Translated from French
The post that inspired my text on wokism, which racked up 80 million views and was picked up by dozens of media outlets around the world—strangely, very few in France—didn’t come out of nowhere.
It came from a conversation with a French intellectual, a former minister, extremely intelligent.
The question was simple.
How could the left have won for seventy years in the West, when we already knew socialism was a disaster?
His answer stopped me cold.
“It’s very simple. They put Hitler on the far right.”
From there, the trap snaps shut on its own.
Anyone trying to sell liberalism and freedom ends up, by design, in the opposite camp. And the opposite camp is Nazism.
That’s why they call Elon Musk a Nazi.
That’s why they stick Javier Milei on the far right.
That’s why a Sarah Knafo gets labeled a xenophobe and a racist. They haven’t dared “Nazi” yet: she’s Jewish. If she weren’t, it’d already be done.
The sleight of hand is old. We’ve redrawn the map. We slapped the word “right” on the corpse of the 20th century, then declared that anything non-collectivist brushes up against that corpse.
That’s why Milei said Hitler was a socialist. That Nazism was national socialism. That fascism, too, is a socialism: “everything in the State, nothing outside the State.”
That’s why the AfD leader is now saying out loud that Hitler ran a left-wing policy. That he wasn’t a liberal. That he was the State against the individual.
The truth is starting to break through everywhere.
Not because some trend has shifted. Because the mental framework that’s held since 1945 is cracking. You can’t shut down the question anymore by yelling “Nazi.”
This empire of lies is collapsing. And what will bring it down isn’t clan infighting, it’s restoring the vocabulary.
The debts of Western countries aren’t some bump in the road. They’re the bill for decades of policies that promise protection and deliver dependency.
Wokism isn’t the heart of the system. It’s the froth. The last layer of moral justification for a collectivism running on fumes.
The real divide isn’t left/right anymore, the inheritance from 1945.
It’s Control versus Freedom.
On one side, all of collectivism, whatever the name: socialism, national socialism, central planning, state wokism.
On the other, those who want to let people build.
Our enemies aren’t bad people. They’re bad mental maps. Reprogramming is possible.
It’s time to reclaim the words.
And go build.
https://x.com/brivael/status/2102718664805888013?s=20
Original post:
Translated from French
I want to offer my apologies, on behalf of the French, for having given birth to French Theory (which in turn gave birth to the worst of all ideological monstrosities: wokism).
We gave the world Descartes, Pascal, Tocqueville. And then, in the intellectual ruins of post-1968, we gave Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze. Three brilliant men who forged, in the elegance of our language, the ideological weapon that today paralyzes the West.
We must understand what they did. Foucault taught that truth does not exist, that there are only power relations disguised as knowledge. That science, reason, justice, the medical institution, the school, the prison, sexuality—everything is just a staging of domination. Derrida taught that texts have no stable meaning, that every signifier slips away, that every reading is a betrayal, that the author is dead and the reader reigns supreme. Deleuze taught that we should prefer the rhizome to the tree, the nomad to the sedentary, desire to the law, becoming to being, difference to identity.
Taken individually, these are debatable theses. Combined, exported, and popularized, they form a system. And that system is a poison.
For here's what happened. These texts, unreadable in France, crossed the Atlantic. The departments of Yale, Berkeley, and Columbia absorbed them in the 1980s. They found fertile ground there that didn't exist among us: American Puritanism, its racial guilt, its obsession with identity. French Theory married that substrate, and the child of that union is called wokism.
Judith Butler reads Foucault and invents performative gender. Edward Said reads Foucault and invents academic postcolonialism. Kimberlé Crenshaw inherits the framework and invents intersectionality. At every step, the matrix is French: there is no truth, there is only power, so every hierarchy is suspect, every institution is oppressive, every norm is violence, every identity is constructed and thus negotiable, every majority is guilty.
That's how three Parisian philosophers, who probably never imagined their practical consequences, provided the operating software to an entire generation of activists, university bureaucrats, HR managers, journalists, and legislators. That's how we ended up with a civilization that no longer knows how to say whether a woman is a woman, whether its own history deserves to be defended, whether merit exists, whether truth can be distinguished from opinion.
It's shit for one simple reason, and it must be stated calmly. A civilization stands on three pillars: the belief that there exists a truth accessible to reason, the belief that there exists a good distinct from evil, the belief that there exists a heritage to be transmitted. French Theory set out to dynamite all three. Not out of malice. Out of intellectual play, fascination with suspicion, hatred of the bourgeoisie that had nurtured them. But the result is there. An entire generation learned to deconstruct and never learned to build. An entire generation knows how to suspect and no longer knows how to admire. An entire generation sees power everywhere and beauty nowhere.
I apologize because we French bear a particular responsibility. It's our language, our universities, our publishers, our prestige that gave this nihilism its chic packaging. Without the legitimacy of the Sorbonne and Vincennes, these ideas would never have crossed the ocean. We exported doubt like others export weapons.
What is being built now, in Silicon Valley, in AI labs, in startups, in workshops, in all the places where people still make things instead of deconstructing them—that's the response. A civilization is rebuilt by builders, not by commentators. By those who believe that truth exists and is worth devoting oneself to. By those who embrace a hierarchy of the beautiful, the true, the good, and who are not ashamed to pass it on.
So, sorry. And back to work.
_____
Apparently re-written:
Translated from French
Today I’m going to explain to you how the international left pulled off the greatest heist in human history.
And how it all hinges on a single word.
“Far right.”
It’s not an insult. It’s an electric fence. Once planted around Hitler’s corpse, it sterilized for seventy years the only camp truly capable of resisting him: the one that refuses to let the State decide in place of the people.
The post that inspired my text on wokism—80 million views, picked up everywhere except, strangely, in France—didn’t come out of nowhere. It came from a conversation with a French intellectual, former minister, extremely intelligent. The question was simple. How was the left able to win for seventy years in the West, when we already knew socialism was a disaster?
His answer stopped me cold.
“It’s very simple. They put Hitler on the far right.”
From there, the trap snaps shut on its own.
Anyone who wants to sell liberalism and freedom ends up, by design, in the opposing camp. And the opposing camp is Nazism. Elon Musk is a Nazi. Milei is far right. Sarah Knafo is xenophobic. They haven’t dared “Nazi” yet: she’s Jewish. If she weren’t, it’d already be done.
The sleight of hand is old. We redrew the map. We stuck the word “right” on the corpse of the 20th century. Then we declared that anything non-collectivist brushed up against that corpse.
It took time to set this up. It didn’t fall from the sky in 1945.
First, the Frankfurt School. Horkheimer, Adorno, Marcuse. Brilliant Marxists who saw, as early as the 1930s, that revolution through the factory had failed in the West. So they shifted the front line. No more proletarian against bourgeois. Culture against civilization. The family, school, reason, norms, heritage: everything becomes “domination.” It’s no longer an economic theory. It’s a suspicion machine. Marcuse would turn it, in the 1960s, into the software of the New Left. The “long march through the institutions” isn’t a legend. It’s an assumed strategy: take the university, the press, the school, the bureaucracy, and install suspicion as a virtue.
May ’68 isn’t a student party. It’s the moment this software enters the elites. In France, it then marries up with Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze. I’ve talked about it before. We exported doubt like others export weapons. An entire generation learned to deconstruct and never learned to build.
The Club of Rome arrives right after, in 1968, and publishes *The Limits to Growth* in 1972. New layer. After cultural suspicion, moral rationing. Growth becomes guilty. Abundance becomes violence. The planner regains a “scientific” justification for telling people what they no longer have the right to want. Degrowth wasn’t born in a forest. It was born in a report. And it gave collectivism its last virtue: protecting the planet by administering life.
There remains the most important lock. The historians.
Not “all evil.” Many are honest, scholarly, useful. But the center of gravity in their profession, after 1945, shifted left. Anti-fascism became the moral sesame of the Western university. Sticking Hitler on the far right isn’t just a thesis. It’s a career. It’s protection. It’s the right to keep teaching collectivism after Auschwitz, after the Gulag, after Mao, after Pol Pot, by pretending the absolute evil lived on “the other side.”
The incentive is crystal clear. If Hitler is right-wing, socialism remains a generous idea poorly applied. If Hitler is a racial socialist—planning, price and wage controls, nationalizations, total State, scapegoat, “everything in the State, nothing outside the State”—then the 20th century is no longer a duel between progressive Good and reactionary Evil. It’s a civil war within collectivism. National or international. Racial or class-based. Same method. Same result: the State deciding who deserves to live.
That sentence couldn’t be allowed to circulate. So we made it unsayable. We stuck the word “right” on the corpse. And we sterilized the camp of freedom. For seventy years, wanting less State, more property, more individual responsibility meant “brushing up against.” Brushing up against Hitler. Brushing up against 1933. Brushing up against the monster.
Everything we’ve observed since flows from this map.
Wokism isn’t the heart of the system. It’s the froth. The last layer of moral justification for a collectivism running out of steam. Western debts aren’t an accident. They’re the bill from decades of policies that promise protection and deliver dependence. Calling Milei far right, Musk a Nazi, the AfD a brown resurgence: that’s not analysis. It’s the survival reflex of a mental map that’s cracking.
Because it is cracking. Not because a fad changed. Because you can no longer ban the question by shouting “Nazi.” Milei says it out loud: Hitler was a socialist. The AfD now says it in Germany, in the very land of the taboo. X has broken the local narrative monopoly. An argument that took ten years to cross a faculty now circles the world in ten minutes, and gets publicly annotated.
They held for seventy years. Now it’s blowing up everywhere.
They have two ways out.
The first is total war as a smokescreen. Re-gluing the “Good” camp through existential urgency. When the vocabulary collapses, the last lever is fear. I’m frightened enough to see NATO doing propaganda with white faces to go “save a Europe in danger.” Not because Europe doesn’t deserve defending. It does. But because I recognize the ploy: we pull out the 1945 map, we designate a monster, and we shove everyone asking for accountability—on debt, borders, school, energy, freedom of speech—into the camp of treason. In this logic, war no longer needs to be won to be useful. It just needs to be moral enough to ban the conversation.
The second way out is the collapse of the frame.
X is one vector. Not a party. A public square where the word “Nazi” wears out from being stuck on everything that doesn’t obey. Musk broke the media bottleneck. Milei proved you could win an election by saying socialism is a poverty machine, including in its national version. The AfD, whatever one thinks of this or that line, dared a sentence Germany had banned for three generations: Hitler ran a left-wing policy. He wasn’t a liberal. He was the State against the person.
This isn’t a fad. It’s the restoration of vocabulary.
The real divide is no longer left/right inherited from 1945.
It’s Control versus Freedom.
On one side, all of collectivism, whatever the name: socialism, national socialism, planning, state wokism, administered degrowth. On the other, those who want to let people build.
Our enemies aren’t bad people. They’re bad mental maps. Conversion is possible. Many of those shouting “far right” today simply inherited a rigged compass in school. We don’t hate them. We’re giving them back their words.
It’s time.
And to go build.
