Angela Davis is the most famous prison abolitionist of the last fifty years.

She built her name on one rule: no one should be caged for their beliefs.

Then political prisoners in communist regimes wrote to her. 🧵 She made political imprisonment her life's work. She wrote "Are Prisons Obsolete?" She co-founded Critical Resistance in 1997. She edited "If They Come in the Morning" in 1971.

She is the person who put the phrase "prison abolition" into serious American political conversation.

Three iron cages hang from a church tower in the German city of Münster. They have been there for almost 500 years.

Inside them, once, were the bodies of men who tried to build heaven on earth by abolishing private property.

Münster wants its people to know what put them there. 🧵 In February 1534, a group of radical Anabaptists won the city council elections in Münster. Within weeks they had expelled every neighbor who refused rebaptism, redistributed the empty houses, and welcomed a Dutch baker named Jan Matthys who claimed to be the prophet Enoch.

The New Jerusalem had begun. Münster's ruler, Prince-Bishop Franz von Waldeck, had been driven out with the rest. He raised an army and laid siege to take his capital back.

In 1825, a rich Welsh industrialist bought an entire American town to prove that socialism could work.

He had the money, the buildings, the theory, and hundreds of eager followers waiting to move in.

Two years later, it was over. 🧵 Robert Owen paid around $150,000 for the town of Harmonie, Indiana. He got 20,000 acres, more than 160 buildings, working mills, and farms already producing food.

He renamed it New Harmony. Close to a thousand people arrived in the first year.

Almost every major revolution in modern history followed the same script: overthrow one power, install another.

France swapped the King for Robespierre, then for Napoleon.

Russia swapped the Czar for Lenin, then for Stalin.

Cuba swapped Batista for Castro.

Only one revolution broke the script. The American one, in 1776. 🧵 In every other case, the logic of power survives the change of regime. A new sovereign takes the throne.

Rights remain concessions, granted by whoever holds power, revocable when politically inconvenient.

In 1960, newly independent African leaders had a choice: capitalism or socialism.

Almost all of them picked socialism.

A Ghanaian economist named George Ayittey spent forty years documenting what happened next.

His findings are in print, and almost nobody outside Africa wants to hear them. 🧵 The reasoning in 1960 looked airtight.

Colonialism had been run by Western capitalists. So capitalism was a tool of oppression. Socialism, its opposite, would be the path to liberation.

Kwame Nkrumah in Ghana, Julius Nyerere in Tanzania, Sékou Touré in Guinea, Mengistu Haile Mariam in Ethiopia, and Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe all reached the same conclusion through the same logic.

Thomas Jefferson wrote "all men are created equal" while owning more than 600 human beings over his lifetime.

The contradiction is real. But the sentence he wrote kept working long after he stopped. Abolitionists used it. Lincoln used it. The civil rights movement used it.

Here is the whole, contradictory story of the man who wrote it. 🧵 America is not a nation in the ordinary sense. It is not built on a shared ethnicity or a common ancestry.

It is built on a claim about human nature: that every person has rights that exist before any government, and that government exists to protect those rights.

Jefferson wrote that claim, even though he failed to live by it.

In July 1985, over a billion people watched Live Aid.

Months earlier, Michael Jackson and Lionel Richie had written "We Are the World." All of it was a response to a famine in Ethiopia.

Almost nobody remembers who actually caused the famine. 🧵 What the world saw: on October 23, 1984, the BBC aired a report by correspondent Michael Buerk with footage filmed in the Korem refugee camp by Kenyan photographer Mohamed Amin.

Within weeks, 425 television stations had rebroadcast those images of starving children to roughly 470 million viewers worldwide.

The Nazis claimed racial science was settled.

The Soviets claimed Marxism was the science of history.

An Austrian refugee debunked both with one word. 🧵 Born in Vienna in 1902, Karl Popper was arguably the most important philosopher of science of the twentieth century.

Trained in mathematics, physics, and psychology, by his early thirties he was already in conversation with the leading scientific minds of Europe, including Albert Einstein.

He spent his life trying to answer one question with the precision of a mathematician: how do we know what we know? That question turned out to be the most politically dangerous question of the twentieth century.

Modern economics built elaborate mathematical models of how markets work.

Israel Kirzner spent six decades pointing out the same problem with every one of them: the agent that actually makes markets work does not appear in any of them. 🧵 In 1973, Kirzner published "Competition and Entrepreneurship" at the University of Chicago Press. He had earned his PhD at NYU in 1957 under Ludwig von Mises.

The book made a claim mainstream economists found uncomfortable.

For decades, American politicians cited Sweden as proof that democratic socialism works.

The Wall Street Journal sent a reporter there in 2026 to see for themselves.

The Sweden they found is not the country Bernie Sanders describes on the debate stage. 🧵 The mythical Sweden has high taxes, generous welfare, a big state, and equality enforced by government.

Swedish social spending in 2026 is 23.7% of GDP. That puts Sweden below France, Finland, Germany, Belgium, Italy, Austria, and Denmark. It sits at roughly American levels.

In 1992, a 32-year-old historian became Prime Minister of Estonia.

He had read exactly one book on economics: Milton Friedman's Free to Choose.

He used it as a policy manual. Western advisors and Estonian economists told him it would fail. 🧵 After gaining independence from Soviet Union in 1991, Estonia had a destroyed economy.

Inflation over 1,000%. Output falling 30% a year. Massive shortages of fuel and food. 95% of the economy state-owned. 92% of trade locked to a Russia that had stopped paying.

The standard recipe for transition economies was gradualism. Step by step. Protect vulnerable sectors. Let the market adjust slowly.

Marxism's most devastating critic wasn't Hayek, Mises, or any Austrian.

It was Marx himself.

Volume III of Capital, published after his death, destroyed the theory Volume I had built. 🧵 Marx published Volume I of Capital in 1867.

He told the world that a commodity's value comes from the labor time used to produce it, but he admitted in the same book that real prices don't behave that way. He promised the answer was coming in Volume III.

Every American student learns the same story about Standard Oil:

Rockefeller as the villain of unregulated capitalism, Standard Oil as proof that free markets inevitably produce monopolies that crush consumers.

A historian went to the primary records and found the opposite. 🧵 In "The Myth of the Robber Barons," Burton Folsom builds the Standard Oil case around one number: between 1870 and 1911, the price of kerosene fell from 26 cents a gallon to under 8 cents. Standard Oil dominated the kerosene market and the price to consumers fell by roughly 70 percent over those forty years.

A predatory monopolist raises prices once it owns the market. Rockefeller kept cutting them.

In 1994, on live BBC television, Michael Ignatieff asked the historian Eric Hobsbawm a direct question: if communism had produced the society it promised, would 20 million deaths have been worth it?

Hobsbawm answered yes.

He kept every honor he had, and collected more. 🧵 Ignatieff gave him the chance to walk it back.

"Even knowing what we know now, you'd still say it was worth it?" Hobsbawm confirmed. The exchange was broadcast, transcribed, and noted in the major obituaries. Nobody has ever claimed it was taken out of context.

He was one of the Soviet Union's most valuable agents inside the U.S. government.

His network reached into the State Department, Treasury, and the Bureau of Standards.

He walked away from all of it because of an ear. 🧵 In 1925, Whittaker Chambers joined the American Communist Party. He was 24, had worked through Marx more carefully than most of his future critics, and was convinced that capitalism was collapsing and communism was the only moral alternative.

He was not just a naive militant. He took the ideas seriously, which is exactly why he became dangerous.

In 1936, John Maynard Keynes published The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money. It became the most influential economics book of the 20th century.

The only man intellectually equipped to refute it decided not to respond.

He spent the rest of his life regretting that decision. 🧵 The man was Friedrich Hayek.

Five years earlier, in 1931, Lionel Robbins had brought him to the London School of Economics specifically to provide a serious intellectual counterweight to Cambridge.

He had then spent more than a year writing a line-by-line dissection of Keynes's previous book, A Treatise on Money, published in two parts in Economica in 1931 and 1932. In that moment, he was the most credible critic Keynes had in the English-speaking world.

The mainstream narrative always tells the same story: FDR's New Deal single-handedly saved the US from the Great Depression.

Academic economists have disagreed with that story for over 60 years.

The research is public, but it rarely reaches popular culture. 🧵 The popular story is simple: the market failed, Roosevelt acted and the country recovered.

The only problem is that all of those claims have been challenged in academic economics for the last sixty years. The work comes from a Nobel laureate in economics, the discipline's most prestigious journal, and some of the most cited historians of the period.

In October 2023, 108 economists, including Thomas Piketty and Gabriel Zucman, signed an open letter warning that Javier Milei would devastate Argentina if he won in November.

Major outlets treated it as settled consensus.

He won, and this is what actually happened. 🧵 Milei's program, the letter argued, would "increase already high levels of poverty and inequality," produce socio-economic devastation, and severely reduce policy space for years to come.

When he took office in December 2023, annual inflation was running above 200% and climbing toward 300%. The primary deficit had not been closed in over a decade.

Poland's Communist Party trained him to defend Marxism for life.

He produced its most devastating critique instead.

Three volumes, more than 1,500 pages, and his central conclusion still hasn't been refuted.

His name was Leszek Kolakowski. 🧵 After WWII, Poland became a Soviet satellite: not part of the USSR, but a one-party communist state taking orders from Moscow.

The Polish United Workers' Party ran everything. The press, the universities, the courts.

Kolakowski was born in 1927. He joined the party in 1947, like many idealistic young intellectuals shaped by Nazi occupation.

By 1959, at 31, he chaired the department of History of Philosophy at the University of Warsaw and was the country's leading Marxist philosopher.

Why do so many young people today celebrate killers?

The ideas that justify political violence didn't start on TikTok. They were developed in universities, published by prestigious presses, and taught to millions of students as serious moral philosophy before they became acceptable by so many people. 🧵 Ideas don't stay in books. Every ideology that has produced mass violence was first a theory. The intellectuals came before the violence.

In the last century, three thinkers spent their careers building a moral architecture that makes political violence not just acceptable, but virtuous.

Their ideas have been inside universities for fifty years. They are now inside a whole generation.

For 69 years, the largest political experiment in human history — spanning 15 countries, 286 million people, and 8 leaders — tried to deny reality.

Here is a step-by-step account of how the Soviet experiment was forced to face it. 🧵 In 1917, the Bolsheviks made the world a promise: equality, abundance, liberation.

The communists were convinced that markets were exploitation and that the state could do better. History was on their side, the revolution of the proletariat was inevitable, their prophet Marx claimed. They had found the solution: central planning would replace the chaos of markets. The state would act where private interests wouldn't. And for a brief moment, much of the world believed them.

It was a grand theory, and the next seven decades would test it against the one force no ideology can permanently suppress: reality.