By Mike Huckabee
November 18, 2020
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PRAYERS FOR CHUCK GRASSLEY
Iowa Sen. Chuck Grassley, who at 87 is the longest-serving Republican Senator, announced that he has tested positive for COVID-19 and is in quarantine. He says he’s feeling good, not experiencing any symptoms and intends to keep working. Nevertheless, I hope you’ll keep him in your prayers that he remains in good health.
WISCONSIN RECOUNT
Latest election update: Wisconsin finished its vote count with Biden ahead by about 20,000 votes. The Trump campaign now plans to pay for a recount in two Wisconsin counties where they believe there were the most irregularities in the ballots. More details at the link.
SHERIFFS SAY NO
Some New York Sheriffs announced that they will not enforce Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s restrictions on family Thanksgiving dinners. They say it’s unconstitutional and wouldn’t stand up in court anyway. One said he doesn’t see how it’s in the public good to devote police resources to counting cars in people’s driveways and investigating how much turkey and dressing they bought. Personally, if I were ordered to be on the lookout for big turkeys, I’d head straight to the Governor’s Mansion.
And in a somewhat related story, the Washington Free Beacon reports that 644 New Yorkers have died of COVID-19 since the day Gov. Cuomo released his self-congratulatory book about how brilliantly he'd handled the crisis.
Overall, New York's latest COVID-19 death toll stands at 33,540, over twice as many as second-place Texas, which has nearly 10 million more people. Incidentally, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott also wrote a book, "Broken But Unbowed," but it's about both his battle to overcome an accident that left him paralyzed and restoring American greatness by bringing the government back to obeying the Constitution.
I think I'm starting to see why so many people are moving out of New York to go to Texas.
NOT GOING AWAY
Our elite classes in government and media seem to believe that if they can only vanquish Trump, they will reign triumphant once again and cement themselves into power forevermore. First of all, even if he loses, Trump's not going away. Second, they have never seemed to grasp that Trump wasn’t the cause of their rejection by the public, he was a symptom of it. He even told Biden in the debates that if he and Obama hadn’t done such a terrible job, there’s no way he ever would have been elected President, and that’s probably true.
In this Twitter thread, Richard Fernandez tries once again to tell them that the people’s loss of faith in their leaders’ competence dated back well before the 2016 election. This isn’t news to me, since I wrote an entire book about how out of touch with America our coastal and DC elites were before Trump even entered politics:
Fernandez warns that more woke virtual signaling at the “deplorables” is not going to convince anyone that our self-proclaimed elites are competent again (based on Biden’s vow to reverse every Trump policy that led to a booming economy, record job creation, energy independence, cheap gas and peace in the Middle East, I think competence is the last thing a Biden Administration would be known for.)
Mark Judge at The Stream has a great suggestion for journalists: get a menial job. Take a few months to go work in a restaurant, hardware store, coal mine, factory, construction site, nursing home or anyplace where working class Americans put in a hard day, sweating for their paychecks.
Maybe if journalists actually meet some of the “flyover” people they constantly talk down to, they’ll learn a few things about them. Like that they’re not racists, they’re not obsessed with politics, and they love America and think it’s working just fine. They want to keep the money they earn instead of giving it to politicians in taxes to redistribute to their pet projects and people who won’t work. They hate bullies who try to tell them what they’re allowed to say and think, and they don’t want to be lectured about ridiculous things that defy common sense, like that a man can become a woman or that illegal immigration is not a problem. I would add that they’d also learn that working class people are not stupid or “low-information voters;” in fact, they are in many ways smarter and far more accomplished than most of the desk jockeys with useless college degrees who mock them.
Also, they might learn the most devastating realization of all: that many Americans view the elite journalist class as a bunch of over-privileged narcissists and “whiny, entitled, half-educated mediocrities.”
SNOPES.COM DOES IT AGAIN
This week, I discovered that the “fact-checking” site Snopes.com had done a piece on my Open Letter to Joe Biden. As usual with these pieces, it was filled with arguable leftwing talking points presented as indisputable facts, while it misrepresented what I wrote. But on the whole, it didn’t really attack my piece too much, because frankly, I don’t think there was anything to attack in it on a factual basis, and I stand by it. Their purported reason for running it was to verify that I actually did write it, since people were posting it on social media without links to the original site in my newsletter.
Here’s a piece of their introduction, with my corrections in parentheses, to show you how “objective” these so-called “fact-checkers” are:
“In the aftermath of the Nov. 3, 2020 U.S. election and Democratic nominee Joe Biden’s projected victory (only by the media, which has no authority to declare a winner), defeated incumbent U.S. President Donald Trump (the election has not been settled so calling Trump a “defeated incumbent” is inaccurate), along with some of his allies and his supporters, promoted unfounded and often easily-debunked allegations and conspiracy theories about electoral fraud playing a telling role in the outcome of the election (while some stories have proved incorrect, there are many such claims which have yet to be “debunked” or proven as “conspiracy theories,” and the jury is still out on whether there was sufficient fraud to have affected the election outcome), which they disputed more than a week after Biden was declared the winner (Biden has not been declared the winner, the stories began appearing as soon as the next day after the election, and Trump declared that he had actually won – also a disputed claim – on Thursday after the election, which is two days, not more than a week.)
Would you like me to drop by Snopes HQ and explain to your “fact-checkers” what a fact is?
Snopes also claimed that my letter included several “dubious,” later debunked claims of suspicious vote activity that I haven't changed. I made it clear there and in subsequent writings that I only report that these claims are being made, I don’t endorse their veracity. I’m not a leftist, so I’m not going to go back and rewrite old news stories. Besides, those claims have already been supplanted by countless others. But whether they eventually prove true or not, the salient “fact” to my article was that they did exist and need to be addressed because they affect the public's attitude toward their government.
The point of the letter was obviously not to endorse every claim of vote chicanery but to appeal to Biden (and by extension, his fellow Democrats) to join in calling for a full and transparent investigation to assure Americans that the vote was honest. Did they not just put us through a two-year, $40 million investigation of their claims of Russian collusion with the 2016 Trump campaign in the last election? And now we know for sure: there wasn’t any. I warned Biden in good faith that even if he prevailed, he would suffer the taint of suspicion by millions of Americans, just as Trump did, if the Democrats refuse to cooperate and keep putting up stonewalls and telling suspicious voters that they’re crazy and to shut up. That’s not good for him, and it’s not good for America as a whole.
There are certain things you learn from a decades-long career in politics that maybe a twentysomething Internet “fact-checker” doesn’t know. One is that once a politician loses the public trust, it’s very hard to win it back. Unlike Google, political leaders don’t have a monopoly. They can’t violate the public trust and sail blithely on, assuming there’s nobody else people can turn to.
And even if you have Google, most of the news media and all of social media on your side to censor any criticism or suspicion of you, you still can’t stop people from thinking it. Not even the most repressive communist regimes, where the government and military terrified people into voicing fake love for Dear Leader, could manage that.
Conservative humorist P.J. O’Rourke used to visit countries behind the Iron Curtain, and he wrote that the first thing oppressed people did when they discovered he was an American was to take him aside privately and tell him the latest jokes about what a corrupt, incompetent bunch of clowns their government masters were. If that’s what you want, then keep telling people they’re not allowed to question their leaders or voice their suspicions of wrongdoing by them
I’ll leave you with one more quote from Snopes that’s actually accurate:
“The main point of the letter appeared to be to ask Biden to ‘put partisanship and political ambition aside and join President Trump in demanding an impartial investigation into the very disturbing allegations of voter irregularities and fraud in Tuesday’s election.’”
Well, they got me there! I actually did call on a politician to put partisanship aside and work across the aisle to reassure voters that the election was honest. The HORROR!!!
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