Xi Van Fleet recounts China’s Cultural Revolution (1966–76), where Mao’s Red Guards—mobilized youth—shut schools, purged teachers, and erased cultural heritage under propaganda-driven chaos. Now in the U.S., she warns of parallel tactics: CRT in schools, public shaming of dissenters (like Sen. Lott’s forced resignation), and Marxist infiltration rewriting history to justify systemic destruction. Comparing 2020 protests to Mao’s power grabs, she argues America’s elites are replicating revolutionary violence unless citizens reclaim education and media before democracy collapses. [Automatically generated summary]
Shortly after George Floyd died Memorial Day weekend 2020, people began to say that what was happening in the United States bore some resemblance to what happened in China 50 years ago, the Cultural Revolution, with Red Guards and struggle sessions, public humiliations, public atonements, a kind of secular frenzy that looked very much like a hate-centered religious right.
The Cultural Revolution.
But was that overstatement?
Well, Xi Van Fleet has seen both.
She's Chinese.
She was seven years old in 1966 when the Cultural Revolution started, and 17 when it ended with Mao's death in 1976. And along the way, she became one of its victims.
She moved to this country, to Kentucky, in 1986, and she's been here ever since.
So Xi has seen both revolutions firsthand, and she's written a new book comparing them with a warning.
It's called Mao's America.
And we're grateful to have her, Xi Van Fleet, in the studio with us now.
Aiming their rage at the behest and the direction of the central government of Mao against not foreigners who threaten China, but against Chinese, against your own people.
I remember reading about the Cultural Revolution years ago, reading a biography of Mao, and was so struck by how much Mao hated the Chinese, hated the country, hated the history, hated the culture, and yet he was in charge of the country.
Do you remember the moment that the Red Guard went from carrying slogans and yelling at people, humiliating them, to the point where they went to killing people?
Every rural area was arranged or organized as commune.
Communes collected farming.
So in the commune, there are a lot of production teams.
And so it's all run by the CCP. So what I did is every day we would gather in the meeting place of the production team and the leader would tell us what to do.
So we do their work and we get a point.
And then in the harvest time, you use the point to get some produce, grain or potato or whatever.
You lived in this country, it sounds happily, from, let's just say, 86 to 2020. George Floyd gets killed, and all of a sudden, in a day, the country changes.
What did you notice about those early days, late May, early June 2020, and what did it make you think as you watched it?
And the teacher was telling us, you know, now, you know...
That they are protected.
And as teachers, that we should...
I just took the class, but there are others that were special ed teachers, that we should be very, very respectful.
And we should never say blind.
We should say people with vision.
Impaired vision, something like that.
I don't even remember.
And I was so impressed as Americans, the nicest people.
They try, you know, to be nice and not, you know, not hurt people's feelings.
And now we know, right?
During the process, and we were taught, you can't say vision impaired.
Now it's something, something, something different.
And now you know what?
What's the correct way to call those people?
Blind.
Yeah, according to Stanford, now that is the correct way.
So that just reminds me of the Cultural Revolution, that there is only one correct way of thinking, of talking, and if you don't do it, you're getting into trouble.
I'm just saying, if you ask me what I noticed, that was something I noticed.
Because I noticed later, you can't say that.
There are so many things you can't say, or you have to say it differently.
And who tell you?
The authority tell you.
That's the correct way of saying things, and that's the correct way of basically thinking.
But still, I did not lose my sleep over those things until later.
In my book I did say trend law probably is the thing the person that came to my mind that I can really pin down the moment I really say this kind of really like cultural revolution I don't even know the story whatever he was called a racist because he said something I said That really sounds like Cultural Revolution.
Trenelov was a Republican senator from Mississippi who went to the funeral of the longest-serving Republican senator from South Carolina, Strom Thurmond, and praised him at his funeral.
And it was way before 2020 that I noticed things is really, really going wrong.
Because in the workplace, I was invited to be a member of D&I. Back then it's D&I. Diversity and Inclusion Council.
And I noticed every member...
It has identity there.
And I just realized this is not really about making people work together, help people work together.
It's more like political identity.
Yes.
But things, you know, got so much bad in 2020. When I saw the Antifa and the BMN burning our cities, I said, this is no longer some kind of troubling sign here or there.
This is a full-blowing Marxist revolution.
This is exactly what I noticed or what I witnessed.
During the Cultural Revolution.
So I said, I got to do something.
I have to get involved one way or the other.
And that's the end of 2020. I got involved with the Loudoun Republican, Loudoun County Republican Committee.
And after that, and we get emails, you know, ask us to go to school board.
And I was never, never involved politically to go and give a public speech.
It was just intimidating to me.
But I got so much support from the members.
I said, I don't even have children in school at that time.
They said, it doesn't matter.
We're all taxpayers.
You should go there and voice your opinion.
So I said, okay, okay.
unidentified
I've been very alarmed about what's going on in our school.
You are now teaching, training our children to be social justice warriors and to loathe our country and our history.
Growing up in Mao's China, all this seemed very familiar.
The communist regime used the same critical theory to divide people.
The only difference is they use class instead of race.
Well, I have to say one of the features, just as a foreigner reading about it, of the Cultural Revolution that's always struck with me, is the mass hysteria, rational people becoming irrational, people going crazy, getting caught up in this frenzy and really believing things that are absurd.
I want to show you a piece of tape from the United States.
This is after George Floyd's drug overdose death.
And this is a table of affluent white ladies who have paid money to be told they're racist.
And I just want to get your view of this.
Watch this.
unidentified
Actually, Margaret, you didn't say yours.
What?
Your racist thing.
Thing that you've done.
Thought about or done.
You have something inside of you.
That's not quite, like, that's racist.
So you must have examples in your own life.
I also work in environmental engineering.
I have absolutely no people of colour or minimal people of colour, possibly the exclusion of being slightly Hispanic.
Sayera doesn't like her attitudes.
I can say a racist thing you've done because it just happened.
When you just talked to me the way you just did.
This is how white women talk to us all the time.
These are microaggressions.
When I say the exact same thing to my white girlfriend who says the same exact thing.
I don't care if you talk to everybody like that.
The way you just spoke to me was straight-up white supremacy.
You actually just answered with racism.
White supremacy is said to be hidden in innocuous phrases and banal behaviour.
The smallest things could be considered racist.
It's enough that a person from a minority group feels insulted.
Absolutely.
Sounding terribly white, I don't know that I was all that racist to start with, but I also would be more aware or hyper-aware of my thoughts or reactions to circumstances that would be racist.
And so the only thing I can say is that what's happening in our school and how you push the CRT just, to me, is just the repeat of the Cultural Revolution.
unidentified
During the Cultural Revolution, I witnessed students and teachers turn against each other.
We changed school names to be politically correct.
We were taught to denounce our heritage.
The Red Guards destroy anything that is not communist.
Old statues, books, and anything else.
We are also encouraged to report on each other, just like the student equity ambassador program and the bias reporting system.
This is indeed the American version of the Chinese Cultural Revolution.
The critical race theory has its roots in cultural Marxism.
And then my minute was over and I was just, you know, I really, I just left the meeting and because I took time off my work, I have to go back and make up the time.
So I thought everyone knew it.
Cultural revolution, who doesn't?
Well, then I got a call later and people wanted to interview and I realized, my god, people just don't know.
Between Mao's attempt to destroy Chinese culture, history, language, and our government's attempt to hide our history and change our history, lie about our history to the population.
And as we know that whoever controls the present controls the past, and whoever controls the past controls the future.
That's what CCP did when they took over China in 1949. They totally took over the educational system, they remade the curriculum, but what they really put their energy and focus on is to rewrite history.
So the history that I learned, and even today I have to get rid of all this misinformation that I received as a schoolgirl and later in college.
You know, it is really, really decades in the making in America.
After the 60s, when the Marxists took over all universities, they have been creating generations, not just one generation.
Generations of Marxists or people who absolutely follow those ideologies, now they are in our institutions, in every institution, including educational system, corporations, government, and even our military.
It is everywhere.
So I always say that the infiltration of communism is complete in this country.
And so it is really, really, we're in a dire situation.
So what do we do?
Well, we have to start from educating people and to wake people up by telling them history, by telling them that what's going on here is nothing new.
It happened before.
Not that long ago.
It happened to me 50 years ago.
The witness, the survivors are still here trying to tell American people this is communist revolution.
And the goal is to destroy this country.
unidentified
And the goal is for the globalists, I always say globalists, to take power.
And sometimes I feel so, just feel like there's no hope.
But many times I do.
Feel like there's a great hope.
I have been invited to talk to so many people around the country and I met people who are parents who never involved politically, just like me, but they are involved now.
I think the people who listen to me, yes, they believe me.
And that's why I think I play a very, very important role because I'm telling people not something I just learned from books or just I did some research.
It is from my lived experience, using the left terminology.