Oct 16, 2026

Surviving Communism, part two: the Soviet Union told its people they paid 13 percent in taxes. Dr. Yuri Yarim-Agaev, a physicist the KGB expelled, built an economic model of that system before his exile and put the real rate at 92 percent, hidden inside wages set by the state, the only employer in the country. A job worth 1,000 rubles paid 100 or 120. That is the number Jenny Beth Martin says to take from this episode. She puts the famous photographs of communism on the screen, Tank Man at Tiananmen Square, the Stalin statue coming down in Budapest, the Romanian flag with the emblem cut out, an exiled Catholic bishop from Nicaragua, a Soviet food line, and the Berlin Wall going up, and asks the people who lived under those regimes what we are looking at. Then the panel turns to the present: the Chinese Communist Party's reach into American newspapers, courtrooms, universities, and social media, and a Bundestag witness's account of how Beijing pays influencers. Guests: Sasha Gong, former China director at Voice of America and former political prisoner; Dr. Yuri Yarim-Agaev, Soviet physicist and Moscow Helsinki Group dissident; Agnes Gibboney, whose family fled Hungary after 1956; Ovidiu Frusina and Manuela Colini, who grew up under Ceausescu's Romania; Captain Onofre Gutierrez, born in Managua, Nicaragua; Janice Trey, chairman of the board of The Epoch Times; and Torsten Trey, who grew up in West Germany. Learn more at teapartypatriots.org and jennybethshow.com.

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