As candidates aligned with the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) win more and more primaries, two Republican lawmakers who have experienced the DSA up close and personal are warning Americans: “socialists promise you grand things, but in practice, it just simply does not work,” Rep. Nicole Malliotakis (R., N.Y.) cautioned.
This is “why you saw 8 million, if not more, Venezuelans flee and come to the United States, whether that’s illegally over the border or under the TPS program,” she added. “They fled because they could not survive. Literally, they could not survive. They were starving.”
Reps. Claudia Tenney (R., N.Y.) and Malliotakis represent a blue state where DSA-aligned Democrats like Zohran Mamdani, Darializa Avila Chevalier, Brad Lander, and Claire Valdez have already won key primaries, and all four are all but certain to be in elected office next year.
For Malliotakis, socialism is deeply personal. She explained in the latest episode of the Republican Study Committee’s (RSC) Right to the Point Podcast, which was obtained exclusively by the Washington Reporter, that her “mother fled Communist Cuba in 1959. And the way that my mother actually defines socialism is that it’s communism lite.”
Socialism, Malliotakis said, “is sort of the baby steps where they begin to implement changes. They begin to take away freedoms. They begin to ration things, to implement price controls that are very destructive to the economy. And they do this in a way to test it and see how far they can get. And if they’re successful and if they’re able to consolidate more power, then they move on to communism, which is when you really start to lose your freedoms, whether it be freedom of religion, freedom of the press, freedom of speech, freedom to assemble and to protest. And sadly, there are countries where they’ve gone that far, and communist Cuba is one of them. And Venezuela, quite frankly, is also one of them. In fact, was the richest country in South America prior to the rise of Hugo Chavez and then Nicolás Maduro.”
Malliotakis blamed western propagandists for the “fallacy” the Cubans have great health care. In reality, she said, “there’s no access to basic things that we in the United States are very used to. Things like toilet paper, things like aspirin. I know my mother sends different types of over-the-counter medication to our relatives in Cuba because they don’t have access to that.”
“That’s really what communism is,” Malliotakis said. “They consolidate the power, they consolidate the money, and they keep it from themselves. And they are the ruling class. And then the people, they have equality. They equally have nothing.”
“Whether you’re a doctor or a waiter in Cuba, it doesn’t matter,” she explained. “You get the same roughly $20 a month. They treat you like slaves. They literally treat people like slaves. They’re told what they’re going to study, they’re told what their contribution to society will be, and they all get paid so little that they can’t even purchase anything, because a lot of the things that they sell, they can sell them in the equivalent of American dollars. They’d have to work all year to maybe buy a pair of sneakers. It really is a horrendous system of poverty and sadness and misery. There’s no goals, there’s no aspirations. You get a measly salary and then you have rationed food. People there are prohibited from cooking or buying beef; that’s only for the elite.”
Malliotakis’s father’s side, in contrast, provides hope for those concerned with America’s flirtation with socialism. “Greece, where my father is from, flirted with socialism, but turned back because it was a disaster,” she said. “It was a fiscal disaster. And they were even putting controls on how much of your money you could take out of the bank at one point. If people are smart enough to wake up and stop this train wreck now, we can survive another 250 years.”
While Cuba, Venezuela, and Greece are not within America’s borders, Malliotakis cautioned that those same devastating consequences could happen in America, too. “What they did were the very things that the Democrats here are saying that they want to do, the policies that they’ve said. They want to seize the means of production. They did that, particularly with the oil sector in Venezuela. They want to abolish private property rights. They want to have government-run supermarkets. At least those are the things that my mayor, Mayor Zoran Mamdani, campaigned on and was elected on. These are very dangerous ideas. They are right out of the communist playbook of Karl Marx.”
Tenney also noted her firsthand experience abroad with the devastations of communism. “I actually grew up and spent a lot of time in Communist Yugoslavia,” she noted. “I studied there, I ended up going back and actually working for the Yugoslav consulate during the time when we had the Olympics in Sarajevo, which is now Bosnia and was always Bosnia, but now is its own country.”
“A lot of people don’t realize that Tito was a communist, Tenney noted. “Although they were not in the Soviet Bloc, and they were not behind the Iron Curtain. They considered themselves nonaligned. They were nonetheless still communist… [Now] I’ve seen a dramatic change from when I was in Yugoslavia in the 80s to what it is today, where they’re trying to emerge as market economies.”
Closer to home, Tenney noted, “the Democratic Socialists of America claim that they are ‘democratic.’” But, she explained, “there’s really nothing democratic about it.” And she warned that the DSA’s successes are not limited to blue cities and blue states.
“We’ve also seen socialist candidates win primaries not just in New York but in New York City, as well as in Colorado and Pennsylvania, candidates who were backed by the so-called Democrat Socialist organization won,” Tenney said. “It’s a fool’s errand, in my opinion.”
Malliotakis sees America’s education system as part of the problem, and noted that on the Ways and Means Committee, she and her colleagues are cracking down on adversarial funding of American schools.
“We are looking at foreign money that is coming from communist China, funneling through nonprofits to political activity,” she noted. This happens through “501(c)(4)s for political education and activities; there is a bill we’re going to be taking up in House Ways and Means Committee that I drafted that’s going to start cracking down on that, because we’re seeing that type of foreign influence from outside communist countries infiltrating and basically using it as propaganda. And these young people are buying into it.”
Both Tenney and Malliotakis lamented how DSA members like Chevalier, Lander, and Valdez will be joining them in Congress next year, and Malliotakis explained that “they’re not just socialist and communists. They’re actually anarchists who want to destroy America. Look at what some of them have said during their campaigns: they want no jails, no police, no borders, and they want to defund our military. One of the candidates [Chevalier] even went so far to say that she wipes her hands on the American flag because she didn’t have a napkin.”
Malliotakis, who previously ran for New York City Mayor herself, noted that Mamdani is already actualizing much of the DSA agenda in her back yard.
“They are making the lives of property owners, small landlords, so miserable that they’re going to be abandoning properties,” she lamented. “They’re going to be abandoning their properties. I think that’s exactly what Mayor Mamdani wants. He wants to be able to take those properties. He criticizes landlords in the city of New York. Meanwhile, the New York City Housing Authority is the biggest slumlord in the city of New York. I have constituents that we visit there, and we’ve helped them in situations where they have mold and rodents and roaches and leaks and all sorts of problems. And this is in the city of New York. And he has the audacity to try to say he’s going after slumlords. He should fix the property that the city owns itself right now, before he starts dictating what other property owners should or should not be doing.”
In contrast with the policies of Mamdani, both Republican lawmakers noted that another New Yorker, President Donald Trump, is delivering for their constituents.
Trump, Malliotakis said, is “making the country safe, securing our border, deporting the criminals. In New York City, we saw how illegal immigrants were really wreaking havoc all across the city. I did a freedom of information law request and found that there were 16,000 crimes committed by thousands of people who were in the country illegally who were residing in these migrant shelters that the taxpayers were paying for, these luxury hotels that could be upwards of $4,000 per unit per month, which is insane.”
“We were literally being forced to pay for a crime on our own citizenry,” she added. “The president put an end to that right away. We’ve seen New York City become much safer. The crime numbers have come down substantially since President Trump took office and stopped all this chaos from the Biden administration. But in addition to that, we’re respecting the taxpayers.
I think that’s really incredibly important, because socialists believe that you should give more of your hard-earned money to the government so that they can redistribute it in a way that consolidates power for themselves. That’s what they believe. We, on the other hand, believe if you work hard, you should be able to keep that money because you know how to make decisions and the best interests of your family.”
Malliotakis also touted the House GOP’s successful push for the largest tax cuts in American history, which she called “a great package that reduce taxes for hardworking Americans, for our middle class families, for senior citizens, tipped workers, overtime work. It really was significant, the largest tax cut for the middle class in history, and that’s a complete different ideology.”
Both lawmakers expressed concern that if Democrats retake the House majority next year, that sort of progress would be jeopardized.
“If the Democrats were in power, they said that they would raise the taxes $5 trillion, and they would obviously use that money to create more of these socialist type programs,” Malliotakis cautioned. “That is the key difference: the open borders versus a closed border and a safe, secure country making sure our military is funded so we can defend our homeland and the tax cuts, because we believe that money should be kept in your pocket and not in Uncle Sam’s.”
