For release: 08/06/26

  Testimonies from people who have lived under socialism

By Cal Thomas

Tribune Content Agency

It has become a truism that people who are embracing socialism have never had to live under it and its ideological twin, communism. Young people seem so enamored by these train wrecks that they are willing to vote for the most radical candidates who promise them the moon and claim they can pay for it all by increasing taxes on “millionaires and billionaires.”

Hoping to balance the one-sided propaganda about socialism coming from the media and candidates running for offices as socialists, Fox News has conducted interviews with people who once lived under these systems. The testimonies are a powerful rebuke to those who believe socialism is the answer to every problem.

In a one-week series, correspondent Alexandria Hoff interviewed people who fled the Soviet Union, China, Venezuela and Cuba.

Virginia attorney Marina Medvin, who left the Soviet Union, described herself as “overwhelmed” by the abundance of food in U.S. grocery stores. Hoff says: “Like many who have fled authoritarian socialist regimes, Medvin is alarmed by what she sees as the Democratic Party in America warming to socialist promises.”

Medvin: “They say that the purpose of democratic socialism is to bring equality … but what equality does it bring? That everyone is equally poor? That everyone is equally miserable, everyone is equally depressed?”

In Venezuela, reports Hoff, it took about 15 years for the nationalization of private industries to unravel into social and economic collapse. Daniel Di Martino: “We couldn’t find milk in the grocery store and then we couldn’t find chicken, then we had to line up. The government asked for our ID to buy groceries and assigned us a day of the week to go to the store.”

The story of Cuba is well known, Yali Nunez escaped the failed island nation. Nunez sees democratic socialists in the U.S. blindly embracing what she fled at age 16: “None of these people have spent one day in socialism or communism … they are selling you a story they don’t even understand.”

The democratic socialists, notes Hoff, claim their brand of socialism differs from the totalitarian regimes because “workers” would govern institutions and not unelected bureaucrats. The two systems are founded on lies, so why should people running on the DSA platform be trusted? Evidence reveals the objectives of socialism and communism. As many as 100 million are estimated to have died at the hands of these totalitarian governments.

Xi Van Fleet survived China’s murderous Cultural Revolution. Xi has appeared on many U.S. TV programs, warning Americans about the Maoist-communist tactics and the danger America faces if we allow these economic and political systems to further expand in our politics.

Others have testified about economic hardships, loss of liberties and other things Americans take for granted.

In an 1814 letter to John Taylor, John Adams warned: “Democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide.” Adams argued that unchecked human passions lead to self-destruction.

As I wrote in a previous book (“America’s Expiration Date”), the average age of democracies is 250 years. We are now at our “expiration date.”

Inertia from “the greatest generation” will soon run out if we do not renew the principles upon which Adams and the other Founders built the nation.

Socialism will lead to our destruction and once destroyed it will be nearly impossible to bring back our constitutional republic.

Readers may email Cal Thomas at tcaeditors@tribpub.com. Look for Cal Thomas’ latest book “A Watchman in the Night: What I’ve Seen Over 50 Years Reporting on America” (HumanixBooks).

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