The Genie’s Revenge: When Revolutionaries Get Exactly What They Asked For! By James Reed

 Suppose, for the sake of philosophical clarity and comedic fairness, that an evil genie appears on the steps of a typical Leftist university. He materialises in a puff of sulphur and undergraduate HEC debt, stretches his back after ten thousand years in a lamp, and announces:

"Your wish is granted. The United States/Australia/the West is destroyed."

He vanishes.

The revolutionaries cheer.

And then, five seconds later, the problem begins.

Because it turns out that destroying the United States etc was not a detailed plan. It was a mood.

This is the central metaphysical weakness of movements like Students for Justice in Palestine: they specialise in negation, not construction. They are experts in the theology of the bonfire, but novices in the engineering of the replacement furnace.

The genie, being evil but not stupid, grants exactly what was requested — no more, no less.

No electricity. No federal student loan system. No Pell grants. No university endowments. No visa regimes. No constitutional protections. No internet backbone maintained by DARPA's ghost. No subsidised campus infrastructure. No Starbucks accepting digital payment through a financial system that no longer exists.

The first casualty of revolution, it turns out, is the revolution's Wi-Fi.

The activists discover, with the speed of empirical science, that their existence was parasitic upon the very host they denounced. Their slogans were typed on devices designed in California, manufactured in Taiwan, and shipped through a global trade system secured by American naval power. Their protests were livestreamed on platforms protected by American law, using bandwidth maintained by American capital.

They were not standing outside the system.

They were standing on it.

Like cartoon characters who run off a cliff but do not fall until they look down, they had mistaken suspension for independence.

The genie, meanwhile, watches with professional curiosity.

He has seen this before.

Revolutionaries tend to imagine destruction as a kind of moral purification, a cosmic reset in which justice emerges automatically from the ashes, like a phoenix that has studied political theory. But destruction is only subtraction. It removes constraints. It does not supply replacements.

Gravity does not cease to exist just because one has denounced Newton.

The activists now face an awkward question: what comes after the victory?

History provides the answer, and it is never flattering.

In the vacuum left by a destroyed order, power does not evaporate. It condenses. Someone with guns, organisation, and fewer moral hesitations fills the space. Usually not the people with protest signs. Usually the people with command structures.

The French Revolution did not end with student committees. It ended with Napoleon.

The Russian Revolution did not end with egalitarian assemblies. It ended with Stalin.

The destruction of a system does not empower the pure. It empowers the ruthless.

Our genie knows this. He has watched civilisations collapse like soufflés.

He waits.

Within weeks, the activists begin to miss the old oppressor. Not its ideology, of course — that remains condemned — but its infrastructure. Its stability. Its predictability. Its peculiar habit of allowing dissent without immediate disappearance.

They discover that tyranny, properly understood, is not defined by how loudly one can shout, but by how safely one can survive shouting.

The destroyed United States/Australia/the West, for all its alleged monstrosity, possessed a strange characteristic: it tolerated its own critics.

It funded them.

It educated them.

It gave them microphones.

The genie's gift has removed this paradox.

There is no longer a system generous enough to subsidise its own denunciation.

This is the deeper irony. Radical Leftist negation depends upon a stable object to negate. It is structurally dependent on the thing it hates. Without it, the revolutionary loses not only his enemy, but his identity.

He becomes unemployed in the industry of outrage.

And so, in time, a second wish begins to form— not spoken aloud, but felt privately.

Not "destroy the United States etc."

But "restore the conditions that made my protest possible."

Of course, the genie does not grant unspoken wishes. He is evil, not charitable.

He granted exactly what was asked.

Nothing more.

Nothing less.

And in that precision lies the true horror — not destruction itself, but the revelation that destruction was never a plan. It was an emotion mistaken for a blueprint.

The genie returns to his lamp, satisfied.

He has done nothing but take people at their word.

Which, as always, was enough for their self-destruction.

https://gellerreport.com/2026/02/muslim-temple-university-students-for-justice-in-palestine-it-is-our-job-to-destroy-the-united-states.html/