One of our members, MICHAEL D. DUNCAN, recommended this article. Thank You! 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.
John Sexton 8:00 PM | November 07, 2025
Here is Peter Thiel’s email to Zuck and Andreessen in Jan-2020 predicting socialism.
Tl;dr: Too much student debt and lack of affordable housing keep young people with negative capital for too long. And without a stake in the capitalist system, they will turn against it.
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 got 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.
One of our members, MICHAEL D. DUNCAN, recommended this article.
Please read it and comment below.
(The spelling and grammar have been corrected in the original content.)
Replies
I sympathize with the plight facing the Millenials and their perceived lack of opportunity to have what their parents and grandparents were able to achieve; however, it was the socialistic policies that have crept silently into US Governance which have caused most of the problems the Millenials face. The move to subsidize higher education by the US Government did NOTHING to improve the quality of education, but only served to drastically increase demand by enabling "young adult children" the opportunity to go to college without having any clear career goals in mind. Eventhough I went to college on an ROTC Scholarship, I knew on day one of my Freshman year what degree I wanted to obtain and I never waivered. With the government providing easy money to encourage greater college attendance, these kids, without any clear career goals, went to college to "find themselves!" That is a very expensive experience and with too many college professors who are1960's hippy rejects, these impressionable kids were led down the primrose path to destruction. College is NOT a place to find yourself and this is especially true when you are borrowing all of your money to attend and being guided by the same people who are profiting from your indecision. The Colleges and Universities are big businesses and they have become huge businesses with the receipt of billions of Federal Aid money paid out to confused children who had no idea about what they wanted to learn or how what they learned was going to make them a productive citizen in society. Of course, this outcome is predictable since government bureaucrats are only interested in doling out money and NOT interested in OUTCOMES! The Millenials dug their own grave with their indecision and now they want the taxpayer to bail them out. Mamdani is telling them what they want to hear, but we all know he has no power to do what he is promising. His platform is all empty words based in false promises.
I believe that President Trump's plans to onshore jobs and enhance the economy of the United States will achieve his desired end-state. He just needs to have some old fashioned fireside chats with We the People to explain that the government can no longer afford to be a sugar daddy and that if the Millenials want to have the American Dream, it comes with hard work. I think President Trump makes a great father figure and that he needs to use his bully pulpit to mentor the Millenials and other youth generations on the realities of Freedom, Liberty, and Self-Reliance.
I am positive that Mamdani is going to fail miserably and that this failure will serve as a prime example to the youth of America that the Trump way is the ONLY way to prosperity!
COL, so very well said and so accurate, I agree 1000%! I am wondering if Nixon was a communist, and they prompted him to remove the gold standard in 1971!
Michael, I don't think that Nixon was a communist. Nixon's problem is that he was thin skinned in his relationship with the rest of the GOP and had an inferiority complex that caused him to make some really bad decisions with regard to the Gold Standard and the Vietnam War. He was desperate to fund the war and taking the nation off the Gold Standard seemed like a good idea at the time; however, he failed to reflect on the unintended consequences of that decision. Nixon did a lot on the international stage that was good for America; however, he didn't have a long term vision for exploiting his international victories in the long-term. He also had a lot fo political appointee advisors who gave him bad advice and then stabbed him in the back when their recommendations went wrong. He was also a bit naive about the Demoncratic Party, believing that he could compromise in good faith, which they only retured ill faith. Carter was a complete disaster and Reagan brought us back form the Carter brink of destruction, Bush 1 was useless, but Clinton was the President who inflicted a lot of pain on our Republic that carried through the Bush 2 era and these bad policies were placed on steroids during Obama who was the REAL communist!
COL, thanks for posting, very informative, as usual!
Good insight.
Steve, thanks for posting this! I think it is a very wise comment! Trump needs to come up with some real plans to get the young people on his side! It sucks to always be out of money! I have been there myself, fortunately, years ago!
It, the problem, again and repeatedly goes back to education......or lack of it. The youth is told without college they won't amount to anything, then the college rapes them and makes them bleed for a huge portion of their life. Colleges do not serve the youth they supposed to teach, they serve themselves, they are like vampires sucking the blood out of the youth. The rest of the left in leadership makes sure there are no jobs for them because they forced everything to foreign countries.........and you have the poor, hopeless youth rebel........giving the left the very power they could not get any other way! Ain't politics grand!
I completely agree with you, plus, they do surgically precise damage to belief in equality, and every good thing. It's the blame America 'game.'
Does everyone realize the schools started to disintegrate the day the Bible was removed from the classroom!
STEVE, THAT WAS INDEED THE START OF OUR DOWN FALL, AND IT REALLY GOT GOING WHEN THE CHILDREN WHO NEVER LEARNED ABOUT GOD, OR TEN COMMANDMENTS, OR THE BIBLE GRADUATED AND WENT INTO SOCIETY!
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