Bernie Sanders’s Cuba: Close but No Cigar
Mike Gonzalez doesn’t like to write about his family. “I like to write about ideas,” says the Heritage Foundation’s senior fellow. But when the 2020 race started turning into a socialism love-fest, he decided it was time to speak up. His family came from Cuba – and not the one Senator Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) describes.
“We’re very opposed to the authoritarian nature of Cuba,” the senator said at a recent “60 Minutes” interview. “But you know, it’s unfair to simply say everything is bad. You know? When Fidel Castro came into office, you know what he did? He had a massive literacy program.” For Sanders, it was par for the radical’s course. “Senator Sanders has a very long and consistent and sustained habit of embracing [and] singing the praises of the Castro regime," told Sarah Perry on "Washington Watch.” “And the Castro regime is just awful.” He ought to know. His family lived it.
Cuba was, he has written, “a fairly advanced country before 1959, which is why Europeans – like five of my eight great-grandparents – emigrated there.” But all of this, he explains, “has been crushed by 60 years of communism. No European or American in his right mind would immigrate to Cuba today.” Castro destroyed the culture. “He destroyed the country of my parents.” And now, Mike says, “Cuba is a basket case.” Why? “Because socialism has a perfect record of failure.” Africa, Germany, China, Korea, the Caribbean – they’ve all tried it. And the result wasn’t the rosy picture Bernie Sanders paints.
Mike’s grandparents lost everything. His parents, he says, lived in constant fear after Castro’s revolution, worried they’d be arrested for refusing to embrace communism. “All they wanted was to have freedom of speech and be able to offer my sister and me a religious education without fear of retribution. As an altar boy in the 1960s, I can tell you that practicing Catholicism took guts. I was eight or nine.”
“Did my father deserve to die from diabetes at 44 because he could not get the diet or medication he needed? Had he not walked out of the university and refused to teach law in 1961, he might still be alive. When he died in hospital, the only piece of equipment that could have saved his life was being used on a Russian diplomat; our father did not have access to it.
And all this human suffering, all these broken eggs, for what kind of omelet? For all the vaunted gains in literacy, Cubans today cannot read what they want, only what the party says.”
And yet, not only does Sanders praise the communist dictatorship of Cuba, “he’s praised the communist dictatorship of the Soviet Union and many other countries.” The fact that he could be the presumptive Democratic nominee says a lot about where we are as a country and how short our memory is on the murderous regimes Sanders praises. But, as Mike points out, for our young people, it’s not that they’ve forgotten – it’s that they’ve never been taught.
“You and I know very well that our children, the last generation, has been handed over to Marxist professors. The [Berlin] Wall came down 30 years ago, and they have learned nothing about the evils of communism. They have learned that America is supposedly hateful, and that we’re a structurally racist country, and all that – but nothing bad, really, about communism. Look, I think that we need to get across to the young is that a socialist system is not your mother doing laundry for you or giving you lunch? It’s going to take away your individuality and your freedom to do things. It’s going to tell you that you cannot have equality of opportunity. Things that Americans are not going to like.”
Originally published here.
House Dems Clash on the Free Way
If you’re wondering what Washington would look like with a radical liberal in charge, Thursday’s House hearing was a pretty good preview. Maybe you’re thinking we already know what to expect after eight years of Barack Obama – but trust us. As bad as the last administration was on religious freedom, those policies would feel like a love pat compared to the army of the new Left.
If there’s one thing Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) has made clear, it’s that House Democrats don’t want a gavel – they want an eraser. And the first thing they’d take it to is the U.S. Constitution. For years, liberals tried to play it coy on their ultimate goals. But now that they’ve gotten a lot of what they wanted out of same-sex marriage, there’s no point in hiding the rest of their agenda: destroying religious liberty. And at Thursday’s Oversight hearing, Democrats pointed out that they don’t take too kindly to the president getting in their way.
“The Trump administration,” Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) ranted, is turning the government “into an instrument of hostility towards LGBTQ rights…” Like his colleagues, he can’t stand the fact that this president has had the nerve to roll back some of the attacks Obama launched against men and women of faith. It’s not that Democrats don’t support religious freedom, Rep. Carolyn Maloney (D-N.Y.) tried to explain, it’s just that they don’t want people practicing it. If you want to exercise your faith, they argued, do it at church.
They took turns railing against the administration’s rules on conscience rights and faith-based protections, calling them an insult to people in the LGBT community. “Religious liberty,” the legal director of the Human Rights Campaign testified, “doesn’t mean that you get to engage in discrimination.” But just because someone doesn’t agree with the Left’s radical ideas about sex and gender doesn’t mean they don’t respect the dignity and decency of other people. The White House pointed that out in a statement to the committee, explaining that the president is just trying to “eliminat[e] unfair and unequal treatment by the federal government.”
Congressman Mike Kelly (R-Pa.), who’s been a huge advocate for leveling the playing field for religious groups, doesn’t understand why everyone can’t co-exist. “The faith community has deeply-held religious beliefs. The LGBTQ community has deeply-held beliefs. We do not discriminate against those beliefs – and we say if that’s what you choose, fine. All we ask is that [the government doesn’t] discriminate against somebody… because they don’t hold those same beliefs.”
But unfortunately, that’s exactly what the government has done. And the people who’ve suffered, Rep. James Comer (R-Ky.) points out, aren’t the LGBT activists. They’re the men and women of faith. “[W]hen Obama was president, [they] became a target. And now that President Trump is in office, he’s trying to right the wrong of the Obama administration with respect to faith-based organizations. And the Democrats don’t like it. That’s what today’s hearing was about.” To be honest, he said, “Over the last two years, it’s just become shocking to me how obsessed the Democrats are with [so-called] LGBTQ rights. And, you know, LGBT individuals have rights just like everyone else has rights. But what the Democrats are trying to do is create new rights, create a special category [that supersedes everyone else’s rights].”
And it’s creating havoc in medicine, health care, adoption and foster care, even places like homeless shelters. The church can’t even have something as simple as a drug rehab program, Rep. Comer said, without committing to an LGBT policy so radical that most of them couldn’t agree to. Homeless shelters, he pointed out, can lose their funding if they won’t put a biological man in with the other females. “It’s ridiculous,” Comer argued. “Our founding fathers would be rolling over in their graves if they knew that that was even a topic of debate in Washington. The president is trying to stop [it]. And the Democrats are crying, "discrimination, discrimination, discrimination’ – and it’s not!”
Unfortunately, he warned, “Democrats are going to continue to double down on their assault on religious liberties. And we’re going to just have to continue to band together and evangelicals are going to have to continue to be active and informed as far as elections go. And hopefully we can reverse this trend. I think President Trump’s gone a long way in reversing some of the excessiveness of the Obama administration. And hopefully we can win this war of ideology, because that’s what we’re fighting right now in Washington…”
Originally published here.
Wright Talks Media’s Wrongs
Liberal journalists may be part of the fake news crisis, but that doesn’t mean they all want to be. ABC’s David Wright made that abundantly clear on an undercover Project Veritas video that led to the correspondent’s suspension. Sure, he may have radical views (he openly calls himself a “socialist” in the footage), but even he sees the values in reporting the truth. Unfortunately for him and so many others, his bosses at ABC don’t.
No, David Wright doesn’t like the president. But he also understands that he’s a strong man that the Left hasn’t “figure[d] out how to challenge…” That was just one of the revelations caught on tape in New Hampshire last month. “We don’t hold him to account,” Wright says. But, “we also don’t give him credit for what things he does do.” It was a candid assessment of the state of journalism in America. “It’s like there’s no upside in – or our bosses don’t see an upside – in doing the job we’re supposed to do, which is to speak truth to power and hold people to account. And because of that, David says frankly, "the truth suffers” and “voters are poorly informed.”
Thursday, James O'Keefe, the conservative behind this latest video, joined Sarah Perry on “Washington Watch.” The bottom line, he said, is that “the media’s broken.” They’re pushing their own narrative, and Americans don’t trust them. “I’m not surprised by anything anymore,” James said, almost sadly. “It’s just a matter of what I can prove.” But the big picture is that most of the bosses in the media are more concerned about “covering their [backsides] than telling the truth. And that’s the problem.”
And nowadays, James laments, people shrug their shoulders and say, “‘Well, that’s just the way it is.’ No that’s not the way it is. That’s not the way it used to be. Reporters before the digital era… took their job seriously. Investigative reporting was… a full-purpose profession…” Now, he says with a sigh, the industry is set up in such a way that it’s almost completely incompatible with truth-telling.
So what do any of us do about getting accurate news?
“Well, the first thing that you do is that you don’t trust information that comes from these platforms. They’re giving you no reason to trust them. They’ve settled lawsuits with the Covington kids. They’ve squashed stories on Jeffrey Epstein. Their own veteran correspondents say their bosses don’t report news, that their prerogative is not to report information the public has a right to know. You hold yourself to a higher standard…
I would advise the American people, just stop believing the things that you see. It’ll probably improve democracy, because most of what you’re seeing is manufactured right now in television news. And don’t take my word for it. Just listen to the words coming out of… David Wright’s own mouth. And much more to come.”
Originally published here.
This is a publication of the Family Research Council. Mr. Perkins is president of FRC.
