Gaatze U de Vries

The Left Has Been Running the West Into the Ground for 40 Years. Here's the Receipt. I wrote that Milei and Bukele exposed the empire of lies. A lot of you asked: whose empire? Who exactly built the system they're dismantling? Let's name it. When I say "the left," I don't mean a party. I mean an ideology that took over the institutions of the West and stopped needing elections to rule. Some of its members call themselves socialist. Some call themselves centrist. Some, like Macron, say they're "neither left nor right." Merkel was officially center-right. It doesn't matter. Look at what they do, not the label on the jersey. Here is what I call the left. Barack Obama and the Democratic establishment. Emmanuel Macron and the technocracy that runs France from the Inspection des Finances. The European Commission, which produces 10,000 pages of regulation and zero industrial champions. The international bureaucracies: the UN agencies, the WHO, the IMF of the austerity-for-thee era. The philanthropic billionaires who fund all of it, Bill Gates, one of the largest private funders of the WHO, and George Soros, whose Open Society Foundations have poured billions into progressive NGOs, activist networks and media projects around the world. And the professional class that lives off the machine: the NGOs, the think tanks, the consulting firms, the "experts." Different faces, one worldview. Here it is in one sentence: ordinary people can't be trusted, so a credentialed class must manage them. Everything flows from that. Start with September 11, 2001. That day, the West got the clearest warning in its history. Nineteen men, an ideology that openly declared war on our civilization, and 3,000 dead in the most powerful city on earth. The correct response was obvious. Name the enemy. Defend your borders. Defend your culture without apology. What did the left do in the two decades that followed? It decided the real danger was "Islamophobia." It spent twenty years explaining that the problem was us: our history, our foreign policy, our "lack of inclusion." It opened the doors wider. In Libya in 2011, the Obama administration and its European allies helped topple Gaddafi with no plan for the day after, turning the country into an open highway to Europe. In 2015, Merkel declared "we can do this," and over a million people entered Germany in a year with no vetting worth the name. In France, after Charlie Hebdo, after the Bataclan, after Nice, after Samuel Paty, the official response was candles, hashtags, and a lecture about "amalgame." 9/11 should have been the moment the West woke up. The left made sure it went back to sleep. The economic scam. For forty years, the left sold us the same idea: the state can spend without limit, debt doesn't matter, and every problem is solved with a new program, a new agency, a new tax. France is the laboratory. Public spending around 57% of GDP, the highest in the developed world. A debt over 3,000 billion euros. The highest taxes in Europe. And for what? Hospitals in crisis, schools collapsing in the PISA rankings, a police force that can't secure a train station. That's not a failure of the system. That is the system. The money doesn't disappear. It flows to the people who administer it. Every euro of "public action" employs a committee, a consultant, an NGO, a report. The poor never get richer. The managers of poverty do. Milei proved it in Argentina. The moment you cut the machine, inflation collapses. They told us it was impossible because their salaries depended on it being impossible. COVID: the full-scale stress test. If you want to see this class in action, look at 2020. In March, the French government told us masks were useless for the general public. A few months later, they were mandatory outdoors. We signed our own permission slips to leave our homes, like prisoners filling out forms for their guards. Schools closed. Small businesses died while Amazon had its best year ever. Children lost years of education and socialization. Health passes split society into two classes of citizens. In the United States, it came out that the CDC's school reopening guidance had been shaped with input from the teachers' unions. Not from pediatricians. From unions. And who was advising? A "Scientific Council" whose members appeared on TV every night and never paid a price for being wrong. Models predicting millions of deaths that never matched reality. Not one of them ever came back to say "we got it wrong, here's what we learned." These weren't experts. They were experts by title. A diploma, a prestigious institution, a position on a committee. Never a business built, never a product shipped, never a consequence suffered for a bad decision. Consulting firms: the metastasis. And when the experts by title don't know what to do, they call the experts by invoice. In 2021, the French state spent more than one billion euros on consulting firms. McKinsey was brought in to help organize the vaccination campaign. The pension reform, the housing benefit reform, the vaccination strategy: all passed through consulting decks. A French Senate inquiry called the phenomenon "tentacular," and the Paris financial prosecutor opened an investigation into McKinsey's tax situation. Think about what that means. A country with millions of civil servants, the most prestigious administrative schools in the world, and it outsources its thinking to 28-year-old analysts with a PowerPoint template. Steve Jobs saw this decades ago. He said consulting gives you a broad but paper-thin view of companies, like "a picture of a banana." You never own the result. You recommend, you invoice, you leave. If it works, you take credit. If it fails, it's the client's fault. Nassim Taleb gave it a name: no skin in the game. And that is the core disease of the entire system. The people who make the decisions never pay for the consequences. The politician who opened the borders lives in a gated neighborhood. The economist who defended endless debt has a tenured job. The consultant who designed the reform is already on the next mission. The philanthropist who funded the NGO pays no price when the policy blows up. The ones who pay are always the same: the worker, the shop owner, the farmer, the kid in a school where nobody teaches anymore. So what's the common thread? 9/11, uncontrolled immigration, endless debt, catastrophic COVID management, consulting firms running the state. These look like separate problems. They're not. They're five symptoms of the same disease: a class that governs without accountability, protected by titles instead of results, funded by money it didn't earn, and convinced it knows better than the people it rules. Every idea they push follows the same logic. More state, less individual responsibility. More managers, fewer builders. More guilt, less pride. And a civilization that stops building, stops defending itself and stops believing in itself has only one possible destination. The good news. Milei and Bukele proved the machine can be stopped. Not in fifty years. In two. Inflation can be crushed. Gangs can be crushed. Experts can be ignored. And the sky doesn't fall. The sky clears. The left's greatest power was never its ideas. It was the belief that there was no alternative. That belief is dead. Now it's our turn.