x a week. They know they can come to nice areas. Rob us. Do w…

Wow. Read the article. (Link below.) What a stunning set of mistakes by ABC News. They confused the total size of an investment round in Anduril with a small level of secondary participation in that round by the venture capital fund in which Donald Trump Jr. is a partner (1789 Capital). Further, they created a false quid pro quo narrative that somehow that investment by 1789 Capital has directly resulted in DoW contracts for Anduril. Anduril has been around since 2017 and is a global leader in defense autonomous systems. It has been receiving significant defense contracts under both the Biden and Trump Administrations for quite some time now. As a Silicon Valley VC attorney myself, I assure you that the only way to make such mistakes is deliberate sloppiness through a prism of TDS hate. The facts here could have been easily checked both through public securities law filings and by just asking Anduril! A rational reporter with rational editors would never have made such grievous errors. Were they intentional errors? Perhaps. There is a reason I call them "journovermin."