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Fidel Expert Colin Kapernick May Have Glossed Over a Few Itty Bitty Atrocities

November 29, 2016
 Lori Hanes

Writer

Further cementing his place as the most hated man in the NFL --- and perhaps America --- San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick continued sharing his wisdom on social issues and violent leaders prior to playing the Dolphins on their home turf in Miami.

"He said that Castro instituted universal healthcare in Cuba, invested in the education system, supported Nelson Mandela when he was jailed. What a wonderful man. What a wonderful, happy almost Disneyland type, almost Disney character type. And to say that right before you go to Miami," Co-host Pat Gray said, filling in for Glenn on radio.

WATCH: ESPN Anchor Finds Out Kaepernick Didn’t Vote, Teaches QB a Lesson He’ll Never Forget

Kaepernick's assessment may have glossed over a few key details.

"The Washington Post had an op-ed that listed some of the things from Castro's reign. I'm wondering if Kaepernick mentioned any of these things?" Co-host Stu Burguiere mused.

Here are just a few of the atrocities committed by Fidel Castro that should never be forgotten:

• He turned Cuba into a colony of the Soviet Union and nearly caused a nuclear holocaust.

• He sponsored terrorism wherever he could and allied himself with many of the worst dictators on earth.

• He was responsible for so many thousands of executions and disappearances in Cuba, that a precise number is hard to reckon.

Kaepernick's comments did accomplish one thing. They fired up Kiko Alonzo, a linebacker for the Miami Dolphins of Cuban decent, who hit Kaepernick intensely a few times.

Listen to this segment from The Glenn Beck Program:

Below is a rush transcript of this segment, it might contain errors:

PAT: You still have Colin Kaepernick --

STU: Oh, jeez.

PAT: -- who is you such an idiot. I -- he's really -- he's done a really good job of becoming the most hated man in the NFL. And maybe one of the more disliked in America.

STU: Hmm.

PAT: And one of the things he said about Castro was that -- you know, and this is right before he goes to Miami. What an idiot.

STU: Yeah.

PAT: But as Jeffy brought up, his girlfriend is a Black Lives Matter person, right?

JEFFY: Yeah. Nessa, I think, the D.J. I'm pretty sure that's her.

PAT: You want to bet he gets all his information form her. Because I don't remember Colin Kaepernick doing any of this before. Was he? I mean, he wasn't showing up at press conferences in a Malcom X T-Shirt before. He wasn't doing this kneeling thing.

STU: No. This is all -- most of that is this year. He had some stuff I remember early on about how, don't judge me on my tattoos. He was one of those guys.

JEFFY: Yeah.

PAT: Yes.

STU: Your whole tattoo stance is important, I'm sure. But it was like that type of thing, where it was somewhat implied.

PAT: Right. But it wasn't really radical social kind of things.

STU: No.

PAT: He said the Castro instituted universal health care in Cuba, invested in the education system, supported Nelson Mandela when he was jailed. What a wonderful man. What a wonderful happy almost Disneyland type -- almost Disney character type. And to say that right before you go to Cuba --

JEFFY: Miami.

PAT: Or, Miami. Is just unbelievable to me. But at least it fired up Kiko Alonzo, the linebacker for the Miami Dolphins.

STU: Oh, really?

PAT: Oh, yeah. Yeah. He was -- and he had a great game against Colin Kaepernick. Kaepernick had a decent game too. But Kiko Alonzo hit him a few times I think a little extra intensely and said there was very bad blood between them.

JEFFY: I bet.

STU: The Washington Post had an op-ed that listed -- I'm wondering if Kaepernick mentioned any of these things.

Mentioned some of the things from Castro's reign: He turned Cuba into a colony of the Soviet Union and nearly caused a nuclear holocaust.

PAT: He did not mention that, no.

STU: He sponsored terrorism wherever he could and allied himself with many of the worst dictators on earth. Was that something --

PAT: I don't remember that part either. No.

STU: He was responsible for so many thousands of executions and disappearances in Cuba, that a precise number is hard to reckon. Is that --

PAT: No, he didn't mention that part.

STU: He brooked no dissent and built concentration camps and prisons at an unprecedented rate. Which is a pretty amazing sentence.

PAT: Yeah.

STU: And this is -- we've talked to people who have studied this before. This is actually true, especially when it comes to a percentage of population. You can find there are atrocities in Cuba, at times as bad or worse than some of the ones you would think of when you think of genocides. Really horrific.

PAT: Well, yeah, but he instituted health care. You're just looking at the negatives of the guy. Not the entirety of his life.

STU: Right. Did Kaepernick mention that he condoned and encouraged torture extrajudicial killings?

PAT: I don't think so. No, he was focusing on the positive.

STU: Did he talk about how he forced nearly 20 percent of his people into exile?

PAT: Right. It's an island of 11 million. Two million of whom live in the United States. Two million.

STU: That's pretty amazing. How about how he prompted thousands to meet their deaths at sea?

PAT: Right.

STU: Did he --

PAT: People have died to get off the island to Florida.

STU: Uh-huh.

He claimed all property for himself and his henchmen, strangled food production, and impoverished the vast majority of his people. Was that something that Colin mentioned?

PAT: I don't remember that part.

STU: No?

PAT: No. That he was living in luxury and cavorting with tons of beautiful women while his country starved, he didn't really mention that part.

STU: He outlawed private enterprise and labor unions.

Now it's funny --

JEFFY: You keep going down this road, but Kaepernick was talking about the positives.

STU: Yeah. Yeah.

PAT: Right. The education system, you haven't mentioned that yet.

STU: No, I haven't mentioned that. But it was interesting that, but it was interesting that Colin Kaepernick is both involved in private enterprise and labor unions. And doesn't see at all --

PAT: Right. That's very true.

STU: That's weird.

He persecuted gay people and tried to eradicate religion.

PAT: Have you seen how good their national baseball team is? I think that's Fidel Castro. I think in part. I think he really encouraged --

STU: But did Kaepernick go into the whole eradicating gay people thing?

PAT: No. Not really. Not extensively any other.

STU: He censored all means of expression and communication. One of the most interesting parts about this because --

PAT: You're pissed off that he created a safe space?

STU: No, he didn't. No.

JEFFY: Wow.

PAT: He created a safe space.

STU: He did. He really did -- a nationwide safe space, where you could not have --

PAT: That's right.

STU: It's funny because we did a special on communism back in the Fox days. And one of the things was Che. And it's amazing to see how Che and Castro are respected by prominent musicians and artists. People who would have been killed in the country they're talking about.

PAT: It's why I like Bono so much. Because he understands that -- he's one of the few rock icons who seem to understand brutal dictators aren't fun.

STU: No, that's weird.

PAT: They're not meant to be celebrated.

STU: It's not as joyous as you might think.

PAT: No.

STU: He mentioned this -- because we finally are getting to the good things, I think, the health care system and the education system. Because that's what he talked about.

PAT: Okay. Good. Good.

STU: He established a fraudulent school system that provided indoctrination rather than education and created a two-tier health care system with inferior medical care for the majority of Cubans and superior care for himself and his oligarchy. And then claimed that all his repressive measures were absolutely necessary to ensure the survival of these two ostensibly free social welfare projects.

Was that mentioned? Did he go into that sort of depth? Because he might not have had time in the press conference.

PAT: I don't think -- I think he was cut off before that. They asked him about an interception or something.

STU: Did he talk about how -- because this word is described -- his performance last couple years, how Cuba turned into a labyrinth of ruins, which has essentially been his quarterback rating the past couple years. How about, did he ever apologize for -- because I may have noted this. Fidel Castro, did all these things. Most people don't have any qualms about whether he did them. But he never apologized for them. Never even had a moment on his deathbed where he said, "Wow, I screwed that up." And never stood trial for any of the things that he did. I mean, none of those things were mentioned by Mr. 68.7 Quarterback Rating. None of that was mentioned.

PAT: Is it that high?

STU: No, it's got to be better than that.

(laughter)

PAT: I thought it was about 26.3. Somewhere in there.

STU: Mr. Guy who lost his job twice to Blaine Gabbert did not necessarily --

PAT: Oh, that's an insult --

JEFFY: That hurts.

PAT: That hurts.

JEFFY: That hurts.

PAT: That hurts.

STU: It's amazing though. Because this is the one time you'd think -- the media, which is all about talking about how there's fake news everywhere on the internet and how people aren't telling the truth, they can't even come together to criticize Fidel freaking Castro. It's amazing. It was amazing to see.

Featured Image: Colin Kaepernick #7 of the San Francisco 49ers looks on during a game against the Miami Dolphins on November 27, 2016 in Miami Gardens, Florida. (Photo by Mike Ehrmann/Getty Images)

A contested Democratic convention could lead to the ONE candidate who could beat Trump, says Michael Medved

Paul Morigi / Stringer/ Getty

On Wednesday's TV show, Glenn Beck sat down with radio show host, author, political commentator, and film critic, Michael Medved.

Michael had an interesting prediction for the 2020 election outcome: a brokered convention by the DNC will usher in former First Lady Michelle Obama to run against President Donald Trump.

Watch the video below to hear why he's making this surprising forecast:

Use code BECK to save $10 on one year of BlazeTV.

Want more from Glenn Beck?

To enjoy more of Glenn's masterful storytelling, thought-provoking analysis and uncanny ability to make sense of the chaos, subscribe to BlazeTV — the largest multi-platform network of voices who love America, defend the Constitution and live the American dream.

FLASHPOINT? Virginia Gov. Northam declares state of emergency to ban firearms ahead of gun-rights rally


Zach Gibson / Stringer

On Thursday's "Glenn Beck Radio Program," BlazeTV's White House correspondent Jon Miller described the current situation in Virginia after Gov. Ralph Northam (D) declared a state of emergency and banned people carrying guns at Capitol Square just days before a pro-Second-Amendment rally scheduled on Martin Luther King Jr. Day.

Jon told Glenn that Gov. Northam and the Virginia Legislature are "trying to deprive the people of their Second Amendment rights" but the citizens of Virginia are "rising up" to defend their constitutional rights.

"I do think this is the flashpoint," Jon said. "They [Virginia lawmakers] are saying, 'You cannot exercise your rights ... and instead of trying to de-escalate the situation, we are putting pressure. We're trying to escalate it and we're trying to enrage the citizenry even more'."

Glenn noted how Gov. Northam initially blamed the threat of violence from Antifa for his decision to ban weapons but quickly changed his narrative to blame "white supremacists" to vilify the people who are standing up for the Second Amendment and the Constitution.

"What he's doing is, he's making all all the law-abiding citizens of Virginia into white supremacists," Glenn said.

"Sadly, that's exactly right," Jon replied. "And I think he knows exactly what he's doing."

Watch the video to catch more of the conversation below:

Use code BECK to save $10 on one year of BlazeTV.

Want more from Glenn Beck?

To enjoy more of Glenn's masterful storytelling, thought-provoking analysis and uncanny ability to make sense of the chaos, subscribe to BlazeTV — the largest multi-platform network of voices who love America, defend the Constitution and live the American dream.

Ryan: Trump Louisiana Finale

Photo by Jim Dale

Part One. Part Two. Part Three.

At the end of Trump rallies, I would throw on my Carhartt jacket, sneak out of the press area, then blend in with everyone as they left, filing out through swinging doors.

Often, someone held the door open for me. Just 30 minutes earlier, the same person had most likely had most likely hissed at me for being a journalist. And now they were Sunday smiles and "Oh, yes, thank you, sir" like some redneck concierge.

People flooded out of the arena with the stupidity of a fire drill mishap, desperate to survive.

The air smacked you as soon as you crossed the threshold, back into Louisiana. And the lawn was a wasteland of camping chairs and coolers and shopping bags and to-go containers and soda cans and articles of clothing and even a few tents.

In Monroe, in the dark, the Trump supporters bobbled over mounds of waste like elephants trying to tiptoe. And the trash was as neutral to them as concrete or grass. They plodded over it because it, an object, had somehow gotten in their way.

It did not matter that they were responsible for this wreckage.Out in the sharp-edged moonlight, rally-goers hooted and yapped and boogied and danced, and the bbq food truck was all smoke and paper plates.

They were even more pumped than they had been before the rally, like 6,000 eight year olds who'd been chugging Mountain Dew for hours. Which made Donald Trump the father, the trooper, God of the Underworld, Mr. Elite, Sheriff on high horse, the AR-15 sticker of the family.

Ritualistic mayhem, all at once. And, there in Louisiana, Trump's supporters had gotten a taste of it. They were all so happy. It bordered on rage.

Still, I could not imagine their view of America. Worse, after a day of strange hostilities, I did not care.

My highest priority, my job as a reporter, was to care. To understand them and the world that they inhabit. But I did not give a damn and I never wanted to come back.

Worst of all, I would be back. In less than a week.

Was this how dogs felt on the 4th of July? Hunched in a corner while everyone else gets drunk and launches wailing light into the sky? configurations of blue and red and white.

It was 10:00 p.m. and we'd been traveling since 11:00 a.m., and we still had 5 hours to go and all I wanted was a home, my home, any home, just not here, in the cold sweat of this nowhere. Grey-mangled sky. No evidence of planes or satellites or any proof of modern-day. Just century-old bridges that trains shuffled over one clack at a time.

And casinos, all spangles and neon like the 1960s in Las Vegas. Kitchy and dumb, too tacky for lighthearted gambling. And only in the nicer cities, like Shreveport, which is not nice at all.

And swamp. Black water that rarely shimmered. Inhabited by gadflies and leeches and not one single fish that was pretty.

Full of alligators, and other killing types. The storks gnawing on frogs, the vultures never hungry. The coyotes with nobody to stop them and so much land to themselves. The roaches in the wild, like tiny wildebeests.

Then, the occasional deer carcass on the side of the road, eyes splayed as if distracted, tongue out, relaxed but empty. The diseased willows like skeletons in hairnets. The owls that never quit staring. A million facets of wilderness that would outlive us all.

Because Nature has poise. It thrives and is original.

Because silence is impossible. Even in an anechoic chamber, perfectly soundproofed, you can hear your own heartbeat, steady as a drum. A never-ending war.

I put "Headache" by Grouper on repeat as we glided west. We were deadlocked to asphalt, rubber over tarface.

And I thought about lines from a Rita Dove poem titled "I have been a stranger in a strange land"

He was off cataloging the universe, probably,
pretending he could organize
what was clearly someone else's chaos.

Wasn't that exactly what I was doing? Looking for an impossible answer, examining every single accident, eager for meaning? telling myself, "If it happens and matters the next year, in America, I want to be there, or to know what it means. I owe it to whoever cares to listen."

Humans are collectors and I had gone overboard.

Because maybe this wasn't even my home. These landmarks, what did they mean? Was I obvious here? When I smiled, did I trick them into believing that I felt some vague sense of approval? Or did my expressions betray me?

Out in all that garbage-streaked emptiness — despite the occasional burst of passing halogen — I couldn't tell if everything we encountered was haunted or just old, derelict, broken, useless. One never-ending landfill.

Around those parts, they'd made everything into junk. Homes. Roads. Glass. Nature. Life itself, they made into junk.

I cringed as we passed yet another deer carcass mounded on the side of the road.

As written in Job 35:11,

Who teaches us more than the beasts of the earth and makes us wiser than the birds in the sky?

Nobody. Look at nature and you feel something powerful. Look at an animal, in all of its untamable majesty, and you capture a deep love, all swept up in the power of creation. But, here, all I saw were poor creatures who people had slammed into and kept driving. Driving to where? For what reason? What exactly was so important that they left a trail of dead animals behind them?

So I crossed myself dolorously and said an "Our Father" and recited a stanza from Charles Bukowski's "The Laughing Heart"

you can't beat death but
you can beat death in life, sometimes.
and the more often you learn to do it,
the more light there will be.

Out here, nothing but darkness. Needing some light, by God. Give me something better than a Moon that hides like an underfed coward.

Jade told me about some of the more traumatic things she'd seen while working at the State Fair.

"Bro, they pull roaches out of the iced lemonade jugs and act like nothing happened."

"All right but what about the corn dogs?"

"You do not want to know, little bro."

She looked around in the quiet. "Back in the day, the Louisiana Congress refused to raise the drinking age from 18 to 21," she said. "They didn't want to lose all that drunk gambler money. So the federal government cut off funding to highways."

We glided through moon-pale landscape for an hour before I realized what she had meant. That there weren't any light poles or billboards along the road. Nothing to guide us or distract us. Just us, alone. And it felt like outer space had collapsed, swallowed us like jellybeans.

Like two teenagers playing a prank on the universe.

In the cozy Subaru Crosstrek, in the old wild night, brimming with the uncertainty of life and the nonchalance of failure, we paraded ourselves back to Dallas. Alive in the river silence that follows us everywhere.

New installments come Mondays and Thursdays. Next, the Iowa caucuses. Check out my Twitter. Email me at kryan@blazemedia.com

Amid election security concerns, states should look to blockchain

Wikimedia Commons

The Iowa primary is just around the corner, and concerns of election interference from the last presidential election still loom. Back in 2016, The Associated Press found that a majority of U.S. elections systems still use Windows 7 as an operating system, making them highly susceptible to bugs and errors. And last year, a Mississippi voter tried multiple times to vote for the candidate of his choice, but the system continuously switched his vote to the other candidate. It's pretty clear: America's voting systems desperately need an update.

That's where blockchain voting comes in.

Blockchain voting is a record-keeping system that's 100% verifiable and nearly impossible to hack. Blockchain, the newest innovation in cybersecurity, is set to grow into a $20 billion industry by 2025. Its genius is in its decentralized nature, distributing information throughout a network of computers, requiring would-be hackers to infiltrate a much larger system. Infiltrating multiple access points spread across many computers requires a significant amount of computing power, which often costs more than hackers expect to get in return.

Blockchain voting wouldn't allow for many weak spots. For instance, Voatz, arguably the leading mobile voting platform, requires a person to take a picture of their government-issued ID and a picture of themselves before voting (a feature, of course, not present in vote-by-mail, where the only form of identity verification is a handwritten signature, which is easily forgeable). Voters select their choices and hit submit. They then receive an immediate receipt of their choices via email, another security feature not present in vote-by-mail, or even in-person voting. And because the system operates on blockchain technology, it's nearly impossible to tamper with.

Votes are then tabulated, and the election results are published, providing a paper trail, which is a top priority for elections security experts.

The benefits of blockchain voting can't be dismissed. Folks can cast their vote from the comfort of their homes, offices, etc., vastly increasing the number of people who can participate in the electoral process. Two to three-hour lines at polling places, which often deter voters, would become significantly diminished.

Even outside of the voting increase, the upsides are manifold. Thanks to the photo identification requirements, voter fraud—whether real or merely suspected—would be eliminated. The environment would win, too, since we'd no longer be wasting paper on mail-in ballots. Moreover, the financial burden on election offices would be alleviated, because there's decreased staff time spent on the election, saving the taxpayer money.

From Oregon to West Virginia, elections offices have already implemented blockchain voting, and the results have been highly positive. For example, the city of Denver utilized mobile voting for overseas voters in their 2019 municipal elections. The system was secure and free of technical errors, and participants reported that it was very user-friendly. Utah County used the same system for their 2019 primary and general elections. An independent audit revealed that every vote that was cast on the app was counted and counted correctly. These successful test cases are laying the groundwork for even larger expansions of the program in 2020.

With this vital switch, our elections become significantly more secure, accurate, and efficient. But right now, our election infrastructure is a sitting duck for manipulation. Our current lack of election integrity undermines the results of both local and national elections, fans the flames of partisanship, and zaps voter confidence in the democratic system. While there's never a silver bullet or quick fix to those kinds of things, blockchain voting would push us much closer to a solution than anything else.

Chris Harelson is the Executive Director at Prosperity Council and a Young Voices contributor.