My Family Fled Socialism. Then I Voted for Bernie Sanders. ^⁠15%

6/30/2026, 12:00:15 PM

Topics: Socialism, Venezuelan Politics, US Politics, Bernie Sanders, Immigration, Higher Education

Keywords: Socialism, Venezuela, Hugo Chavez, Nicolas Maduro, College, Education, Higher Education, Bernie Sanders, Health, Health Care, Immigration, Capitalism, Politics, Latin America, South America, Cuba, Nicaragua

BS Summary: This article contains 20 faulty reasoning types, including Hasty Generalization, Biased Writer Voice, and Straw Man, with Confirmation Bias as the most egregious example at 33.3% saturation with 470 hits. Analysis detected 1,672 faulty-reasoning hits from 1,412 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 31.1% and a BS Rank of ⁠15% (18,120 of 21,198 articles). This article is better (less manipulative) than 85.50% of the article peer group.

Confidence50%

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1,412 words

In 2005, when I was 11, my mother and I fled Venezuela because the government was going to arrest her for her reporting.

She was among the first investigative journalists to document how President Hugo Chávez and the socialist party were taking control of the judiciary and integrating Cuban operatives into the military and security apparatus.

She exposed how Chávez and his cronies were enriching themselves with oil revenues, creating what would become the largest corruption ring in modern world history.

In an effort to silence her, the regime fabricated charges that she had orchestrated the murder of a corrupt prosecutor and put out a warrant for her arrest.

My mother's escape from Venezuela played out like a Hollywood thriller.

She hid in safe houses, was transported in the trunk of a car covered with trash bags, and eventually made it out of the country stowed away on a small boat.

A family friend shepherded me to Miami to join her a few days later.

My family had already experienced the brutality of "Chavismo."

The police had raided our home, our car had been fired at, and our family bodyguard, Germán Delgado, had been kidnapped and tortured to death by state security thugs.

My grandfather was charged with bogus crimes for his journalism.

He was arrested by Italian authorities at Interpol's direction, and eventually joined us in exile.

The socialist regime forced the newspaper and magazine he owned to close down by preventing them from importing paper to run their printing presses.

One by one, my relatives were forced to flee, including my grandmother, who spent her final years desperate to see her home in Caracas one last time before she died.

A radical leftist government uprooted my family and wrecked my homeland.

Yet after I arrived at New York University (NYU) as a freshman in 2013, I became a leftist.

How NYU's Groupthink Turned Me Into a Leftist

It was all about fitting in.

When we first moved to Miami, I longed for Venezuela.

We sang the "Star-Spangled Banner" every morning in school, and I refused to put my hand over my heart.

("That's not my anthem," I told my mom.)

But I quickly learned English and made friends with gringas.

By the time I was a teenager, I wanted nothing more than to be an all-American girl, which entailed sealing off my Venezuelan identity.

At first, I was a moderate liberal Democrat, campaigning for Barack Obama's reelection in high school.

Then I arrived in New York and encountered NYU's hyperprogressive campus culture.

Like my classmates, I became obsessed with social justice.

I majored in journalism and politics, and my course load included "The Politics of Inequality," "LGBT Politics," and "Latina Feminist Studies."

My professors included militant leftists, an anti-establishment Catalan independence supporter, and a pro-Palestine activist who assigned a book edited by the Marxist historian Vijay Prashad—a defender of Chávez, Nicolás Maduro, and their socialist dictatorships.

The year I arrived on campus, Chávez died of cancer and was succeeded by Maduro, who continued dismantling Venezuela's democratic institutions and doubled down on Chávez's socialist policies.

I was still a freshman in 2014 when the country erupted in daily protests, with millions occupying the streets across the country.

They were driven by a fury and desperation that my classmates at NYU could hardly imagine.

I knew that Chávez and Maduro were socialists, but I wasn't focused on their economic policies.

The problem, I figured, was that Chavez and Maduro were authoritarians who trampled on civil liberties.

In the classic immigrant narrative, the protagonist, who wants nothing more than to be a real American, eventually reconnects with her past through nostalgia or family obligation.

I experienced plenty of both, but my transformation was ultimately the result of a profound intellectual dissonance: I couldn't reconcile what had happened to my family with what I was being taught in my Latin American studies classes.

I was told that U.S. and European colonialism and imperialism were solely to blame for poverty in the region.

I was being indoctrinated into the philosophy of tercermundismo, or "Third-Worldism," as the Venezuelan classical liberal Carlos Rangel dubbed it—a modification to the socialist creed made by Vladimir Lenin.

After the proletariat failed to revolt, as Marx had predicted, Lenin recast communism in internationalist terms.

Capitalism's real victims were the uncorrupted peoples of the Third World, whose land had been pillaged by colonialists.

They, not the workers, would rise up and overthrow the bourgeois countries.

I was assigned Eduardo Galeano's Open Veins of Latin America, the seminal text of Latin American studies and a manifesto of Third World victimhood, which Chávez had publicly gifted to Obama at the Summit of the Americas in 2009.

It tells of how European colonists and American imperialists impoverished Latin America by extracting its resources.

But in Venezuela, the nationalization of the oil industry in 1976 marked the end of our most prosperous years.

Chávez then dismantled the state-owned oil company's independence and turned its revenues into his personal piggy bank.

He stopped maintaining the oil industry's basic infrastructure and seized the assets of foreign operators.

Our own government was making us poor.

When Campus Politics Collided With My Family's Story

At NYU, we believed that unconstrained capitalism and "trickle-down economics" were causing the calamity of inequality in the U.S., and it was our moral duty to fight back by promoting social justice and progressive values.

We learned about the Iraq war, the Abu Ghraib scandal, and why the U.S. was to blame for the recent right-wing dictatorships in Argentina and Chile.

But this narrative didn't square with what I knew about Venezuela's recent history.

In 2002, the military had briefly removed Chávez from power; I was taught at NYU that the U.S. government had engineered the failed coup out of fear that Chávez would cut off access to our oil.

But my mother had been in the room when members of the Venezuelan media were discussing the possibility of a Chávez overthrow.

The U.S. ambassador emphatically told everyone present that the Americans wouldn't support a coup.

Perhaps Latin American history wasn't as simplistic as I was being taught.

I became acutely aware of how many of my NYU classmates were obsessed with race and identity, and how they believed that silencing Republicans was more important than protecting free speech.

It reminded me of how Chávez had shut down the free press (with support from the American and European left) on the grounds that they were a propaganda tool of the oligarchy.

My NYU classmates characterized those who disagreed with them as deserving total exclusion from polite society.

They shouted down right-wing speakers.

Anyone considered a Republican, or Republican-adjacent, was socially ostracized.

I met rich kids who called themselves "antifa," and heard protest chants like, "How do you spell racist?

NYU!"

As a Venezuelan in exile, I could see what they couldn't: U.S. democracy, capitalism, and the rule of law had afforded us unimaginable wealth, freedom, and security.

I was excited when one of my professors encouraged our class to attend a lecture by Alejandro Velasco, an assistant professor at NYU who had grown up in Caracas.

Imagine my disappointment when I showed up at the lecture and learned that Velasco was an apologist for the regime.

His views are summed up in his 2019 In These Times article characterizing the opposition to Chávez as the "middle-class and elite sectors."

While acknowledging Maduro's authoritarianism, Velasco advised his fellow progressives "to resist a growing narrative that uses the last five years of economic crisis in Venezuela to retroactively cast the entire chavista project—even socialism itself—as an unmitigated failure."

Velasco's version of Venezuelan history didn't square with my own memories or my mother's reporting.

Socialism was an unmitigated failure.

I'm ashamed to admit that after Sanders made his comments in defense of the Cuban and Nicaraguan dictatorships in 2016, I still voted for him in the Democratic primary.

I can't take back my vote for Bernie Sanders, and I still feel shame for all the years I spent defending democratic socialism.

I'm now honoring my heritage by spending the rest of my life spreading the truth about the ideology that destroyed Venezuela and caused so much human suffering.

Socialism turned the wealthiest nation in Latin America into the site of the worst peacetime tragedy in modern world history.

We honor its victims by making sure it doesn't happen again.

1412 words analyzed.

Speakers

1speaker2.6%attributed speech1,375writer words

37 attributed words100% of attributed speech74% writer coverage

Attribution is sentence-level. Pattern percentages are calculated only from words assigned to that voice.

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Analysis

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My Family Fled Socialism. Then I Voted for Bernie Sanders. ^⁠15%

Speakers

Alejandro Velasco

Analysis

Biases

Fallacies

Manipulations

My Family Fled Socialism. Then I Voted for Bernie Sanders. ⁠15%

Speakers

Alejandro Velasco

Analysis

Biases

Fallacies

Manipulations

My Family Fled Socialism. Then I Voted for Bernie Sanders. ^⁠15%