The National Defense University, a branch of the Department of Defense, boasts that it “educates joint warfighters and other national security leaders in critical thinking and the creative application of military power to inform national strategy and globally integrated operations, under conditions of disruptive change, in order to prevail in war, peace, and competition.” In the Biden era, the DOD believes that its people should learn that socialism is the answer to dealing with China. Perhaps this is the “fight fire with fire” curriculum.

Thomas Piketty is a French economist who loves socialism. His affinity for leftism isn’t a fad. He is a hardcore leftist. According to Wikipedia, his parents were Trotskyites, although they moved away from this position after they visited the Soviet Union in 1991 when Piketty was 20. By that time, it seems that it was too late for their son—he was a determined socialist.

In his early twenties, Piketty was studying at the London School of Economics, which was founded by open socialists in 1895 and has remained true to that creed ever since. His thesis was about wealth redistribution, which I’m guessing he supported.

Piketty then taught at MIT before heading to the Paris School of Economics, which he abandoned briefly, in 2006, to help a socialist party candidate run for president of France. In 2012, he again threw his weight behind a socialist candidate, this time the successful François Hollande, who was an abysmal president. By 2015, Piketty was working for the British Labour party, and reporting to Jeremy Corbyn, the hard-left Labour Party leader who was briefly kicked out for giving the party’s blatant antisemitism a pass.

In 2013, Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century excited American Democrats. It contends that the way to reverse economic inequality is for the government to control the economy. (Piketty presents this as reforming capitalism. If only Marx had thought of that delicate euphemism.)

Piketty seems unperturbed by the fact that socialism has only brought economic disaster and human despair in its wake. I’m willing to bet that none of his work acknowledges that Europe’s post-WWII socialism worked as well as it did only because America funded Europe’s defense, leaving the ungrateful Europeans free to “socialize” their medicine and then sneer at us.

Image: Thomas Piketty by Fronteiras do Pensamento. CC BY-SA 2.0.

Piketty’s most recent book is Time for Socialism: Dispatches from a World on Fire, 2016-2021. I don’t have to read it to know that this French limousine liberal, who’s never had to meet a payroll and is probably extremely wealthy thanks to the New York Times crowd loving his books, claims he has the recipe for socialism done right. With this academic git as our guide, we’re assured that we don’t need to worry about becoming North Korea, Cuba, the dead Soviet Union, Ethiopia, collapsing Europe, or any other failed socialist experiment.

And this is the man that the DOD wants to have speak at its university:

The lecture, which is scheduled to take place online February 16, is titled, “Responding to China: The Case For Global Justice and Democratic Socialism,” and will be given by French economist Thomas Piketty, who is the author of a 2021 book titled Time for Socialism.

A summary of the event, posted on the university’s website, reads:

Western countries are still struggling to define their attitude towards the Beijing regime. In this talk on February 22, 2022, Thomas Piketty will argue that the right answer lies in ending Western arrogance and promoting a new emancipatory and egalitarian horizon on a global scale, a new form of democratic and participatory, ecological and post-colonial socialism. If they stick to their usual lecturing posture and a dated hyper-capitalist model, Western countries may find it extremely difficult to meet the Chinese challenge.

Under another administration, I might think that the point of the lecture is for the DOD’s students to understand the enemy (that is, China and its political-economic system). However, because this is Biden’s DOD, I’m pretty sure that this lecture is intended to prepare our “joint warfighters and other national security leaders” to get along with our new Chinese overlords as we embark upon the grand experiment of the Great Reset and the New World Order.