Ep. 341 - Venezuela Is Bernie and AOC's Utopia
Summary
Venezuela descends into chaos as people starve and tanks crush protesters, but socialists in the United States, like Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, refuse to admit that Venezuela is their utopia, the logical conclusion of their awful ideas. We will examine how socialism ruined that country, and others. Then, Democrat senators try and fail to grill Attorney General William Barr over the Mueller report. Finally, academics in Great Britain declare pedophilia normal and natural.
Transcript
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Venezuela descends into further chaos as people starve and tanks crush protesters.
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But socialists in the United States, like Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez,
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refuse to admit that Venezuela is their utopia, the logical conclusion of their awful ideas.
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We will examine how socialism ruined that country and others.
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Then, Democrat senators try and fail to grill Attorney General William Barr over the Mueller report.
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Finally, academics in Great Britain declare pedophilia normal and natural.
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I'm Michael Knowles, and this is The Michael Knowles Show.
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This is going to be a very abnormal and unnatural show, discussing all of those things.
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Other things that are abnormal and unnatural are happening in Venezuela right now.
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This clip just came out yesterday, rightly horrified the world.
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A tank, a government tank, pulled out onto the street and crushed starving protesters in Venezuela.
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A military truck rammed into a group of protesters in Caracas.
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Just one of several violent clashes between security forces and thousands of anti-government protesters.
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This has been going on for weeks and weeks and months and months now.
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The tanks running over the protesters is socialism.
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This is the conclusion of what Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Bernie Sanders are offering.
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Luckily, America has a strong culture and economic and political heritage of freedom.
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So it's not as though Bernie Sanders would get elected and then the next day you'd have tanks running over people in the street.
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But given enough time and given enough success at implementing the agenda that they are proposing,
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the tanks crushing the people in the streets is the logical conclusion.
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Looks like violent clashes in the streets in Venezuela.
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Looks like the opposition leader down there, Juan Guaido, calling on the military to overturn the government there, the Maduro regime.
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It looks like CNN now being taken off of the airwaves by the government,
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which is proof positive that every storm cloud has a silver lining.
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Not everything is bad down there, but most things are very bad.
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Doctors have injured, or rather are treating 50 injured people right now just from those clashes yesterday.
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That includes a woman who was shot in the abdomen.
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Amnesty International is reporting systemic oppression throughout that country and for a long time now,
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So the Maduro regime will go in in the middle of the night,
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will drag people out who they think are a threat to their political stability or to their political power.
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They will take them out and they will kill them without any law, without any trial, without any due process.
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One-third of Venezuelans are estimated, according to Amnesty International, to eat one meal per day.
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Many Venezuelans go multiple days without eating.
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In fact, there were interviews among the Miami Herald and other newspapers that talked to some of these Venezuelans,
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and they will say they will just wait with hundreds and hundreds of people in bread lines at their churches
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Inflation, as a result of the government not cutting spending, of the government printing money,
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of the government over-promising and under-delivering.
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Inflation in Venezuela, do you know how high it's gone?
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Right now, I think inflation, well, in the 1980s, I think inflation in Venezuela hit about 80%.
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Right now, inflation is about 1.3 million percent in Venezuela.
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In January, inflation rose up to about 2.7 million percent.
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People forget now, because we have short historical memories,
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we forget that Venezuela was a very rich country.
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For most of the 20th century, Venezuela was the richest country in South America.
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In the 1980s, there was a huge spike in inflation.
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Not huge compared to today, but still it was significant.
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Well, one, Venezuela is largely dependent on oil prices,
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so fluctuations in oil prices do affect the country.
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Also because when all that oil money started pouring in,
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politicians and the government decided they could start buying off votes through socialism.
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Now, at a certain point in the 1990s, you saw GDP declining.
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Then, when the governments would decide to cut back on socialism,
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start liberalizing the economies, start allowing more free markets in,
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all of a sudden, you saw GDP start to increase again.
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The socialist politician, Hugo Chavez, campaigned and took power officially in 1999.
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I'm actually old enough to remember when this happened,
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and I remember all the left-wingers loved Hugo Chavez.
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I've been a newshound since I was like two years old,
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and I remember Hugo Chavez was the big hope of all the leftists.
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That guy, Sean Penn, the famous actor, loved Hugo Chavez.
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relied on these massive oil revenues that he was getting
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It's not as though he was cultivating new industries
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So he's basically buying off the people with cheap food.
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What he does is he seizes even more political power.
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So at this point, the only way, like any Ponzi scheme,
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the only way to keep this going is to take more and more stuff.
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So Hugo Chavez decided to nationalize companies and farms and factories.
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Now, nationalize is a really fancy leftist term that means steal.
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So his regime stole whole companies, whole farms from people, whole factories.
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As a result of this, by the way, ExxonMobil and CanocoPhillips left the country of Venezuela.
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So now you've got international capital is pulling out
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where this thug government is just going to steal your property.
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he outlawed private gun ownership all throughout Venezuela.
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If those people who are being crushed by tanks right now
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because they would be shooting the military and the cops and the thugs
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who are oppressing them and who are attacking them
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Maduro, his hand-picked successor, takes power.
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At this point, I actually almost feel bad for Maduro
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because the poison of socialism had run its course.
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The bill for all that free stuff that Hugo Chavez was giving out
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And at the same time, a drop in oil prices meant
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that the government couldn't even keep up the pretense of solvency.
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He could have shown that he was gradually willing to respect property rights.
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He was going to deal responsibly with his government.
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So, instead what he did is he just started printing money.
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Like, I love when politicians think they can just print more money.
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and very, very quickly, you get hyperinflation,
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and that revolution triggered the violent crackdown
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that you see from tanks rolling over citizens in Venezuela.
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It happened in other Latin American socialist governments.
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the majority of young Americans support socialism.
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only 45% of young Americans look favorably on capitalism,
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which is to say, the free exchange of goods and services.
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Young America is far more socialist than capitalist.
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Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.