Democratic Socialists Think America Is Somehow Worse Than Mass Murderer Mao Zedong

Editor’s note: This is a lightly edited transcript of today’s video from Daily Signal senior contributor Victor Davis Hanson. Subscribe to our YouTube channel to see more of his videos.

This is Victor Davis Hanson for the Daily Signal.  

We’re hearing more and more from the Democratic Socialists of America about all of the sins of America and very little of the good things we’ve done to ourselves and to the world at large on our 250th birthday. 

What is it, the nature of this DSA, Democratic Socialists of America, and the diversity, equity, inclusion criticism that we were racist, sexist, nativist, cruel, ruthless, etc., etc.  

But my question is, compared to what? 

Mao Zedong? He killed 70 million people. He was the greatest mass murderer in history, and that government is still communist in an unbroken chain from [Chinese leader] Xi [Jinping] all the way back to Mao. Do we ever talk about that or the million people who are in concentration camps in China? 

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Compared to historically to the Aztecs? We’re told the Aztecs were great people. They had an empire, but they crushed over a million people to create their empire. Some years, they sacrificed up to 10,000, maybe 15,000 a year of conquered tribes of fellow Indigenous people. 

Do we remember Shaka Zulu, the 19th-century creator of the Zulu nation? He was responsible for a genocide in crushing his enemies that probably cost over a million lives. 

Do we really think that the Native Americans were living in paradise until Europeans came? The story of Native Americans was conquest, enslavement, butchery of rival tribes. 

So, what is going on? 

We have a tradition in the West of self-criticism. That’s what makes us different. Rationalism, self-criticism, improvement. But when that goes to an extreme, it ventures from self-criticism and self-reflection to nihilism, and it’s quite destructive. 

So, let’s just take a look at where the United States is compared to the rest. 

Look at immigration. Why do a million people, or 2 million people, 10,000 a day under Joe Biden, from very poor countries, most of them from what we would call the former Third World that were victims of socialism, why do they risk their lives coming here every year? 

Why do all these critics of the United States … [Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez], why did her parents want to come here? Why did [Rep.] Ilhan Omar’s father want to come here? Why did [Rep.] Rashida Tlaib’s father want to come here? Why did [New York City Mayor] Zohran Mamdani’s parents want to come? Was it so bad? 

Can’t they ever acknowledge that they came here because they had greater security, they had greater freedom, they had greater economic opportunity? And if they had criticisms, it was never enough that they wanted to go back to the places that they praised, but only from a distance and in the abstract. 

The truth is that the poor in the United States are better off than most of the middle classes in every other country. We saw that in the World Cup when middle- and upper-middle-class Europeans came over, and unlike … to watch the games, and unlike most tourists, they didn’t just stick on the coasts. They went to places in Arkansas, Oklahoma, Texas, the South, and the Midwest. 

And they found two things. One, Americans were amazingly friendly and open, upbeat, not downers and drab, and everything’s terrible, which they expected from their experiences in Europe. 

And more importantly, they were affluent. They had big homes. They had air conditioning. the poor had appurtenances. Everybody has a cell phone. Nobody worries about the cost, apparently. 

There’s also then the hypocrisy of a lot of our critics. And let me just give you an example of a few of them. 

Hasan Piker is a child of very, very wealthy Turkish immigrants that became U.S. citizens. He grew up for much of his life in Turkey. He gave a talk the other day in a Mao suit to Democratic Socialists of America. Think about that. He put on the uniform, so to speak, of the greatest mass murderer in history, and then he denounced capitalism. 

But he didn’t denounce capitalism in his own life because his parents are multimillionaires. He is a multimillionaire, and he drives a, what? $120,000 Porsche. Isn’t that a luxury of the bourgeoisie? 

And then there’s Zohran Mamdani, of course. His family, as I pointed out numerous times, was the elite of the elite of the elite in Uganda, a community of expatriates, Indians, from India that control 60% of the wealth, and they’re only 1% of the population. 

And he grew up in privilege here. He had a very nice home. He has a family estate on Lake Victoria, of all places. 

Ro Khanna, the congressman from California, he always is pointing out the evils of Republicans, and as he looks at the drift of the Democratic Party, he puts his finger in the wind, and he says socialism is the answer. Ro Khanna does. 

But he’s a multimillionaire. His father-in-law is one of the wealthiest members of the Indian American community, probably worth $500 or $600 million. His own children have been deeded golf courses. His wife drives a $190,000 Range Rover, and he’s lecturing us about our shortfalls? 

And then, of course, we come to [California Gov.] Gavin Newsom. He wants to get in on the socialist craze, so he said the other day, as is his wont, moving his arms around and being very slick and glib, that capitalism fails. It didn’t work. 

It worked for you, Gavin. You have a $9 million home. You are the, basically, the quote-unquote, “protégé” of the Gordon Getty oil for- fortune, who backed all of your business opportunities. 

Graham Platner, the now-disgraced madman who thought he was going to be senator with a Nazi tattoo. He criticized capitalism. He said that, you know, he was drifting towards socialism, very critical of America. 

But he really wasn’t a small-business person. He was a construct. His mother and father, who were very wealthy, one owned an upscale restaurant, the other was a well-known, often corporate real estate lawyer. They set him up in business, and they were his only client, and they allowed him to have land to use. 

So, what I’m getting at is most of this criticism of America is not coming from the so-called poor. It’s not coming from the lower middle classes. It’s coming from elites in urban enclaves who have done very well with capitalism, and they feel that by mouthing these socialist and communist platitudes, it’s a way to get power within the Democratic Party first, and then within the United States second. 

And remember one thing, this is not new. Most of the violent socialist communist movements in history, whether we look at the anarchist of the late 19th century, or whether we look at the Bolsheviks of 1905 all the way up to the Russian Revolution of 1917, or we look at the revolutions of 1848 in Europe, especially the Reign of Terror, 1792 and 1793, when a bunch of very wealthy, this should sound familiar, socialists hijacked the French Revolution and turned it into a Stalinist-like murder spree. 

They all had one thing in common. They were very, very wealthy, and they hated the very system that had enriched them, and they wanted to try out a whole series of nihilist projects on whom? On the middle class and the poor, with the proviso that none of their ideology would ever apply to themselves. 

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