Translated from French
For a long time, I didn't really have a camp.
I had an intuition, that's all. When I listened to the left, I often had the feeling that they were lying to me. When I listened to the right, it rang truer. But I had never seriously delved into the subject. I wasn't particularly enlightened. I was focused on something else: building.
And above all, I hardly knew anyone in the camp that's labeled as untouchable. I'd already been told who they were: the far right, the reactionaries, the heirs of fascism. Bitter people, closed-off, hateful. Without fully believing it, I'd never taken the time to go check for myself.
These past few months, that's changed. I've met a ton of these people. French, Americans. Entrepreneurs, intellectuals, journalists, ordinary folks.
And I have to be honest with you: nothing matched the portrait.
I found people with a disarming kindness. Who take the time. Who listen all the way through before responding.
People often far more open-minded than those who caricature them. Capable of saying "you might be right" or "I don't know."
People with surprisingly little resentment, even though they'd have every reason for it given how they're talked about.
And above all, people who've grasped the scale of the problem, while so many still refuse to face it head-on.
Péguy wrote a line I reread often: "We must always say what we see. Above all, we must always—which is more difficult—see what we see."
That's exactly it. I didn't even have to change my mind: my intuition was confirmed. The hardest part was accepting the scale of what was right in front of me.
Because in the camp that proclaims itself benevolent, I've often found the opposite of what it claims. Resentment. Jealousy toward those who succeed. Constant suspicion. The need to point fingers at a culprit. And a growing disconnect from reality, from what ordinary people live through, from plain common sense.
Tocqueville sensed it nearly two centuries ago. Observing democratic America, he wrote: "I know of no country where, in general, there reigns less independence of mind and true freedom of discussion." He wasn't talking about a dictatorship. He was talking about a soft, invisible pressure that pushes everyone to self-censor out of fear of exclusion. We're there.
Elon Musk gave a name to this mechanism: the "woke mind virus." You can find the phrase brutal. But it describes something real. An ideology that spreads less through conviction than through fear. That doesn't debate, but disqualifies. That judges people by their affiliation rather than their actions. It's no coincidence he bought Twitter presenting himself as a "free speech absolutist." When you can't speak anymore, you end up not thinking anymore.
And it's no coincidence either that so many of those resisting this mindset are entrepreneurs.
When you build a company, reality catches up with you every day. A product works or it doesn't. A client pays or they don't. You can't lie to yourself for long. Those who build develop an almost physical relationship to the truth, because every illusion costs cash.
An ideology that never confronts reality, on the other hand, can drift indefinitely. It doesn't have to answer to anyone.
Those who follow the media without critical distance don't realize it. Not out of stupidity. Out of comfort. I myself settled for an intuition for years without going to see for myself.
But once you've seen, you can't pretend you haven't.
They sold me monsters. I found people who build, who doubt, who listen, who love their country without hating anyone.
The hate wasn't where they'd told me to look for it.
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