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July 14, 2021 - Dinesh D'Souza
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UNDEMOCRATIC DEMOCRATS Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep131
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Who's attacking the democratic process?
The Republicans or the Democrats?
Lisa Murkowski takes the plunge.
And political commentator and TV host, Steve Cortez.
This is the Dinesh D'Souza podcast.
The times are crazy, and a time of confusion, division, and lies.
We need a brave voice of reason, understanding, and truth.
This is the Dinesh D'Souza Podcast.
Joe Biden, in what is being described by the media as one of the most significant speeches of his presidency, went to Philadelphia, site of the Liberty Bell, and gave a ringing defense of democracy and a fierce attack on Republican efforts.
as he sees it, to subvert it.
Here's a little piece of what he said.
Listen. It's simple.
This is election subversion.
It's the most dangerous threat to voting and the integrity of free and fair elections in our history.
Never before have they decided who gets to count.
Count. What votes count.
Some state legislators want to make it harder for you to vote.
And if you vote, they want to be able to tell you your vote doesn't count for any reason they make up.
They want the ability to reject the final count and ignore the will of the people if their preferred candidate loses.
They're trying not only targeting people of color, they're targeting voters of all races and backgrounds.
It's hard for me to watch this guy because I have such a mixture of emotions.
And I notice that normally it's very hard to generate these contradictory emotions, even in a movie.
On the one hand, I feel a certain anger, a certain rage at the mischaracterizations, the whoppers that this guy puts out.
On the other hand, his stumbling, meandering stare, he looks to the left, he looks to the right, he's clearly not all there.
So you've got the combination of the immoderation of his rhetoric combined with the kind of dim, flickering light brain that is delivering these lines.
And the combination is both frightening and comic at the same time.
I want to get into the argument here a little bit because Biden really doesn't.
Biden makes really no effort to persuade.
If you listen to what he's saying, it is nothing more than categorical assertion.
He seems to imply, number one, that Republicans are leading an effort to block people from voting.
And by the way, primarily, I guess, people of color, but all people.
People are targeting all races.
So we're just trying to make it hard for people to vote, according to him.
That's his first point. And the second is, even once people vote, we're trying to control the count as if we've got our own counting system in place.
We're going to tabulate the normal result and then somehow rig it by producing our own result.
And this is why you had that kind of repetition of count.
It's ultimately about who gets to count.
Yeah, it is about who gets to count.
And it's also about the core meaning of democracy.
So that's what I want to get into in a kind of fundamental way.
Now, let's start for a moment with what's going on in Texas, because you have the Texas Democrats, who, again, are very much in the Biden camp.
They went running off to Washington to urge the Democrats to pass H.R. 1.
They're trying to put pressure on Senators Sinema and Manchin.
And according to them, they are standing up for democracy.
It's kind of funny. I don't know if you saw on social media, they're all singing, We Shall Overcome.
I mean, an absolutely horrible rendition.
But nevertheless, you know, they have this idea that they are brave champions of democracy.
But let's step back and think about this for a minute.
They are themselves elected members of a legislature.
They're part of a democratic process.
They happen to be in the minority.
Who's in the majority in Texas?
Republicans. So the Republicans have called a session of the legislature, which is duly constituted.
They're exercising their authority as democratically elected state legislatures under the Constitution.
And they have a whole raft of legislation on a bunch of things that are coming up.
Now, Biden himself said in his speech that minorities have got to learn to accept the will of the majority.
They have to acquiesce and recognize that democracy means majority rule.
Well, Texas is a red state.
We have a Republican majority.
And so the Democrats, in trying to subvert the democratic process here in Texas by skipping town, if you think about it, They're doing something that is fundamentally similar to what the Democrats say the January 6th protesters did.
What are the January 6th protesters accused of doing?
Number one, delaying and subverting a democratic process.
Some of the charging documents literally talk about obstructing an ongoing democratic process.
And the obstruction is caused, supposedly, by a delay.
A delay of what? An hour or two?
By going into the Capitol building.
Now, the Texas Democrats didn't go to the Capitol building.
They left the Capitol building.
They left the state. But with what end?
What is their objective? Well, they're very blunt about it.
Their objective is to obstruct the democratic process in Texas.
Their objective is to prevent a legitimate democratic process from going forward.
So who is the real opponent of democracy here?
The Democrats or the Republicans?
Well, quite obviously, it's the Democrats.
They're not heroes of democracy.
They're enemies of democracy.
Why? Because what's going on in Texas is no subversion of democracy.
It's the actual exercise of democracy.
Now, let's turn to what Biden is fundamentally talking about, which are these voter ID laws.
I'm going to set aside for a moment the extravagant rhetoric about, you know, it's the greatest threat since the Civil War.
And here's Biden.
He goes, the Confederates even didn't breach the Capitol as the insurrectionists did.
So, according to Biden, pretty much everything goes right back to the Civil War.
And then he says, somewhat comically, that's not hyperbole!
Well, you may want to look that one up in the dictionary, the definition of hyperbole, because I think probably right there in small letters, at least in a future dictionary, it will say, see Biden's speech circa 2021, as an example of hyperbole.
But... Voter integrity laws should serve two purposes.
Number one, they should make it easier to vote.
And number two, they should make it harder to cheat.
Now you can see that both these considerations are in fact synonymous with the meaning of democracy.
Democracy means that people who are eligible to vote should be able to vote.
But democracy also means that only people who are eligible to vote should be able to vote.
Now, notice it's not only the Republicans who are pushing for sort of voter integrity, signature verification.
When there was a signature submitted for a recall petition for Governor Newsom in California, the Democrats went through all those signatures one by one, checking every one, verifying every single signature, throwing every anomalous signature out.
Why? To make sure that only legitimate signatures counted.
So when it comes to the Democrats, when their interests are at stake, they want signature verification.
They want voter integrity.
Now, the point that Biden does not address is if he wants to make his case that in trying to protect...
In trying to make it harder to cheat, the Republicans are also making it harder to vote.
This appears to be the argument he was going for, although he never said it.
But if this is the argument he wants to make, the way to do it is to take these provisions one by one, starting with things like the requirement that you have to bring your own water.
Poll workers and campaign managers can hand you water while you're waiting in line to vote.
Or number two, a two-week early voting period.
Or number three, voter ID. Biden would have to take each of these things and go down the list and say, listen, it's true that to bring your own water makes it a little bit harder to vote.
But at the same time, it makes sure that they can't be campaigning going on at the very last minute.
So in weighing these two considerations, which one should take predominance?
Or take voter ID. Yes, voter ID makes it marginally harder to vote because you have to produce an ID. But big deal, you produce an ID in all kinds of other contexts.
If producing an ID is not racist when you produce it to a bank, and it's not racist when you produce it to an airline, it's not airline suppression, it's not travel suppression, it's not banking suppression, why would it be racist when you produce an ID to vote?
So it's not really making it harder to vote.
Pretty much everyone with very little trouble can get an ID. But...
Voter ID laws are very important to make sure that it's harder to cheat.
And that's really what seems to be getting the Democrats here.
That's really why Biden is on the warpath.
It appears that the premise of the Democrats, it's their premise, is that cheating took them across the finishing line.
Cheating is necessary for Democrats to win elections.
And that's why, under the guise of making it easier to vote, But paying no attention to making it harder to cheat, the Democrats are able to go on this kind of crusade and accuse the Republicans of subverting democracy when the ones truly subverting the democratic process is the party that bears the democratic name.
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Bad news for Senator Lisa Murkowski in Alaska.
The Alaska GOP recently...
And they voted to endorse her challenger, Kelly Shabaka.
You might remember Kelly Shabaka came on this podcast a few weeks ago.
A very dynamic person.
And by the way, a very solid candidate for the Senate.
This is not some fly-by-night person who's just running on a kind of rebel platform.
Kelly Shabaka, by the way, she's married, she's a mom, she's a Harvard Law grad.
She's worked in the IG, the Inspector General Office of the Department of Justice and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.
She was the Chief Data Officer of the Postal Service, and she served as Alaska's Commissioner of Administration.
From 2019 until she resigned this year or last year to pursue her Senate run.
Now, the vote against Murkowski was pretty decisive, 58 to 17.
I think what this means is that there's a broader meaning here.
Not only does it mean that there's a rage against Murkowski and people like her for voting to impeach Trump, but it is a sign, I think, that this Never Trump phenomenon has sort of no future in the Republican Party.
Liz Cheney is basically kind of a walking corpse, a sort of political zombie in Wyoming.
Adam Kinzinger is kind of a dead duck and basically probably looking to a future on MSNBC, one of the left-wing networks to be their sort of token Republican, oh, see, we've got a bipartisan views over here.
And Murkowski is in trouble and she knows it.
Now, what are her options?
The last time around, she came to political prominence mainly because of her dad, Frank Murkowski, the former, who was the governor.
So, essentially, she kind of inherited that seat.
Now, she did have a sort of Tea Party challenger.
But she was pretty successful by running as an independent and being able to outmaneuver the Tea Party challenger.
So this was a surprise win in 2010, I believe.
Yes, 2010.
But now there are leftists who are telling Lisa Murkowski, you need to become a Democrat because you're finished in the Republican Party.
You're not even probably going to get the nomination, which would be astounding, a sitting senator losing the nomination.
The precedent for Lisa Murkowski going to the Democratic side is not good either.
By and large, when Republicans become Democrats, they might think they're going to be welcome to the Democratic Party, and they sort of are for about five minutes.
After that, the Democrats realize, well, we don't need these fake Democrats.
We have real Democrats.
This happened, by the way, to Arlen Specter.
Arlen Specter, you might remember from the 1980s, he actually played a kind of honorable role in the Bork hearings.
But Specter was a Republican for about 30 years in the Senate.
But then what happened is he realized that the Republican Party in Pennsylvania had become more conservative, that he actually had a good chance to lose the GOP nomination.
And so he decided, I'm going to switch parties.
And he said, quote, So that's the last we heard of Arlen Specter.
You might, if you're younger, you might not even remember who's Arlen Specter.
Well, exactly. Arlen Specter discovered that crossing the party line was essentially the death knell for his political career.
So this is the problem for these never-Trump types.
They're unwelcome in the Republican Party, and they're only useful to the Democrats as a truncheon to beat the Republicans.
But once they really become Democrats, then their usefulness to that degree is lost.
They become dead weight to be cast humiliatingly to the side of the road.
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I'm really happy to. Welcome to the podcast, political commentator, political strategist, and now TV host and commentator, Steve Cortez.
Steve, welcome. You know, our roles are normally reversed.
I've been on your show with Jen Pellegrino on Newsmax a few times, and you're interviewing me.
This time, I get to ask the questions, and you're on the other side of it.
But I've been looking forward to this, and maybe I want to start by asking you about this statement...
The DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, who's apparently of Cuban descent, recently made the statement that Cuban migrants and asylum seekers who come to the U.S. by boat are going to be turned away.
Now, by the way, this is the same guy who earlier had issued a statement saying how grateful he was to have come to America in this way.
And so you have a Biden administration that has apparently got an open-door policy on the border, and they're letting in all kinds of people, while these Cuban immigrants, who I think would qualify as refugees fleeing communism, fleeing socialism, and they are facing a closed door.
What do you make of this very shocking, I think, and bizarre statement?
It is shocking and bizarre.
It's infuriating, quite frankly, because people who are fleeing Cuba are the very definition, Dinesh, of legitimate asylum seekers.
That is what the generous asylum laws in the United States are intended to provide, is asylum for refugees who are fleeing persecution.
And again, the Cuban regime is so tyrannical that...
Probably every single person fleeing Cuba is a legitimate asylum seeker, and the United States has provided asylum for decades to those people who have become wonderful patriotic Americans.
and contrast that with what we're doing in our Southern border, where we are welcoming with open arms hundreds of thousands of economic migrants under the guise that they are legitimate asylum seekers, when in fact, the overwhelming majority of them are not.
They are coming from troubled countries.
Yes, places like Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras.
But those countries, while they are tough neighborhoods, they are not places of systemic political persecution.
They are functioning democracies.
And by the way, you don't have to take my word for it Janess, you don't have to listen to Steve Cortez or Janess D'Souza.
Barack Obama, when he was president, actually spoke very forcefully about this.
He said very clearly, coming from a tough neighborhood is not a qualifier for asylum in the United States.
And by the way, part of the reason is a lot of Americans live in tough neighborhoods, okay?
We wanna take care of those Americans first on the West side of Chicago, on the South side of LA, before we worry about economic migrants from places in Central America.
But my point is, we know that almost none of those bogus asylum seekers are legitimate, and yet they are pouring across the border, and they are welcomed, and in fact, encouraged by the Biden administration.
At the same time, they are telling legitimate asylum seekers actually oppressed.
Systemically oppressed people in Cuba that they may not come.
We have this completely backwards.
Joe Biden could not be more wrong on this.
And Mayorkas in his short tenure at DHS has proven to be a disaster.
I mean, you're touching on here, I think, a very important distinction, which is to say that simply coming from a poor country or facing economic hardship does not qualify you by itself to be a refugee.
In other words, more than half the world is poor, and so if you had the standard that anybody who can't get food or can't get proper medicine or can't look after themselves in old age is eligible to come to America, that would mean that half the world would be able to just walk across and get here.
So, the definition of a refugee is that you need to be a victim of systemic political persecution.
And what you're saying is that the Cubans qualify, and in some ways, the Salvadorans, the Hondurans, the Mexican Americans don't.
So, my question then to push it further is, do you think that at the bottom...
Guys like Mayorkas and Biden are saying, listen, we don't care about any of that.
What we do care is that by and large Cuban Americans who come to America fleeing socialism are likely to be right-wingers.
They're likely to be Republicans.
Whereas if we can get some Salvadorans and some Guatemalans and give them food and shelter, maybe they'll be grateful to the Democratic Party for opening the door.
So do you think at the end it comes down just to this naked political calculation?
I do, unfortunately.
And listen, I hate to be that cynical, but I don't see any other explanation.
I mean, why else would they prioritize, you know, again, bogus asylum seekers from Central America over legitimate ones from Cuba, if not for domestic politics.
And the fact that South Florida, particularly in this most recent election, really moved hard to the right, and not just Cubans.
Cubans certainly did, but also Colombian Americans.
My father came to this country from Colombia.
Colombian Americans in South Florida, which is a massive community, they moved hard to the right.
The data shows us in the Miami area in this election is one of the key reasons that Florida, in fact, was not in play, what we thought was going to be a toss-up state, what a lot of Democrats thought would be in the blue column, in fact, ended up being pretty solidly in Donald Trump's camp, largely because of Latin American immigrants or their descendants in South Florida.
So I think the Biden administration, they're not dumb, they're fully aware of that reality, and they fear, perhaps, that growing that Cuban population will only make their political predicament in the state of Florida even worse.
But, you know, that's a shameful calculation that that's what's driving this, because again, the United States has always been a generous country offering asylum to people who legitimately need it, okay?
To a dissident in the Soviet Union, to somebody who is a Christian pastor who's being persecuted in North Korea.
or to a Cuban who is suffering under the Awful damage done by the Cuban regime.
Those are legitimate asylum seekers.
But a young man, 20 years old, from Guatemala, who simply wants to be in the United States, and by the way, I understand his yearning, he does not qualify as an asylum seeker.
When we come back, I want to ask Steve Cortez whether there is a global divide between the party of freedom and the party of tyranny.
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Use discount code AMERICA. Call 800-246-8751 or go to balanceofnature.com and use discount code AMERICA. I'm back with political commentator and TV host Steve Cortez.
Steve, I was really struck by the fact that the Cubans protesting the regime were tearing up the Castro paraphernalia, but they were also waving American flags.
I noticed that when you had the Hong Kong protests against the Chinese crackdown, American flags, the Star Spangled Banner.
So isn't it interesting and perhaps ironic that the American flag has now become a symbol for freedom-loving aspirations all over the world?
And conversely, in America, you've got a left-wing movement that demonizes these very symbols of freedom, demonizes the flag, demonizes the national anthem.
And so my question is this.
Is there, in fact...
A worldwide division mirrored inside the United States between the party of tyranny and the party of freedom.
And the Democrats know that they're the party of tyranny in America, and therefore they oppose the worldwide symbol of freedom, which is the American flag and the American anthem.
You're so right. Here again, the Democrats and the left, they have it exactly backwards.
And freedom fighters in Hong Kong and in Cuba seem to have a better grasp of what America represents in its essence than do Americans who subscribe to left-wing nonsense.
It's wonderful and invigorating, I think, by the way, to see these freedom fighters use the American flag as one of their symbols to rally around.
And then think of this juxtaposition.
Let's pull out an American leftist, a very loud one, Colin Kaepernick, the former quarterback.
He is in America denigrating the American flag and literally wearing t-shirts with Castro on it.
So he is enjoying all of the blessings of American liberty.
He's fabulously wealthy.
He is totally free, but per his First Amendment rights, to spread his blessings.
His lunacy via the airwaves.
He has a massive platform.
And he uses it to celebrate a deadly dictator, Fidel Castro.
While the very people who suffered under that regime of Castro and suffer still under its successor regime, those very people are waving the American flag that is so disrespected by American leftist Colin Kaepernick.
So I think you're very much onto something here.
I think also part of this, Dinesh, is that the American left They don't really see themselves as Americans per se.
They certainly don't believe in nationalism anyway.
They believe in the party of Davos, and that's just the reality.
There are a lot of ruling class Americans, CEOs of companies, Democratic elected politicians, academics, who identify far more With fellow elites, fellow ruling class operatives in Paris, France, than they do with a regular citizen in Paris, Texas, or in Paris, Illinois.
And that is part of why they reviled the American flag.
But thankfully, a lot of really sensible people, everyday people in places like Cuba, they know what the American flag represents, and they respect the nationalism.
Ironically, they respect the nationalism of America and what it has done for the world and what it could potentially do for a place like Cuba.
Do you think that the Kaepernicks of the world, in a sense, even believe their own ideology?
Because if the people who advocate critical race theory, the country systematically racist and so on, you would think they would be standing at the US border trying to dissuade people from coming here.
You'd think they'd say, listen, don't come.
Your country's much better.
We have systematic racism.
You don't. You're better off in El Salvador.
But they don't say that.
So, ironically, it seems that at bottom, they don't believe their own message or they know that their own message is being used for strategic and propaganda purposes, not because their actions correspond to it.
Correct. And by the way, that narrative being used to make themselves fabulously wealthy in the case of Colin Kaepernick, who settled reportedly, we don't know exactly, but reportedly his NFL lawsuit settled in the tens of millions of dollars.
Massive contract with Nike.
So yeah, he may very bizarrely be using his narrative just to become fabulously wealthy, but you're so right about that point of the proof is in the pudding and people vote with their feet.
And if we were this systemically racist hellscape that is described by the left, Why would millions and millions of decidedly non-white people so yearn to come to this country?
Why would people like you, why would people like my own father, people who are not Norwegian lily white, why would they want to come to this country if it were systemically racist against dark-skinned people?
Of course, they know that it is not the case.
We know it's not the case, anybody who is honest about this country.
You know, is there racism? Of course.
You know, racism will always unfortunately exist in a fallen world.
But is there systemic racism?
I would argue, in fact, Dinesh, I've made this case very publicly, that I think being a minority in 2021 America is actually an advantage in many facets of life, and I can attest to that personally as an Hispanic.
Steve, you mentioned earlier the Cubans, the Venezuelans in Florida, for example, who have tipped the state pretty decisively to the right.
Let's talk about the largest group of Hispanics in America, which are the Mexican Americans.
It looks like Trump made some significant inroads with that group.
We can see here in Texas at the Rio Grande Valley a kind of shift to the right.
Is this why the Democrats are freaking out?
Is this why they're doing this kind of crackdown?
They're against these voter integrity laws?
It's almost as if they feel that the demographics are moving against them.
I mean, the Democratic Party, if they only have the blacks, are not viable as a party long term.
If Republicans can make significant inroads with Hispanics, let alone with Asian Americans who you would think would be even more conservative than Hispanics as a group, then the Democratic Party is looking at some very dismal prospects down the road, aren't they?
That's right. When we look at the demography, the Democrats are in trouble, and they know it.
They're not willing to say so publicly, but they see these trends that by far the largest minority group in America, Hispanics, and a growing minority group, is shifting dramatically to the right.
And I think for a lot of them, by the way, a lot of them, if they were politically oriented, they tended to be Democrats, but they realized that they simply have no home in the Democratic Party anymore.
All the polling shows us that Hispanic Democrats, who self-identify as Democrats, are the most conservative of Democrats.
Well, a moderate Democrat almost can't exist anymore in a party that believes in taxpayer-funded abortion, and believes in attacking the little sisters of the poor, that doesn't believe in any kind of real borders.
And so in the real Grand Valley, to put a statistic on this, what we saw the last four years was really amazing from 2016 to 2020.
For example, Star County, Texas, that's the most Hispanic Democrat We're good to go.
You are such an astute observer.
You know those kinds of shifts don't happen that fast.
That is very, very rare in politics.
So there's an earthquake going on among Hispanic voters, and they are really rallying to the America First agenda.
And I believe it's going to continue into 2022.
I think we're going to steal at least one, perhaps two, flipped house seats in the Rio Grande Valley.
And I think we're going to see that replicated all over the country.
So it's happening in South Florida.
It's happening in the Rio Grande Valley.
And by the way, it's happening in the Bronx, New York.
Again, a place that Donald Trump didn't come close to winning, but he doubled his raw vote total in the Bronx, and he gained 10% on margin in the Bronx, which is 90% minority.
So this is a movement that is just getting started.
It's young. Steve, this is an awesome analysis.
Love to have you back again.
Thanks for coming on the podcast.
I appreciate it.
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With massive protests underway in Cuba against the socialism and tyranny of the Cuban communist regime, I thought it would be interesting to talk about the life and death of Che Guevara.
Che Guevara became a symbol, in fact he still is a symbol, of the leftist revolutionary.
And you have all kinds of people who don't know much about Che Guevara.
They wear the kind of iconic Che Guevara t-shirt, because to them Che represents bravery, rebellion, the revolutionary spirit.
But Che's life, very different from the myth of Che.
Now, the myth of Che was cultivated after his death when Che Guevara was celebrated by Fidel Castro.
Castro gave a famous speech in which he talked about Che Guevara as representing the spirit of the Cuban Revolution.
The philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, the French thinker, described Che Guevara as, quote, the most complete human being of our time.
Now, Sartre was an admirer of all kinds of communist dictators, so it's not surprising that he adored Che Guevara.
Debbie and I, gosh, about a year ago, I guess it was, maybe more, we watched a documentary on Che, an adoring documentary.
Benicio del Toro played Che Guevara, and it's one of those things that we watch.
I mean, we're a little nauseated through it, but fascinated at the same time.
And even now, there are statues to Che Guevara in Cuba, also in Argentina.
And people go to his death place in Bolivia as a kind of shrine.
Oh, let's go find out where Jay was killed.
By the way, I say a word about...
His real name was Ernesto Guevara.
He got the nickname Che when he was older.
Actually, that wasn't his original nickname.
His earlier nickname was Chancho, which I guess means pig.
And it was given to him by his classmates in school because he apparently didn't like to bathe.
And this was true in his whole life.
The guy just stunk.
When he was in Bolivia, he said that he didn't take a bath in six months.
And so a lot of people recognized Che even before he entered the room because of the smell.
In any event, the word Che just means something like, you know, hey.
And that's the nickname he came to be known by, Che Guevara.
Now, he had a heroic moment in his early life when he joined the Cuban Revolution.
He wasn't Cuban, but he went to fight in the Cuban Revolution.
Cuba was at the time run by a dictator, Fulgencio Batista.
Batista was overthrown by the Castro revolution, and Che played a sort of heroic role in that.
It was like he led a kind of guerrilla battle against some of the Cuban troops, successful.
But that was probably really the heyday of Che's career, if you will, because once he joined the Cuban government, he was actually made the finance minister of Cuba.
of Cuba.
What he did was he nationalized the banks, he nationalized factories, he nationalized businesses.
Basically, in a very short order, he ruined the Cuban economy.
They say that in two years, he managed almost by himself to cut in half the Cuban sugar harvest.
So Cuba became then, and then for many years it remained, just kind of a parasite on the Soviet Union.
relied on massive money transfers from the Soviet Union to Cuba in order to sustain the Cuban economy, but sustain it at a pathetic level.
The per capita income in Cuba, even now, is pathetically low.
Che became the governor of Santa Clara prison for about five months, and in that time he proved himself to be basically a state-sponsored murderer.
I say this because what he would do is conduct these reprisals, not just against former sort of Batista officials.
In some senses, all revolutions turn on the Ancien Regime.
They go after the people who were in the old system.
But Che went way beyond that.
He began to assassinate people who just disagreed with him, fellow revolutionaries on his own side.
And what he would do is essentially hold a gun to their head, play a kind of Russian roulette with them, and then just shoot them through the head.
He once wrote himself, quote, And that, in a sense, was a sort of definition of Che Guevara.
Of course, he never bothered to give anyone a trial or conduct any attempts to discover evidence.
Is this person even guilty of the charges being made against him?
He seemed to sort of enjoy killing.
And it is said that he killed more than 100 people personally himself.
He created a sort of Soviet-style gulag in Cuba, a so-called corrective work camp.
And very interestingly, not only were rebel Cuban journalists thrown into the work camp, but also homosexuals.
Apparently, one of Che's slogans were that a work camp will teach a gay man to become a man.
So he was trying to sort of, you may say, de-gay them by putting them into a work camp.
I'm quoting the slogan of the work camp, work will make you men.
This was something that Che sort of chuckled about.
So although he celebrated as this kind of great guy, this wonderful guy, He was a terrible human being, a murderer, and defined really by his viciousness.
Not anybody's genuine role model.
It's one thing to wear the t-shirt, it's another thing to admire the real Che Guevara.
And as we'll see in the next segment, this guy died.
Not a heroic death, not a revolutionary death, not fighting on the barricades, but sulking, pleading, going down on his knees and whimpering.
A death that I happened to meet someone Who gave me a first-hand account of.
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On October 18, 1967, Fidel Castro delivered a eulogy in the Plaza de la Revolución in Havana.
It was a tribute to the recently killed Che Guevara.
And Castro said, if we want to know how we want our children to be, we should say, with all our revolutionary mind and heart, we want them to be like children.
This was the beginning of the Che Guevara legend, which has continued to this day, making Che a kind of cultural icon.
Now, a couple of years ago, I was introduced by a mutual friend to a fellow named Felix Rodriguez.
Felix Rodriguez is now almost 80, so he's in his later years.
But as we were chatting and I got to know Felix Rodriguez, I learned that Felix Rodriguez had been in the Bay of Pigs.
He was part of the intelligence team sent by We're good to go.
And I was a little shocked and incredulous, and I'm like, that's not true, is it?
And so he reached into his wallet and he pulled out a photo, a photo I've now pulled off the internet, and it's been certified as an authentic photo.
I'm going to show it to you. Here it is.
So, this right here, that's Che Guevara.
This right here, that's Felix Rodriguez.
Felix Rodriguez is 26.
Che Guevara is 34.
Now, Here's the story, and it's a story that's so captivating it could actually make a movie.
Che Guevara started out, as I mentioned in the previous segment, he was a revolutionary in Cuba and he became an official in the Cuban government under Castro.
But soon he fell out with Castro.
And he fell out with Castro not because he ruined the Cuban economy, which he did, but also because he wanted Castro to now devote resources, Cuban resources, to spreading the communist revolution throughout Central and South America.
He had his eyes on Argentina.
He had his eyes on Uruguay, on Bolivia, on the Congo, even to Africa.
And Castro was like, no, I'm not interested in that.
I'm content to be a big man on campus right here in Cuba.
And so Castro then began to, recognizing that Che wouldn't give up the idea, basically said to Che, you do it.
You go off to these countries.
And so Che essentially slunk out of Cuba.
He tried some stunts in the Congo.
In fact, he went to the Congo and he said, you know, I've concluded these Congolese people are not real revolutionaries.
They don't have the revolutionary spirit.
He entered in Uruguay and a false passport, but the government authorities cracked down on the communist movement in Uruguay.
And that was that. And finally...
J. Guevara made his way to Bolivia.
And in Bolivia, he thought, look, Bolivia is perfect for revolution.
Why? He said, because he said, the Bolivians are really poor, and so the peasants are going to completely come over to our side.
And But what Che didn't realize is two things.
One is that poor people aren't natural communists.
Poor people actually want to improve their lives and their harvests and so on.
And second, poor people don't really like to be robbed.
And one of the things Che would do is he'd go to grocery stores and he would go to peasants in Bolivia and take their stuff and not pay for it.
And so the peasants then became informants to the Bolivian government.
Now, the United States... We're good to go.
The Bolivian government in counter-revolution, in fighting against the Che Guevara attempt to subvert the government.
The Bolivians didn't know how to do this, and so the CIA decided to help.
Down goes Felix Rodriguez to Bolivia, and they begin a counter-insurgency against Che.
Now, as I mentioned a moment ago, they were helped in this by the Bolivian peasants, who basically said, In this area, they identified the area where Che and his fellow guerrillas were hanging out.
And this was an area that was called the Quebrada del Euro, and the Bolivian troops surrounded it.
There was a firefight.
Che Guevara got shot, but shot in the knee and in the ankle, so not a life-threatening injury, and he was taken captive.
Very interestingly, before he was taken captive, he shouted, quote,"'Don't shoot!
I'm Che Guevara, and I'm worth more alive than dead.'" So this is perhaps not the revolutionary spirit.
It's the pleading, negotiating, you can probably trade me for cash or you can trade me for some kind of political favor spirit.
So Che Guevara is then captured and he's put into a prison.
And Felix Rodriguez thinks that his job is over.
He's getting ready to come back to the United States.
In fact, the United States wants to bring Che Guevara to Panama to have him interrogated.
But then Felix Rodriguez gets a striking message from the Bolivian High Command, ultimately from the president of the country, that says, we've decided that Che Guevara must be killed.
And we have chosen you, Felix Rodriguez, to shoot him.
And Felix goes, well, why me?
And the reply is kind of very poignant and telling, because he destroyed your country, namely Cuba.
And Felix Rodriguez says, well, I'm not going to be able to do that because it's a decision of the U.S. government to keep him alive.
But the Bolivian commander says, no, military order is to shoot him.
And so the last night that Che Guevara spends alive, he spends with Felix Rodriguez.
And they talk through the night about the fact that they're both in their own way revolutionaries.
One a revolutionary for communism, Che, the other a revolutionary for freedom.
And at the end of it...
Felix tells Che that, I'm very sorry, but they have decided to shoot you.
You're going to be killed in the morning.
And Che Guevara begins to weep.
He begins to cry and blubber.
And then when he dries his tears, he kind of mans up to it.
He recognizes this is inevitable.
It's not even Felix's decision.
And he gives Felix a...
Something that he wants to give to his wife, his kind of common law wife.
And he also says, I want you to tell my wife that I want her to remarry after my death so that she can be happy.
And it's really amazing.
You've got this sort of great revolutionary and this great counter-revolutionary spending their last moments together, and then they embrace.
And Felix says that he then retreated and went sort of out of the picture.
And then a whole procession of Bolivian soldiers came in, raised their rifles.
He heard, bam, bam, bam, bam, bam.
And that was the end of Che Guevara.
Che Guevara's body was thrown into a ditch in an unmarked grave.
It was actually found decades later in 1997.
And so now, as I said, in Bolivia, there's this sort of shrine to Che Guevara where people go, oh, the great Che Guevara.
He was not great.
He died sort of not a hero's death, but sort of the death of a dog.
He tried to subvert a government.
He failed. They got him.
And they decided to give him capital punishment.
But I was really struck by the poignancy of this story by the man who was with Che Guevara the last night that he spent alive on Earth.
And I think that Che's life and disgraceful death Our testament ultimately to the fact that what goes around comes around.
The law of karma in the end.
All the people, all the people that Che Guevara mistreated and abused and killed, their ghosts came back to haunt him and he ended up ultimately just like them.
I want to intervene in a very interesting online dispute that has erupted between some Christian traditionalists like Saurabh Amari The op-ed editor of the New York Post, Sourabh Amari, was on this podcast recently.
But Sourabh Amari on the one side, and Nicole Hannah-Jones, the architect and chief writer of the so-called 1619 Project.
And apparently the dispute involves the meaning and significance of natural law.
And I want to quote a tweet from Nicole Hannah-Jones.
And I want to answer the question she raises in the tweet.
She says, initially she had said, I don't know what natural law is.
And then people like Saurabh were like, really?
You're supposed to have gone to Fordham?
You're supposed to be this educated person?
You've never heard of natural law?
And then Nicole Hannah-Jones comes back and goes, I know what natural law is.
I don't understand what it means to replace CRT, critical race theory, with natural law.
Why don't you explain it to me?
Well, I would like to do that and explain it to her.
So, the concept of natural law, it's a medieval concept, but it goes back to the Greeks.
The Greeks didn't use the term natural law, but they used the term natural right.
And what they meant by natural right, well, natural right is anchored in the concept of nature.
And when the Greeks talked about nature, they always talked about nature in distinction from convention.
So think of it this way.
We speak language by nature.
It is part of human nature to have the ability to speak.
But what language we speak, whether Spanish or English or Hindustani, is by convention.
So the distinction between nature and convention is a distinction between that which is sort of, you may say, given, and that which is humanly created by custom.
Now, consider a practice.
I'm going to take a practice from ancient India, the custom of taking a wife whose husband had died and throwing her on the burning pyre of her husband.
Now, you might say that that's wrong, and it is wrong.
Why is it wrong? Well, it's wrong because it goes against the natural law.
Now, the natural law is nothing more than the innate principle of right and wrong that distinguishes nature from convention.
So, the burning of the widows was conventional.
It was a common practice.
It went way back for centuries, and so it was sustained both by law and by convention.
And yet, the people who declared it to be wrong were using the natural law To go against what you could call the positive law.
The positive law is the law as it is enacted by human beings.
The positive law is rooted in convention.
It reflects conventional mores.
But the natural law is the appeal of the higher law.
Let's turn for a moment to Martin Luther King because what Martin Luther King does is he's looking around him at the laws of segregation and racial discrimination in the South.
And remember, those laws are upheld by convention.
They've been around for a long time.
And they are part of the positive law, which means that the segregationist statutes and laws were passed by democratic legislatures.
They were signed by democratic governors.
They were enforced by democratic officials.
And yet, Martin Luther King says, these laws are wrong.
These laws must not be obeyed, and I'm not going to obey them.
Now, what is Martin Luther King's authority for going against the positive law?
Well, it's none other than the natural law.
Martin Luther King says it doesn't matter that these laws have been democratically enacted.
It doesn't matter that they have the sanctity of convention behind them.
There is a higher law that says that you can't separate people by race, and it's wrong to discriminate against people because of the color of their skin.
And here we get to the heart of the matter, which is that CRT, critical race theory, is wrong for exactly the reason that Martin Luther King opposed segregation laws and opposed racial discrimination laws that were very common throughout the democratic South.
Critical race theory elevates some races over others.
It legitimizes both racial segregation and racial discrimination.
Now, the racial discrimination it legitimates may be in favor of blacks and against whites, in favor of Latinos and against Asians, in favor of African Americans and against Jews.
But the point that natural law brings to this conversation is simply this.
If discrimination is wrong, it's wrong in principle.
If it is wrong to judge people based upon their appearance, based upon whether they're tall or short, whether they have straight eyebrows or bushy eyebrows, whether their skin color is brown or white or yellow or black, if it's wrong to do that, how could it be right to do it in certain contexts and not others?
And so natural law brings a certain moral consistency to the debate.
Consider two guys who... Apply for a job.
The black guy is better qualified, and the white guy gets the job.
Well, that's racial discrimination.
That's wrong. That's against the natural law.
Now consider a second case.
A black guy and a white guy apply for a job, and the white guy is better qualified.
The black guy gets the job.
That's affirmative action.
That's critical race theory.
That is what the CRT people call benign or positive discrimination.
But the point that natural law makes is that there's no such thing as benign discrimination.
All discrimination is benign to the guy who's benefiting from it.
All discrimination is invidious to the guy who suffers from it.
So if discrimination is wrong in principle, discrimination against whites or against Asians or against Jews is no less wrong than discrimination against blacks or Latinos or Native Americans.
So when Nicole Hannah-Jones says, explain it to me, the point is that a natural law approach...
Would take a four-square position against racism and against discrimination instead of licensing, as CRT does, as the 1619 Project does, some forms of discrimination while opposing others.
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