Posted on 11/08/2025 8:54:50 PM PST by SeekAndFind
Way back in January 2020, Peter Thiel wrote an email to Mark Zuckerberg, Sheryl Sandberg, Marc Andreessen and others warning that Millennials turn toward socialism needed to be taken seriously. Here's that email which started going viral this week in the wake of Zohran Mamdani's win in NYC.
Here is Peter Thiel’s email to Zuck and Andreessen in Jan-2020 predicting socialism.
Tl;drtoo much student debt and lack of affordable housing keeps young people with negative capital for too long. And without a stake in the capitalist system, they will turn against it.
pic.twitter.com/BOKgwJ2cV0— Chamath Palihapitiya (@chamath) November 5, 2025
His conclusion was that "if one has no stake in the capitalist system, one may well turn against it." He was referring specifically to some of the same young people who just elected Mamdani.
Today the Free Press published an interview with Thiel in which they asked him about the email and his thoughts on what to do about the rise of socialism.
If you graduated in 1970 with no student debt, compare that to the millennial experience: too many people go to college, they don’t learn anything, and they end up with incredibly burdensome debt. Student debt is a version of this generational conflict that I’ve talked about for a long time...
It’s extremely difficult these days for young people to become homeowners. If you have extremely strict zoning laws and restrictions on building more housing, it’s good for the boomers, whose properties keep going up in value, and terrible for the millennials. If you proletarianize the young people, you shouldn’t be surprised if they eventually become communist.
As for Mamdani himself, Thiel's take is that he's go no real plans to fix anything, but at least he's talking about the thing young people are worried about.
...to Mamdani’s credit, he at least talked about these problems. So my cop-out answer is always to say: The first step is to talk about the problems, even if you don’t know what to do about them. There’s been a failure of, let’s say, the center left-center right establishment to even talk about them...
So the idea is: Maybe we should look for solutions outside the Overton Window. And that includes some very left-wing economics, socialist-type stuff. I don’t think those ideas will ultimately work, but they’re more than whatever was on offer. Cuomo did not have a plan for housing. He didn’t even think it was an issue. And of course, he’s been in politics and government for many, many years, so it’s hard not to ask: Why is he going to do something now, if he hasn’t done anything before? So, I’m not optimistic about Mamdani, but if you score it relatively, this is the kind of thing that’s going to happen if you look outside the Overton Window for solutions.
He also offered this warning to people who'd like to defeat Mamdani and people like him.
We’ll see how much Mamdani can do as mayor of New York. But I would say it’s symptomatic of things being very unhealthy. It’s symptomatic of establishment parties not tackling certain very basic problems, of having broken this generational compact. I would prefer people to focus more on solving this generational problem.
If all you can say is that Mamdani is a jihadist, communist, ridiculous young person, what that sounds like to me is that you still don’t have any idea what to do about housing or student debt. If that’s the best you can do, you are going to keep losing.
He may have a point. Obviously, the fact that Mamdani is a far-left socialist who won't denounce Hamas didn't matter to a lot of people who want free buses and rent freezes. We may be seeing the same thing happen in Maine where Graham Platner also called himself a communist and said a bunch of things the left would normally find objectionable. But so long as he's promising some kind of fundamental change, Democrats seem willing to overlook his other issues.
They’ve been taught socialism is peachy for years, in the schools they’ve attended.
But it wasn’t really any different 50 years ago.
They have been indoctrinated by the MSM to hate capitalism and love socialism. Quite simple.
All we can do is pray for billionaires to step up and instead of…corrupting or bribing the mayor-elect, to somehow work with him in a way that can build up and restore the city in a business friendly manner.
Quote from Facebook co-founder Tyler Winkelvoss’s take:
“The Wall Streeters, financiers, and hedge funders have been too busy working on their fishponds and climbing the rungs of polite society to remember to protect the system that allowed them to achieve their success in the first place and allowed New York City to once become the greatest city in the world. Not ruffling feathers was more important than questioning the ideological insanity being taught in the private schools and universities that they sent their kids to. All that mattered was fitting in and getting invited to the right dinner parties.
Now their kids are indoctrinated NPCs, always protesting and supporting the current thing. Like their parents, they too want to fit in. ”
https://freerepublic.com/focus/f-chat/4325494/posts?q=1&;page=24 things.
Cause the MSM/leftists/democrats have lied to them and brainwashed them.
And they’re entitlement minded drones who think they deserve everything for free and are way out of touch with reality.
“True pandemic”
Student “loans” are a disaster.
The idea that everyone should go to college whether they academically qualify or not is asinine. And on top of that you give loans to kids majoring in some useless subject with no hope of ever being able to repay it, and on top of that the government guarantees those loans!
Anyone with an ounce of sense could have predicted the disaster that it has become.
This is not good for the Boomers. They get bled out by constantly increasing property taxes and insurance premiums which eventually force them to sell their homes. Most Boomers are on fixed incomes which cannot keep up with rising costs of living.
Just like the Millennials and Gen_Z people.
And who buys those homes when the Boomers lose them? Way too often it is large corporations who turn those homes into rental properties. The former middle class has been harvested.
Socialism is not going to help the Millennials. But it sure will make them feel better as they join a movement that promises they can take stuff away from the Boomers.
Imagine the surprise when they find out that the government officials cleaned out the swag way before the Millennials got there.
The reason is he has promised them “free stuff”.... and they’re too ignorant to understand there is no such thing!
Sadly, he might be partially correct. And it’s not helping that AI is putting thousands out of work. Without any recourse or financial cushion, they will turn to the government for support.
Remember . . . it was the Depression that got Hitler into Germany. And World War I brought Communism into Russia; Lenin himself thought that war was the only possible way. Following that war, in the early 1920s, the chaos in Italy led to the election of Mussolini.
These people, not so educated or rational to begin with, with clutch at anything.
As if this was the work of conservatives? Earth to Thiel, it is the leftist bureaucracies that cook up the new rules per the preferences of banks, insurance companies, and unions. Millennials are turning socialist to fix the consequences of socialism.
And we're to pretend they're not stupid, brainwashed kids?
Peter Thiel was the only major tech guy to come out for Trump in 2016. He spoke at the Republican Republican Convention.
I was impressed by Frank Capra’s patriotic US propaganda film series Why We Fight.
It showed American schoolrooms, the lives of free people here and so on, contrasting it with life under any tyrant including Hitler and the Japanese WWII leaders.
(Ironically, the Soviets with their sacrifice of scorched earth and fighting desperately to kill Nazis, turned out later to be our new Cold War enemies.)
Since the 70% of the young people do not know what socialism and communism really mean-—not a teacher’s wimpy theory of them-—they could use simple films like that. Glenn Beck had his two books which help:
“Arguing with Idiots: How to Stop Small Minds and Big Government” (2009)
and
“Arguing with Socialists”.
What exactly does the older generation OWE the younger one? America used to be about working hard to achieve your dreams.
You are supposed to start at the bottom and work your way up.
My wife and I are preparing her late father’s home to be sold.
WE CANNOT EVEN GIVE AWAY A LOT OF THE OLD MAN’S FUNCTIONAL FURNITURE.
We have been turned away by many places supposedly looking for donated items.
My wife and I were happy to get household items as “hand-me-downs” when we started.
Young people today want to START AT THE TOP of the game of life.
Exactly.
To say that young people today are ignorant of history and economics is true. To say that they have been indoctrinated by their teachers in grade school, middle school and high school, as well as in college, is also true. It is also true that the youth of any particular generation for at least the last several hundred years, and probably for all of recorded history, has been similarly ignorant. That’s what young people do, that’s what young people are. It takes decades of learning in the school of hard knocks to figure out that your opinion of things when you were 20 or 30 years old was a bunch of crap, and to learn a little something about history and economics and how the world works in many other subject areas. Why do I bring all of this up? Because it is a waste of time to condemn today’s youth for being pretty much just like the youth of any other generation. That is not the unique problem that we face right now.
The problem that we face now is that there seems to be little or no hope for today’s youth to enjoy a standard of living like that of their parents or grandparents. Why is that? I would say that a large part of the blame, for at least the half or so of the population that attends college, is that college is so ungodly expensive these days. As an example, I attended Georgetown University between 1979 and 1983. The tuition my first year was a bit under $4500, and in my final year it was about $6800. That was expensive in its day, even for private universities, but I sincerely doubt that it was more than about 5% of what my parents earned. In the intervening 40 odd years, the cost of education has gone up at a far faster rate than inflation and wages, with the result that if you adjusted what my parents earned back then for inflation, and had them try to pay today’s tuition at Georgetown, it would be far more than 5% of their earnings. Ditto for ALL colleges and universities. Effectively nobody can afford that, and as a result, students are compelled to take on immense loans. When they graduate, because we’ve sent industry overseas, the jobs aren’t there that pay well enough for them to be able to repay their loans. They are stuck as debt slaves for somewhere between 10 and 20 years. This is why they have no hope. This is why they are bitter. This is why they look at our present system and say that they want to junk it and replace it with something, anything, that promises them a better life. For those who don’t go to college, they don’t have student loan debt, but they also can’t find jobs that pay decently compared to the equivalent job that their parents or grandparents were able to get. Both groups, those who go to college, and those who don’t, face incredibly high costs for housing and for medical treatment. Now, most young people don’t need much in the way of medical treatment, but they still have to pay insurance premiums, which are out of sight. So, again, they are pretty bitter and pretty willing to change to any system or policy advocated by a smooth-talking politician that offers them some hope. That they are choosing socialism is based on pure ignorance, simply because it cannot possibly work. If anything, it will be even worse. But those kind of stupid choices were also made by a large percentage of people in Germany in the early 1930s, and in Russia during and after World War I. Ditto for the revolutions all over Europe in 1848. If you kill someone’s hope for a better future, don’t expect them to act rationally, simply because the definition of rational to them is anything different from what conventional wisdom says (and conventional wisdom is usually based upon a reasonably decent understanding of history and economics).
So, what is the solution? Well, if I had the perfect solution, I would be in a very different position than I am in right now. However, it seems to me that the policies which killed the American dream for so many of today’s youth are based on socialist principles. We not only need to hold the line to stop the further implementation of these unworkable and disastrous policies, but we need to effectively communicate to our youth that it is a very socialism that they advocate for now that got them and the rest of us into this mess in the first place. Education got immensely expensive because the education-industrial complex captured Washington, and got all kinds of grant and loan programs implemented that allowed tuition to go as high as it has these days. Couple that with a complete hands off attitude toward the professors who have filled the heads of our youth with nonsense for many decades, and you have a true recipe for disaster. Socialism has also made housing much more expensive. A free market would not allow for rent control. A free market would not have various housing regulations being so restrictive that they dissuaded builders from producing more housing units. A free market, rather than a socialist mindset, would have immense competition in both health insurance and in medical services, rather than the overly bloated, bureaucratic and monopolistic system that exists today. Every which way we turn, socialist policies, even if labeled otherwise, have destroyed hope by gradually shutting off one avenue after another of opportunity. If we wish to avoid an actual Communist revolution, or even something similar to the FDR peaceful revolution of the early 30s, the older generations not only need to stop socialists policies in their tracks and reverse them to the greatest extent possible by, but we need to find an effective way to communicate how we were suckered in by the promises of socialism and the politicians who advocated for those policies, and to make them understand that the socialism they think is the solution to their problem is, in reality, the cause of their problems. After all, we had a much more free economy, even under FDR, than we do right now, and opportunity was available back then.
Those of us who lived during the time when the Soviet Empire existed, and who learned why communist economics, also called socialism, doesn’t work - we are getting older, and are starting to die off or leave the political discussion. We have a very short time in which to impart whatever wisdom we have acquired over our lifetimes to the younger generation, and if we don’t do it, they will employ their ignorance and lack of wisdom to change things in a way that they believe will help them, but which will actually end this country as we have known it. Peter Thiel is correct in warning about this, and in understanding that we need to do something about it very quickly. That is certainly not going to be easy, not with most of the Democrat party and virtually all of the educational establishment telling them the exact opposite of what we all know to be the truth. But we owe it to ourselves, to the generations that came before us, and most of all to the generations coming after us to give it our best effort.
It is a disservice to the public for these people to call what Mandami is selling, Socialism. Makes what he is peddling sound cute and harmless. Mandami is a full blown Islamic terrorist with ideology closer to Marxism and Communism.
“Peter Thiel was the only major tech guy to come out for Trump in 2016. He spoke at the Republican Republican Convention.”
Only because he is business partners with Vance and stood to profit greatly if Trump and Vance won. He is NWO/One World Government enslavement just like the rest. So is Vance... Vance hated Trump until Thiel, Karp, Eric Schmidt, Steve Case, Marc Andreessen, and Elon Musk told him to calm down and smooth his way in because they could gain more power and money if he did. And they are...
Follow the money, they are all just actors stabbing the people in the back and advancing the NWO agenda. Not one of them is actually loyal to Trump. They have ulterior motives. There are always ulterior motives... Always...
Things didn't just happen this way on their own. This is the result of policy choices we've made since the 70s. We could make different policy choices that would drive housing costs down, reduce demand by deporting hordes of foreigners, getting the Blackrocks and Vanguards and the banks out of the housing market, cutting back on zoning restrictions, slashing administrative overhead at universities, etc. We did finally start putting the brakes on the H1B job stealing/wage suppression program. We're starting to crack down on all the cheap foreign illegal alien labor the country's been flooded with but we could do more.
Those who largely got in and got theirs (ie Boomers) are only going to keep shrinking as a share of the electorate. If MAGA doesn't provide solutions, they are going to turn to the Left for solutions. It obviously won't work because socialism only makes things worse but we can't put out a message of "everything's fine and let's have more of the same". That will lead to disastrous defeats in upcoming elections.
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