A Disturbing New Poll — and Dennis Prager’s Warning for America

“Frightening” is perhaps a word used too often by people on both sides of the political aisle when reacting to polls that seem to capture a momentous societal change. But when Dennis Prager is the one giving the warning, I listen carefully.

In a discussion with PragerU Executive Director Allen Estrin, Prager broke down a new CBS News/YouGov poll showing that 58% of Democrats view socialism favorably, while only 32% favor capitalism. This is a subject about which Prager, whose field of study in graduate school was communism, is qualified to speak. But who cares about that credential when “socialism, much less democratic socialism, is not communism," as CNN Chief White House Correspondent Kaitlan Collins has said, right?

Prager wasted little time dispelling that argument with a brief history lesson:

The record of socialism in terms of human suffering, human death, human enslavement is the worst record in recorded history. In one—I won't even say a century—inside of about 50 years, 100 million, 100 million people were murdered by socialists, by socialist/communist regimes. China, USSR, Cambodia, Vietnam—basically everywhere that socialists took over. Remember, the name of the Soviet Union was the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. That's very important.

He told of his first trip to the Soviet Union when he was a young man. After getting off the plane, he saw a large billboard that read "Forward to Communism." Prager explained what we can learn from that: "They knew they weren't there yet. It was a socialist country. And the DSA, the so-called Democratic Socialists of America know it." 

And its members know that private property has no place in their utopian vision of America. Just as the DSA wants to abolish the Supreme Court, the Electoral College, and the Senate, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani gave the game away when he expressed support for abolishing private property in an interview. Prager, after noting that the Soviet Union's communist leaders hated the free market and private property, explained: "What does communal property mean? The community owns all property. That means you own nothing. Nothing. Private property is the backbone of freedom and rights and individualism."

The DSA plays a cute semantics game in an attempt to hide what its members really believe — to the surprise of many Democrats like podcaster Scott Galloway, who supported Mamdani's pied-à-terre tax but then found himself on a “wanted poster” of property owners who may owe more taxes. To avoid future surprises, easily manipulated voters like Galloway would benefit from playing the "Who Said It? Democratic Socialists vs. Communists" game that PragerU posted this week. When even a survivor of Venezuelan socialism, Franklin Camargo, has trouble distinguishing the rhetoric of Mamdani and the DSA from that of Karl Marx and Hugo Chávez, you know that the U.S. faces a grave threat.

Prager also put the lie to the argument that countries like Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Denmark are examples of socialist successes:

A Danish economist made a PragerU video and he makes the point which every one of us who knows about the northern European countries knows. None of them are socialist. In fact, Swedish corporations are taxed at a lower rate than American corporations. People don't know socialism doesn't mean free university or free this or free that. That's that's a uh a policy of liberals. That's not socialism. So do you know who knows what socialism is? All of the people running for office who call themselves democratic socialists, they know they don't want to make Denmark or Sweden in America. They want to make something much closer to communist China. That's what they want to create.

A democratic socialist not at all shy about admitting his admiration for communist China is Hasan Piker, who wore a Mao jacket while speaking to college students in July. That didn't stop Abdul El-Sayed, the Democratic candidate for the U.S. Senate in Michigan, from campaigning with Piker at an event the following month. Prager highlighted the troubling alliance before explaining why the mind-numbing number of communism’s victims doesn’t faze its defenders:

Now, I told you that socialism is responsible for 100 million people being murdered—60 million alone in China. Oh, and by the way, Hasan, who campaigns with Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan, Hasan, who is a popular podcaster, says that Mao is one of the greatest figures in human history. I am at a loss for words. The man was a monster. He was a barbaric, torturing tyrant monster who mass-murdered on a level unseen elsewhere.

Now, here's the problem. When I tell you that socialists murdered 100 million people, it doesn't make a big impact. And I'll tell you why. Stalin explained why. The great mass murderer Stalin, who murdered 20 to 40 million Soviet citizens, including the deliberate starvation of five to six million Ukrainians. Stalin said—and he was right—he said, “One death is a tragedy. A million deaths is a statistic.”

Estrin asked Prager how we got to this point, when using the word “socialist” in a campaign was once a dealbreaker for a politician. After first blaming universities, Prager said it starts even earlier:

It starts in high school. It starts with the belief that this country was born in evil and continued it. The New York Times led that with the 1619 Project. America was not founded in 1776, according to the New York Times’ 1619 Project. It was founded when the first black slave arrived in America.

Editor's Note: The Democrat Party has been infected by socialism, and it's spreading FAST. Democrats are claiming there's nothing to worry about, but we know the truth.

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