Terence Donnelly

Once you see the world through this lens, a lot of things that looked random suddenly make sense. You understand why Macron recognized a Palestinian state at the UN. Not a state with borders it controls, a single government, or elections. A symbol. A gesture for domestic consumption, performed on the world stage. That's the politics of posture over reality, the obłuda I described earlier: what matters isn't what is true on the ground, it's the narrative you get to emit. You understand why Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the leader of France's hard left and a man trained in Trotskyist organizations in his youth, made Gaza the center of his politics and refused for months to call Hamas a terrorist organization. Look at the mechanism. He doesn't address French Muslims as individuals with their own jobs, families, ambitions and disagreements. He addresses them as a bloc. A mass to be mobilized. That's the collectivist reflex in its purest form: you don't speak to people, you herd categories. Yesterday the proletariat, today identity blocs. The individual disappears every time. You understand why Zohran Mamdani built his rise on the Democratic Socialists of America. The mayor of New York isn't just a progressive Democrat. He's a DSA member, and DSA doesn't hide what it is: an organization that openly calls itself socialist and treats the Democratic Party as a vehicle. His campaign promised a rent freeze, city-run grocery stores, free buses. Every one of those ideas has the same shape: the individual steps back, the city steps in. The price is set by the planner, the store is run by the planner, and voters are addressed as categories, tenants, riders, communities, rather than as free people who can build something of their own. And Mamdani didn't come out of nowhere. The same movement helped send Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to Congress in 2018, and Bernie Sanders spent decades making the word "socialist" respectable in American politics. Different faces, same software. The lie isn't that they hide their ideology. It's the promise attached to it: that you can freeze prices without killing supply, that the state can run what entrepreneurs run, that someone else will always pay. That promise has been tested on every continent. It has never been kept. And you understand the most important thing: collectivists need chaos. This isn't a metaphor. It's their own doctrine. Lenin's strategy in 1914 was to turn the war between nations into a civil war inside them. The Soviet Union spent decades arming and funding movements across the Middle East and pushed through the 1975 UN resolution equating Zionism with racism. The KGB had an entire doctrine, "active measures," dedicated to amplifying every division inside Western societies. A stable, prosperous, confident society is the collectivist's worst enemy. Chaos is his natural habitat. Why? Because chaos is the perfect justification. It justifies emergency powers. It justifies more state. It turns citizens into frightened masses looking for a shepherd. It replaces individual judgment with tribal loyalty. A society at peace with itself asks the planner: what do we need you for? Look at the two great conflicts of our time through this lens. Russia's war in Ukraine was launched by a former KGB officer who called the collapse of the Soviet Union the greatest catastrophe of the century. A man formed in the exact school that treated chaos as a weapon. He doesn't just wage war on Ukraine. He wages it on Western cohesion, feeding every division he can find in our elections, our streets, our feeds. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is the perfect fuel for Western politics. It splits every campus, every party, every city. It lets politicians like Mélenchon build an electoral base on permanent outrage. And for everyone who lives off that outrage, a real peace would be a disaster. Ask yourself honestly: who in our political class actually has an interest in this conflict ending? That's the pattern. The people who live off chaos never solve it. They manage it, they feed it, they posture around it. Because a solved problem is a lost lever. Freedom produces order from the bottom up: people who own things, build things, trade with each other and have something to lose. Collectivism produces disorder from the bottom up and then sells you order from the top down. Once you see it, you can't unsee it.

Right now in the US, part of the Democratic Party has decided to play the "socialist" card. Days before the midterms, DSA candidates are winning primaries and the word isn't taboo anymore. So today I'm going to show you why socialism never works. Not with ideology. With mechanics. Let's start with a dumb question. How much should a loaf of bread cost? You don't know. Neither do I. Nobody does. And that's exactly the point. The price of a loaf of bread is the instant synthesis of millions of pieces of information that no single person holds: the wheat harvest in Kansas, the price of gas for the oven, the baker's wages, the shop's rent, a drought in Argentina, a war on the Black Sea, whether people feel like bread this morning or a bagel. In 1920, Ludwig von Mises published a paper that should have ended the debate. His argument: without private ownership of the means of production, those means are never exchanged. No exchange, no prices. No prices, no economic calculation. The planner can't know whether a steel mill is worth more than a dam or a hospital. He's flying blind. He can't even tell that he's wrong. In 1945, Friedrich Hayek drove the point home in "The Use of Knowledge in Society." Useful knowledge is scattered across millions of minds. The baker knows things about his neighborhood that no ministry ever will. Prices are a telecommunications system: when tin becomes scarce somewhere in the world, its price rises, and millions of users economize on it without even knowing why. No committee, no ministry, no plan can replicate that. The market isn't an ideology. It's a distributed information processor. Then Milton Friedman picked up a simple pencil. The wood comes from Washington State, the graphite from South America, the rubber from Malaysia. Thousands of people who don't know each other, don't speak the same language, maybe even hate each other, cooperate to make something none of them could make alone. Nobody gave them orders. Prices were enough. Now run the experiment in reverse. Set the price yourself. Cap rents below market: landlords stop maintaining, stop building, housing disappears. Swedish economist Assar Lindbeck, a man of the left, said rent control is the most efficient technique known for destroying a city, short of bombing it. Cap the price of flour: shelves empty, lines form, the black market takes over. Venezuela, 2016. The country with the largest oil reserves on earth, and people standing in line for hours to eat. Nearly 8 million Venezuelans eventually fled. Socialism smashes the thermometer and then acts surprised that the fever keeps rising. And this is where it gets serious. Because when the plan fails, and it always fails, the planner has two options. Admit the plan is wrong. Or blame the people. Saboteurs, speculators, kulaks, enemies of the people. He always picks the second one. Hayek saw it in 1944 in The Road to Serfdom, in a chapter with a chilling title: Why the Worst Get on Top. A central plan requires central power. Central power attracts those who crave power. And when reality resists the plan, reality has to be broken. Which means people have to be broken. Stalin. He collectivizes the land. Output collapses. He blames the peasants and seizes the harvests. The Holodomor, 1932-1933: millions starved to death in Ukraine, the breadbasket of Europe. Add the Gulag, the purges, the deportations. Mao. The Great Leap Forward, 1958-1962. Backyard furnaces producing useless steel, insane grain quotas, local officials inflating numbers to avoid punishment, and the state requisitioning food based on those fake numbers. The result: the worst famine in human history. Estimates range from 30 to 45 million dead. Pol Pot. The Khmer Rouge abolish money, markets, property, and empty the cities. The dream of total planning, carried all the way. In four years, roughly one in four Cambodians dies. Hitler. He sent communists to the camps, but his party called itself National Socialist and the economy answered to the plan and the party. Companies stayed private on paper, but the state decided what to produce, at what price, and for whom. Hayek dedicated The Road to Serfdom "to the socialists of all parties" precisely because he saw the same root: the idea that the state must steer society toward a collective goal, and the individual must step aside. Different eras. Different continents. Different cultures. Same mechanism. Same ending. This isn't a bug. It's a feature of the system. Remove prices and you remove information. Remove information and you remove the ability to correct. And when you can no longer correct through prices, you correct through force. So let me say it plainly. Socialism always starts nice. A rent freeze. Public grocery stores. Make "the rich" pay. Nobody promises the Gulag on day one. But if America truly goes down this road, the rest of the story is already written. The plan will fail. There will need to be culprits. There will need to be power to punish them. And a socialist government holding the American state apparatus, its surveillance capabilities, its technology, its military, wouldn't be a regional tragedy. It could be the greatest tragedy in history. The 20th century paid for this lesson with tens of millions of lives. We don't get to forget it in one generation. Prices aren't the enemy of the people. Prices are the voice of the people.

It's been months that I keep saying Hitler was far left. Every time, thousands of clowns show up in my replies to give me history lessons. So I made a video to answer all these low IQ takes at once. Topic closed. Next.

🚨 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.