The Megyn Kelly Show - What's Happening In Cuba and Hong Kong, with Antonio Garcia-Martinez and Samuel Chu | Ep. 132

Episode Date: July 21, 2021

Megyn Kelly is joined by Antonio Garcia-Martinez, author and entrepreneur whose family came from Cuba, and Samuel Chu, Managing Director of the Hong Kong Democracy Council, to talk about what's happening now in Cuba and Hong Kong with citizens fighting back against governments, as well as what's behind the protests in Cuba today, the extraordinary way Cuba regulates the internet, how the Democrats and Republicans approach Cuba today, China's crackdown of Hong Kong in the 1980s, what the world can do to help Hong Kong, what's next for Hong Kong, and more.Follow The Megyn Kelly Show on all social platforms:Twitter: http://Twitter.com/MegynKellyShowInstagram: http://Instagram.com/MegynKellyShowFacebook: http://Facebook.com/MegynKellyShowFind out more information at:https://www.devilmaycaremedia.com/megynkellyshow

Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show, your home for open, honest, and provocative conversations. Hey everyone, I'm Megyn Kelly. Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show. Today, what's happening in Cuba and why should you care? And by the way, what's happening in Hong Kong, because it's not totally unrelated, pushes for democracy in societies where the leaders, or at least those in control, are trying to stop it. And what are we doing to help, right? What is the United States doing?

We're going to get into all of it. Quick explainers. I think I confess these are two areas in which I haven't fully understood the history. And I love sort of getting up to speed on both of them in preparation for today's interview. So if you don't know much about them, we'll lead you through it. We's a tech entrepreneur and he, his parents are Cuban exiles and he was born in the United States, but has been very actively following what's happening in Cuba and can explain it all to us. This is the same guy. You may remember him. He was fired by Apple over this BS charge after the woke came for him. He had written something in his book that wasn't all that flattering about women in Silicon Valley. It was such nonsense,

right? So it's like another innocent victim of our crazy cancel culture. But he's on for something else today. And we're happy to have his expertise. And then we're going to be joined by Samuel Chu, who is he was raised in Hong Kong. He spent his childhood there before immigrating to the United States. His dad has been a leader of the pro democracy movement there. He's been a leader of that from over here. And his dad's been arrested. He's been under an arrest warrant from the Chinese government for pushing for democracy from over here. And his take on what the United States needs to do, whether we should be having the Beijing

Olympics in China and, you know, what the chances are for the push for democracy to actually prevail. So all of that in one minute. First, this. Antonio, hi, how are you? I'm doing very well. Thanks for having me on. Good morning. The pleasure is mine. OK, so let's just start with, can you get us up to speed on just a little bit of the history on Cuba? Because I think most Americans have heard generally of the Bay of Pigs and the Cuban Missile Crisis and Fidel Castro, but might not really understand why do we care about Cuba and

what the hell's going on down there, right? So like, I actually boned up on the history just before this interview, but just take us back to, you know, like the mid 1950s and where Cuba was then before Fidel took over. It's a great question because for some reason, Cuba's history has always been intertwined with American history. And for some reason, it somehow always ends up in the news. So, yeah, you know, Cuba was just to go back slightly, just a little bit more than 1950s, just one second. Yeah. You know, Cuba was one of the last Spanish colonies in the Americas. There was both a revolt against Spanish rule and the Spanish-American war that happened at the same time. It became a republic in 1902. It ran as a democratic country

for 50-odd years. There was a dictatorship in the 50s that definitely was not great. But Cuba, by and large, had a high standard of living. My grandparents and great-grandparents were actually Spanish immigrants. I'm a Spanish citizen. We're Spanish immigrants. Took Cuba from Spain at a time when that sort of thing made sense, which of course sounds ridiculous now, but at one point that was actually a thing. Cuba was very tied to the American economic system and all the rest of it. And then one of the most improbable things, I think, in 20th century history, there was a revolution and it went communist and Cuba became a Soviet satellite state, you know, in the very late fifties, early sixties. So the first half of the, of the 20th century, Cuba was more democratic.

I mean, I know that it was independent. The United States is like, here you go. Good luck. So did it, did it, was it, was it democratic for the 50 years? I mean, I wasn't alive then, so I can only tell you what, but I, but I was raised in the, in the bosom, so to speak to speak, of the Cuban exile world in Miami, and we were expected to have a full Cuban education alongside the American one. So, yeah, I mean, it was a democracy until about the 40s. Then this guy named Batista, who, you know, indeed was a dictator.

He ruled twice, actually. There was two dictatorships. There was a reversion to democracy, and then he took power again. And his dictatorship was a corrupt one and certainly nothing to be proud of. But, you know, the Fidel dictatorship that came after it was very different. And again, you have to think about it in the context of the Cold War, right? Having a Soviet client state 90 miles away from Key West is just a whole different ball of wax, right? So I think that relation, the fact that, I mean, of course, that was the case throughout the Cold War. I still remember I was raised in Miami. There was this thing called the Mariel Boatlift in 1980,

in which 125,000 Cubans came over on small boats. There was the rafter crisis in the 90s that some of your listeners might remember as well. And so now Cuba, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the end of the Soviet Union, is this bizarre anachronism, right? You know, it's, it's, I actually traveled in 2017 to do some reporting on the internet, in fact, for Wired Magazine. And, you know, I knew a lot about Cuba, was raised in Miami, which is, you know, kind of a suburban version of Cuba. But what I didn't quite understand or I'd never experienced was what it's like being inside a totalitarian police state, basically. One where an individual has no due process or rights against the government. It is totalitarian. We use that term, but it's a system that totalizes everything. There's very little outside of the state inside Cuba.

There's a little bit of free enterprise and capitalism around Airbnbs and what they call cuenta propistas, basically what we would call a sole proprietor, so small little businesses. But, you know, there's no, Cubans don't have like checking accounts. There's no, there's no associations outside of the official party. There's no large corporations. There is some outside investment. For example, I stayed at a hotel run by a Spanish hotel chain, but those, that's basically a lease that the government grants the Spanish company. They don't really own much of anything inside the island. But that's basically a lease that the government grants the Spanish company. They don't really own

much of anything inside the island. So it's not, I hate to make the illusion because it's such a very different country, but like the image you have of North Korea, of this sort of status system, that is what Cuba sort of is with just little bits of capitalism

here and there. So, yeah, I mean, back in the mid 1950s, you had this, you had Che Guevara, you had Fidel Castro, he became prime minister. And now, you know, boom, you're off to the races with Fidel at the helm. And between 1959 and 1993, they say an estimated 1.2 million Cubans fled to the United States. They understood that this was a regime they didn't want to live under, came the United States. And we've been sort of watching Castro Institute communism and nationalize all the businesses and so on ever since. And then 2008, his brother takes over, right? Fidel retires, Raul takes over. And now there's a successor after Raul, who doesn't seem as scary, I guess, as powerful as the Castros were, at least not as much of a dynamic figure. And you tell me what led to, because I think what happened with the

protests, you know, however many days ago it was, was a lot of people were surprised. They were surprised that the Cuban people would have the guts to go out because you really are potentially risking your life if you go out into the streets of Cuba and protest, but they did it. So what were the factors that led up to it? It's a good question. And by the way, I'm glad I'm glad you highlighted how many Cubans live abroad. I mean, something like 10% of the population lives outside of Cuba. And my parents, just in the interest of full disclosure, were among the many children that came in the 60s or their their parents, my grandparents put them on planes alone in the 60s to just get out of the country as quickly as possible. And since then, there's been a number of waves of, people tend to sort of think of the Cuban exiles in Miami as like a monolithic group.

But in fact, there's been several waves of it from, you know, the early 60s, my parents, the so-called Marielitos that came in the 80s, then the Rafters in the 90s and so on. So it's just a large number of Cubans living outside of the island. And as you state, one of the sort of hopeful delusions that many Cuban exiles had in Miami is that the moment that Castro died or gave up power, it would all go back to being how it was before, which, of course, as time grew on, became increasingly fantastical, right? What we're seeing, right, is that the Cuban state is a system. It's a monolithic system. And once the Castros gave up power, as you cited, the guy who's

in power now is a guy named Miguel Diaz-Canel. He's the first sort of non-Castro who has been head of state. You know, he's not, he's not, he's the first leader after the revolution. He was not part of the revolutionary generation. He wasn't there fighting in the mountains with Castro or anything. Age wise, he's probably, I don't know, my age or maybe in the maybe somewhat older. But the system took over in April of 2018. There you go. Right. And, you know, he's probably in his early 50s or something. You know, he he rose through the party ranks as as many did. And the state continues. Nothing.

There really hasn't been any real blips other than the Obama opening in 2017. That changed a little bit, a little bit more American tourism, this and that. But by and large, not much has changed in the state. The one thing that has changed, and I'll finally answer your question, about how the protests started.

The one thing that did change is the internet situation. That has changed in the past year in a radical way. And I think, so let's get into how the protest started. So not this past Sunday, but the previous Sunday in a little town called, well, it's more of a city, but San Antonio de los Baños, which is a provincial city, not particularly large or important, southwest of Havana, people just started basically randomly yelling at the Communist Party headquarters and that anyone who would listen, you know, freedom, we want vaccines. One thing to mention here is, A, the economic situation in Cuba is not good. It hasn't been good for a long time.

Two, the COVID situation is deplorable. The state claims that it's developed vaccines, but there functionally is no vaccine rollout in Cuba. And even though it's relative isolation meant that it didn't get hit by the waves that we all got hit by last year, it's getting hit by a wave now, basically. And so it's having its COVID crisis now with no vaccine. So that's part of what's impelling this level of dissatisfaction. But to get back to the internet thing, the one reason why this spread so quickly, and this would never have happened even a year or two ago, is someone uploaded like a 45- video on Facebook of the protests of this happening, of these just shocking scenes of random Cubans on the other of protests like this that you just, again, you just haven't seen in the past 30 years of Cuban history. Well, how did that happen? Because was Cuba just allowing more access to the internet

than it had prior? Up until about 2008, cell phones were actually illegal in Cuba. You could go to jail for having a cell phone. In fact, there was an American named Alan Gross, who was part of, he was visiting, I think, an NGO, brought some phones and gave it to Cubans. He actually ended up in jail for a number of years. So the Cuban government in general has not been pro open communication or pro internet. Smartphones are now legal. They're no longer illegal. However, internet as we know it, right, i.e. relatively fast connection that comes to this desktop computer or mobile does not really exist in Cuba, or at least not until very recently. So how does the average Cuban experience the

internet? Two ways. One, there's public access points at, you know, a random square inside Havana that'll have weak Wi-Fi, and it's not free. It's actually very expensive. When I was there, you have to buy these little scratch-off cards from the state monopoly. There's no private internet in Cuba. The state monopolizes the internet. The entity is called Edixa. And you buy this little card, you pay $4 for it, which in Cuba, so again, Cuba's strange. There's a local currency, which is what locals get paid. And then there's the foreign currency, which is worth real money. The local currency is basically worthless. But in local currency, the average Cuban makes something like $20 or $30 a month. That's really how little cash

or hard currency they actually touch. You can only survive in Cuba if you're somehow involved in the tourist economy or you get money from abroad. And most Cubans do try to do both. And so imagine spending $4, roughly a quarter or a fifth of your income for an hour of internet of weak Wi-Fi inside a public square. But but they do it right. Because that's how they contact, you know, relatives abroad, get in tune with the world. That's not the official narrative, et cetera, et cetera. So that's one way the other way, and this, this is going to blow your mind and your listeners minds in there's something called El Paquete, literally the package. And what it is, is they take basically a week of the internet. So like

all the most recent Netflix shows, whatever went viral on YouTube, European soccer, formula one, whatever, you know, a week's worth of internet content. And they actually copy it onto like an external hard drive or USB stick, for example, for your computer. And then they sell that and they copy that and they physically transport that all over the island. And your, your average Cuban who doesn't have access to a lot of dollars will buy it, you know, the internet for like a dollar for that week, plug it into his, you know, a cruddy laptop. And then that's, that's how he interacts. That's how he watches an episode of Breaking Bad or whatever. And they are tuned into that. They'll have watched The Wire and all that, like they're fairly tuned into global media. They're just interacting with it in a way that

sort of recalls, you know, us in the 90s carrying around hard drives or something. Right. Right. And so that was the state of Cuban internet until about 2018, which brings us to the current thing, right? So starting in 2018, and it was very slow to roll out, and it's still very expensive. So don't imagine everybody has access to this. But in theory, there is slow 3G data going to smartphones, right? And over the course of the past year, adoption has been relatively strong, at least for those in Havana who are early adopters, have the cash to pay for it, et cetera.

And so for the first time ever, right, I mean, this thing that has possessed our lives, right, for the past 10 years of mobile ubiquitous computing, right? You know, the world's eyes and ears are in my pocket and I can be in everybody else's pocket. That weird dynamic that has disrupted so much in the West has only hit Cuba like in the past year, basically. Like it just hasn't existed at all, right? And now, you know, given the economic situation, COVID, everything that's led to this protest, they're having the biggest protest they've had in decades in a, you know, 62-year-old one-party dictatorship with smartphones for the first time. And it's almost like some uncontacted population being exposed

to some new technology or some new pathogen or something. It's like, boom, it's just hitting it once. And then they see something so exciting on there, which is a push in their own country for independence. Right, right. Which they would never- Not independence, but just getting rid of this totalitarian regime. I don't know what we'll call it. Yeah, exactly. Democratic reforms. Right, exactly. And that's why it's so fascinating to watch it unfold in real time, because it's kind of like the past 10 years of our history happening in the span of weeks in Cuba. And again, it's the speed of it. And also

the difference between the narrative before, again, the state controls all in the Cuban constitution. And one of the posts that I posted on my stuff, like I actually quote the article from the Cuban constitution. There is no freedom of speech in Cuba. Like there's no, it's not possible, like even legally, I mean, forget like the legal reality and what they do. Like even legally, it's the case that the average Cuban doesn't have freedom of speech. There's no private control of media.

It has to be through the state, right? But through the constitution And so the the the sort of public narrative about cuba both externally and internally was completely controlled By the state it was it was basically impossible for one cuban to speak to another cuban without passing through state media And um, and so now that's been completely undone Right. And so the the speed of what's going on and and the delta between The sort of on the ground live stream reality versus the public narrative is just enormous. And watching it crumble, like you literally had, you know, influencers like Mia Khalifa trolling Dia Canel, the Cuban president on Twitter. Which again, we're kind of we're kind of used to that. Well, like that's that's that's what we've done for several years.

But that is she the one who got arrested on the air, like live on the air. Oh, no, no, no, no, no, no. Although that's, I'm glad you brought that up. That is, so that is as, as has happened, as internet is rolling out, as we have here, there's a whole, there's a whole set of influencers that exist in Cuba that have popular YouTube channels that have Twitter accounts with tens of thousands of followers, you know, that whole very online people, right. That is happening in Cuba as well. And indeed, there's this, she's Dina Stars, I think, underscore on Twitter. And she also has a YouTube channel.

She's not really political and orientation, like her channel is not really about politics in general. But indeed, she's a popular YouTuber. And as you said, she was giving a live interview to Spanish TV from her room room and state security showed up. I'm sorry, I'm laughing because it's just the absurdity of it, obviously. But, you know, she's live streaming on like a Spanish national TV show and state security shows up like goons and just like hauls her away. And she's like, by American standards, it's just so shocking to see something like that. But I guess by Cuban standards, they're like, yep, that's how it goes here. Exactly.

I mean, it's like it's like so much. I mean, you know, the Internet is like the body body cam on everything. Right. In the same sense that, you know, body cams reveal a lot of brutality and just lots of ugly things that happened that had always been happening. Right. But now we're seeing them. It's the exact same thing with Cuban oppression, because, I mean, there's this YouTube who got arrested. Fortunately, she got released a few days later.

So things were awfully well. But you can look at videos of, you know, the street goons beating people. You can see the Cuban government actually started showing up at night after the protests are over and actually seizing people they know that have been at the protests. I mean, that sort of that iron fist of oppression. Yeah, you can you can live stream it and see it now when they get Internet. That's the other thing you'll be asking. Well, isn't the Cuban government sort of trying to shut down all this? Well, they are. They will get to that one second. OK, sure. Pick up on what we think is going on with those protesters, which is a point of concern. But so when you say there's no freedom of speech in Cuba, I mean, how did how did that manifest?

Let's let's go back before this. Let's go back 10 years. You know, if you wanted to go down to the town square and have a conversation criticizing Fidel or Raul, you know, over a cup of coffee, could you? No. In fact, I'll tell you an anecdote, because again, me, kind of like dumb American, never lived in this sort of country, didn't quite understand it. I was having a coffee in a cafe in Havana talking to, there's a small, tiny number of independent journalists inside Cuba who have what we would call blogs, basically. And they do non-state journalism. There's still real restrictions on what they say. Anyhow, he and I were just talking about what it is to be an independent blogger inside

Cuba. And, you know, he was saying, you know, we blog and in some sense we bring accountability to the government and the democratic process. And me, like a fool, just blurt out, well, what do you mean accountability? There's no democracy here. This is a dictatorship. And he just stared at me. I had just uttered a string of obscenities and just ignored what I said.

Like what I had just said, one cannot say in a public setting. And he just continued the conversation as if I hadn't said it. It didn't happen. It didn't happen. It didn't happen. And so it's that sort of thing. Could it be that there's like a spy at the next table? The next thing you know, you get a sub-step.

Oh yeah, absolutely. Oh yeah, absolutely. I mean, the other anecdote that I also shared in a sub-step post is that I was in a party, social event, rum flowing, people playing dominoes, like chill, social atmosphere. Some little kid starts telling a joke that I'm sure he heard from his parents

about Fidel supporters. And they instantly shut him up so that he wouldn't incriminate himself and his parents by saying a joke, making fun of Fidel. Yeah. This is why, honestly, can I tell you something, Antonio? This is the first moment it's really dawning on me why people who have a connection with Cuba, either their parents live there or they live there as children, are the ones who are the most outspoken about this crazy culture happening right now in the United States saying, I have seen the extreme of this. Slow your roll. This is not the life we want to lead. Trust me.

And I realize it's an extreme, but I'm getting it now. I'm getting it. Yeah, no, I made that point in my steps. Again, nothing in the US is anything like what's going on in Cuba. But that feeling of sort of performative signaling, of ratting out your neighbor for the sake of public gain, of, yeah, you, that, yeah, you can feel that the notion that we have to re-architect society for some future utopic perfection. And to get there, we have to use these means. I mean, yeah, there's, there's definitely similarities there. It's scary. And, and we're not talking about, I mean, you could lose your freedom, right? You can get locked up, but there's not due process. You could really sort of get locked up and have the

key thrown away. And no one's really in a position to challenge the government to to fight for you. Yeah, no. I mean, one of the things you're doing again, it's just amazing to see this unfolding on Twitter. There's a there's a public list of what are called this about to see those disappeared. And what that means is, again, when you get arrested and often it's after the protest, like they've tracked you down and then you just arrest you to intimidate you. There's no due process. There's no bail. They will haul you away. You go to parts unknown. Your family doesn't know. They'll try to figure out where you are. And then you reappear a few days or weeks later. But there's nothing like a defense or like English common law like that basically doesn't exist. And that's how the regime works, by the way. To be not like if you want being disappeared and executed right? It's it's more the screws that turn in the oppressive system have been finely tuned over 62 years and it starts with an arrest

Maybe a beating if you get a little violent They have what are called act act on her polio acts of repudiation In which your neighbors are basically encouraged to show up and yell at you and throw stones and kind of ostracize you There's a lot of screws that they turn to get you there. You start losing your jobs. People are tweeting again. It's amazing. People are tweeting about it now. Like, yeah, I was at the protests and I lost my job or that or that YouTuber that you mentioned that we talked about Dina Stars. She went she got back to her apartment and she lost her apartment. The landlady said that you can't live anymore because the government shut up. You're out of here.

It's it's scary when you when you hear it like in real terms. So just to take a step back in 1996, the United States imposed this embargo against Cuba. And we sort of said, we're not doing business with you. And we're trying to pressure the regime to change, which hasn't worked out all that well. They didn't change. And things got really crappy for people inside of Cuba because of the policies of the government there. The United States wasn't going to help them out. They weren't going to do business with them. But, you know, there's a point Marco Rubio has been making all along saying that things are crappy inside of Cuba because of because of Cuba, because of the policies there, because of communism. And yet that Cuba keeps wanting to

blame it on the United States. Like if you would just do business with us, if you would open up trade the way Obama did, things would be different. And we're an easy scapegoat for them. But Obama was the first president to come along and say, let's try something different. Like, let's actually try to create a relationship with Cuba. And within, you know, two years, Trump took over. It was even shorter. Trump took over and reversed it because he was back to sort of know the embargo is the only way they're not going to listen to us. We're not going to change things. But the thing about the Obama time was it did it did help things in Cuba. And it showed the Cubans sort of what life could be like with a relationship with the United States. Right. So you tell me what how did that how what are your feelings about the embargo and then the brief

period in which we were doing business with that? Yeah, I mean, I know the embargo chatter in the U.S. is super important because, of course, it's the one lever that the U.S. government has. In some ways, I think it's probably asking the wrong question, but let's get into that. So what is the net impact of the embargo? You know, if you look at, for example, a lot of, again, what motivated originally a lot of the protests is the abysmal response to COVID, right? And that in Cuba, a lot of the conversation, I have a lot of contacts on the island, right? A lot of things they're asking for are donations of medical supplies to deal with the results of COVID, which the hospitals just don't have them, right? And so, you know, Cuban hospitals don't have antibiotics. It's not like all the antibiotics in the world are made in the United States and nowhere else, right? Cuba trades freely with every other country in the world, Europe, you know, Latin America, whatever, right? And it's good that you mentioned Obama, because indeed, he did shake up U.S.-Cuba relations. One of the things that he did was, I mean, the embargo is in place, but he made it such that food and medicine actually are not subject to the embargo.

And in fact, it was for a number of years after the Obama sort of thaw, there was actually some buying of Cuban food by the government. But again, they can buy, you know, they don't have to buy, you know, chicken from Tyson Foods. They can buy it from Brazilian and Mexican suppliers. And so it doesn't really change that much on the ground. You'll note that of all the rhetoric from all the protesters around the ground, almost none of them actually mentioned the embargo. It's just it's just not material. It doesn't matter.

Right. Like changing the embargo isn't going to really change that much in. Because that's what we hear from the leftists here in the United States. I mean, Bernie Sanders, AOC, they're very, very focused on the embargo and putting blame on the United States. Right mean, Bernie Sanders, AOC, they're very, very focused on the embargo and putting blame on the United States. Right, exactly. It's one way of kind of turning Cuba's problems into condemnation of U.S. policy. I think it's not going to be that impactful. I mean, the other thing is, and again, even so the Obama thing, right? Like, again, I stayed at an Airbnb when I was in Cuba, because again, you could do that at the time and you certainly couldn't before. And, you know, does it,

does it inject more dollars into the economy? Yes. I mean, does it help prop up the regime because they make money off of it? Of course it does. But that said, do some Cubans that wouldn't have contact with dollars before have it now? Almost certainly, yes. But, you know, Cuba has been open to tourism for 20 plus years, right? Like Europeans, again, Americans don't quite realize this. Europeans have been going, like when I was a college student in Spain, like your average young Spaniard would go there for like the cheap vacation the same way that, I don't know, you know, Americans maybe go to Baja or whatever, right? They would go to the party and hang out. So Western tourists have been going to Cuba forever and haven't changed

anything. I just don't understand, you know, do Americans bring like freedom in their luggage when they come, you know, they get off the plane in a way that, in a way that Europeans don't? Like, I just don't understand the transformative change that Americans having mojitos in Havana is really going to do. But that said, if you talk to some of these people, and again, some of these people are my friends who have local businesses that work inside the dollar economy and their argument, which I don't think is totally bogus as well. Yes, this helps the government. Yes. It's not going to be transformative. That said, we're creating sort of a middle class that's somewhat

capitalistic, but as this evolves, we'll clamor for power and be a factor in human society. And you know, maybe they're right. Maybe over the longterm, that level of opening is a good thing. I mean, my understanding is there are a few events that led to these protests happening, you know, yes, COVID a hundred percent% because one of the guarantees of the government has always been when it comes to healthcare, we got you. You know, there may be all these problems inside of Cuba, but when it comes to healthcare, you know, this is the one advantage of living in this kind of country

is you'll be covered and they haven't been. And it's come to Cuba in a massive way and, you know, people are dying. And the other thing is, first they were backed by the Soviets, then they were backed by Venezuela, you know, both basically collapsed. And so that backer has gone away. And, you know, now you've got, you've got the internet and sort of the power of information sharing in a way that, you know,

as you've been pointing out, has been pretty profound. But so they took, they took advantage of it, right? So the Cubans go to the streets, and we see this remarkable tape of, you know, Cubans protesting and yelling freedom. And it's like inspiring. It makes your heart sing. And then nothing. And then it's like stopped. And I was just saying to my team, because I'm like, where what's happened? Where are the rest of the protests in Cuba? Like what? You know, the Arab Spring, you kept going to Hong Kong. We see it day to day. It was like a day. And then they've been gone. And now there's no information. So what happened? Right. So the protests are definitely

less, I think, riotous than they were in the past. They're still ongoing. The problem is twofold. One, state control has come in such that, again, they're starting to put people in jail, starting to fire people. So that's repressive. The other thing is that one thing the Cuban government does is just turn off the internet. Since if you have a state control of the internet, what it does is it basically filters traffic to Twitter and Facebook. So if you, if you talk to a Cuban and I have through Signal, or if you use like Twitter spaces, this sort of social audio app, they're all connecting via VPN, virtual private networks. So they're connecting to another machine, which then connects to Facebook, which makes the filtering harder. And so the government is basically stepping in to shut that down. So you don't see the guy getting beaten up, or you don't

see, you mentioned the healthcare thing. People are live streaming from the hospitals and people are actually seeing that human hospitals are quite rudimentary and that the care is not particularly good. And so the government shuts down a lot of it. But I think you did put your finger on a good thing, Megan, which is broadly, and this is playing out to the 30,000 foot view, a lot of this online sort of protest movements, whether it be the Gilets Jaunes, the Yellow Jackets or Yellow Vests in France or Occupy Wall Street,

or they don't tend to coalesce into sort of conventional political movements that maybe we're used to in the past in which there would be some charismatic leader, a platform of demands, and there'd be a negotiation process with the state. Not that I think it would be even possible to do that in Cuba, but it just doesn't seem like a lot of these protests turn into that. It seems like more like you just heighten the contradictions between the public narrative and the reality and hope that the state sort of crumbles like what happens or seemed to happen in the Arab Spring, right? So I think the hope for now for a lot of the protesters is just,

again, heightening the contradictions both internally and externally, right? Like I know- It's a start, in other words, it's a start. Yeah, yeah. And you're absolutely correct that Bernie and AOC got up and were somewhat apologists for the regime and turning attention to the embargo. But as someone who's lived like in the US outside of Miami as a Cuban's lived like in the U.S. outside of Miami as a Cuban exile, and in some senses had to like try to bring a little dose of reality to the American Cuban discourse, right? The, you know, the level of irreality before these current protests was much higher. People, again, would clamor about the Cuban healthcare. It's a brilliant

socialist experiment. Oh, Bernie Sanders, the literacy program instituted by Fidel. It's a great place. Right. Although human literacy was instituted by Fidel. It's a great place. Right. Although Cuban literacy was always higher even for the revolution. But in any case, but now you can see the reality, right? It becomes much harder either for the Cuban government or for those who are sympathetic to the Cuban government in the United States to weave those narratives when you're seeing a live stream video of states goons beating up a minor, which got shared on Twitter a couple of days ago. It's very difficult. You were tweeting about this. There's a teenager.

There's a teenager, you know, who yelled something at the cops and they got him in an armhold and, you know, stuck him in the thing and put him in jail. Just that's just how it works. How do you defend that? Right. You can't. Well, what about it? So it's not just AOC and Bernie, but, you know, BLM made news this week when they they

remember the last week that they they blasted the United States for what's happening in Cuba, did not admit the failures of Marxism there and got some blowback for that. But then it turns out that one of our you know, one of our chief commentators in the United States, Nicole Hannah-Jones, who authored the 1619 project and her work is being pushed in schools. She was very, very pro Cuba saying it's it's very equal. It's like it's an example and equality between blacks and whites. We actually have this. This is as recent as 2019 in a podcast with Ezra Klein, who's now with The Times, too. Here, listen. Most equal multiracial country in our hemisphere, it would be Cuba.

Cuba has the least inequality between black and white people, any place really in the hemisphere that, I mean, the Caribbean, most of the Caribbean, it's hard to count because the white population in a lot of those countries is very, very small. They're countries run by Black folks. But in places that are truly, at least biracial countries, Cuba actually has the least inequality. And that's largely due to socialism, which I'm sure no one wants to hear. Oh, boy. Well, Nicole, yes. If you make everyone poor, inequality is indeed lower. That's right. That's exactly it. That's exactly it. Right. It's like

and even the mainstream press has admitted there's a piece in The Washington Post the other day talking about the plight of black citizens in Cuba. And it's, you know, Nicole Hannah-Jones is living in some sort of a fantasy world, thinking that they've hit perfect equality between the races there and that this is the place you need to go if you want to understand what true equality looks like. Anyway, I just think the reaction from the left here in the States has been kind of consistent with the reaction of the left Maxine Waters when Charlie Rangel was in charge too, Sheila Jackson Lee. They've been very pro Castro.

If you look back at their history over the year, over the years, and why is that right? Why is the left so in love with this, with this government? Well, I mean, for a long time, it had good marketing, right? I don't know how quiet to put it, but the sort of romantic figure of Che Guevara. I think Cuba, I mean, it's, it's odd, but I think from inside the American worldview, a lot of countries exist as kind of projections of domestic crises, right? And you see that in Israel-Palestine when they're trying to project a lot of American sort of work politics on the situation there. Or Cuba is another one of these things that serves as like a screen to project a lot of the internal debates that we're having that often have little to do with reality on the ground, but that serves as sort of a talking point around, it's basically a way for the left to say, oh, socialism can succeed. It can be socially and racially equitable. And here's the example, Cuba, of course, just nevermind all these live stream videos of people getting

beaten up or put in jail. And again, you can say that line when you don't have those videos, but I think now that Cuba, you can actually go to Twitter, you heighten these contradictions. So I wonder how long that narrative is going to hopefully how long that narrative is going to be able to survive. So what should happen now? Because with the they say hundreds of Cubans are now facing charges of inciting unrest. There are very, very real concerns about trials being held without due process. A lot of these protesters can't even get defense lawyers who would actively be who would be independent and actually be able to represent them. They say most of the folks who have been arrested are young people from the poorest

corners of the country. That's so reports the Wall Street Journal. As you point out, the government's cut the internet. They've cut phone services. They've deployed what are called rapid reaction brigades, police and Communist Party militants to take back control. We got some 500 people arrested right now, although we don't know the full number, to be honest. And these folks are being held without means of communication. It's like it's a true crisis. So what should the United States be doing? Marco Rubio's had some proposals of, you know, trying to help them out with the Internet, the phones and so on. What should we be doing short term and what the hell can we do long term to help? Yeah, no, it really is a crisis. I mean, one of the things that you're doing on the

internet, by the way, is keeping that list of 500 plus people who are this up out of sea that were just kind of gone. And again, it's amazing that the internet can do that, that I was actually sent a link to like a Google Doc, in which there was all the names with all their particular details saying when they disappeared, as a way to sort of centralize it, because again, otherwise, there's nobody holding the government to account. Again, another way that the internet is sort of opening things up in Cuba. So yeah, what can we do there? I mean, there's a lot of proposals, right? Everything from military, diplomatic and whatnot. I think one of the most interesting proposals, in my opinion, Florida Governor DeSantis actually sort of posted a sort

of open letter to the Biden administration saying the federal government should help the Cuban people get internet. FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr, who I interviewed actually in a podcast recently, kind of echoed those remarks. And I think they're right. I think the internet and open communication and freedom of speech to a single party dictatorship is probably the most disruptive possible thing you could do. And unfortunately, the Cuban government, and the Cubans are very resourceful, as I mentioned, about trying to get access to it in various ways. But if they just there's there's literally one or two C cables that actually go to Cuba. If and that's it. There's no other way to access Internet. If the government turns those off, that's it. It's over.

And so I, you know, I, the technology exists apparently in during, oh, sorry, during Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico, when, you know, Puerto Rico had big interruptions in its communications. There was this thing called Project Loon that Google funded for a while, which was these balloons that actually had antennas on them, which I know sounds like the most, the most weird contraption, but it actually works. You can actually beam the equivalent of 4G sort of cell data over large, you know, we're talking dozens of miles of territory using balloons. And so a lot of the proposals are around that. Like, can you imagine having, you know, internet balloons or, you know, a lot of companies have actually worked on this. Not as crazy as it sounds.

Facebook had a company that would actually beam internet from solar planes. And a lot of companies have, you know, a lot of private companies have actually done work in this to try to sort of fill that last mile gap of broadband to places that are really off grid. In this case, though, it wouldn't be places that are like, it's not Antarctica or whatever. It's a place that is connected, but chooses to turn itself off due to the government.

And so, and again, this isn't that strange. One thing people may not realize since 1983, the US has funded what's called Radio Martí, Radio Martí, and TV as well that basically beams TV and radio to Cuba. And, you know, during the Cold War, actually the Voice of America, which is the American sort of PR wing, started in 1947, transmitting to the Soviet Union, you know, unfiltered news to those behind the Iron Curtain. So the U.S. has played a role in getting open information to people behind Iron Curtain's various forms. And so this is sort

of in keeping with that. So I don't think it's a question of historical precedent or technology. It's really one of political will. Here's the, you know, $64,000 question. Why should Americans care? Ah, good question. Well, I mean, I know it might sound a little cliche and patriotic, but if Americans care about freedom and democracy abroad, they should care about 10 million people who still live under the communist yoke, just 90 miles away from U.S. territory. So for that reason, there's a huge human exile community in the United States who all vote quite actively in Florida, one of our largest electoral states. That's another thing to think about it from the, just from the hard-nosed political point of view. And it's the

right thing to do. I mean, I don't know quite how else to state it. I mean, it's free internet, free communication, engage with the world. I mean, who could be against that, right? Why shouldn't the United States make that possible to a country that's survived 62 years of dictatorship? Yeah, we're not talking about sending troops in. Right. It has been interesting, though, I have to say, to see the DHS chief come out and say, oh, Cuban immigrants, not you. Don't come here. This is this not an option for you. Right. It's like a very different sounding message than we've heard from the Biden administration when it comes to immigration. But, you know, the more cynical analysts might say those are all future

Republicans. They don't want them. Judging from the last election, that's that's very possible. Which is interesting as a side thing, right, because the way that the Cuban government has typically dealt with this in the past and there's been protests in like 94, 1980s, I mentioned, is by opening the sort of spigot to the United States and letting Cubans go. But since Obama changed the wet food, dry food policy, that's no longer possible, right? They won't actually be welcomed in the US. And so the Cuban government can't sort of play that card. So in some sense, they're kind of stuck. They're kind of stuck. They can't, they can't have Cubans fleet up to Miami. And they can't quite keep the internet off forever. Yeah. Well, I love the idea of the

balloons. We'll continue to follow it. It's, it was inspirational to see all these Cubans in the streets with American flags waving the stars and stripes because it stands for freedom. It stands for freedom. You know, while the Americans here, you know, folks on the far left are spitting on it and saying it's a symbol of oppression. And it's like, oh, my gosh, how can it how can this group of, you know, foreigners get it? And this group of Americans not sad. Yeah, I mean, those who would spit on the American flag, I invite you to spend a week in Cuba living as a Cuban. And your thoughts about the nobility of the United States might change after that experience and realize that the United States is a magical country in many ways. My parents and grandparents were always very grateful for the welcome they got here after fleeing Cuba.

I'll bet. Antonio, thank you so much for coming on. I appreciate your input. Thanks, Megan. Thanks for having me on. Up next, Samuel Chu on Hong Kong and what's happening there and why you should care. By the way, it relates. You can see the similarities in what's going on in Cuba right now. Stay tuned. Samuel, hi, how are you? Good. Good morning. Good. Thank you for being here. So let's just start with a brief history of Hong Kong, because I'm not sure everybody understands how it was under British control for so long, and then it had to go back to China in 1997. How did that come about? Yeah, I think that's actually really a great starting point. Hong Kong was actually ceded

from China to Britain after the Opium War. And it was basically given over as a 100-year lease, for which that the territory, particularly the Hong Kong Island and part of the new territory, which is known as Kowloon now, was given over, controlled to the British government. And so for really a century, it was a British colony. And it was really until, it wasn't until the late 70s and early 80s where conversation and negotiations started between China and the British to say, well, what is gonna happen to the future?

And eventually after much negotiation, in 1984, what is known as the Sino-British Joint Declaration was signed, where Hong Kong was going to be turned back over to mainland China in 1997. And the agreement then was that Hong Kong was going to maintain this high degree of autonomy that it has now been enjoying under British rule, with all the freedoms and basic rights that really people in the mainland did not enjoy. But the agreement was that after 1997, for 50 years, everything was going to remain unchanged for Hong Kongers. And that deal was ratified not only by the Chinese government,

not only by the British government, but it was ratified by the UN, as well as many other countries, including the US, expressed its support. And so that's how it was turned back over from a British colonial state territory back to the control of China in 1997. And obviously, as we've seen in the last year or so, a couple years, that agreement, the joint declaration that really was supposed to protect the autonomy and freedoms of Hong Kongers has now been eroded and broken. Yeah, it's not worth the paper it's printed on. They said one country, two systems. There was concern right from the get go about whether that was sustainable when you're talking about China, which is a communist country, and Hong Kong, which was democratic. I mean, you tell me I've never been there, but I've been told it largely resembles the United States or

did before all of this, and Great Britain, you know, freedom of the press, fair judiciary, the ability to protest. What was it like before 1997 when control was handed back to China? I think that, you know, for, you know, I grew up in Hong Kong, I was born there. And even though Hong Kong was never fully democratic, meaning that they have never had the full full universal rights to vote for their own leadership. After 97, some part of the legislature was voted on by people in open elections, while others were not. And so in a way, the political system has never been completely open. But as you described, Hong Kong for generations, for decades, have enjoyed, as I was growing up, the freedom of the press, the freedom of assembly. For 32 years, actually for 30

years, Hong Kong was the only place where on mainland soil of China, people were able to openly commemorate and remember the June 4th Tiananmen Square massacre in these rallies of hundreds of thousands of people where the right to protest and free speech was freely practiced and protected. And it's also the same reason why the city enjoys such a top status as a financial hub, as a free business hub internationally. All of those things have now been wiped out. And I think that it's exactly as you said. This actually, in a way, is unprecedented because we are used to seeing cities and states and countries being sort of kept under repressive regimes. We have never witnessed a city of 7.5 million people having every freedom taken away and having all the institutions and

rights reversed over such a short period of time where they have enjoyed it. Jay Norlinger of National Review had a piece, which is great. He's always worth reading. And the subtitle was, The Great Free Vibrant City Was Promised 50 Years of Autonomy. It got less than half of that allotment because here we are, you know, 24 years later or so on, and China's got full control and no one's helping. It just seems to me that the United States doesn't have the appetite to interject itself into this fight. There seems to be a collective shoulder shrug because China's so economically vibrant and important to world trade. And so no one seems to be helping the people of Hong Kong. But let's just jump back to your story so people can understand. So you grew up there. You're 42 years old,

as I understand it. And what was it like as you led up to 1997, understanding that this transfer in control was about to happen and also understanding that China's word was probably not very trustworthy? Yeah. So I was actually born in 1978. I'm 43 now. And I, when I was growing up here, I mean, in Hong Kong, I remember actually always thinking that there's this tension, which I think is a really important point for people to understand that we didn't also, you know, we also didn't get freedom completely a democratic system under colonial rule. But what we did have was, you know, never having to be afraid of speaking our minds and never having to worry about our basic freedom and rights being infringed on. I remember the early days in 89, I participated along with my father and my family on the first million Hong Kongers

march and protest in Hong Kong in support of the student protests in Tiananmen Square in 1989. And when they won a hunger strike wanting to push for political reform in China, the democratization of China, and when the massacre happened, I remember just the citywide devastating feeling of just how could this happen? And the immediate fear that people had of if this is what's happening in the mainland, what is going to happen to Hong Kong? And I remember, I think that leading up to 97, and I actually actually left in 1990 but even in the 80s and in the early 90s you saw scenes of people families with all their gatherings at the airport fleeing many of them going to the UK to the Canada here to the US and that's those scenes

are actually unfolding again today if you go to the U.S. And those scenes are actually unfolding again today. If you go to the Hong Kong International Airport today, every weekend you see pictures of families with everything that they can carry with them, getting on planes, saying goodbyes to their loved ones, because they know that they're leaving, and this time they're not coming back. And so I think that the fact that the pro-democracy movement that was,

has been so central and vital for the last 30 plus year in Hong Kong, a movement that my father have led, a movement that I have participated. And now today, almost every one of those leaders of the pro-democracy movement are either in jail, house arrest, living in exile, or just being essentially stripped of their political and personal rights to speak out. And that is- Let me jump in and ask, how did it start, right? Because China was supposed to give

Hong Kong 50 years from 97. And it seems to me that little by little, they started seizing more control. It started to look more authoritarian over there. And while there were protests here and there by the folks in Hong Kong, there wasn't much they could do. I mean, China, when it wants to control something, is going to control something. And they're really not apologetic about their strong arm tactics. But you tell me how it manifested bit by bit. Yeah. And within that deal, as you said, in the 50 year no change deal, in addition, there was also actually steps that were promised to Hong Kongers about democratization in Hong Kong, meaning that by 2010 and 2012, there were supposed to have been universal

voting rights for every Hong Konger to choose their own chief executive, their own executive leadership in Hong Kong. But leading up to that, not only was there this unease about if they were going to maintain even a status quo, China already, actually, by the 2010, have reversed its stand and said that we're not going to do any of this democratizations and voting. We're not giving you any of those rights. And that was actually what spurred on the 2014,

what is known as the Umbrella Movement. My father happened to be one of the organizers. And your dad helped lead that, right? Exactly. My dad actually called for and helped organize the largest civil disobedience protest in Hong Kong history at that point to say that this is something that you promised us. Again, you have broken that promise. And so for 79 days, I think it was, and I spent the first two weeks of those days on the streets with hundreds and thousands of Hong Kongers. They took over the financial district and they said that this is the promise that you broke. And this is something that you represents this larger agreement and promise that we do not think that you will hold to.

And it was clear that China, even at that point, have said that what agreement, whatever the paper that is signed on is now a historic document. It's worth nothing. And that really, I think, became the genesis of really the latest wrap. And then actually my father and others were prosecuted for the Peace War protests in 2014. By the time they were convicted and sentenced in 2018, China has used the Hong Kong government to propose another law that says that if you break the law in Hong Kong, we are going to preserve the right to extradite you into the mainland to be tried under our system that nobody wants to be tried under.

No, that's not good. known as the En Tais extradition protest, in which a million Hong Kongers and then two million Hong Kongers came out to the street and said that we're not going to allow you to infringe on the justice system of Hong Kong. We do not want Hong Kongers to be extradited. Imagine if my dad, you know, who went through the trial in Hong Kong, I sat there in the courtroom

for the crime of organizing a peaceful protest was sentenced to almost two years. If that was to take place in the mainland today, I have no doubt that they would have gotten life sentences. Wow. Wow. And even you, so you, you left Hong Kong, you're, you're, as I understand it now, you're an American citizen, but you went back for the protest. Your dad's, I guess, still there and, and active politically, but even you over here trying, I understand you, you, you co-founded this group called Occupy Central, um, or your dad did, but you, you co-founded your own group that's pushing for, um, you know, democratic reforms there and push back against China. Even you got arrested or that they've tried, they want to arrest you.

Actually. So I, uh, been, you know, as you said, I've been going back and then I actually was there in my dad's trial. And then about a little over a year ago, China, in response to, I think, both the protests on the ground, but also overseas efforts like mine, implemented what is called the national security law. So there's nothing about national security, really, about this law, except that it gives it supreme power in Hong Kong. And within there is what is called Article 38. And Article 38 basically says that anyone, anywhere, even if you're not a Chinese citizen or Hong Kong resident,

if you say or do something that is deemed to be threatening to the party, to the Communist Party, or to the regime in Beijing and in Hong Kong, that you violate and could be charged under the national security law. And so that was implemented on July 1st or June 30th last year. And about a month later, I was actually sitting and sleeping in my home in LA, actually, where I was living. And I suddenly woke up to hundreds of messages on my phone on July 31st and August 1st, the day after. And it turns out that the Hong Kong government had issued a rest warrant under the national security law to come after me, to target me for the crimes of colluding with foreign powers. And my immediate reaction was, well, first of all, I was actually sleeping.

So I was just waking up. I remember I actually fell asleep watching Law & Order. And it was ironic that I woke up a fugitive. I was actually sleeping. So I was just waking up. I remember I actually fell asleep watching Law and Order, and it was ironic that I woke up a fugitive. And when I woke up and I read the actual charges that were being levered against me, I thought to myself, what foreign forces? I am an American citizen. I have been an American citizen since 1996.

I created and founded Hong Kong Democracy Council to lobby and advocate my own government. And so that was really the preposterous, but that is the way that the Communist Party in China works, right? That's how strong arms they are. They're far reaching. They believe that their reach is, you know, there's no limit and that they can actually simply go across oceans and across the sea, across the airwave. And I will just, you know, I probably should have told you this disclaimer by talking to me, they can probably arrest you for violating the national security law. Now, good luck with that.

I had a big argument with Mark Cuban about China and his support for China and so on. And honestly, I have no idea whether it's related, but like that week, you know, those calls that you get from, you know, Chinese rebel rousers that come on your phone all the time. I mean, an explosion every minute it happened on my phone. We had to put a special mechanism on the phone to block all of them. But I thought, could this be unrelated? I don't know. It's just after very publicly going after his support for China, even just that small little harassment on my phone ratcheted up exponentially. I cannot imagine what it's like to be someone like you. Up next, what is life like on a day-to-day basis in Hong Kong right now? And should the

civilized world have done more to stop this deterioration? We'll get into that. But first, we're going to bring you a feature we have here on the show called Asked and Answered. This is where we answer some of our listener mail. Steve Krakauer is our EP, and he has got the question today, which is, who is it from, Steve? Yeah, Megan, it's from Ginny Johnson, who emailed us at questions at devilmaycaremedia.com, where we continue to get lots of great questions and we'll answer them right here on the podcast. This one is interesting. She says she's a super big fan, listens to every show, sometimes two or three times because you give us so much information. I like that. I don't know if that counts as multiple downloads for us, but we'll take it. With that comes my question. She says, are you worried that YouTube, where we will soon be putting some clips, will pull or block your content as they have so much for Steven Crowder and others? Many of the topics you've covered, albeit true, would not have survived the fact checker, she says. Thank you for that. I'm not worried. I mean, I, I think they probably

will at some point. Maybe, I don't know. I think I have a good relationship with YouTube and I think they understand what kind of journalism they're going to be getting from me, but that doesn't make me immune. So I, I'm a little less worried than I think most people would be just because I, I actually have a good relationship with them. However, the reason I'm really not that worried is because a couple of things, number However, the reason I'm really not that worried is because a couple of things, number one, as of September 7th, we're going to be doing the show live on Sirius. So that, you know, the genie's out of the bottle. YouTube may try to censor it, but it's already out there. It's, it was out there live. So there's only so much YouTube can do.

You know, the message is already out there. People want to hear it. Same thing with the podcast. You know, the podcast is available and not censored by Apple or anybody else. And it's there. So what, what good does it do for Apple or for YouTube to go in there and start slicing and dicing product commentary journalism that's already available to millions and millions of people, right? It's doesn't make a whole lot of sense. Having said all that, I understand they have the fact checkers and their fact checkers sort of automatically, they have a system that automatically flags certain content. And if you get flagged, they demonetize you. That's what happens. You get put in sort of a jail, YouTube jail for a few days while they check it out and see whether it was,

it's a claim that they can allow. I think I would pass all those tests. So if it's a matter of dollars and cents, I'll suck that up, you know, for the for the opportunity to be on YouTube where a lot of my fans are. I mean, there are a lot of people who consume their news via YouTube. It's not ideal. I don't like it, but I still think it's worth getting on there, even if I have to deal with the hassle of their automated fact checking system. So all in all, I think it's a worthwhile place to be and place to go. And I think, you know, we don't surrender these battles by just saying we're out, we have to get in there and fight them. You know, I do see it happening. Stephen Crowder, who I really love. And I feel for him, because he's been proven right on so much of what they've

tried to censor. And there's no apology after the fact. Now he's, you know, provocative, I think he's definitely more provocative than I am, but who's to say what's provocative these days, right? It's like, I've made many comments that I thought were pretty banal that then wound up becoming national news for days. It's like the woke media will decide and leftists who control these platforms will decide what's controversial. Meanwhile, people of reason are stuck sitting there saying, what? What? Right? So we just have to keep churning out production and trusting that the audience will find it when and where they can. And if YouTube is overly censorious, you'll just get it live on Sirius. So you'll get it from the podcast as you do now. And I'm grateful to have you as a listener.

And also kind of curious about when we do go on so many platforms, live on Sirius, available on YouTube, still taped on the pod. Where do you think you'll get it? Like, where do you guys think you'll choose to take in the show? Which of those forums is most interesting, user-friendly and attractive to you? Let us know by subscribing to the show and giving us a five-friendly, and attractive to you? Let us know by subscribing to the show and giving us a five-star rating and then giving us a comment in the comment section so I know what you're thinking. And thank you for the comment. So Steve, there are many ways

to write in your question to the show. There are. Yeah. You can keep emailing us at questions at devilmaycaremedia.com. We look at those every day and start gathering those. Or you can reach us on social media. So Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, at Megyn Kelly Show. Feel free to throw questions over there. We'll gather them up and put them over to Megyn. Awesome. And now, back to our guest in one second. Can we just spend a minute on this July 2020 national security law? Because while their authoritarian power grabs took place before that, between 1997 and 2020, that seems like just a shocking, shocking power grab to me. Xi Jinping then issued a warning against the growing calls for separatism at that time and said, this is a quote, any attempt to divide China will end in body smashed and bones ground to powder. I mean, imagine imagine a leader in the United States saying something like that. Right. The law criminalizes secession, subversion.

What does that mean? Right. Very broad terrorism, collusion with foreign forces. That was your alleged crime. It gave Beijing unprecedented power over daily life in Hong Kong, made it easier to punish protesters, reduced the city's autonomy and was dubbed the end of Hong Kong by critics. to look identical to almost China. Films were canceled. Citizens started scrambling to delete their Facebook posts, newspapers, independent newspapers closed. Protests were squashed. Arrests of activists all over the place. Warrants issued on foreign activists. More than 100,000 people were arrested for crimes like, quote, uttering seditious words. The police became tools of the state. I just feel like, was that the before and after moment? Yeah, I think that what had happened in the national security law, and actually it's kind of interesting because when they were proposing it, you have to remember that this law,

the implementation of it actually broke the Hong Kong city constitutions and Chinese law, because it was implemented without any participation and input from the Hong Kong legislature or people of Hong Kong. They stopped pretending, right? China stopped pretending that they were even relevant. Yeah. I mean, I understand that people in the U.S. sometimes get frustrated about our process of democracy, but imagine if we didn't get the debate and then our elected leadership or anybody who's in government did not get a chance to read the text of the national security law. I actually read and finally saw the text in Chinese for the very first time the minute before it was implemented and enacted in Hong Kong. And that was how the law was brought into being. And at first,

they made this propaganda claim that said, so we're only going to use this to go after a very, very small group of rabble-rousers of the people who are just the problem. And what immediately became clear, and what we all knew all along was that this was going to become then the one supreme law of the land. You described the way that it is used. And I think it's important to even point out, I think you might be familiar with a good friend of mine, Jimmy Lai,

who was the owner and publisher of the largest opposition paper, Apple Daily. But I think people have to remember, he's not just a newspaper man. He is the head of a multimillion-dollar corporation. That was essentially shut down. He has been in jail since December. He has not actually been convicted.

Well, he has been convicted on lesser crime, but he is essentially kept indefinitely behind bars. And while that is happening, they have frozen his assets. And then just a month and a half ago, they raided his newsroom for I think a fourth or fifth time this year, froze their operating account, told every bank in Hong Kong to not do business with them, and then essentially forced them to close down a company, a multi-million-dollar media company, was essentially shut down under the NSL overnight. What happened to Apple Daily can and will happen to American companies, to international corporations,

because now you're in that territory of totalitarianism where they can, whatever they say, it doesn't matter if it's your personal freedom or the rights to everyday business transactions those can be criminalized under the national security law and for the first time under again as I said for 30 years Hong Kong was the only place where people could openly protest

and every year they met together thousands of them to commemorate what happened in Tiananmen Square for the last two years those have been banned. And now effectively in Hong Kong, any gathering publicly, there was a grandmother who actually tried to take a solidarity protest walk during the June 4th

and then the July 1st turnover, handover time. She was arrested for illegal assembly while she was marching and walking by herself. And that's the kind of total crackdown and repression that we now see and people are living under in Hong Kong. Yeah, the Biden administration came out, Biden came out and said, after Apple Daily was shut down, it's a sad day and and also warned American businesses, you as you just pointed out, you could be next. You know, you need to understand where Hong Kong's going. And the Chinese responded by saying this will be responded to strongly. You know, you're not even allowed as the U.S. president to to issue warnings to

American businesses about them being next. I want to spend more time on Apple Daily in one second. But to your point, The New York Times had a report recently that talked about the status of things there now, having gone and done on the ground reporting. And this is this is I'm quoting now. Neighbors. This is in Hong Kong. Neighbors are now urged to report on one another. Children are taught to look for traitors. Officials are pressed to pledge their loyalty, meaning to China. Police officers have been trained to goose step in the Chinese military fashion, replacing decades of British style marching. And again, back to that Jay Norlinger, he writes today, Xi Jinping is presiding over the

nastiest, most oppressive period since Mao's cultural revolution. So my question to you is, when you look at, you know, all this, could and should the civilized world have done more to stop this prior to this moment? Yes. And I think that the world, the international world has been asleep at the wheel for too many years. I think there were warning signs, right? I think that we knew even before, after the joint declaration was agreed to and signed, before the handover happened in 97, 1989, the world witnessed

one of the bloodiest crackdowns by a regime of its own people. Footages, reporters were there. We saw people shot and rolled over by tanks. And that, as it was for Hong Kongers, a clear warning should have given the rest of the world a much more clear wake-up call. That handing Hong Kong over simply

and believing and trusting that somehow there was going to be this opening and liberalizing of China because of it or around it was just a pipe dream. We've been here before, and it's not just one party. It's not just the current administration. We have been asleep in the wheel for a long time because we keep thinking to ourselves that if we just gave them something else, right, if we gave them the most favored trade status in the U.S., if we got them into the world trade organizations, if we gave them an Olympic or if we gave them two Olympics, that it was just going to get better. And I think that that is our responsibility. I think that is the world's responsibility. As I said, that Hong Kong was created because of the commitment and the support of the international community to recognize it as a separate, autonomous region for China. But I think that just as the Chinese regime have,

people have benefited economically and continues to. But they have just fallen off the job on keeping the other part of the bargain, the bargain that was made, the commitment that was made to Hong Kongers. So they kept cashing the checks and kept looking the other way. And this is how we got here. And I think that that is a real shame. And I think that this is why, in a lot of ways, China can continue to say that, Samuel, you are colluding with foreign forces on our internal affairs. I tell them, you recruited the US and the UK and the rest of the world to support and create Hong Kong as it is.

This is the deal that you made. And so I am simply calling all the parties back to the table and saying that it is now your responsibility to save and to keep your promise to Hong Kongers. That's right there. Richard Haass put up put the fine point on it. He's the former director of policy planning for the State Department under W. George W. Bush and said, quote, we don't have the luxury of building a foreign policy that's centered on promoting the rule of democracy and human rights. Talking about Hong Kong. So our influence is limited. He said we can vent, but we should have no illusions that it'll change the situation there may seem cruel, but it's a fact of life. So good luck. You know, it's not our

problem is basically what they're saying. It's all Richard's quote. And actually, I think I'm quote right after Richard and that piece that I think you're referring to in the LA Times. And I think that here's what I was – I mean, the first thing I would actually say is that I am more than happy to have friends and allies. And I think Hong Kongers have enjoyed bipartisan support in the U.S. I would also say that the life and death of Hong Kong is not something to be declared by others. If you look at the courage and the fight and the legacy of protests and resistance in Hong Kong, I am not so sure that I would prematurely declare Hong Kong over as many have. But what I would also say is this. I think that the US and others could look administration is that what

is happening in Hong Kong is an existential threat to the Chinese Communist Party. That is the reason why they are taking such a rapid, total approach to cracking down.

How so? And if you look at it from that way, because they cannot allow any sort of resistance, opposition to exist, even at a very low level, and they cannot let Hong Kong to continue to zimmer like the way that it has. Right now, even without a free press, even without the right to assembly, you continue to see people arrested and taken to jail because Hong Kongers continue to express in various creative ways. And that will continue. And I think that what we are witnessing is that the heavy-handed crackdown that Xi Jinping has employed and deployed in Hong Kong is because he understands

that if this gets to continue, if Hong Kongers continue to speak out and to stand up and to continue to get global and international support overseas, it is a threat to the control that Xi Jinping has

in and within the party and within the mainland. And you have to remember that if that's the case, that means that everything that we engage with China on, this is actually at the center of it, right? That we can't let it go because if this is, we look the other way and simply say that we're just going to deal with you on trade, on other economic competitions or cooperation, or even as some would suggest, we're going to go and do climate change together and forget about human rights. is that this is actually what Xi Jinping is scared of the most, is the distress of the opposition and the pressure that he experienced from within. And that is why he keeps dispatching his most trusted official

to come down to Hong Kong and try to right the ship and close down and let the curtain down to Hong Kong and try to right the ship and close down and let the curtain fall on Hong Kong because he is willing to sacrifice everything that Hong Kong is and every benefit economically it presents because it presents the most direct threat to his political power. Thanks for staying with us this far. The end of the episode and who's coming up on our next show is right after this quick break. The thing about Apple Daily, I confess, surprised me.

I expect sort of strong arm tactics by China. But what I read was that and some of this was live streamed by reporters who were in the newsroom. Not only did he arrest Lai, he sent over 200 national security officers into this newsroom. They were arresting reporters. They paraded him through the newsroom in cuffs to try to humiliate him. It was condemned immediately by the international community, but he, you know, and Lai vowed to resume the operations after the raid, but they put him in, and, and live vowed to resume the operations after the raid, but they put him in prison and, and did all the things that you just talked about. They basically forced the company to close. They, they wouldn't allow them to do business with other

people. They were concerned about the safety of the staff. And to me as a reporter, it was so sad because this is just a week or two ago, late June, the final edition came out. People lined the streets that the circulation was normally, I guess, around 80,000 or edition came out. People lined the streets that the circulation was normally, I guess, around 80,000 or had been at one point over a million copies were printed this time. The supporters were in lines all around waiting, waiting for hours to get a copy. The thirst for democracy, for a free press, for the freedoms that were there to some extent prior to 1997 is strong. And I just, I don't know what it's going to take, right? You see these things like the umbrella movement protests organized by your dad,

where they try to protect themselves with interior gas, with the umbrellas. And then 2019, we saw it ramp up again in Hong Kong with the protests. And, you know, it's, we see something similar happening in Cuba this week. And it's like, they get a lot of attention when they happen, and then they go away. And we move on with our lives. And the crackdown continues. So what, what's your prediction for what's next in Hong Kong? As I said, I think mentioned earlier, something that is very unique, besides the fact that it, you know, Hong Kong, it has been a global city, you know, that just as we said let's three years ago heritage foundation used to say it's the freest city in the world and and cato institute had its own rating that is the most you know free society on the face of the earth uh and and i think that as much as we're angered and

sat in by it and and it's unthinkable to have all of that ripped away just in a period of over two years. Again, I go back to this, I think, unprecedented moment in history where people who have enjoyed, people like me who have lived and breathed all of these freedoms and these democratic practices and rituals in Hong Kong for so many years, having that taken away is not going to be that easy. I was explaining to someone the other day that it's just kind of like showing your kids television and then telling them that it doesn't exist. And I think that this is what continues to give me hope is that there is continues to be a set of individual leaders of institutions, of organizations, of the movement. Nobody is giving up and nobody is actually giving over their rights and handing it over. You can take them in jail, like Jimmy has, who has been in jail now for months and months and months,

have not been able to actually even get a clear set of charges against him, and we expect that he might be extradited into the mainland. But I think the idea here is that we will not see people easily being completely silent, walked over because they are at a point of realizing that they have lived and breathed these freedoms for their whole lives. And it is up to the US and the rest of the world to come together and say that we are going to protect you because we make you a promise. It's unlike Cuba in that way, where they grew up under Castro.

But Hong Kong's very different. They had freedoms that are now being taken away one by one. Last question for you before I let you go, Samuel. What are your thoughts on the Beijing Olympics? Should we be holding Olympics in China? Well, I think it's very clear that the Beijing Olympics, as I said, fool me once, shame on me. Threw me twice. I think that the con is pretty clear for everybody to see,

that China has said that they were going to do human rights to open up and protect and improve human rights in 2008 when they got the Olympics. And what they did is they used the games to actually expand the surveillance states and all the apparatus that is now being used. And we knew exactly, and the IOC knew exactly what they were walking into when they awarded them the 2022 Winter Olympics. from bipartisan leaders. Senator Rick Scott, for example, Florida have been pushing for a boycott. Even the speakers of Pelosi have said that we need to have a diplomatic boycott. I think that this is a very clear sign. And this is actually one of those things that I would say that actually matters

to Xi Jinping in China. The fact that they can host a global international sporting event and actually have it as a showpiece while they are committing genocide and reversing the fate of a whole city of Hong Kong and broke every promise that they made. Any form of pushback, of boycott, and of diplomatic boycott, of sponsors pulling out matters to Xi Jinping and the regime in Beijing. And so I definitely think that it is a shame if we actually go through next year and have people and sponsors and have Xi Jinping be able to preside over a showpiece while peoples

are actually being put in camps. It's unacceptable. Yeah. All right. We haven't even touched on the Uyghurs and what he's doing, but Hong Kong is bad enough. Listen, thank you so much for telling your story. Stay well and stay on it. We'll continue to follow you as well, Samuel. Thank you so much, Megan. I'll talk to you hopefully soon. All right. Don't miss our next show. comes out on friday and we will have a nice long form interview with malcolm gladwell i cannot wait for this i've read all of his books he too is a provocateur of types i was mentioning stephen crowder earlier as a provocateur malcolm gladwell i mean he's an intellectual he's an amazing author he's a deep thinker um but he's provocative in that he doesn't really give a fig if you don't

like what he says i mean he said some controversial stuff and i think it's going to be fun to talk to him about what that's like in the book world right in the book world they're so woke they're crazy woke there and yet somehow he's muddled through he throws his arrows and is one of the best known and best selling authors in the world. Anyway, very happy he's coming on. That's Friday. Don't miss it. Thanks for listening to The Megyn Kelly Show. No BS, no agenda, and no fear.

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