Surviving Communism, part three: Jenny Beth Martin reads the Democratic Socialists of America's 2026 program to seven people who lived under the system it describes. The page asks you to imagine a day without capitalism: no bills, no debt, no mortgage, no landlord, housing as a human right, retirement publicly funded, and food, energy, medicine, and transportation run as common goods. The Democratic Socialists of America are winning primaries and sending members to Congress, so she asked survivors from China, the Soviet Union, Hungary, Romania, and Nicaragua what they recognize on that page. Dr. Yuri Yarim-Agaev, a Soviet physicist and dissident, translates it into a tax rate: a moneyless system is a 100 percent tax, and the government decides who gets what. Sasha Gong, a former political prisoner in China, says that if nobody told her the source she would take it for a translation of Mao in 1958, the year collectivization began, and she describes what came a year later. Ovidiu Frusina, a mechanical engineer who spent 23 years in Ceausescu's Romania, walks through a real week without capitalism, from the 6:30 siren to the three-hour bread line. Janice Trey, chairman of the board of The Epoch Times, answers a 22-year-old who likes the pitch. Agnes Gibboney and Manuela Callini explain the store clerk who never left her stool and the pickled goods that served as a family's money. Learn more at teapartypatriots.org and jennybethshow.com.
Guests:
Sasha Gong is a former China director at Voice of America, a former political prisoner in China, and a Harvard PhD. She was a factory worker in Mao's China with three years of schooling before she reached university, and she was a small child during the famine that followed the 1958 collectivization.
Dr. Yuri Yarim-Agaev is a Soviet physicist and a member of the Moscow Helsinki Group who was exiled from the Soviet Union in 1980. He arrived in the United States as Ronald Reagan was elected.
Agnes Gibboney is the founder of Angel Families of America. Her family fled Hungary after the Soviet invasion of 1956, when she was two years old.
Ovidiu Frusina is a mechanical engineer who spent 23 years in Nicolae Ceausescu's Romania, where the state assigned his job and the Communist Party approved his work.
Manuela Callini grew up under Romanian communism, the daughter of a factory finance chief whose pickled goods were the family's trading currency.
Captain Onofre Gutierrez was born in Managua, Nicaragua, and lived under the Sandinista regime.
Janice Trey is chairman of the board of The Epoch Times. She was born in a forced labor camp during China's Cultural Revolution.
Host: Jenny Beth Martin, co-founder of the Tea Party movement and Chairman of Tea Party Patriots Action. This is part three of the Surviving Communism panel; part four covers the rest of the same program.
Key topics:
• The Democratic Socialists of America's 2026 program and the page that asks you to imagine a day without capitalism
• Janice Trey: ask who is behind the movement, what the end game is, and why the insiders of communist states send their children to capitalist ones
• Ovidiu Frusina's week in Ceausescu's Romania: the 6:30 siren, no hot water, the bribe for the boss, the chessboard, the bread line, and the Party official who vetoed an engineer's work
• No choice of job, no taxes, no banks, no credit: borrowing from the neighbor until payday
• The Dacia: save for six years, wait four more, then take the car with the oil leak or go to the back of the line
• What Janice Trey says to a 22-year-old who likes the socialist pitch: Taiwan versus the mainland, Hong Kong's broken promise, and the frog in the pot
• Yuri Yarim-Agaev: communism, socialism, and why the word that matters is totalitarian
• Lenin's Bolsheviks called themselves the Social Democratic Workers Party; Scoop Jackson and the AFL-CIO were the anti-communists
• Does every socialism end in totalitarianism? The panel splits
• The Shah's 1979 warning to the CIA about the red-black alliance of Islamists and communists
• Agnes Gibboney's fabric store clerk who was paid whether she sold anything or not
• Fascism, authoritarian, and totalitarian: the definitions
• Sasha Gong's bicycle and the Sunday swap; "we pretend to work, they pretend to pay us"
• Manuela Callini's family currency: pickled goods traded for toothpaste
• The full passage read aloud: Yarim-Agaev's 100 percent tax and Sasha Gong's translation of Mao in 1958
• The grain taken, then the seed grain, then the famine, and why American researchers in 1961 concluded China had none
• Agnes Gibboney: in modern language, it is slavery
• If there is no capital, there is no debt, no insurance, no house, and no retirement to fund
• Next in the series: a new constitution, public ownership of the largest corporations, and abolishing the Senate, the Electoral College, the police, and prisons
Timestamps:
00:00 — A day without capitalism: the page Jenny Beth Martin read to seven survivors
00:41 — Five countries, seven survivors: the panel
01:34 — The Democratic Socialists of America are winning primaries, and their 2026 program
02:35 — Janice Trey: who is behind this, what is the end game, and why the insiders leave
05:51 — Taking a day off from what? There are no companies left to work for
06:43 — Manuela Callini: a gray, hopeless day where everything is taken and safety is promised
07:51 — Ovidiu Frusina's week in Ceausescu's Romania: the siren, no hot water, the bus, the bribe
11:40 — Wednesday: a Party official on the third floor vetoes the engineer
13:17 — No choice of job: the state sends you where it needs you
15:43 — No taxes, no credit cards, no banks: borrowing 100 lei from the neighbor
16:24 — The Dacia: save six years, wait four, take the car with the oil leak
18:19 — What Janice Trey says to a 22-year-old who likes the socialist pitch
20:44 — Hong Kong: one country, two systems, and the promise that was broken
22:24 — The frog in the pot
24:13 — Yuri Yarim-Agaev: communism, socialism, and the word that matters is totalitarian
26:25 — Lenin's Bolsheviks called themselves Social Democrats too
29:08 — Does every socialism end in totalitarianism? The panel splits
32:30 — Reagan, Trump, and the swing back from socialism
33:37 — The Shah's 1979 warning to the CIA about the red-black alliance
34:11 — Agnes Gibboney's fabric store clerk who never left her stool
35:34 — Yuri Yarim-Agaev defines fascism, authoritarian, and totalitarian
39:52 — War communism: within months everything collapsed and the famine began
40:34 — Ethiopia and China: famine follows the communist economy, not the drought
41:14 — Manuela Callini: pickled goods as the family currency
42:19 — Jenny Beth Martin reads the full passage: no bills, no debt, no landlord
43:33 — Yarim-Agaev: in simple words, it means 100 percent taxation
45:02 — Sasha Gong: a translation of Mao in 1958
45:48 — One year later, starvation; what the leaders did not know
47:20 — Two months of cabbage; Stalin did the same thing twenty years earlier
47:47 — Agnes Gibboney: in modern language, it is slavery
48:28 — If there is no capital: no debt, no insurance, no house, no retirement
49:33 — Part three closes: how quickly they move from the promises to who decides
50:05 — Share these episodes, vote, and help get out the vote at iwillsaveamerica.com
Links: teapartypatriots.org, jennybethshow.com, and iwillsaveamerica.com.