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Oct. 4, 2021 - Dinesh D'Souza
51:40
CONFLICT OF INTEREST Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep 188
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How corrupt is our federal judiciary?
A new study suggests more corrupt than you think.
In better news, a federal judge for the first time refuses to impose a strict punishment on a January 6th protester.
You know why? He says, what did the BLM and Antifa rioters get?
The rapper 50 Cent is moving to Texas, and in his honor, I've composed my own rap tune.
And activist Maria Bello, who experienced socialism firsthand in Venezuela, joins me.
We're going to talk about socialism in theory versus socialism in practice.
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.
We have dismayingly seen the spread of corruption in so many of our basic institutions, including trusted institutions that have now revealed themselves to be rotted from the inside, and particularly rotted at the top.
And there's a disturbing new study, a detailed investigation by the Wall Street Journal, which shows that over 130 federal judges have broken the law and violated ethics rules by doing what?
By ruling on cases in which they have a direct financial interest.
Wow.
Now, federal judges are allowed to invest in companies.
They're allowed to own stocks.
But there are disclosure requirements for those possessions.
And federal judges are required to recuse themselves when a case comes up where they have any financial interest whatsoever.
In fact, it says that their ownership of a legal or equitable interest, however small, that's what the regulations say.
The Journal looks at cases over a 10-year period.
2010 to 2020, 685 cases where judges...
Refused to recuse themselves.
And not surprisingly, when you look at those verdicts, it says, quote, some two-thirds of those cases end up with judges ruling in favor of the interests that benefit themselves or benefit their own immediate family members.
Wow. Now, the cool thing is that the journal notified these judges of what it found.
It goes, hey, guess what?
And the reaction of these judges is totally priceless.
First of all, I should say that these federal judges that are surveyed by the journal, they span the political spectrum as the examples I'm about to give show.
The first example is Judge Edgardo Ramos.
This guy is now presiding in a case between Exxon and an insurance company.
He votes in favor of Exxon.
And no surprise, this is a guy who owns a whole bunch, in fact, between $15,000 and $50,000 of ExxonMobil stock during the period in which he's making this adjudication.
This, by the way, is an Obama appointee.
And... Here's another case.
A Colorado judge, Louis Babcock, case involving Comcast, the telecommunications giant.
This is a judge, by the way, appointed by Reagan, who votes in favor of Comcast, and uh-oh, turns out he and his family own Comcast shares.
Now the journal points this out to him, and here's his response.
He says, oh, I dropped the ball!
As if this is like, he's on the field, he dropped the ball.
What he really means is he's corrupt and he's sort of recognizing that he's been caught.
It would never recur to him to disclose this otherwise.
And he thanks the journal. This is the kind of sleazy rhetoric you often hear from public officials with their hands in the cookie jar.
He thanks the journal for, quote, helping me stay on my toes the way I'm supposed to do.
So again, notice how he minimizes his offense.
He needs to stay on his toes, as if this is a very minor infraction, and he's just going to do a little better going forward.
In Ohio, appellate court judge Julia Smith Gibbons.
Writes an opinion in 2014 in favor of Ford Motor Company.
Right before the ruling, her husband buys stock for his retirement account of, you guessed it, Ford Motor Company.
And Ford wins the case.
Now, once again, she issues a statement.
This judge, by the way, a George W. Bush appointee, she says,"'I regret my misunderstanding, but I assure you it was an honest one.'" Now, there's no real misunderstanding here.
I guess what she says is that she thought that the rule applied only to her and not to her husband, as if their money isn't pooled and as if a kind of stock boost for her husband's stock account isn't going to benefit her in any way.
And all of this, by the way, is coming right on top of the president of the Dallas Federal Reserve.
The Federal Reserve has governors.
This is the governor of the Dallas Fed.
He stepped down recently.
Why? Because it turns out he's been doing all kinds of rather massive stock market trades.
Now, people who are on the Federal Reserve, people who are sort of setting interest rates, regulating the money supply, they're supposed to be extremely careful about their own investments and We're good to go.
And when it was made public, now once again, the Fed Chair, this is Jerome Powell, goes, we need to make some changes and we're going to do that as a consequence of this.
There will be a thoroughgoing and comprehensive review, all to the good, to be sure.
But I think it's really telling that, again, another institution, just like the FBI, an institution that we consider kind of unimpeachable, the Federal Reserve, the The federal judges, people who are, again, supposed to be neutral, supposed to be looking out for the public interest, supposed to be civic-minded.
But we find that they are not so much civic-minded as they are looking out for number one.
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And I mean finally.
By which I mean finally.
What am I talking about?
I'm talking about a federal judge finally refusing to impose a strict penalty on a January 6th protester.
And you know why? Because he goes...
Whatever happened to the BLM and Antifa rioters?
Why didn't the same U.S. government that is prosecuting these guys go after them?
And so what the judge says, very telling, is he says, quote, the U.S. Attorney's Office would have more credibility if it were even-handed.
Now, here are some details.
We're talking about the case of Danielle Doyle of Oklahoma.
She's accused of entering the Capitol through a broken window.
She remained in the Capitol for 24 minutes.
Her crime in there is, quote, yelling at police.
So she's not someone who's violent in any way.
She's not accused of hurting anyone or damaging any kind of property.
And the U.S. government wanted to give her two months of home arrest and three years of probation.
And the judge, District Judge Trevor McFadden, goes, Nah, I'm not doing it.
He gives her two months probation, $3,000 fine, she's out of here.
And now, what's even more interesting than the sentence, and of course the left is like, This is a very light sentence!
See, let's remember the standard pattern.
The standard pattern is, and I'm going to quote here from Judge James Boesberg.
This is an Obama appointee.
Whenever these January 6th guys come up, even if they've done nothing and walked around, took a selfie, you get this kind of rhetoric.
And this is from Judge Boasberg, the Obama guy.
I can't emphasize enough that the cornerstone of our democratic republic is the peaceful transfer of power after an election, blah blah blah.
And what you and others did on January 6th was nothing less than an attempt to undermine that system of government, blah blah blah.
So this is the kind of bloviating nonsense that we get from these frauds.
But... Notice, by the way, Judge McFadden, I should point out, graduate of Wheaton, an evangelical college.
He went to the University of Virginia School of Law, probably one of the more conservative law schools in the country.
He clerked for Judge Stephen Colleton, U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit, conservative judge.
So this is a judge who's not going along, as in fact some Reagan and even Trump appointees have, with the left's narrative.
And I want to quote some more statements from the judge.
He makes the point that he says, look, he says, why hasn't the federal prosecutors brought more cases against those accused in the 2020 summer protests?
In fact, he reads out statistics showing all these incidents of riot, arson, attacks, and so on, certainly attempts to influence things, certainly attempts to affect official procedures, riots at courthouses, riots over Kavanaugh, nothing.
And the judge basically says, listen, this woman, Danielle Doyle, was, quote, he doesn't excuse her actions.
He doesn't say she was right to be in the Capitol.
Not at all. In fact, he says she was acting, quote, like all those looters and rioters last year.
And the judge goes on to say, that's because looters and rioters decided the law did not apply to them.
So, when people accused the January 6th protesters of being, quote, above the law, that they were trying to subvert a legal process...
The judge is saying, this is Judge McFadden, so were the guys on the left.
They, too, had a disregard for law.
They, too, refused to accept the legitimacy of law.
In that sense, they, too, were subverting the United States as a country under the rule of law.
And so, I think that this brings a refreshing dose of even-handedness to the procedure.
And the left is, of course, screaming.
Why are they screaming? They're screaming because finally they're actually getting blind justice.
They're finally getting even-handedness and they don't want it.
They don't like it. They want justice that is not blind.
They want justice that is kind of one-eyed, that basically looks away when their guys do bad stuff and then jumps to its feet when the offenses are on the other side.
And clearly, Judge McFadden is having none of it.
Finally, to our great relief, an honest judge.
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It seems that the radical left has largely taken over.
The Democratic Party and the Biden administration.
We see a glimpse of this, by the way, in the hounding of Senators Manchin and Sinema.
Look at the way that they are being confronted.
Sinema was recently accosted in a bathroom, someone screaming at her.
Now, here's something interesting.
You never see any of this occurring to the left.
In other words, here you have the Biden people and Pelosi and Schumer putting pressure on Sinema and Manchin to bend.
Where's the pressure on Ilhan Omar and Bernie Sanders and the left to bend?
The fact that you don't see it tells you who's running the show, who has in fact infiltrated the party, who has in fact taken over.
All of this for me is prelude to talking about the Biden administration's nominee for comptroller.
Comptroller is basically a very important position in the U.S. government, the person who oversees the banks.
And guess who the Biden people have nominated?
They've nominated an absolute kook, a woman named Saul, S-A-U-L-E, Omarova.
This is a graduate, I'm not kidding, of Moscow State University, 1989.
She got the Lenin Academic Scholarship to go there.
So, just as Bernie went and honeymooned in the Soviet, this is a woman who studied in the Soviet Union.
She's a hardcore communist, a Leninist.
And she came back from her studies declaring that the Soviet Union is superior to the United States.
You want proof? Here's a tweet.
This was her tweet from her in 2019, basically praising the old Soviet Union.
And when Twitter users kind of jumped on her, she adds this caveat.
I never claimed women and men were treated absolutely equally in every facet of Soviet life, but people's salaries were set by the state in a gender-blind manner.
And all women got very generous maternity benefits.
Both things are still a pipe dream in our society.
So wait a minute. You've got a Soviet Union, an absolutely crumbling society, putting all its money into heavy weaponry.
You've got a Soviet Union where there's no iota of freedom.
You've got gulags and forced labor camps all over the place.
But this is a woman who's really excited about maternity leave policies.
So you're dealing here basically with...
And then we turn to her views on the banks.
She basically thinks that things like asset prices, pay scales, capital and credit, this should not be dictated by the market.
Who should it be dictated by?
The federal government. She wants to expand the Federal Reserve's mandate to include setting the prices of, quote, systemically important financial assets.
She also wants the Federal Reserve to have a say in what workers get paid in the ordinary economy.
She wrote a paper called The People's Ledger, and she said why doesn't the Federal Reserve kind of oversee all consumer bank deposits?
She talks about the fact she wants the government...
To quote, effectively end banking.
End banking, as we know.
In other words, to change the normal system.
And how? Because she wants a new kind of system.
In fact, she wants the US to create its own new digital currency.
Not the dollar. Not dollar notes, not normal deposits, a new currency.
Think of the potential for abuse.
And in fact, when we say the potential for abuse, that's probably why she likes it.
Because it opens the door to bureaucrats like her to gain power and money.
And she probably admires the old Soviet nomenklatura, the old ruling class, that all these perks and privileges.
She thinks, oh, you know what? I can get those now in America by being a leftist.
Yeah, yeah, it's going to be great.
I'll drive a big car.
Everybody else will live in misery.
You know, this is the kind of person we're dealing with.
And as comptroller, she would supervise 1,200 financial institutions.
Now, the real power these people have, I mean, they're supposed to be following the law, but their real power is that they can intimidate the banks to do this and do that because no bank wants the Federal Reserve examiners to be in there.
No bank basically wants to have a kind of group of government investigators descend on the bank.
Very bad for all kinds of reasons.
And so what's going on here is that Biden wants to put in power And this woman needs to be blocked.
Republicans better take note.
In fact, to quote the Wall Street Journal, Omarova is the wrong nominee for the wrong industry in the wrong country in the wrong century.
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The rapper 50 Cent, I'm not sure if you're a fan.
I can't say I'm a fan.
But nevertheless, 50 Cent is very concerned about all this big spending by the Biden administration.
And even more, he's concerned about the big taxes that go to pay for the big spending taxes that he suddenly realized.
Not suddenly, because this is a guy who, by the way, he realized this in 2020.
This is why he endorsed Trump.
And he had the funny line.
He goes, I don't want to pay these taxes the Democrats are proposing.
I'm 50 cent. I don't want to be 20 cent.
I love that. So the guy, but now he's...
Now he is worth 20 cent.
Well, he's now escalating.
He was on a radio show with Ari Melber, and he's talking about the Biden plan, and he's onto it.
He knows that Biden wants to raise taxes.
Any American making over $400,000.
And I'm now quoting him.
His tax plan, Biden's tax plan, says 50 cents.
I didn't realize I'd be paying 62% of my income back to the IRS. Right?
So he goes, that does change a lot.
He's talking, by the way, about federal but also state taxes.
The guy lives in New York. He goes, New York City will change dramatically.
Like, they're going to end up moving to different territories.
He goes, you look at Silicon Valley?
It's in Austin, Texas.
He's talking about the way that Silicon Valley firms and employees have decided, listen, let's skip the confiscatory tax system of California, which puts another roughly 10% on top of the federal tax.
So this is basically a systematic ripoff.
Yeah, the rich are paying their fair share and more.
Now, 50 Cent says, I think this is the heart of the matter.
People have a right to hold on to what they are earning, quote, not to have it just taken from them by the government.
So 50 Cent goes, I'm going to Texas.
I've got my cowboy hat and everything.
Everything is bigger in Texas.
This is going to be great.
A rapper with gold chains and a cowboy hat.
Now, to welcome him to Texas...
I have prepared my own...
You know, I probably should have dressed the part.
I probably needed to have a hoodie.
I probably needed to wear my...
Well, my old confinement center outfit would have worked just fine.
But... And, honey, instead of raising objections, why don't you supply the background music?
All you need to do is go...
While I'm doing my...
50 cent he coming our way because 50 cent he don't want to pay.
In New York he'd pay 62% and he don't want to be no 20 cent.
He's coming to Texas as fast as he can.
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Guys, I'm really happy to welcome to the podcast Maria Baio.
Debbie and I both follow Maria on social media.
We see her comments, we see her videos, and we long wanted to bring her on the podcast.
This is such a brave and admirable young person.
And she was born and raised in Venezuela.
At the age of 17, she fled her native country to come to America.
And she's the CEO and co-founder of a new group called America's Momentum, which as I understand it is basically aimed at disinfecting young people from the socialist virus.
Maria, welcome. Great to have you.
Debbie and I are both fans.
And I want to start by talking about how you learned, not from a book, but from experience, About socialism.
So, let's talk about your life in Venezuela, sort of, when you were a kid.
This is Venezuela in the old days in which you grew up, as you say, in a middle-class family.
Tell us a little bit more about that.
Well, thank you so much for inviting me.
As a kid, life in Venezuela was easy.
We didn't have any problems.
We kids could actually play outside on the streets.
We could talk to our neighbors.
We could have a normal life.
Suddenly, one day I was going from my house to my neighbor's house and then I see these people coming in a bicycle and one of the guys had a gun and he was like, give me your phone.
I had my phone on my hands and I have my laptop in my backpack.
That's when I started noticing that things were not good in the country.
My mom started working in politics.
She was the secretary of the mayor in my hometown.
And I remember one day I asked my mom, Mom, why people do not support Chavez?
And that's what my mom told me.
Chavez is not doing good things.
As a kid, you don't understand politics, but when your parents tell you that, you know that there's something wrong.
I started digging, asking questions.
Then I realized that my grandparents have voted for Chavez.
My grandparents used to work for the petroleum company in Venezuela.
And I remember my grandparents will tell me, we have to vote for Chavez.
If we don't vote for him, we're going to lose our benefits.
We're going to lose our jobs.
After that, I got so involved in politics because of my mom.
Then at the age of 16, I started doing politics.
I started doing campaigns against Chavez.
My thing was, if I do something for my country, if I actually help my country, if I actually do campaigns and we win, I will be able to stay at home with my family and I don't have to leave to another country.
Sadly, that didn't happen.
And when I graduated from high school, I immigrated to the United States.
Let's talk a little bit about why it didn't happen.
Was it because the socialist government, which actually, Debbie says this as well, came originally to power as the result of a free election, but nevertheless began to take over the court's Overrun the Constitution, undermine the procedures of separation of powers, checks and balances, democracy itself.
So by the time you were on the street, in a sense, nothing could be done.
They had all the power.
The system was rigged against you.
Yes. That's what people don't understand.
When socialist government have the power, they will take control of everything.
Sadly, the government had control over the elections.
So it didn't matter who won.
Maybe Chavez won.
Maybe the guy that ran against Chavez won.
We don't know. But since the government had control of all of that, and actually the people that counted the vote was with the government, they could tell you Chavez won, Maduro won, and there was nothing else that we could do.
Now, when I was growing up, Maria, in India, you know, there's one corrupt government after another, and my family has had, by and large, a sort of a, these guys are all bad guys kind of view, a pox on all their houses, so to speak.
But in your case, you came to the understanding that this just wasn't a bad sort of third world style government or a bunch of thugs that have taken over, that there was a destructive ideology behind it called socialism.
How did you wake up to that phenomenon?
It was when I started to understand about socialism when I started growing up.
I mean, at the age of 10, you don't understand, you don't know anything about politics.
But because my mom was working in politics, I started asking her questions.
I started reading books. I started looking at what was happening in my country.
I came to realize that there was something really wrong when I had to do a line of hundreds of people to be able to get into the supermarket and get one thing.
That's when I realized that I didn't want to live that life.
I didn't want to continue in Venezuela.
I didn't want to grow up and not have the freedom that other countries could give me like the United States.
So when I came to the United States, I left my country.
It was because I was looking for freedom.
I was looking for a better future.
I was looking for a better education.
And that's what United States has given me.
United States has given me the opportunities that my home country has never done for me.
When we come back, I want to talk to Maria about her experiences in America, perhaps to her very surprising popularity of socialism, particularly among young people.
Why is that?
What is the socialist illusion that, in her experience, was discredited by reality?
We'll be right back.
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I'm back with the young activist Maria Bello, the founder of a group called America's Momentum.
We've been talking about her life in Venezuela and how she ultimately fled here to freedom.
Maria, it must have been a little surprising to put it mildly, when you find yourself in America and you begin to see a country which has been defined for most of its history by freedom, nevertheless lurching in the direction of socialism and a lot of young people your age, cheering that development.
What was your reaction when you first encountered that?
So I will go back to when I came here the first time.
I was only 17. I didn't really know how politics actually worked in here.
So I have to learn that. I didn't want to be in politics.
I didn't want to be involved in politics here in the United States just because my family back home.
I still have my family there.
So I thought that if I did something or if I say something, it will go, you know, the government will go after them.
But then in 2019, I started hearing people my age saying, socialism is so good.
Socialism will actually work in the United States.
I was just like, wow.
I left my country.
I left my family behind.
I left everything I knew just because of socialism.
When you're telling me socialism is good, I started getting involved in 2019.
I started with the Leadership Institute, a great organization.
I started doing trainings with them.
I worked for a couple of non-profits, but then now I have founded my own non-profit.
And I think that people like stories.
People like to hear from those people who have actually lived through it.
It is not just enough that we read about socialism, that we know that socialism is bad.
But when you have a personal story, people might engage a little bit more about you.
And that's why I founded my non-profit.
So let's talk about the non-profit.
Is it your goal to have lots of young people who have been, in some ways, had some direct experience with either socialism or facets of it, tell their stories?
And is it your idea to share those with young people in the hope that through experience, you can break through this kind of illusion?
The goal of America's Momentum is giving a voice to those people who have gone through human rights violations, such as socialism and communism.
The pro-life movement, it's really important here, was seeing how many people are celebrating abortion.
And that's what they don't understand, is that if you are pro-abortion, then you are against human rights.
We are trying to get A group of young people, which might be all of my friends who have lived through socialism, we want to go to every university, to every school in the United States and tell them our stories.
Hopefully, people are going to open their eyes.
They're going to wake up and realize that they don't want socialism in America.
One of the things that I would say is that people talk about the American dream.
Maybe their American dream is to buy a house, to have a business.
My American dream is freedom.
That's what America means to me, freedom.
Now, Maria, you know, many years ago when I was at, when I was your age and I was at an international students event, a young fellow came up to me and he was talking about why he loved India.
And I was like, I was kind of intrigued.
I'm like, well, why do you love a white guy, you know?
And he'd never been to India, but he's like, to me, India is just unbelievably liberating.
And I was like, what a strange thing to say.
And so I said to him, I said, you know, India is a fairly rigid society, at least it was when I was a kid, arranged marriage and dowry and the caste system.
So I'm like, what do you find so liberating about India?
And as I was talking to him, I made him very uncomfortable of course, I realized that he didn't know anything about India and he didn't even care.
But he was angry with America.
He was angry with his pastor and he was fighting with his parents.
He was upset about the small town he grew up in.
And so he was putting onto India a set of illusions that didn't describe India at all.
So here's my question to you.
What if young people today know nothing about socialism and don't even care?
But what happens is they've got grievances that are local and personal.
And so what they do is they look to this socialist paradise to redeem their own miserable lives.
And so my question is, Even if you tell them a story, it didn't work in Venezuela, it didn't work in North Korea, it didn't work in Cuba, they might still want to psychologically hold on to that illusion.
How do you break that false utopianism in which people almost fantasize about things that are not reality but they don't want to give up their fantasies?
That's one of the things.
Even though I went to Texas back in February and was giving a speech about my story, and everyone in my audience were democratic socialists, the young democratic socialists.
And one of them tell me, hey, Maria, so I was doing my research in Venezuela, and Venezuela is actually not a socialist country.
Venezuela is an adult country, and capitalism has done this to Venezuela, and actually the U.S. sentience.
And my answer to him was, didn't you just hear everything I said?
Sometimes we might not even be able to change the way they think.
Sometimes Even you telling your story, what you went through, and some people will tell you, no, that's not true.
I had a professor actually said that in my PragerU video.
I had a professor telling me that What I wrote on my essay about Venezuela was not true.
That Venezuela is not a socialist country, and I couldn't say that about Maduro.
I told him, Professor, I lived 17 years of my life in Venezuela, pretty much my whole entire life.
My family is still living there. How can you tell me what is happening in my country?
It's not true. Sometimes we might be able to open some people's eyes and have been in our sight, but sometimes our stories might not be enough.
I mean, think about it, Mary. You have Chavez, the founder of a socialist party, who literally takes the label made in socialism and sticks it on milk cartons and on eggs and every product in every store.
And then you've got American professors saying, you know, this guy is not a socialist.
I mean, at some level, you have to throw up your hands and you must do this every day in which you say, how do I... These people are supposed to be educated, but in fact, they're...
They're investing in ignorance and illusion, aren't they?
Yes. And one of the things that I always tell people is that to change someone's mind, you need to start with education.
You need to start with educating your kids in the household.
You need to start educating them.
Probably in schools, you might not be able to because every school is becoming a socialist little place.
But you have to start educating kids in your household.
Maybe the only option that we might have is to get kids homeschooled at some point.
Because private schools are talking about socialism and communism, public schools too.
So what is the future of America?
Homeschool every kid so they don't become a little socialist?
Well, I mean, it shows the extent to which the left has overrun the culture.
They dominate the institutions of education and media.
We haven't talked about media at all, but you must be just as frustrated to see the kind of activism on the part of the media, because something like that happened in Venezuela.
The media was eventually corralled by the regime and turned into yes-men or courtiers for the regime, and something like that is occurring in the United States.
If you don't agree with the government, then it's like Chavez did in Venezuela.
When all of these channels didn't agree with him, he closed them down and lots of people didn't have a job in the media.
So it seems like it's happening here in the United States and it starts with social media.
If you say something bad about, or when we're talking about the vaccine, for example, they will censor you.
If you talk bad about Mr.
President, they will censor you.
Because you're actually telling the truth.
There are so many people talking about what's going on in America right now, and they're getting censored.
They're deleting our videos.
They're deleting our stories.
They're deleting everything that is actually truth.
And the censorship of not only dissenting views, but of history, that is one of the signature hallmarks of a socialist regime.
Maria Beo, thank you very much for joining me.
I really appreciate it. We'd love to have you back sometime.
Thank you so much.
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Feel the difference. That was really fun, I thought, to be talking to Maria.
You know, she's so spirited and she's taking her experience from Venezuela, bringing it to America, and she wants to be a fighter because she's seen what happened.
Let's talk a little bit about the connection between January 6th, which most people don't relate in any way to Venezuela.
But, in fact, they think January 6th is kind of unprecedented.
It's never happened. If you have to go back to the Civil War to find any kind of antecedent.
But you're seeing some strange parallels between even the January 6th and its aftermath and the story of Venezuela.
Yeah, well, you know, she was probably one of those...
She was probably very young when this happened, but as you know, Hugo Chavez died in 2013.
Things were already going really bad in Venezuela.
People were already pretty fed up with what was going on.
There was a lot of inflation...
There was corruption.
There was scarcity.
There were blackouts, rolling blackouts everywhere, devaluation of the Bolívar.
All those things. No economic freedom for people.
Pure censorship.
And I mean, censorship only to those that weren't Chavistas, right?
The patriots that followed the Constitution...
We're censored.
They couldn't say anything against the regime and human rights violations.
In other words, they would put people in prison for saying things against the regime with no due process.
They would put them in solitary confinement.
And a media in cahoots at this point.
Exactly. And the media was in cahoots.
So these people were made to look like terrorists, like they were trying to overthrow a legitimate government.
And really, these people were made up of people like Maria.
They were made up of people like me.
If I had been in Venezuela, I would have been one of those protesters.
So I have a few photos of some of these protesters that were merely saying, respect the Constitution.
So basically, it went from patriots protesting the abuses of the Constitution to some people dying on the streets.
And what really resonated to me during the January 6th and Ashley Babbitt's death was a death, there were many, but one in particular, her name was Genesis Carmona, and she was a beauty queen in Venezuela, a really pretty girl. She was on a motorcycle with her boyfriend or friend, you know, somebody on a motorcycle, and she was going towards the capital.
To protest.
And she was shot and killed.
And there's a photo of her that I will put up on the screen of her dead on, you know, the boy that's on the motorcycle kind of carrying her body because she protested.
At this point, they don't really know if it was a GMB, which is a police officer, you know, kind of a capital police officer type, or it was one of the thugs, colectivos, that are, you know, running amok.
Antifa types.
Antifa types that are running amok in Venezuela, terrorizing these, you know, citizens and patriots.
I think what I find interesting is that the regime immediately portrays people like her.
She's an insurrectionist.
She's a rider.
She's trying to organize a coup against a legitimate government.
I mean, all of this chillingly familiar, the demonization of protest.
And the treatment of desperate people who are trying to get their voices heard, somehow making them into enemies of the state, unleashing the power of the government, legitimizing thugs on the street to go after them.
Absolutely. And I try to tell people this that don't understand.
They want to know, well, why do you care so much about Venezuela?
Besides the fact that I have family in Venezuela and I was born there.
I love Venezuela.
It's just a lesson.
It should be a lesson.
For people to understand that once the government takes over everything, it's very difficult to take it back.
These people were trying.
They were protesting Order, security, real justice.
In other words, not blind justice, not justice that's not blind, but rather that sees that, or no, actually it is blind justice, right?
That doesn't see whether you're a chavista or whether you're a patriot who's against the regime, whatever, right?
That's not the way it is in Venezuela.
People don't have the same rights.
And I started seeing a lot of that.
It was, you know, hey, if you say anything against...
Because a lot of this also had to do with the fact that all the cheating was going on with the elections.
And in fact, there's a photo of my friend, Maria Corina Machado, who was a legislator in Venezuela.
And she was also protesting.
And there's a stark photo of her with the Venezuelan flag.
And the police with their shields.
It's very poignant because she was demonized for calling out the regime and for calling out elections that were fraudulent.
I mean, the underlying point is that in Venezuela, you have corrupted institutions, a corrupt judiciary, a corrupt media, a corrupt regime, a whole corrupt electoral process.
And so the protesters were on the right side.
The protesters were demanding that the fair rules of the Venezuelan constitution, the basic liberties of the country used to enjoy, be restored.
And for doing this, They were demonized as criminals.
Well, they were demonized. They were incarcerated.
Some were even killed.
Some even died in prison.
They starved to death.
Lots of human rights violations that went on in these prisons that still go on today for no reason other than you do not agree with the man in charge.
My five video series for Prager University, videos on the American founding, they're called collectively The Making of America.
I'm told by Alan Estrin, who runs the project for PragerU, that these videos are doing fantastic.
They're really finding a huge audience.
By the way, an international audience, which I love.
space. I mean in 25 minutes you get a real window into not just the genius of these men but the political statesmanship, the architecture that they produced working together. Very hard to imagine that kind of talent being available today. Now before I've been talking about Jefferson the last few days and I was about to pivot to start talking about Hamilton or laying the ground for my discussion of Hamilton.
But before I do that, I actually want to talk about something more connected to Jefferson, and that is the election of 1800.
The election of 1800 in which Jefferson was elected president.
He became the third president of the United States.
Washington, number one.
Adams, number two. Jefferson, number three.
Now, the election of 1800, most people don't realize, was in a way a watershed, a landmark election in world history.
Why?
It's the first time that power peacefully moved, based on the consent of the governed, from one party to the rival party.
And the losing party basically went about its normal business.
These people were not exiled.
They weren't imprisoned. They weren't tried.
They weren't executed. I mean, just think back in history of what happened, for example, after the Napoleonic Wars.
Or it has been its customary for the losing side.
We saw this even in the French Revolution.
The losing side ends up in the guillotine.
The losing side in the English Civil Wars.
And it didn't matter.
In the English Civil War, you had the king on the one side, you had Cromwell and Parliament on the other side, but both sides were practicing a kind of brazen lawlessness, trying the other people for made-up offenses and so on.
Now, it's true that America had its constitution since 1789, but Washington served for the first two terms, and there was an election...
In 1796.
And a pretty hard-fought election.
But the ruling party, the Federalists, retained power.
So there was no transition of power.
The significance of the election of 1800, by the way, an absolutely knock-down, drag-out type of election.
Vicious allegations, perhaps as bad or worse than anything we've seen today, between the two parties.
In fact, the...
In the lead-up to the elections, both Jefferson and Madison working together had helped produce the Kentucky and Virginia resolutions.
And these resolutions were so incendiary that they were making, in a sense, threats of secession.
In fact, later in 1860, the Southern Democrats would appeal back to the Virginia and Kentucky resolutions and say, Even Jefferson and Madison were talking about the possibility of breaking away from the Union.
And what I find particularly interesting about the bitterness of all this and these resolutions is that it didn't matter to Jefferson and Madison one bit that they were protesting against A majority party that had been legitimately elected.
They didn't contest that. They didn't contest that Adams had won a free election, but they argued that the majority is no less capable of imposing tyranny than the minority.
And their argument was that the Alien and Sedition Acts, which were acts passed by the Federalist government, supposedly to deal with foreign threats, but nevertheless gave the government enormous power to arrest citizens virtually without pretext.
Kind of familiar, isn't it?
The argument of the Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions is that there was a usurpation of power by the legitimately elected government that was exceeding its constitutionally enumerated powers.
Now, this was a hard-fought election.
Both sides called each other names.
Both sides accused the other side of betraying the American Revolution itself.
But when the votes were counted and Jefferson won, we have something very interesting.
We have Jefferson now in his inaugural speech, and it has the following phrase.
We are all Republicans.
We are all Federalists.
So here's Jefferson, in some ways the divider prior to the election, who recognizes he has to become the healer, the genuine healer, not the Joe Biden healer.
I'm going to be promoting healing.
Arrest all those people!
No, it's Jefferson realized that there was truth.
In both sides.
And that ultimately, the country needed to come together, which it did.
Now, of course, later, one interesting question to examine is, why didn't the people who lost, why didn't the Democrats, the Southern Democrats particularly, but even the Northern Democrats who lost the election of 1860, do the same?
As the losers in the election of 1800, why didn't they just say, okay, we had a fair fight, Lincoln won, we lost?
So that's a very interesting question, but the reason I'm focusing on the election of 1800 is it is interesting to see how a democratic society can fall apart.
in 1860 it did, as it might now, as it might in our time.
But it's even more interesting to see how a democratic
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