The Democratic Socialists of America's website invites young Americans to imagine life without capitalism: no need for a day off, because you only do the work that is needed, and no worries about bills, because housing and health care are free. Jenny Beth Martin reads that promise to Robert Ratonyi, who grew up inside it in communist Hungary and risked his life at 18 to get away from it, and asks what he thinks when he hears it.
His answer is blunt. Enough people have never learned what socialism and communism are, so they take the bait, and the bait is a lie: for everything to be free, somebody has to pay for it, and the Soviet Union collapsed from the inside because it never understood that. He says something is wrong with an education system that does not teach what happened in the Second World War and why the Soviet system failed. Then he explains why he still loves America. It is an exceptional country, he says, and the exceptional thing is not the people, who are the same human beings as the ones who swallow these lies. It is the system and the Constitution, and nobody has a constitution like ours. Civic education is gone, the founders studied the Bible and the Torah and knew where freedom comes from, and that, he says, has to be taught again.
A Holocaust survivor, an engineer, and a man who once carried a stranger's child across a border to escape socialism takes the Democratic Socialists of America's promise seriously enough to answer it line by line.
Robert Ratonyi is the author of From Darkness into Light: My Journey Through Nazism, Fascism, and Communism to Freedom. This clip is from his second conversation with Jenny Beth Martin, co-founder of the Tea Party movement and Chairman of Tea Party Patriots Action.
Watch the full episode and subscribe: jennybethshow.com
Learn more: teapartypatriots.org
00:00 — The Democratic Socialists of America's website: imagine life without capitalism
00:53 — Everything free: Ratonyi says they have never learned what socialism and communism are
01:25 — You risked your life and left your mother to get away from it
01:47 — What the schools do not teach about why the Soviet Union collapsed
03:39 — An exceptional country because of its system, not its people
04:10 — Civic education is gone; Churchill on democracy
04:46 — The media as the fourth leg
05:21 — A republic, if you can keep it
#JennyBethShow #DemocraticSocialistsOfAmerica #NothingIsFree #RobertRatonyi #Socialism #CommunistHungary #SurvivingCommunism #Constitution