By Mike Huckabee
April 1, 2019
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Over the weekend, the powerful movie “Unplanned,” based on the true story of former Planned Parenthood clinic manager Abby Johnson, made it to #5 on the top box office list, with an estimated $6.2 million gross. That’s more than double the most optimistic estimate, and more than the entire production budget. Even though it’s on only 1,059 screens nationwide, it made $5770 per screen, more than “Captain Marvel.” It also grossed over a million dollars more than the new animated movie “Wonder Park,” which is on over three times as many screens. The producers announced that they will add another 600 screens next weekend.
And congratulations, too, to lead actress Ashley Bratcher for a riveting performance that should earn her awards consideration, but will most likely get her blacklisted in Hollywood instead. (Hollywood only hates blacklists of leftists from the ‘50s; blacklists of conservatives and pro-lifers today are fine.)
If you haven't seen "Unplanned" yet, you can find out more, locate a screening near you and buy tickets at this link:
https://www.westernjournal.com/unplanned-movie/
The fact that it did so well is something of a miracle, considering how desperately Hollywood and liberal media and social media outlets worked to keep Americans from knowing it existed and to discourage them from seeing it. This is a movie that could change hearts and minds about abortion by ripping off the fuzzy, fell-good euphemisms like “reproductive choice” and showing the truth about what it really is, and that terrifies the pro-abortion movement. So they struck back on multiple fronts:
The MPAA slapped it with an unjustified “R” rating (so a 13-year-old girl can get an abortion without her parents even knowing, but she can’t see a movie showing what abortion really is without being accompanied by an adult until she’s 17?)
A number of TV networks refused to sell commercial time to the filmmakers. They air grisly commercials for horror films, so that’s not it. They claim they refused because it’s “political,” but some have had no problem with airing pro-Planned Parenthood programming.
Note that at the movie site Rotten Tomatoes, it has only a 53% positive rating from critics, but a 94% positive rating from viewers (some critics, like Owen Gleiberman at Variety, seemed to be more interested in writing pro-abortion op-eds than reviewing the movie – a fact that didn’t go unnoticed in the comments.) I’m curious: have any of the movie critics smugly telling us this is a biased and inaccurate view of what happens inside a Planned Parenthood clinic spent years running a PP clinic, the way former PP “Employee of the Year” Abby Johnson did?
And then there was Twitter, which blocked the movie just before it opened, then kept mysteriously blocking people from following its site, or removing 99,000 followers who had already signed up.
Naturally, when called on it, Twitter had an excuse that had nothing to do with bias; it was just one of those pesky algorithms that purely by coincidence always seem to block conservative content and never liberal content.
Just ignore the biased reviews and social media assaults. They’re part of a frantic attempt to keep you from learning the truth about abortion (in that regard, both Planned Parenthood and its media defenders are exactly the same.) Here are my two simple words of advice: “See it.”
I also have two words for Twitter: “Public utility.”
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CNN and MSNBC have dined high on the hog for the past two years by pushing the fake narrative that the President of the United States was in cahoots with foreign operatives who had the goal of undermining American interests. Ironically, by doing so, they were serving the interests of Russia by undermining faith in the American President and electoral system. And now that that hog carcass has been picked clean, they apparently feel it’s time to move on to giving airtime to operatives of yet another foreign government who are trying to serve that nation’s interests by undermining America’s President and policies.
I’ll say this for these media outlets: they’re consistent. Consistently wrong, but consistent.
https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2019/mar/28/railing-against-islamophobia-and-anti-trump-too/
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One of the many fatal flaws of socialism is that people who are sold on it have no idea what it actually is. For instance, one popular defense of socialism on social media is that if you are in favor of fire departments, highways, Social Security, etc., then you love socialism. Except those things are NOT “socialism.” Every government has certain things it does in the public interest and pays for through taxes. That is not government control of the means of production.
And Social Security was designed as an insurance program to which people contributed throughout their lives and got their own money back in retirement. It was perverted through the years by government spending the money on other things and replacing it with IOUs, which turned it by default into an entitlement program that it was never meant to be. Now, one generation pays in and the money goes to generations that joined earlier. That’s not exactly socialism, either, that’s a “Ponzi scheme.” If you ran a system like that in the private sector, you’d end up in prison with Bernie Madoff. But socialism and Ponzi schemes are similar in that they both take money from one person and give it to another, and they both eventually collapse.
Another fatal flaw of socialism is that it fails to take into account human nature: you can’t give control over that much power and money to a few bureaucrats and not expect them to be corrupted by it. I recently saw a video in which someone who’d quit one of the radical millennial “progressive” groups was quoted as saying that the people he’d worked with knew they were promoting dictatorship but thought it was okay because they would be “benevolent dictators.” They were so incorruptibly noble, good and well-intentioned that nothing could go wrong, like in Cuba or Venezuela. That’s the same self-deluded line socialists have peddled everywhere it’s been tried, including Cuba and Venezuela. When it fails, there’s always the same excuse: “Socialism works, but the right people haven’t been in charge of it yet!”
People duped by socialism are also always convinced that all that free stuff from the government is going to be paid for by someone else, i.e., “the rich.” By the time they figure out that even the rich don’t have enough money to pay for all that free stuff and now, they are classified as “the rich” and getting the bill, it’s too late.
A recent poll by Business Insider found that 48% of millennial Democrats identify as “socialists” or “Democratic socialists,” but I’d bet few of them even know what socialism really is, having not been taught that in school. So Campus Reform took its camera to Florida International University and gave some socialism-friendly students an example of how it works that they could understand. Turns out socialism drops in popularity pretty fast when young people discover how much of their particular form of wealth “sharing the wealth” would cost them.
https://www.westernjournal.com/ct/watch-students-love-socialism-asked-share-gpa/
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Like a time-share condo they swear someone else will pay for, the media keep giving us a hard sell on Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. This week, her face graces the cover of Time magazine (Remember Time? Remember magazines?) The caption in large font reads: “The Phenom.” Well, they’ve been remarkably successfully at making her into a media phenomenon, but if the point was to pitch her socialist policies, most Americans are saying, “No sale.”
Recent polls show that the more Americans learn about AOC and her far-left policies, the less they like them. Now, even some of her own constituents may be starting to feel a little buyer’s remorse at having elected a socialist media star with global ambitions instead of a Representative of the Bronx.
https://www.westernjournal.com/fed-constituents-beginning-turn-aoc-not-princess/
I honestly try not to write about her that often, but she makes it difficult by being a never-ending fountain of outrageous comments. It’s earned her the description in some quarters of being “seldom right but always certain.” I actually admire the way she fights back when challenged (I wish more Republicans would stand up and fight for their principles like that when attacked), but if you punch back when you’ve said something demonstrably incorrect, it just comes across as combative and arrogant. That happens way too often.
Latest example: during a town hall on MSNBC, AOC claimed that Republicans passed the 22nd Amendment restricting a President to two terms “to make sure Roosevelt did not get reelected.”
As most of us used to learn in junior high, FDR was reelected three times. He died during his fourth term, and the 22nd Amendment passed two years later. It would have prevented his reelection only if he planned to run again after he died. I thought Democrats only vote after they die, not run for President.
If you want to get picky, Republicans couldn’t have passed a Constitutional Amendment alone (this is stuff we learned on “Schoolhouse Rock.”) The 22nd passed the House with 47 Democratic votes, and the Senate 59–23, with 16 Democrats supporting it. It then went to the states, where 36 of the then-48 states ratified it.
Politicians on both sides of the aisle have called for repealing it, including Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton, Barney Frank and Mitch McConnell. It’s been called an infringement on the right of the people to choose their leader. Fair enough, but while the Founders didn’t include term limits in the Constitution, it’s hard to imagine they would have approved of keeping that much power in one person’s hands for an unlimited period after fighting a revolution to free themselves from a monarch.
Personally, rather than repealing the term limit on the Presidency, I’d like to see term limits imposed on the House and Senate. Sure, there are always elections as the ultimate term limits; but the benefits of incumbency (influential donors and supporters, PAC money, party support, pork, gerrymandering, etc.) make it very difficult to oust someone once they’re in office.
I suspect the Founders might have included term limits if they’d imagined we’d see the rise of politics as a lucrative lifelong profession. They envisioned a government run by citizen legislators who distinguished themselves at home enough to represent their districts in Washington for a while, then go home and live under the laws they passed. They didn’t think we’d have people somehow growing rich while in public service, passing laws from which they exempted themselves, and staying in office until the day they died – or, as I suspect in some cases, until several months beyond that.
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If you’ve been paying attention for the past hundred years or so, you might’ve noticed that there are two hallmarks of leftists:
1. Nothing they believe in works.
2. That’s always someone else’s fault.
For instance, Venezuela recently blamed its socialist death-rattle blackouts on President Trump and capitalists. But then, Trump is to blame for everything, from the New Zealand shooting to the anti-Semitism in the Democratic Party to the Boeing plane crash to Barbra Streisand’s weight gain and Barbara Bush’s heart attack.
https://www.bostonherald.com/2019/03/30/fault-line-trump-is-blamed-for-everything/
And while most people point to the notoriously corrupt “Chicago way” to explain the dropping of 16 felony charges against Jussie Smollett for allegedly faking a hate crime that smeared Trump supporters, Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel knows who’s really to blame: Donald Trump.
https://www.foxnews.com/us/chicago-mayor-urges-trump-to-sit-on-the-sidelines-in-the-smollett-case
You see, it was the “toxic” and “hate-filled” racist environment created by Trump that made Smollett think he could get away with faking a hate crime, not that he thought he could pull strings with the Chicago prosecutors, which is how he actually got away with it. Oddly, Emanuel also called Chicago a “Trump-free zone.” If Smollett was relying on an environment created by Trump to get away with a hoax, why would he pull it in a “Trump-free zone”? Did he think he could get away with it because…Trump runs the Cook County prosecutors’ office? And why have there been so many documented hoax hate crimes intended to smear Trump and his supporters, going back almost to the moment he announced his candidacy?
Also worth noting: racial divisiveness has been worsening in America since the Obama Administration. And since long before Trump came on the political scene, Chicago has suffered some of the nation’s highest levels of shootings and other gang-related crimes that disproportionately harm African-Americans, while the city hasn’t had a Republican mayor since 1931.
So tell me again, Rahm: which Party is to blame for creating a “toxic” environment in Chicago?
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Three cheers for Chris Rock, who is under fire from the left for doing to Jussie Smollett what comedians are supposed to do: tell the truth and point out hypocrisy in humorous terms. He didn’t get the memo that comedians today are supposed to be one-sided mouthpieces for a particular political agenda. Or maybe he did get it and ripped it up. Let’s hope more comedians rediscover their spines and start doing that. I’m sick of comics who are supposed to be fearless satirists giving us cowardly PC lectures and calling them “comedy specials.”
https://www.westernjournal.com/ct/told-chris-rock-no-jussie-smollett-jokes-walked-stage-demolished/
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Joe Biden might want to reconsider whether he really wants to get into the Presidential campaign Cuisinart in 2020 at this stage of his life. I’ve often said that running for President has become the equivalent of a colonoscopy, but for an older, white male candidate with his “Crazy Uncle Joe” reputation in the current Democratic Party, it’s going to be like a colonoscopy conducted with a Weedeater.
https://www.westernjournal.com/joe-biden-defends-his-behavior-will-listen-respectfully-to-accusers/
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Add another name to the list of those who agree with President Trump that there is a crisis on our Southern border – and this name is Jeh Johnson, Barack Obama’s former Director of Homeland Security.
https://www.westernjournal.com/ct/former-obama-dhs-explodes-dems-border-wall-argument/
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Liberals who keep telling us that they are on the side of science don’t seem too interested in looking at what science is discovering about the negative physical and mental effects of marijuana use. They’d also like us to ignore the results of those state-level lab experiments in legalizing marijuana in states such as Colorado, where eliminating black market pot was supposed to reduce violent crime (in fact, it's up by 19 percent, compared to 3.7 percent nationwide.) Property crimes are up 8 percent, while they’re down by 13.6 percent nationally. And legalized pot was supposed to result in a tax bonanza, but Coloradans are actually paying $4.50 to mitigate the effects of pot legalization for every dollar in revenue it brings in.
You have to ask people who thought wide-open access to pot would be an unmitigated positive development, “What were you smoking?”
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