This 6-pillar curriculum teaches the basic literacy we need to be personally and financially successful and to do so in a manner in which together we evolve a culture that supports the emergence of an advanced human civilization.
The decade-long Chinese Cultural Revolution launched by Mao Zedong in 1966 has gone down in history as one of the most egregious chapters of violence and chaos in a 20th century replete with numerous bloody upheavals. Mao’s “cultural” experiment and other disastrous initiatives like his ironically named “Great Leap Forward” killed an estimated 65 million Chinese over the course of his 27-year reign.
For most Americans, such events—if known about at all—seem long ago and far away, but Cultural Revolution survivor Xi Van Fleet warns, “Not so.” The Cultural Revolution colored Van Fleet’s childhood years and education (which she describes as “pure indoctrination”)—and those experiences positioned her to recognize similar patterns elsewhere.
In her case, “elsewhere” is America, where Van Fleet has lived since the 1980s. In her 2023 book titled Mao’s America: A Survivor’s Warning, and in her similarly titled one-hour talk given in 2024 at the Institute of World Politics, Van Fleet describes the eerie parallels between what she experienced in China and the cultural subversion tactics she is now observing in the U.S.
A key tactic, she says, is to teach people fake history “so they don’t know the past.” For Van Fleet, it is disturbingly familiar to witness America’s removal of statues, renaming of streets and institutions, constantly changing terminology to ensure “political correctness” (which “is [tyrants’] way to control your speech—you have to say what they tell you”), as well as the ways in which young people are encouraged to get caught up in victim identity, “cancel culture,” and the destruction of anything traditional (the Cultural Revolution waged war on the “Four Olds”—old ideas, culture, customs, and habits).
Unchecked violence, too, was a key feature of China’s Cultural Revolution, perpetrated by young Red Guards who were often from prestigious high schools and universities—the “best of the best”—whipped into a frenzy of torturing and killing “authority figures” such as teachers. In a 2024 interview with Tucker Carlson, Van Fleet acknowledged that U.S. youth are on a similar slippery slope in this regard: “Today they’re just out there accepting, justifying, and celebrating violence. It’s only a short step away from committing violence.”
However, citing the influence of the Frankfurt School and institutions like Columbia University, Van Fleet opines that ultimately, cultural Marxists are the “smarter” group: “They know how to take down America is not by violence—it’s by subversion.”
At Solari, it is not for nothing that we so often emphasize Dr. Joseph Farrell’s message about the vital importance of protecting and nurturing the culture. His July 2026 interview with Elze van Hamelen about how Poland kept its culture provides some positive lessons well worth our attention.
