The communist political movement that devastated China decades ago is unfolding in America, warned Xi Van Fleet, a parent-turned-activist who made national headlines after speaking out against critical race theory (CRT) at a school board meeting.
“When the Cultural Revolution started, I was a first grader,” the Virginia mother told EpochTV’s “American Thought Leaders.” She said that all classes ceased at schools and colleges as older students proclaimed themselves Mao Zedong’s Red Guards.
Emboldened by Mao’s slogan “To Rebel is Justified,” the Red Guards did not hesitate to instigate violence and destruction on everyone and everything they considered “counter-revolutionary.”
“With Mao’s approval, no one could stop them,” said Van Fleet, recalling a story she heard from someone who witnessed the Red Guards beating to death a man, who was deemed an “oppressor” and “exploiter” for simply being able to withdraw a large sum of money from his bank. The perpetrators faced no consequences for the killing, since the criminal justice system was already paralyzed.
Another key feature of the Red Guards movement was to attack the “Four Olds,” namely “old ideas, old culture, old customs, and old habits.” To enforce what Van Fleet described as a “cancel culture,” the Red Guards would go door to door to search and destroy any item that was connected to the period before the communist takeover of China.
“I remember this whole street was just a mess of things destroyed, and the people, those homeowners, howling and crying,” she said.
While the madness and lawlessness of Mao’s Cultural Revolution may sound extreme to Americans, Van Fleet warns that America is following a similar path.
“One of the things that I noticed is people are afraid,” she said. “There is the right way to talk. There are the right ideas, and those who don’t share it feel like, if they tell their own opinion, they might run the risk of being considered racist—a word like China’s ‘counter-revolution.’”
By GQ Pan and Jan Jekielek
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‘I Want to Wake People Up’—Xi Van Fleet, Survivor of Mao’s Cultural Revolution
“The result of the Cultural Revolution … is the total destruction of society.”
In this episode, we sit down with Xi Van Fleet, a Virginia mom from China who made headlines after she compared the rise of critical race theory to China’s Cultural Revolution at a Loudoun County school board meeting.
Just as people in China were designated class enemies at birth, now whites in America are born guilty under critical race theory ideology, she says.
The old catch-all charge of being a “counterrevolutionary” has now been replaced with the new crime of being “racist.” Stripped of its original meaning, it now simply refers to anyone who strays from leftist orthodoxy, she argues.
