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July 30, 2021 - Dinesh D'Souza
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SENDING BACK THE CUBANS Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep143
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Why the Biden administration is sending home Cuban victims of political persecution while letting in droves of people from around the world, illegals, at the southern border.
A New York Times writer says,"...let's expand voting rights to non-citizens I'll discuss." Marjorie Taylor Greene joins me to talk about what she saw at the Deplorables Jail.
And political artist John McNaughton has a new painting featuring Trump and Candace Owens.
And guess who?
This is the Dinesh D'Souza podcast.
The times are crazy in a time of confusion, division, and lies.
We need a brave voice of reason, understanding, and truth.
This is the Dinesh D'Souza Podcast.
The Biden administration is sending back Cuban victims of political persecution who show up by sea on our shores, particularly in Florida.
According to Breitbart, 27 Cuban rafters just came on two boats this week, and these are so-called balsa leros or rafters.
This is part of what's people fleeing after the major protests in July in Cuba.
Dozens of cities, dozens of municipalities demanding an end to state-sponsored violence.
Now, it's very dangerous for these people to leave.
The communist society in Cuba, this is characteristic of communist countries, doesn't allow people to leave.
They force you to stay.
And they especially force you, if you're a professional, if you're a doctor, you can't leave.
Why? Because they want to pay you, what, $10 a month to practice medicine there.
They don't want you to have more opportunities anywhere else.
Journalists can't leave.
Dissidents can't leave. And so for the U.S. government to send these people back is to send them probably to the risk of detention, torture, perhaps even death.
So the Biden people, they're doing this knowingly.
Remember, too, that we have refugee laws that qualify people to come as political refugees.
And the Cuban case couldn't be more clear-cut.
So we're sending back eligible refugees.
Meanwhile, as you know, the southern border is basically open and hordes of people, in fact, 600,000 people already, and that's a conservative count since Biden's inauguration.
Have come through. Now, probably the majority of those are Mexican, but a lot of Salvadorans and Nicaraguans.
But it's not just Central America.
Haitians come through.
Africans come through.
Asians come through. Chinese come through.
So, this is a policy of letting a whole bunch of people in while keeping these specific Cubans out.
Now, what possible reason can there be for this double standard?
Let's look at what Alex Mayorkas, the head of the Department of Homeland Security, says about this.
First of all, he says, we stand in solidarity with the Cuban people.
A completely meaningless statement.
We stand in solidarity.
As if he's standing alongside them.
But the key is that he's not doing anything to help them.
Now, The pretense is that all of this is for the security of the Cubans.
And now quoting the statement by the Coast Guard.
The transit is dangerous and unforgiving.
And now here's Mayorkas.
Our priority is to preserve and save lives.
The time is never right to attempt migration by sea.
To those who risk their lives doing so, the risk is not worth taking.
But who's he to decide?
These are people willing to risk their own life.
Obviously, to them the risk is worth taking.
But then Mayorkas gets to the bottom line, quote, allow me to be clear, if you take to the sea, you will not come to the United States.
So, he's going to block them even if they're willing to risk their lives to flee to freedom.
Now, again, it can't be simply because he cares about the risk to their lives because if you go to the southern border, you see all those people are taking huge risks.
I mean, there are drug cartels involved.
There's sex trafficking involved.
There's gangs involved.
There are little children whose lives are in danger.
There are people who mortgage their lives to try to get across the border, and then they owe money to the gangs and to the cartels.
So, they're taking tremendous risks.
It's not as if Mayokas sort of has this humanitarian concern.
No, he's willing to allow those guys to come through on the southern border while blocking these guys.
And the reason has to go deeper than...
Than simply a kind of worry about the safety of the Cubans.
Now, I think to understand more deeply what's going on, we have to turn to what happened in the Obama years.
You might remember that famous photo where Obama went to a baseball game with Raul Castro.
And that was a very significant meeting.
Why? Because as soon as Obama came back, U.S. policy changed.
U.S. policy was essentially, before, that if you're a Cuban and somehow by hook or by crook you ended up in the United States, you were allowed to stay because it was understood why you were leaving.
But Obama stopped that.
He repealed the policy that allowed Cubans to remain in the U.S. legally if they somehow made landfall here.
Now, let's think of what Obama's motive is, because I think the motive of the Biden administration is the same.
One obvious motive is that the left does not want anti-communists to come to this country.
They want immigrants, but they don't want a certain type of immigrant.
They don't want immigrants who are likely to vote Republican.
They know what happened in Miami this last time around.
They know that Florida tipped so heavily in the Republican camp, in part because of the Cuban vote.
So that's their first motive. But it's not their sole motive.
There's a second motive. What's that?
Well, for Obama, it was very clear, to prop up the Cuban regime.
In other words, if the United States genuinely stands in solidarity with Cuban dissidents, genuinely puts pressure on Cuba, genuinely motivates the Cuban people to rise up, who knows where that could lead?
The Castro brothers are now gone.
This could, in fact, lead to a weakening, if not toppling, of the regime.
So you see how the left, although it kind of talks out of two sides of its mouth, Oh, we're very upset about...
We're very concerned about the fate of the Venezuelan people.
We stand with the Venezuelan people, but you do nothing to weaken the Maduro regime.
We stand with the people of Cuba, but you do nothing to weaken the communist regime in Cuba.
So here we have a policy, I think, cynically designed, simultaneously to protect left-wing regimes, left-wing authoritarian regimes around the world.
While at the same time keeping brave anti-communist lovers of freedom out of the United States.
There's a hilarious article in The Atlantic.
The title alone makes me chuckle.
It says, the MyPillow guy really could destroy democracy.
Here it is. This is just a copy of the article.
But you see Mike Lindell kind of hanging on, hugging one of his pillows with the White House behind him.
And then a very telling subhead.
In the time I spent with Mike Lindell, I came to learn he's affable, devout, philanthropic, Mike Lindell is offering a ridiculously good deal on his six-piece towel set.
And this includes two bath towels, two hand towels, and two washcloths.
They're made with USA cotton.
They're soft yet absorbent.
Unbelievable price. It's normally $109.99.
Mike is offering them for $39.99.
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Who should be allowed to vote?
In U.S. elections.
I'm not talking about people who surreptitiously voted.
I'm not talking about voter fraud.
I'm talking about legally who should be permitted to cast a vote.
Now, there's an article making the rounds on social media.
This is an article in the New York Times.
It's a guest essay.
It's written by a guy named Atosa Araxia Abramanian.
Whoa. Anyway, this guy is a U.S. resident, which is to say a green card holder, but he's not a citizen.
And he thinks that people like him, i.e.
non-citizens, should be allowed to vote.
So here's his article.
There's no good reason, there's no good reason you have to be a citizen to vote.
Not just that there's reason to allow non-citizens to vote, but there's no good reason you have to be a citizen to vote.
Um... I beg to differ.
But let's explore his logic a little bit, because often on social media, conservatives will put these articles up or put the headlines up as if they are self-evidently absurd.
And the idea is sort of like, can you take a look at this?
It's ridiculous. But why is it ridiculous?
What's ridiculous about it?
That's kind of what I want to probe here.
Now, the argument that he makes in this guest essay, this fellow named Abrahmanian, is he says, first of all, that...
He gives a couple of reasons why this is a good idea in his view.
Number one, he says it will give American democracy new life.
Kind of a vague phrase, giving it new life.
He goes, two, it will restore immigrants' trust in government.
That's an interesting statement.
He, after all, is a resident here, but you're not an immigrant until you become a citizen.
The term is used much more loosely.
Immigrants are crossing the border.
No, those aren't immigrants. Those are illegals.
So we have, despite the promiscuous misuse of language, he thinks that immigrants will feel better about their government if non-citizens were allowed to vote.
Here's one immigrant that Nash does not agree.
And then he goes in court, it'll send a powerful message of inclusion to the rest of the world.
Why? You think the rest of the world is going to go, man, you know, you can be a Haitian or a Pakistani or a Brazilian and vote in America.
The first question they'd have to ask is, well, if that's the case, why can't all those people vote in India?
Why can't all those people vote anywhere else in the world?
Why is it the case that most other countries limit voting to their own citizens, but here the United States has chosen to go a different route?
Why does the world expect America to operate a different sort of democracy than other democracies around the world?
Now, somewhat disturbingly, this Abrahmanian fellow goes on to argue that there are some local elections in America.
He mentions Tacoma Park, Maryland.
He mentions some other towns in Maryland that actually allow non-citizens to vote in local elections.
Not in statewide elections, not in federal elections.
He talks about the cities of Chicago, Washington, and Portland that are considering giving some extension of the franchise.
And New York as well, giving what they call immigrant voting rights, even though, again, these aren't really immigrants.
Now... There's some kind of built-in assumptions here, and the biggest built-in assumption, this by the way is the assumption that always comes out whenever you hear the left and when you hear Democrats talk, is it's better ultimately to expand the franchise.
Democracy is better if the people have a more direct and a greater say, if more people can kind of weigh in.
And I actually want to push that logic to its conclusion and ask a very simple question.
Why do we have representative democracy at all?
Why don't the people, all 360 million of us, or at least all the adults, and we can include here citizens and non-citizens, or let's limit it to citizens.
Either way, why don't the citizens directly participate in the election process?
Why just vote every two or four years?
If they want to decide, let's say, for example, the Green New Deal, why don't you send everybody a link and have them vote?
Technology makes this possible.
Maybe in the old days it was impractical.
Oh, how are we going to get the opinions of 80 million people?
But now it's very easy to do that.
It'd be very possible to consult the entire electorate on every issue.
You want to go to war? Ask the American people.
You want to spend money on infrastructure?
Ask the American people.
But we don't do that. And the Democrats have not even proposed that we consider that, which is direct democracy.
Now... All of that, the fact that we don't have direct democracy, raises the logic of why we have representative democracy.
And if we just remember that logic or make it more explicit, we can see why this proposal from the New York Times makes absolutely no sense.
The whole logic of representative democracy is it's based upon setting a much higher standard for the government than direct democracy.
The idea is that the ordinary citizen is not wise enough To make decisions on behalf of the whole country.
That the ordinary citizen is only wise enough to choose citizens wiser than himself or herself and entrust them with making decisions in our stead.
So the founders believed that you could have a filtering process in which citizens choose representatives who would be wiser than the citizens themselves.
Now, they also believed the citizens, though, need to have a certain level of wisdom to be able to make those choices.
And this is why the founders believed that the franchise should be limited to people, first of all, to adults.
But even the property requirements, the requirement, for example, that you have to own a certain amount of land, today it's portrayed, this is just elitist, this is just racist.
No, it was also intended, very clearly, to limit the franchise to people who had a stake in the system.
In other words, if you were just a freeloader off the system, you wouldn't have any stake in maintaining fiscal responsibility.
You're just there, in a sense, as a looter.
You're just there to ultimately help yourself to the public trough.
Why do you want people like that making decisions about how the trough should be handled?
Why not have people who have a direct stake in the fiscal responsibility of the state being the ones who participate?
This was the original logic for representative government.
And although the Democrats keep saying, the more voters, the better.
Let's expand the franchise.
Notice they never say why.
They never say why by itself expanding the franchise is somewhat better.
I guess their only reason is this.
If you let more younger people vote, if you let more illegals vote, if you let illegals become citizens and then vote, if you let non-citizens vote...
Well, that's going to benefit the Democratic Party, and that's all we need to know.
And in fact, this is exactly what Abra Maniam says.
He basically says, he kind of admits it.
He says, it's time for Democrats to radically expand the electorate.
He knows. He knows what he's saying.
And then he goes on to say, quote, Democrats are likely to be the biggest beneficiaries of this change.
So even though this is an argument that talks about democracy, giving it new life, the rest of the world will admire us even more, none of this is really what this is about.
What it's about is a kind of a crass move attempting to give a long-term advantage to the Democratic Party.
There's no doubt in my mind that Americans' trust in the media is at an all-time low.
I mean, when you turn on so-called respected news channels, all you get is state propaganda, shameless virtue signaling, and a blatant disregard of the truth.
It's an insult to the intelligence of the American people.
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Hey, I'm really happy to welcome Marjorie Taylor Greene back to the podcast.
Marjorie, I've been following your, well, along with Matt Gaetz and a couple of others, you went to the deplorables jail.
And apparently you were obstructed, you were blocked.
Talk about what you saw.
Because you texted me and you said, it's bad.
And I want to know what you were able to see and then talk a little bit about what happened when you got there.
Right. Well, thank you so much.
The reason why we went to the jail yesterday, it was actually just yesterday, on Thursday, is the same reason we went to the Department of Justice.
We have been sending letters and asking questions, all kinds of questions around January 6th.
One of our main questions is, why did Nancy Pelosi refuse to bring the National Guard to protect the Capitol on January 6th?
And that is the question everyone is asking.
So on Tuesday, we went to the Department of Justice, was completely denied entry.
We had let them know we were coming ahead of time.
They would not even let us in the lobby.
So on Thursday...
We went to the federal prison, which is here in Washington, D.C., and as members of Congress, we have oversight over the prison because we vote to fund the prison.
We vote and make legislation that completely involves our federal prisons.
That's what members of Congress do.
Two of the people with us, or several, actually three, Our members of judiciary or oversight committees, which have direct oversight over the federal prisons and the Department of Justice.
So we were completely in our purview going there to both locations, Department of Justice and the prison here in Washington, D.C., where the January 6th detainees, some of them are being held.
Now, we went because we heard horror stories coming out from family members and attorneys about the treatment of these defendants, the January 6th defendants who have been arrested, they've been charged, and they're waiting for their court date, and some of them are not being allowed out on bail.
We've heard stories of solitary confinement.
We've heard stories of beatings.
We have heard just terrible stories, and we wanted to go there and ask questions about it, and we wanted to basically tour the jail and check the conditions.
This is something that we do commonly as members of Congress.
Just a couple weeks ago, I went to a detention facility in California that houses illegal aliens, some of which are waiting for their amnesty claims, and some of them have been charged with committing crimes inside the United States, and they're waiting to be tried in court.
Now, so this is a normal thing for us to do, and I can tell you I'm so proud of We're good to go.
They have beautiful shower facilities, laundry facilities.
They have a gym.
They have a full-size basketball court and iPads.
They can FaceTime with family and friends pretty much anytime they want.
Great food and everything.
So we're able to go in as members of Congress and make sure the American tax dollars are being used and spent wisely.
So going to the federal prison here in Washington, D.C., we fully expected to go in like we normally do and tour a facility.
Well, when we went into the door, we were met with a completely different environment.
The lobby was filthy dirty.
It was disorganized.
It was not well kept.
It didn't look anything like the very nice detention facility that I saw for illegal aliens just out in California a few weeks ago.
But it was the attitude of the people that worked there that was even more concerning.
They were defiant, they were arrogant, and they were obstinate.
And what the woman told me when I walked in and I walked right up to her and I was like, hi, introduce myself.
We let you know we were coming.
We're here to tour the detention facilities and we have questions.
That we'd like to ask about the people that are detained here.
Well, she told me that we were trespassing.
It was myself, Congressman Matt Gaetz, Congressman Paul Gosar, and Congressman Louie Gohmert, and she told us we were trespassing.
Then we talked to her a little bit more and she refused to answer questions.
Then she went outside.
We were told by someone that the supervisor was outside.
So we walked outside to talk to the supervisor and they locked us out of this federal prison.
They locked members of Congress out.
We had a few members of the press with us, which as you know, freedom of press is very important.
They were completely denied being able to go in and show the public what's happening there as well.
And so that was our experience here in Washington, D.C., while we were trying to find out information on the detainees for January 6th.
I mean, Marjorie, there's a lot of attention focused right now on Cuba and on the fact that in Cuba you have political prisoners, you have people in detention centers.
It's a one-party state.
There's really no oversight at all.
Debbie tells me the same thing goes on in Venezuela.
We're going to have a bond hearing for this guy, but who knows if the bond hearing will even take place.
So ultimately, it's a very arbitrary system.
Now, we always like to think that the United States is different, and we have even Republicans rallying to the, we stand with the people of Cuba.
But aren't we seeing some alarming signs that some of these authoritarian habits seem to be imported into the United States?
And it's with the consent and the wink wink complicity of the Biden administration.
Is that an overstatement or am I simply describing what's going on?
Dinesh, you're hitting the nail on the head.
It's almost an understatement.
I would say, you know, of course, I'll tell you my belief.
I support the people of Cuba and overthrowing their communist dictatorship.
But I am very much more focused on the American people that that I feel that I serve.
And we're having a communist dictatorship right here in Washington, D.C.
No, you're absolutely right.
This is a country where people are being canceled, and I never thought we would see this before.
I'm sure you feel the same way.
We're seeing the same type of behavior out of the current administration and the Democrat members of Congress that we see directly out of communist China.
Communist Cuba, you know, and other communist countries where they don't care about certain portions of their society.
They will cancel their voices, cancel their beliefs.
And if they really don't like them, they will just make them disappear.
And that is what they're trying to do with these January 6th defendants by completely just not allowing even members of Congress to go in and provide oversight on a federal prison.
Yeah. Let me just ask you one more thing, Marjorie, and that is you've been in a little bit of a skirmish with Nancy Pelosi on the mask issue, and I noticed somewhat comically you call her Senator or Congresswoman Maskhole.
Is that your name for her?
I call her Speaker Maskhole.
Speaker mask hole.
I like it.
It gets my mind to put all kinds of words together.
But anyway, you found out something very interesting about Pelosi, at least a report about it.
Tell us what the latest is about Pelosi on the mask front.
Well, the word coming from DEM staffers is that Nancy Pelosi has a few members of her own staff that have just tested positive for COVID.
But she has told them that they can keep coming into the office right here in the Capitol and they can keep working even though they are COVID positive.
Now I want to tell you why we are all so outraged by that is because on Thursday, just yesterday, she went ahead and put out a statement and she advised and actually she ordered Capitol Police to arrest any staff member or visitor into the Capitol that is not wearing a mask.
Arrest them, which is so extreme.
It's unbelievable. And then she said members of Congress will have to be turned in and they can't arrest them.
Because we're members of Congress, but we get turned in if we aren't wearing a mask.
And so this is just an unbelievable abuse of power coming from Speaker Maskell, Speaker Pelosi, and such a hypocrisy coming out of her as just the queen of the House of Hypocrites, that she has members of her own staff that are COVID positive, and she has them coming in, going to work.
And so, you know, I've sued Nancy Pelosi.
I'm suing her right now.
We filed a federal lawsuit.
That was Thomas Massey, Ralph Norman, and I. We are suing her because we went through an ethics hearing where our paychecks have been fined.
We've been fined.
And she can't do that.
It's a violation of the 27th Amendment.
It's also discrimination in the workplace.
And we don't work for Nancy Pelosi.
We work for the people of our district that voted for us to represent them here in Congress.
And so Nancy Pelosi is abusing power like never before.
And it goes right along with what we're talking about with communist countries.
Great thing about you, Marjorie, is you're fighting on all fronts.
Keep it up. And thanks so much for coming on the podcast.
Thank you, Dinesh. I'll see you soon.
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A handful of Republicans, led by Senator Rob Portman of Ohio, but I include in this group Romney, Murkowski, Richard Burr, Susan Collins.
This is part of the bipartisan infrastructure group.
And it is complemented on the Democratic side by some, well, you'd have to say somewhat centrist Democrats.
Manchin is on there.
Kyrsten Sinema is on there.
Mark Kelly, the other Arizona senator.
Mark Warner, Virginia. This is not the left wing of the Democratic Party.
Now, interestingly, the fact that you've got this group, and I'm going to kind of show it to you here because it is...
It's a sea of white faces, and this is what provokes AOC to go.
She says that bipartisanship, quote, is, quote, just as defined by people who people in power agree to exclude than include.
She's implying that, hey, we don't have any blacks or Latinos in the group.
Probably because Latinos, Latinas like her, are to the far left.
You can't exactly put them on a bipartisan commission.
The bipartisanship would break down immediately.
And Cori Bush, also part of the same gang, is this the bipartisan infrastructure group or the audience at a Kid Rock concert?
So again, the implication here is that this is just a bunch of old white people making these decisions.
So there's some scorn on the left that's being directed at this group.
And this is probably... This is probably why it's because the bipartisan group is pushing for a $550 billion infrastructure plan.
That's a lot of money, but it's a far cry from the vastly greater amounts, including a $3.5 trillion The larger one is not an infrastructure plan.
It's a childcare. It's a paid leave.
It's a public education.
It's a Green New Deal.
It's a climate change.
It's got kind of the whole kitchen sink thrown into it.
I do not think that that is going to pass, and it's certainly not going to pass in its current form.
But the bipartisan infrastructure bill, now this is largely an infrastructure bill.
Most of the money does go to transportation, goes to broadband, goes to utilities.
So the Republicans, the sort of moderate Republicans who are in there, But their argument for themselves, and we have to hear it, is they'd say, listen, we are preventing a far worse plan from going through.
We're making sure that infrastructure is, in fact, infrastructure.
We don't believe that climate change is infrastructure.
Abortion is not infrastructure.
So we have narrowed the bill to something that, yes, we're going to help it pass, but we're also going to make sure that it stays true to its purpose.
Now, I think these guys also say things like, it'll also prove that government can get things done.
So they want to help restore the credibility of government and its ability to actually get things passed.
But there's a downside, and that downside is often ignored.
I want to highlight the two elements of the downside of what these Republicans are doing.
Number one... They're giving Biden an unnecessary win.
Why give Biden a win at all?
His ship is kind of taking on water on all fronts.
Taking on water on the border.
He's taking on water on rising crime rates.
An economy that's now in trouble.
Inflation is spiking its ugly head.
So why help this guy by delivering any political victory?
That makes no sense for the opposition party.
And second, what often happens is when you give a president momentum, they can then run with it to do other things.
So he gets the momentum from the smaller bill to now push for the bigger bill.
And of course, the Democrats recognize they're not going to get 10 Republican votes in the Senate for the bigger bill.
They're hoping to finagle away to get maybe Mansion on board, Cinema on board, and pass basically a Democratic bill, a 51 to 49, or a 51 to 50, I should say, with Kamala Harris breaking the tie for the larger big spend program that they have in mind to kind of give away to all their constituencies.
So in my view, unbalanced, although I can understand why the modern Republicans are trying to do what they're doing, this is a strategic and a tactical mistake, not just because it's helping Biden, but because it may lead to ultimately to a bigger, uglier, even more irresponsible infrastructure bill.
On July 4, 1776, we declared our independence from taxation from a government an ocean away.
On July 4th, 1776, we declared our independence from This is a strategic and a tactical mistake, not just because it's helping Biden, but because it may lead to ultimately to a bigger, uglier, even more irresponsible infrastructure bill.
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The Supreme Court this fall, most likely in October, will take up an important Mississippi abortion case.
This is a case in which the state of Mississippi has passed a law largely outlying abortion after 15 weeks.
It's outlawed in every case.
There are exceptions, but the exceptions are very rare.
Prior to that, abortion is largely allowed.
And the Mississippi law is up for consideration by the court.
And Mississippi has gone further and asked the court essentially to strike down also Roe v.
Wade, the underlying 1973 precedent that permits virtually no As I've mentioned before, in its original language, Roe does in fact allow later term regulation of abortion, but in subsequent decisions,
notably Doe v. Bolton, which came really on the heels of Roe, the Supreme Court very clearly said, I'm not quoting Justice Harry Blackmun, he said that medical judgment may be exercised in the light of all factors.
Physical, emotional, psychological, familial, and the woman's age, relevant to the well-being of the patient.
All these factors may relate to health.
In other words, Roe v.
Wade had said that after a certain point, you could only have an abortion when it jeopardizes, quote, the health of the mother.
Otherwise, states could regulate abortion.
But here, Justice Blackmun says, writing for the majority, well, health is so elastically defined that even if this would somehow, you know, make you feel terrible, that's a scar on your emotional health.
And then the state really can't regulate you in that case because the health of the mother isn't.
So health was interpreted so broadly that you didn't have to be in dire medical conditions at all.
And so, in effect, you had abortion on demand for the full nine months of pregnancy.
This is the horror that we've been living with.
Now, it may seem like the European countries, which are by and large, you know, they've had long time and more expansive welfare states.
They're thought to be further More down the road to socialism than America, and that they would have equivalent or even more permissive abortion laws, maybe even provide state funding for abortion.
But it turns out that none of this is really true.
There's an important study just out from the Charlotte Lozier Institute, which does a comparison of European countries' laws on abortion and the laws in the United States.
So in contrast with America's sort of abortion on demand, which, by the way, makes us one of the...
We have some of the most radical pro-abortion laws in the world.
You have to go to third world countries that allow this kind of thing, and only a handful of them do, to find a legitimate comparison.
But the European countries aren't like this.
47 out of 50 European countries limit elective abortion.
Elective abortion means abortion for any reason.
After 15 weeks.
So, wow! Basically, the European laws are in line with the Mississippi law.
The European laws already do what Mississippi would want to do.
Now, it says, while the majority of European countries limit elective abortions to 12 weeks, so not even 15, it's only 12 weeks that you can have an abortion, basically, without giving a reason.
Five countries limit it to 14 weeks.
Eight countries don't allow elective abortions at all, which means not that they don't allow abortions, but they don't allow abortions just for any reason.
You can't just walk in and get one.
And so we see here that these European countries are, by the way, also in line with American public opinion.
American public opinion has...
Always, and this is going all the way back to Roe, favored some restrictions on abortion.
The level of restriction obviously depends on the state, depends on how conservative.
Is it a red state? Is it a blue state?
But there's only a small minority of Americans who want to have abortion on demand for any reason for the whole nine months.
But that is the position of Planned Parenthood.
The Democratic position is even further.
They want to provide taxpayer money.
For abortion. So to force people who find abortion morally objectionable to pay for other people's abortions.
I mean, it's hard to think of something that's more offensive than that.
So if we want to be progressive, we want to be in line with Europe, we should recognize that the Europeans, even the Europeans, Don't take the same fanatical view that abortion is some kind of absolute right, some kind of virtual political sacrament.
But that is, alas, the view, not always, but it is now, the view of the Democratic Party.
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Or go to balanceofnature.com and use discount code AMERICA. I'm really happy to welcome political artist John McNaughton.
John, thanks for joining me.
Let me start by asking you, we're going to talk about a specific work of art that you did.
We just got it yesterday.
We're excited to actually show it to the audience.
But before we do that, let me start by asking you, how did you become a painter?
And tell us a little bit about your story.
Yeah, well, I started painting back in 1983, just, you know, 13 years old, and one of my first paintings won a statewide competition, and the governor gave me an award, and I thought, wow, I guess I can do this.
So I've been doing it ever since.
That is awesome. Well, I'd describe you.
Would it be wrong to call you a patriotic or a conservative painter in that you tend to pick themes that resonate with Americana, that are designed to inspire?
Say a word about your choice of topics.
Yeah, that's exactly how I'd describe it.
I consider myself an American artist first, a patriotic artist, one of the few conservative artists that are out there, which is kind of a strange thing that that's how it is in the art world.
But, you know, ever since I can remember, I feel like I've been butting heads with the art world because, you know, you have to fit a certain mold.
And I've always kind of rebelled against that.
And so I'm not, it's just kind of how things have worked out.
I didn't plan it as a career move.
It just, you know, as an artist, you just express who you are.
And this is what I do.
Why is it the case?
It seems like artists typically, and this goes back to the early 20th century, I think of places like Greenwich Village or San Francisco, the left bank of Paris.
You've got these sort of bohemian artists who see themselves as rebels against society, at least against traditional values.
They like to sort of push the envelope.
They sometimes like to shock the mores and maybe morals of society.
You don't seem to attempt to do any of this, so it appears like you have a different conception of art than they do.
What are the feelings and ideas that you're trying to cultivate in people's heads as they see your art?
What do you want them to feel?
That's a good question.
The thing that caught my interest, what you just said, is you talked about how You know, artists are trying to break the mold and such.
I always felt like that when I was going to art school.
I was the only one that was doing something different.
And all my art professors were angry at me and frustrated that I wouldn't do what they were telling me.
So it's like, you know, we went from the, I don't know, 50s to the 70s, this art rebellion.
Everyone, you know, was breaking away from tradition.
And now it's like things have taken the opposite swing.
And to be a conservative artist puts you in that same position where you're having to break away and be different.
And I'm constantly butting heads with art critics.
I'm flattered every time they even mention me because I'm getting under their skin is what's happening.
And so today, my purpose, what I'm trying to do is just paint things that I feel represent our time in history as a conservative artist.
You know, that's what we're supposed to do is reflect society.
And there's nobody that's reflecting the conservative view of America, which is basically half of the country.
So, you know, it's funny how it's such a rare niche to be in.
We want to focus on the latest painting you sent us.
And I had to chuckle.
I mean, I'm honored and I was also amused.
Here's... Oh, Debbie's playing my van of white here.
And this is the latest painting.
It's... Well, but...
I mean, quite apart from the fact, obviously, I'm thrilled to be.
This is me. This is Candace Owens, right?
Yes. And this is Trump.
And there's the American flag and the troops behind us.
I mean, here's Joe Biden.
And he's down for the count.
And he's looking... Sleepy Jones.
He's looking very sleepy and very lost.
Now, talk to us about just the process of creating this.
Well, first of all, how did you decide to choose me and Candace to be alongside Trump?
And then second of all, is this a painting that's based on a classic painting?
Yes, it's based on a classic painting by an artist named Archibald Willard.
It was done in 1876, and it was called The Spirit of 76, you know, 100 years after the Declaration of Independence.
And so there's this classic, iconic American painting, and I felt like You know, now would be a good time to kind of redo this painting in a modern sense, you know, because we're gearing up for 2024, hopefully.
And so I called the painting The Spirit of 2024.
And as I was thinking of who should I put in the roles of these different people, you know, I mean, I've painted a lot of different conservative people that have a strong voice, and I'm thinking, who could I put in here?
And I thought, oh, Candace Owens, she's, you know, she's pretty, pretty smart.
She's always been a straight shooter.
Recently, she had a kind of a funny altercation when she interviewed Trump, and she said that she'd be willing to be his running mate, you know?
You remember that? I do.
I do remember that.
And then I thought, who would be the perfect one to kind of balance this painting?
And I just, when I thought of you and her and Trump together, I just, I had to chuckle.
You know, it was just like the perfect mix.
So, and I knew it would drive the liberals crazy.
So I just, I knew I had to do it.
Awesome. Now, let's close out by telling people, can people actually buy prints of this painting?
Can they buy the painting?
Oh, yeah. And they're selling fast.
It's going to sell out soon, I think.
It's on my website.
All right. So let's tell people.
So your website is johnmcnaughton.com.
But J-O-N is J-O-N, johnmcnaughton.com.
And yeah, guys, check out John's work.
I think you'll see as you look at it closely, it's high quality stuff.
It's very creative. John also has a great video on his website where he describes...
in doing this particular painting.
And John, listen, we need a lot more people like you.
In my opinion, we need political artists and musicians and stand-up comedians.
We need to create our own, you may almost call it alternative universe, where we don't have to be subjected to the drumbeat and the censorship and the intimidation of the left.
I guess we can coexist with them, but we do it by creating our own world and living in it.
Absolutely.
Thanks for joining me, John.
Thank you.
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As conservatives living in progressive culture, part of our challenge is to create a culture of our own, so we don't just become critics of what the other side is doing, but also creators of our own books and our own ideas and our own novels and our own poems and our own plays and our own movies and our own comedy.
How do we do that?
How do we, for example, write novels?
Fortunately, There's an interesting book I want to talk about.
It's called Letters to a Young Novelist.
It's by the South American writer Mario Vargas Llosa.
It's part of a series of books that are sort of mentoring books written by accomplished people in certain fields, written to younger people.
By the way, many, many decades ago, in fact, in the 19th century, the writer Rilke wrote a book called Letters to a Young Poet.
Apparently a young poet wrote Rilke and said, how can I be a good poet?
And Rilke wrote a short book basically saying, this is how you do it.
And a publisher in America got this idea of asking all kinds of people in all walks of life to write, have a prominent attorney write letters to a young lawyer.
They actually asked me to write letters to a young conservative, one of my early books that came out in the early 2000s.
And they had, I believe, Christopher Hitchens write letters to a young contrarian.
Well, here's Mario Vargas Llosa, the He's an eminent writer, letters to a young novelist.
And he talks about why people write novels at all.
Who's the kind of person who writes a novel?
And he goes, well, it's the kind of person who has a very vivid imagination, someone who's always sort of inventing things and creating things.
But he goes, but why?
Why would you want to invent characters and make up situations?
After all, you live in a real world.
Why don't you just content yourself with that?
And so he makes the insightful point that one of the things that motivates people to become writers is that they believe that there is something very wrong with the real world, something wrong with the world as it is, and therefore it becomes interesting and challenging to sort of create another world.
Not necessarily the world as it might be, but alternative worlds.
And that's really what a novel does.
It's a creation of an alternative world.
Vargas Yosa makes a very interesting point.
He says, fiction is a lie, because none of those people really exist.
But he goes, it is a lie covering up a deep truth.
He goes, it's the opposite of history, because history is kind of, this is what happened.
Fiction is, this is what didn't happen, but I want you to read it anyway.
And of course, the interesting question is, why would someone want to do that?
Vargas, he also talks about how the writer's life is a little bit of a form of captivity.
He gives a kind of vivid example.
He says, as a friend of his one time, who swallowed a tapeworm.
This guy hangs out with interesting people.
But he says, And then I'm now quoting this Spanish writer, the fellow who swallowed the tapeworm.
He's talking to Mario Vargas Llosa.
He goes, yeah, me and the tapeworm, we do many things together.
We go to theaters, exhibitions, bookstores.
We spend hours discussing politics, books, films.
And he says, and you might think I do these things for the reason you do, because I enjoy them.
But you're wrong. I do them all for the tapeworm.
That's how it seems to me. My whole life is no longer live for my sake, but for the sake of what I carry inside me.
And basically, Mario Vargas Llosa is saying that when you write a novel, your novel is the tapeworm.
It's going to kind of consume you.
It's going to take you over.
It's going to be very difficult for you to expel, at least not until you have somehow finished the novel and then you've delivered the tapeworm, so to speak, to the world.
Now, he goes on to talk about the fact that writers base their plots, their characters, on people they know.
So you don't have such a thing as a writer who is able to sort of conjure up a world out of nothing.
People conjure up a world out of their own experience.
And yet, it is not sufficient, he says in a novel, just to take your experience and deliver it in fictional form.
I'm going to take eight guys I know, I'm going to make them the main characters, I'm just going to describe what I think their interactions with each other will be, and boom, I have a novel.
No. Because ultimately what needs to happen is you may start off...
Your starting point is people you know, situations you were in, a funny line someone once said at a restaurant.
But you've now got to take that and transform it and sort of build it into a plot that takes off on its own.
This is the key point.
And I'm not quoting Vargas Llosa.
Although the starting point of a novelist's invention is what he has lived on, That is not and cannot be the end point.
So what is the end point in that case?
And the end point, says Vargas Llosa, is to create an alternative world, ideally a distinctive world.
You know, when you're in Hemingway's fiction, it's got to be Hemingway.
Nobody else can write like that.
No one else can create worlds like that.
That's Hemingway's world.
The same is true of Dostoyevsky.
In the Dostoyevskian novel, even the eccentricities of the characters, these must have been to some degree people Dostoyevsky knew, but he's made it into a Dostoyevskian universe.
That resembles Russia in the 19th century, but not totally.
Why? Because it's only Dostoyevsky who can create that world.
We're living, in a sense, inside Dostoyevsky's own head.
So Vargas Llosa ends by making the point that the novelist is kind of, he calls him, quote, a trickster and a swindler.
He's a swindler.
Why? Because the novelist, even though creating an artificial world, a lie, as Vargas Llosa says, nevertheless, the lie is so believable that That you begin to think it contains a deeper truth than reality itself.
You're able to finish a novel like Crime and Punishment, and you feel you have more insight into the human condition, having read that, than having lived, let's say, 10 years and talked to Tom, Dick, and Harry and explored all their experiences.
So, real life is not as, quote, The novel, in a sense, and this is what Vargas Llosa calls the novel's, quote, power of persuasion.
It is the power to persuade you to sort of enter my world, become part of it, and see in it, even through its fictional characters, a completely internally coherent, plausible world, one that is able to deliver, at least by its conclusion, more truth than one can get from life itself.
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