Good morning!

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

Today's newsletter includes:

• Bible Verse Of The Day
• Backlash intensifies against leftist "cancel culture"
• Comment Of The Day, from Newt Gingrich on Sunday's LIFE, LIBERTY & LEVIN
• Stirring Up Racist Violence
• Old Faithful: Maxine Waters Spews Hot Gas
• Apparently, Trump Is To Blame
• Raul Castro To Step Down
• Bonus Podcast Episode
• A Reader Writes Back...
• America The Beautiful

Sincerely,

Mike Huckabee

BIBLE VERSE OF THE DAY 

Backlash intensifies against leftist "cancel culture"

By Mike Huckabee

Last week, we talked about the backlash against “cancel culture” that’s starting to happen around the country, as millions of Americans have finally just had enough. Today, I have more good news on that front, concerning the most dangerous manifestation of this poison, in the schools.

First, let’s all bow in homage to Parent Of The Year Andrew Gutmann. Mr. Gutmann is the parent of a 7th grader who until very recently attended an elite private all-girls’ school on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, tuition –- brace yourself –- $54,000 a year. This school, Brearley, is so “woke” that families who send their kids there have to take an “anti-racism” pledge. Bari Weiss on Substack has a great write-up on this story.

Weiss starts with a reference to another story we’ve brought you, about a math teacher from another private Manhattan school, Grace Church High School, who can’t stand by watching his students being indoctrinated with the toxin of “anti-racism” –- Critical Race Theory –- as it’s being taught there. When the teacher, Paul Rossi, brought up his concerns, he was told he had “created dissonance for vulnerable and uninformed thinkers” and “neurological disturbances in students’ beings and systems.” (I swear I am not making this up.) His contract requires him to “participate in restorative practices designed by the Office of Community Engagement” in order to heal his “relationship with the students of color and other students” in his classes. The nature of these “practices” remains unspecified until he agrees to sign.

Rossi also teaches a class called “Art of Persuasion,” and one of his concerns is that students may never challenge any of the premises of CRT. He notes the irony that being an “anti-racist” requires one to treat individuals differently according to their race. In class, students must stick to “a narrow script of acceptable responses.” There are no questions allowed on any of these teachings; the head of the school told him that “the moment we are in, institutionally and culturally, does not lend itself to dispassionate debate.” Rossi said that a recent faculty email chain “received enthusiastic support for recommending that we ‘officially flag students’ who appear ‘resistant’ to the ‘culture we are trying to establish.’”

If I taught a class called “Art of Persuasion” under these conditions, I certainly would be concerned that what the school was practicing was not persuasion, but force-feeding.

“I know,” he says in his letter, “that by attaching my name to this, I’m risking not only my current job but my career as an educator, since most schools, both public and private, are now captive to this backward ideology. But witnessing the harmful impact it has on children, I can’t stay silent.”

And now, we have what might be the greatest and most articulate letter that has ever been written in the history of public education; Bari Weiss publishes it in full here.

“It cannot be stated strongly enough that Brearley’s obsession with race must stop,” Gutmann writes. “It should be abundantly clear to any thinking parent that Brearley has lost its way.”

Much of what he writes about “anti-racism” echoes what we’ve expressed here. We say that to teach white children to feel guilt and shame for the color of their skin and black children to feel hated for the color of their skin is psychological abuse, pure and simple. Schools are committing CHILD ABUSE, poisoning children’s minds.

In Gutmann’s words, “I object to the view that I should be judged by the color of my skin. I cannot tolerate a school that not only judges my daughter by the color of her skin, but encourages and instructs her to prejudge others by theirs. By viewing every element of education, every aspect of history and every facet of society through the lens of skin color and race, we are desecrating the legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and utterly violating the movement for which such civil rights leaders believed, fought and died.”

Are you standing on your feet and cheering yet?

It goes on, and is similarly brilliant all the way through. As for Black Lives Matter, he has this to say: “I object to Brearley’s advocacy for groups and movements such as Black Lives Matter, A Marxist, anti-family, heterophobic, anti-Asian, and anti-Semitic organization that neither speaks for the majority of the Black community in this country, nor in any way, shape or form, represents their best interests.” Thank God.

And then there’s this: “I object to the gutting of the history, civics, and classical literature curriculums. I object to the censorship of books that have been taught for generations because they contain dated language potentially offensive to the thin-skinned and hypersensitive.” Hallelujah, amen.

On FOX NEWS SUNDAY with Maria Bartiromo, Candace Owens and Charlie Kirk praised the letter and talked about what adults need to do to protect kids’ rights. Bartiromo also spoke with a brave Minnesota parent who faced intimidation after started a Turning Point USA chapter at the local high school.

Anyway, these are great examples of pushback, one from a teacher and the others from parents. This will help weaken the intimidation that has kept a lot of other teachers and parents from rebelling. The threat of being labeled a racist when you are nothing of the kind and being canceled from your entire social and professional life is frightening indeed. It’s even worse when you see that your child might be similarly penalized for what you say. But it just takes a few brave souls to get things rolling. That is happening.

Now, look at this: another comedian has had enough of “cancel culture.” When comedian Chad Prather was booked into a venue near Austin, Texas, he rebuffed attempts to censor his opening act.

Prather is a conservative who appears on Blaze TV and FOX NEWS, so one might imagine the Austin crowd would consider itself much too “woke” for his brand of comedy. Why, they'd be offended. Sure enough, before his second show, he was told “We don’t want your opener to tell some of the jokes he told last night.”

Prather refused. “I said, ‘You can’t tell a comic what to say onstage….You can’t ask for a guy to change what he does. Lenny Bruce, George Carlin –- they went to jail for comedy. We’ve not going back to those days when when we tell somebody what they can and cannot do.’”

He went on to explain that mocking and ridicule are the job description. I would add that leftists can't allow ridicule because their views won't stand up to it. Just about any answer Jen Pskai gives the press corps can be blasted into subatomic particles with one satirical headline in THE BABYLON BEE. And we’d like to think we do our part as well!

In an ironic twist, Prather is known for his hilarious song parody about...censorship, called I’ve Got Friends In Safe Spaces.” Don’t miss this!

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Comment Of The Day, from Newt Gingrich on Sunday's LIFE, LIBERTY & LEVIN

By Mike Huckabee

“You have the large internet giants trying to turn a man who got 75 million votes into a nonperson. That’s something worthy of the Soviet Union or worthy of Communist China. And it’s a very deliberate, very serious effort on their part.”

Stirring Up Racist Violence

By Mike Huckabee

Sometimes news stories seem to come in waves, and one of today’s themes is “People who ought to know better stirring up racist violence.”

First up is alleged journalist Chris Cuomo of CNN, who did a little skit with himself about recent high profile police shootings of non-white suspects in Minnesota and Chicago that showed how out of touch he is with how average Americans really think. Then he declared that police shootings and gun control laws will only come “when white people’s kids start getting killed.”

Aside from how horrifying it is that someone on a major news network would actually say such a thing, it’s also factually incorrect on virtually every level, as Jack Davis points out at the link. For instance, in 2020, there were nearly twice as many whites shot by police as blacks, you just didn’t hear about it on CNN. And Republican Sen. Tim Scott introduced a bipartisan police reform bill last June, but Senate Democrats blocked it from coming to a vote, most likely because police shootings were more useful as a campaign issue than actually passing police reform would’ve been.

Old Faithful: Maxine Waters Spews Hot Gas

By Mike Huckabee

Next, like Old Faithful dependably spewing hot gas at regular intervals, came Rep. Maxine Waters. With violent rioters burning America’s cities, looting businesses and threatening police and citizens, Waters decided the time was right to pour some more gasoline on the wildfire. Minneapolis authorities are urging calm before the Derek Chauvin verdict comes in, but Waters egged the mob on, declaring, “We’ve got to stay on the street and we’ve got to get more active, we’ve got to get more confrontational. We’ve got to make sure that they know that we mean business.”

FYI: This is the oath of office Waters took as a member of Congress: “I, ___, do solemnly swear that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion, and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office on which I am about to enter. So help me God.” Out of curiosity, how does inciting mobs to violence in place of respecting due process rights and the rule of law jibe with defending the Constitution?

Of course, this is hardly new for Mad Maxine. During the Trump Administration, and even after the near-murder of Rep. Steve Scalise, she was still urging leftist lunatics to confront Trump officials and drive them from public places. My own daughter Sarah and her family had to leave a restaurant because of this kind of vicious partisan nuttery.

Even as her words were being widely reported, news came that someone opened fire on a Minnesota National Guard security team. Two Guard members were struck; fortunately, their injuries are minor, but that’s no thanks to Maxine and her malignant mouth.

It is beyond me not only how someone in a position of such high responsibility can continue to speak and act so dangerously and irresponsibly, or how her colleagues can sit silently by and when called on their silence, actually try to defend the indefensible. I am a Trump supporter, but when I thought his rhetoric went too far, I called him out on it. And as far as I know, he’s never called for violence in the streets. If he had, it would be 24/7 news. Democrats blamed him for the Capitol riot just for telling his supporters to protest peacefully. Imagine if he’d said what Waters said.

There are calls from House Republicans for Waters to be expelled, but I don’t expect the same Democrats who impeached Trump on a false charge of inciting a riot to hold her to account for actually doing it.

Apparently, Trump Is To Blame 

By Mike Huckabee

Meanwhile, Ed Driscoll at Instapundit collected a series of tweets to show how unserious the Democrats have become about quelling their violent rhetoric.

New York State Sen. Diane Savino called on Twitter to ban an anti-Cuomo account for tweeting that if you see anyone from the Cuomo Administration, confront them, create a crowd, push back on them and “tell them they’re not welcome anywhere anymore.” Savino called that “beyond outrageous.”

When it was pointed out to Savino that it was actually a quote from Maxine Waters, only with the name “Trump” replaced with “Cuomo,” she immediately fell back on blaming Trump. She tweeted, “I see what they did, but that was then and this is now, and 4 years of Trump has led to words becoming weapons. We can’t just ignore them anymore, people take them as a call to violent actions.”

So Trump was to blame when Maxine publicly called for violence against people who worked for Trump. And when she’s still calling for violence even after Trump has left office, it’s still Trump’s fault.

Well, I agree with her on one thing: we can’t ignore this anymore. Some of us realized that it shouldn’t be ignored at the time. But as late to the party as she is, I welcome her joining me in condemning Maxine Waters for her incredibly irresponsible exhortations to violence.

I assume that’s what she meant, right?