Oct 28, 2026

Socialism in America scares Sasha Gong, and she has earned the right to say so. Born in Beijing in 1956, she grew up inside Mao's Cultural Revolution: parents sent to a labor camp, a grandfather jailed for 20 years as an accused "culture spy," schools closed, executions at the village market every ten days. At 12 she read a banned Soviet novel, and one footnote connected every misery she had seen to the system itself. As a teenager she joined an underground dissident group and hand-copied Hayek. At 20 she was jailed for eleven months under seven guards, and her interrogators' first question was whether she listened to enemy radio. She did. It was Voice of America, which decades later hired her to direct its China branch. Jenny Beth Martin walks through the whole arc: how a dictatorship separates "true" from "truth," how Xi Jinping's father freed her group in 1978 and she asked him only for college, and why she left UCLA in 1998 as the most unfree environment she had ever seen. Then Gong turns to the socialism rising here. It is, she says, the worst combination of smart people who think they can run everyone's life and lazy people who want something without working for it. False hope is no hope. Sasha Gong holds a PhD in sociology from Harvard, taught at UCLA, worked for Radio Free Asia and the AFL-CIO, and directed the China branch of Voice of America. Learn more at teapartypatriots.org and jennybethshow.com.

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