Segment 01 · Fleeing Cuba — From Journalist to Fighting Socialism Full-Time · 00:44

Mark:

Let’s say that you wanted to destroy America, but you didn’t want America to know that you wanted to destroy America. How would you do it?

Well, one of the first things you would need to do is figure out how to get money. A lot of money. And nothing bothersome like going out and earning it, or developing a billion-dollar company — that’s a lot of hard work. Besides, you’re going to need much more than that, because destroying America is going to require reprogramming people, distorting their view of reality, and getting them to believe a lie.

We’ve talked about that before — we interviewed one of the co-authors of the book Disinformation. This was a Soviet program back when the Soviet Union was still around, and that kind of disinformation is a key part of socialism or communism, if you prefer — they’re the same thing. But to do that, you need a tremendous amount of resources and money, because doing it on a country-wide scale is not easy or inexpensive. And you’ll need allies — the media, universities, clever marketing slogans. So you need a lot of money.

Now, what’s the largest business in America with practically a bottomless checkbook? No, it’s not SpaceX or Google or one of the new AI companies. It’s the American government. They spend trillions of dollars every year — so much they can barely keep track of it. You don’t need a trillion dollars every year, that would be too obvious. But you do need to bleed off money by the billions — hundreds of billions of dollars every year.

And that’s easy — fraud, or setting up imaginary problems like Climate Change, telling people if we don’t do something the world is going to end. You scare people into believing things that simply aren’t real. And you need enemies — what better enemy than America itself, since that’s what you’re trying to destroy. But you can’t make it too obvious that you’re just voting to give Democrats money. Instead you need a network of shell companies — nonprofits. And you need laws to protect how all of that public money gets sent to them, and how it’s spent, and who they give it to.

On today’s show, we’re taking a deeper look at socialism. The goal today is to give you some idea of what you’re facing, because it’s coming here — especially right here in Oregon — unless people wake up and realize what the stakes are and do something about it.

As we say all too often here on I Spy Radio, the fight for freedom is an everyday fight. So to talk about the rise of socialism in America, I’d like to welcome Mike Gonzalez, the Angeles T. Arredondo E Pluribus Unum Senior Fellow at The Heritage Foundation. That is quite a mouthful, but it’s great to have you. Thanks for joining us.

Mike Gonzalez:

Mark, thanks a lot for having me on. Arredondo — it is a mouthful, but it’s a very nice family name.

Mark:

Oh, yeah, I have no doubt about it. So, we know you’re busy getting ready to testify in front of Congress, so we really appreciate you joining us here. As I understand things, you and your family left Cuba — so how old were you when that happened?

Mike Gonzalez:

Oh my God, it’s so long ago — I was twelve years old when I left. That’s not exactly last week, if you look at me.

Mark:

So do you have any memories of it yourself, or is most of what you know entirely secondhand, from your family and what they’ve told you over the years?

Mike Gonzalez:

No, no, no — I have many, many memories, most of them very bad, because communism is a horrible thing and we shouldn’t be inviting it into this country. But there you are. I still have searing memories of what that was like in the sixties.

Mark:

Well, the owner of one of the stations we air on grew up back in Romania when it was still behind the Iron Curtain, and he left when he turned twenty-one, if I remember right. So in terms of what you experienced, are there details that have really stuck with you as you’ve gotten older and started studying socialism for a living — things that just jump out and say, oh my gosh, people really need to know this?

Mike Gonzalez:

Well, socialism has evolved from the socialism that I experienced — I experienced a revolution, like the communism it used to be. You talk about your friend in Romania — we all have war stories to trade. I was just in the Czech Republic two weeks ago; we say we’re members of a club nobody wants to be a member of. So it’s socialism today, and I’ve written a few books about how this has undergone an evolution — a huge change that’s more cultural. It affects our cultural institutions. The work I’m occupied with right now is the Smithsonian. The Trump administration, quite rightly I think, has focused on the Smithsonian Institution, which is the world’s largest museum complex, and cultural Marxists have taken it over. They’ve tried to use history and these museums that the nation has entrusted to them for societal change — that’s what cultural Marxists do. They try to use the culture, the educational system, to change how people think from within. It’s no longer a revolution like my family experienced — but if you change how people believe, then you have millions of voters voting for someone like Zohran Mamdani, or for Katie Wilson, or for Graham Platner, or for Darializa Chevalier. And they’ve been told by their cultural institutions that this is good, that this is how society needs to change — that American culture needs to change. That’s what I’ve gained through my studies, not through personal experience.

Mark:

Well, I think so much of what today’s socialists think — when it comes to why they want socialism — is because they have no experience with it. It’s really very much this imaginary utopia. So what’s the reaction of today’s socialist wannabes when you tell them, hey, have you ever lived in a socialist country or experienced it? Because my family has.

Mike Gonzalez:

Well, they don’t, really. First they’ll say platitudes like, “that wasn’t really socialism,” or “it’ll be different this time, we know what we’re doing.” Or they’ll say what happened in Cuba was actually pretty good — it was an attempt at equality, and you’re just a malcontent, you should go build socialism in Cuba. They’ll say a number of things that evade reality. To quote scripture, they know not what they do.

Mark:

Yeah, or what they espouse. You’ve got a recent book out with Katharine Gorka, NextGen Marxism, and I got a really interesting review from a Manhattan Institute fellow saying it shows readers the nature of the beast, and how to fight it. I’d like to come back to that in more depth later in the show — but for now, can you give our listeners a preview? What are some of the things that work to stop the socialists?

Mike Gonzalez:

Well, I think what Trump is doing — you have to take the cultural institutions back. You have to clean out the universities, clean out the Smithsonian, and that’s what’s being done right now. The administration looks serious about taking back an institution that belongs to the American people, not to these Marxists. I’m testifying in Congress twice next week on this issue. So all of these things — fighting the universities, the Smithsonian, the K-through-12 school system, bringing down the Department of Education, fighting the teachers unions — all of it matters. That’s the way to do it. But you also have to run candidates against these people. Darializa Chevalier is going to be elected — she’s in a very deeply blue district in New York. She won the primary because nobody turned out to vote except her followers. She beat Adriano Espaillat, a working-class guy who’d held that seat for three terms, was an appropriator, brought a lot of bacon to his district. And yet her very organized, very disciplined followers were able to beat him in the primary. And once you win a Democratic primary in a deep blue district, you win. She’s going to win the election. She’s going to be in Congress.

Mark:

Absolutely. Okay, stay with us — today’s show is all about socialism and defeating it. Coming up: why is socialism gaining so much ground in today’s America?

Segment 02 · Why Socialism Is Winning Now — and the Smithsonian’s $1.1 Billion Question · 10:29

Mark:

Our guest today is Mike Gonzalez, senior fellow with the Heritage Foundation, and we’re talking about the rise of socialism — later on we’ll ask him about stopping it. So, Mike, socialism isn’t new — Bernie Sanders has been selling this since the 1980s. So the question isn’t whether socialism exists in America, it’s why it’s suddenly appealing and gaining ground, especially with people under thirty. I’ve got a theory on this: I don’t think this current push for socialism would have gone anywhere in the years right after the fall of the Soviet Union, when most adults had grown up in the shadow of the Cold War and understood personally what the fight against communism actually was. Young people today just don’t have that reference point. Do you think that’s one reason this is working now — that they just have no clue what they’ve actually fallen in love with — or is there something else driving it?

Mike Gonzalez:

This is a variety of things. Yes, we were fighting the Soviet Union — American people saw that the Soviet Union and the countries behind the Iron Curtain lacked freedom and were economically backward, all the things that happened under communism. But these things were also taught in school. In the 1970s, in high school, I was taught a class — Americanism versus Communism — it was mandatory. People were taught the nature of communism; immigrants were taught to assimilate. All of these things have disappeared. The left has won a number of key, very important victories that have left us without any weapons to fight communism. So all of this has to be reversed. I’m about to get busy trying to get rid of the racial categories in the U.S. census — categories like “Hispanic,” for example, are fake, synthetic categories the left created in the 1970s to balkanize the nation, to drive us apart, to make sure we had no assimilation ethos anymore. We have to be serious about getting rid of all of these things.

Mark:

Well, I know that Hispanics used to be considered Caucasian, and then that got split out, as you say —

Mike Gonzalez:

There were no Hispanics. There are no Hispanics. There’s no Hispanic cuisine, no Hispanic food, no Hispanic culture, no Hispanic history. If you were a person of African descent from the Caribbean or South America, you were considered a person of African descent. If you were of European descent, you were considered a person of European descent. This is what the left did — they were very methodical about it. They created “Hispanic” in 1977 through the Office of Management and Budget, and then they said, we’re going to retroactively change history. For example, we celebrated the 250th anniversary of America, and people were talking about Bernardo de Gálvez, a general who won many victories on the side of the colonists, and people were saying, well, there’s your Hispanic general. No — he was not a Hispanic general, he was from Spain. My own ancestor, who fought alongside him at Baton Rouge and Pensacola, was from Cuba. Hispanics did not exist at that time. But the left is very clever — they talk about Hispanic participation in the Civil War. How could there be Hispanics? The category hadn’t been created yet.

Mark:

Well, just to get back to what you talked about, because I think this culture war is so important — that’s one of the reasons this is taking hold. You had a really interesting article, and I think you were on Fox News talking about this too — the White House put out a report called “Saving America’s Story,” accusing the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History of — well, we talked about that in the previous segment, but it really strikes me that this is so key to why socialism takes hold: they have to erase the past, or rewrite it, to cast America as the villain instead of the hero. That’s not an accident — it’s standard operating procedure for socialism, communism, Marxism, whatever form it takes, because they need villains. That’s part of good story-crafting — you’ve got to have a villain to rise up against. So they’ve recast America as the villain, and they need people not to know how good things used to be, when socialism inevitably failed. Is that a fair read?

Mike Gonzalez:

I urge everybody listening to my voice right now to go to the White House website and find this report on the Smithsonian and read it, because it’s a really important report — a hundred and sixty pages long, five hundred and fifty-two endnotes. It quotes the leaders of the Smithsonian, and all of them say they want to use the Smithsonian — not just Smithsonian history itself, but history as a tool for change. They want to change America systemically, and they’re going to use this huge museum complex, and history itself, the past, to create societal change in America. And they’re doing this with our money — 1.1 billion dollars of our money that we give them every year.

Mark:

Yep, I was just going to point that out — this is what they’re doing with America’s tax money, to rewrite America’s history. There was a really interesting line from an article by the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation that called schools and universities, quote, “the epicenters of indoctrination.” And if that’s true — getting back to funding — should schools and universities that keep doing this lose all public financing, including things like research grants?

Mike Gonzalez:

Yeah, absolutely. With the Smithsonian — we defunded the Corporation for Public Broadcasting last year, and it should have been defunded, because they were using taxpayer money for biased reporting, and we don’t need to pay a news outlet to do that. However, we can’t do the same thing with the Smithsonian. The Smithsonian is really important — societies and cultures need national museums. They need museums that preserve, collect, and curate national history and heritage to transmit it to future generations. Museums play a key role in that. When Africa became decolonized, the first thing those countries did was create national museums. When the communists took over mainland China in 1949, the Nationalists saved hundreds of thousands of artifacts from five thousand years of continuous history across all the dynasties and brought them to Taipei — I’ve been to that museum — so that the Chinese in the future would know what Chinese culture and heritage was. So we cannot just defund the Smithsonian. We just need to fire the leadership.

Mark:

Yeah, absolutely. Okay, I do want to come back to the money side of things and how we are funding our own demise. That’s next, with Mike Gonzalez, senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation, talking about the dangerous rise of socialism.

Segment 03 · Follow the Money — USAID, CPB, and the $303 Billion Question · 18:08

Mark:

And welcome back — this is the I Spy Radio Show, talking today to Mike Gonzalez, senior fellow with the Heritage Foundation. His family fled Cuba after socialism, or communism, took over there — doesn’t matter what you call it, there are different degrees of the same immoral system that doesn’t recognize individual rights, the very thing America was founded on. And now socialism is on the rise right here. In the last segment we talked about the money and the public funding of organizations that hate America — the Smithsonian, public schools out there trying to change not just history but how people learn and think about America. I think that’s really endemic to why socialism keeps growing — we’re funding our enemies. And aside from the fact that socialism itself is a parasite, a tick that can only survive by feeding on the back of capitalism — when we talk about the public funding of these organizations that hate us, it’s much more than just these institutions. For decades we’ve been funding things like green energy and climate change, and none of that money ends up on the right — it’s all going to the left, and we’re talking trillions of dollars. Al Gore himself said that about six hundred billion dollars from the Inflation Reduction Act — one bill from the Biden administration — was going to give them six hundred and thirty-some billion dollars, and it’s actually even more than that, because some of those tax credits would have kept going forever had the Trump administration not pulled them. One estimate I saw was over one point two trillion dollars that would have gone to the left. Do you think the Trump administration is finally wising up to the fact that we’ve got to stop giving taxpayer money to people within the country who hate the country?

Mike Gonzalez:

This is something the left has been very, very good at, and the right just doesn’t know how to do — and we shouldn’t do it either. But the left has created a machine for giving taxpayer money to its pet causes and pet organizations. The main example of this is USAID, the U.S. Agency for International Development. When Trump, Marco Rubio, and Elon Musk came in in January 2025, one of the first things they did was dismantle USAID. Since then — and a good paper is waiting to be written on the correlation — we’ve had seven victories in a row by conservative candidates in Latin America. I was just an hour ago with the new foreign minister, who’s about to become the new president of Colombia, taking over from the communist Petro. When Petro ran in 2022, our government sent thirty million dollars through USAID — sent it straight to the left in Colombia. We did this constantly. Now that USAID is no longer there to finance their institutions, they’ve lost seven presidential elections in a row. We need to get wise. And we’re doing this internally too, by the way — OMB, the Office of Management and Budget, has just proposed a rule to do the same thing with domestic funding — to dry up the funding for these institutions domestically, not just internationally.

Mark:

Well, I’m really encouraged to hear that, because feeding taxpayer dollars to the left and these organizations eventually filters down to campaigns. I came across one non-profit research group that found at least thirty-five thousand nonprofits get half or more of their revenue from federal taxpayers, and that taxpayer financing provides roughly three hundred and three billion dollars a year to more than a hundred thousand NGOs. That’s a tremendous amount of money — and I don’t know of any funding at all that goes to the NRA from U.S. taxpayer dollars, or to pro-life groups, or to conservative evangelical churches, getting even one billion dollars. And here you’ve got three hundred and three billion dollars a year going to a hundred thousand NGOs. That’s pretty hard to overcome.

Mike Gonzalez:

Right, and we have to stop doing that. I think this is another great thing President Trump — he’s not perfect, but he’s doing a lot of intelligent things, and the people around him are doing a lot of intelligent things too. One of them is getting rid of this machine that funds the left with money collected from all Americans — the CPB, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, money from all Americans going to fund radio and TV stations that were inimical to the wishes and interests of the average American citizen. No more of that.

Mark:

Well, that’s so encouraging to hear that Trump is finally waking up to that — and I think he’s surrounded himself with much better, more competent people this time around than he had in his first administration.

Mike Gonzalez:

Absolutely.

Mark:

I think it’s places like Congress, in both the Senate and the House, that seem to be resistant to this. I’d like to think they’re finally going to start pulling the plug on this, because there’s another one I came across too — I mentioned the six hundred and some billion dollars from just one bill, the Inflation Reduction Act. There was a separate two-point-eight-billion-dollar Environmental and Climate Justice program tied to funding groups like the Climate Justice Alliance, and those payments are currently on hold because it’s tied up in the courts. But if this isn’t fixed legislatively — and it’s got to be fixed legislatively, not just administratively —

Mike Gonzalez:

Well, I agree with that — things are going to have to be codified by Congress. For example, that OMB rule I just mentioned will have to be codified by Congress too. In the meantime, the president is going to have to act through executive orders. You see how difficult it is just to pass the SAVE Act, even though Republicans have had majorities in the House and the Senate. This should be a gimme by now. And by the way, it’s not just people on the Hill opposing the president — there are people deeply embedded in the bureaucracy who are still there. For example — and I think we’re going to hear more about this, breaking new ground here — money is still going out from the State Department to fund some of these leftover programs. I’m not the guy doing that research, but I know people who are. If that’s true, that’s career officials deeply embedded at the State Department trying to do what they can to sabotage and subvert the policy of the elected government of the United States.

Mark:

Yeah, that is absolutely shocking, and yet not surprising. Socialism is the opposite of America’s founding, so in order to pull it off here, you’ve got to have people on the inside taking it down from within. All right, it’s time for a break — coming up, we’re going to talk more about how socialism wins at the ballot box. Stay with us.

Segment 04 · Do They Win Head-to-Head? Vote-Splitting, the Democratic Civil War, and Oregon · 25:51

Mark:

Mike Gonzalez, senior fellow with the Heritage Foundation, is our guest today. We’re talking about the rise of socialism here in America, which was founded on the exact opposite values of what socialism’s values are, if you can call them that. Mike, we talked earlier about them winning elections, and you’d mentioned that when a socialist wins in a deep blue district, it’s an automatic shoo-in that they’re going to win the election.

Mike Gonzalez:

If they win the primary — if they win the primary.

Mark:

Right — if they win the primary, then it’s a shoo-in for them to win the general, and boom, they’re in Congress, or whatever office at the state level. So I went looking for a single documented case this cycle of a democratic socialist beating a Republican head-to-head in a genuinely competitive district — not a safe seat, and not a multi-candidate plurality like when Mamdani won against two other opponents. I couldn’t find one. Every headline win is a Democratic primary in an already safe blue seat. Are you aware of any cases where they’ve actually won against a Republican in a general election?

Mike Gonzalez:

Well, they beat the Republican in New York.

Mark:

Well, yeah, but that was a plurality — I’m talking about a head-to-head.

Mike Gonzalez:

No — he got over fifty percent of the vote.

Mark:

Yeah, I wasn’t clear there — I meant a plurality of candidates, not a plurality of the vote totals. There were three candidates in that race, and I was wondering if you knew of a place where there was a real head-to-head in a competitive district — someplace like New York City, which was never going to be competitive for Republicans anyway. I mention that because what we’re seeing here in places like Oregon — there was a real push last year to get ranked-choice voting; Portland is actually using it now — and there’s some genuine academic research behind this. It goes back to things like Duverger’s Law and Arrow’s Impossibility Theorem, which show that once you’ve got three or more names on a ballot, that election can be manipulated, and a candidate with genuine minority support can win outright. Do you think that’s the actual mechanical reason DSA has been pushing so hard for things like ranked-choice voting and multi-candidate strategies — not idealism, but simple math and statistics?

Mike Gonzalez:

What I’ve seen — the people who put that strategy together, for example, there was a guy named Daniel Moraff, one of three people who helped build it. He wrote a long piece for In These Times, a communist magazine, about nine years ago, laying out the strategy. The strategy was to win in the primaries in very blue districts. They figured out the Green Party doesn’t win, the third party never wins. But if you take over the Democratic Party with a socialist candidate, a DSA candidate — and this is a takeover, by the way, a zombie takeover of an existing party — and you win in these blue districts, then you’re assured of winning. We’ve got another example in the Democratic primary in the city where I am right now — the mayor was DSA, the one who won, I forget her name. There’s no doubt in my mind, or in anybody’s mind — I’m not a betting man, but I’m not going to bet against her being elected in November, because ninety-four percent of Washington voted for Kamala Harris. Let that sink in — that’s not ninety-four percent of any one race, that’s all of D.C.’s voters. Ninety-four percent voted for Kamala Harris. You’re telling me they’re not going to elect the socialist mayor? No — they will elect the socialist mayor. So the blueprint this guy Moraff set up, I think, is working really well for them.

Mark:

Well, one of the things I hear on occasion is people like James Carville out there aghast at what’s happening — that the socialists are starting to win. I’m not sure how seriously I take that, because the Democrats have been lurching left just fine for a couple of decades now. Ever since Clinton left office, they’ve been marching steadily to the left, and now all of a sudden they’ve got these socialist candidates and — surprise, surprise — they’re winning. Well, you’ve been telling them for the last two decades that that’s perfectly fine. So do you think there’s an actual struggle within the Democratic Party — that they’re genuinely concerned about these democratic socialists — or are they perfectly fine with this?

Mike Gonzalez:

Well, the governor of Pennsylvania, Josh Shapiro, is fighting this. Rahm Emanuel is fighting this. One of the senators from Pennsylvania, John Fetterman, is fighting this. God knows Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries are not fighting it, but you have enough Democrats of renown — I just named four of them — who are saying, no, we cannot allow the DSA to take the party over. It’s going to be a lot of fun watching what they do.

Mark:

But at the same time, you’ve got, as you mentioned, D.C. voting ninety-four percent for Kamala Harris. So I question whether the average Democrat is really going to say, “I am so committed to fighting socialism within our own party that I’m willing to vote for a Republican instead of a socialist,” when it comes to the general.

Mike Gonzalez:

Oh, no, no, no — that’s not going to happen. That, in my opinion, will not happen. They will not vote for a Republican. I’m looking out the window at the Capitol right now, in the city where I am — they will not vote for the Republican. Let me take that to the bank, man.

Mark:

Right. But in the broader national sense, do you think enough Democrats will say we need to take this seriously enough that we will, in fact, vote for a Republican over a socialist?

Mike Gonzalez:

No, that’s not going to happen. What some of them will do is fight internally — the people I just mentioned, Shapiro, Rahm Emanuel, John Fetterman, they’ll fight internally. When it comes to final election day, Republican versus a DSA candidate, maybe some will stay home. I don’t think we’re that divided right now — the Democrats have really energized against Trump, the same way we’re energized for Trump. And the reason for that is Trump gets things accomplished. The reason people love him is he gets things accomplished, and the reason people hate him is he gets things accomplished.

Mark:

Our guest today is Mike Gonzalez from the Heritage Foundation. Coming up, we’re going to pick his brain on how to deprogram a socialist — we know some people break away. What works, and what doesn’t.

Segment 05 · Breaking the Spell, Part 1 — The Hypocrisy Tests · 33:20

Mark:

There’s a saying that goes something like, “those who don’t understand socialism are socialists, and those who do understand it are not.” Our guest today is Mike Gonzalez — his family escaped Cuba when he was twelve, and he’s now a senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation. Is there a specific question, or a specific thing you say to a committed socialist, that you’ve found genuinely disarms them — where you can actually see the light switch on behind their eyes about what socialism really is?

Mike Gonzalez:

Look — if you’ve been taught by the schools, the universities, the cultural institutions, the media, that this country is systemically racist, that it’s structurally oppressive, that slavery and Jim Crow delegitimize this country from the beginning, and that’s become your faith, and you believe in a worldly utopia — there’s not a lot that can be said to convince you otherwise. But I have seen people convinced in socialist countries — when they get sent to the gulag, or when their father gets shot by a firing squad, or when their wife or husband goes to the authorities and spies on them. When you come up against the reality of socialism — the gulags, people snitching on you, people taking your farm or your cows away — then you can become convinced. But in terms of rhetoric, we have to take the institutions back — I keep coming back to that. We have to take the cultural institutions back, the universities back, the K-through-12 schools back, the museums back, the art houses and entertainment houses back. Because once people are indoctrinated, nothing will change — unless they end up in a gulag in Siberia.

Mark:

Well, there’s a whole field of study about changing people’s minds once they’ve been made up, and I like how you framed it — it really is its own religion, and trying to get somebody to change their religion once they’ve grown up in it is very difficult. So is the process to just chip away at their beliefs — does that work?

Mike Gonzalez:

I’ll just say what I said — no, you have to actually put them on a train to Siberia.

Mark:

Well, I’d hope that would wake them up, although for some people I’m not entirely sure. But let’s do a little brainstorming — here’s a test. In terms of messaging, if somebody wants to redistribute the wealth of the rich, what about asking them if they’d personally be willing to give away ninety-five percent of their own income starting today, with no complaints? If you confront somebody with a scenario like that — where the rich and wealthy give up ninety percent or more of their wealth, and eventually that wealth runs out and they have to turn to people like the person you’re talking to — are you willing to give up ninety percent of your income? Does that have any effect?

Mike Gonzalez:

I have strong memories from the sixties — I don’t think a lot of people were bothered that my family’s house and everything else was taken away. This envy is behind a lot of this, but we rarely write about envy, and yet it’s a driver of a lot of these policies and politics. I remember a lot of people who quietly went along and thought it was good that they took the farm away, good that the country took it away, good that they took the car away. Sorry to reveal the human condition to you, but there it is.

Mark:

Yeah, it’s socialism at its core — it’s really completely self-centered. They promote it as something great for all of society, but it’s very selfish — it’s “me first, you’ve got things, I want it.” I think Margaret Thatcher was the one who said it’s the politics of envy and greed, and I think that’s exactly right. So when you look at places like the socialized countries — Canada, the UK, so much of the EU — they’ve got nationalized health care, and that’s a big thing happening right now here in Oregon too. In fact, the Portland chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America is now openly pushing for a switch to single-payer, universal health care, free access for everybody, right here in Oregon. It’ll only cost eighty-three billion dollars a year — but that’s beside the point. So again, to try to chip away at their mindset: based on what happens in these socialized countries, ask them — if they needed a serious operation, would they be willing to accept a nine-month to a year-long wait, and let other people go first, the way people generally do under socialized medicine in Canada and elsewhere? Would that shock them into some kind of sense of reality?

Mike Gonzalez:

No — again, no. If you’re in Canada right now and you want to leave, you have to pay an exit tax. So say you have a portfolio — a million dollars made up of American companies, Amazon, General Motors, Toys R Us, whatever — you have to act as though you’re selling that portfolio and pay the Canadian government the tax on it before you’re allowed to move. And Canadians are okay with that.

Mark:

Well, they’re trying that same thing in California — Newsom wanted some kind of exit tax too, because so many millionaires were leaving, and he wanted them to pay an extra tax on the way out. I think that stalled, but last I knew he was at least trying it.

Mike Gonzalez:

Yeah, because that’s what happens — why did the Berlin Wall go up? When governments do these things, people flee. Why did my parents flee? Marx wrote about this in the Manifesto — he said people are going to react badly when their property is taken away, and that’s why he said himself there will be a need for “despotic inroads.” That’s the English translation — there’s going to be a need for despotism, because people don’t react well to having their stuff taken away.

Mark:

Yeah, you know, in some ways it’d be nice if schools actually taught the Communist Manifesto for what it really says, not just what people imagine it says.

Mike Gonzalez:

Right.

Mark:

Okay, let’s take a break. Then we’ll wrap things up with Mike Gonzalez, senior fellow with the Heritage Foundation, talking about breaking the spell of socialism. Coming up: some of the practical things you can do.

Segment 06 · Breaking the Spell, Part 2 — What Actually Works · 40:46

Mark:

And welcome back — our final segment now with Mike Gonzalez, senior fellow with the Heritage Foundation. We’ve been talking really since the start of the show about how to defeat socialism, and your book review, as I said, promised readers would learn how to fight it. In your experience, can you give our audience some practical steps — things they can be doing? What actually works to push back against this at the local level, maybe with friends and neighbors or family members — a lot of families are dealing with this too — and what tends not to work?

Mike Gonzalez:

I think you have to monitor what your children are studying. You have to ask inquisitive questions — “what did you learn today, let me see your homework.” You have to attend the Board of Education meetings. You have to go to parent-teacher night. You have to look at the syllabus your kid has for a class at Cornell or Penn State. You have to not abdicate your role as a parent — you have to follow these things very closely.

Mark:

Well, definitely — knowing what your kids are being taught is absolutely key to stopping this at the next generation. So, in terms of political strategy — because we’ve got three now, well, there was one Democratic Socialists of America candidate already, she’s been that since 2022. And now we’ve got two districts where they flipped the incumbent — one was a sitting incumbent, and the other was the handpicked successor to a retiring incumbent — and those are both now DSA candidates, and they’re going to win because they’re in deep blue districts. Trump, Vance, and NRCC Chairman Richard Hudson have all leaned hard into calling this movement communist ahead of the midterms, but Hudson said the Democrats are making it easy for us. I kind of think that’s a bit naive, because there’ve been polls showing capitalism’s favorability among adults down to fifty-four percent overall, and only forty-two percent among Democrats. Do you agree that this line of attack — leaning into “communist” and assuming this is a shoo-in because Democrats are going so far left — is going to work? Or if not, how should they change their strategy?

Mike Gonzalez:

That’s a good point. Capitalism — nobody defends capitalism anymore, not even the right. The right is beginning to attack capitalism too. If even conservatives don’t defend capitalism, well, the left surely isn’t going to defend it. So capitalism isn’t winning right now, because people don’t understand — first of all, “capitalism” is the left’s word for it. It’s the word the left came up with to describe our free-market system, our system of freedom. I own this phone in my hand right now — I can sell it to you for whatever I want, you can offer whatever you want, we agree on a price, you walk away happy, I walk away happy. There’s no victim there — there are two winners. If you explain things like that to people, they get it. But I do think you make a good point that we need to keep calling them communists — we need to insist on calling them Marxists and communists, we can’t back away from that. But then we also have to talk about everything else that comes with communism — the imprisonment, the gulags, all of the soul-killing that comes with it.

Mark:

Yeah, absolutely. So, final question — I’d like to bring this back to where we started. Knowing everything your family went through in Cuba, what do you most want Americans, especially young Americans, to understand before they cast a vote for any socialist?

Mike Gonzalez:

Marx and Engels did not make a distinction between socialism and communism — to them it was the same thing. I’ve heard people defending the DSA saying, “this isn’t the socialism of gulags.” No — it’s always the socialism of gulags. Always. Because of what Marx said — that when you take people’s property away, people get upset, and you need to introduce despotism. So there will always be repression, there will always be — freedom of speech will have to go, all of our basic freedoms will be suppressed. That’s baked into the system — that’s not a bug, that’s a feature. Communists like Marcuse will tell you this when they have a moment of candor — they’ll tell you.

Mark:

Yeah. Unfortunately, it’s time for us to go. Thank you so much — we really appreciate your time today.

Mike Gonzalez:

Thank you — thank you very much. Bye, guys.

Mark (close):

Socialism often starts in poor and poorly run countries, because people see the few rich and believe it’s those rich — and the political system — holding them down. Which is why it’s a little odd to think that socialism is gaining ground here in America.

Until you understand how the left is undermining America’s success and our future generations. Because kids today have it easy — by and large, they don’t have to work, unlike when we were kids. And because of that, they don’t develop a real sense of how hard it can be to earn a dollar.

People who know how hard it is to earn a living are far less likely to want to take away somebody else’s living. The left knows that — that’s why they push higher and higher minimum wage laws, twenty dollars or more. You don’t start at the bottom — you start out at forty thousand dollars a year with no skills and no training. You start out middle class. There’s no reason to work to get ahead — you’re already ahead.

So their early thinking isn’t informed by an appreciation of hard work — it starts instead with, why aren’t I getting even more? It’s unfair that I’m not.

Our guest today talked about how it seems the only way to truly get through to a wannabe socialist is to send them to a concentration camp, the gulags. Then they’ll understand what an all-powerful government can and will do to citizens who only have the rights government gave them — not rights from God, rights from the government.

And let’s not forget — that’s exactly what the left and the Biden administration wanted to do back during COVID, to send people who wouldn’t take the vaccine off to concentration camps. So to think this could never happen here is a mistake. Remember, it almost did. Which is why you need to take this seriously.

Because as we say every week, the best information does you no good if you don’t use it.

Reagan, what do you think?