Eric Roselles retweeted
I’ve said iI before. The reason Monty Python isn’t funny anymore is because we live in the world they created. The surrreal is the new normal.
Eric Roselles retweeted
The US is willing to betray its closest allies in Europe, a market of 450 million people and an economy worth nearly $20 trillion, just to cut shady, corrupt deals with Putin's Russia, an economy roughly the size of Italy's.
What an absolutely insane foreign policy.
Eric Roselles retweeted
Trotsky – The Myth.
Ask a Western leftist which communist he admires, and you often get the same answer: Trotsky. The intellectual. The orator. The true revolutionary, betrayed by Stalin. If only he had won…
Look at the young Trotsky in the picture: round glasses, wild hair, burning eyes. Many young leftists today would recognize themselves in him. The look hasn’t changed. Neither has the certainty.
So let’s look at what he did when he had power.
Born in 1879 in what is now southern Ukraine, Trotsky was a brilliant writer and a spellbinding speaker. In October 1917, he played a central role in organizing the Bolshevik seizure of power.
Then Lenin made him Commissar for War, and he built the Red Army, directing it from an armoured train that rushed from front to front.
Deserters were shot. Military discipline was enforced through executions. Blocking detachments were deployed to stop retreating soldiers, and former tsarist officers recruited into the Red Army were kept under surveillance by political commissars. Their families were sometimes held hostage to guarantee their loyalty.
Cruelty knows no limits when you have no doubts.
In 1920, the Red Army marched on Warsaw. It was stopped on the Vistula.
That same year, Trotsky published an entire book, Terrorism and Communism, explaining why revolutionary terror was necessary. He wanted labour militarized too: workers organized like soldiers, subjected to military discipline and compelled to serve the needs of the state.
In 1921, the sailors of Kronstadt – once hailed as the pride of the revolution – demanded free elections to the soviets. Trotsky supported the suppression of the revolt. Thousands were killed in the assault or executed afterwards.
Then he lost the power struggle to Stalin.
Expelled, exiled, forced abroad. From there, he wrote that the revolution had been betrayed – by Stalin, never by himself.
He ended up in Mexico City, where he stayed for a time with Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera. And so the Western romance took shape: the exiled prophet, the revolutionary betrayed, the road not taken.
In August 1940, a Soviet agent who had gained his confidence entered his study and struck him with an ice axe.
The machine Trotsky had helped build had come for him too. His killer later received the Soviet Union’s highest honour.
Trotsky was not the alternative to Stalin. He was the same machine – only with better prose. He never rejected the terror. He rejected losing control of it.
The "good communist" is always the one who lost.
Next: Stalin.
The Butchers – The Men Who Ran the Soviet Terror.
Moscow, a winter night in 1937. Long past midnight in the Kremlin, a man with a pipe sits at his desk under a lamp. In front of him, a stack of typed lists – names, one per line. He runs a blue pencil down the pages. A tick. A note in the margin. Sometimes a name crossed out, sometimes one added. The same pencil he uses to edit film scripts and poems.
His officials stay awake at home, next to the phone, in case he calls before dawn.
Hundreds of lists. Tens of thousands of names. On a single day, December 12, 1937, he and Molotov approved more than three thousand death sentences. Then, historians tell us, they went to watch a film.
But Stalin didn't invent the machine. He perfected it.
In August 1918, Lenin sent a telegram to his comrades: hang at least a hundred kulaks – hang them so that people see it for hundreds of kilometers around. Trotsky, the "good communist" of Western nostalgia, ordered the families of officers taken as hostages.
The founders gave the orders. Then the machine needed men – men who would build the apparatus, fill the camps, write the confessions and pull the triggers. And sooner or later, it devoured many of them.
1. Dzerzhinsky – the Founder. "Iron Felix," a Polish noble's son, who built the Cheka in 1917.
2. Trotsky – the Myth. The revolutionary Western intellectuals still romanticize, who wrote a whole book defending terror – until the machine he helped build killed him with an ice axe.
3. Stalin – the Editor. The man at the desk, with the blue pencil, long past midnight.
4. Yagoda – the Builder. The Gulag as an economy: canals dug by prisoners who died by the tens of thousands. Then shot by his own machine.
5. Vyshinsky – the Prosecutor. "Confession is the queen of evidence" – so he got confessions. "Shoot the mad dogs!" at the show trials, then the Soviet seat at the United Nations.
6. Yezhov – the Butcher. The Great Terror, the quotas, the Polish operation – then shot, and erased from the photographs.
7. Beria – the Strategist. Katyn, the atomic bomb, the deportations – and a predator. Shot by his own colleagues three months after Stalin's death.
8. Blokhin – the Executioner. In the spring of 1940, at Kalinin, he personally shot thousands of Polish prisoners over a few weeks, in a leather apron and cap.
9. Serov – the Hunter of Poland. He crushed the Home Army, lured the leaders of the Polish Underground State to "talks" and had them tried in Moscow. Then Hungary in 1956, and the first chairman of the KGB.
10. Andropov – the Modernizer. Dissidents sent to psychiatric hospitals instead of camps: softer, quieter – same goal: erasing people. The first secret police chief to rule the country.
11. Epilogue – The Chekists Never Left. From the KGB to the FSB to the Kremlin.
Why name them? Because their whole work was erasure – of people, of records, of memory. Remembering is the opposite of what they did.
And erasure didn't die with them. Today it rarely needs a bullet. It is called cancelling, deplatforming, debanking, lawfare. The inconvenient person isn't shot – he is removed: from his job, his bank account, his platform, the conversation. Yezhov needed a retoucher. Today a terms-of-service update does the job.
For Poles, these are not names from a history book. They are the names behind our grandparents' graves – and that is why we recognize their heirs.
Eric Roselles retweeted
The irony is that communists still imagine themselves leading a workers' revolution when their ideology demands that workers surrender control over their labor, their property, and ultimately their lives to the state.
They call capitalists the class enemy while demanding a political ruling class with powers no capitalist could ever legitimately exercise.
They aren't fighting to liberate workers from masters. They're fighting over who gets to be the master.
Eric Roselles retweeted
Lysander Spooner committed the unforgivable act of taking the state's own logic and following it to its conclusion: anarchism.
Born in 1808 in Athol, Massachusetts, Spooner spent his adult life attacking government monopoly with the fury of a man who had personally been robbed. In 1844 he launched the American Letter Mail Company to break the Post Office's stranglehold on mail delivery. His rates undercut the federal monopoly immediately. Within two years Congress passed legislation explicitly banning private competition, because the Post Office could not compete on price and quality and survive.
That episode tells you everything. When the state wins, it wins by outlawing the competition.
Spooner's 1870 work "No Treason: The Constitution of No Authority" demolished the consent doctrine underpinning every modern government. A contract signed by men long dead binds you to nothing. You never signed the Constitution. Your grandfather never signed it. The men who ratified it in 1788 had no authority to mortgage your liberty to a federal government in perpetuity. Spooner made this argument with the rigor of a lawyer, which he was, having studied law under John Davis and Charles Allen in Worcester.
His natural law theory drew property rights from human labor directly, bypassing the state entirely. Production precedes the state. Rights precede legislation. Governments confiscate rights.
Free market thinkers inherited Spooner's anti-monopoly logic and applied it to every sector the state subsequently captured.
Eric Roselles retweeted
Ro Khanna lists failing public schools, unaffordable housing, poor job opportunities, and government corruption, then somehow concludes that the problem is wealth inequality.
Not one of those grievances establishes that someone else's wealth caused it.
He doesn't question government spending, housing restrictions, regulations, or the policies that protect politically connected interests.
Instead, he proposes another New Deal, granting even more economic power to the very institution responsible for so many of these problems.
The irony is extraordinary: complaining about concentrated power while demanding more of it for government.
Young people deserve opportunity, not another generation of politicians convincing them that their future depends on controlling someone else's wealth.
Eric Roselles retweeted
This is what happens when men like Ro Khanna promise a generation of young people that everything will be free, and then reality catches up. The looters' money runs dry, there is nothing left to confiscate, and the youth demand more, exactly as they were taught. Khanna is condoning their actions right now. Khanna is a despicable morally corrupt man who is now trying to cash in on this tragedy to push his twisted political agenda.
Look at what he is praising. In France, 24 schools burned or ransacked, 6,100 arrests, hundreds injured, headteachers attacked. In Tirana, students set fires and stormed the Education Ministry. Even France's prime minister said burning down a high school does not improve it. Khanna calls it young people telling their governments they want a future.
And notice the schools. France spends more public money on education than almost any nation on earth, and the buildings are still crumbling. The welfare state did not fail these students for lack of funding. It failed because it was the welfare state.
He blames wealth in the hands of a few. The few did not torch the schools. The students did, after a lifetime of hearing their needs were a claim on everyone else.
"America's Next New Deal" is the same promise. Khanna wants the French result here.
From the high schools of France to the streets of Madrid to the universities of Tirana, young people are telling their governments the same thing: in an age of massive wealth inequality, they want a future they can believe in.
In France, students and teachers are asking for safe schools, enough teachers and smaller classes.
In Spain, for affordable rent and housing.
In Albania, for good jobs and an end to corruption.
@JDVance says this is what happens when a nation lets in too many immigrants from the global south.
He is not just morally wrong, but misreading the moment.
The is what happens when nations let wealth and power accumulate in the hands of a few.
This is what happens when young people lose hope in their future.
In America, let us listen to our young.
We need an economic and political transformation.
America's Next New Deal.
Eric Roselles retweeted
The welfare cliff does not trap poor families by accident.
Congress engineered a benefits system where earning one additional dollar can trigger simultaneous cuts to Medicaid, SNAP, housing vouchers, and childcare subsidies, collapsing your effective income by $5 or more. The government built a cage, and somehow we call it a safety net.
Take a single mother in Houston. She earns $22,000 annually and qualifies for $35,000 in combined federal and state benefits. She gets a raise to $25,000. That $3,000 in new wages costs her $18,000 in benefits. Her employer rewarded her productivity; the state punished her for it. No rational actor climbs that wall.
This is price control, but applied to human ambition. Every welfare threshold functions as a marginal tax rate that would make a Scandinavian bureaucrat jealous, often exceeding 80 or even 100 percent on the next dollar earned. This disincentive is the system's core mechanism.
Dependency concentrates political power. Families tethered to benefit rolls vote to protect those rolls, and the politicians who administer the programs vote to expand them. The cliff self-perpetuates. Free market economists have traced this perverse incentive structure for decades, but the administrative state expands regardless, because a bureaucracy that manages poverty also survives by it.
Genuine exit from poverty requires accumulating capital, building skills, and taking calculated risks. The welfare cliff taxes all three.
Eric Roselles retweeted
The socialists and communists love when Islamists burn down cities because their worldview aligns on the destruction of Western Capitalism.
Eric Roselles retweeted
If you think the violent, destructive riots currently going on in France and several other European countries are “student protests” about “classroom conditions” or “the cost of living”, you’re as stupid as the mainstream media thinks you are.
Eric Roselles retweeted
Let's call Ro Khanna what he is. A thief in a suit, condemning the men who earned their wealth for trying to keep his hands off it. His morality is corrupt, but it is the morality most men have been taught to accept. The time is now for men to start questioning that morality.
Start with his claim. Prop 42 does not ban billionaires from ever facing a tax. They still pay income tax, capital gains tax, property tax on real estate, and every tax already on the books. What it bans is a new tax on simply owning what you have, and any tax that reaches back to punish you for where you lived before it passed. That protects your 401(k) as much as any billionaire's.
And "I am with the unions"? He is with SEIU-United Healthcare Workers West, the union that sponsored Prop 40, whose members work in the healthcare system the money would fund. He is with his accomplices, standing beside the people who also want to rob these men.
Notice the premise underneath. He assumes the state has a claim on what you own simply because you own it. It has none. What a man earns is his by right, above all the men who created it from nothing, and defending it is self-defense.
Their work gave us the phones, the search engines, the electric cars, the rockets, the medicines, and millions of jobs. We all benefit enormously. But that benefit is not what makes their wealth theirs. Their right to it comes from having produced it, not from what it does for the rest of us.
If Khanna wants to improve the lives of ordinary men, he can get the hell out of the way and out of the pockets of the men producing the values we all depend on.
@GavinNewsom you are shilling for Prop 42, a billionaire backed initiative, banning billionaires from EVER facing a tax. Come on, man.
I am with the unions, @seiu_uwh & @SEIU1984, in backing a tax on billionaire so poor kids in California do not lose healthcare.
Eric Roselles retweeted
Civilization ends when the good people lack the moral clarity and self esteem to make the bad people pay for what they do.
Eric Roselles retweeted
How Your Country Will Rot When You Elect Socialists.
A step-by-step guide. But first, look north – and then across the ocean.
Picture a young couple in Toronto. Two good jobs, no hope of ever buying a home. When she needs surgery, they wait – months. In 2022, a veteran and Paralympic athlete told Canada’s parliament that when she asked the government for a wheelchair ramp, a caseworker offered her assisted dying instead. When truckers protested, the government froze their bank accounts – a court later called that unreasonable. Canada wanted to be America with better manners. It became America’s poorer, sadder cousin.
Now picture a baker in Lyon. He gets up at four to bake, and spends his Fridays filling in forms written in a language only the administration speaks. Every year a new rule, a new tax, a new inspection. His son, an engineer, left for London. Half of what the country produces passes through the state, and the baker can’t remember the last time it gave anything back. Not even security – his shop window was smashed last week and his daughter doesn’t go out after 6 PM anymore.
That is where the road leads. Here is how you get there – meet the Millers. They don’t exist, but you know them.
Step 1 – Kindness. The candidate promises free childcare, frozen rents, free buses. Mrs. Miller votes for him. Who votes against kindness?
Step 2 – The faces. Look at who gets appointed. The young, photogenic spokeswoman, chosen because she looks good in the campaign photo – diversity of faces, uniformity of thought. The kindly old man who worries so much about your goods that soon you have few of them left... And behind them, the people who actually decide: the committee – appointed, never elected – filled with activists, each one certain he knows how the Millers should live.
Step 3 – The bill. First, the rich were supposed to pay. The factory owner moved to Texas, taking two hundred jobs with him. Then the property tax went up. Then the city borrowed – and the Millers’ grandchildren inherited the debt before they were born.
Step 4 – The rules. Their son wanted to build a small house on the family lot. Two years of permits, reviews and fees later, he gave up and moved away. Meanwhile, the landlord with frozen rents stopped fixing anything, and nobody built new apartments – why would they? Homes disappeared.
Step 5 – The state grocery store. To fight "greedy supermarkets," the city opened its own. It can’t go bankrupt, so it has no reason to stock what you want. Its subsidized prices drove the family grocer out of business. Then the shelves began to empty. Poland had these stores for forty years. In the end, the shelves held mostly vinegar only.
Step 6 – Disorder. The pharmacy on Main Street put the toothpaste behind glass. Then it closed. Shoplifting under a certain amount had stopped being prosecuted, so it stopped being punished, so it stopped being rare. The honest customers paid for the thieves – and then lost the shop.
Step 7 – Speech. Their daughter learned at college which words get you reported. Mr. Miller posted a joke and lost his account. Nobody was arrested. Nobody needed to be.
Step 8 – The wolf ticket. Then Mr. Miller spoke up at a school board meeting. A week later, someone called his employer. Then his bank closed his account – "reputational risk." Under communism, Poland called it the wolf ticket: no job, no university place, no future. Nobody goes to prison. You just can’t live.
Step 9 – Dependency. More neighbors now live on a program. At election time, the candidate promises to "protect your benefits." Nobody votes against their own check. The machine has built its own voters.
Step 10 – Shame, and the empty cradle. The school taught the Miller grandchildren that their country was a crime scene to be ashamed of. Their son, in a rented apartment with no house in sight, decided one child was enough. His daughter, grown up, decided none was.
The family ceased to exist – another civilization took their place.
And all of it happens behind a smokescreen. Every week a new outrage, a new enemy, a new crisis. Conflict and chaos – nurtured, encouraged. Divide people by race, by sex, by class, and they will never unite against the bill. The news is always about the battle, never about the budget. "You never want a serious crisis to go to waste," a White House chief of staff once said. They never do. While you watch the fire, the machine grows: one more agency, one more rule, one more committee.
Nobody in this story needs to be a villain, at least theoretically… The Millers are good people. Every step felt like progress. Every step looked kind, or fair, or safe.
That is how a country rots: not in a revolution, but one kind policy at a time – each one sending its bill to someone who isn’t in the room.
Look north. Look at France. You still have the choice.
And I am writing to you from Poland.
Don’t be stupid. Do not vote for socialism.
It’s the civilization, stupid.🗽
France is living the slow version of socialism. We lived the full one.
Our parents queued for meat with ration cards. Our passports were kept at the police station. Our neighbors were recruited to report on us. And one December morning in 1981, we woke up to tanks in the streets. That is not a theory where I live. It is our life story.
It was all supposed to be the way it is being sold to you now: fairness, justice, the people against the rich. It never stays there. It becomes a machine – more rules, more managers, more lies, more fear. Nobody votes for the queue. You vote for the promise, and the queue comes with it.
We spent forty-five years trying to get out of what some of you are about to vote into. When we finally did, in 1989, Poland became one of the great success stories of Europe – not because someone redistributed better, but because people were finally freer to build.
So let me say it plainly, as a friend: don’t be stupid. Do not vote for socialism.
And understand what is at stake. It is not only your taxes or your rent. Socialism takes the whole thing, slowly: the truth, because it needs lies to run; freedom, because it needs fear to hold; the family, because it wants the state to be your parent; and the future, because it spends your children’s money.
It is the system of the lie.
In 1992, Bill Clinton’s campaign lived by one line: "It’s the economy, stupid."
They were wrong. It’s the civilization, stupid. 🇺🇸🗽
{This is what a monthly ration card for meat and butter looks like under socialism – now it would probably be electronic}
Eric Roselles retweeted
What a negative, defeatist view of humanity.
The assumption is that poor people can survive only through government redistribution, while wealthy people exist primarily as resources to be exploited for everyone else's benefit.
Where is the consideration for human ingenuity, productivity, independence, or the ability to create greater prosperity?
Of course, people can suffer when essential assistance disappears. But treating permanent dependence on government as the only alternative reveals how little faith you have in people's capacity to improve their circumstances.
Imagine viewing humanity primarily as two classes: those who must provide and those who cannot survive without being provided for.
Eric Roselles retweeted
Banks do not lend money they have on deposit; they create it out of thin air. When a commercial bank issues a mortgage, it creates a deposit and takes a lien on your house as collateral. The state plays the same game at scale: the Treasury borrows against your future tax payments, and the central bank monetizes the paper. Every unit of new money enters the economy as debt, and debt demands collateral.
Property is the collateral of choice. Roughly 80 percent of British bank lending flows into real estate, and the American picture looks no different. Fresh money hits the housing market first, before wages, before anyone further down the chain sees a penny.
That is why the median American house cost twice the median household income in 1970. The bricks are the same bricks. The money got worse, and it got worse in that market first, because that market is where money is born.
Politicians call this a housing crisis and prescribe subsidies, which means more credit, which means higher prices, which means another round of subsidies. The cycle feeds itself. Your savings cannot outrun an asset class that doubles as the banking system's printing template.
Stop blaming landlords. The lender who conjures the purchase price from nothing sets the bid. Force banks to lend actual savings instead of ledger entries, and housing reverts to what it remained for centuries under sound money: a depreciating consumer good.
Eric Roselles retweeted
Politicians will say this with a straight face, then advocate replacing private businesses with government monopolies.
The irony is that government monopolies have a long history of inefficiency, coercion, and limited accountability, while the supposed evils of private consolidation are often asserted rather than demonstrated.
So what if companies merge? What specific harm has occurred? Whose rights were violated? Where is the evidence that consumers are worse off?
Private businesses must still answer to customers, competition, and the possibility of failure. Government monopolies can compel payment, restrict alternatives, and protect themselves through legislation.
If concentrated power concerns you, perhaps start with the institution that can legally force everyone to obey it.
Eric Roselles retweeted
Politicians will say this with a straight face, then advocate replacing private businesses with government monopolies.
The irony is that government monopolies have a long history of inefficiency, coercion, and limited accountability, while the supposed evils of private consolidation are often asserted rather than demonstrated.
So what if companies merge? What specific harm has occurred? Whose rights were violated? Where is the evidence that consumers are worse off?
Private businesses must still answer to customers, competition, and the possibility of failure. Government monopolies can compel payment, restrict alternatives, and protect themselves through legislation.
If concentrated power concerns you, perhaps start with the institution that can legally force everyone to obey it.