License To Kill: What Turns Normal People To Political Violence?

Days after Zohran Mamdani won the Democratic primary for New York City mayor, I asked Xi Van Fleet — an activist and survivor of Mao’s Cultural Revolution — to offer her thoughts on the socialist upstart.

“The danger of Communism is not that it comes all at once,” Van Fleet wrote in July, “but that it creeps in gradually. I’ve seen where that road leads. And I’m here to say: don’t go down it.”

Now that Mamdani is poised to be the next mayor of New York City, and his future in Democratic politics all but guaranteed, this warning is more important than ever. That’s why The Daily Wire is proud to introduce a new series of essays this week from Van Fleet and Sasha Gong, a scholar and survivor of the Cultural Revolution.

“American Maoists: Warnings From The Cultural Revolution” lays bare the similarities between Chinese communists and American Leftists on everything from political violence to gender insanity.

The result is a chilling and timely warning about the state of American politics. — Tim Rice

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On September 10, the world was shaken by the brutal assassination of Charlie Kirk, founder of Turning Point USA and a bright star of the conservative grassroots movement. He was gunned down by a 22-year-old man while doing what he always did: engaging students in open debate on a college campus.

An even darker reality followed. While legacy media outlets scrambled to whitewash the murder, social media platforms, especially TikTok, were flooded with posts openly celebrating this unspeakable act of political violence.

How did we reach such a point where assassination is not only excused but openly applauded? And where will this path of legitimized violence take us next? We, two immigrants from China, have seen this descent before. And tragically, we know all too well where it leads.

August 1966 in Mao’s China is forever remembered as Red August, also called the month of Red Terror. Less than three months into the Cultural Revolution, Mao’s indoctrinated Red Guards — youths ranging from college students to even elementary school children — unleashed a wave of political violence against “class enemies” in Metropolitan Beijing.

The Red Terror claimed more than 1,772 lives. Many victims were randomly picked by the mob. This was only the beginning. The violence soon swept across the nation, and by the end of the Cultural Revolution, as many as 20 million had perished.

You may wonder how Mao turned children into killers overnight. But the truth is, he didn’t.

It took nearly two decades of relentless indoctrination in schools and universities — 17 years from the time the communists seized power in 1949 — to mold a generation ready to carry out Mao’s will. At the core of this indoctrination was a single lesson: to love the Party with absolute devotion and to hate its ‘class enemies’ with equal passion — even if those enemies were one’s own parents.

Showing loyalty was the only path to societal recognition and status elevation. The more extreme, the better.

Some in the West may remember Bo Xilai — once a promising contender for the CCP’S top job, until his rival Xi Jinping put him in prison for life. The son of Vice Premier Bo Yibo, Bo Xilai became one of the earliest Red Guard organizers, when he was only 17. After so many ordinary people were killed by the Red Guards, Mao turned against his political opponents, the true target of the Cultural Revolution. Among them was Bo’s father. To prove his loyalty, the son took part in the public humiliation and beating of his father, and reportedly broke three of his father’s ribs.

In America, the Left has had even more time — far longer than Mao’s seventeen years — since taking control of the educational system and the media. Their relentless indoctrination and propaganda have now borne the bitter fruit they labored so hard to cultivate.

Although America has not experienced anything on the scale of China’s Cultural Revolution, the soil has been made disturbingly fertile for it. Both the CCP and American Leftists use the same Marxist operating system: pitting the oppressors against the oppressed to divide people and define enemies. Simply by labeling their opponents Hitler, Nazi, Fascists, KKK — all extremists on the left of the political spectrum — they are able to empower the indoctrinated army to take the step to eliminate the threat to their “our democracy.”

When a society accepts, justifies, and even cheers political violence, the license to kill has been granted. In just the past few years, we have witnessed the 2020 BLM and Antifa riots that burned cities and cost dozens of lives, assassination attempts on President Trump, the assassination of Charlie Kirk, and escalating attacks on ICE.

The survival of our republic and our civilization depend on us taking away that license to commit violence. Otherwise, we will descend into something akin to Mao’s China.

Xi Van Fleet is a survivor of Mao’s Cultural Revolution, activist, and author of “Mao’s America: A Survivor’s Warning.”

Sasha Gong is a writer, scholar, journalist, and filmmaker. A dissident in Mao’s China, she holds a PhD from Harvard University and was previously Director of the China Branch at Voice of America.

The views expressed in this piece are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.