Ayn Rand escaped Soviet Russia and watched a society destroy itself from the inside.

She identified 5 patterns that signal a civilization is circling the drain.

You're watching all 5 happen in real time. 🧵 Rand didn't write philosophy in a vacuum. She watched her family's pharmacy get seized. She saw productive people get punished for succeeding. She witnessed merit become meaningless.

Then she came to America and wrote a warning: here's exactly how it happens.

We shouldn't need to say this.

But after recent conversations in conservative circles, apparently we do.

Here's a thread on why anyone who claims to defend liberty, Western civilization, or American principles cannot be a collectivist. 🧵 Collectivism isn't just a left-wing problem.

It's any ideology that treats groups as more real than individuals. That judges you by what tribe you were born into rather than what you choose and achieve.

On the left, it appears as class warfare and identity politics.

On the right, it appears as nationalism that judges by ethnicity. In tribalism that divides by blood.

A month ago, Javier Milei looked politically dead.

Congress overturned his vetoes. Markets were in freefall. The peso was collapsing. Polls showed voters turning against him.

On Sunday, he won a landslide that shocked everyone.

This is how he pulled it off. 🧵 Let's rewind to early October.

Milei's Argentina had spent months trapped in a vicious cycle.

He'd slash spending. Congress would override him. Investors would panic. The peso would drop. His approval would sink.

Then Congress would get more aggressive.

Liberty isn't a cult.

These days, there's a race to be the most "libertarian" or "classical liberal," but it's grounded in dogmatism. Acting like there's only one way to justify liberty, support it, or advance it.

That thinking could be the death of liberty. 🧵 Here's the irony:

The people most dogmatic about liberty are acting more like Marxists than liberty lovers.

They treat their preferred thinkers like sacred texts. They excommunicate anyone who disagrees. They run purity tests instead of building movements.

This is how ideologies die.

Marx lost the economics debate by 1900.

But he planted an intellectual time bomb that wouldn't detonate for a century.

It's why you can't have debates anymore. It's why arguments are replaced by identity credentials.

Mises warned us in 1949. We didn't listen. 🧵 1896: Economist Böhm-Bawerk publishes a systematic dismantling of Marx's value theory.

150 pages. Every contradiction documented.

Marx's defenders had a choice:

Refute the arguments

Or change the rules of debate

They chose option 2.

And it changed everything.

Recent polls show growing support for socialism among young people worldwide.

Here's the irony: This support is strongest among those who hate authority, reject compliance, and refuse to obey.

The only two things you can do under socialism are comply and obey. 🧵 Let me show you what youth life actually looked like under socialism.

In the Soviet Union, youth indoctrination began early. Parents enrolled children in the "Little Octobrists" organization to help them secure future positions.

By age 14, they joined the Komsomol. Its core mission? Prepare future members of the Communist Party.

Do socialists have a better moral sense of fairness than capitalists?

After all, they're the ones concerned about everyone's well-being, right?

Well, no. Research shows the main drive behind support for redistribution isn't fairness. It's a desire to see the better-off suffer. 🧵 In 2017, researchers from various Psychology and Anthropology departments analyzed data from 6,024 participants across the United States, the United Kingdom, India, and Israel.

What they found destroys the entire moral foundation of socialism.

They want businesses controlled by the state. They praise politicians who fight "greedy capitalists." They see your property as something the collective gets to control.

Who are we describing?

If you said fascists, you're right. If you said socialists, you're also right. 🧵 You've been taught that fascism and socialism are opposites on the political spectrum.

Left vs. right. Freedom vs. oppression. Good vs. evil.

But here's what nobody tells you: they're not opposites. They're rival gangs fighting over the same territory.

June 1987. The Berlin Wall had stood for decades, seemingly immovable.

Then David Bowie organized a concert in West Berlin with one goal: make sure the sound could be heard on the other side.

What happened next would help tear down that wall. 🧵 The stage was placed just meters from the wall that split the city.

West Berlin's radio stations broadcast the concert, hoping the signal would reach listeners beyond the wall.

This wasn't just entertainment. This was acoustic warfare against totalitarianism.

Seven times in the last century, Austrian economists warned about economic disasters while mainstream economists said "everything is fine."

Seven times, the Austrians were right.

Here's the story they don't want you to know about who really understands the economy 🧵 October 1929: Irving Fisher, America's most celebrated economist, stands before reporters with absolute confidence. "Stock prices have reached what looks like a permanently high plateau," he declares.

Three days later, the market crashes. Fisher loses his fortune.

Your high school teacher said the Great Depression started with the 1929 stock market crash.

Your economics professor blamed "unregulated capitalism."

But everything you learned about America's worst economic disaster is wrong.

Here are 7 myths that hide the real story: 🧵 MYTH #1: The stock market crash caused the Great Depression

The recession actually started in August 1929 - two months BEFORE the crash.

The crash was a symptom, not the cause.

What really happened? The Federal Reserve had been pumping money into the economy for years, creating a massive bubble just waiting to burst.

Water keeps you alive. You'll die without it in 3 days.

But you can buy a bottle for less than a dollar.

Diamonds? Pretty rocks you can't eat or drink.

Cost thousands.

This paradox broke economists' brains for centuries. Until 1871 changed everything. 🧵 That year, a 31-year-old journalist in Vienna named Carl Menger published something that would destroy Karl Marx's entire worldview.

He didn't just solve the water diamond paradox.

He discovered why socialism always fails.

In 1965, a German philosopher wrote an essay that would reshape American universities.

His name was Herbert Marcuse. His essay was called "Repressive Tolerance."

And yesterday, his ideas pulled the trigger. 🧵 Marcuse had a simple argument: Traditional tolerance is actually oppression in disguise.

When you let "oppressors" speak freely, you're just helping them maintain power.

Real tolerance, he claimed, means being intolerant of the right and tolerant of the left.

Every politician and pundit hopes you never discover Thomas Sowell's anti-BS framework.

But why are they so terrified of one 93-year-old economist?

Because once you learn his three questions, their power over you disappears forever. 🧵 Sowell spent decades watching the same manipulation tactics work on intelligent people. The same emotional triggers. The same logical gaps. The same missing pieces that let your biases fill in the blanks.

He realized something profound: most public deception follows predictable patterns.

In 1991, Milton Friedman made predictions about the War on Drugs that sounded completely insane at the time.

33 years later, every single one came true with terrifying precision.

Here's how a Nobel laureate saw what nobody else could: 🧵 Politicians called him a radical. The DEA dismissed his warnings. Mainstream economists said he was out of touch with reality.

But Friedman understood something they didn't: economics doesn't care about good intentions.

Karl Marx spent his life attacking capitalism and the "exploitation" of workers.

Your leftist colleague loves this story. Socialists worship him. But there's one problem: Marx never worked a day in his life and lived off capitalist profits for decades. 🧵 Marx rails against the bourgeoisie while his best friend Friedrich Engels literally owns factories employing 800 workers in Manchester.

Marx didn't just tolerate this. He lived off those "exploitative" profits for most of his adult life.

Your leftist campus colleague with a "Tax the Rich" sticker on his MacBook says he's a socialist because he cares about minorities and fighting inequality.

But here's what they won't tell you: the ideology of "caring about people" has the worst human rights record in history. 🧵 Picture this: You care about equality, minority rights, individual freedom, and human dignity.

You should be the first person to reject socialism completely.

Because no political system in history has been worse for the exact things you claim to care about.

This book written by Ludwig von Mises in 1944 may be the most important thing to understand the threat we are facing in 2025.

"Omnipotent Government" predicted our current crisis 🧵 In the 1800s, the world experienced unprecedented peace and prosperity under classical liberalism.

Free trade connected nations. People moved freely across borders.

Then something shifted in the realm of ideas, and within decades, two world wars consumed civilization.

Trump imposed sweeping tariffs to "protect" American industry.

Meanwhile, 40 years ago, a small island nation did the exact opposite and became an economic powerhouse.

This is the story of New Zealand's farming revolution, and why protection breeds weakness. 🧵 In 1984, New Zealand faced a crisis.

The government was broke, spending more than it could afford, and agriculture—their economic backbone—was heavily subsidized.

Farmers received roughly one-third of their income from taxpayers. Sound familiar?

Stop taking Karl Marx seriously.

He was completely refuted over a century ago by Austrian economists who dismantled every pillar of his theory.

Yet somehow, his ideas still haunt lecture halls and political debates like intellectual zombies.

Here's how four economists buried Marxism forever. 🧵 The destruction began in 1871 with Carl Menger and a simple question: where does value really come from?

Marx said labor creates value. Eight hours of work equals eight hours of worth.

Menger said: wrong. Value lives in human minds, not in objects or hours worked.

In 1990, a Black Democratic legislator who ran Jesse Jackson's campaigns twice implemented Milton Friedman's free-market education ideas.

This is how liberty can win through unlikely alliances. 🧵 Meet Polly Williams and Milton Friedman. On paper, they had nothing in common.

Friedman: Nobel Prize-winning economist, architect of free-market theory.

Williams: Former welfare recipient, inner-city Milwaukee representative, civil rights activist.

Yet together, they revolutionized American education.