In a different era, he might have been called a fascist. After all, Hugo Chávez was an anti-Semitic demagogue and chauvinistic nationalist who hated Israel, hated the United States, hated democracy, and favored state control of the economy. A onetime paratrooper and failed coup leader, Chávez aggressively militarized Venezuelan society, creating pro-government citizen brigades to serve as his own praetorian guard and arming them with Russian-made assault rifles. He threatened neighboring countries and constantly warned of looming foreign invasions. He promulgated wild conspiracy theories about Jews and Americans. He befriended the most reactionary and fascistic governments on earth, including the theocracy in Iran, the gangster regime in Russia, and the racist Mugabe dictatorship in Zimbabwe.
I’m happy to call him one in this era. And he is living proof of Jonah Goldberg’s thesis.
I want to go back to the gun law history. In 1987, Florida responded to a wave of crime by loosening restrictions. Were you surprised by what happened as a result?
At the time, I thought, “Oh, this is going to be a bloodbath.” And it wasn’t. The late ’80s were a very violent time in the U.S. The crack cocaine thing was in full flower. Then Florida did this, and most liberals thought it was crazy. But crime dropped. A lot. Crime there is now half of what it was before then.
…These are precisely the kind of people the Democratic Party says it exists to serve. Over and over, people I met on my trip would say, “I don’t get it. Democrats are the party of the working man. How can the Democrats do this?” They feel so alienated that they won’t listen to the Democrats on climate change or health care or immigration or anything else. As a Democrat, it broke my heart to hear this over and over and over again. These are our guys. These are our people, and they hate us. We take this anti-gun position and we’re giving these people away, and we’re getting nothing in exchange. We are not making the country safer.
He might want to reconsider some of the other things that “liberals” think are crazy.
Steve wrote: “The ACLU wholeheartedly supports Senator Paul’s efforts to make the Obama administration explain why it feels it has the right to kill Americans on American soil when they are not attacking America.