Google co-founder Sergey Brin said recently that he fled socialism in the Russia with his family in 1979 and does not want California to end up in the same place.

The response was predictable.

The New York Times devoted more space to his girlfriend than to his argument. Progressives on X dismissed the warning as hysterical billionaire bluster over a modest five percent tax. 

Hyperbole, they insisted. Soviet comparisons are over the top, they claimed. Lighten up, they said.

Unfortunately, it’s not hyperbole. The reflex to call it hyperbole is the warning sign itself.

I am American, but my family is Czech. Brin reaches for Russia because it is his story. I reach for Czechoslovakia because its example is even harder to dismiss. The two histories tell the same tale, and that tale runs straight through California today. 

Tsarist Russia in the three decades before the Bolshevik revolution was richer than it had ever been. It industrialized rapidly on a gold standard ruble after Sergei Witte’s 1897 reforms. Output grew more than three percent a year. Per capita gains ranked among the fastest on earth. By 1900, Russia was the world’s largest oil producer. It boasted world class universities and a merchant class awash in wealth.

But here lies the irony at the heart of every revolution. Portions of that merchant class personally bankrolled the revolutionaries who would later seize their factories and shoot their grandchildren. Savva Morozov, one of Russia’s richest industrialists, wrote checks to the Bolsheviks. So did much of Moscow’s commercial elite. They thought proximity to the revolution would protect them from it. It did not.

In 1938, my parents’ native Czechoslovakia was richer, freer, and more sophisticated still. It was one of the most industrialized nations in Central Europe, with high literacy, a stable currency, and the only functioning parliamentary democracy left between Berlin and Moscow.

The Czech bourgeoisie, my family among them, failed adequately to resist the rise of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia, and in many cases they subsidized it.

The communists’ strength came not from coal miners but from the salons of Prague and Brno. Professors, novelists, theater directors, and editors of every important literary review championed the left. Some members of my own family were openly sympathetic to progressive politics.

Then, in February 1948, the communists seized the ministries one by one under cover of legality. Nationalization laws and decrees confiscated agricultural property and general property. Roughly ninety thousand Czechoslovaks faced political persecution over the next six years. The enabling elites went first. They were arrested, expropriated, and worse.

Now consider California. It is the richest state in the richest country on earth. Its economy exceeds every nation except the United States, China, and Germany. It is strong and dynamic. It sets the pace, in Governor Newsom’s own words.

But for thirty years, California’s billionaires have written the checks to fund our state’s and our nation’s self-destruction. They sponsored the foundations that captured universities. They bankrolled district attorneys who refused to prosecute violent criminals. They paid for climate catastrophists, DEI consultants, open borders activists, and campaigns to “defund the police.” They thought they were purchasing credibility and the right side of history. Instead, they were buying their own rope.

Brin himself offers the textbook case. He was a major Obama donor who called Trump’s 2016 victory deeply offensive. This year he emerged as the second largest individual donor in California, fighting a wealth tax that would cost him roughly thirteen billion dollars.

Has Brin finally figured it out? Maybe, but possibly a bit too late.

The cultural revolution always precedes the political one. First come the universities, then the press, then the prosecutors, then the streets. Capture the language. Capture the institutions. Demonize a productive class. Refuse to prosecute your own while selectively prosecuting everyone else. Treat property as theft and theft as a civil right. Drive the productive out, then blame them for leaving.

Every step describes California today. 

The Russians who could warn us are dead. The Czechs of my grandparents’ generation who witnessed first-hand the destruction of their country are mostly dead, too. The handful still alive beg Americans to recognize the pattern before the next stage begins.

Brin is not being hyperbolic. He is simply remembering, and so am I.

We are in the midst of a Communist Revolution in California, and perhaps the nation writ large. Democrats now openly identify as socialists and win elections – something politically inconceivable a decade ago.

The Revolution’s success is not predetermined. These things never are.

But it is underway, and any honest reading of the histories sketched here should leave you motivated to fight back rather than resigned to whatever comes next.

My warning to you: pay attention before it is too late.

Sam Mirejovsky is a first generation American, co-founder of Sam & Ash Law and west coast host of the “What’s Right Show.” 

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