Stephen Prewitt

I don't know how many people realize that if Elon Musk pulls off what he's building, it will be the biggest social reset in human history. To understand why, you need to understand a concept almost nobody really gets: rent. Yesterday I was talking about it with someone. I told them something simple: the moment a rent sets in, whatever kind it is, it gets paid for. Not necessarily in dollars. It gets paid for in stagnation. So what is a rent? A rent is income that doesn't come from the value you create, but from the position you hold. You don't win because you're better. You win because nobody is allowed to come and beat you. The mechanism is almost always the same. A company succeeds. Then, instead of continuing to innovate, it goes for regulatory capture: licenses, standards, quotas, approvals, lobbying. It turns its lead into a wall. And behind that wall, new entrants can't get in. But they're the ones who innovate. They're the ones who drive prices down, raise quality, create new wealth. When you block them, nothing dramatic happens. Nothing happens at all. Prices stop falling. Quality stalls. The pie stops growing. And when the pie stops growing, the only way to get richer is to take someone else's slice. This is the point almost nobody sees: what people blame on "capitalism" (frozen inequality, a broken social ladder, the feeling that the game is rigged from the start) are the effects of that stagnation. The symptoms of rent. Not of capitalism. Capitalism is competition. Rent is its negation. Now, Elon Musk. He said that by 2036, money won't matter anymore. Most people read it as science fiction. I read it as an implicit critique of our entire monetary system. His reasoning: AI and robots will produce more than we can possibly consume. So prices will collapse. Deflation, not inflation. And this is where it gets interesting. For decades, the role of central banks has been to stabilize prices. In practice: to stop them from falling. Yet in an economy that innovates, the natural direction of prices is down. Look at what a computer cost thirty years ago. Preventing prices from falling was the worst thing we could have done. Because it created an entire generation of rentiers. People who got rich not by creating something, but by owning something at the right time. An apartment. A plot of land. An asset shielded from falling prices by money printing and by rules that choke supply. In a world not captured by the state, house prices would be extremely low. And who would stay rich? The people who keep creating value. The ones whose wealth comes from the valuation of their company, because their company keeps innovating. Wealth you have to re-earn every single year. That's where Elon's line really makes sense. In a world of deflationary abundance, human life would look like a video game. Or a game of chess. If you're good and you start at the bottom, you can rise very, very fast. In a few years. If you're bad and you inherit the inertia of a position you don't know how to maintain, against people who keep innovating, you fall very, very fast too. No more rent. No more entitlement. Just your ability to create value, put back on the line every day. It would be the greatest equalizer in human history. Not equality of outcomes imposed from above. Equality of the playing field, imposed by abundance. I think Elon Musk is reinventing the rules of capitalism. Or rather, bringing them back to their original form: the Austrian school. Real capitalism. Value creation as the only legitimate source of wealth. And at the end of the road, something neither rent nor redistribution has ever achieved: the end of poverty on a global scale.

We live in a completely fake world. And that's why everything feels chaotic. Why everything around us is burning. Let's start with one number. In 1972, 7 out of 10 Americans trusted the mainstream media. In 2025, only 28% did. The lowest Gallup has ever measured in half a century. Nearly 7 out of 10 Americans no longer believe what they're told on TV. Have you ever asked yourself why? Not "because people became conspiracy theorists." Not "because of social media." The real reason is that people feel an increasingly violent gap between what they're told and what they see with their own eyes. And that gap is not an accident. It's the product of a war between two camps. On one side, those who want to preserve reality: nations, cultures, borders, heritage. On the other, the globalist camp. And you need to understand its project in full. First, a world without borders. Not just physical borders. All borders. Between nations, between cultures, between what belongs to you and what belongs to everyone. And at the end of the chain, between true and false. Second, the hybridization of every culture. They sell it to you as openness, richness, diversity. But a culture is precisely a border. A language, a memory, customs, a way of life that isn't your neighbor's. When you blend everything together, you don't get a super-culture. You get the absence of culture. A consumable, interchangeable mush with no roots. And look closely at which culture you're asked to "deconstruct." Never anyone else's. Always Western culture. Its history, its religion, its family, its heroes. The end goal of the project isn't blending. It's the erasure of the West as a civilization. Now, the point almost nobody understands. Most of the leaders carrying this project never thought it up. They designed nothing. They are products. They went through the same schools, the same universities, the same think tanks, the same newsrooms, the same dinners. The system trained them, selected them, promoted them. They recite a script they mistake for their own thinking. You don't need a conspiracy when everyone was cast from the same mold. They're puppets, but sincere puppets. That's exactly what makes them dangerous. And that mold has a history. It has an intellectual architect: Antonio Gramsci. Gramsci, an Italian Marxist, writes in the 1930s from Mussolini's prisons. He makes an observation: in the West, the workers' revolution failed. Why? Because here, power doesn't rest only on the state and the police. It rests on culture. On schools, universities, the press, the Church, the arts. What he calls cultural hegemony. His conclusion: you don't take the West by frontal assault. You take it through a war of position. You conquer minds, language and institutions first. Political power then falls on its own. In the late 60s, German activist Rudi Dutschke summed up the strategy in one phrase: the long march through the institutions. Fifty years later, look at the universities. Look at the major newsrooms. Look at the NGOs, the international agencies, the HR departments, Hollywood. The march is over. The institutions have been captured. And that's when you understand why the world feels fake. When the institutions that are supposed to tell you the truth become the instruments of a project, they no longer describe reality. They prescribe it. Then, in the middle of this system, one man stood up against it. Elon Musk. He understood before anyone else that the heart of the machine is control of information. So he did the one thing that could truly crack it: he bought Twitter for $44 billion. He opened the Twitter Files and showed the world how moderation worked from the inside. He gave millions of people their voice back. And that's why he backed Trump. Not out of affection. Out of strategic clarity. Because Trump isn't a program. Trump is an antibody. The immune response of a social body that someone tried to dissolve. When a civilization senses it's being erased, it produces antibodies. They're rough, imperfect, loud. But they're proof the organism is still alive. Trump is the antibody to the empire of lies. But here's the good news. This project is doomed. Not just because we'll fight it. Because it carries the same flaw as every communist system, and it will end the same way. This isn't the communism of collective farms. It's the communism of norms, cultures and identities. But the structure is identical: an elite that believes it can redesign society from the top down. And Friedrich Hayek explained 80 years ago why that always fails. Reason one: the knowledge problem. The knowledge that makes a society run isn't in anyone's head. It's scattered across millions of individuals, in millions of local situations. No planner, no committee, no elite can gather it. Markets work because prices aggregate that knowledge. The Plan fails because it claims to replace it. Reason two, and this is where Hayek becomes prophetic: traditions, cultures and moral codes are knowledge too. Compressed knowledge. Centuries of trial and error, rules nobody invented but that survived because they worked. Hayek calls it the fatal conceit: believing that the reason of a handful of men can redesign what millennia have selected. Destroying a culture doesn't free people. It erases the memory that allowed them to live together. Reason three: the dynamics of lying. When the Plan collides with reality, it can't admit its mistake. So it needs propaganda, to make people believe the Plan's goals are their own. And it needs coercion, for those who refuse to believe. In The Road to Serfdom, Hayek devotes an entire chapter to this: The End of Truth. And another with a crystal-clear title: Why the Worst Get on Top. In a system that has to lie to survive, the best liars rise. That's the loop. Reality resists. You lie to hide the failure. The lie demands more control. Control produces more failure. Until collapse. That's exactly what you're living through today. The world feels fake because it is. The chaos you see isn't the end of the world. It's the noise a system of lies makes when it crashes into reality. The USSR lasted nearly 70 years. It collapsed all at once, without a war, because nobody believed Pravda anymore. Today, nearly 7 out of 10 Americans no longer believe their media. You see where I'm going with this. Reality always wins. The only question is how long we're willing to live inside the lie before we look it in the face.