By Mike Huckabee
July 5, 2022
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BY MIKE HUCKABEE
My staffers will be off this week for a well-deserved break, but keep checking in daily. We’ve prepared lots of great material in advance, and we’ll have a daily round-up of the latest news. And as always, if anything major happens, everyone will drop their hot dogs and sparklers and rush back to their PCs to keep you informed. Thank you for subscribing and I hope you enjoy today’s newsletter.
There is no Evening Edition for those subscribers.
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DAILY BIBLE VERSE
I press on to reach the end of the race and receive the heavenly prize for which God, through Christ Jesus, is calling us.
Philippians 3:14 NLT
If you have a favorite Bible Verse you want to see in one of our newsletters, please email [email protected].
The Leaders We Need
We all knew a kid in school who just had to run everything. Remember the classmate who insisted on picking the games you’d all play at recess, where you’d go after school, even who was “in” or “out” of your group? In high school, that kid had a compulsive need to be the leader of every student organization. You just wanted to say, “Hey! You’re not the boss of me!” Whatever happened to those kids? I wouldn’t be surprised if most ended up in government. We certainly have no shortage of people there who think they know how to live your life and spend your paycheck better than you do.
I’m convinced the world is divided into people who just want to live their own lives and those who, for some reason, have an uncontrollable urge to tell everyone else how to live. Unfortunately, to that latter group, government seems like the ideal place to work, and at the moment, they are getting 99.9% of all the attention from the media. As more of them gravitated toward government, Congress abdicated much of its legislating authority to unelected bureaucrats. Their bureaus grew like kudzu, and so did their regulations with the force of law (but no input from the people.) Then one day, we looked up and discovered we had a crushing national debt and were paying huge salaries to an army of people who enforce how big your soda should be and who couldn’t be fired and who is allowed to come into your daughter’s locker room. That’s when sane people realized that government is the LAST place these out-of-control control freaks needed to be.
The temptation for government to overreach is hardly new. In fact, it stretches back to the beginning of recorded history, and I bet even earlier than that. There’s a story in the ninth chapter of the book of Judges in the Old Testament about Gideon’s son Abimelech, who craved leadership and stature - not to serve the people but to control them and make them serve him. He said, “Give me dominion over your lives, and I will simplify your existence.” Wow, does that sound familiar? It’s basically the entire Democratic platform. Our government has taken us pretty far down that same road, but does your life seem any simpler -- or just a lot less free?
Anyway, back to Abimelech. He had a very smart younger brother, Jotham, who came up with a clever tale about three trees: an olive tree, a fig tree, and a vine tree. All three were fine trees that produced lots of fruit. All were offered the exalted position of “King Of All Trees,” but all three turned it down. The plant that wanted to be “King Of All Trees” was the bramble bush, a weak plant that produces no fruit at all. Jotham’s point was that only the weak and nonproductive have the desire to rule everyone else. Does that lesson not resonate like a gong right now?
When anyone aspires to a position of power, take a long, hard look. If that person seemingly crawled out of the cradle with an ambition to be President, then beware! Anytime someone talks about “running the country,” alarm bells should sound. No one – not the President, not Congress, no one person – “runs the country” or should aspire to.
That’s why the Founders took such pains to divide and limit federal power, and why we need to reinstate those limits that have been trampled in recent years, whether by Presidents ruling via executive order or out-of-control judges legislating from the bench or unelected bureaucrats abusing their power to try to influence the results of elections. If we allow any one person or entity to ignore those limits and assume the power to run everything, we won’t be able to stop them when they run America into the ground.
We should pick leaders who resemble the trees in the Bible story that don’t need or crave power but that have shown they bear good fruit. As it is said, by their fruits ye shall know them. Government has more than enough nuts already.
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More Farmers, Fewer Lawyers
I hope you’re having a great 4th of July week, but between the celebratory fireworks on one hand and the anti-American political fireworks on the other, let’s take just a moment to reflect on what Independence Day really means and how it led to the freedoms and blessings that far too many Americans fail to appreciate these days.
Most historians (not New York Times writers, but real historians) mark the beginning of America as the signing of the Declaration of Independence on July 4th, 1776. But in truth, there was still a long road to travel before America as we know it came to be. First, of course, there was the matter of fighting a bloody revolution against Great Britain, one where victory was an overwhelming longshot, and win or lose, the leaders risked their lives, honor and fortunes. Victory was followed by more heated battles over what kind of government we would have.
Our Forefathers finally agreed to a blueprint, the Constitution, that wasn’t even introduced until 1789 – over 13 years later. Today, many Americans take those hard-won freedoms very lightly and seem eager to trade them away for false promises of security. Many can’t even name the freedoms guaranteed by the Bill of Rights. Maybe they’d cherish them more if they knew how close they came to not having them at all.
Did you know that the Constitution very nearly got passed without the Bill of Rights? Even some of the wisest of our forefathers thought a Bill of Rights was a dangerous idea. Alexander Hamilton argued that it was risky to list the rights the government couldn’t take away because then, politicians might try to grab any and every power that wasn’t specifically prohibited to them (apparently, the ability to rap wasn’t the only way Hamilton predicted the 21st century). He and many others also felt that a Bill of Rights was unnecessary: since nobody was surrendering their God-given rights by agreeing to the Constitution, there was no need to list them, right? Hamilton wrote, “Why declare that things shall not be done which there is no power to do?”
It’s ironic that Hamilton made that argument. Later on, as the first Treasury Secretary, he cited powers that the Constitution merely implied that the government had in order to take on debt, create a federal bank and impose unpopular taxes. Over a century later, when the federal income tax was passed, some lawmakers wanted to include a 10% limit, but they were voted down. Opponents scoffed that it was absurd to think the government would ever steal as much as 10% of an American’s hard-earned wages. Flash forward just 30 years, and they were happily taxing away 94%. So just imagine how few freedoms we’d have today if they’d listened to Hamilton and decided it wasn’t necessary to put specific limits on government power.
Luckily for us all, Thomas Jefferson won the argument, and the Bill of Rights was added. They even included the 9th amendment, which I’ll bet most people can’t even describe. Here’s what it says:
“The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.”
It means that just because some God-given rights aren’t specifically listed, that doesn’t mean the people cede them to the government. Maybe because so many of the framers were also farmers, they understood that like weeds, government tends to grow and grow, choking out the productive crops -- and like a bull, it will trample you if you don’t corral it. (Also, it produces the same thing a bull does.)
So if we want to preserve our freedoms, and keep government limited, maybe we should send more farmers to Washington -- and fewer lawyers.
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The True Story of Yankee Doodle
Usually around the Fourth of July, we hear a lot of songs about all the great things about America: “God Bless America,” “God Bless The USA,” “America the Beautiful” (although you might not have heard them this year because of some people whining that hearing God’s name or praise for America “triggers” them.) But before them all, even before “The Star-Spangled Banner,” there was the original American patriotic anthem, “Yankee Doodle.” However, it didn’t start out as a celebration of Americans, but as a mockery of them.
Since 1776, the song “Yankee Doodle” has been as much a symbol of America as the flag. Every child learns it from the cradle (or used to.) But many of us grew up without ever knowing what it really means. Like, why did he call his cap macaroni? Did he use cheese for hair mousse? (I’ll bet a lot of recent college graduates actually believe that and think he was a speciesist exploiter of cows.) Well, I’ll answer those questions and more.
“Yankee Doodle” dates back long before 1776. It most likely started as a German nursery rhyme, since “dudel” is an Old German word for “fool.” It first became associated with America when British soldiers made up their own lyrics to it to mock the ragtag American Revolutionaries. That baffling line – “stuck a feather in his cap and called it macaroni” – makes sense when you know that a macaroni wig was one of those ridiculously large powdered wigs that dandies of the time wore. The Brits were ridiculing Americans as a bunch of hayseeds, so dumb they’d think sticking a feather in their hat would make them look sophisticated. Imagine a Huffington Post article about Trump voters from Alabama, and you’ll have a pretty good idea of just how much arrogant condescension they intended to convey.
Unfortunately for the British, it turned out wars weren’t settled according to who had the spiffiest uniforms (in fact, red coats just made you an easier target.) Those unfashionable Americans were fighting for their homes, their families and their freedom. So they did what Americans have done ever since: they took the ridicule aimed at them, threw it back in the faces of those who mocked them, and got the last laugh. “Yankee Doodle” was the Babylon Bee of its time.
The Americans took the song that was meant to belittle them and adopted it as their anthem. They marched to it in the streets, sang it in bars, and made up their own new lyrics to promote the cause of freedom and glorify leaders like General Washington, “upon his strapping stallion.” It wasn’t long before the British learned to dread the sound of that tune, especially when it was played on a fife and drum, accompanied by American militiamen. A Boston newspaper reported that Minutemen who captured two British officers forced them to dance to “Yankee Doodle” until they collapsed. After that, the Brits admitted that that mocking little song didn’t sound so funny to them anymore.
Well, now you know how “Yankee Doodle” came to be the unofficial American battle anthem that later inspired another great patriotic song for this time of year, George M. Cohan’s “Yankee Doodle Dandy.” As Cohan proudly sang, “I’m a Yankee Doodle Dandy, a Yankee Doodle, do or die…A real live nephew of my Uncle Sam, Born on the Fourth of July!”
Of course, Cohan was actually born on the third of July. But that’s another story for another day.
NEWS RECAP
TRAGEDY:
There was a tragic mass shooting during a Fourth of July Parade Monday in Highland Park, Illinois, an upscale suburb of Chicago. Six people were killed and more than 30 injured by a shooter who opened fire sniper-like on the crowd from the top of a building. After a brief pursuit, police arrested 22-year-old Robert “Bobby” E. Crimo III. A self-styled “hip-hop phenom” who has multiple face tattoos and goes by the name “Awake the Rapper,” Crimo has some pretty disturbing social media posts, but again, nobody seemed to pick up on the danger he posed. The gun he used was reportedly obtained legally. Here's a link to Fox News' continually updated reports.
https://www.foxnews.com/live-
Crimo had barely been arrested before some people were trying to score political points by claiming he was a Trump supporter (which seems unlikely, given that he followed Nancy Pelosi, Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton on Twitter) or to call for more gun control laws. But whatever his politics are, those issues can wait until after (A.) we actually know the facts, and (B.) we focus on the most important issue, which is praying for the victims and their families, and keeping up with the news to see if there’s anything we can do to help them.
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EXPLOITATION
Whenever there’s a tragedy, some people will always try to exploit it to sow division or tear down America. That’s the kneejerk response for too many media outlets. But for a welcome antidote to those toxic narratives, read this by Sean Dietrich.
https://seandietrich.com/
It’s about the deadly crash and derailment of an Amtrak train in Mendon, Missouri, but it tells a side of the story that hardly any news outlets mentioned. It’s the story of the hundreds of local people of all ages, ethnicities, beliefs and economic backgrounds who immediately rushed to the scene to do anything they could to try and help save and comfort the victims, all of whom were strangers to them. Remember this July 4th, that is the real America, not the false hateful, racist caricature that we’re constantly being fed.
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CNN SAYS RECESSIONS ARE RACIST
Latest thing that’s racist, according to CNN: Economists who notice we’re entering a recession while Joe Biden is in office.
https://spectator.org/cnn-
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URGENCY IS RACIST TOO
And what’s not only racist, but “white supremacist?” Acting with “urgency.”
https://reason.com/2022/07/02/
It sounds as if the Oregon health official who came up with that has some notion that black people aren’t capable of acting with urgency, which sounds like an incredibly racist idea pulled from old Stepin Fetchit movies.
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BAD MOOD
I hope you had a safe, fun and patriotic Fourth of July. Not wanting to ruin your good mood, I’ll just pass this along for you to read later. It’s a round-up of some of the overpaid media and Hollywood figures who spent the 4th cursing America and badmouthing the flag and other symbols of this great nation.
https://www.foxnews.com/media/
What do you want to bet that next July 4th, each and every one of them will still be cursing this nation, still claiming it’s so much better somewhere else, and yet still living here?
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ROMNEY INTERVIEW
I think Mitt Romney had the right idea when he was tweeting under the pseudonym of “Pierre Delecto.” He should’ve given this interview to the Atlantic under a fake name.
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TIME TO DEFUND NPR
NPR used to always read the Declaration of Independence on the air as a 4th of July tradition. But this year, they decided to “break with tradition” and show us how much better one of the greatest and most important documents in the history of the written word could have been if only it had been edited by a woke NPR wonk. Maybe it’s time we broke with the tradition of our tax dollars funding this.
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HIGHER EDUCATION FAILURE
Here’s yet another example of how today’s colleges are definitely not preparing students for real life:
https://www.foxbusiness.com/
Michael Lopez was a young production coordinator for Universal Music. His job required him every Friday to process reports on new music releases and email them to 275 people who needed them to do their jobs. But last Friday, he decided not to do it. Instead, he sent an email reading, "I didn't do them today. I'm in mourning due to the attack on people with uteruses in the US. Federally guaranteed access to abortion is gone. Vivendi and Universal Music Group must stop donating to anti-abortion, anti-queer and anti-trans politicians. Politicians like Marsha Blackburn, Ken Buck, Victoria Spartz, etc. Or expect more unproductive days. Yours in fury, Michael Lopez."
Lopez is now slamming Universal Music for firing a “queer, brown person” like him during Pride Month, just for “Not doing your job, disrupting the day of 275 people and poor judgement.” He accused them of only caring about profits and of saying “F--- you to the working class.”
Um, Michael? I don’t know if you can comprehend this, but when you claim you’re just too triggered to do your job, you’re not doing “work.” You’re doing “woke.” Keep up this attitude, and you’ll never be part of the working class again.
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