Sisters Catalina and Madeline Lauf, who are from Chicago, spoke on the first night of the Republican National Convention on Aug. 24, 2020.
Transcript
Catalina Lauf: I’m Catalina Lauf, I work in the political space.
Madeline Lauf: And I’m Madeline Lauf, and I’m the founder of Begin Health, a children’s nutritional company.
Catalina Lauf: We grew up in a really small town outside of Chicago.
Madeline Lauf: Our mom’s from Guatemala, our dad’s a small business owner from Chicago and so he brought two different cultures together to create us, a little bit of crazy and …
Catalina Lauf: A little bit of fun, I guess. They taught us the values of hard work, liberty, to love this country unapologetically. Our dad is a beekeeper and just had so many different things out in the countryside and it was just such a sweet, quaint-
Madeline Lauf: We grew up selling honey at farmer’s markets. So my line was, “Have you ever been stung by a bee?” But really it was teaching us again, entrepreneurship, small business, self-reliance and that we’re the ones that need to put in the hard work to get what we want.
Catalina Lauf: And my mother being from Guatemala, escaping what she had there, growing up in poverty and coming here to the United States, being able to fulfill her destiny and be somebody that she couldn’t, there in her home country.
Madeline Lauf: And they really instilled in us the sense of purpose, but also self-accountability and that we had to strive to do the things that we wanted and it was up to us to make those things happen.
Catalina Lauf: In America, there’s no ceiling of opportunity, you define your own destiny through personal responsibility, through hard work, through having a moral value system. That’s the American dream and President Trump’s providing that for everybody.
Madeline Lauf: Look at my business, Begin Health, as a small startup that is growing and launching, we are constantly trying to innovate and the big challenge that COVID brought that we just didn’t see coming, was that just almost everything just shut down. And when you are a small startup and you have limited funding and the funding is really only to get you to that next milestone, we were really struggling. And so we were able to apply for a PPP loan, which really helped allow us to continue hiring and working and developing our products so that we could ultimately still launch.
Catalina Lauf: It’s now more than ever so important to have a president and administration that understands that small business is the backbone of our economy. Tax cuts and jobs act was huge, manufacturing, deregulation, fair trade, these are things that affected real Americans. We have a champion in the Oval Office who has this business background. He actually understands the need for small businesses like my sisters, to survive. We aren’t the stereotypical conservative, I mean, we come from Hispanic descent and we’re millennial women, and that’s not what the media wants. And so somebody like AOC, Alexandria Ocasio- Cortez, this far left, these women come out with these very, very destructive political ideologies that are trying to infiltrate millennials and the next generation. I’ve decided to step up and say, “Well, we need a counter voice to these women.”
Madeline Lauf: There has been an assault on capitalism just generally and I think it’s very scary to imagine a Biden world where the progressive wing ideas are starting to take front and center stage. That will really choke the American economy. There will be over-regulation, over taxation, it’s very hard to innovate through those two things. And ultimately what’s really sad is the thought of making all of us dependent on the government and we are not going to allow that.
Catalina Lauf: I’ve seen a lot of moderates, a lot of people now changing over because of everything that’s been happening. This is a taste of Biden’s America. I mean the rioting, the crime, freedom is at stake now, and this is going to be the most important election of our lifetime. We want to preserve the America that our mother came here for, having a thriving economy, that is keeping America great and President Trump has delivered on that promise. He’s truly fighting for the American people. We’re the greatest country in the world period. On our worst day, we’re still the greatest country in the world and in order to preserve that it’s by putting America first, having a thriving economy, having happiness.
