It’s an open secret that many American Democrats admire Communist China. Sen. Elizabeth Warren has praised China’s commitment to state-funded infrastructure. Sen. Bernie Sanders has praised it for lifting “more people out of extreme poverty than any country in history.” Yet one of the most zealously pro-Chinese politicians in America is Minnesota Governor and Democratic vice presidential candidate Tim Walz.

After working as a high school teacher in Guangdong, China, in 1989, Walz tried to import Chinese values to the United States. During a lesson on China’s Communist system in November 1991, Walz told a class of Minnesota high school students that communism “means that everyone is the same and everyone shares. The doctor and the construction worker make the same. The Chinese government and the place they work for provide housing and 14 kilograms, or about 30 pounds, of rice per month. They get food and housing.”

Walz’s remarks were reported in a 1991 article in Nebraska’s Alliance Times-Herald that focused on his work on student exchange programs in China, yet this article did not comment on Waltz’s shockingly naive description of the Chinese Communist Party’s rule.

Karl Marx said, “[T]he theory of the Communists may be summed up in a single sentence: abolition of private property.” Income equality is a major feature of the system. Yet describing communism as a system where “everyone shares” is dangerously inaccurate. People do not “share” their wealth under communism. The government forcibly steals the fruits of their labor to keep or redistribute as it sees fit.

Communism is not a well-meaning ideology that prioritizes voluntary sharing; it is a totalitarian ideology that abolishes private property by stripping away people’s freedom.

“Communism is not evil because of the estimated 85 million to 100 million deaths caused by Marxist-Leninist regimes,” wrote New Zealand author Trevor Loudon in his article “Why Is Communism Evil?” He continued:

Communism is not evil because of the gulags of the Soviet Union, the labor camps of China, or the killing fields of Cambodia. Communism is not evil because of the vast numbers of Communist-supported terror groups like the Palestine Liberation Organization, the Philippines’ New People’s Army, Peru’s Sendero Luminoso or South Africa’s Umkhonto We Sizwe. All the above are appalling beyond measure, but they are symptoms—not the cause—of the inherent evil of communism. The reason that communism is the greatest evil is simple: Communism is the greatest enemy of personal responsibility ever invented.

This is a good analysis. Many liberals focus on the personal failings of men like Josef Stalin, Mao Zedong and Pol Pot when trying to explain away communism’s death toll. But they miss the core problem. This ideology seeks to create perfect income equality by abolishing private property; in doing so, it abolishes both personal freedom and personal responsibility. This freedom-less environment is what creates the conditions for death camps and allows men like Stalin to rise to power.

In the late Herbert W. Armstrong’s words, “Communism is the vulture of decadent, dying politics, religion and society” (Plain Truth subscriber letter, Nov. 24, 1967). It seeks a world where “the doctor and the construction worker make the same.” Yet it ends up pitting larger, poorer groups against the smaller, wealthier group and creating civil war-like conditions that blot out millions of lives before the death camps even get constructed. It completely ignores humanity’s evil nature and the eternal truths of the Bible.

Most U.S. Democrats are convinced that Barack Obama, Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, Tim Walz, Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi are better people than Josef Stalin, Mao Zedong and Pol Pot. But they still favor Big Government over personal responsibility, so their proposals always produce evil outcomes.

In Genesis 3:19, God told humanity to eat bread earned by the sweat of their brow. It was this scripture that inspired U.S. President Abraham Lincoln to condemn slave owners who asked God’s assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men’s faces. Despite the radical left’s zealous condemnations of America’s history with slavery, their Communist-inspired economics still seeks to forcibly wring bread from the sweat of other men’s faces while sanctimoniously equating state confiscation with voluntary sharing.

Democratic socialism in Red China turned into a continent-sized horror story, not because people didn’t get to vote but because Communists ignored laws to limit government power and protect individual rights.

The Bible shows that the modern descendants of ancient Israel include the United States. Isaiah prophesies that these modern Israelites will become sick in their reasoning and faint in their hearts (Isaiah 1:4-7). He prophesies that their nation will be laid desolate by civil war. How could a dramatic prophecy like this be fulfilled? How could the most powerful and prosperous nation in human history fall into such a terrible fate?

One major reason is over this issue of government control. By its very definition, Big Government socialism is directly opposed to small-government constitutionalism. Communism is based largely on atheism, and the U.S. Constitution is based largely on the Bible.

Today, communism and socialism are gathering strength. What people don’t understand about “democratic socialism” is that the aim of socialism in the United States is to overthrow its constitutional form of government—by violence if necessary. Socialists usually downplay this, but the protests and riots occurring across America today are not really against Donald Trump or Republicans; they are against the constitutional system of government he aspires to lead.

How widespread and how violent will this movement get? The history of socialism—and Bible prophecy—provide the chilling answer.

To learn more about how prophecies from Isaiah and other biblical books apply to America, read “Communism in America Today,” by Gerald Flurry.