Eric Pelletier

Philosophy, languages, politics, economics, math.
I post to figure out what I actually think.
«Πάντες ἄνθρωποι τοῦ εἰδέναι ὀρέγονται φύσει.» –Ἀριστοτέλης

[Eric Pelletier @Type1Eric]

One of the most insidious things I have experienced in my intellectual life is having massive amounts of input and almost no output. It is kind of like reading a cookbook and never cooking. I am trying to stop doing that.

[Eric Pelletier @Type1Eric]

What the hell! I just butt dialed my Grok @bot. I did not know that I could have a voice conversation with my bot. Also, when I conveyed that it was a butt dial, that’s what it put for the call. Amazing!

[Darren Bailey @DarrenBaileyIL]

JB Pritzker called for "disruption" against the government. Then he gathered generals and dared the Commander in Chief to try to "conquer" Illinois.

What do you call it when a governor stirs up the streets and lines up military men against America?

Sedition.

[Eric Pelletier @Type1Eric]

“To enforce rules, you must build dependencies. To build dependencies, you must weaken sovereignty. To weaken sovereignty, you must centralize power. To centralize power, you must accept fragility. To accept fragility, you must give up resilience. To give up resilience, you must accept authoritarian drift.” Unelected (30), @DataRepublican

[DataRepublican (small r) @DataRepublican]

I just came across this in an Open Society Foundations document about how to fix public “mistrust” of liberal "democracy," and I honestly feel sick reading it. I've read many alarming quotes, but few are so "mask off" like this.

"I believe the time has come for a responsible, courageous elite, those who care far more about addressing the genuine social problems than about election results. Only a political elite with vision, prudence and a focus on the general good—to whom the electorate… can cede part of their sovereignty in the elections—will be able to justify public trust and spearhead... our struggle to survive.""

Read that again. The proposed solution to the public's distrust in democracy... is less democracy.
An unelected "elite" to whom the public should cede sovereignty.

Abolish democracy to save democracy. This kind of thinking is what we're up against.

[Eric Pelletier @Type1Eric]

I just voted. 🗳️

[Thomas Sowell Daily @DailySowell]

“The last person to trust with power is someone who is dying to have it. The best person to wield power is someone who is reluctant to do so, but who will do it for a while as a civic duty.”

— Thomas Sowell

[Eric Pelletier @Type1Eric]

@JBPritzker That’s kind of the point.

[Brivael Le Pogam @brivael]

I love the USA, I love France, I love Japan, I love Italy.

I love them because they're countries with radically different cultures and ways of life. And that difference is exactly what makes them valuable.

America, I love your pragmatism in business and your technical excellence in everything you do. For you, an idea is worth what it produces. You build, you ship, you do it again. No country on earth turns ambition into reality faster.

Italy, I love your art of living and your passion. The espresso downed standing at the bar in thirty seconds. The evening passeggiata where the whole town goes out to walk for no reason, just to be together. La bella figura, the idea that you owe it to the world to look elegant even to buy bread. Sunday lunch that lasts four hours with three generations around the table. And that relationship between men and women, unapologetic, playful, made of glances, gallantry and seduction without guilt. For you, life isn't a problem to optimize. It's something to savor.

France, I love your intellectual side. That need to think everything through, debate everything, question everything. It has its flaws, especially when it gets lost in detached leftist theories. But when it's put to work on things that matter, it's incredibly fertile. Descartes, Pascal, Tocqueville, Poincaré. France remains the intellectual lung of the West, for better and for worse.

Japan, I love your obsession with detail. The craftsman who spends his entire life perfecting a single gesture. The silence on the subway, streets spotless without trash cans, respect as a collective reflex. You've proven you can be at the cutting edge of modernity without giving up a single second of who you are.

Spain, I love your relationship with the night, with celebration, with family. Dinner at 10pm, life lived outdoors, everyone talking loud, and everyone with a seat at the table.

Germany, I love your rigor, your industry, your pride in work done right. You gave the world Bach, Kant and half of modern precision engineering.

Britain, I love your humor, your composure and your institutions. You invented parliamentary government, common law and the industrial revolution. Not bad for an island.

Greece, I love that it all started with you. Democracy, philosophy, geometry, theater. Every time a Westerner thinks, he speaks a little Greek.

Portugal, I love your melancholy, your saudade, and the insane courage to send caravels into the unknown while the rest of the world was still staring at the coastline.

Ireland, I love your pubs, your poets, and your gift for turning every tragedy in your history into a song.

Switzerland, I love your direct democracy and the living proof that four languages can hold together when each identity is respected.

Poland, I love your pride. You were wiped off the map, occupied, crushed, and you're still here, standing, true to yourselves.

Scandinavia, I love your collective trust, your restraint, your design. Societies where you can leave your bike unlocked.

All these countries are different. And that's exactly what the West is: not a uniform mass, but a mosaic of nations that fought, influenced and inspired each other for centuries, and together produced the most fertile civilization in human history.

Every country must remain. Every culture must remain. When you're in Italy, you should still feel like you're in Italy. When you're in France, you should still feel like you're in France.

This project of total destruction and dilution of cultures, dissolved in the acid of mass immigration and of a culture and religion that aren't ours, is a completely insane project.

It has to stop. Fast. Everywhere in the West.

[Eric Pelletier @Type1Eric]

@DataRepublican Simply, Thank You.

[DogeDesigner @cb_doge]

Elon Musk in his new interview on “suicidal empathy”

“I think you don’t want to have misguided empathy. I agree with Gad Saad’s philosophy here. And suicidal empathy is, you know, that’s his term. You ideally want people to be default trusted, not default distrusted. And you want to encourage behavior that is good for society, you know, for people to do good things that are good for their fellow human beings. And ultimately, that actually does end up being good for the individual, provided it is mutual. So if you think everyone is like yourself, then you’re going to have a problem, because this is simply not true. There are peoples and cultures with very different views.”

[Brivael Le Pogam @brivael]

To every American reading this: in two weeks, on November 3, you're not voting for a party. You're voting on whether your elected government gets to stay legitimate.

Read the thread below. According to the documents DataRepublican published, a network of former USAID and State Department officials has drafted red lines past which an elected federal government should be declared illegitimate, with governors as the alternative source of legitimacy and the street as the trigger.

If that sounds new to you, it isn't. It's the oldest playbook in the communist tradition. Here is how they have always taken power.

Russia, 1917. The Bolsheviks were a minority. They never won the country. What they built was "dual power": a parallel structure, the soviets, that claimed more legitimacy than the official government. Lenin wrote about it openly. When the moment came, they declared the government illegitimate and took over. When they then lost the Constituent Assembly election with roughly a quarter of the vote, they dissolved the Assembly after a single day.

Hungary, 1945 to 1949. The Communists got about 17% of the vote. It didn't matter. They took the Interior Ministry and the police, and Rákosi cut the opposition away slice by slice. He called it "salami tactics." Four years later, one party.

Czechoslovakia, February 1948. The Communists purge the police leadership. The democratic ministers resign in protest, expecting to force a crisis. Instead the Communists flood the streets with action committees and armed workers' militias, and the president gives in. Weeks later, foreign minister Jan Masaryk is found dead beneath his window. No tanks needed. Street pressure plus control of the institutions was enough.

Cuba, 1959. Castro promised free elections and a restored constitution. The elections never came.

China, 1957. Mao launches the Hundred Flowers campaign: speak freely, criticize the Party. Then comes the Anti-Rightist Campaign, and the people who spoke up are hunted down by the hundreds of thousands. In Cambodia, the Khmer Rouge went further. Being educated was enough to get you killed.

Venezuela, 1998 onward. No coup at all. Chávez wins an election, rewrites the constitution, packs the Supreme Court, captures the media and the army. By the time people understood, there was nothing left to vote with.

Then there's the Western version, the one Gramsci theorized: don't storm the palace, take the culture. Schools, universities, media, administration. What Rudi Dutschke later called "the long march through the institutions."

The pattern is always the same. Build a parallel legitimacy. Capture the institutions that decide what is true and what is legal: police, courts, schools, press. Use the street as a weapon. Speak the language of "democracy" and "the people" the entire time. And once you're in, never leave.

Now look at the West in 2026. Europe is largely there already. In the United States, the institutions lean overwhelmingly one way. In Syracuse University's survey of American journalists, only 3.4% called themselves Republicans. In the first study in 1971, that figure was 25.7%. Universities, the federal bureaucracy, the NGO world: same story.

In every one of these revolutions, society splits into the same groups. The people who produce, the workers, farmers and entrepreneurs who learned from experience that collectivism doesn't work. The cynical collectivists who want to live off the work of others, the apparatchiks, a nomenklatura in waiting. And between them, a huge mass of sincere people convinced they're on the side of progress, who become the fuel of the machine. History is brutal on that last group. They are always among the first purged once the cynics win. Ask the Kronstadt sailors. Ask the Hundred Flowers intellectuals.

America, you already knew this once. You had anti-communist laws. The Smith Act. The Communist Control Act of 1954, still technically on the books. I think it's time to clean up all your systems and launch a real hunt for collectivists.

So this is the fight, and it will be decided in America. The US Constitution is the strongest firewall against concentrated power ever written. If it holds, the West holds. And Elon's project, free speech, energy, rockets, AI, is what can make Western civilization reborn, not just in America but across the entire West.

Then we can finally do what history never had the courage to do: a Nuremberg of communism. Not revenge. A reckoning. The great moral and historical trial of an ideology that killed tens of millions of people and keeps coming back under new names.

And after that comes the real project: a civilization that harnesses the full energy of its star, Kardashev Type II, and then its galaxy, Type III.

November 3. Don't look away. Vote like it matters, because it does.

[Aɴᴛ @AntSpeaks]

There's a scene in The Dark Knight where Alfred explains to Bruce Wayne that some people simply cannot be reasoned with. They aren't interested in money, personal gain or anything you might ordinarily associate with someone's motives.

As Alfred famously puts it, "Some men just want to watch the world burn."

I've been thinking about that scene while watching what's happening in France.

People keep trying to make sense of the destruction. Why burn down buildings? Why smash up businesses? Why destroy the very places ordinary people depend on? What exactly is being achieved?

But perhaps that's where people are making a mistake. They're assuming the destruction has to make sense according to their own understanding of what constitutes a rational objective.

It doesn't...

When you're dealing with people consumed by ideological fanaticism, particularly those who have absolutely no respect for the country, its history, its culture or its institutions, destruction itself can become the objective.

And this is what concerns me about the increasingly aggressive attempts to impose ideologies completely at odds with the values upon which European civilisation was built.

You don't necessarily need to conquer a country militarily to change it beyond recognition. Undermine its institutions, intimidate its population, normalise disorder and gradually make people afraid to defend the very things their society was built upon.

Not every rioter has to share that objective. Some are ideological extremists, others are opportunistic criminals, and some are simply enjoying the chaos.

But the consequences can be much the same.

The mistake is assuming that because their actions make absolutely no sense to you, those actions cannot possibly serve a purpose.

Sometimes the destruction isn't an unfortunate consequence of the objective.

Sometimes the destruction IS the objective.

[Nayib Bukele @nayibbukele]

J’ai entendu dire que la France était finie, qu’il était trop tard pour la sauver.

Mais la France est toujours aussi belle, enviable même. Sa grandeur n’a pas disparu, elle ne demande qu’à renaître.

Nous avons surmonté en un an un problème cent fois plus grave, sans avoir les moyens dont dispose la France.

La France pourrait y arriver en une semaine.

[Voices of Liberty @VoLDaily]

Roger Scruton recalls the exact moment he became a conservative during the 1968 Paris riots:

“When I looked down the street and saw all these rowdy students throwing stones at policemen, I just said to myself, ‘Whatever they believe, I believe the opposite.’”

[C3 @C_3C_3]

I keep going back to this interview as we watch France burn…

The Far Left interviewer frame Elon and us as “Far Right” for being against exactly what is happening today.

Elon’s every word was proven correct.

Her view was proven wrong.

The Media is the Enemy of the People.

[Brivael Le Pogam @brivael]

On my way to the office this morning, I passed a group of young people protesting, a Palestinian flag draped over their shoulders.

And I asked myself a question I can't shake: why does this generation always fall into the same trap? No matter the history. No matter the context. Even the ones from wealthy families, who went to the best schools, who were dealt every good card. Always the same trap.

I don't think it's stupidity. I think it's a mechanism. And a mechanism can be taken apart, piece by piece.

A. The observation: everything the state touches becomes unaffordable.

Look at economist Mark Perry's famous chart, the one people call "the chart of the century." It tracks US prices since 2000.

At the top, what explodes: hospital services, college tuition, textbooks, childcare, housing. Increases of +100%, +150%, up to +250%, far above general inflation.

At the bottom, what collapses: TVs, software, phones, toys, clothing. A TV today costs a fraction of what it did in 2000, for an infinitely better product.

Look at what separates the two groups. It isn't technology. It isn't complexity. It's one variable: how much the state is involved.

At the top, sectors that are subsidized, regulated, shielded from competition, where the state funds demand and blocks supply. At the bottom, sectors where companies fight every single morning to serve you better and cheaper.

B. The mechanism: why it's systematic.

When the state subsidizes demand without freeing supply, prices rise. Every time. Guaranteed student loans, and universities raise tuition. Housing aid plus blocked building permits, and rents skyrocket. Administered healthcare, and bureaucracy eats the budget before it ever reaches the patient.

In France it's even more vicious, because the price doesn't disappear: it hides. You never see the hospital bill, you pay it through payroll contributions. You never see the cost of school, you pay it through taxes. Public spending at 57% of GDP, one of the heaviest tax burdens in the world, more than €3.4 trillion in debt. And the result? Overflowing ERs, falling PISA scores, young people who can't afford to live in the city where they work.

The market didn't fail in these sectors. It was never allowed in.

C. Suffering demands a culprit.

A 22-year-old lives all of this in their bones. They can't find a place to live. Their degree either buries them in debt or opens no doors. The future feels blocked. That suffering is real, and I don't deny it for a second.

But human beings can't stand suffering without a culprit. They need a face. A scapegoat.

And this is where everything is decided: who taught them how to read the world?

D. Whoever tells the story picks the villain.

Schools are public. Universities are public. Culture runs on grants. Film goes through funding committees. Public broadcasting shapes the narratives. The people handing down the interpretive framework are, overwhelmingly, paid by the very system that creates the problem.

Do you really think that system is going to name itself as the culprit?

No. It names the capitalist. The boss. The landlord. "The rich." The multinational. The commercial West. Same role, same casting, every time.

E. One lens, a thousand causes.

And this brings me back to that flag. A generation taught to read every situation through a single lens, oppressor on one side, rich, Western, capitalist, oppressed on the other, will apply that lens everywhere. To housing. To climate. To conflicts on the other side of the world. The cause changes, the lens stays. That's why the trap is always the same: it's not the cause that draws them in, it's the way of thinking that was installed in them.

F. The perfect inversion.

Here's the irony. Capitalism is the force that drove down the price of almost everything it touched. The state is the force that blew up the price of almost everything it captured. And young people blame the first for the crimes of the second.

It's like blaming the firefighter for the fire because you saw him at the scene.

G. The ballot box confirms it.

In the US, a few weeks out from the midterms, a large share of urban young voters is getting ready to vote Democrat for more state, more spending, more regulation. New York elected a self-described socialist mayor, carried by young voters, on promises of rent freezes and city-run grocery stores. Rent freezes, the policy that has made housing scarcer everywhere it's been tried. The cure that worsens the disease.

In France, it's the same play in two acts. Part of the youth votes for the radical left, which promises more state. Another part votes for the center, which promises to "manage" the state well, and has dug the debt deeper than ever. Two different ballots, one shared assumption: the problem is the market, the solution is the state.

H. The way out.

These young people aren't stupid. They're right to be angry. They're just aiming at the wrong target.

The day they understand that their rent, their tuition and their hospital are expensive precisely because the state runs them, their anger will change direction. They'll stop protesting against those who create. They'll start protesting against those who capture.

That day, the greatest intellectual scam of our time will be over.

[Eric Pelletier @Type1Eric]

@mattvanswol Given everything and giving back hate and destruction.

[Eric Pelletier @Type1Eric]

@brivael What a shame and sad day for France.

[Visegrád 24 @visegrad24]

A left-wing French woman joined the student protests but was horrified when the second and third-generation migrants she was with started looting stores. She screamed “This isn’t the cause”

They pushed her aside, told her to shut up and said they had “urgent shopping” to do

[Brivael Le Pogam @brivael]

To every American, and to everyone watching France burn from abroad:

Do not blame the French people for this.

We never asked for it. We never voted for it. And the one time we were clearly asked, we said no.

Here are the numbers your media won't show you.

70% of the French say there are too many immigrants in France today.
79% want a tougher immigration policy.
77% disapprove of the government's record on immigration.
83% want foreign criminals and long-term unemployed foreigners sent home.
And no, it's not just the old. 69% of French 18 to 24 year olds support suspending legal immigration for three years.
This is not a fringe. This is the French people.
In 2005, we were asked if we wanted the European Constitution. 55% voted no. Three years later, our politicians passed the same text under another name, through parliament, without ever asking us again.

That is modern France in one sentence. The people say no. The elites do it anyway.

So who is responsible? The politicians who lied to us. A class of leaders formed in the same schools, the same forums, the same networks, loyal to each other before they are loyal to their nations.

In 2017, at Harvard, Klaus Schwab, founder of the World Economic Forum, bragged about his Young Global Leaders program in four words: "We penetrate the cabinets." He added that it was true in France. Emmanuel Macron was one of his Young Global Leaders.

It's the same project in Brussels with Ursula von der Leyen and in Paris with Macron. Borders treated as an obstacle. Nations treated as relics. The people treated as a problem to be managed.

What you are watching in France is not the French people failing. It is the end of the globalist project, an abject, quasi-communist dream of a world run by unelected planners. It is collapsing everywhere in Europe at once, and the West has to cut this cancer out before it takes the rest of the body with it.

The peoples of Europe don't want this. They never did.

So when you see our town halls burning, don't say "the French chose this."

The French never chose this.

They were forced into it.

If you're French and you agree, repost this so the world hears it from us.

If you're American, look at us carefully. Then choose differently on November 3rd.