Steve Fedorko

A few years ago, Peter Thiel wrote to Mark Zuckerberg: 70% of Millennials say they're pro-socialist. His conclusion: stop calling them stupid, and try to understand why. His explanation was economic. Too much student debt, unaffordable housing, no capital. When you own nothing, you have no reason to defend the system. He's right. But that's only half the story. The other half is school. School destroys critical thinking. Methodically. For fifteen years. You learn to recite instead of question. To find the expected answer instead of the true one. To obey authority instead of reasoning for yourself. When you've spent your youth outsourcing your thinking to an institution, it feels natural to outsource your life to an even bigger one: the State. That's why so many end up Marxist. Not by conviction. By conditioning. And that conditioning is about to become a handicap. We're entering a world where AI does everything conformist, predictable and standardized better than we do. The only value left is thinking differently. To create value tomorrow, you'll need to be neurodivergent. And someone who thinks differently and reasons from first principles almost always ends up seeing the same thing: the State, as it works today, destroys more value than it creates. It's no accident that Alex Karp created a fellowship at Palantir dedicated to neurodivergent talent. To him, in the age of AI, there are only two ways to have a future: master a real trade, or be neurodivergent. But I'll go further than Karp. I believe neurodivergence isn't the exception. It's the natural state of the human mind. Look at a four-year-old. They ask hundreds of questions a day. They take everything apart. They refuse any rule they don't understand. They think from first principles without even knowing it's a thing. Then they go to school. And we spend fifteen years normalizing them. School doesn't shape minds. It sands them down. The future belongs to those who survived the sanding.

Recently I told you there are two kinds of people in this system: cynics and believers. Ursula von der Leyen, I put her with the believers. And that's exactly why you need to understand how the machine works. Because cynics are very rare. Soros, I put him in that category: he knows exactly what he's doing, and he has never hidden it. He read Popper, he has a theory of change, and he understood early on something the right still hasn't figured out: you don't change a society by winning an election. You change it by funding, for thirty years, the people who will write the reports, train the lawyers, and advise whoever wins the elections. $24 billion spent by Open Society since its creation. More than 50,000 grants. In 2015, he wrote in plain text that the EU must accept at least a million asylum seekers a year, and mobilize NGOs, churches and businesses to take them in. All of it is public. That's the most impressive part. Here's how the system got hacked, in three steps. Step one: selection. Nobody recruits idiots. No need. The money does the selecting on its own. A grant never goes to the person who doubts. It goes to the person who already believes. Repeat that over thirty years and tens of thousands of grants, and you get an entire ecosystem where the free thinker was filtered out at the door. He wasn't fired. He just never got funded. What's left: people who are sincere, credentialed, conformist, and whose paycheck depends on the cause. Step two: funding manufactures conviction. Try explaining something to someone whose paycheck depends on not getting it. The NGO produces a report. The report gets cited by an expert. The expert testifies before the Commission. The Commission turns it into a directive. And the NGO guy ends up in a cabinet, then goes back to a foundation. Everyone knows each other, cites each other, funds each other. It's an echo chamber with a budget. Step three: emotion. You never debate results. You debate intentions. One photo beats a thousand statistics. Every objection backed by numbers becomes a moral failing. And when reality contradicts the narrative, the dissonance always gets resolved the same way: "It's a necessary evil." "It's collateral damage." "The real problem is elsewhere." Immigration is never a problem. The problem is your perception. The result: the system doesn't produce corrupt people. It produces NPCs. People reciting a script while convinced they wrote it themselves. Ursula doesn't need to be bought. She has spent her entire career in an environment where every expert, every report, every "civil society" group tells her the same thing. She is convinced she's on the side of good. And that's what makes her immune to facts. And the best part of the story: Soros isn't even the system's biggest funder anymore. You are. Between 2021 and 2023, €7.4 billion in EU funds went to more than 12,000 NGOs. The European Court of Auditors itself says it can't get a reliable picture of who gets what. The hack worked so well that the machine now runs on your taxes. This is not a conspiracy. A conspiracy hides. Here, the amounts are public, the op-eds are public, the recipients are public. It's an incentive system. And you don't fight an incentive system by insulting the believers. You fight it by cutting off the tap and demanding total transparency: who funds whom, to say what. As long as it stays opaque, they'll keep shipping believers at scale.