The low point of the segment came when I recounted the story of my great-grandfather dying in a Soviet gulag under Stalin. His crime: owning a private business — specifically, a bakery.

The show’s producers then intercut footage from the Sanders interview, with the Vermont socialist joking that no one would be sent to the gulag under his brand of socialism.

That was my beloved grandmother’s father. Her life was shaped by his absence, by his death at Marxist hands. He was a real person, he mattered and the socialist system destroyed him and added his body to the enormous pile of corpses it created.