Greetings, this is Pastor David Bass at New Geneva Orthodox Presbyterian Church with the Moment of Truth, where we challenge you to think through an important issue of life and faith. And today, we want to challenge you to think through the issue of socialism and the upcoming election. We are glad to have back, then for round two, Bill from Wealth of Health Foods, where you're going to find some great organic and natural foods. Bill and his wife, Dasha, have been at this now for many, many years, and they have studied and become proficient in foods as medicine.

My wife and I, Deborah, have come around to seeing our food as medicine in life and bringing us health and well-being. And there is indeed a wealth of health available to you in natural means. You don't need big pharma, you don't need big tech to keep you healthy and strong for eons. Nature has been doing that through our foods and environment and water, clean water, clean food. And Wealth of Health is one of those places where you're going to find good stuff for your own well-being yourselves.

And just full disclosure here, my wife and I, Debbie, have a farm in Teton Valley, and we produce a lot of goat products, goat milk products. And Wealth of Health has seen fit to offer our goat's milk in their store. So among the many fine selections that you're going to find, as Bill and Dasha have studied this area for so long, you're going to find just a great panoply of supplements and foods that you can trust to build up your own health and strength. And our milk is part of that. Bill, welcome back to the radio program today.

Got a lot of response. Very good. I'm glad to be here. One or two people are listening. And how quickly the news cycle changes a week ago when we did this was right before Trump got positive.

And then a day later when his personal doctor put out a press release statement that he's on, in addition to the prescription meds and a cocktail of stuff, that he's on D and zinc, the whole country went nuts. And so we've been obviously talking about zinc and D since April. And now everybody's jumping on the bandwagon. Yeah. That's a whole other area.

Yes. The COVID crisis, so-called, the manufactured crisis, and those mediative elements that will help you not only stay healthy, but if you do get sick, will help you overcome it at a much faster pace. And it doesn't have to be big pharma drugs that do that. As you say, I take a lot of C and D, myself and zinc, to help me stay healthy. The big pharma intervention probably plays into once a person is admitted with some serious symptoms, and they do need some of the pharma intervention, be it oxygen or this plasma cocktail with antibodies.

But the zinc and C and D, on the preventative side, by far are keeping a vast majority out of the hospitals and emergency rooms. Yes. This plays right into, as far as I'm concerned, plays right into our topic from last week, and that is socialism, because big pharma is very much at the heart of socialized medicine as well. Right. Government-sponsored medicine.

Bill, one of the listeners left a message on our church phone, and he wanted to ask you this, and this dovetails right into the medicine aspect of this, that Biden and the Democrats are offering everything free, quote-unquote, medicine, education, housing, even a guaranteed income. What is the two-part question? What is the cost of having everything free? And then secondly, what is the quality of these things offered free? So, based on the history of my growing up in the Soviet Union, free education and free daycare and free kindergarten did exist, and the quality of education was actually quite good.

Most of the kids coming out of the former Soviet republics, assuming that they didn't sleep through their classes, were way, way ahead of the U.S. kids, so you can come in into the U.S. if you had to finish high school, let's say, or college. And I remember vividly coming into the United States and sleeping through the last two years of math and science. English was a different story, of course, because I already had all that two or three years prior as a much younger kid, and even the first two years of college calculus, I already knew coming out of high school in the Soviet Union. So, education was good and it was free.

However, the free part is, again, the taxation, and if people are willing to live with a 70% overall or 80% overall tax burden, which is just a redistribution of money from you bringing it home as part of your paycheck, or the government keeping it and then giving you a bunch of free stuff, then if you make that decision and you want to do that, that's fine. However, all those professors and teachers in the Soviet Union, again, were paid as much as somebody who swept streets. They did not have the machinery to do that because they had to occupy people with artificially created jobs.

So, you saw thousands and thousands of people with broomsticks walking around sweeping streets. They didn't have machines doing it like we have here. So, if you're going to pay 80% taxes, you're going to get free education. And we're seeing that in Scandinavian countries right now with very high tax. As far as the quality, in the case of education, again, it was good, but the quality of other stuff was pretty poor.

So, if you walked into a pharmacy, you obviously did not see any prescription meds in line with what you're expecting to see in a pharmacy in the United States. It was heavily subsidized. So, what they called drugs were extract of valerian root for sleep aid, and valerian root is a base of valium, for example, or white willow is a base of aspirin. So, you could pick up a bottle of valerian back then for a dollar or two dollars, but you could not find a remdesivir drug.

It would never be on the shelves of the Soviet pharmacy in those socialist days because they would never spend that much money paying to the pharmaceutical company to stock those items. And would that have been Western pharmaceutical companies? Correct. I mean, they did not have a very robust pharmaceutical industry. The research into the pharmaceutical industry was very poor.

They did not rely on vaccines much. Again, the value of life. So, you're tying all of that together. They really didn't care if a million people died during a localized pandemic or a flu outbreak. It was just part of the course.

But now, of course, with everything integrated and companies putting plants all over the world to produce the same drugs, whether it's a U.S.-based or a Japanese-based, there's probably much higher access. And it's not a socialism or communism anymore. That ended in the late 80s. Housing was also one of the great contrasts. I know growing up, what is your sense of the comparison between housing and socialist countries and free economy?

Right. So, there was no private ownership of housing under socialism slash communism, with the exception of the higher-ups and people who were well-connected. All of those, and you've seen famous pictures of the dachas, the second homes of the Politburo people, or famous athletes, or famous musicians, or famous doctors, or famous politicians. Everybody else lived in the identical apartment buildings.

There was a very popular comedy, a movie comedy, in the Soviet Union at the time, where a guy gets drunk and accidentally walks into a building that looks exactly like his building, and his outside of the apartment door looks exactly like his apartment door. And his key opens the door just like it would his apartment, except it's not his apartment. And it's a single gal, and it turns into a funny sort of a love story. But they all look like matchboxes. We've seen them.

Very gray, very impersonal. Everybody lived in those apartments. Many times, you had communal apartments. Later in life, they became teeny private apartments. In the communals, I grew up in a communal apartment where we had six tenants sharing one bathroom and one kitchen.

That kitchen had six stoves, six little refrigerators. Everybody cooked together at the same time in one long hallway, and then every family would go into their private door in that hallway. So that existed under the communism-socialism, and then later on, little private apartments got built in these matchboxes buildings on the outskirts of the metropolitan areas. Yeah, Bill, yeah, that sounds like the characterization that I've heard, and the reality of that must have been quite stunning compared to when you came to this country.

Yeah, when you see the mid-America, one-level homes sitting on half-acre building lots with beautiful grass, and then, obviously, bigger lots for people with horses and all that. We saw that in magazines. We saw it in Western programs. The United States government obviously put out a lot of propaganda in the Voice of America, Radio Free Europe, and in a big, big magazine called America. It was kind of like a Time Life magazine, except it was twice the size, and that was purely propaganda for the Eastern Bloc of Europe to show them what America was like.

So we saw the photos. We saw the cost of real estate, and, of course, not understanding the value of the dollar and the Russian ruble, which was worthless when you saw a home selling for $60,000 in Kansas or Nebraska. You said, oh, my God, how can you afford that, not understanding that a wage at the time may have been $20,000 a year, and it was quite affordable. Well, that dovetails right with my next question from a caller whose nickname is Vlad. Okay.

And he wants to know, how would you compare the media of the USSR with the mainstream media in America today? And then the second part of his question is, how did you get real info? And you kind of answered that a little bit. Right. So the real info came from Voice of America, Radio Free Europe, people who traveled overseas, and a very small percentage of the population had access to that.

The vast majority of the population was in the dark, which is exactly what we have right now. You've got vast majority of the population not engaged, ignoramuses, watching CNN, MSNBC. And even though you can call this a free media, it is certainly driven, politically motivated, one-directional media, with occasional, so to speak, guests who may throw a little objection to the propaganda side. There, it was widely open. Here, it's slightly overt, but the end result is the same.

I watched the debate last night, and what frustrated me is the moderator. So put her in the media, because she is from USA Today, this gal. She's writing a biography of Nancy Pelosi. So she's drooling all over Pelosi. You saw Chris Wallace two weeks ago.

His dad is a left-wing liberal. He's a left-wing liberal. Mike Wallace. Mike Wallace, yeah, and Chris Wallace. So when you start with a question that already puts you on the defensive, you killed 200,000 people.

How do you defend that? Yeah. And she did not do that to Harris. No. I turned it off with, to begin with, I was so exasperated, with Pence, too.

And he's much more gracious, I'm sure, than Trump. He was told not to attack a black woman, and I'm sure he had to keep it in the back of his mind. But when you start a question with, well, you did this, she never started a question saying, you created 5 million jobs before COVID. Can you do this again? So that immediately predisposes you to, why even do this?

Or to Harris, you put numberless black people behind bars with your policy. Or your voice, your soundbite, yeah, or your soundbite in your voice says, you are opposing fracking. Right. No, I'm not. But here it is, from six months ago.

And she never challenged them. The moderator never came back and said, but that is out there. So it's really frustrating. So this is how the media was there. You obviously didn't have the choice.

You only had two or three main channels. Most of the movies were propaganda-based, World War II, heroes, rah, rah, rah, a lot of sports, a lot of cartoons for the kids. But the main three news stations were all regurgitating the same party line political stuff. So you really, for an average day Soviet citizen, you did not have the information. This brings up a question, generates a question for me now, is how would you compare the election process in the old USSR with what is developing here in America?

Right. Right. So as of four years ago, we hopefully saw that people could go vote and the votes really did not get manipulated. Where in the Soviet Union, you were told how to vote because there was generally one person running. There was no opposition during the communists.

So whether it was Brezhnev or Andropov or any of those people, there was no opposition. So you went and just checked off the blind box because you knew the outcome of the election. Here, this year, because of all the mail-in votes, it will be a very interesting thing to see how much of it gets skewed and how much of it gets thrown in the garbage. And we're hearing every single day now where they're finding ballots and they're losing ballots and then ballots get canceled and somebody's ballot gets delivered to the wrong address.

And the guy who orders a ballot for his wife who passed away three years in California and the state of California says the system worked. We caught the guy and we threw the book at him. It's a counter strategy that's been developed by Trump and his team. Right. The Democrats have their strategy, of course.

Right. We'll mail in. They'll get less than 1%. But the two major parties will get close to 50% of the vote. So you can say that here at this moment, it is still an open election.

Okay. We have another caller who wants to ask. She asks, how many citizens would you say were aware of their circumstances under tyranny, maybe in comparison with the West? And how many were asleep, that is, just went on living their lives without any realization or understanding of their circumstances? Yeah, it's probably a very hard question to answer because nobody ever did any statistical studies on who would you vote for or what's your opinion of this.

There was no such thing as questionnaires. I would say vast majority of people, whether they knew it or not, went along with their life because they were concerned about putting food on the table, getting up in the morning, not getting arrested for some bogus accusation. I would probably venture to guess maybe 20% to 25% of the people, again, who were more engaged, like my family, people who traveled overseas and saw with their own eyes, were aware that there is a better way of doing it, but they just could never speak out. And the few who spoke out generally did not do well in a society. Right.

Solzhenitsyn, of course, wrote his book, The Gulag Archipelago. Yeah. Were people generally aware that that was a potential for their fate, like you say? It was, but the propaganda by the government was he was an enemy of the state. And when he immigrated to Vermont from the Soviet Union, people here in the U.S. who knew him from the Soviet Union days embraced him big time.

And, of course, he became a hero, and he was a hero. People read him. They read Pasternak. They read the Dr. Zhivago story. I mean, here's a classic movie that became sort of a fighting song for many of the population.

But, again, you had to be quiet watching it. You had to be quiet reading about it. You would never share it that you read Solzhenitsyn's book with someone you didn't know who was a reliable, trusted friend. You really had to watch for trusted agents and for the observers and stukaches, the people who watched you and reported you. Was there the kind of technology to monitor you as there is today?

That is a big difference, I think, in the coming turn, is that the technology of monitoring who and what we are, what we say, what we do, is much greater, far more extensive than it was under the USSR. Yeah, clearly, there was no technology that we knew of, except for if KGB was tracking or monitoring a dissident. They probably implanted in lights and telephones, the old telephones, you remember the James Bond on twisting the receiver on the phone and finding a microphone or a little camera. All that existed, as a matter of fact, it existed in every hotel room where the Westerners stayed.

It existed on every Aeroflot plane that flew JFK to Moscow where every flight attendant was a KGB recruited officer. They knew the moment you boarded on a plane who you were, talking about profiling, a classic case that's been going on for many, many years. And then the moment you checked into the hotel, they knew who you were. And the policy in the hotels at the time was when you left your room, you had to leave the key with a floor supervisor. Every floor had a watch person with a desk.

You were not allowed to take the key with you when you went out from the hotel under pretense of cleaning the room. You could have also had a duplicate room, but they didn't do that. They didn't spend the money on duplicate keys. So every room was bugged. Every phone was bugged.

Every place where a Westerner may show up was bugged. But the technology, obviously, in the apartment buildings was not there and just people putting the ear to the door or the wall. Now we're addicted to our cell phones and there's no need for all those exterior devices. And blink cameras that are in everybody's home and you can stick it into a little teddy bear. Facial recognition.

Facial recognition and, yes, yes, cameras on traffic lights. Yeah. Yeah. A tyrant stream. Yeah.

All of these things. Yeah. Bill, one of my congregants also wanted to know what religious life was like. I know that you were not raised as a religious man or you're a spiritual man, but not necessarily a religious man. But I'm sure you had a sense from neighbors, friends, relatives who were practicing their faith.

Since the Russian Orthodox Church had been commandeered by the state, many churches turned into museums. What was the religious life of the average Russian like or that person behind the end curtain where religion was squelched? Right. So after 1917 at the revolution, basically religion went out the window. And being that I was 16 or 15 when we left the country and I turned 16 before we came to the United States, I really did not have any firsthand experience knowing people who were practicing.

But my grandmother, being born and raised before the revolution, still practiced a little bit of Jewish faith, celebrating the biggest holidays. Never went to the synagogue because that basically did not exist. But I remember vividly as yesterday, riding on public transportation, pass a Orthodox Russian church and seeing three to maybe 10 old, old ladies with little silk scarves on their heads sitting in front or praying or standing. Never saw a young person. And the government left those people alone.

There was no reason for them to go. They didn't cause any harm. They just went to the church and sat there. So the younger generation definitely was not involved in the open. If some of them were, I did not know any of them.

None of my friends were any of them. And of course, when their parents were members of the Communist Party, then the religious became a 180 polar opposite to the indoctrination of the Communist Party. What do you think the lockdowns from the COVID-19 pandemic, what do you think that portends for our future and possible journey, possibly increased government oppression? So you're talking about the United States. Yes, the United States.

Right, right. And not just the United States. I think most of the world basically went on lockdowns. So the fascinating thing to me was we've never had a lockdown in history of this country. Under any circumstances, 1918 flu pandemic, not the swine flu, not anything else, civil unrest.

There's never been a lockdown, maybe martial law went into effect for the nighttime to protect property. But it just, it proved, we now have six months past this initiation of this whole COVID thing. It proved to do absolutely nothing. Except destroying the economy and putting out thousands of business and people on welfare, unemployment, suicide watches, prescription drugs for depression, kids who committed suicides and we don't know about them. People going completely haywire, losing their apartments, losing their homes, their businesses, their families.

Nobody is talking about it. And Trump already came out and said this will never happen again on his watch. But it will happen again on Biden's watch because Biden came out and said that. He would do it. Absolutely.

So did they work from a practical standpoint? Did they save any lives? In my opinion, no, zero. Is that the path to tyranny and what the socialism and Bernie Sanders would like? Absolutely.

Is it going to happen? Maybe in the states like Idaho, no. In the states like New York, Michigan, Illinois, probably yes, because that's where people, that's where the demarcation line is. Yeah, California, Oregon, Washington. Yeah, absolutely.

Yeah, I think that is almost a test run, if you will, a test case. That, like you say, it doesn't matter to those governors, at least, or to others of the tyrant line, whether it worked or not. But as we've discussed this before, as Lenin and others have said, the issue is never the issue. The issue is always the revolution. Right.

So the issue is never the pandemic. The issue is how do we acquire more power towards the eventual Marxist-Leninist revolution. Right. And I think that's very much a part of what we've seen in the pandemic like that. Not a single bureaucrat, government employee lost a job or a paycheck.

Very true. And so nobody got laid off. Nobody got furloughed. All of them continued. And so it's easy for that segment of the population to write the rules against those who sign paychecks, as Dasha and I do, as you guys do with your own business, which all of a sudden relies on your potential customers who are no longer buying your products because their income stream has been shut off.

And so it's, again, it's that 50 percent of the population that thinks, yeah, let's shut down the country for the good of the rest without understanding that it's a complete moronity. That brings up another issue that we have seen begin to happen is the barter system of trade. What was the barter economy like under socialism? Yeah, widely accepted, huge black market where people were bartering. And I remember this when my parents wanted to upgrade their apartment.

There was a market late in the evening in a square where people would basically go in and haggle and say, I have this. We would like that. What do you have? And so you would do that. My dad was a merchant sailor.

We've discussed it on the last week's podcast. So he would bring in from the Beatles album vinyl to the pair of jeans. And my mom would trade it for something that the family needed. And my dad also had hard currency, which was given to sailors going overseas. So they were able to go in and buy something.

So those dollars then became a huge bartering tool in the United States. So if my mom needed a medical procedure outside of what the government prescribed was acceptable, and she wanted a good doctor, not a butcher, to perform that, that doctor would do it on a Saturday or after hours. And then my mom would pay with a pair of jeans or the vinyl of the Beatles album or the hard currency. Then the doctor would then go and give to the butcher for a prime cut of meat. Yes.

So the system existed. It existed until in every Eastern Bloc country. We traveled into Czech Republic and other places before 1990 because Dasha's family is from Czech Republic. And we used to bring stuff with us from Nescafe coffee, which was not available, and trade it and butter it for something for Dasha's relatives who had nothing in Prague. America, you better start thinking about these things.

Wake up. Yeah. And begin honing your skills because unless things change dramatically, this is where we're headed. Bill, in closing, any last thoughts, any last comments in about 60 seconds that you think you might want to impart to those on the fence? Right.

You've got to get engaged if you care. And if you hear something and you hear some opposing views, do your own homework and do your own research. As we heard during this debate where Kamala Harris said, I never said I am going to shut down fracking. And if you go back dozens of times in the last year, she said she's going to be for shutting down fracking. If you can find that piece and then scratch your head and say, what else, whoever it is, CNN, Kamala Harris, Joe Biden, MSNBC are lying about, maybe there's a lot more to it.

Bill, that is something I've been saying six or seven times a day to people. Do your homework. Do your research. Get engaged. Get engaged.

Yeah. All right. Bill, it's been a delight having you with us. You have really given us some things to think about. And just appreciate you illuminating these parts of your life that are so important to keep in mind this anecdotal information from your life, Bill.

And we just wish you the best, you and Dasha, the very best, prosperity, health, strength, and happiness. And God help us on November 3rd. Yes, amen. All right. This has been Pastor David Bass at New Geneva Orthodox Presbyterian Church with a moment of truth.

New Geneva meets for holy worship on Sunday at 10 a.m. at 101 4th Street on the corner of 4th and Boulevard. And you can call us for more information and feedback at area code 208-523-0196, 208-523-0196.