March 3, 2021 - Epoch Times
14:50
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| A lot of what we're doing is canceling God. | |
| The cancel culture wants to take God out of everything. | |
| So I'm here with Bob Bunanwe at CPAC 2021. | |
| Bob, you are an owner at Goya Foods, one of the owners. | |
| And you know, the theme of CPAC 2021, of course, is America Uncancelled. | |
| You yourself have experienced some pretty significant cancellation or cancel culture. | |
| So tell me about that. | |
| Yes, it's great to be here with a lot of like-minded people who believe in God. | |
| And the canceling, I said something very horrific when I was at the White House on July 9th of 2020. | |
| I was there to give away two million pounds of food because our company was up and running courageously. | |
| All of our people, we never shut down. | |
| We had the best year of our life. | |
| But I used the word blessed. | |
| I said we were blessed as a country, and I said that to the president, to have a president, because we were blessed to be open and working and to be able to give back to our country. | |
| And that was met with so much fervor, negativity canceling. | |
| And I was wondering, because the Holy Spirit put that word on my lips, and how could we cancel God? | |
| And I've come to realize that a lot of what we're doing is canceling God. | |
| The cancel culture wants to take God out of everything. | |
| You know, we need a reason to get up in the morning. | |
| Goya kept working because we're an essential business, but all businesses are essential. | |
| You need to be able to get up in the morning for God, family, and work. | |
| They want to cancel God. | |
| They want to close our churches. | |
| They want to redefine the family. | |
| They don't want us to celebrate Thanksgiving together as a family. | |
| They don't want us to celebrate Christmas, Hanukkah, other celebrations and gatherings as a family. | |
| Our work. | |
| They want to put us out of work. | |
| They don't want to teach our children. | |
| And really where a lot of the issue is, is with the children. | |
| Because they're being so indoctrinated today with negativity. | |
| And we don't need to focus on the science as much as we need to focus on God. | |
| Goya stayed open safely, and we had our best year. | |
| States that opened, like Florida, Like Texas, like South Dakota, stayed open. | |
| Didn't have any more issues than states that were closed. | |
| The only difference is those states, like our company, staying open, had the best year. | |
| They're the ones that excelled in this cancel culture. | |
| Can you just tell me what actually happened after what resulted from this cancellation? | |
| How did this play out subsequently? | |
| Well, that's an amazing thing because once I said blessed, And that was unacceptable to the far-left cancel culture. | |
| So there were calls for a boycott. | |
| But many people in this country said, this is not right. | |
| We're going to buy Goya products. | |
| And this tremendous boycott was formed. | |
| The president actually supported our company because of what we were going through. | |
| They didn't want to be boycotted. | |
| Ivanka Trump held a can of Goya beans, and they said there was a clamor that, hey, a government official can't support a company. | |
| Oh, but wait a minute. | |
| A government official, AOC or the Castro brothers, they can call for a boycott? | |
| Oh, wait a minute. | |
| You're allowed... | |
| To boycott, but you're not allowed to support. | |
| It's a double standard. | |
| And so, actually, by the boycott, it became very successful. | |
| And I received a meme from someone that had AOC as employee of the month because she raised our sales 1,000%. | |
| That wasn't our number. | |
| It was that meme. | |
| So, a lot of people got a charge out of that, that a Latina... | |
| Puerto Rican would call to close a company, a Latin company, and put us out of business because we use the word blessed. | |
| It's horrific, and thank God that so many good people stood up behind us and said, no, we're not going to boycott, we're going to boycott, we're going to buy Goya products. | |
| And here I've met so many people and said, hey, we bought your products. | |
| For the first time, we kept our core customer and we got many new customers. | |
| So we thank AOC, we thank the Castro brothers and others for calling for a boycott. | |
| So you raised a number of actually interesting issues. | |
| One was, let's call it an attack on faith, I believe. | |
| I think that's one way we can characterize it. | |
| And the other piece is, well, just how society is dealing with coronavirus or CCP virus, as we call it at the Epoch Times. | |
| Presumably, a lot of these measures, and I know that certainly a lot of people believe they are, are To help people essentially not die, right? | |
| And so forth. | |
| So, you know, not all these measures are, at least ostensibly on the surface, meant to cancel anybody. | |
| They're meant to help lives, right? | |
| Save lives. | |
| What are your thoughts on that? | |
| Yeah, I got corona before I went to the White House. | |
| I'll be 67 next month. | |
| I had a fever. | |
| I felt congested in the morning, but I decided to get up and keep moving. | |
| I had heard of things like taking aspirin with lemon and tea and heating it. | |
| That's a blood thinner. | |
| Taking D3, zinc, Hydroxychloroquine. | |
| I guess it's too cheap of a medicine that, for some reason, they didn't want that to work. | |
| Rendezivir, there's other things that had happened. | |
| But what I did, and before I got it, because I was pre-diabetic, type 2, hypertension, And before all this happened, the doctor said to me, hey, we're going to up your medicine, your metformin. | |
| I said, no, I'm not going to go down that route. | |
| I'm going to lose weight. | |
| I lost 50 pounds by basically cutting out carbs, and I got healthy. | |
| So when I got the virus... | |
| I kept moving. | |
| I think the worst thing you can do is stop moving. | |
| It's like a cement truck. | |
| You stop that barrel and it solidifies it around your chest. | |
| I kept moving. | |
| I lost the weight. | |
| I got healthy. | |
| And besides being healthy, but let me tell you, our company kept working. | |
| We kept working safely. | |
| By staying open, we didn't have any more sickness or ills than those who stayed home and closed. | |
| To close down our society, our economy, is catastrophic. | |
| We stayed open. | |
| We were able to give back. | |
| We were able to have the best year of our history. | |
| And, you know, that's what President Trump wanted to do. | |
| He wanted to keep the economy going. | |
| He didn't want to close it down. | |
| Because if we had closed down, if the economy had closed down, forget about coronavirus, we'd all be dead. | |
| I mean, luckily there were enough businesses open to support us. | |
| That make our cans, our bottles, our labels, our carton, and our beans, our food products. | |
| And so the farmers. | |
| Every part of the economy, enough of it was functioning that we could survive. | |
| So we had to keep the economy going. | |
| And the states that did, you know, Florida, Texas, South Dakota, to name a few, they've done very well. | |
| And in the meantime, we figured out the science. | |
| But if we had closed while they figured it out, I don't know where we'd be. | |
| So what measures were you able to take for Goya Foods or, you know, presumably your CEO and your management and everything, what measures did they take, you know, to protect the workers, to protect the management and so forth? | |
| Well, from the beginning, social distance, cleansing, masks as soon as we could get them because they weren't available right away. | |
| You know, if you're Apple and you work from your home and on a computer, that's great. | |
| But we can't farm, we can't manufacture virtually. | |
| So we did social distancing, cleansing this, and of course we're in a food factory in some of our locations. | |
| We're all over the U.S. and around the world. | |
| And we followed the regulations, which weren't really established. | |
| But we took the worst-case scenario, the most rigid. | |
| If we had any cases, we had to notify the government and the Department of Health, etc. | |
| And we just did the best we could. | |
| Okay, wonderful. | |
| Let's talk a little bit about this, what you described as a cancelling of faith, I guess, or an assault on faith in America. | |
| Because this word blessed is what a lot of people reacted to, right? | |
| So what do you think is happening in a more general sense here? | |
| Well, you know, some call for the Pledge of Allegiance to say one nation indivisible. | |
| Now, what do they take out? | |
| Under God. | |
| So we can't be indivisible or united unless we're under God. | |
| We need a common... | |
| If we don't unite under God, what are we going to unite under? | |
| And God stands for love and unity, brothership, you know. | |
| And so by taking God out... | |
| Now, the second thing that happened as far as taking God out is the first thing they did was close the churches. | |
| You can't worship. | |
| And the synagogues. | |
| You can't worship. | |
| They kept other things open. | |
| As a commissioner, I went to Las Vegas, and the only thing opened was these big places where you can do drugs, pot, and other things. | |
| And yet... | |
| The restaurants were closed. | |
| The hotels were closed. | |
| I think it's close to 15 million people working in the restaurant business that were put out of work. | |
| And yet, we as an essential business can continue. | |
| And most of those 15 million people in the restaurant business are minority. | |
| Hispanic, African-American, all ethnicities. | |
| And so, there's a direct assault. | |
| On the middle class, on the working class, a direct assault. | |
| As a culture, as a human being, we're meant to be together. | |
| And by saying you can't celebrate Thanksgiving together, Christmas, Hanukkah, that's how they attack the family. | |
| You can't be a family. | |
| You can't gather. | |
| We're meant to gather as a human race and educate. | |
| They want to take away our work. | |
| And take away our reason for being. | |
| In the Bible, there's a gospel of the talents, that we're given these talents to produce. | |
| And if we don't... | |
| So if you're taking away our ability to produce, build things, you know. | |
| I've always said, or I've heard people say, I don't know where the saying comes from. | |
| But those are born to love and build and unite, and others to hate, destroy and divide. | |
| And we need to choose loving, building, uniting. | |
| There's too much... | |
| You know, World War II, Hitler, they built up a hatred of the Jewish people that made it acceptable to hate. | |
| Today, I think they're building up hatred against anybody who maybe supported President Trump or thinks one way differently than this cancel culture. | |
| So now it's acceptable to hate them, to put labels on those people as racist supremacists, white supremacists or whatever. | |
| And that has to stop. | |
| We cannot Any final thoughts before we finish up? | |
| Believe it or not, I was talking to a gentleman and I asked him, what do you think is going to happen around the election? | |
| He said, God spoke to him. | |
| I said, okay. | |
| God spoke to you. | |
| What did he say? | |
| Or what did she say? | |
| He said, the U.S. isn't ready. | |
| We need to suffer more. | |
| I said, wow. | |
| And why is that? | |
| We need to suffer to realize To what level of division and hatred we can go so that people can realize that we're heading down the wrong path. | |
| You know, it was said that, predicted that President Trump would bring this nation closer to God. | |
| And maybe by all this happening and us seeing what is upon us right now, It'll unite this country together and reject a culture of hatred and division and ferment a culture of love and building. | |
| Bob Unanui, it's such a pleasure to have you on. | |
| It's a pleasure to be here. | |
| You are the voice. | |
| We need to have that positive and faith-filled voice and hope for our future. | |
| I appreciate that. | |
| Thank you. |
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