The leftist organization Code Pink, in response to Trump’s economic sanctions on Cuba’s communist regime, recently partied it up at a five-star Havana hotel while trying to raise sympathy for the failed state. On today’s edition of The Editors, Jim says of Code Pink that “if they didn’t exist, we would have to invent them.”
“They are a Christopher Buckley novel’s notion of a hardline leftist, absolutely in love with every hostile regime that oppresses its own people and absolutely hating . . . the United States in every conceivable way,” he says.
Jim points out, “This is deliberate, willful blindness, deliberate lying, a desire to be fooled, a desire to ooh and ahh at the Potemkin village.” Code Pink hates “the U.S. government. They are the quintessential people who will not take their own side.”
“It’s appalling and there’s something weirdly juvenile about it.”
Noah agrees, saying that “Jim’s point about Potemkin villages . . . irrespective of the czarist implications of that one, the Soviets really perfected it. And he used to need a village to impress these people. Now all it takes is a hotel with a gas generator attached to it. And then you can just wow them.”
“You would think,” says Noah, “that the left, if they had any consistency . . . would look at the communist regime in Cuba as . . . illustrative of everything they hate. It is one of the most racist and racially segregated societies on earth. Income inequality is extraordinarily big in Havana. . . . Environmental degradation is atrocious in Cuba. You name it.”
“Every ideal that [Code Pink] supposedly ha[s] is betrayed by this regime. But all is forgiven because it’s anti-American and they’re all communists.”
The Editors podcast is recorded on Tuesdays and Fridays every week and is available wherever you listen to podcasts.