I asked 30 Japanese 12-year-olds one question. "What do you think of when you hear 'America'?" (My nephew's teacher let me visit his class. I was not prepared.) "Hamburgers the size of my head." "Everything is big. Even the milk." "Cowboys." Then a boy asked me, "Do cowboys still exist?" I said yes. The whole class cheered. "They went to the moon." I told them only Americans have ever walked on it. The room went completely silent. Respect. "The best baseball in the world. Even Ohtani had to go there." "Superheroes. They all live in New York." Then a quiet girl in the back raised her hand. "My grandma says when the tsunami came, American soldiers came to help her town. She still has a photo with them on her fridge." Nobody said anything for a while. Then the teacher asked, "Who wants to go to America someday?" Every hand went up. Including the teacher's.

They really don’t

J’ai entendu dire que la France était finie, qu’il était trop tard pour la sauver. Mais la France est toujours aussi belle, enviable même. Sa grandeur n’a pas disparu, elle ne demande qu’à renaître. Nous avons surmonté en un an un problème cent fois plus grave, sans avoir les moyens dont dispose la France. La France pourrait y arriver en une semaine.

My friends, here's the funny thing: we think we're living in a complex system. They talk to us about multiple crises, multifactorial causes, endless "context." But step back, and the fight we're watching today is almost biblical in its simplicity. It's the eternal fight. Freedom versus control. The individual versus the mass. The one who creates versus the one who confiscates. Capitalism versus communism. And today, communism is infecting the West. Deeper in some countries than others, but everywhere. Not with tanks. Not with gulags. In a far more insidious way. Antonio Gramsci understood this back in the 1930s, from a prison cell in Mussolini's Italy. The revolution had failed in the West because the people didn't want it. So he changed strategy: stop trying to seize power by force, and conquer the culture instead. Win the schools, the universities, the press, the arts. Impose your words, your assumptions, your morality. Make your ideas the "common sense" of the age. Once the culture is conquered, political power falls on its own, like ripe fruit. In 1967, Rudi Dutschke gave it a slogan: the long march through the institutions. Fifty years later, look at the result. The universities. The legacy media. The schools. The senior civil service. The NGOs. HR departments. A huge share of the institutions that govern our lives has been captured. And yet the peoples never wanted this. They were never asked. And the one time they were asked, they said no. That is the paradox of our time: entire nations governed by ideas their own peoples reject. So look at the map. France. The United Kingdom. Germany. Sweden. Belgium. The Netherlands. Ireland. Canada. Different languages, different histories, different voters. The same chaos. The same paralysis. The same ruling class reciting the same catechism. So stop looking for explanations everywhere. Stop looking for scapegoats. It's not the Jews' fault. It's not the boomers' fault. It's not the fault of the Muslim neighbor who works and raises his kids in peace. It's not the fault of the twenty-year-old who was never taught anything else. Yes, some of them may be caught up in the effects of this system. Some may have benefited from it, voted for it, repeated its slogans. But never focus on the effects. Focus on the root cause. Attack the root cause, and the effects disappear on their own. You don't cure a fever by fighting the thermometer. You cure it by killing the infection. And the scapegoat is exactly the trap Marxism sets for us. Divide, designate a culprit, turn people against each other, so that everyone fights the symptoms and nobody touches the disease. Let's not hand them that gift. The enemy is ideas. Marxism and all its offspring: class struggle turned into identity struggle, self-hatred turned into virtue, guilt turned into a political program. And the people who carry those ideas into power, we beat them on the very ground where they won: at the ballot box, in the institutions, in the culture. With votes, with arguments, with work. We take back what they took, institution by institution, exactly the way they did it. In 1848, Marx ended his Manifesto with a call: "Workers of the world, unite!" Today, I answer him: Peoples of the West, unite. Not against a people. Not against a religion. Against an idea that has already left tens of millions dead and now wants to finish the job on our soul. And when we win, get ready. Because what's waiting on the other side is an abundance the West has never known. AI, energy, science: we hold the most powerful tools in human history. The only thing holding us back is this mind virus that teaches us to be ashamed of succeeding. The day it falls, everything comes back. The return of merit. The return of courage. The return of hierarchy, the kind that rewards excellence instead of punishing it. The return of a society where the goal is no longer to complain about each other, but to impress each other. We will build beautiful things again. The cathedrals of our time. Cities people actually want to live in. Works worth passing down. We will throw immense celebrations again, the celebrations of proud, joyful, living peoples who no longer need to apologize for existing. But all of it goes through one thing: killing the disease that's eating us alive. Mental communism. The woke mind virus. Self-hatred dressed up as virtue. Our ancestors built Athens, Rome, Chartres, the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution, the conquest of space. We will not be the generation that let it all go. We will be the generation that took it all back.