Mike Huckabee

How can we all be so connected, and our government be so disconnected?

One of the benefits of living in the 21st century is that thanks to jet travel and the Internet, I constantly talk to Americans from every state and every walk of life. And believe me, they are not shy about sharing their opinions. It gives me a perspective that I wish more of our politicians and media people inside the Beltway Bubble could experience.

According to a recent Reuters Institute and University of Oxford survey, America ranked last among 46 nations in public trust in the news media. If I had to explain that subterranean approval rating in one word, it would be “disconnection.” I don’t think there’s ever been a time when the people in the media were so out of touch with the people they’re supposed to be serving (you’d think the shock they experienced on Election night 2016 would’ve caused them to reflect a bit and make some changes, but they only doubled down on the demonizing of people they never talk to.) They apparently really believed in 2016 that when voters asked for “change,” they wanted bigger deficits and a bloated, more powerful regulatory state. Trust me, based on what they told me, they did not. And they didn’t think they were getting that when they voted for Biden, either. They’re angry now because many believe they’re the victims of a bait-and-switch con.

If you ask most Americans what they want from government, it’s not to have every aspect of their lives regulated and “transformed,” including those that worked a lot better before the government “improved” them. They don’t want 2,000-page bills nobody’s read, or bureaucrats telling them which doctor they can see or how much money they’re allowed to make. The list of what most Americans say they want from government is actually pretty short: national defense, secure borders, safe streets; smooth highways; health care for veterans, seniors, children, the disabled (all those who genuinely can’t help themselves); good schools, firefighters and (yes) police – now more than ever - and it would be nice if the trash were picked up on time. That’s about it.

Yet somehow, the government finds so many ways to meddle in our lives that federal, state and local government spending combined now equals about 40 percent of America’s entire gross domestic product. And in some big cities, they don’t pick up the garbage at all. They just let people live in it.

In poll after poll, despite claims that socialism is on the rise, most Americans say they want less government and less spending. Even those who say they want government handouts like “Medicare For All” abruptly change their tunes when told what it will do to their tax bills and quality of services. They don’t give a hoot what the talking heads or the endlessly-surprised economists or the “too-big-to-fail” Wall Street failures say: they want government out of their lives, out of their wallets and out of their way.

Sadly, whenever political candidates support that philosophy, their opponents and the media paint them as cold-hearted and uncaring. Compassion has been redefined as the willingness to spend limitless amounts of other people’s money. The media also devote almost no time to examining political philosophies and a lot of time to gotcha games, gaffes, fake news and who’s ahead in the horse race.

But the horse is now out of the barn. For eight years, Americans experienced firsthand the results of so-called “progressive” policies. Government out of control, a health care boondoggle two-thirds of us didn’t want, and the economy still struggling long after it should’ve roared back.

The Election of 2016 was not a surprise to me. I predicted it months in advance because, unlike so many people who claim to represent or report on the American people, I actually talk to – and more importantly, listen to - people. Things were turning around quite well before a pandemic artificially shut down the economy and people let the media bamboozle them into blaming Trump and thinking they’d be bringing back moderation and “normality” if they elected Biden.

Now, they find themselves stuck with a combination of Obama and Jimmy Carter times 10. This isn’t what they voted for, but they’re getting it good and hard.

I predict that, despite the media’s best efforts to bamboozle us, politicians who try to sell Americans on socialistic, big government policies will eventually fail, for the same reason that a used car salesman has a hard time selling a lemon to the same customer twice. I think those politicians know it, too; hence their desperation to take over elections so they can control the results. I also predict that politicians who were elected on a promise not to “fundamentally transform” America will remain in office only as long as they remember that Americans did not elect them to turn the United States into Venezuela.

Mike Huckabee

We hear often these days that society shouldn’t have any absolute moral standards. Imposing standards is oppressive, judgmental and outdated. Like Linus and the Great Pumpkin, it doesn’t matter what we choose to believe, as long as we’re really sincere in believing it. Well, pardon me for pointing it out, but that’s…well, stupid (sorry, Linus!)

There are all sorts of absolute standards to which we adhere. A rock band might be filled with nonconformists, but they can’t each play in whatever key they feel like. You might concede Hannibal Lecter’s sincere belief in cannibalism, but you wouldn’t go to his house for dinner. It seems counter-intuitive, but freedom can’t work unless we all agree to abide by certain basic standards of right and wrong. When we step outside those boundaries, chaos ensues, as we’re seeing right now with blue city officials allowing leftwing extremists to ignore laws, seize public property or smash monuments and statues, just because they feel like it. That can leave a bad taste in your mouth, and I’m not still referring to Hannibal Lecter. I like to illustrate the concept with a story from the days when my own kids were young.

When my son John Mark was only 12, he decided one day to bake a cake. My wife Janet and I returned home and were greeted by our son, proudly offering ol’ dad the first taste. Well, it looked good, and I was already preparing some fatherly praise as I took that first bite. But what came out of my mouth wasn’t words. It was the cake. It was so awful, I had to spit it out. My first thought was that my son was trying to kill me for the insurance.

As soon as my tongue overcame its shock, I asked John Mark if he’d used a recipe. He said he had, and he’d followed it to the letter. Well, except that he didn’t know what a “dash” of salt meant, so he decided a cup of salt should be enough.

Now, my son worked hard on that cake…he had the best of intentions…and he sincerely believed he’d done a good job. But hard work, good intentions and sincere beliefs meant nothing once he decided he could make up his own measurement standards. That’s literally a recipe for disaster.

Freedom can’t exist in a moral vacuum. It makes some people uncomfortable to hear this, but without clear boundaries of right and wrong, the very concept of liberty breaks down. A person might argue that he should be free to look at pictures others find offensive. But if it’s pornography featuring a child who’s being exploited, then there’s more at stake than just the liberty of the viewer. There was a big controversy over separating children from parents who crossed the border illegally, but very few people brought up the facts that the parents chose to bring their children along as they knowingly violated federal immigration law – or that (as a pilot DNA test program proved) in many cases, those weren’t even their parents but people illegally exploiting children they weren’t related to.

Self-government can’t mean each of us lives by our own unique set of rules. If that’s how you define liberty, then you’re just going to get less of it. When people live outside the boundaries of a principled and agreed-upon moral code, it inevitably leads to government that’s bigger and more intrusive (and an avalanche of lawsuits), just to force people to do the right thing. And if it doesn’t, then society quickly spirals into anarchy. Neither prospect is acceptable.

If you think more lawyers and bigger government actually improve society, or that doing away with laws and police is a good idea, then I have a delicious cake recipe I’d like to sell you. Then again, no…selling people a recipe for disaster would definitely be morally wrong.

Mike Huckabee

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 2020 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 blurred 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.

Mike Huckabee

Pundits on the left still puzzle and argue over how Donald Trump could have been elected and why he has such strong support. They would know if they’d read my book, “God, Guns, Grits and Gravy,” which was published shortly before Trump even entered politics. It explained how the elites of politics, academia and the media had sealed themselves into such an airtight echo chamber, they had no idea what the mysterious natives of that vast “flyover country” that they looked down on, literally and figuratively, were thinking.

What they were thinking was that they were fed up to the gills with a two-tiered system that gave the politically-connected a pass for things that would land them under the jail. They were sick of being ignored and insulted for voicing legitimate complaints about how their lives were being adversely affected by government policies, disregard for the Constitution and selective enforcement of laws. They were tired of being called racists or xenophobes or immigrant-haters if they thought the welfare of suffering Americans, such as homeless veterans or people put out of work by illegal immigrant labor, should take priority over solving the problems of everyone else in the world.

And on a visceral level, they were tired of the grating combination of ignorance and arrogance (a trait we’ve recently seen turned up to 11 since Democrats have retaken power.) It’s that condescending attitude of elitists (politicians, Hollywood stars, news media figures, Silicon Valley tech/social media denizens) who are convinced they are the smartest people in the room – so smart, in fact, that their ideas are the only ones that should be allowed to be expressed -- even though the results of their ideas throughout history prove that they don’t have the slightest idea what they’re talking about. They think they know how to run the entire planet, but have fewer practical skills than the average apprentice plumber.

The poster boy for arrogant ignorance was New York Mayor Bill DeBlasio, whose brief, doomed presidential bid was exemplified by his clueless claim that all it takes to be a farmer is to throw some seeds in the dirt, add water, and “up comes the corn.” Down went DeBlasio, and for good reason. He proved he knew even less about being a farmer than he does about being a mayor.

During the Obama years, a lot of young leftist wonks with massive egos sailed triumphantly into Washington only to go slinking back to academia after seeing their precious theories shatter on the rocks of reality. Yet since then, they’ve learned nothing and become even more cocksure of themselves and the inevitability of their failed socialist ideas. Now, they’re back in Washington and watching those ideas fail even faster and more spectacularly. So what can all those Ivy League hothouse flowers learn about problem-solving from a lowly former Arkansas governor and business owner?

Well, the most important tip I could offer is this: Very big problems are usually not solved with very big solutions. A 2000-page bill or a massive ten-year “plan” like the Green New Deal only creates a whole new set of problems. If you want to turn a problem into a catastrophe, the recipe is simple: just add lots and lots of bureaucrats and taxpayer money.

When you have a big problem, Step #1 is to break it down into little problems. Then put someone in charge of each problem who actually knows how to solve it. It takes an experienced, executive decision-maker just to decide which decisions to make and which ones can be safely left to someone else. (This is something that doesn’t require political experience; anyone who’s ever run a successful business knows it instinctively.)

Next comes the hardest part: prioritizing. We’ve all seen executives who are constantly bustling and shouting. They look busy – some people are even impressed by their constant bustling -- but they never really get anything done. That’s because they’re trying to do everything at once, instead of focusing on issues in their order of importance.

I’ll let you in on another secret: the importance of an issue is not determined by how important the people closest to it think it is. You might have to disappoint or even anger people by telling them their pet issue isn’t your top priority. Sorry, that’s part of the job.

I once had a professor of religion who said one of the wisest things I ever heard about management: “Don’t use all your water to put out too small a fire.” If you use up all your resources and credibility overreacting to a small crisis, then what do you do when a big crisis comes along and your fire extinguisher is empty? (We’re seeing this a lot in the media these days, when every little controversy becomes a hair-on-fire CRISIS, and every piece of fake news becomes a “BOMBSHELL SCANDAL,” and then gets dropped the second the next one comes along. All this has accomplished is to erode their own credibility.)

Another essential skill is choosing the right employees. If you have important jobs to fill, find people who’ve mastered every aspect of their current job and are happy there, but ready to move up. Someone who wants a promotion because he’s not comfortable where he is won’t be any more comfortable higher up.

You also don’t need an idealistic dreamer who leaps in from academia to reinvent the wheel. Advanced degrees and high grades in school are admirable, but often, real world experience and common sense are far more valuable. When you need to put out a fire, you call a firefighter, not a Ph.D. in combustion theory. When you’re dealing with violent rioters, you need cops, not sociology majors (as shocking as that might seem to certain blue city politicians.) And as we learned from the FBI and the Mueller team, you don’t put people in charge who let partisan zeal prejudice the way they do their jobs or deal with the public.

That’s what you should learn on day one of “Leadership 101.” So how come so many of our leaders, and those jockeying to become our leaders, still haven’t learned it?

Mike Huckabee

I’ve been astounded recently by the way the left has been so successful at using the phrase “hate speech” and the fear of school shootings to convince young people to demand that their own First and Second Amendment rights be taken away.

Somehow, they have managed to bamboozle a large slice of the young generation into simultaneously believing that they are wise and mature enough to start voting and even writing laws at 16; yet they are so childish and irresponsible, they can’t be trusted to touch a firearm until they’re 21, or to hear an opposing opinion without rushing to a safe space to cuddle a puppy and schmoosh Play-Doh.

When young people don’t know their rights, where those rights came from, and how much was sacrificed to secure them, it’s easy to convince them to trade them away for empty promises of comfort and security. This is the basis of all those quotes warning not to sell your birthright for a mess of pottage, a bit of advice so ancient and universal that it dates back to Esau in Genesis 25: 29-34. But leftists are still counting on young people not knowing it (no wonder they want to ban the Bible from schools.)

These days, students are taught an ugly, twisted and totally negative perversion of American history. They’re taught to hate their own magnificent heritage, and they don’t learn the most basic facts (or even what the word “pottage” means), let alone all the great stories you discover when you dig into real American history. This seems like the perfect week for a lesson in how America came to be born. And I’ll try to put it into terms they can relate to.

Maybe – possibly – today’s students vaguely recognize the name Paul Revere (although they might believe he was a slave trader. I certainly doubt they had to memorize the poem, the way we did.) But how many know there was another heroic midnight rider who warned that the British were coming, only this one was a teenage girl from Duchess County, New York?

She’s just one of many American heroes that kids don’t learn about because modern textbooks scrub history of everything interesting or inspiring in favor of leftist social and political agendas that downgrade America. They depict it as a land of nothing but racism and oppression, not as a land where people of goodwill have struggled and sacrificed for generations, constantly working to improve things by establishing justice, securing the blessings of liberty for ourselves and our posterity and creating a “more perfect union” (in the original foundational document, the writers made it clear that nothing’s perfect, but we would strive always to keep working together toward perfection.)

Kids, American history is not a list of personal grievances against people who’ve been dead for 200 years. It’s everything that ever happened to everyone before you came on the scene. Seek it out. Trust me: it can be pretty interesting, and you can actually learn things from it.

For instance: listen, my children, and you shall hear of the midnight ride of…Sybil Ludington? As the oldest of 11 children, Sybil had to take on a lot of responsibility at a young age. She was barely 16 on the night of April 26, 1777. She had just tucked all her siblings into bed when, suddenly, there came an urgent knock at the door. It was a messenger, coming to warn her father, Col. Henry Ludington, that British troops were invading.

His troops weren’t expecting an attack and were scattered all over the countryside. Gathering them meant a dangerous ride over pitch-black roads, through enemy soldiers, wild animals, and hostile Indians (sorry: “Indigenous Peoples.”) Understandably, the messenger refused an order to go. But Sybil volunteered. Her father protested, but she pointed out that only she knew where all his men lived. As any father of a strong-willed daughter (especially one named Sybil!) will recognize, he’d long since learned that arguing with her was futile. So Sybil mounted up and rode off.

It was a rainy night. The British had already set nearby Danbury, Connecticut, on fire, and the flames cast an eerie, red glow on the fog. It spurred Sybil on as she galloped from house to house, banging on doors and shouting that the British were coming. According to legend, at one point, a highway robber tried to intercept Sybil, but she raised her father’s musket and sent him running. Yet another reason why teenagers should think twice before demanding that the Second Amendment be taken away from them.

By dawn, Sybil and her horse were cold, wet and exhausted. She’d roused over 400 troops, who joined the Battle of Ridgefield and helped drive the British all the way back to Long Island Sound. Gen. Washington personally honored Sybil for her heroism.

Today, there are historic markers all along her route, and statues of her in New York and Washington (if they haven’t been torn down by historical illiterates.) But I’ll bet most young people never even heard of Sybil Ludington, a teenager much like them, except she knew what really happened during the American Revolution. Maybe it’s because nobody wrote a famous poem about her midnight ride -- even though her ride was over twice as long as Paul Revere’s. Let’s hope someone turns her story into a hip-hop musical.

Pat Reeder, Staff writer

Mike Huckabee

Yesterday’s story about Tucker Carlson’s claim that, according to a whistleblower, his electronic communications are being intercepted is sending some shock waves, at least through conservative media. On Tuesday evening, the National Security Agency released a formal statement, which reads:

“On June 28, 2021, Tucker Carlson alleged that the National Security Agency has been ‘monitoring our electronic communications and is planning to leak them in an attempt to take this show off the air.’ This allegation is untrue. Tucker Carlson has never been an intelligence target of the Agency and the NSA has never had any plans to take his program off the air. NSA has a foreign intelligence mission. We target foreign powers to generate insights on foreign activities that could harm the United States. With limited exceptions (e.g., an emergency), NSA may not target a U.S. citizen without a court order that specifically authorizes the targeting.”

That statement appears in the updated story from the WASHINGTON EXAMINER.

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/tucker-carlson-accuses-nsa-of-spying-on-him

Recall what we said yesterday about the responsibilities of the NSA as opposed to other intel agencies such as the FBI. If we're going to split hairs, the NSA’s statement might be said to be accurate, though very misleading. The NSA isn't necessarily “targeting” people or “monitoring” Tucker Carlson. That’s because what the NSA does, as far as we can tell, is scoop up communications indiscriminately. They have all the data: yours, mine, Tucker’s, everybody’s. And they just...hold on to it.

What their statement leaves out is that the FBI does the actual targeting. If we understand correctly, when FBI agents want to target you, an American citizen, and go before judges to get a warrant –- remember, we’ve seen with Carter Page how they can falsify the evidence –- that makes THEM the ones doing the targeting and the monitoring, not the NSA. The FBI can also get you by “hopping” from someone else who is targeted. The NSA gives them the data they’re looking for.

On Tuesday, White House press secretary Jen Psaki was asked about the alleged targeting of Tucker Carlson by the NSA, and she stuttered quickly through a non-answer. Here is her entire response: “Uh, well, the NSA, as I think you’re well aware, I’m sure everyone’s aware, uh, everyone on this plane is aware, I should say is aware, is, uh, an entity that focuses on foreign threats and individuals, uh, who are tr-attempting to do us harm on foreign soil. So, uh, that is the, their, uh, purview, um, but, uh, beyond that, I would point you to the intelligence community.”

Um, well, uh, is that a, well, denial?

The story at TRENDING POLITICS also brings up something we mentioned on Tuesday, that Tucker has been looking boldly into the FBI’s possible involvement in the January 6 “insurrection.” It is our contention that all roads lead to THAT, and that the FBI wanted to know what Tucker knew about it. They also wanted to find out who was leaking information about it to him.

https://trendingpolitics.com/jen-psaki-confronted-with-tucker-carlsons-spying-claim-and-now-the-nsa-just-responded-knab/

“We made a very straightforward claim,” Tucker said Tuesday night. “NSA has read my private emails without my permission...Tonight’s statement from the NSA does not deny that.” And he’s right; it doesn’t.

Again, given my understanding of the division of labor among departments within the intel community, let’s see what the FBI, not just the NSA, has to say about whether or not they’re monitoring Tucker’s communications. Will they, um, well, uh, deny it?

Tucker said he’d had a “very heated” conversation 20 minutes before Tuesday's show with officials at the NSA. He asked them the very specific question, “Did the Biden administration read my emails?” and “again and again” they refused to say. They couldn’t even tell him why they wouldn’t say.

“The message was clear,” Tucker said. “'We can do whatever we want. We can read your personal texts, we can read your personal emails, we can send veiled threats your way to brush you back if we don’t like your politics. We can do ANYTHING. We’re our own country! And there’s literally nothing you can do about it. We’re in charge; you’re not.'”

“Orwellian does not begin to describe the experience,” he said. “It was like living in China.”

I would stress that the Biden administration is trying to make this level of intrusion the “new normal,” something we all just need to get used to. But it’s NOT normal –- it’s un-American and something we should deeply resent and strongly resist. The only thing more chilling is imagining this “what-if”: What if this whistleblower had not contacted Tucker and the surveillance had simply continued with no one ever finding out?

Tucker said that as long as the Biden administration has classified tens of thousands of Americans as “domestic terrorists” and “white supremacist saboteurs,” there will be a lot more of this.

Tucker brought on civil rights attorney Harmeet Dhillion, who said she was not surprised by this. Ever since 9/11, she said, she and other civil libertarians had been “screaming about the Patriot Act.” Even so, since 1947, our laws have specified that the spying is supposed to be limited to people outside the United States who are not American citizens. Intelligence officials will say that your information is “incidental” to their spying on foreign individuals, she said, going on to bring up what was done to Carter Page to be able to spy on the Trump campaign.

She called that “a huge dragnet.” Under the current incarnation of this law, the phone companies gather this data, and THEY have to store it, but the NSA can “go shopping” there, “in a treasure trove of billions of pieces of data.” Anyone who might be considered “an enemy of the state” should expect that there’s some way in which the NSA can get hold of them, or somebody near them, get an order, “and then all of a sudden, they have all that information, and a bunch of unelected, faceless bureaucrats are going shopping in your data, and then talking to the guy next door [or] in the cubicle next door...”

https://news.yahoo.com/civil-rights-attorney-responds-tuckers-015051563.html

Thus, the war on terror has been re-directed inwards, by corrupt partisan ideologues, and used against Americans who challenge the political narrative. The corrupt partisan media are helping.

According to Dhillon, no lawsuits against the NSA have been successful. If you think you’ve been spied on, they’ll say it’s a matter of national security, we can’t give you any information, you can’t prove your claims, and so you essentially have no recourse. These are self-policing agencies, she said. After what happened with “Crossfire Hurricane,” that seems obvious.

But Tucker demands answers. As big a podium as he has, this could get really interesting. I still say this all leads back to Tucker’s reporting about the FBI and January 6. That's coming out, no matter what they try to do.

Mike Huckabee

The International Institute for Strategic Studies just completed a two-year assessment of the cybercapabilities of 15 nations, and they believe that China has been exaggerating its power and is at least a decade behind the US.

https://www.westernjournal.com/new-study-finds-china-fooling-world-exaggerating-true-power/

The study ranked nations in three tiers, and the US was the only one that ranked in the top tier with “world-leading strength” in all categories. The second tier of nations with world-leading strength in some categories included China, Australia, Canada, France, Israel, Russia and the UK. The third tier of nations had strengths or potential strengths in some categories but significant weaknesses in others. It included India, Indonesia, Iran, Japan, Malaysia, North Korea and Vietnam. For more details of those categories and which strengths and weaknesses different nations had, click the link above.

The study warned that since the early 2000s, China has been engaging in “industrial-scale espionage” to acquire cyber technology and is likely to catch up to the US by 2030. So this report offers no reasons to get complacent and every reason to shore up our cyber defenses and not trust China. We also have no reason to get complacent about the non-cyber capabilities of China when it’s engaged in an aggressive military build-up while our military leaders seem more concerned with promoting transgender rights, driving patriotic conservatives (who are traditionally the backbone of the military) out of the ranks, and planning how to defend America from its #1 threat: straight, white Trump voters.

Mike Huckabee

So far this year alone, there are over 42,000 cases of serious crimes in New York City, including murder, rape, robbery, burglary, felony assault, grand larceny and grand larceny auto. Many of these remain unsolved, as do many of the thousands of backlogged cases from before 2021.

And yet, Manhattan District Attorney Cy Vance has squandered years of effort and public resources endlessly investigating former President Trump and his companies, without any evidence that he committed any crimes, other than beating Hillary Clinton in 2016 and not being a liberal Democrat. They even went all the way to the Supreme Court to get authorization to seize his tax records. And now, it appears that Vance’s Javert-like pursuit of his political nemesis is about to come to a stunning anti-climax.

Vance recently indicated that he was considering criminal charges against the Trump Organization, which got a LOT of headlines. So last week, Trump attorney Ronald Fischetti held a meeting with Vance’s team to find out what these alleged charges are. Do they involve the much-ballyhooed accusations made by Stormy Daniels or former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen?

No. Fischetti claims Vance’s team told him that the first indictments would not be against Trump, and they have no immediate plans to charge him. Instead, they plan to charge a small number of Trump company executives with failing to pay taxes on some perks and benefits, such as company cars. It’s such common small potatoes that tax attorneys told the New York Times that they couldn’t think of any company ever being charged over it.

Fischetti told Politico, “We asked, ‘Is there anything else?’ They said, ‘No.’ It’s crazy that that’s all they had…It’s like the Shakespeare play ‘Much Ado About Nothing.’ This is so small that I can’t believe I’m going to have to try a case like this.”

https://www.politico.com/news/2021/06/28/trump-lawyer-manhattan-da-wont-charge-496768

It doesn’t surprise me that they got nothin’. They can abuse their office by harassing a citizen, but at the end of the day, they still have to come up with actual evidence of a crime (and by the way, you're supposed to have a solid reason to suspect a specific crime first; in America, investigations aren't supposed to be fishing trips.)

Vance’s team told Fischetti, “Our investigation is ongoing.” Which I’m sure it is: having wasted this much of the taxpayers’ money on a wild Trump hunt, they’re not giving up easily. Besides, they have to keep up the hopes of Trump haters and fans of politicized lawfare that if they hunt long enough, they’ll find something – anything! – to pin on Trump.

If those folks read my newsletter instead of the New York Times, they would have been better prepared for this. I’ve been saying for years that Trump must have massive tax returns filed by platoons of CPAs and tax attorneys and signed by a robo-pen. They have this fantasy of him staying up late on April 15th, sweating over his 1040 form and trying to hide criminal activity in it. The fact that the IRS examined those forms every year and never brought charges didn’t dissuade them from this delusion that his tax forms contain a smoking gun. Obviously, they know as little about how billionaires file their taxes as they do about the economy, policing, responsible public service, or just about anything you’d expect mature adults to grasp.

Mike Huckabee

I told you about the laughable claim by the White House that Republicans are to blame for defunding police. It’s more like an I.Q. test than a legitimate political statement. Nobody in his right mind could believe that Republicans slashed the police budgets in cities that, in some cases, haven’t been run by Republicans since Jean Harlow was America’s #1 sex symbol.

But more of them are picking up that hilarious claim, so just for the record, let me explain what it’s based on.

https://redstate.com/nick-arama/2021/06/28/wh-official-doubles-down-on-gop-defund-police-lie-but-it-blows-up-in-their-faces-n404043

Since no Congressional Republican backed Biden’s “American Rescue Plan,” they claim that means Republicans voted against cities getting needed funds during the pandemic to keep their police departments running.

The facts: Republicans opposed that bill because it was a giant, deficit-fueled slush fund that forced taxpayers to bail out blue states and cities for the costs of decades of corrupt policies, like unsustainable pension benefits in exchange for unions helping reelect Democrats. There was nothing in that bill that said any portion of the money would specifically go to keep police departments funded. In fact, before it was even proposed, blue city leaders were already slashing police budgets, whether they needed to for budgetary reasons or not, and they’ve continued doing it ever since.

Breitbart News correspondent Charlie Spierling did a text search and found that in the entire 242-page bill, the words “police” and “law enforcement” never appeared once.

If that’s not enough to shatter the narrative, on the very day the Biden White House staff tried to blame Republicans for defunding police, the city council of Oakland, California, voted to slash the police budget by millions despite a surging crime wave.

News flash: Republicans do NOT run Oakland, California.

Mike Huckabee

Last week, I told you that a group of Senate Republicans had agreed with President Biden on a compromise infrastructure bill. It cut the $2.3 trillion that Biden wanted to spend down to a bare-bones $1.2 trillion. Well, I barely had time to send that story before Biden undid it all by announcing that he wouldn’t sign the bill unless it was part of a “reconciliation” package that included all the government-bloating, big spending schemes that he’d just agreed to cut to get the Republicans to sign on.

https://www.westernjournal.com/biden-scrambles-recover-blunder-tries-walk-back-big-threat/

With the Republicans screaming that they’d been duped, Biden (or more likely, his panicked staffers) issued a statement on Saturday walking back Biden’s most recent statement. It said that in no way did his statement that if the other spending didn’t come along with the compromise bill, “I’m not signing. Real simple,” mean that he wouldn’t sign it. The statement read, “My comments also created the impression that I was issuing a veto threat on the very plan I had just agreed to, which was certainly not my intent.”

It’s not known whether that reassurance will be enough to lure Republicans back into the trap a second time. Will Biden’s current assurance that he’ll abide by the deal last longer than the 2-3 hours that his previous assurance lasted? According to my source, which is more reliable than the White House’s word, “Reply hazy, ask again later.”

Mike Huckabee

The rise of cancel culture has been a curse for comedians, who are terrified that one joke that offends someone might end their careers, and these days, every joke, no matter how innocuous, offends somebody. This has also destroyed late night comedy shows, which have become smug recitations of DNC talking points, designed to elicit approving applause from the woke studio audience instead of actual laughter.

The only people who’ve remained immune to this toxicity are conservatives like me, who don’t care what a handful of humorless crybullies on Twitter say. Some others include Greg Gutfeld, Steven Crowder, and of course, the brilliant satire site, the Babylon Bee. They are bravely and hilariously doing the job that liberal comedians used to do back when they were funny: using exaggeration to point out the hypocrisy and absurdity of the humorless establishment in power (which is currently leftist Democrats.)

But one persistent trait of today’s leftists is that while they love to mock conservatives, they have ZERO sense of humor about themselves. They also have no self-awareness, and they’re utterly terrified of having anyone laugh at them, for the same reason that the Spanish Inquisition, the Soviet Union, the Iranian Mullahs and other tyrannical regimes down through history have always tried to quash humor.

That’s why Facebook and its “fact-checkers” have been trying so hard to convince us that the Babylon Bee is rightwing “misinformation” hiding behind satire, so they can censor it. Check out Facebook’s new “guidelines” on satire and tell me they weren’t crafted out of a slurry of bias and double-talk specifically to prevent anyone from sharing Babylon Bee stories that make fun of ridiculous leftist positions.

https://pjmedia.com/columns/stephen-kruiser/2021/06/25/the-morning-briefing-humorless-democrat-marxists-are-terrified-of-the-babylon-bee-n1456900

Let’s be clear: nobody with a functioning brain seriously believes that the Babylon Bee is trying to make you believe its stories are real. Just like the Onion, back in the days when liberals were funny, they take an inconvenient truth about the left (and sometimes the right) and spin it humorously to illustrate the absurdity of that position.

For instance, does anyone really believe the headline, “Nation starts stocking up on F-15s after Biden says you’ll need them to overthrow the government” is literally true? If so, get your head, or your sense of humor, examined.

https://babylonbee.com/news/nation-starts-stocking-up-on-f-15s-after-biden-says-youll-need-them-to-overthrow-the-government

And news flash, Facebook: this is NOT an actual documentary (it is hilarious, though):

https://babylonbee.com/news/motorcycle-that-identifies-as-bicycle-sets-world-cycling-record

I suppose the Bee should take the attempts to silence them as a compliment. When people who are that terrified of being laughed at are that desperate to censor your comedy, you know you are squarely over the target (I apologize if that phrase triggers anyone. Also if the word “trigger” triggers anyone. It’s impossible to write jokes these days faster than they become reality.)

https://notthebee.com/article/the-phrase-trigger-warning-is-now-triggering-according-to-this-ridiculous-chart-from-brandeis-university

Mike Huckabee

I wrote last week about an online poll showing that more Republicans want Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis to run for President in 2024 than want Donald Trump. And right on cue, the left begins its assault on DeSantis as being “worse than Trump!”

https://redstate.com/bonchie/2021/06/25/ron-desantis-gets-labeled-worse-than-trump-n402208

When you live as long as I have, you start to experience déjà vu every time a new Republican leader emerges and has to be tarred by the left as a racist/idiot/Nazi, etc. They go so over the top in doing this that it’s necessary for them to rehabilitate the last Republican they slandered just so they can say, “Well, he really wasn’t that bad, but this one definitely is!”

I’m old enough to remember when Ronald Reagan was depicted as a crazy, dimwitted, senile, bumbling warmonger who was going to start World War III. Then he became a revered statesman, compared to the moronic, fumble-mouthed “Chimpy McBushHitler,” George W. Bush. Bush became a respected elder statesman compared to the hateful, racist, white supremacist “worse than Hitler” Donald Trump.

And now, DeSantis is already “worse than Trump.” I don’t expect them to start rehabilitating Trump’s trashed reputation until they’re sure he won’t be the candidate, but at least Trump can look forward to it as soon as it’s expedient. They’ll need to stop depicting him as Satan incarnate so they can do it to DeSantis, and they’ll expect the media to carry that message and people to believe it. Democrats rely on their followers having the long-term memory of house cats.

Mike Huckabee

The University of Arkansas at Little Rock kicked over a beehive by renaming an endowed professorship known as the Distinguished Professor of Law and Public Policy to the “William J. Clinton Professor of Constitutional Law and Public Service.” The change was made without consulting faculty members, some of whom are not happy at the idea of the school honoring a lawyer who was disbarred over giving false testimony.

https://taxprof.typepad.com/taxprof_blog/2021/06/renaming-of-endowed-professorship-for-president-clinton-roils-arkansas-law-school.html

Those seeking to defend him are arguing that he wasn’t disbarred, he was only suspended. Well, that certainly should quell any questions about honoring him! To respond to that, here’s a source that liberals always claim is reputable. Even Snopes.com says the claims of Clinton being disbarred and fined are “mostly true.”

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/bill-clinton-fined-and-disbarred-over-the-monica-lewinsky-scandal/

Mike Huckabee

Attorney General Merrick Garland proved once again what a service Mitch McConnell did for America by keeping him off the Supreme Court. In a stunning display of politicized “justice,” Garland announced that the Biden DOJ will sue the state of Georgia for passing its recent election integrity laws. I can't think of a better metaphor for the Biden Administration than the news that it's going to war against election integrity. Here’s a good analysis of the case by Redstate.com:

https://redstate.com/shipwreckedcrew/2021/06/25/biden-doj-sues-georgia-seeks-to-accomplish-the-goals-of-the-failed-elect-only-democrats-forever-bill-in-congress-n402384

I’m not an attorney, but this lawsuit seems like a huge waste of taxpayer resources. The Redstate analysts points out that the Georgia law contains nothing that other states don’t already impose (some, like Biden’s home state of Delaware, have even stricter laws.) And the DOJ is trying to argue that returning to the election laws that prevailed before they were loosened (in some cases, unconstitutionally) for the pandemic is somehow racist, without making the case that the laws were ever racist in the first place.

As Redstate notes, the success of this case will likely depend on how good a job Garland does of shopping for a liberal judge. In the meantime, this article has more on the lawsuit from the Federalist’s Margot Cleveland, who calls it “surreal,” and Redstate writer Bonchie, who uses the colorful descriptive phrase, “mind-meltingly moronic.”

https://redstate.com/bonchie/2021/06/25/the-dojs-lawsuit-against-the-georgia-election-law-is-mind-meltingly-moronic-n402609

Mike Huckabee

Mike Huckabee

Last week, we took a look at the latest developments concerning China, including information reportedly provided by a high-level Chinese defector linking the Wuhan lab with the military bioweapons program, and also the crack-down by the CCP on academics and billionaire business moguls to keep them in line. Today, we see how they must have put the screws to Nike, as that corporation’s Chief Executive Officer John Donahoe said in a phone call to Wall Street analysts, “Nike is a brand that is of China and for China.”

That statement, part of a transcript released by Nasdaq, seems oddly inconsistent, considering that as recently as March, Nike expressed concern about “reports of forced labor in, and connected to, the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region.” In a statement, they said that “Nike is committed to ethical and responsible manufacturing and we uphold international labor standards...Nike does not source products from the XUAR and we have confirmed with our contract suppliers that they are not using textiles or spun yarn from the region.” Read the whole statement, and it sounds as though they were concerned and being quite diligent about this.

https://archive.is/PLRfG#selection-203.111-205.41

But the inconsistencies are stark. According to an article in THE FEDERALIST, there are believed to be over 1 million Uyghur Muslims being held in Xinjiang and used for forced labor to deliver 80 percent of Chinese cotton. And last November, when the Uyghur Forced Labor Protection Act was making its way through the House –- overwhelmingly passed 406 to 3 –- Nike joined with Coca-Cola and Apple to lobby against it. The bill prohibits “certain imports” from Xinjiang and imposes sanctions on those responsible for human rights violations in that region. Why would American corporations have been lobbying against THAT?

Nike is the biggest sports brand in all of China. Donahoe’s revealing phone call came as a new earnings release shows Nike’s sales in China for the past three months at $1.9 billion. This is 17 percent higher than the same time last year.

Incidentally, Nike gave over $604,000 in campaign donations in 2020, 80 percent of which went to Democrats, no doubt because they prefer the Democrats’ looser policy towards China.

“We’ve been in China over 40 years,” Donahoe said in the phone call, “and the biggest asset is consumer equity...it’s real; I saw it in my first week on the job.”

https://thefederalist.com/2021/06/25/of-china-and-for-china-nike-ceo-admits-company-exists-to-serve-communist-china/

We did a little research to try to understand what Donahoe meant by “consumer equity" regarding their marketing plan in China. In general, this term translates to “the present value of the total revenues that the customer base will generate in its lifetime.” This value is driven by three factors: perceived value for the money, emotional connection to the brand, and loyalty to the brand. The greater the consumer equity, the more future revenue can be derived over the lifetime of its clients.

And apparently, in his first week on the job, Donahoe saw evidence that these measures of long-term profitability are strong in China. When it comes to China, Nike is playing the long game, and so they have to stay on the CCP’s good side.

In light of that, a story in the WASHINGTON EXAMINER made some sense out of Nike’s flip-flopping. Apparently, after Nike’s statement in March, they were hit with a backlash on China’s social media. Looks as though the CCP has pulled Nike back into line.

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/nike-ceo-company-china

In March of 2020, the Australian Strategic Policy Institute reported that “the Chinese government has facilitated the mass transfer of Uyghur and other ethnic minority citizens from the far west region of Xinjiang to factories across the country. Under conditions that strongly suggest forced labor, Uyghurs are working in in factories that are in the supply chain for 82 well-known global brands in the technology, clothing and automotive sectors, including Apple, BMW, Gap, Huawei, Nike, Samsung, Sony and Volkswagen.”

According to this report, “Since 2017, more than a million Uyghurs and members of other Turkic Muslim minorities have disappeared into a vast network of ‘re-education camps’ in the far west region of Xinjiang, in what some experts call a systematic, government-led program of cultural genocide.” Inside these camps, detainees are forced to undergo political indoctrination, to renounce their culture and religion, and even in some instances to undergo torture. It’s a harsh, military-style life in which the workers are under constant surveillance and the threat of detention.

“There is mounting evidence that that many Uyghurs are being forced to work in factories within Xinjiang,” the report says. “...Some factories appear to be using Uyghur workers sent directly from re-education camps.”

This report is an eye-opener, a must-read. In addition to outlining exactly what China is doing to essentially enslave its ethnic minorities, it also contains a long list of companies, mostly American, “potentially directly or indirectly benefiting” from forced labor. Nike is just one, sharing the honor with many well-known brands. “Some brands are linked with multiple factories,” it says.

I would add that some of these corporations are going overboard right now trying to build an image of “woke-ness” in the United States. How “woke” are they to the idea that slave labor is a bad thing?

Don’t miss Case Study #1: UYGHUR WORKERS MAKING NIKE SNEAKERS IN QINGDAO. It even has pictures.

https://www.aspi.org.au/report/uyghurs-sale

According to this report, these people who apparently make Nike shoes are not free, are not allowed to practice their faith, and must undergo political indoctrination in “night school” after work. They live and labor in a compound surrounded with barbed wire and watchtowers and are monitored everywhere they go.

Under Case Study #3, about workers making selfie cameras for Apple iPhones, the report says their work assignments were “highly politicized.” According to a local Xinjiang newspaper, the workers “were expected to ‘gradually alter their ideology’ and turn into ‘modern, capable youth’ who ‘understand the Party’s blessing, feel gratitude towards the Party, and contribute to stability.”

In its conclusions, the report says, “The tainted global supply chain that results from these practices means that it is not difficult to guarantee that products manufactured in China are free from forced labor.” Can you say, “MADE IN THE USA”?

This report is quite long and detailed, but I hope you’ll read the whole thing. As for Nike, I would say that hearing from their CEO that the Nike brand is “of China and for China” should be enough to tell us that it’s not for America. Nike's marketing plan seems to be based more in China, anyway. And if they’ve decided it’s worth humoring the CCP to maintain “consumer equity” in China, well, they can have it.

But I hope Americans will renounce any brand loyalty THEY might have had and go to the trouble of looking for shoes, sporting gear and clothing made here –- or at least not in China –- by people who choose the work they do, can think and worship as they please, and don’t exist behind barbed wire.

Finally, if you have access to THE EPOCH TIMES’ “premium” reporting, I recommend a related piece, about the CCP’s manipulation of American companies (like Nike) to shape public opinion, influence government decisions, and acquire U.S. technology.

https://www.theepochtimes.com/mkt_breakingnews/china-is-manipulating-american-businesses-to-serve-beijings-interests-house-gop-investigation-finds_3876041.html?utm_source=newsnoe&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=breaking-2021-06-27-3&mktids=1a70f5541a0c24ba8174d8738f88db5e&est=bkVpu8EfwdI7AI4T%2FwFx5roim0t5jn8TiyEzqyKjt607IohT6Ie3tP46GrGaeMBfWkE3UA%3D%3D

Mike Huckabee

In banana republics, it’s usual for an incoming administration to put a target on the back of the outgoing President and his associates, to punish them and make sure they stay gone. That is clearly what is being done to former President Trump, and, by extension, to those who support or defend him. Today, I have a couple of examples of this that I never thought I’d see in America.

First, Rudy Giuliani, the distinguished former U.S. attorney and transformative New York mayor –- and currently the personal attorney for President Trump –- has had his law license temporarily suspended in New York State. Rudy has been practicing law in New York since 1969. The reason for the suspension: According to a five-judge panel of New York State Supreme Court’s Appellate Division, Giuliani “made false and misleading statements” related to voter fraud in the 2020 election.

Rudy has 20 days to request a post-suspension hearing.

Here’s the story as told by the NEW YORK POST.

https://nypost.com/2021/06/24/rudy-giulianis-law-license-suspended-in-new-york/

The judges said Rudy had made false allegations of voter fraud while serving as Trump’s legal counsel after the election, on radio programs and in other public statements. They claimed there is “uncontroverted evidence” of this. According to the ruling, “These false statements were made to improperly bolster respondent’s narrative that due to widespread voter fraud, victory in the 2020 United States presidential election was stolen from his client. We conclude that respondent’s conduct immediately threatens the public interest and warrants interim suspension from the practice of law, pending further proceedings before the Attorney Grievance Committee.”

That the election was stolen from his client is exactly what his client contends.

Keep in mind, this ruling comes right at the time when a full audit of the election in Maricopa County, Arizona, is going on, with results expected in a few weeks. Tabulation procedures, the use of outside money, widespread mail-in and absentee voting, and fraud-facilitating changes in election law are under scrutiny in Georgia, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan as well, with pressure building for similar audits and forensic analyses in those states. In key counties, we’ve seen huge statistical anomalies, highly suspicious vote-counting procedures, and affidavits from election workers that stacks of absentee ballots marked for Biden were unfolded and looked like copies. That’s without even getting into unresolved questions about the hack-ability of voting machines. We don’t have hard proof that the election was stolen, but we don’t know for a fact that it wasn’t, either. In some places that happen to have razor-thin margins, the election appears to have been an outright mess.

All five judges who gave Rudy the thumbs-down are Democrats, with three of them, if Giuliani’s son Andrew is correct, having been appointed by Andrew Cuomo. And the judges are wrong about this. It does not “threaten the public interest” to raise legitimate questions; in fact, it could be argued that doing so is very much IN the public interest. Long-term, it’s impossible to maintain trust in a system by ignoring obvious problems and preventing a transparent examination of results. But the new administration and its media minions have christened this sincere questioning “The Big Lie” and must severely punish any skeptic who dares cast even the slightest doubt on Biden’s legitimacy. That’s what they do in banana republics.

Just wondering, how many members of the New York State Bar Association have participated in the spread of the one really egregious lie –- the proven lie –- that dominated headlines for years: the Russia hoax, the lie that Donald Trump, before and after his election, was actually an agent of Vladimir Putin? How much did THAT “threaten the public interest”? And how many of those attorneys have had their licenses to practice law suspended?

These judges accused Giuliani of leveling false claims about the number of absentee ballots counted in Pennsylvania after Biden carried the state. (Trump had won Pennsylvania in 2016.) The forums were a radio show called “Uncovering the Truth” with Dr. Maria Ryan on November 8, 2020; a meeting of the Republican State Senate Majority Policy Committee in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania on November 25; and an episode of “Steve Bannon’s The War Room” on December 24.

Andrew Giuliani, in a video he posted on Twitter, said he was “infuriated” and that this was a political ploy.

https://twitter.com/AndrewHGiuliani/status/1408096094169468929?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1408108837593239556%7Ctwgr%5E%7Ctwcon%5Es3_&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.nydailynews.com%2Fsnyde%2Fny-kathy-griffin-rudy-andrew-giuliani-video-20210624-hbtdec3fo5hjzauczd5cbwzmqu-story.htmled%3Drss_www.nydailynews.com%2Farcio%2Frss%2Fcategory%2Fnews%2F

Rudy’s son is extremely well-spoken and passionate here about what was done to his dad. The left, however, had to try somehow to dismiss his rant and keep him from being taken seriously, so they mocked the framing of the video and the fact that he was standing in a parking lot. The hateful and stunningly unfunny comedian Kathy Griffin questioned whether or not he was wearing pants. This actually became the story, to take attention off the real issue.

Recall that in April, Giuliani was served with an FBI search warrant, and agents combed through his Manhattan apartment, taking all his electronic devices. (Except, of course, for his copies of Hunter Biden’s hard drives. How interesting that the FBI wouldn’t take those, even when they were offered.)

Trump released a statement about what was done to Rudy:

https://thelibertydaily.com/president-trump-responds-to-lefts-latest-witch-hunt-against-rudy-giuliani/

Our second example of “not in America” also involves the FBI. On Thursday, they showed up unannounced at the home of Casey Cusick and arrested and handcuffed him in front of his wife and 3-year-old daughter, who asked her mom at one point, “Why are they locking daddy’s hands?” Also arrested and handcuffed was his 73-year-old father, James, who is founder and pastor of a church in Melbourne, Florida.

What was their crime? They attended Trump’s January 6 rally, and they peaceably entered the Capitol Building. Yes, the feds are still tracking down people and arresting them for that. In fact, 32 more “criminals” have been arrested this month.

Oh, and the 73-year-old pastor is a veteran who volunteered to fight for his country in Vietnam. According to his daughter, Staci, he was “shocked” to find out why they were arresting him. He had told her he was friendly with officers inside the Capitol, who even directed him to a bathroom, and that they had never told him to leave. He apparently had no idea he had done anything wrong.

We’ll have more details on this story. In the meantime, you can read how this went down at THE GATEWAY PUNDIT. Be sure and read what Staci has to say about her patriotic, law-abiding, Constitution-loving father being taken away in handcuffs.

https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2021/06/breaking-exclusive-73-year-old-pastor-purple-heart-veteran-arrested-capitol-son-also-arrested-front-3-year-old-daughter-videos/

This is what we’re up against, folks. We’ve had some successes in recent days, with parents realizing they have to stop schools from indoctrinating their children in toxic Critical Race Theory (or, as I like to call it, Commie Racist Theory). But our fight is on other fronts as well, as the double standard of “justice” becomes more obvious every day. Good people are harassed and even jailed while rioters and attackers go free to commit more crimes.

None of this is acceptable in the United States of America.

Mike Huckabee

While we’re on the subject of school board meetings, remember when those were considered boring, and you could get through one without anyone being arrested? But then, that was back when schools concerned themselves with things like reading, writing and arithmetic instead of far-left politics and social issues.

https://www.foxnews.com/us/virginia-loudoun-county-school-board-mulls-transgender-critical-race-theory-policies

At another school board meeting, parents made so much noise, it sent a wake-up call to the woke board members, and they woke up, smelled the egg nog, and returned “Christmas” and other holidays to the calendar.

https://www.nj.com/education/2021/06/nj-district-reverses-course-will-add-holiday-names-back-onto-school-calendar.html

And speaking of schools being turned into racist leftist indoctrination centers, were you aware that if you want to Make America Great Again, it means you’re a white supremacist? That’s what a school district in Iowa is telling its teachers to impart to students.

https://www.westernjournal.com/iowa-teachers-forced-mandatory-crt-training-told-classify-maga-white-supremacy-report/

This will come as quite a surprise to all the black people I saw wearing MAGA caps and T-shirts at Trump rallies.

Mike Huckabee

The Biden Department of Justice is preparing to go after the cause of all the rampant violent crime in Democrat-run cities. No, they’re not planning to arrest the mayors, DA’s and city councils, unfortunately, even though those are the root causes. No, after all the releasing of criminals and rioters, decriminalizing crimes, protecting criminal illegal aliens, and defunding and prosecuting police, they’ve decided that the reason for the skyrocketing crime wave is… guns!

https://www.westernjournal.com/bidens-doj-readying-strike-forces-go-firearms-blamed-liberal-cities-sky-high-violent-crime/

Yep, crime is caused by the hardware, not the criminal holding it. So they’re going after dealers of illegal guns and after “assault weapons.” I’m fine with them trying to get rid of illegal guns. In fact, it’s kind of nice to hear them admit that most criminals like gang members don’t buy guns legally and go through background checks (that’s for law-abiding citizens); they get them through illegal channels. But I doubt that the crackdown on “illegal gun dealers” won’t end up as harassment of legal gun dealers.

RELATED READING: Biden Fights Crime

As for “assault weapons,” I put that in quotes because it’s a silly, meaningless term made up by people who know nothing about guns. Any weapon can be an assault weapon if you assault someone with it. If you defend yourself from that assault with the exact same kind of weapon, then it’s a defensive weapon. This is the area that’s ripest for abuse, and for trampling on the rights of citizens to defend themselves.

When you have Democrat politicians releasing criminals and rioters while defunding their police, if you think the solution to ending the resulting crime waves is to disarm law-abiding citizens, then you can only be a liberal or a moron. Sorry if I’m repeating myself.

Mike Huckabee

I usually don’t comment on celebrity news, but the testimony that came out of singer Britney Spears’ attempt to end her court-ordered conservatorship was so shocking that it even led serious newscasts. It was also newsworthy in ways far beyond typical celebrity voyeurism.

As Megan Fox at PJ Media reports, Spears testified that she has been stripped of virtually every basic human right. She claims she’s not only forced to perform and has no control over the money she earns, but she has zero privacy; her keepers watch her even when she’s changing clothes; and most outrageous of all, she said she wants to marry again and have children, but the “team” controlling her life has banned her from doing that and forced her to have an IUD implanted to prevent pregnancy.

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/megan-fox/2021/06/24/shocking-britney-spears-audio-rips-mask-of-california-conservatorships-n1456800

Ms Fox asks, where is the “My body, my choice” crowd? Will they speak up for someone who’s being denied the choice to have a baby?

She also makes a second important point: this high profile case may shine a spotlight on much more widespread abuse of the conservatorship system by corrupt judges, greedy guardians and predatory lawyers. She reports on a couple of journalist investigations that suggest there may be thousands of similar cases of less wealthy, non-famous people, many in nursing homes, who have had their property and rights taken away by the scandalous abuse of the conservatorship system. Perhaps a public outcry over the Britney Spears case will spark more widespread reform.

After the story broke, Ms Spears made a statement to her fans about why she spoke out and why, she says, she’s hidden the painful truth for so long behind fake happy images on Instagram. I suspect that’s what many celebrities do, but hers is an extreme case.

https://www.foxnews.com/entertainment/britney-spears-speaks-out-after-request-end-conservatorship

Mike Huckabee

One of the most positive side effects of the rising calls for investigations of the 2020 election is the spotlight that’s being shone on Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg’s part in buying the White House for Joe Biden.

Under the guise of promoting “democracy,” Zuckerberg gave hundreds of millions of dollars to a group called the Center for Tech and Civic Life. It’s ostensible goal is to make voting easier and more common. But while a small amount of these “Zuck Bucks” went to GOP districts, the majority of the get-out-the-vote funds were poured into heavily-Democrat districts in swing states. In some cases, local election officials practically let Zuckerberg’s minions take over their election systems.

Now, some local officials are alarmed at what happened and how much influence one tech billionaire had on the election, and they’re trying to make sure that never happens again. For instance, a former county clerk in Green Bay, Wisconsin, is accusing the Zuckerberg group of making last-minute changes that may have violated state law.

https://www.westernjournal.com/wisconsin-election-official-says-zuckerberg-funded-group-seized-control-2020-election/

And in Texas, Gov. Greg Abbott just signed a new law aimed squarely at Zuck Bucks, limiting private funding of election administration.

https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2021/06/14/ttexas-gov-greg-abbott-signs-bill-into-law-limits-private-funding-of-election-administration/

That’s a bill that needs to be adopted nationwide, although that won’t happen with the beneficiaries of Zuck Bucks in charge in DC. That’s why citizens have to demand that their state and local leaders step up and stop it.

Ironically, for years, Democrats have railed against “billionaires buying elections.” Their principles seem to have shifted considerably since billionaires started buying elections for them.

Mike Huckabee

Wednesday, President Biden announced his policy to reduce the big surge in violent crime that’s been caused by the policies of his fellow Democrats. Not surprisingly, it was a mixture of the obvious and the useless. The obvious: increase community policing. Wait, I thought the key to reducing violence was to defund the police? Well, that worked about as well as a cement life jacket. So now, Democrats can announce that they will solve the problem they caused by doing the opposite of what they’ve been doing for the past year and hope that voters have amnesia.

The useless proposals Biden announced were, of course, more gun control laws, like strengthening background checks and banning assault weapons (which liberals can’t even define) and high-capacity magazines (ditto.) These will inconvenience law-abiding gun owners and create a lot more paperwork while doing nothing to stop criminals from obtaining illegal weapons.

All this stuff was sadly predictable, but what got the most attention was Biden’s wandering comments (bizarre even by Joe Biden standards) about those who view the Second Amendment as protecting the citizens’ right to be armed to prevent government tyranny. Biden claimed “most responsible gun owners” agree there’s “no possible justification for having 100 rounds in a magazine…Those who say the blood of patriots*, you know, and all the stuff about how we’re gonna have to move against the government. If you think you need to have weapons to take on the government, you need F-15s and maybe some nuclear weapons.”

https://www.westernjournal.com/biden-accidentally-made-best-case-gun-rights-president-ever/

That statement launched a thousand conservative commentaries and memes. Some pointed out that he’s the same President who’s also trying to convince us that a handful of unarmed nuts in the Capitol were actually a serious threat to topple the government. Others pointed out that Democrats call AR-15s a “weapon of war” (they’re not), but now claim you can’t win a war with them, you need F-15s and nukes. Others reminded Biden that guerillas with rifles and IEDs have fought the US to a standstill in the Middle East for decades. Some noted that the main driving force of gun sales isn’t insurrectionists but law-abiding residents of cities where idiot Democrat leaders have slashed police forces and started releasing criminals and prosecuting cops. And still others pointed out the ludicrousness of suggesting that if there ever was a revolt against the government that Washington would fight back by…what, nuking Oklahoma?

Kurt Schlicter, who is not only a hilarious columnist and an attorney but also a former military officer, was kind enough to give the media a lesson in doing their job as well. He gave them a list of follow-up questions they should have asked the President, if they knew anything at all about military tactics or the Second Amendment or the limits on government power. It’s worth reading all the way to the end.

https://twitchy.com/brettt-3136/2021/06/23/kurt-schlichter-gives-journalists-some-questions-to-ask-the-president-after-his-comments-about-needing-f-15s-and-nukes-to-fight-the-government/

* (I think he was referring to the Thomas Jefferson quote, “The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.” It’s telling that he remembered the part about patriots shedding blood but didn’t mention tyrants having to shed any blood. That would sort of explain his attitude toward Iran.)

Mike Huckabee

Despite President Biden’s campaign promise that nobody making less than $400,000 a year will pay a dime more in taxes under his plan, an analysis by the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center estimates that it would result in higher taxes for nearly 60% of Americans.

https://www.westernjournal.com/analysis-60-americans-will-forced-pay-taxes-bidens-plan/

That’s because, as I keep trying to tell people, higher taxes on corporations are treated as an expense of doing business, just like supplies and labor. And those costs are passed on to consumers in the form of higher prices. Corporations don’t pay taxes, they collect them…from you.

Simple example: if the government taxes the company that makes Snickers bars, your Snickers bar will cost you more. Democrats will claim they’re making the corporation pay, but they won’t eat the tax. You will.

And speaking of everyday Americans having to eat the cost of Biden’s policies: Prof. Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit reports that a restaurant owner friend told him food costs have skyrocketed just this week, with the price of cooking oil more than doubling. Add this to the extra costs of trying to compete with enhanced unemployment to get workers plus the higher shipping costs due to rising gas prices, and we’ll all be forced to eat the high cost of bad Democrat policies.

Mike Huckabee

House Democratic Caucus Chair Hakeem Jeffries let the cat out of the bag by declaring that America can’t go back to pre-pandemic “normal” unless the government spends a Mount Everest-sized mountain of borrowed money on a raft of massive government social programs. Or as he calls it, “Investing in the caring economy.”

https://www.westernjournal.com/top-democrat-exposes-lefts-real-agenda-says-america-cannot-go-back-pre-pandemic-normal/

I hate to break it to him, but most of America is already returning to normal, thanks to Trump’s vaccines and Democrats finally taking their boots off their necks. And as always, “normal” includes ignoring Democrats who always claim that the only solution to any problem is to invent a massive new government program and shovel a ton of borrowed money into it.

Incidentally, Rep. Jeffries, this is what Americans are talking about when they say we need to fix our infrastructure, not spending trillions on new social programs.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/roads-open-after-northeast-dc-pedestrian-bridge-collapse/ar-AALorok

This happened very close to you in DC, so maybe you should get a few of your colleagues together and drive by to take a look at it for future reference.

Mike Huckabee

The same Monmouth University poll that found that more minorities than whites want voter ID laws (but large majorities of both groups want them) also found that one-third of Americans believe Joe Biden won the presidency thanks to vote fraud. That includes 63% of Republicans and those leaning GOP.

https://www.westernjournal.com/poll-one-third-americans-believe-joe-biden-won-election-voter-fraud/

Those numbers haven’t budged since November, despite the media’s insistence that it’s a false conspiracy theory, a “big lie” and an attack on democracy. You could draw a lot of conclusions from this. Maybe it’s a testament to just how divided on partisan lines we are. Or maybe these voters distrust the vote because the Dems and the media dost protest too much, with their all-out war on any attempts to examine the 2020 ballots and voting machines. Or maybe they just remember how the Dems spent four years claiming that Russia stole the 2016 election for Trump, and they just enjoy turning the tables.

RELATED READING: Election Integrity Laws Receive Biased Media Coverage

Or maybe, as this article points out, they know there’s more evidence of voter fraud (even if it’s not enough to have changed the election results) than there is of “voter suppression,” yet the media and the Democrats also insist that’s real and a genuine danger to democracy.

There’s only one thing I know for certain: all this never-ending turmoil, suspicion and divisiveness wouldn’t still be going on if Biden and Trump had joined together to call for a transparent, bipartisan investigation of the vote to get to the truth and settle all the questions and accusations before Biden took office. If only someone had suggested that! Oh, wait, I remember now: I did.

Mike Huckabee

The head of Portland’s Police Association says morale among officers is “as bad as it’s ever been.”

https://www.foxnews.com/us/portland-police-association-leader-morale-officers-bad

Due to lack of available officers, Portland Police have been ordered not to make traffic stops for certain types of moving violations. This is being called part of an effort to “reimagine our public safety system.” Yes, try to imagine that the city is safe. You’ll need a very active imagination, since the city’s homicide rate is up 800% since the leftist city leaders slashed the police budget by $16 million.

https://www.westernjournal.com/portland-discovered-black-people-commit-minor-traffic-offences-decided-stop-enforcing/

It’s so bad for police that you might say there’s only one job in Portland that’s harder, and that’s running the tourism bureau and trying to convince people to visit. FYI: If I were trying to get people to overlook all the crime and rioters, I probably wouldn’t mention the phrase, “cutting edge.”

https://townhall.com/tipsheet/juliorosas/2021/06/22/portlands-tourism-organization-begs-people-to-come-back-to-the-city-amid-crime-wave-n2591347

Mike Huckabee

Documentary filmmaker and conservative activist Chris Rufo has been effectively exposing Critical Race Theory for what it is, sounding the warning for the past year, and, naturally, the “woke” left can’t stand that. So the WASHINGTON POST did a long hit piece on him. The slant of it was that the teaching of Critical Race Theory was being used by Republicans not because it’s evil and racist (which it is) but because they see “political promise” in making it a wedge issue to use for taking back Congress in 2022. And they made Rufo out to seem manipulative when he’s simply running a public persuasion campaign –- not by lying about CRT but by telling the truth about it.

Rufo challenged what they'd said, and WAPO ended up having to retract or add six paragraphs from their story. They had to reverse one of their key accusations against him. They even had to admit to out-and-out fabricating a timeline of events that was central to their story. They also had to admit they didn’t have an audio recording or transcript of the (fake) quotes they had used.

https://twitter.com/realchrisrufo/status/1407151635214700545

Still, the “clarification” they printed at the end of their revised story really downplays the problems with their piece. All they said was this:

“This report has been changed to clarify the sequence of events that followed Rufo’s appearance on FOX NEWS last summer. In addition, the story adds a clarification from the Cupertino superintendent that a lesson was presented once before it was canceled.”

When Rufo also called out Joy Reid of MSNBC for denouncing him “by name multiple times” and suggested she lacked the courage to invite him on her show, Reid –- who is perhaps the most racist person on television if it can narrowed down to just one –- tweeted, “This is a weirdly aggressive way to get yourself on TV, Christopher...Why not just contact my booking producers like a normal person, rather than going with the White Man Demands option? I had never even heard of you until @oneunderscore_piece exposing your plot to rebrand CRT.”

https://www.foxnews.com/media/washington-post-issues-clarifications-on-chris-rufo-story

“White Man Demands”? Told you, this person views everything from the lens of her own bigotry.

Rufo appeared on Tucker Carlson’s show Tuesday night. “I’m eating these hit pieces for breakfast,” he said. “It’s really not fazing me at all.” He’s focused like a laser on his mission.

He said WAPO had assigned three reporters and spent three weeks to try and undermine him but that this had “backfired spectacularly.”

So, “it doesn’t bother me one bit,” he said. “I think it really shows that we’re having an impact. We’ve woken up millions of parents to the dangers of Critical Race Theory. They’re now starting to take action in school boards across the country. And these neo-racist bigots are starting to get worried.”

He added that it’s important to recognize the difference between “equality” and “equity.” The former means equal protection under the law, while the latter, though it might sound good and soft and fuzzy, really means “something totally different” –- it means that they’re trying to divide and conquer by forcing groups to compete against each other.

“They’re using active racial discrimination,” he said, “which they call ‘anti-racist discrimination,’ to try to achieve equality of outcomes.” When regimes in the 20th century tried to set up this kind of society, “it left body counts in the tens of millions, and we shouldn’t try it here. There’s no chance that it will succeed. And we have to know exactly where it’s starting, which is in our schools."

Rufo is slightly off about one thing: historians will say, the body count was in the HUNDREDS of millions. And the slaughter continues to this day in some countries.

In related news, two parents were arrested Tuesday at a meeting of the Loudoun County, Virginia, school board. One who didn’t want to go quietly was roughed up and tackled to the floor. They had come “because they had been given space to speak,” Tucker Carlson reported, but so many angry parents had shown up to put the “loud” in “Loudoun” and protest the teaching of Critical Race Theory and also a proposed new transgender policy that the school board, after first calling for a five-minute recess to let things cool down, chose to adjourn the meeting and send everybody home. That didn’t sit well with some of the parents who had wanted to speak. Police were there to arrest for trespassing the ones who wouldn’t leave, and it got contentious.

More coverage on Laura Ingraham’s show and on FOX NEWS early Wednesday morning showed complete bedlam in the meeting hall, with parents demanding board members resign over their support of CRT. A total of 259 parents were signed up to make public comment, and only 51 got to speak. When board members filed out of the room after adjourning, parents chanted, “Shame on you! Shame on you!” and also sang “The Star-Spangled Banner.”

https://www.foxnews.com/us/virginia-loudoun-county-school-board-mulls-transgender-critical-race-theory-policies

One after another, while they had the chance, parents took to the microphone. Demographically, it was a largely white crowd, but not all-white. Black parents are upset by this as well, as it teaches black children that they are victims and losers who need intervention to do as well as others. “My child is not oppressed,” said one mother who is black, “and don’t assume that. As long as you Marxists push your unconstitutional agenda, my child --- she will not be returning back to Loudon County schools.” The room erupted in cheers.

Video of the entire event is here.

https://citizenfreepress.com/breaking/crazy-scenes-from-loudon-county-school-board-meeting/

This was a rowdy crowd, and it would have been better not to see fighting and booing. But this illustrates what happens when people get pushed too far, especially where their kids are concerned. Parents are realizing that when it comes to the education of their kids, school boards aren’t even giving them a seat at the table. But school boards are answerable to THEM. Policies they vehemently disagree with are being shoved down their throats by progressives who just keep moving the goal post further and further left, and parents, in particular, are sick of it.

FOX & FRIENDS on Wednesday morning interviewed one of the parents. “We do not want to co-parent with our government,” Rachel Pisani said, concerned that kids are being indoctrinated. This board, she says, is planning to fire any teacher who isn’t on board with their cultural message. And during Tuesday’s meeting, she said, they cut off speakers with whom they disagreed. But she vowed that the protests by this “army of moms” will not stop until they are heard. The goal of these parents now is to recall and replace six of the nine members of the school board.

It's great to see that pushing back against the radical left agenda is waking more people up. Parents need to stay pedal-to-the-metal on this and any other school issue they have a problem with. To borrow a word from President Trump, it seems that finally, on the issue of Critical Race Theory, we are...WINNING!

Mike Huckabee

Seth Barrett Tillman, a law lecturer at the National University of Ireland, dug up an eye-opening Newsweek article from January 18, 2018. Currently, Trump supporters who think the election was rigged are being silenced and vilified as delusional for thinking that the results could be overturned and Trump become President again. I’m not saying that could happen, but this article reminds us that many Democrats had a very different attitude when they thought the Mueller probe might prove that Russia rigged the 2016 election for Trump.

https://twitter.com/SethBTillman/status/1406665439288176644

The article quotes Harvard professor Lawrence Lessig as saying that if it was proven Trump conspired with Russia to steal the election (spoiler alert: it wasn’t, and he didn’t), both he and Mike Pence should resign or be impeached. That would make then-House Speaker Paul Ryan President, and he should nominate Hillary Clinton, "the person defeated by the treason of his own party, and then step aside, and let her become President.”

Lessig admitted that there is no “mechanism for correcting the criminal results of the previous election," and he wasn’t saying this should happen, just that it could.

The important point is that only three years ago, questioning the validity of the previous Presidential election wasn’t treason or insurrection, it was free speech. And fantasizing about the current President being forced to step down and replaced by his former opponent because the election was rigged wasn’t a conspiracy theory so crazy that anyone who even mentioned it had to be censored, monitored and investigated. It was something that Harvard professors openly discussed in mainstream media outlets.

Gee, I wonder what changed in so short a time?

Mike Huckabee

CNN is under fire for running the provocative and misleading headline “Georgia removes 100,000 names from voter rolls,” which prompted Robert Reich to declare on Twitter, “Our democracy is under attack.” But CNN omitted the important details that (A.) they were inactive voters, and (B.) all states routinely remove inactive voters from their voting rolls, as required by law.

https://www.foxnews.com/media/cnn-misleading-headline-georgia-voter-rolls

The headline on this story could be “CNN promotes divisive, misleading partisan spin over journalistic accuracy,” but that wouldn't qualify as news.

Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger pointed out a few more details that CNN overlooked in trying to make it appear that Georgia is disenfranchising Democrat voters.

https://www.westernjournal.com/officials-act-georgia-makes-massive-discovery-voter-rolls/

The number of voters purged is actually much smaller than in 2017 or 2019. Only 275 are on the list due to inactivity (five years or more with no contact with elections officials), but anyone who was removed mistakenly can re-register online in seconds. The vast majority are being removed because they filled out change-of-address forms or their election mail was returned as undeliverable. And 18,000 of them had died. Raffensperger said, “So they are not going to be voting anymore.”

On the other hand, you might take that as an admission that we’ve finally, at long last, found an actual example of Georgia disenfranchising a loyal Democrat constituency.

Mike Huckabee

Good evening! My Evening Edition for today contains the following:

• Daily Bible Verse
• Hypocrisy In Regatta
• America Is Waking Up
• Related
• The Olympics Are Coming
• Another Loss In Court For The Biden Administration

Sincerely,

Mike Huckabee

DAILY BIBLE VERSE

And we know that all things work together for good to them that love God, to them who are the called according to his purpose.

Romans 8:28

Hypocrisy In Regatta

By Mike Huckabee

Liberal Democrat Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse loves to expound on BLM and other people’s racism on Twitter, but when it comes to his longtime membership in an exclusive, all-white beach club in his home state of Rhode Island, he isn’t quite so woke.

https://www.westernjournal.com/pro-blm-dem-senators-hypocrisy-gets-exposed-confronted-membership-white-club/

When surprised by an interviewer who asked if Bailey’s Beach Club in Newport ever added any non-white members, Whitehouse said no, but “I think the people who are running the place are still working on that. I’m sorry it hasn’t happened yet. It’s a long tradition in Rhode Island, and there are many of them, and I think we just need to work our way through the issues, thank you.”

Whitehouse has been a member of the all-white club for decades, and his wife is even a major shareholder. He’s never quit or used his power and influence to change things. Yet he’s escaped the cancel culture apparently because he’s a prominent Democrat. If you’re one of those, and you say the “right” things (i.e., the left things), you get a pass on actually doing the right thing.

https://www.newsbusters.org/blogs/nb/nicholas-fondacaro/2021/06/21/nets-blackout-sen-whitehouses-membership-all-white-elite

Guy Benson of Townhall.com had a great observation about this on Twitter:

https://pjmedia.com/instapundit/457376/

“(Actress) Ellie Kemper had to issue a groveling apology because she won a pageant crown in 1999 from a group that was segregated decades prior. Sheldon Whitehouse belongs to a club that is *still all-white TODAY* (after promising to quit years ago) & his response is “it’s a tradition.”

Well, so was slavery, and it took Republicans to end that, too.

Mike Huckabee

If you wonder why so many of your fellow Americans don’t seem to understand why anyone would oppose something called the “For the People Act” or think that trying to make elections honest is “voter suppression,” you can partially thank the Democrat Party press agents known as the “news media.”

Newsbusters.org analyzed the NBC, CBS and ABC evening news from March 1 to June 10th. They found that coverage of states’ attempts to increase election integrity received 96% negative coverage. They were routinely depicted as voting “restrictions,” even though none of them prevent any eligible person from voting, and many expand voting opportunities. Coverage was also couched in partisan terms, comparing these laws to Jim Crow and claiming that “many are calling them racist” and that “Black and brown voters are screaming that this is voter suppression” (ABC.)

https://www.newsbusters.org/blogs/nb/rich-noyes/2021/06/15/study-nets-blast-state-election-laws-ignore-dem-election-takeover

On the other hand, from the networks’ coverage of the Democrats’ “For the People Act” (or as I more accurately call it, the “Legalize Vote Fraud Act”), you’d think there was no legitimate criticism of that at all. They depicted it as needed to prevent voter suppression, even though turnout in 2020 was the highest since 1900. Also, as noted by Rich Lowry at National Review, it’s backers claim it would increase confidence in the accuracy of elections even though it bans states from updating voter rolls and abolishes voter ID laws (which are favored by a majority of blacks, FYI.)

Even when Sen. Joe Manchin announced his opposition to the bill, a major story, the networks gave it no air time.

It shows that in an age when you can get practically anything delivered, the people who claim to be delivering the news are the only ones not delivering.

Mike Huckabee

Saturday in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, the driver of a pickup truck drove into a crowd during a Pride Month parade, killing one person and injuring another. He narrowly missed a convertible that was carrying Rep. Debbie Wasserman-Schultz. We extend our sympathies and prayers for the victims and their families.

Sadly, even though the event was supposed to be promoting tolerance, Mayor Dean Trantalis immediately leapt to an intolerant conclusion, telling local media, “This is a terrorist attack against the LGBT community. This is exactly what it is. Hardly an accident. It was deliberate. It was premeditated, and it was targeted against a specific person. Luckily, they missed that person, but unfortunately, they hit two other people."

https://www.foxnews.com/politics/ft-lauderdale-mayor-terrorist-attack-pride-dean-trantalis

That false impression quickly spread, sparking denunciations of Gov. DeSantis and other conservatives. But Trantalis backed down after experiencing a swift backlash. It was reported that if he’d just waited 15 minutes before making his false accusation, he would have seen that the driver being arrested was wearing a Fort Lauderdale Gay Men’s Chorus T-shirt. Both he and the victims were involved with the chorus. The driver was reportedly a 77-year-old man whose ailments prevented him from walking, so they let him drive the lead vehicle, and it suddenly accelerated. So it was not deliberate, premeditated or targeted. It was an accident.

It’s also a tragic reminder of the wise old saying, “Make sure your brain is in gear before engaging your mouth.”

Mike Huckabee

President Biden and DC Democrats seem to want to keep subsidizing unemployment forever, or at least through September 6th, but many states are sick of it. Sunday, nine more states (Alabama, Alaska, Idaho, Indiana, Nebraska, New Hampshire, North Dakota, West Virginia and Wyoming) will join Iowa, Mississippi and Missouri in cutting off the extra $300 a week in pandemic unemployment benefits.

https://www.westernjournal.com/nine-states-end-pandemic-unemployment-bonuses-saturday/

With the pandemic ending and businesses reopening, 9.3 million jobs were created in April. But many employers say they can’t get people to apply because they’re currently paid more to stay home than to take an entry level job. The benefits are especially lavish in blue states. For instance, in Massachusetts, someone on unemployment can make up to $1,155 a week, or the equivalent of $60,060 a year for not working, plus state-paid food and medical support. Why accept a job and take a pay cut?

Biden insists that there’s no connection between these payments and continuing unemployment despite plenty of job openings, and Democrats claim there are still many people who can’t find a job and need the support. But we’ll soon know for sure, thanks to the laboratory of the states. By the end of July, more than half the nation (26 states) will have ended the bonus pay. Only one of those states has a Democrat Governor (Louisiana.)

By comparing the red and blue states, we’ll soon know whether unemployment remains higher in states that subsidize it. And if we see a sudden exodus of people moving from red to blue states, we can be pretty certain that’s the only reason.

Note to anyone seeking to extend unemployment: don’t move to California because even they’re tired of people taking money and not even looking for work.

https://redstate.com/jenniferoo/2021/06/18/california-employment-development-department-will-require-ui-claimants-to-search-for-work-n398937

Mike Huckabee

Mark and Patricia McCloskey, the St. Louis couple who were facing felony charges for brandishing rifles to warn off protesters who were trespassing on their property and threatening them, agreed to plead guilty to much-lesser misdemeanor charges of fourth-degree assault and second-degree harassment, respectively. They have to pay fines of $750 and $2,000, and relinquish the two rifles, but they will serve no jail time.

https://www.westernjournal.com/mccloskeys-plead-guilty-come-swinging-fiery-statement-god/

Mark McCloskey took it as a victory and remained defiant, saying, “The prosecutor dropped every charge except for alleging that I purposely placed other people in imminent risk of physical injury, right, and I sure as heck did… That’s what the guns were there for and I’d do it again any time the mob approaches me…In other words, I stood out on the porch with my rifle and made them back up. And that’s what I’d do again. If that’s a crime in Missouri, by G** I did it, and I’d do it again.”

As the story notes, many people, including Gov. Mike Parson, don’t think it’s a just settlement, and you can add me to that. The McCloskeys did nothing wrong, and they shouldn’t have to pay a cent in fines, give up their guns or have anything on their records. They merely showed weapons (didn’t fire them or even point them at anyone) to protect themselves from threatening trespassers. They were well within their Second Amendment rights to do so. If anyone should have faced charges, it was the trespassers. But in blue cities, up is now down, left is right, and criminals are let go while citizens and cops are prosecuted. It’s the New Abnormal.

The story says that Gov. Parson is “evaluating the situation.” I don’t know what he can do, since they agreed to take the deal to end the legal harassment. But a good start would be to immediately expunge their misdemeanor criminal records.

Mike Huckabee

Watch former FBI Assistant Director for Counterintelligence Frank Figliuzzi tell (of course) MSNBC that to fight “domestic terrorism,” the feds may have to go after people “around the former President” and even current members of Congress who supported Trump. He said federal law enforcement need to proactively “attack” Congress members who exhibit “cult-like leadership.” Apparently, if you criticize establishment politics and entrenched, corrupt, hyper-politicized, power-abusing bureaucrats, you are “recruiting people to violence.”

https://www.westernjournal.com/former-fbi-assistant-director-arrests-arent-enough-take-people-close-trump-sitting-congressmen-stop-domestic-terrorism/

Well, I criticize those things daily, but I’ve never encouraged anyone to commit violence. Quite the opposite, in fact. Meanwhile, I see people on the other side who are committing violence and terrorizing our cities daily, while Democrats in Congress defend and excuse them. Should the feds attack them? Or does freedom of speech only apply to leftist speech? Guess we know where Mr. Figliuzzi comes down on that question.

This is an eye-opening look into the mindset of those who are trying desperately to criminalize any disagreement with leftist politics and massive, unaccountable federal power. Anyone who expresses such views should never be allowed within a thousand yards of federal power.

That’s why the only good thing about his title of “former FBI Assistant Director for Counterintelligence” is the word “former.” Turn out in massive numbers to vote for Republicans so we can keep it that way.

Related: Stephen Kruiser of PJ Media has an excellent article on the Democrats’ attempts to convince everyone of their ludicrous fantasy that the biggest terrorist threat to America is patriotic, white Trump voters.

https://pjmedia.com/columns/stephen-kruiser/2021/06/17/enough-with-the-white-boy-domestic-terror-threat-fiction-n1454952

He also makes the very good point that what happened at the Capitol on January 6th wasn’t an “insurrection,” it was a riot. And if rioting is terrorism, then all the BLM and Antifa riots they’ve been excusing for the past year are also terrorism. Since both the number of leftwing riots and rioters vastly outnumber those of the Capitol riot, then aren’t Antifa and BLM a far bigger terrorist threat than Trump voters?

I love Kruiser’s summation: “The biggest threat to freedom right now is a government that’s being run by rabid, un-American ideologues who are using an isolated incident to wage a protracted war against anyone who disagrees with them. That drunk dude with the horns on his hat ain’t the one we need to be worrying about.”

Mike Huckabee

Thursday brought a mixed bag of decisions from the Supreme Court. On the plus side, in a surprising unanimous 9-0 decision, the SCOTUS ruled that Philadelphia cannot exclude a Catholic services organization from providing adoption services through its system because their religious beliefs bar them from arranging adoptions for same-sex couples. There are more details at the link. The decision was fairly narrow, and conservatives on the Court thought that there should have been more clarity to clean up the conflicts between previous related decisions and First Amendment rights.

https://redstate.com/joesquire/2021/06/18/the-roberts-court-punts-on-religious-liberty-again-n398562

However, for the third time, the SCOTUS rejected an attempt to get rid of Obamacare, this time filed by 18 states. In a 7-2 ruling, the Court said that the states “lack standing” to sue because they suffered no direct harm. “Lack of standing” seems to have become the Court’s go-to excuse for not examining controversial issues that need to be settled.

https://townhall.com/tipsheet/reaganmccarthy/2021/06/17/scotus-n2591129

In a stinging dissent, Justice Alito scolded the Court for its creative efforts to keep pulling reasons out of the air to preserve Obamacare. He noted that if it costs the states $1, then they have standing to sue, but it costs them billions in Medicaid funds, yet they don’t have standing to sue? Alito wrote:

“No one can fail to be impressed by the lengths to which this Court has been willing to go to defend the ACA against all threats. A penalty is a tax. The United States is a State. And 18 States who bear costly burdens under the ACA cannot even get a foot in the door to raise a constitutional challenge. So a tax that does not tax is allowed to stand and support one of the biggest Government programs in our Nation’s history. Fans of judicial inventiveness will applaud once again. But I must respectfully dissent.”

I’ve decided that Obamacare is the Bill and Hillary Clinton of health care legislation. No matter how bad it is or how much trouble it causes, someone in a powerful position will always intervene to protect it, even if it requires twisting the law like a pretzel.

Mike Huckabee

Happy Juneteenth! You might think that was yesterday because President Biden signed a bill on Thursday declaring it a national holiday and federal workers took off work on Friday. But it’s actually commemorating June 19, 1865. That’s the date when Union Maj. Gen. Gordon Granger arrived in Galveston, Texas, to inform them that the Civil War was over and to free the last slaves, two years after the Emancipation Proclamation. Texas was so far away from Washington that Lincoln’s order had yet to be enforced and slaves hadn’t been told about it.

Some of the bill’s critics argued that a holiday celebrating the end of slavery should have been on the date of the Proclamation, as Juneteenth is very specific to Texas, where it’s long been a holiday. You can read more about the history of Juneteenth at this link.

https://www.foxnews.com/us/juneteenth-history-oldest-commemoration-abolishment-slavery-us

Naturally, after signing the bill, which had heavy bipartisan support, Biden immediately pivoted to a partisan attack on Republicans (who, it should be noted, actually freed the slaves held by Democrats), again accusing them of trying to suppress the black vote with election reform laws like voter ID, which is favored by a majority of black voters. It’s not often that you see a man of his age leap so nimbly, from pandering to blacks to insulting their intelligence.

https://www.foxnews.com/politics/biden-juneteenth-national-holiday-bill-signing

Blogger Larry Correia had a very appropriate quote about the new holiday, given Biden’s exploitation of it to misrepresent GOP election integrity efforts: “I love Juneteenth being a national holiday, because it’s when we celebrate Republicans informing a bunch of black people that Democrats have been lying to and using them.”

At this link, J. Christian Adams has more on Juneteenth’s history and how only federal workers got Friday off for it.

https://pjmedia.com/jchristianadams/2021/06/18/happy-juneteenth-n1455591

This is added to 10 other federal worker holidays, plus Christmas Eve and the day after Christmas, all the time they took off during the pandemic, and the month of August when Washington practically shuts down.

Adams notes that one of the few months without a day off for federal workers is April. He suggests April 19th, the date in 1775 when “brave patriots at Lexington and Concord got sick and tired of a distant, far-off ruling class and decided to fight back.” That’s certainly worthy of a holiday, but he doubts the people in Washington today would want to remind Americans of it.