One group of conservative Asian Americans who stood out in the past 2020 U.S. election campaign came from places like mainland China, Vietnam and Cambodia. In their words, they oppose the socialist ideology in the United States because their Parents, and even they themselves, have experienced the hardships of socialism and they know the path the current far-left Democratic Party in the United States is about to lead America down.
Elizabeth Heng, a California-based Cambodian businesswoman who graduated from Stanford University as an undergraduate and Yale University as a graduate student, is one of them.
“My parents experienced the horrors and destruction wrought by evil socialism, so I cannot stand by while socialist leaders in Congress, the mainstream media and Silicon Valley mock us and undermine American principles under the guise of ‘progressivism. “
Elizabeth Heng introduced herself on her LinkedIn page saying, “I am a woman, a minority, a conservative millennial, a new face of the Republican Party, and someone who will stand up against socialism in America.”
Elizabeth Heng, a Cambodian-American and founder of a conservative high-tech company in California.(Heng Facebook)
In a recent interview with the English-language Epoch Times’ CrossRoad program, Elizabeth Heng expressed her fear of the censorship that is currently taking place in American society and the fear that people are afraid to express themselves.
Creating a high-tech company for free speech
In order to defend the freedom of speech that is the foundation of the United States, she has created a new high-tech company: The New Internet, a browsing software and application that seeks to give people a platform to express their opinions without fear and to maintain a healthy debate. habits.
Elizabeth said she wants to keep America the way it was when her parents fled from Cambodia, able to work and study, raise their children in a new environment and bring them up. “Because I really don’t think there’s any other place in the world like America where people can realize their Dreams.”
Elizabeth’s parents experienced the communist movement in Cambodia firsthand and saw millions of lives die under the Khmer Rouge. Her parents’ high school was a large concentration camp where people were locked up and tortured, so there was no school for her parents to receive a complete Education. Later, the parents fled to the United States. Here, they learned a new language, a new way of Life, and gave their children the opportunity to get an education that would allow Elizabeth and her brothers to achieve personal success and realize their American dream.
Her parents’ experiences gave Elizabeth a deep understanding of socialism and communism.
“Because they didn’t want to have a free society, they wanted to control people’s lives, how much people ate, what people did, and health care …… all of it they wanted to control.” She said. In recent years, however, Elizabeth has been horrified to find that the same socialist mindset her parents fled has resurfaced in the United States.
America’s move toward socialism? “It scares the hell out of me.”
“Some of the elected officials now are talking about the same ideology, and it freaks me out,” She said. “But you know, I’ve seen firsthand the opportunities that America has given our Family. And so I want to do everything I can to defend those very basic principles that were given to us, because there is no other place in the world where a family that came here penniless and as a refugee can send their daughter to Stanford, to Yale, even to run for Congress and to start a high-tech company. — this country has given me and my brothers freedom. So I want to make sure that I pass those values on to future generations so they can enjoy them as well.”
In 2018, at the age of 32, Elizabeth ran for Congress in California as a Young Conservative Republican. On the campaign trail, she made an ad in which she recounted their family’s experience and their fears for the future of America. As a result, she came under scrutiny from Facebook and Twitter, and at one point the high-tech companies pulled her campaign ad on the pretext that it contained images of Cambodian communist killings.
“When real socialism happens, that’s when people are killed and burned, and that includes a lot of my family members.” Elizabeth said. “It’s the idea of socialism that they should be angry about. We’ve seen Time and time again that socialism doesn’t work in all countries around the world. What we need to do is not bring those values and ideologies to America.”
In the end, though, Elizabeth, who was running for public office, won the battle with her name recognition and social influence, forcing Facebook and Twitter to later reinstate her ads. But the incident got Elizabeth thinking about what happens when she is one of those ordinary people with no power and no reputation who are censored for their speech.
“So I feel like it’s a very important thing for us to set up our own platform that everyone, including conservatives and liberals, can use without fear of having their First Amendment rights suppressed.”
Elizabeth said Thenewinternet.com is a website, a social media outlet, a search engine and a browser that allows each member to authenticate the user behind each account themselves, which prevents people from hiding behind fake profiles to bully others and allows conservatives to speak their minds boldly.
“This way our community can have a fairer and more balanced environment for discussion and discourse.” Her vision, she said, is for people to have a voice without having to be afraid of what they think or ashamed of who they are. “Because that’s one of the most basic rights that we’re given as Americans. …… because we have no censorship here, real people with real freedoms; it corrects the political censorship, fake news, bullying, privacy issues, high-tech monopolies, and suppression of conservatives that used to be on the old Internet.”
Keep Suppressing Keep Speaking Out to Give Future Generations a Chance at the American Dream
Not surprisingly, Elizabeth’s website has encountered a second wave of censorship. GoFundMe, another Silicon Valley tech company and fundraising site, abruptly shut down the account she was using to raise money without notifying her. When she sent a press release to PR Newswire to publicize this dispute over the First Amendment, it was rejected by the latter.
“Once again, high-tech companies, as well as the liberal media, have silenced conservative voices.” She said, “This is absolutely unacceptable.”
Constantly silenced, she has to keep fighting. Elizabeth says that although she is frightened by what is happening in the U.S. right now, and it seems that the things she has been speaking out about and giving people warnings about for the past few years are coming true, the reality of being a descendant of Cambodians who rose from the dead of communism has motivated her even more to keep fighting.
“My parents instilled in me these values that through determination and hard work, you can achieve everything you want.” Because that’s something she’s seen firsthand, she says, and that’s that America has made her dreams come true for her parents, who once had nothing. “So I’m going to make sure we keep our country going so that other people have those opportunities, because I really believe that’s not possible anywhere else in the world.”
The young high-tech company CEO said, “It’s something that’s melted in my blood, and I’m going to continue to fight for that, and I’m going to make sure that future generations have those opportunities.”
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