Helen Raleigh Warns of Socialism’s Grip on America

On September 24th, 2025, Helen Raleigh, a prominent conservative voice and author, visited the Republican Strategy Forum to share her concerns about the rise of socialism in America. Born in Communist China, Raleigh came to the United States for school with less than $100 in her pocket, driven by the promise of the American Dream. Before the COVID-19 pandemic, she worried that socialism could happen in the U.S.; now, she asserts that it is already taking hold.

Raleigh said she used to focus on economic issues when discussing socialism but since the Covid19 pandemic, she realized that cultural and political changes happen much faster than the changing conditions of economics in the U.S. Therefore, her talk focused on noneconomic aspects of socialism, based on a frame work provided Hannah Arendt’s book on Totalitarianism. Socialism, she argues, is another form of totalitarianism, a socio-economic-political system that tolerates no personal freedoms.

According to Raleigh, three conditions are necessary for socialism to take root: lonely people isolated from family, churches, and community; an elite class (“champagne communists”) who control government agencies, political offices, and major institutions and fancy only themselves can solve society’s problems. To do what they perceived as good, they sincerely believe they must completely control and impose their ideology and will on the rest of us, even if it means destruction and suffering and the employment of non-stop immersive propaganda and media control.

Raleigh believes that the United States is already experiencing these conditions. She argues that COVID-19 isolation policies have helped to isolate individuals, while corporate media became the left’s echo chamber, and big tech became the left’s speech censors. During the COVID pandemic, government officials, big tech, and corporate media shut down debates. They violated our constitutional right to free speech in the name of “public health” and “follow the science.” Anyone who dared to raise questions was labeled as “grandma killers,” or “anti-vaxxers,” or  “science deniers.”

She draws parallels to China’s elaborate class system, which used 60 categories to segregate people. Socialists, she asserts, claim equality as their goal, yet their first step is to categorize people.

In the U.S., Raleigh sees similar categorization at play, with labels like “science deniers,” “MAGA (Nazis),” and others being used to deny individual rights. She points to the people pushing Critical Race Theory (CRT) as proclaimed Marxists who justify their actions, including violence against others, to usher in socialism under the guise of oppression. The pandemic, Raleigh warns, has led to learning loss and set back an entire generation of youth.

Raleigh said that socialism never happens overnight. There are three stages of dehumanization. The first stage is soft exclusion, With the assistance of propaganda tools, elites use artificial external factors to identify individuals/groups and turn them into scapegoats for society’s ills, i.e., “unvaccinated,” “MAGA Republican.” Once identified and labeled, these individuals or groups become inferior parts of society and are criticized publicly for acting and thinking differently. Such soft exclusion is all about group identities, regardless of facts. 

The second stage is hard exclusion, which isolates individuals socially, financially, politically, and physically by denying basic rights, removing employment, confiscating property, dehumanizing, and even imprisoning them. She believes the U.S. is currently experiencing hard exclusion, citing examples such as the assassination of Charlie Kirk, the banning of Donald Trump from social media, the shutdown of open debate, and the expected election of Mamdani as mayor. The end game, she warns, is mass incarceration and extermination.

Despite the dire situation, Raleigh sees hope in Donald Trump’s re-election, as people are waking up to the reality of socialism’s grip on the country. She also points to Elon Musk’s X platform, which has broken media barriers, and the beginnings of a revival.

Raleigh encourages everyone to read Solzhenitsyn. (Solzhenitsyn is best known for his works that exposed and criticized the Soviet Union’s forced labor camp system and the totalitarian nature of its regime.) To save the republic from socialism, Raleigh suggests that everyone at the minimum does what Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn once said – trying to “Live not by lies.” Other forms of activism include speaking against lies, supporting the right candidates, write or share articles, strengthen families, faith, and communities, educating youth about how we got here, engaging in citizen journalism, and stop the government’s encroachment on privacy and erosion of freedoms. 

Quoting Winston Churchill, Raleigh believes that Americans will do the right thing, but only after they’ve tried everything else. Her visit to the Republican Strategy Forum serves as a call to action for conservatives to recognize the threat of socialism and fight to preserve the American Dream and the freedoms it represents.