Asked about the city’s plan to spend $30 million building a government-run grocery store, and whether it might crush the bodegas nearby, Gustavo Gordillo replied: “If one publicly owned grocery store that brings prices down is enough to put someone out of business, then maybe they shouldn’t have been in that business in the first place.”

A municipal government commanding the tax revenue of 8.5 million people, including the taxes paid by the bodega owner himself, will open a store across the street from him, undercut his prices with his own money, and if he goes under, well, he had it coming.

More astonishingly, this is offered as a philosophy of fairness by a movement that claims to champion the little guy. The bodega owner is the little guy. And he is being told that his life’s work was a mistake that the state is now correcting.

So who is Gustavo Gordillo? Here the story turns from absurd to tragic. His family emigrated from Peru when he was a child, and he grew up outside Miami before making his way, apparently, to Yale and then to New York’s art world. Consider what his parents fled. Peru at the close of the 1980s was Alan García’s socialist catastrophe: populist spending, nationalizations, price controls, shortages in the shops, and an inflation so violent that prices could double in weeks. Stalking the countryside was the Shining Path, Maoist guerrillas who massacred peasants in the name of the people. The market reforms that later stabilized Peru, the austerity and privatization known as the Fujishock, had barely begun when families like the Gordillos boarded planes. They fled a left-wing collapse in its purest form.

His parents crossed hemispheres, took whatever jobs they could find, and lifted their son into the American middle class. And when MacCallum asked him why his family came here, he explained that Peru’s misery was caused by “the imposition of capitalism and American imperialism.”

Pause. Process that. He said his parents fled to America (and its still-somewhat-capitalist system) because of… America and its capitalism? “That doesn’t make much sense,” his host rightly pointed out.

It makes no sense as history. But it makes perfect sense as strategy.

Gordillo is an intelligent man, and intelligent men can see where power pools in our culture. There is little cultural power today in gratitude, in thanking the country that sheltered your family, in telling the unfashionable truth that socialism wrecked your homeland. There is, by contrast, enormous power in grievance. The mantle of the oppressed confers moral authority, media attention, and now, in New York, actual political office. He has made his choice, and he is counting on the rest of us to respond the way comfortable majorities usually do: with a shrug.

The shrug would be a mistake, because Gordillo is a symptom rather than an aberration. A 2025 poll found that 62 percent of Americans aged 18 to 29 hold a favorable view of socialism. A third of them view communism favorably. These are the voters who powered Zohran Mamdani into City Hall on promises that include the aforementioned grocery stores and a freeze on rents for a million apartments.

More pointedly, as I wrote in Reason the day after the election, it was those with college degrees who supported Mamdani the most. Young Americans are seduced by socialism, and more so those who spent years on a college campus swarming with its adherents and activists.

Lest anyone conclude that these delusions live only on the left, consider what happens when government hands subsidies, bailouts, and sweetheart contracts to favored corporations: the same sin Gordillo proposes, with better-dressed beneficiaries. The TARP bank bailouts. Subsidies for farmers and film crews alike. Tax incentives lavished on sports stadiums and data centers. The Export–Import Bank, quietly guaranteeing loans for politically connected exporters. Each is socialism in a different flavor, the state picking winners and losers with other people's money. Conservatives can be outraged all they want at a radical DSA member like Gordillo, but their preferred party is guilty, in differing degrees, of the same anti-competitive market interference that Mamdani is advocating with his grocery store idea.

Young people who watched banks get rescued while their parents lost homes drew the reasonable conclusion that the game was rigged. So did the teenagers who watched governors order the family diner closed as "nonessential" while the big-box stores, blessed with lobbyists, stayed open and posted record profits. So do the twenty-somethings who follow accounts tracking congressional stock portfolios, wondering how lawmakers so reliably beat the market they regulate.

They are right about the rigging and wrong about the remedy. All of this is capitalism corrupted, wealth flowing to the politically connected rather than to those who earn it by creating value for customers. The answer to government favoritism toward the rich or well-connected cannot be government favoritism run by different people. It is government favoritism toward no one.

Why, then, is socialism so seductive to the young among us? It is, I believe, a symptom of historical illiteracy, and that illiteracy is manufactured, however unintentionally, by the institution that raises most American children: the government school.

We should not be surprised. Government schools are themselves socialist enterprises, funded by compulsory taxation, insulated from competition, assigned their customers by street address. Everything Gordillo proposes for groceries, voters (including conservatives who profess to reject socialism) long ago accepted for education: a "free" government provider, bankrolled by taxes on the very families it lures away from private alternatives, driving those alternatives out of business in neighborhood after neighborhood.

If a tax-funded grocery store putting the bodega under is tyranny, what shall we call a tax-funded school that did the same to independent schooling generations ago? Conservatives who recoil from Mamdani's supermarkets have spent a century defending Mamdani's model in the classroom, then wonder aloud why the classroom keeps producing Mamdani voters.

That wonder is misplaced. An institution built on the socialist model has no incentive to teach the case against itself, and this shapes what passes for history in its classrooms. Students learn that the Great Depression happened; they don’t learn how FDR’s meddling deepened and prolonged it. They learn that the Soviet Union fell; they don’t learn about the engineered famines, the queues for bread, the informants in every apartment block, or why an economy without prices cannot feed itself. The syllabus will not linger on García's Peru, or Mao's tens of millions starved, or the Venezuelan grocery lines, because every one of those stories is an argument for limiting the very power that signs the teacher's checks.

History arrives, instead, pre-filtered: capitalism's sins itemized, socialism's catastrophes reduced to a paragraph about good intentions gone awry. (Gee golly, surely socialism will work next time!) The predictable result is a generation that can recite the perceived sins of markets but cannot name a single country ruined by the state meddling in them. So the curriculum drifts toward the collective and away from the individual, and children marinate for 13,000 hours in an environment that treats the state's provision of life's necessities (including education and even groceries) as the natural order of things. They graduate fluent in grievance and ignorant of economics, and then we act astonished when 62 percent of them like the sound of socialism.

None of this would matter if parents had kept the duty of formation for themselves, but most surrendered it decades ago, assuming the state’s schools would transmit ideas and values it is incentivized to ignore. A civilization that assumes its children will absorb its values by osmosis has written its own obituary. Liberty is an inheritance, and inheritances must be deliberately transmitted, or else they are lost in a single generation. That transmission is now (and always was!) a family responsibility because nearly every other societal institution has grown indifferent or adversarial to the values of individual freedom. Michael Novak understood this, in a line I once turned into a book-length treatment:

Between the omnipotent State and the naked individual looms the first line of defense against totalitarianism: the economically and politically independent family, protecting the space within which free and independent individuals may receive the necessary years of nurture.

This conviction is why I have spent years writing the Tuttle Twins books, which have put the ideas of free markets and individual rights into the hands of millions of children whose schools will never mention them. But no book series, mine included, is sufficient to the scale of the emergency. Ideas compete for the young the way merchants compete for customers, and for decades, the socialists have been showing up to the market. They are selling envy dressed as justice, and to a generation that was never told the price, it looks free. Parents need to realize the red-level crisis that this actually is.

Gordillo’s parents understood something their son has unlearned: that the difference between Lima in 1990 and Miami in 1995 was liberty, and that the difference was worth crossing the world for. Somewhere between their sacrifice and his socialist seminar rooms, the story broke down. No one handed it down, so ideology rushed into the vacuum. A young Gordillo heard the socialist siren song from Bernie Sanders, and now he, Mamdani, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and others are assimilating young people, Borg-like, each convert wired to recruit the next.

Every American family now faces a humbler version of the choice Gordillo's parents faced. They crossed the world to give their son liberty; we need only cross the living room to explain it. Hand down the story, deliberately and early, or watch someone else hand down a different one. The bodega owner already knows which future he is living in. The question is whether the rest of us will notice before our children inform us, with perfect sincerity, that we “shouldn’t have been in business in the first place.”

For this, Langley has called DeFlock a “terroristic organization” whose “primary motivation is chaos.”

Sit with that inversion for a moment. A billion-dollar enterprise photographs most cars in America (regardless of whether their drivers are suspected of a crime), logs each vehicle’s movements into a searchable national database, and grants access to thousands of police agencies, no warrant required. A private citizen responds by noting, on a map, where the cameras sit in plain view atop public poles. And in the CEO’s telling, the man with the map is the menace.

Consider how strange this standard is. Tens of millions of Americans open Waze every day, an app that lets drivers flag police cars and DWI checkpoints in real time. When the NYPD demanded Google shut the feature down, the company refused, noting that informed drivers make safer decisions, and nobody seriously calls Waze a terrorist network. Freeman's map does less than Waze.

The ACLU (rightly) called Langley’s assertion “simplistic, juvenile, and ultimately authoritarian.” But even that seems charitable. When merely watching the watchers gets branded as terrorism, something foundational has flipped in the relationship between citizen and state.

Fairness demands we grant Flock its strongest case. A shop owner who points a camera at his own parking lot is exercising his property rights, and sensibly so. Many police departments credit these systems with helping them investigate cases. Flock claims to have “supported more than 1 million investigations, assisted in solving 20% of cleared cases, helped locate more than 10,000 missing persons, and contributed significantly to stolen vehicle recoveries across the country.”

Langley himself puts it plainly: “Everyone wants to live in a crimeless society.” He is right about the desire. Nobody roots for the carjacker. The longing to be safe is among the most human of impulses, and any honest critic must concede that these cameras have, in particular cases, done genuine good.

But honesty cuts both ways, and the devices are no longer only what their marketing suggests. “License plate reader” undersells the machine considerably. Flock’s cameras record a vehicle’s make, model, color, dents, bumper stickers, and roof racks, creating a fingerprint that can be tracked even when the plate is not visible. And their cameras can also record the people inside their cars.

The company’s next product, Nova, promises to knit police records together with Social Security numbers, credit histories, and property data into one AI-searchable whole. And the cameras have migrated from highways to the places we go to escape being watched: parks, trails, playgrounds, libraries. Local governments plug into the network, share their feeds across state lines, and very rarely ask their residents first.

What happens when this much power sits in this many hands with this little oversight? We no longer have to speculate. Consider a brief inventory of the record so far:

• At least 18 police officers, including multiple chiefs, have been caught using Flock to stalk ex-girlfriends, spouses, and romantic rivals, sometimes running a single plate hundreds of times.

• A Texas sheriff’s office searched 83,000 cameras across the nation hunting a woman who had taken abortion pills; the stated reason in the log read “had an abortion, search for female.” Officials claimed a welfare check, but court records later showed police had weighed criminal charges.

• In Dunwoody, Georgia, records revealed Flock’s own employees accessed the city’s cameras regularly (reportedly over 1,000 times), including a camera inside a children’s gymnastics room, while the company’s FAQ had promised that “nobody from Flock Safety is accessing or monitoring your footage.”

• Federal immigration agents tapped the network in states whose laws forbade it, prompting Illinois to audit and expel dozens of agencies from its data.

Each incident was predictably dismissed as an aberration. But together they form a pattern, and the pattern is the point: infrastructure this powerful will be abused because it is operated by fallible human beings and checked by almost nothing.

Where does the road lead if we keep driving? Look at London, the CCTV capital of the Western world. Nearly a million cameras watch nine million residents, roughly one for every ten people; the average Londoner is recorded about seventy times a day. Yet researchers find little correlation between camera density and crime rates. The cameras did what cameras do. They watched everyone, and criminals adapted, and the dragnet stayed.

Nor is this some distant foreign cautionary tale. Flock’s own hometown of Atlanta is now the most surveilled city in America, with 124 cameras per 1,000 residents; worldwide, only cities in China watch their people more closely. The panopticon has a zip code, and it is domestic.

Langley believes that “Safety is a fundamental right.” He simply wants a world where people are kept safe, and I take him at his word. But that is precisely what should trouble us, because the urge to be kept safe is the campaign fodder for every tyrant in history. No regime ever announced itself as an oppressor; each arrived promising protection from crime, from chaos, and from enemies within. The Stasi kept East Germans very “safe” from one another. The question a free people must ask is never whether surveillance can prevent some harm. Of course it can. The question is what kind of people we become once we accept being tracked, logged, and cataloged as the price of admission to public life. A society where every trip to a church, a gun store, a clinic, a protest, or a political meeting enters a database is a society where dissent grows quietly expensive. Anyone with a modicum of historical knowledge knows how that story ends, and it does not end with safety.

There is resistance. Langley’s reaction to calling DeFlock a “terroristic organization” stemmed in part, no doubt, from how some individuals are using its information to disable these surveillance systems. (I should point out that while Langley and others see this behavior as itself criminal, our very country, whose anniversary we just celebrated, was founded by patriots engaged in similar activities in the name of liberty.)

On the more peaceable front, more than fifty cities have canceled, deactivated, or rejected Flock contracts after residents mounted pressure. City councils respond to rooms full of neighbors in ways no federal agency ever will. Concerned citizens should (at a minimum) demand legal reforms that:

1. require a warrant to use data from these devices;

2. impose short retention windows after which the data must be purged; and

3. require publicly available audits of how the systems are used and for which types of investigations.

I should note that for years, our team at Libertas Institute has been passing and promoting legislation in states across the country to protect privacy. Flock’s rapid expansion of surveillance systems catches many communities off guard. Private companies develop (and law enforcement agencies begin using) new tools and technologies far faster than committees and councils and citizens can typically keep up. More work is needed, and Libertas will be engaged on this topic.

The Fourth Amendment was written on the premise that a free people are entitled to be left alone absent particular (read: individualized) suspicion. Which returns us to the man with the map. Telling your neighbors where the cameras are is among the oldest of American instincts: the refusal to be governed in the dark. (And what some choose to do with that information, including destroying them, is borne—much to the chagrin of Langley and law enforcement—of a related American instinct.)

Perfect safety has never been on the menu of human life, and the societies that chased it hardest made themselves miserable without ever catching it. What is on the menu is a choice older than the republic: whether we will live as free people who accept the risks freedom carries, or as monitored people who traded their birthright for a promise neither Flock nor their friends in law enforcement can keep.

Our ancestors made that choice under far graver dangers than ours, and they left us a clear answer, one best articulated by Franklin: “Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.” The least we can do is decline to auction off our liberty, one pole-mounted camera at a time.

You see, there is a grim regularity to the lifespan of great powers. Sir John Glubb, a British officer who spent his retirement surveying the wreckage of empires from Assyria to his own, concluded that the average dominant power endures about 250 years, roughly ten generations.

Samuel Arbesman, examining 41 empires across three millennia, landed on a similar number. Chart their rises and falls and you get a horizon of overlapping arcs, each cresting and collapsing with almost embarrassing consistency (see below). Nations ascend, plateau, then decline, gradually and then all at once. Note America at the end (of the chart, heh…).

Many of the founders would not have been surprised. They were morbidly fluent in the failure of republics. They studied Athens and Rome as cautionary tales rather than curiosities, and they built accordingly. What they feared was never foreign conquest so much as domestic complacency: a people grown too comfortable, and too incurious, to know why liberty was worth the trouble and what’s required to preserve it.

Franklin’s famous warning, “a republic, if you can keep it,” carried no rhetorical flourish. It was a job description of sorts, handed to every generation that would follow.

So how is the present generation performing? Consider an awkward birthday statistic.

A new Cato Institute survey, released on Friday, found that 46 percent of Americans cannot even say what the 250th anniversary actually commemorates. Among Gen Z, that figure rises to 61 percent. Fewer than four in ten young Americans can identify the adoption of the Declaration of Independence as the occasion we are celebrating with parades and pyrotechnics.

(This is why, I’ll briefly note, our America’s History Tuttle Twins series is so critical, helping the rising generation learn history through storytelling—a strong antidote to dry textbooks. Volume 3 just launched last week and there’s a sale right now.)

Young people are seven times likelier than their grandparents to believe the founders acted chiefly to pad their own fortunes. Barely half of Gen Z counts the ideals of 1776 as part of their own inheritance, against 88 percent of seniors. And in the cohort that will superintend America at its 300th birthday, socialism now polls better than capitalism.

Here’s my thesis, in short: A civilization that cannot even explain itself to its children has already begun to end.

Civilizations do not fall because the barbarians grow stronger. They fall because the heirs grow indifferent. Education degrades from the formation of character into the accumulation of credentials (if even that). History becomes a dusty file cabinet of antiquated anecdotes, easily archived in favor of the seductive now. The common story dissolves into competing tribal ones, and a people who no longer share a past discover they cannot agree on a future.

And here is the consolation the arc of empires conceals: the pattern is descriptive, not prophetic. It records what has happened, never what must. Decline is a choice, assembled from a thousand small surrenders. And if decline is a choice, so is renewal.

That renewal, I believe, must happen upstream of where most people focus. Politics captures our attention, money, and care. But this constant squabbling is downstream of the cultural forces that influence it, which themselves are downstream of the family. This is where the battle for America’s preservation truly lies.

I see this as a tragedy: We pour fortunes into short-term political fights and nearly nothing into forming the next generation. We fight over the harvest and neglect the planting. This isn’t me just opining; it’s what the data shows. Here’s where the money currently flows in right-of-center organizations focused on freedom (taken from a slide deck I’ve shared with a few of Libertas Network’s donors):

The most consequential efforts of the next 250 years will not occur in any capitol, courtroom, or classroom. It will occur at kitchen tables and in curricula, in the ordinary handing down of ideas from those who hold them to those who do not yet. Asked in that same survey what they most want children to learn from this anniversary, Americans’ top answer was this: that freedom is rare and must be protected. They know what is needed. The question is whether we will build the means to deliver it.

As we celebrate America’s 250th, I think of what it will take to perpetuate classically liberal values—free speech, property rights, free enterprise, and more—for another 50, 100, or 250 years. Can America beat the trend? Can it survive longer than the average civilization?

Answering that requires us to confront this simple truth: No free society has outlived its own ignorance of the values that gave it life.

The founders built the first 250 years. They did it deliberately, against long odds, with clear eyes about how fragile the whole experiment was. The next 250 are our assignment. The hour is late, but it is not too late, and a birthday is as good a moment as any to begin.

Franklin's job description has come due again, and the question, as it has always been, is whether we will keep it.

P.S. This topic is the theme of a new, single-issue magazine we’ve mailed out to a few donors and friends. Here’s the PDF.

If you’ve read this far, I’m excited to share that there’s more to come. This is the first of a new weekly newsletter I’ll be sharing commenting on current events, providing behind the scenes updates of our work, and breaking down complex ideas into simple, self-evident truths that you can communicate to your children.