It is all too easy to sneer at the astonishing ignorance of the half of all younger Americans who say they would prefer living in a socialist country. It is much harder to do something about it. Kudos for a new non-profit organization, Young Americans Against Socialism, for embarking on that mission.
YAAS’ founder and CEO, Morgan Zegers, ran a credible campaign for the New York State Assembly in 2018, the same year she graduated from American University. On video she is almost preternaturally engaging, smiling, upbeat. While an observer must wait to see how an organization actually operates before pronouncing it worthy of support, YAAS’ stated mission and strategy both look admirable.
The idea is to use the tools of social media particularly popular among young voters to tell powerful, true stories about the real horrors of socialism. YAAS records interviews with impressive people who escaped socialist systems and then uses those social media platforms to share their stories.
“The Left is so good at emotion,” Zegers told Glenn Beck. “The Right, conservatives, people who advocate for freedom and opportunity are not the best at it. So Young Americans Against Socialism is adding emotion to the playbook. We take these emotional, powerful stories of people who escaped from Venezuela, from Cuba, from the USSR: It’s really, really scary, passionate stuff that they tell into the screen, and we put them on very short social-media videos.”
Zegers also said part of the mission is to tear apart the false idea that there is some sort of real distinction between “socialism” and “democratic socialism,” and to explode the notion that Scandinavian countries are successful examples of the latter. The opposite is true.
Whole treatises have been written showing the overwhelming evidence that socialism of any form is an aggressive purveyor of economic collapse, social misery, and oppression. Only the massively ignorant can still argue otherwise. Alas, the American educational system has created at least two generations in which large subsets are, indeed, massively ignorant. YAAS’ mission is to make sure the ignorance does not become invincible. More power to it.
