Oct 30, 2026

Surviving Communism, part five: if the United States becomes a socialist country, the world is finished. That is the plea of Agnes Gibboney, who arrived in America stateless after communist Hungary revoked her family's citizenship, and it is the question Jenny Beth Martin has been building toward for the whole series. Six people who grew up under communism in China, the Soviet Union, Hungary, Romania, and Nicaragua explain why they chose America, what it sounded like from inside their countries when President Reagan called their system illegitimate, and what the world loses if America stops holding the line. Dr. Yuri Yarim-Agaev, a Soviet physicist and Moscow Helsinki Group dissident exiled in 1980, was part of President Reagan's briefings the day before Reykjavik and the day before Moscow. He lays out why Reagan won, and why George H.W. Bush never finished the job. Sasha Gong, a former political prisoner in China and later the director of Voice of America's China service, remembers her interrogators asking whether she listened to enemy radio, and the first English speech she ever understood completely. Ovidiu Frusina, a mechanical engineer from Nicolae Ceausescu's Romania, has a question for the democratic socialist who admits the two systems are not compatible: then why do it here? Captain Onofre Gutierrez, a retired airline pilot who lost everything in Nicaragua, and Manuela Callini, who grew up under Romanian communism, close with their answers for a 22-year-old who thinks the socialists have a point. Learn more at teapartypatriots.org and jennybethshow.com.

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