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Nov. 30, 2016 - The Ben Shapiro Show
24:05
Ep. 217 - Castro Dies, The Left Weeps
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So, Hillary Clinton has now joined the Jill Stein quixotic recount effort in swing states including Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Michigan.
Campaign counsel Mark Elias announced that while the Clinton campaign had no evidence of hacked voting systems, they wanted to ensure the veracity of the vote.
Because we had not uncovered any actionable evidence of hacking or outside attempts to alter the voting technology, we had not planned to exercise this option ourselves, but now that a recount has been initiated in Wisconsin, we intend to participate in order to ensure the process proceeds in a manner that is fair to all sides." Stein is infamously launching a recount effort, if you missed it, in an obvious effort to raise money for the Green Party.
So, what's the goal here?
Well, not to overturn election results, clearly, because Hillary lost.
But, Ron Fournier of National Journal raises another awful horrifying possibility, quote, Make some calls.
Raising doubts about the legitimacy of the election, even without overturning the result, is part of Clinton's plans to keep her options open for 2020.
Make some calls.
You'll hear the same from her confidants.
Or no. No.
Except this would actually be the best-case scenario for Republicans.
Hillary was a historically bad candidate.
She was the first female major party candidate in history, and she was somehow unable to beat the guy who was caught on tape talking about grabbing women by the bleep.
Her husband was a president with significant blue-collar appeal.
She lost a blue-collar white vote in historic fashion.
She didn't even match Barack Obama's numbers among Hispanics.
After Trump openly said a judge of Mexican descent couldn't judge his case fairly, she relied on Hollywood glitz rather than on-the-ground campaigning, and she paid for it with the White House.
Hillary for re-election in 2020 would be incredible for Republicans.
It'd be so great.
She'd be back.
She'd be twice as annoying, which is almost mathematically impossible.
She'd have half the enthusiasm, again, almost mathematically impossible.
And she'd have half the energy level, which means that she would be twice as dead.
Meanwhile, she would suck all of the oxygen out of the room, preventing other candidates from rising.
Her corruption would ensure any future Trump corruption would be negated as a campaign issue.
Republicans should pray for more Hillary Clinton.
In a way, though, Hillary doesn't really have much of a choice.
Donations to the Clinton Foundation have plummeted since her loss, since there's no pay if there's no pay for play.
What happens to her if she merely becomes a failed presidential candidate?
Hillary needs access in order to sell the access.
So, Watch for a Hillary comeback.
We can only hope and pray that once again, Hillary's ego drives her to new lows.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
Okay, so much to get to today on this post-Thanksgiving Day show.
We're back, and we're kind of in the nice period of the year.
This period between Thanksgiving and New Year's, where everybody calms down a little bit.
We calm all the way up until the inauguration, except for the continuing chaos that emerges from the left and from the White House on a consistent basis.
So, we'll keep you up to date on all of that.
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Alrighty, so there's some good news over the weekend.
Some really good news over the weekend.
An evil piece of crap died.
That's always excellent.
Fidel Castro bit the bullet.
90 years too late.
I shouldn't say that.
Maybe he was a good child.
I don't know.
But certainly, about 60 years too late, he took over Cuba at age 32.
So anytime before that, he could have gone.
That would have been alright.
He did an enormous amount of damage to people.
The media have treated him as though he was a controversial figure, as opposed to a mass murdering Barbaric dictator.
He was basically low-rent Stalin for people who don't know much about Fidel Castro.
And I want to go through and talk a little bit about what Fidel Castro actually did.
Because the left will never tell you straight exactly what was wrong with Fidel Castro.
Because the thing about Fidel Castro for the left is the left is pretty much fine.
The left is pretty much okay.
With anything that other leftists do.
They're not in love with the mass murder, but if mass murder has to get done in order to create the new utopia, they can live with it.
So the front page of the New York Times said, Well, he didn't actually hold Cuba in his thrall.
He actually created a giant gulag and sentenced everybody in the country to stay in it.
And he wasn't a revolutionary so much as he was a socialist dictator who murdered all dissidents.
But I think that it's important to go through some of the facts about Fidel Castro.
So we will do that today.
So first of all, Fidel Castro took over the country in 1959.
He took over from a guy named General Bautista.
General Bautista was also a dictator, but he was sort of a right-wing dictator.
And General Bautista, under Bautista, Cuba was one of the richest countries in Latin America.
It was on the upswing.
He was sort of like, not a good guy, Bautista, but sort of like Pinochet, except less violent.
He was eventually going to end up transitioning into a form of democracy in all likelihood.
Instead, there was a violent revolution with Castro at its source.
And here is Fidel Castro taking power.
Here's what it looked like.
Outside Havana's presidential palace, hundreds of thousands rally at the call of revolutionary leader Fidel Castro, who estimated their number at a million.
Most of the throng wears the colors of Castro's 26th of July movement.
They are in an exultant mood as the man who overthrew the Batista dictatorship calls on them to approve the public trials and executions of pro-Batista figures guilty of war crimes and atrocities.
The executions, some 250 to date, have been widely criticized by many as too hasty and summary, even if justified.
Says Castro, the Cuban revolutionary government has no reason to offer explanations to America or to anyone except the people of Cuba.
Castro asks his audience if it favors the summary court martial.
He gets his answer in a roar of approval.
All in all, he ended up executing thousands and thousands of people.
He conspired with the mass murderer Che Guevara, we'll talk about Che in just a minute, to overthrow Fulgencio Batista, who was that dictator, and then he began a guerrilla campaign resulting in his takeover of the island.
He immediately exiled priests, he exiled all religious figures, he destroyed religious schools, he nationalized all businesses, he imprisoned and murdered his enemies.
Within the first three months, he had Between 600 and 1100 people shot.
Che Guevara said, this is a direct quote from Che, this piece of crap who you see people walking around with his face on t-shirts.
It's like walking around, again, with a Stalin t-shirt.
He said, to send men to the firing squad, judicial proof is unnecessary.
This is what Che Guevara said.
These procedures are an archaic, bourgeois detail.
This is a revolution.
And a revolutionary must become a cold killing machine motivated by pure hate.
We must create a pedagogy of the paradigm.
That's the execution wall.
So you have to teach people through the execution wall.
Castro actually imprisoned more of his citizens by percentage than Hitler or Stalin.
By 1961 he had imprisoned 300,000 human beings.
He asked the Soviet Union to actually nuke the United States in 1961 during the Cuban Missile Crisis.
Castro supported terrorist groups all over the world, ranging from FARC in Colombia to Shining Path in Peru and the Sandinistas in Nicaragua.
Hundreds of thousands of Cubans fled.
Millions, actually.
Many drowned in the ocean.
Thousands of people drowned in the ocean as they attempted to sail to Florida.
Between 1959 and 1992, at least 2 million Cubans fled Cuba.
Now, some of the lies that you'll be told is that he didn't impoverish Cuba.
He absolutely did.
The average GDP per capita in Cuba, when Castro took over, was a little bit over $2,000 per person per year.
By 1999, the average GDP per capita—remember, this is a 40-year period—by 1999, the per capita GDP in the nation was $2,300.
So it advanced $300 in 40 years.
According to Discover the Networks, the average daily wage for agriculture workers in Cuba in 1950 was $3.
The average daily wage in France at the time was $2.73.
Cuba had in 1958, the year before Castro took over, the highest standard of living of any Latin American country in half of Europe.
Here's the Wall Street Journal.
The Cuba that Castro inherited was developing but relatively prosperous.
It ranks third in Latin America in doctors and dentists and daily calorie consumption per capita.
Its infant mortality rate was the lowest in the region and the 13th lowest in the world.
Cubans were among the most literate Latins and had a vibrant civic life with private, professional, commercial, religious and charitable organizations.
Castro destroyed all of it.
He ruined agriculture by imposing collective farms, making Cuba dependent first on the Soviets and later on oil from Hugo Chavez's Venezuela.
In the past half century, Cuba's export growth has been less than Haiti's.
And now even doctors are scarce because so many are sent abroad to earn foreign currency.
Hospitals don't even have sheets or aspirin.
The average monthly income is $20.
Government food rations are inadequate.
As for that, healthcare, you always hear about the Cuban healthcare?
Absolute crap.
There are three systems.
There are the socialist revolutionaries who get good care.
There are the foreigners who come and pay with cash, like Fat Michael Moore.
And then there is the actual people of Cuba.
This is according to Jay Norlinger of National Review.
He said, hospitals and clinics are crumbling.
Conditions are so unsanitary, patients may be better off at home, whatever home is.
If they do have to go to the hospital, they must bring their own bedsheets, soap, towels, food, light bulbs, even toilet paper.
That's how poor healthcare is.
Imagine you go to the hospital and you have to bring your own light bulbs and toilet paper.
Basic medications are scarce.
Doctors have been known to reuse latex gloves.
Okay, the whole point of latex gloves is that you don't reuse them.
As for the infant mortality rate, they're constantly bragging about the infant mortality rate.
That's because they do all sorts of prenatal checkups, so they want to keep that statistic artificially high.
And the way that they do that is they do prenatal checkups.
If there's any danger to the pregnancy at all, they simply abort the kid.
So the abortion rates in Cuba are extraordinarily, extraordinarily high.
It really is a horrifying system of government, and that's been brought about by the Castro's.
But look how the media just worshipped the Castro's.
This is Ed Sullivan.
Ed Sullivan had on Castro.
This is 1961, I believe.
Or 1959.
And here's Ed Sullivan, who's then the most popular television host in the United States, praising Fidel Castro.
I know, in school, I understand you were a very fine student, a very fine athlete.
Were you a baseball pitcher?
Yes.
Baseball pitcher.
Basketball.
Basketball?
Soccer and everything, every sport.
Well, undoubtedly all of that exercise you did in school prepared you for this role now.
Yes, it helped me very much now in this world.
You know, this is a fine young man.
And a very smart young man.
With the help of God and our prayers, and with the help of the American government, He will come up with the sort of democracy down there that America should have.
He'll create the sort of democracy America should have?
Unbelievable.
This is how the media treated Fidel Castro, a mass-murdering dictator.
Mass-murdering dictator.
Castro on Face the Nation.
Here's Castro appearing on Face the Nation.
This is from 1959.
Because public opinion in Cuba is now very strong and with a tremendous force.
Nobody is enough powerful Opposite now the public opinion of the free country of Cuba.
Okay, so he says that public opinion will drive, and this is always what socialist revolutionaries would-be dictators say.
Whenever somebody talks about public opinion making might right, that's never a good thing.
It's why demagogues are scary, right?
People who come up and they say, well, the public says I can do this.
Doesn't matter what the law says.
Doesn't matter what the Constitution says.
The people want it.
We'll have summary executions.
Again, tens of thousands of people murdered, hundreds of thousands of people imprisoned by Fidel Castro.
Okay, here's Che Guevara at the United Nations talking about human rights.
It says, as Fidel Castro has said, so long as the concept of sovereignty exists as the prerogative of nations and of independent peoples, as a right of all peoples, we will not accept the exclusion of our people from that right.
So long as the world is governed by these principles, so long as the world is governed by those concepts that have universal validity, because they are universally accepted and recognized by the peoples, we will not accept the attempt to imprive us of any of those rights, and we will renounce none of those rights.
So he's basically saying here's Che Guevara in 1964 in front of the United Nations.
Three years later, he was dead, and he was dead because he went into other parts of Latin America and attempted to lead coups there, communist coups there.
So he's talking there about how nobody should interfere with Cuba, and then he promptly went to Latin America and attempted to start a revolution in Bolivia and was killed for his trouble.
Thank God.
Really terrible human being.
Che Guevara.
You want to see what it was like for Cubans living in Castro's Cuba.
People still are, by the way, thanks to the incompetence of Barack Obama and this idiotic policy imposed over the last 50 years in the United States.
I've never been in favor of this policy that the United States has.
With regard to non-assassination, it makes no sense to me.
I don't see why literally millions upon millions, generations of people should live in terror and suffering because we have to let an old piece of crap, an old, disgusting, desiccated piece of human debris like Fidel Castro live.
We would have been better off killing him.
But here's what it was like in Cuba and still is like in Cuba.
People can't escape.
It's a giant prison.
Here is some footage of Cuban refugees.
Here's what people were doing just to get out of Castro's Cuba while all of these Westerners were praising Cuba as this halcyon of light and liberty.
Here's what it actually looked like for people trying to get out.
In 2003, news media the world over broadcast this image.
A dozen Cubans sailing for freedom aboard an old green Chevy truck.
Luis and his three-year-old son, Angel, were on board.
Luis explained to me that few new cars entered Cuba after the revolution in the 1950s.
But his old one worked just fine.
He tells me he was scared, building the boat in secret and pushing from shore in the dark of night.
But he was willing to risk everything for a better life in America.
OK, I mean, this is, again, hundreds of thousands of people attempting to escape Cuba.
In the early 1980s, there were so many people trying to escape that Fidel Castro actually said fine.
And then he sent a huge number of kind of the Cuban criminal class.
He let them escape.
He let all the criminals go to Miami, and that's why you saw a major upsurge in crime and the drug trade in Miami in the early part of the 1980s.
But people have been attempting to float in cars.
I mean, this is how you ended up with the situation with, what was the name of the kid who was deported back to Cuba after his dad died on the way over from, or his mother died on the way over from Cuba, and then he was deported back to Cuba thanks to the Clinton administration.
People have been attempting to get out of Cuba for 50 years, thanks to the Castros.
Here's some footage of Castro's prisoners speaking about what it was like to be a dissident in Castro's Cuba.
It was like being in the depths of hell.
The suffering made me a little crazy, but my husband and children wrote to me and that kept me going, she said.
Callardón and her husband Ángel were arrested at a small anti-government demonstration in May 2014.
Their crime, they say, chanting down with Fidel Castro.
Education for Cubans has been about fear and how to be afraid, about how to avoid confrontation with the authorities, because they have power.
They teach you what they want you to know, but not really what goes on in the world, he said.
Both were released on January 8th, according to their prison papers.
The pair spent eight months behind bars in what they say were appalling conditions.
Okay, and that's not unusual.
Lots of people died and just went missing in Castro's prisons.
Castro had a special hatred for homosexuals, so very early in his regime, he basically rounds it up.
Homosexuals, here is testimony from some gay folks who were rounded up by Fidel Castro and put in prison camps.
The Youth Union brought a list of those to be purged.
Some who knew they were on the list didn't attend.
Others only found out at the assembly.
they were on the list of defendants.
Others only found out of the assembly.
The humiliation during these meetings consisted in forcing all those present to hurt every imaginable insult at each person being purged.
No one could escape it.
There were people who couldn't bear it, who were shocked and killed themselves.
Not only because of the public humiliation, but they were ashamed before their families too.
They had to go home and say, I was expelled because I was accused of being homosexual.
Some killed themselves.
Okay, that was not uncommon in Castro's Cuba.
And again, this is somebody who mass executions were not uncommon in Castro's Cuba.
Here is a footage of one of the original executions.
This was released by the Castro regime very early on.
This was supposedly a member of Batista's regime.
So delightful folks, delightful folks.
The reason that I do all of this is because the left in America and in the West glorify people like Castro.
They really do.
And it's truly disgusting.
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So back to our story there.
The reactions to the Castro death are really quite telling.
The difference between right and left on the Castro death is really quite amazing.
So Donald Trump gave what I thought is the best thing that he's done this entire campaign.
It's the best thing that I've done that I think that Donald Trump has done since he announced.
Here was Donald Trump's statement on the death of Fidel Castro.
And he didn't write this, but it doesn't matter.
He's the president-elect, so he put it out.
It says, quote, Today, the world marks the passing of a brutal dictator who oppressed his own people for nearly six decades.
Fidel Castro's legacy is one of firing squads, theft, unimaginable suffering, poverty, and the denial of fundamental human rights.
While Cuba remains a totalitarian island, it is my hope that today marks a move away from the horrors endured for so long and toward a future in which the wonderful Cuban people finally live in the freedom they so richly deserve.
Though the tragedies, deaths, and pains caused by Fidel Castro cannot be erased, our administration will do all it can to ensure the Cuban people can finally begin their journey toward prosperity and liberty.
I join the many Cuban Americans who supported me so greatly in the presidential campaign, including the Brigade 2506 Veterans Association that endorsed me, with the hope of one day soon seeing a free Cuba.
This is the best statement that there was from any world leader on this.
That's exactly right.
Fidel Castro does not deserve one iota of praise.
Reince Priebus came out and he said, look, Obama's famous deal that he did with the Castros, we'll just renege on it.
We're not going to do that anymore.
Because that deal is a total train wreck, and everybody knows it, and anything that we can do to get rid of it, we will.
Now, there's parts of it that may be very difficult to get out of, but we're going to take a fresh look at it, put fresh eyes on that deal, and I can assure you if anyone can renegotiate that deal, or do something about it to make it better for the American people, and not start a nuclear arms race in the Middle East, it's going to be President-elect Trump.
Okay, so if he rips up the Cuba deal, that would be a wonderful thing, obviously.
Ted Cruz says the Obama administration has strengthened the Cuban regime.
Clearly they have.
Unfortunately, the policies of the Obama administration have made that less likely.
What the Obama administration has done is strengthened Raul Castro.
Raul is the dictator now.
You know, I asked my dad at dinner last night, well, what do you think happens now that Fidel is dead?
And he shrugged and said, Raul's been in charge for years.
The system has gotten stronger.
And what Obama has done is funneled billions of dollars to Raul Castro, which is being used to oppress dissidents.
You know, in 2015, roughly 10,000 political arrests occurred in Cuba.
That is five times as many as occurred in 2010, when there were only about 2,000.
tyrannical regime has gotten stronger because of a weak president, weak foreign policy.
And it is very much my hope and belief that with a new president coming into office in January, President Trump, a new administration, that U.S.
foreign policy, not just to Cuba, but towards our enemies, whether they are Iran or North Korea, will no longer be a policy of weakness and appeasement, but instead using U.S.
strength to force and press for change.
Okay, so that's the right's take on the Castro death.
For more, for the left's take, and this is where it really gets interesting, you're going to have to go to dailywire.com and subscribe.
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