Good morning!

Blessings on you and your family, and from all the Huckabee staff! 

Today's newsletter includes:

• Bible Verse Of The Day
• 42 Million
• News you can use
• RIP Larry McMurtry and Prayers for B.J. Thomas
• Surveys Say
• New Podcast Episode
• What's really going on inside our "woke" military?
• A Reader Writes Back...
• America The Beautiful

Sincerely,

Mike Huckabee

BIBLE VERSE OF THE DAY 

42 Million

By Mike Huckabee

A survey by Gallup found that among residents of 33 nations in Latin America and the Caribbean, 42 million people want to move to the US permanently.

The big question now is, will they all be here by next weekend?

News You Can Use

By Mike Huckabee

A new survey by Lending Tree found that many Americans are struggling to deal with medical debt. However, among those who contacted the providers and attempted to negotiate their bills, about 93% saw the bills reduced or dropped entirely. So don’t be afraid to speak up.

RIP Larry McMurtry and Prayers for B.J. Thomas

By “Huckabee” writer/pop culture guru Pat Reeder

As you might know, my wife/writing partner Laura Ainsworth and I live in Texas (I was born here, she got her as fast as she could.) So it falls to me to report some sad news for all the world, but especially for us Texans.

First, the great Texas-based singer B.J. Thomas released a statement revealing that he’s receiving treatment for stage four lung cancer. The winner of five Grammy Awards for his many pop, gospel and country hits such as “Raindrops Keep Fallin’ On My Head,” “Hooked on a Feeling,” “Rock and Roll Lullaby,” “I Just Can’t Help Believing,” “Whatever Happened to Old Fashioned Love” and “(Hey, Won’t You Play) Another Somebody Done Somebody Wrong Song,” Thomas said he’s hopeful for a full recovery, but added, "I ask all of you for your prayers during this time and that my music can live on with you."

We saw him in concert just last year, and he sounded as great as ever. We hope you’ll join us in praying for his recovery so that he can keep on making wonderful music for years to come.

Also, it’s almost too much for the Lone Star State to have to bear, in one year, the pandemic, the winter storm/blackout, the Biden border policies, the death of Jerry Jeff Walker, and now the loss of the official Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Texas, Larry McMurtry. He died Thursday night of heart failure at 84.

McMurtry was one of America’s greatest novelists and screenwriters, but he was particularly beloved here in Texas, and he loved Texas in return, and set almost all of his books here. I attended his alma mater, the University of North Texas, where the reverence for him is super-concentrated.

McMurtry gave the world some of the greatest novels of the past half-century, many of which became hit movies, including “Terms of Endearment;” “Horseman, Pass By” (which became the Paul Newman movie “Hud”); “The Last Picture Show;” and of course, “Lonesome Dove,” which spawned the classic TV miniseries with Robert Duvall and Tommy Lee Jones. The movies of his works racked up 34 Oscar nominations and 13 wins. “Lonesome Dove” alone scored 18 Emmy nominations and seven wins.

I was working in Connecticut when “Lonesome Dove” first aired, and I enjoyed coming to work every morning to be peppered with questions from incredulous co-workers, asking if it was really like that in Texas: did we really have blue northers and poisonous snakes that live in the water and Texas Rangers who could quell a riot single-handed? I loved telling them, “Of course we do. Doesn’t everybody?”

If you’re not familiar with McMurtry, do yourself a favor and watch the original “Lonesome Dove” miniseries, or better yet, read the book (best yet, do both.) You’ll want to work your way further in from there. Granted, some of the novels are better than others (I wasn’t too crazy about the “Lonesome Dove” sequel and prequels, and I generally prefer his historical novels to his contemporary ones like “All My Friends Are Going to be Strangers”), but hey, not even Ranger Captain Woodrow F. Call could hit the bullseye with every shot. Well, come to think of it, maybe he could...

Surveys Say

By Mike Huckabee

Border Survey March 2021:  51,000+ responses

Do you think the crisis along our border has worsened because of Joe Biden's reversal of President Trump's policies? 94% YES 4% UNDECIDED 2% NO

Do you think the crisis along our border has worsened because of Joe Biden's reversal of President Trump's policies? 78% COMPLETING THE BORDER WALL 22% STRICTER ENFORCEMENT OF EXISTING LAWS

Do you support the Republican Governors of Texas and Arizona, taking the lead role in enforcing border security within their state? 84% YES, THE BIDEN ADMINISTRATION IS FAILING 8% UNDECIDED 8% NO, THIS IS A FEDERAL RESPONSIBILITY

Vaccination Poll March 2021: 35,000+ responses

Have you received the vaccine? 59% NO 41% YES

If you have NOT been vaccinated, do you plan on getting the vaccine? 10% YES 23% UNDECIDED 67% NO

New Podcast Episode

By Mike Huckabee

On the latest bonus episode of "The People's Podcast," Masterpiece Cakeshop owner Jack Phillips joins Governor Huckabee to discuss how and why he has become the target of the far Left and anti-religious zealots in the Colorado government. Jack and his attorney tell the story and explain the motivation behind how Jack has been continuously harassed and taken to court after he declined a request to bake a cake for a same-sex marriage because of his personal Biblical religious convictions.

To listen and subscribe, go here>>>

What's really going on inside our "woke" military?

By Mike Huckabee

Since the January 6 security breach on Capitol Hill, there’s been a great deal of talk about how to deal with those espousing “extremist ideology,” particularly within the military and law enforcement. We’ve seen ridiculously gross overreaction to the breach by Democrats in Congress and also have big reason for concern about the upper echelons of the military. POLITICO, certainly no right-wing news outlet, has been running stories on this over the past several weeks, and I thought it would be a good idea to explore a couple of these along with some of our more go-to sources.

On Saturday, POLITICO ran a piece on some of the internal training materials being used by the Department of Defense, one of these a 17-page briefing compiled by the DoD Internal Threat Management and Analysis Center, part of the Defense Counterintelligence and Security Agency.

According to this briefing, they report, both military and civilian personnel have “a duty and responsibility” to report extremist behavior or activity.” They’re also supposed to be aware of symbols of these ideologies. (According to POLITICO, the materials do at least mention far-left ideologies and Islamist views, but other sources very strongly suggest the focus is on the right.)

The article states that “the prevalence of extremists in the Defense Department appears to be small. For example, the 220,000-strong Marine Corps recently reported that it kicked out four members last year for extremist activity.” But this isn’t stopping the Pentagon, which says “one is too many.”

The focus on white supremacism as a general threat didn’t start just with Biden. In a Homeland Security Assessment from October 2020, the acting secretary of the Department of Homeland Security said, “...I am particularly concerned about white supremacist violent extremists who have been exceptionally lethal in their abhorrent, targeted attacks in recent years.” He did also go on to cite what he called “the exploitation of lawful protests causing violence, death and destruction in American communities.” You know, those activities that were billed in the media as “peaceful protests”?

(By the way, one can tell this was produced during the Trump administration by its mention of another threat: “illegal and mass migration to the United States.” I would imagine this has been taken out of current threat assessments. But I digress.)

One of my researchers did a deep dive and found an item of interest, this 2021 workshop dealing with threat assessment in general, that "examines the emerging threat posed by extreme right wing anti-government groups." A "terrorist radicalization assessment protocol" is used to help determine who is dangerous. We don't know how focused this workshop is on ferreting out right-wing "extremism," as it deals with a variety of perceived threats, but I'd love to be a fly on the wall.

Anyway, after a "highly unusual" order from Biden's new Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, all members of the military by the first week in April are required to have taken part in a day-long “stand down” to discuss extremism and obtain feedback from troops on “racism and other hateful ideologies or anti-government sentiment [that] have taken root in recent years.”

The new military training materials reportedly focus on behavior and symbolism. According to the article, they do point out the risk of making false assumptions about people who don’t pose a threat, mentioning that religious conservatives are often wrongly lumped in with white supremacists and other extremists. (As you’ll see, though, other sources say that’s exactly what they’re doing.)

POLITICO’s Bryan Bender reported about a month ago, before the training materials were released, that “there’s a growing sense of anxiety within the Pentagon that this push [to confront white nationalism and other far-right ideologies] could feed the perception that it is policing political thought, favoring one political party over another or muzzling free speech.”

No kidding. We’ve seen enough of that outside the military --- finding out what “cancel culture” can do in response to one misinterpreted tweet, even decades old –- to know what it would look like inside the military. In other words, the “perception” that they’re playing Thought Police has been well-fed, and our concern is well-founded.

Here’s an excellent piece by retired Army lieutenant colonel and intelligence officer Roger Rosewall, warning of the dangers of “witch hunts” within military ranks.

Rosewall asks two key questions: 1) what is “extremism”? And 2) what will happen to military members deemed to be “extremists”? He also provides a valuable historical perspective by bringing in examples of previous witch hunts, which “have not ended well,” he says.

Rosewall suggests that the way to deal with the current “perceived problem” is to “clearly define and articulate ACTIONS AND BEHAVIORS [emphasis his] that are considered contrary to good order and discipline.” That way, they avoid the trap of trying to assess “creeds, convictions and personal beliefs.”

But Aaron Reitz, a major in the Marine Corps Reserve and the Texas deputy attorney general for legal strategy, appearing with Tucker Carlson on Friday, expressed alarm that the Biden Defense Department won’t be satisfied with that limited an effort. The military in its current incarnation is just too “woke.” His impression is that this latest “witch hunt” within the ranks will not turn out well.

Reitz warned that at a time when we’re seeing an “ascendant” China and Russia, an unstable Middle East, a border crisis and a nuclear North Korea, Biden’s top generals are saying, “You know what we really need right now? Extremism training!”

He speculated that people in the upper ranks who want to get promoted even higher during Biden’s term “see the ideology coming from the top and may be working to accommodate it in order to get “the next star.”

According to Reitz, the military is NOT focusing just on actions and behaviors: “So extremism training is --- and I’m quoting from documents --- ‘to eradicate, eliminate and conquer all forms of racism, sexism, homophobia’ and so forth. What does this stuff mean? Who knows?”

Reitz has just been through the required “stand down” day of training. Here’s the article he wrote about this for NEWSWEEK. It’s so good, I’m surprised to see it there.

He describes the nature of the training as “left-wing political programming, as direct as it sounds.”

"We were instructed that there is a Taliban-like threat in the United States called ‘domestic terrorism,’ he writes. “These terrorists are characterized in part by ‘anti-government,’ ‘anti-authority’ or ‘abortion-related’ [editorial comment: !!!] extremism and various ‘supremacist’ ideas. None of these terms are defined. The Marine Corps entrusts the government’s HR department to figure that out.”

He writes that since Biden’s election and, especially, since the Capitol Hill incident, “bureaucratic progressivism has hardened into iron-fisted wokeism.” Importantly, he quotes the highest-ranking members of the Army and the Marines to show that this effort goes far beyond a focus on actions and behavior to root out any ideology they don’t like. Absolutely, Reitz’s article is a must-read.

With our defense in the hands of “a bloated military-industrial complex given over to Fortune 500-style corporate progressivism,” we are deservedly being laughed at by our enemies, he says. “We need a military fit for real warriors,” he says, “not the social justice kind.”

A Reader Writes Back...

Mike, thank you for all you and your crew do to keep us in the know. Many people just wait daily to read your articles and sadly we don’t comment. But so many people believe your reporting is the only believable source of information. Please keep up the good work. And always know we are here reading and keeping up with you like a lifeline for conservatives. May God bless you and yours!

America The Beautiful

God's creation is all around us. To learn more about National Park of American Samoa, visit its website here.