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June 29, 2021 - Dennis Prager Show
09:54
Is Hong Kong Dying?
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Hoping you had a good weekend.
I think that this president has done tremendous damage to this country already.
However, if he does something good, I am actually delighted to note it.
I don't do it with regret, I do it with joy.
Because I care about America more than I care about Democrats or Republicans.
But he has been awful.
Nevertheless, he is poised, I hope it happens, to do something very, very important.
And that is bring out the 18,000, 19,000 translators and others who helped Americans in Afghanistan, out of Afghanistan.
Every one of them would be murdered, their family murdered, their wives and daughters very possibly, and their sons, raped.
Taliban are into boy rape as well.
The Taliban are a fascinating group.
To think that people believe in a God who looks favorably upon torture, rape, and murder, it takes your breath away, doesn't it?
To say that their God is not my God is to engage in massive understatement.
I have done a number of shows in that regard, and I'll get back to the Afghanistan issue and the president, on this issue of when people say they believe in God, what does it mean? on this issue of when people say they believe in And the answer is nothing.
I know nothing about you.
And I mean it literally.
I don't speak in hyperbolic terms.
I know nothing about you or your beliefs if you say you believe in God.
Nothing.
Do you believe that God gave the Ten Commandments?
That God created the world?
That...
Even those two things.
Do you believe in those?
If you don't believe God gave the Ten Commandments...
Then how do you know that God doesn't like what the Taliban does?
Right?
Why is your God any different from theirs?
So, this has been a staggering failure of religious people in not communicating what it means to believe in God.
I say it with love because they're my last hope.
America's religious people, but nevertheless, part of the reason there are so many young people who don't identify with religion is the fault of the religious, who simply didn't know how to make the case for religion.
Anyway, the president has, in fact, it is planning to bring to Guam 18,000, 19,000 Afghans.
I have talked about this over and over.
I don't think we should pull out of Afghanistan.
I see zero benefit to the United States.
This notion of we've been there X number of years, I find that to be as good an example of a non sequitur as exists.
We've been in Afghanistan X number of years, therefore we should leave?
If somebody can make that...
Explicit to me, I would appreciate it.
What that means.
To me, that is a perfect example of emotional over rational thinking.
But we live in the age of the emotional more than perhaps ever before.
And that would be an example of it.
Or my favorite line, you can't go into a place if you don't have an exit strategy.
You like that term?
Exit strategy.
Yes, I have an exit strategy.
There's only one exit strategy in war.
You leave a winner.
That's the only exit strategy there should be.
And yet people say it as if it actually means something.
So, let's see.
Biden says U.S. will evacuate Afghans who helped Americans.
Well, let's pray this happens.
And I salute President Biden for doing this if he does it.
Okay.
Barry Weiss, the wonderful Barry Weiss, female, in case you're not familiar with her, she quit the New York Times because she saw what was happening to this non-newspaper that has become a propaganda sheet for the left.
And she started...
Wouldn't you say liberal?
She was never left, right?
She was always liberal.
She has a wonderful website, barryweiss.substack.com.
When a free society becomes a police state.
Now you might think, is she writing about America?
Unfortunately, it would not be inapt.
Is there a word inapt?
Not apt.
It would not be not apt, but that sounds wrong.
No, it's about what is happening in Hong Kong.
It's another heartbreaker for me.
That was Margaret Thatcher's mistake.
I said it at the time and I love that woman.
She should never have given Hong Kong away to the Chinese communists.
They will never allow freedom because no leftist from Beijing To Columbia University allows dissent.
There is no example of leftists allowing dissent.
Liberals do.
Conservatives do.
Leftists do not.
So it was only a matter of time.
I knew this at the time.
I said so at the time.
But they had a 100-year deal with China.
However, there was a very easy way out.
We made this with a different Chinese government.
We didn't make it with the butchers of Beijing.
The largest number of human beings ever murdered by its own government was China.
And Margaret Thatcher gave Hong Kong back to that government.
It doesn't get worse than Maoism.
It doesn't get worse.
There are equally evil doctrines and governments, but it doesn't get worse.
So she's writing about what had happened.
By my light, she writes, the most important news event of this past week was not the New York mayoral primary.
It wasn't Bitcoin dropping below $30,000, and it certainly wasn't the new bipartisan infrastructure deal announced by President Biden.
It was the forced closure of Apple Daily, a pro-democracy newspaper in Hong Kong.
You may not have heard of Apple Daily.
I knew of it, but only vaguely.
It is, or rather it was, Hong Kong's version of the New York Post combined with William Lloyd Garrison's The Liberator.
A tabloid, yes, but also a voice for freedom.
Ever since it began publishing in 1995, Apple Daily has been a thorn in the side of the Chinese Communist Party.
Its commitment to democracy and freedom had everything to do with its founder, Jimmy Lay, L-A-I. It is not possible to do Lay's whole story justice.
In a column, someone should make a blockbuster movie.
But here is the CliffsNotes version.
Lei fled mainland China.
At 12 years old, as a stowaway on a fishing boat, he found a job in a Hong Kong sweatshop and eventually worked his way up in the garment trade.
Along the way, he encountered fellow garment workers in New York who introduced him to free market theorists like Frederick Hayek, Karl Popper, and Milton Friedman.
This is a guy who didn't have any formal schooling past the age of maybe eight, Mark Simon, who has been Lay's right hands for the last two decades, told me.
Those books started his real political awakening.
So this kid did not go to school after the age of eight and understood life better than 99% of the graduates of Western universities.
By the 1980s, Lay had built out...
I built out his retail empire in Hong Kong.
His company called Giordano after a New York pizza spot became a wild success.
But becoming rich wasn't what changed the course of Lei's life.
The massacre at Tiananmen Square did.
That's when he went from his economic and intellectual awakening to his political awakening, said Simon.
I don't want to be too crude, but Lei said, I hated the bastards.
I knew evil when I saw it, and they are evil.
Yes, if you can't call Chinese communists evil, if you can't call any communists evil, you're a person of the left.
The article is up at DennisPrager.com.
More when we return.
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