Rothmus 🏴 (@Rothmus)

Every gun, mine, and guard tower on the Berlin Wall was pointed at East Germans. In 1957, the communist regime in East Germany made unauthorized emigration treason after an estimated 2.5 million people voted with their feet, fleeing the communist East towards the West. So in 1961, the authorities closed the border, called the wall “the Anti-Fascist Protection Rampart”, and gave border guards shoot to kill orders. People only ever risked their lives escaping in one direction.

So here’s how America ended up with Ilhan Omar and Learing Centers. The rebels in Somalia overthrew the Marxist dictator in January 1991 and then they started killing each other over who got to rule next. General Mohamed Farah Aideed and Ali Mahdi Mohamed both claimed the presidency, and then from November 1991 to March 1992, the two sides slaughtered an estimated 14,000 people in Mogadishu (the capital) alone. The clans united to remove Barre, but they failed to replace him with anything functional. And so, Somalia has been a failed state for 35 years and Minnesota has welfare fraud.

After their slave revolt, Haiti’s founder ordered the killing of all white people on the island. Soldiers went house to house killing thousands including women and children. They took full control, purged the population they blamed, and turned the richest colony in the Caribbean into the poorest and most dysfunctional country in the Western Hemisphere. Today, their descendants demand entry into the West they fought to escape, refuse to return to the mess they and their ancestors created, and are for some reason strongly convinced that borders are racist.

Every intellectual who invents excuses for mass murder eventually learns the commie regime has no permanent use for useful idiots. Take Malcolm Caldwell, who spent the 1970s as a University of London Marxist dismissing every report of Khmer Rouge mass murder as Western propaganda and calling their peasant revolution “valid and valuable.” In December 1978, the regime invited him in as one of the few Westerners allowed since they took power. He left the meeting with Pol Pot euphoric. Hours later, he was shot inside the Phnom Penh guesthouse. They never said why.

In stark contrast to what Deng did in China, up to a million North Koreans starved to death in the 1990s because their government had already banned private farming and lived off Soviet handouts. The Soviet collapse in 1991 cut the free fuel and fertilizer that had kept the whole system afloat for decades, and energy imports dropped 75% almost overnight. North Korea had fully collectivized its farms since the 1950s, so farmers held almost no private plots and had zero reason to grow more than the state’s quota. When the free inputs vanished the system had no slack left. Floods in 1995 finished off what crops remained, and the Public Distribution System that nearly the entire population relied on for food simply collapsed in large parts of the country. City rations fell from 585 grams of grain a day in 1987 to 30 grams by 1997. The regime called it the “Arduous March”. And even after Kim Il Sung died the year the famine began, his son kept the exact same centrally planned system running for the next 17 years while hundreds of thousands starved. And that is the body count of full collectivization under communism.

They smashed babies against trees and murdered nearly 2 million Cambodians in under 4 years chasing a pure agrarian communist utopia with no cities, no money, and no private property. On April 17 1975, the Khmer Rouge rolled into Phnom Penh and within hours emptied the entire city, marching hospital patients and the elderly into the countryside on foot as they declared Year Zero and set out to erase every trace of the old society. Anyone tied to the past became a target and wearing glasses alone could get you killed because it proved you could read, while doctors, teachers, engineers, and monks were executed as enemies of the revolution. They turned a high school into a prison where roughly 20,000 people were tortured into confessing crimes that never happened, after which they were trucked to mass graves in the killing fields where executioners smashed infants against the killing tree to save bullets. But they never achieved a classless utopia so it wasn’t like real communism.

800 million people were lifted out of extreme poverty in China thanks to a little bit of capitalism. Central planning doesn’t work. At least Deng Xiaoping saw Mao’s catastrophic blunders and understood that. Which is why when he took power, he ripped out the collectivized economy by the roots. >let farmers work their own plots and sell what they grew instead of farming for the state (food production soared almost overnight) >carved out Special Economic Zones like Shenzhen where foreign capital could operate under different rules than the rest of communist China > poverty crashed from nearly 90% in 1981 to under 4% by 2016 On his Southern Tour in 1992, Deng told CCP officials “to get rich is glorious.” He was right btw. And it is best done through private property and free markets.

Civilizations die from suicide. After spending 3 decades studying 26 civilizations, Toynbee found that civilizations rise when a creative minority actually solves hard problems and earns real loyalty from the people. Then that same minority hardens into a dominant minority that keeps power through force and habit while it stops actually leading. The majority disengages and a schism opens in the body social. External threats only finish what already started from inside. No invading army ever killed a healthy civilization, they only bury the ones that have already stopped believing in themselves.

Unlimited tolerance is how open societies commit suicide. Elon Musk just warned that societies holding incompatible values eventually hit a reckoning. Karl Popper made the exact same point in 1945 while watching fascists and communists use open societies’ own tolerance against them. Popper wrote that unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If a society keeps extending tolerance to people who openly want to destroy it and refuses to defend itself, the intolerant win and tolerance dies with them. He never demanded censorship first. Argue with intolerant ideas. Suppress them only when they stop arguing and start using force. 80 years later Musk is asking the same question: how much can a tolerant society tolerate before it stops being one?

On this day in 1918 the Bolsheviks herded Tsar Nicholas II, Empress Alexandra, and their five children into a basement in Yekaterinburg and opened fire. The bullets bounced because the girls had diamonds sewn into their corsets. So the reds finished the job with bayonets, stabbing, crushing skulls, and butchering the children while they were still alive. Then they stripped the bodies, doused them in acid, burned what remained, and dumped the remains in a forest to hide the crime. This was the deliberate, sadistic murder of an entire family, including a sick little boy, by communist animals who needed the blood of innocents to cement their power. Never forget what the Bolsheviks were. Never forgive it.

“Capitalism is not a profit system, it is a profit and loss system, and the losses are more important than the profits.” —Milton Friedman But the US education system runs on the exact opposite principle. No failure allowed. Instead of closing or losing funding, failing schools get more taxpayer money, more administrators, and more programs. And bad teachers rarely face real consequences thanks to tenure and union protection. The “customers” (parents and kids) have almost no exit. Real per-pupil spending has nearly tripled since 1970 after inflation. NAEP scores flat or eroding in core skills for decades. PISA rankings middling at best, with math especially weak. Thomas Sowell diagnosed this in Inside American Education, asserting that the system is morally and intellectually bankrupt. It has turned into a propaganda operation more than an educator primarily pushing ideology, feelings, and self-esteem over knowledge and competence. With endless public money and zero market test, there is nothing forcing correction. Unions buy political protection so the failure machine keeps running. Friedman and Sowell both identified the same disease and the same cure, namely real competition and choice. Vouchers or education savings accounts let parents take the money and flee failure. Good schools grow, while bad ones finally face losses and must improve or die. Without the discipline of losses, mediocrity is subsidized forever. And the kids, especially in the worst districts, pay the permanent price. But that’s just the system working exactly as designed.

We exist and work so leftists can rule over us. Our labor and taxes get extracted to build and sustain political clients who deliver power to the left at home and extend its reach abroad. Democrats expanded welfare after the War on Poverty to turn black Americans into a captured voting bloc. The new programs discouraged marriage and work. The rate of out-of-wedlock births rose from 24% in 1965 to above 70%. Black support for Democrats locked in at 90% or higher and has stayed there. The identical approach runs with illegal immigrants now. Policies drive large inflows. Taxpayer money then covers housing, healthcare, food, and schooling in Democrat areas. Fiscal estimates place the net annual cost near 150 billion dollars. Census counting of non-citizens shifts House seats and electoral votes toward the party that sustains the inflows. Abroad, the same funds support left leaning movements and governments through foreign aid and grants. Billions flow to organizations and projects that advance the broader agenda. Domestic clients and foreign allies draw from one source, taxes taken from working Americans. The record shows the pattern without interruption. Welfare after 1964 produced long-term dependents whose votes reward the party delivering benefits. Current immigration policies expand the dependent pool and alter political arithmetic. Foreign spending projects the model outward. Productive labor funds all of it so the left maintains control. The numbers on family structure, fiscal transfers, voting loyalty, and power allocation line up exactly. So work harder and pay your taxes, peasant.

Your kids are retarded while you pay higher taxes because Democrats bought the teachers unions as a permanent ally to stay in power. Jimmy Carter created the Department of Education just to lock in the NEA’s first ever presidential endorsement. That’s it. He just wanted their votes. Democrats protect the monopoly by killing real school choice, piling on federal mandates that bloat the bureaucracy, and pushing trillions through a system built to resist accountability. In return, the unions deliver the votes, ground game, and hundreds of millions in political spending with some 98% routinely going to Democrats. Democrats give taxpayer money to the unions and then the unions launder it back to the Democrats’ election campaigns. Taxpayer-funded Democratic party campaigns, basically. From 2000 to 2017, school district admin staff grew 75% while teachers grew just 8%. Non-teaching staff now make up nearly half the workforce. That explosion creates more dues paying jobs and political muscle while shielding the whole thing from competition. The alliance keeps the power. Unions and Democrats get the resources and the jobs. Your kids and your wallet get the bill. That is limited options and stagnant results. And the best thing is that the Republicans watched it happen for decades and did nothing.

“‘Social justice’ is simply a quasi-religious superstition… which we must fight when it becomes the pretext of coercing other men. And the prevailing belief in ‘social justice’ is at present probably the gravest threat to most other values of a free civilization.” — F.A. Hayek The Henry Nowak murder, the Pakistani muslim rape gang report, and the political response that followed are the perfect illustration. True justice is individual. It exists only to protect a person’s life, liberty, and property from aggression. The same clear rules apply to everyone, regardless of skin color, ancestry, or group grievances. No special treatment. No collective score-settling. Social justice and “collective rights” do the opposite. They turn an inconvenience or conflict involving one person into a supposed crime against his entire identity group. The state then feels entitled to bend procedures, evidence standards, and equal protection to “protect” the narrative of that group. This is how you manufacture a two-tier system where some individuals are worth more than others depending on which demographic box they check. The dying man gets handcuffed while officers entertain the killer’s racism claim. Facts become secondary to group identity. That is the destruction of justice. Tribal collectivism dressed up as morality. Hayek saw where this road leads. Britain is already on it. Reject the mirage before the rule of law collapses for everyone.

“We are going to have a multi-racial nation in Singapore. This is not a Malay nation. This is not a Chinese nation. This is not an Indian nation. Everybody will have his place here, equal: language, culture, religion.” — Lee Kuan Yew, August 9, 1965 LKY’s quote echoes Aristotle’s account of the polis as the highest koinonia, or community, formed not by blood or mere aggregation but for the sake of eudaimonia, the good life, through justice as its binding principle and the cultivation of virtue among citizens. A regime, or politeia, endures when it serves the common good rather than faction. Lee took a vulnerable, divided entrepôt and deliberately constructed a modern polis. He rejected ethnic clientelism, imposed equal rules under law, rewarded merit, and built habits of discipline and cohesion so citizens of every background could pursue security and rising prosperity together. He treated nationhood as a fragile achievement that required constant defense against stasis. Aristotle warned that when a politeia no longer aims at eudaimonia for the whole but instead manages competing interests and erodes the civic ethos, it decays into factional strife and eventual collapse. And Lee showed what deliberate counter measures look like in practice. America today is moving toward the condition Aristotle feared and Lee refused to accept. Identity based claims increasingly displace equal rules, merit yields to group outcome, and trust in shared institutions frays. Without a conscious recovery of the principles that once sustained our own politeia, namely justice applied without favor, habits of self-government, and a civic ethos oriented toward the flourishing of citizens as one people rather than rival tribes, America risks the very stasis and hollowing that have undone polities throughout history.

How many more children before we admit the experiment failed? This time it’s two Iraqi brothers, 18 and 20, on trial in Essen, Germany, for allegedly raping a 7 year old girl on two separate occasions. She was the friend of their younger sister who lived right next door. Another horror story in a continent-wide pattern. Across Europe, men from certain immigrant backgrounds, especially Middle East, North Africa, and parts of Africa, are wildly overrepresented in rape and child sexual abuse statistics. In Germany, foreigners are 15% of the population but 38% of rape suspects. In Sweden, immigrant men dominate rape convictions in long term studies, even after adjusting for age and socioeconomic factors. Those arriving as teens or adults bring the highest risk. In the UK, foreign citizens are 3.5x more likely to be arrested for sexual offences. The Pakistani muslim grooming gang scandal is still unraveling. Europe didn’t have an epidemic of 7 year olds being raped by their neighbors’ older brothers before the mass low-skilled migration experiment. It imported the problem along with the people. Cultures that treat non-muslim girls as fair game, or that normalize early sexualization and weak boundaries around children, don’t magically become Swedish, German, or British just because they cross a border. This is what happens when you prioritize volume over compatibility and then gaslight the public about the results. The trial continues. The pattern continues. The denial continues.

It’s all fake and gay. Government and media manufactured the “class war” then pivoted to race war to absolve the state of blame for the 2008 crisis, sideline the Tea Party with racist media attacks, and consolidate power in leftist hands. The crash was produced by Fed money printing, Fannie and Freddie guarantees, and government mandates that forced risky loans into the system. When it collapsed the insiders got bailed out. The public absorbed the damage. The Tea Party demanded accountability for the bailouts and spending. Media met that challenge by branding the movement racist from the start. That attack neutralized a direct threat to big government and crony finance. Occupy was tolerated because it focused on banks and left the state’s central role untouched. And since the “racist” accusations worked on the Tea Party, the pivot to race delivered new tools for state expansion. Media usage of the word racist surged after 2012. Equity and systemic claims became the justification for deeper government reach into hiring, lending, education, and speech. The result is consolidated leftist power. The administrative state grew larger and more intrusive. Progressive ideology gained institutional dominance while opposition gets preemptively discredited rather than debated on substance. This sequence protected the government from reckoning with the crisis it created and shifted authority toward those who thrive on bigger government and identity based control. Now the woke narrative is crumbling, watch them pivot back to a class war.

The open society and its enemy, Soros. While he named his Open Society Foundations after Karl Popper’s “The Open Society and Its Enemies,” his project stands as a philosophical inversion of everything Popper defended. Popper’s open society rested on critical rationalism, the recognition that no one possesses final truth, that institutions must remain open to criticism and piecemeal reform, and that democracy functions as a method for removing rulers without bloodshed. He rejected historicism, the belief in iron laws of history that justify sacrificing present generations for a utopian future, and warned that such thinking inevitably produces closed, authoritarian societies. Soros has repurposed the label to advance a grand project of engineered demographic transformation. Through mass immigration, multiculturalism as official policy, and diversity mandates that prioritize group identity over individual merit and assimilation, his foundations actively dissolve the cultural continuity and social trust that make rational criticism and incremental change possible. Popper understood that openness requires a stable framework, a shared language of reason, basic cohesion, and institutions citizens feel they collectively own. Soros treats those foundations as obstacles to be overcome in the name of an abstract, borderless openness. The concrete results are visible. Parallel societies that operate under different norms, public spaces where debate on the scale and selection of immigration is treated as illegitimate, and the rise of identity based hierarchies that close off dissent in the name of equity. These are certainly not expansions of the open society, but new forms of closure, tribal in character, enforced through institutional capture rather than overt dictatorship, yet hostile to the very critical spirit Popper placed at the center of civilized life. Philosophically, Soros replaces Popper’s falsification and humility before reality with a new historicism, the conviction that global multiculturalism and open borders represent inevitable moral progress, and that resistance from actual existing communities constitutes the new enemy. The machinery funded in the name of openness does not test its own assumptions against evidence, it suppresses the questions. Those who still value the ideal of an open society should read Popper on their own terms. They will find that Soros has not extended the open society, but has supplied its most sophisticated contemporary enemies.

Nobody voted for this. The same supranational elites shouting “save our democracy” are ramming through a globalist agenda of open borders, mass amnesty, and demographic replacement that no European population ever approved. Because to them, democracy never meant rule of the people. It means their rule. No different than North Korea claiming to be democratic because the dictator supposedly speaks for the will of the people. You’re only allowed to vote on trivial issues. The decisions that actually destroy a civilization like who enters your country, what your culture becomes, whether your nation even survives, it all happens without your consent. You’re not in charge. You’re being ruled.