Sep 28, 2026

The Democratic Socialists of America promise a future where everything is free. Lily Tang Williams grew up inside the version of that promise Mao Zedong built, and on this episode of The Jenny Beth Show she tells Jenny Beth Martin what it looked like from the bottom: eight families on one outdoor restroom and one faucet, a six-year-old in the ration line at 5 AM, and the month she lost the family's protein coupon. Williams was two when the Cultural Revolution began and twelve when Mao died. She explains what the Communist Party promised before it took power, what land reform and the people's communes actually delivered, and how a famine of 40 to 60 million reached her home province of Sichuan. She describes Mao's ten classes, five black and five red, her grandmother's year of struggle sessions, and the day a straight-A seven-year-old learned you cannot be too confident in a collective society. Then a law student at Fudan University, told in her second week that law is a tool for the ruling class to govern the masses, meets an American exchange student with a pocket Constitution who tells her that her rights come from God, not from government. She got out in 1988 with 100 dollars in cash. Lily Tang Williams is the Republican nominee for Congress in New Hampshire's Second District and a speaker for the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation. This episode opens The Jenny Beth Show's Surviving Communism series. Learn more at teapartypatriots.org and jennybethshow.com.

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