Mike Huckabee

All the cries from the left to expand and pack the Supreme Court for not giving them what they want have led to a rare flurry of public responses by members of the Court from across the ideological spectrum. Over the past week, Justices Steven Breyer, Amy Coney Barrett and Clarence Thomas have all spoken up against politicians and the media pressuring the Court to be more political or reading political motives into their decisions.

Liberal Justice Breyer said judges are not “junior league politicians,” while Barrett said the Justices are not “partisan hacks,” and she sometimes doesn’t like the results of her own decisions, but it’s not her job to decide cases based on the outcome she wants. Last night, Justice Thomas voiced agreement to an audience at Notre Dame University.

https://www.foxnews.com/politics/clarence-thomas-media-supreme-court-texas-abortion

Since this latest round of “Pack the court” screeching was sparked by the SCOTUS not blocking Texas’ new abortion law, Thomas said the media make it sound as if the Justices always go to their personal preference; for instance, if they’re personally pro-life, they’ll always rule that way and become like a politician. Thomas said, “We have lost the capacity" as leaders "to not allow others to manipulate our institutions when we don't get the outcomes that we like." Because of this politicization, he said, "The court was thought to be the least dangerous branch, and we may have become the most dangerous."

One of the main reasons leftists want to pack the SCOTUS is their fear that Roe v. Wade will be overturned, and for the record, Thomas has called on the Court to do just that. But it’s not because he’s personally pro-life. As he explained in 2007, the Roe v. Wade decision has "no basis in the Constitution." And last year, he said Roe is "grievously wrong for many reasons, but the most fundamental is that its core holding -- that the Constitution protects a woman's right to abort her unborn child -- finds no support in the text of the Fourteenth Amendment. "

It’s ironic that the very people who are accusing conservative Justices of acting politically are actually terrified that a conservative majority would overturn decisions that were based purely on the Justices’ liberal political views.

Laura Ainsworth, Staff writer

Several days ago, I related a story about my personal experience with someone who exhibited blind, irrational fear of a non-vaccinated person (me), even though the non-vaccinated person had already had COVID-19 and as a result possessed natural immunity that studies increasingly suggest surpasses the protection provided by vaccines.

The reason for telling this story in the first place was to show that we really are living in a time of mass hysteria --- a time when facts don’t much matter because everyone believes he HAS the facts and “the science is settled” –- and that in many cases our fears are being exploited to achieve desired behavior. How does the government get everyone to do what it wants them to do? By scaring them half to death.

We received numerous reader comments, a few of which we highlighted. One we did not include but that I’d like to address now came from a reader named Chris who identifies himself/herself as a “pediatric technician.” Chris is about to become famous as “Exhibit A” in my case that logic flies right out the door when fear climbs in the window. Here’s the letter, with slight editing...

………………………

You and the Christian Broadcasting Network are totally immoral and irresponsible. You all claim to be "Pro-Life" and you are all miserable hypocrites in the eyes of the world. You don't follow scripture or read your own revised Bible.

Kids are dying daily by the thousands in America and the Pediatric wards are packed with kids who have COVID. YOU ARE KID - KILLERS AND THAT IS HOW YOU WILL BE REMEMBERED. Infants are dying. Toddlers are dying. Small children are dying. You are not pro-life. You are anti-science and anti-fact. You are ignorant and stupid! You can't fix stupid. Too much inbreeding in your own family.

COVID is preventable by a simple vaccine but because you want money from the Trump base, you keep quiet while many children are being killed by their parents and their miserable stupidity. Pure GREED. This is not your finest moment. Maybe your grandchildren will be waiting on a ventilator soon....possible, because of the stupidity that runs in your family.

By remaining quiet you are executing children......you are kid - murderers and kid - killers. No different than serial killers and rapists but you all claim to speak the "truth" and follow Jesus. What a joke.

You are weak and cowardly and you will be judged on this by the big guy in the sky. BURN IN HELL.

You can take that banjo and Bible of yours and shove it up your a--.

…………………………...

Okay, where to start? Do you sense the terror that has transported this person to Crazy Town? First of all, in his (her?) rage, Chris directed this abuse at “all” of us “miserable hypocrites,” including Gov. Huckabee, when I’m the person who wrote the piece. I guess if anyone is going to be judged by “the big guy in the sky” and “burn in hell,” it is me. Though I’m tempted to say this person is not guilty by reason of insanity, I think he or she or xi owes the Gov. an apology. The individual who wrote this also owes the “Christian Broadcasting Network” --- does he mean Trinity Broadcasting Network? --- an apology. Gov. Huckabee, CBN/TBN, the pro-life movement, Christian believers in general, and the version of the Bible the Gov. prefers to read (I have no idea) have absolutely nothing to do with the commentary on vaccines and virus-fear, which I wrote, would write again, and proudly put my name on.

So, Chris, let’s talk about what has inflamed you so and how much truth there is to it. As you are an irrational person, this analysis will not change your mind at all --- probably just anger you more, if that’s possible --- but there are other, sane readers who might benefit from the discussion. Let’s look at a few things you claimed in your letter:

1. “Children are dying daily by the thousands in America and the pediatric wards are packed with children who have COVID.” This is wildly incorrect. Can you even imagine what it would be like in our country if this were actually happening to our children? The total number of children who have died of COVID-19 in the U.S. since the pandemic began is just over 400. Of course, that’s a terrible tragedy, but it’s not thousands of deaths a day. A Johns Hopkins research team looked at records from 48,000 cases in young people under 18 from April to August of 2020. At that time, they found zero deaths that didn’t involve a serious comorbidity such as leukemia. More here…

https://www.wsj.com/articles/cdc-covid-19-coronavirus-vaccine-side-effects-hospitalization-kids-11626706868

So, who fed you that lie about thousands of children dying every day? Someone has an interest in making you believe this. And if you’re really a “pediatric technician,” it stands to reason that you would know it’s false. You certainly haven’t witnessed it on your job, because it isn’t happening.

2. “You are not pro-life. You are anti-science and anti-fact.” Chris, you are stating opinions that are not based in any fact at all. To say Gov. Huckabee is not pro-life is like saying Dr. Kevorkian was not pro-death. And nothing makes a real scientist cringe like the phrase “follow the science.” That is a talking point; you do not understand how science works. Instead of discussing the research, you stoop to crass personal insults.

3. “COVID is preventable by a simple vaccine but because you want money from the Trump base, you keep quiet while many children are being killed...” Chris, the vaccine can provide a lot of protection and lessen the severity of symptoms but it does not PREVENT infection. Gov. Huckabee has said numerous times that he personally has been vaccinated, and he advises everyone to seek their doctor's advice. He would never tell someone not to get vaccinated, and neither would I.

Again, though every death from this virus is tragic, it’s not true that “many children are being killed.” This is true though vaccines weren’t even approved for children until very recently, and then only for kids 12 and older.

https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/coronavirus/in-depth/covid-19-vaccines-for-kids/art-20513332

Ah, and we see from your reference to “the Trump base” that it really does come down to politics. Chris, this has nothing whatsoever to do with Trump or his base. You are off-base. But I would say the current administration has worked hard to make you believe it does, so that you'll associate your fear with Trump, and they have succeeded.

4. “Maybe your grandchildren will be waiting on a ventilator soon.” Chris, I can tell from this remark that you are one of those compassionate liberals I’ve heard so much about.

Finally, what was that banjo remark? The Gov. plays bass. Facts matter!

Chris, your letter is so out-there that at first I thought it might even be an attempt at satire. Satire is very challenging to do well –- and even to recognize in this age when real stories can be as crazy as made-up ones. If you were just impersonating a crazy person, you succeeded. Be well.

Mike Huckabee

Wednesday, four female Olympic gymnasts – Simone Biles, McKayla Maroney, Maggie Nichols and Aly Raisman – came out from behind official anonymity to testify to the Senate about the horrific sexual abuse they suffered from former USA Gymnastics team physician Larry Nassar (now serving a sentence of up to 360 years in prison - yes, you read that correctly.) Much of that was already known, but what also was revealed was the shocking way in which the FBI, then under our self-appointed national conscience James Comey, turned a blind eye to their accusations against Nassar and attempted to cover it all up so the public would never learn about it.

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/stephen-kruiser/2021/09/15/lock-em-up-same-fbi-that-chased-russia-collusion-hoax-for-years-covered-up-sexual-abuse-of-usa-gymnasts-n1479070

As Stephen Kruiser reminds us at the link, this was the same FBI leadership that busied itself with trying to manufacture accusations of Russian collusion against innocent political opponents while at the same time refusing to investigate “a serial predator who was attacking the most vulnerable among us.” He quite rightly calls for us to “start casting a wide net for people within the Bureau who need to be locked up.”

There’s a lot more at the link, including a video of Sen. Marsha Blackburn’s statement (sample quote: “Every single person in authority who turned a blind eye to these young athletes’ allegations is complicit in Nassar’s crime, and each one of them should be considered a predator.”) There’s also video of Ms Maroney’s testimony, which I warn you is disturbing and graphic.

Here’s more on this story from Matt Vespa at Townhall.com.

https://townhall.com/tipsheet/mattvespa/2021/09/15/its-not-hard-to-see-why-the-fbi-didnt-care-about-larry-nassar-raping-scores-of-young-women-n2595948

Mike Huckabee

Congressional Democrats have put forward a massive tax hike plan that they claim will only soak the very wealthy. That may sound popular to people who think that refers to someone else, but as Grover Norquist explains at the link, it will affect everyone negatively.

https://justthenews.com/government/congress/norquist-bidens-tax-increases-reconciliation-bill-will-lead-gop-led-house-maybe

It not only raises taxes on people making less than $400,000, in violation of Biden’s campaign promise, but it will raise business taxes higher than those in Europe and even communist China. That will impact hiring and expansion, and encourage the return of businesses moving overseas and taking their jobs with them. It will impact 401K retirement plans, inheritances, capital gains and the prices we pay for most products, especially our electric and gas bills. The only upside Norquist sees is that it will probably lead to a GOP Congress that will put the brakes on more socialist insanity.

He also makes a great observation that voters in swing states and districts should take to heart: there are no “moderate Democrats” in the House or Senate. There are Democrats from moderate districts and swing states. They might say they oppose runaway taxing and spending. But every last one of them voted over and over to keep advancing the $3.5 trillion spending orgy through Congress.

Here’s another analysis of the Democrats’ tax plan showing that wealthy residents of blue states like California, New York, New Jersey and Hawaii could end up paying a combined tax rate of nearly 60%.

https://www.foxbusiness.com/politics/democrats-tax-plan-combined-tax-rates-new-york-california

Not that they actually would, of course. They’d probably move to Texas or Florida, and then start giving a lot of money to leftist politicians so they could ruin those states, too. But as bad as this tax plan is, thinking of all those wealthy liberals having to fork over 60% of their income to the wasteful, oppressive politicians they did so much to help elect would be heartwarming if the rest of us weren’t also having to pay for their dumb political decisions.

Mike Huckabee

One reason why it’s so hard to get Americans to “trust the experts” on COVID-19 is because the “experts” and “authorities” have given us so many conflicting stories. I’ve always cut them slack for getting things wrong: I get that it was a new disease, and new data can require changing our assumptions. However, we seem to have settled on some official assumptions that are almost impervious to new data. And public trust is eroded further when the “experts” keep dodging basic questions.

One question people have been asking for over a year is whether the hospitalization rates used to justify mass lockdowns, school closures and mask and vaccine mandates are accurate. Are they counting only people who are actually hospitalized or killed due to COVID, or inflating the numbers by including people who tested positive regardless of the actual reason they were in the hospital? The answer may finally be at hand.

https://townhall.com/tipsheet/scottmorefield/2021/09/13/the-atlantic-scoop-almost-half-of-covid-hospitalizations-are-exactly-what-you-suspected-they-were-n2595832

David Zweig at the Atlantic magazine (hardly a rightwing or anti-vaxxer outlet) reports that the VA office of Research and Development backed a study of nearly 48,000 admissions to over 100 VA hospitals nationwide. It found that from March 2020 to early January 2021, before the Delta variant or widespread vaccination, 36% of recorded COVID patients had mild or asymptomatic cases, which makes it questionable whether they were or needed to be hospitalized due to COVID. From mid-January to June, that number rose to 48%. That suggests that nearly half the recorded COVID hospitalizations were mild or asymptomatic cases or else people who tested positive but were hospitalized for something unrelated.

None of this is to downplay the dangers of the disease (that’s still a lot of people hospitalized due to severe COVID.) But the good news is that this suggests vaccination has created more mild or asymptomatic cases. The bad news is that it suggests authorities are relying on misleading data to impose draconian measures on the entire population. And when people know “the experts” are being misleading about the reasons for their policies, it makes it all the more likely that they will reject those policies.

In short, once you lose the public’s trust, it’s hard to get it back. Particularly if you do nothing to earn it back except to say, “I order you to trust me!”

Laura Ainsworth, Staff writer

Thanks to all who responded to my story about the government’s latest very successful fear campaign --- the one against the unvaccinated.

By the way, since then it’s become obvious that the same motivation was just used in California to help a failing governor survive a recall election. To keep his office when California is a disaster on so many fronts, Gov. Newsom needed people to be AFRAID of the alternative, Republican opponent Larry Elder. And how was that going to happen, given that Elder is a genial, self-made black man who wants to fix problems and make life better for everybody in California? That’s easy: liken him to the biggest object of fear to the left, former President Trump.

An aggressive fear campaign had already been waged against Trump for years, and so progressives are TERRIFIED of him. To them, he’s the COVID-19 of political leaders. If you know the George Orwell novel “1984,” Trump is Emmanuel Goldstein in the daily government-mandated “Two Minutes Hate.” I’m talking abject, screaming-at-the-sky fear and loathing, as satirized in this masterpiece must-see video that I wish I could take credit for...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y6fNtODWUwY

You understand, of course, that these people aren’t terrified of the actual Trump, about whom they typically know little, but of the imaginary Trump that has been created out of the thin air in their heads. You know, the evil white supremacist who thinks the KKK are “fine people” and collaborated with Putin to become President. THAT Donald Trump. I’d be scared of him, too, if he existed. The real Trump, I like.

But the Democrats’ anti-Trump fear campaign wasn’t aimed at me.

And it laid the foundation for Newsom’s recall election. This time, it was pounded into California voters’ heads that Elder was, in effect, Trump. Newsom then ran against Trump. He'd say, “A vote for Elder is a vote for Trump.” Or even, “Larry Elder is a clone of Donald Trump.” (They wanted voters to forget Elder is black.)

So, in the end, Newsom beat Trump---I mean, Elder.

But back to my story. I received some great comments on my real-life tale of being leper-ized by someone out of his mind with irrational fear...

From Tyna:

My daughter works FROM HOME and is an HR generalist. She sees NO patients or co-workers. She was given an ultimatum to get vaccinated or she will be terminated. She already has had Covid, and she has a health condition that was supposed to kill her by age 14. She wants to see her kids and grands grow up and get married. What happened to FREEDOM?

From Laura:

Someone who works from home can’t transmit anything to patients or co-workers but a computer virus! This makes no sense. And your daughter likely has better immunity than someone who hasn’t had COVID but took the vaccine. The decision should be hers, with advice from her doctor. Good luck to her with her employer. Time is on her side if she can stall; I think personal choice in this matter will win in the courts.

From Kathleen:

I was helping a neighbor with her yard sale a few weeks ago. A young man drove up in a Tesla; I had never been close to one and asked if I could sit in it. He had a “VACCINATED” button on his shirt, and I said, “By the way, I am not vaccinated.” Upon hearing that, he said I could not sit in the car. Then he went on a ten-minute rant on why everyone should get vaccinated. All the friends at the sale were friends and were not vaccinated, and we all felt sorry for the fool.”

From Laura:

I can picture this guy finishing his rant; hearing the rest of you weren’t vaccinated, either; speeding off in a panic and driving his Tesla smack into a tree.

If he’s vaccinated, he must not have much confidence that it will protect him. Why would your vaccination keep him safe if his own is that iffy? Again, none of this is rational.

From Prudence (excerpt):

Hello, Laura -- Thank you for your spot-on article. You are not alone. I experienced a similar incident two weeks ago. My regular doctor is out with cancer and so I had to see her colleague to get a prescription refilled...This doctor's visit was almost surreal! He wanted to know why I wasn't vaccinated, and I explained that I've had adverse reactions to vaccines in the past, including the flu shot. He began to berate me, telling me I believed all the rot on the internet and bought into all the foolishness, continuing to give me his "expert" advice on why he felt I needed to just take the vaccine. I'd never seen this idiot doctor before and will never seen him again.

My doctor knows my circumstances and respects my wishes on why I won't take the shot. Unfortunately, not only are people divided on the vaccines, so is the medical community! I didn't mention to him about my conversations with my doctor for fear of her receiving retribution from her colleague if and when she returns.

From Laura:

Your concern for your own doctor was well-founded. Doctors are also running into problems within their profession for prescribing treatments such as ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine. I hope your independent-minded regular doctor is soon able to return to her practice.

From Mike:

Very disappointed you have decided not to be vaccinated, I had Covid in February 2020 when doctors didn’t really know what it was. I was diagnosed with severe bronchitis. Haven’t smoked in 36 years, [am] a jogger, and I developed COPD and my antibodies were gone in 60 days. Please rethink you position.

From Laura:

I’m grateful for your concern, Mike, but am hesitant because of some vascular issues in my family that might be hereditary. If I hadn’t had the virus, I definitely would have gone ahead and been vaccinated, but my personal risk analysis is telling me to stick with natural immunity. Also, my understanding is that the antibody test after one is recovered is not necessarily an accurate measure of one’s immune response once the virus is re-introduced. Thanks and be well!

Finally, a reader with a wicked sense of fun left me this gem…

From Doug:

I was just reading your latest article, "The Latest Government Fear Campaign," when I got to the part where you said that YOU HAVEN'T BEEN VACCINATED!!! Needless to say, I IMMEDIATELY stopped reading your unvaccinated words, erased the article from my tablet, wiped down the tablet with an anti-bacterial wipe, then bleach, then ran an antivirus program on said tablet. Fortunately, it came up clean, so I am hopeful that I avoided exposure to the Delta Variant that you are most assuredly carrying and exposing everyone to, YOU HEARTLESS, SELFISH, EVIL, TRUMP-LOVING, PLAGUE-CARRYING RADICAL RIGHT FASCIST!!!!

By the way, I went to the public library to write this comment to you because I didn't want to expose my device to your plague. Pretty smart, huh?

From Laura:

You can’t be too careful! Uh-oh, you’re reading my unvaccinated words again.

Mike Huckabee

In Tuesday’s election, Californians went for the “Thank you, sir, may I have another?” option, and Gov. Gavin Newsom easily escaped being replaced by about 67-33%. It was disappointing but hardly unexpected, as the recall was always a longshot. That’s why we have the saying, “You can’t fix…California.”

https://www.foxnews.com/politics/the-nos-have-it-gov-gavin-newsom-survives-in-california-recall-election

Newsom claimed that what the election was about was, "We said yes to science, yes to vaccines, yes to ending this pandemic." Funny, just one day before, he was claiming that the election was about protecting “racial justice” by not replacing the wealthy white guy with a black man who grew up poor.

Also, his policies of shutting down churches while allowing BLM protests, closing neighborhood restaurants while he dined in fancy French restaurants and let Hollywood productions set up big catering stations, and forcing other people’s kids to wear masks at summer camp while sending his son to one that didn’t require masking don’t exactly scream, “I care about science.”

Here’s a good analysis of the race and its likely aftermath from Joe Cunningham at Redstate. He expects Democrats to do what they always do: interpret this win as a mandate to inflict more disastrous, freedom-crushing policies that will eventually hurt them in the upcoming general election.

https://redstate.com/joesquire/2021/09/15/gavin-newsoms-win-will-end-up-dragging-democrats-down-n443242

I expect that the immediate result will be that more people will decide California is beyond redemption and move out. But wherever you end up, please don’t forget what you came there to escape and vote for more Gavin Newsoms to ruin your new home. It’s bad enough that Texas has to deal with Austin now. They don’t need “Beto” O’Rourke actually getting elected to anything important.

Mike Huckabee

In yesterday’s newsletter, we discussed the way fear has been used to make Americans do what their government wants them to do, most recently to get vaccinated (two or maybe even three times, whether they need it or not) for COVID-19. Staff writer Laura Ainsworth related how she had just witnessed firsthand the cold, irrational fear someone was experiencing just from being in the same room with an unvaccinated person. This was the case even though he knew the unvaccinated person had previously had COVID, which appears to provide far better immunity, especially against variants, than the vaccines do.

So, would it surprise you to know that according to a new Scott Rasmussen poll, a majority of Democrat voters believe that Trump supporters and unvaccinated Americans pose a bigger threat to the nation than either the Taliban or China? I am not kidding. That’s what it’s like on Planet Democrat, now that a relentless and apparently successful propaganda campaign has been waged against both of these groups. These days, who needs a terrorist attack aided and abetted by the Taliban when you can feel terror just from the presence of an unvaccinated neighbor or friend? Even when that neighbor or friend has already recovered from COVID and has virtually zero chance of giving it to anyone.

The poll is real. Breakdown at the link.

https://justthenews.com/politics-policy/polling/democrats-believe-trump-supporters-and-unvaccinated-pose-bigger-threat

I’m reminded of that infamous video of Maxine Waters urging people to harass former Trump administration officials and “tell them they’re not welcome.” The unvaccinated, even those with natural immunity (which, for some reason, doesn’t count), are now in that category of deplorables as well. Socially aware people see the unvaccinated as ignorant, extremist, irresponsible, uncaring, and dangerous. Never mind that they might have a heart condition, clotting disorder, autoimmune disease or...pregnancy, or that about 40 percent of health care workers are vaccine-hesitant. If “those people” don’t worship at the altar of Dr. Fauci, they’re to be feared and marginalized, barred from as much of public life as possible.

Governments know: nothing motivates the populace to do what you want more than fear. And, at least among Democrats, this fear campaign is working. Ironically, that’s a little scary.

Mike Huckabee

The report from the 2020 Maricopa County election canvass conducted by Liz Harris of the Voter Integrity Project and sponsored by Arizona Senate Republicans, which we brought to you last week, has drawn "fact"-checkers like a picnic draws ants, so let’s take a look.

Keep in mind that, as we pointed out in our original commentary, this two-month effort was NOT part of the official audit currently going on in Maricopa County. The huge, official one has no set deadline and keeps stretching into the future because, according to auditors, they haven’t been getting cooperation from either state officials or Dominion Voting Systems, who have withheld materials the auditors say they need. That’s something we know is true.

So, we just have to cool our heels, as the official report will take as long as it takes. In the meantime, the Voter Integrity Project did their own canvass of just mail-in votes. Something else we know is true: the sudden and widespread implementation of mail-in balloting, in itself, doesn’t prove cheating but sure does make it easier. And, the easier it is to cheat and the more difficult it is to detect, the more likely there is to BE cheating. The key question is, “How MUCH cheating?”

One story we linked to, from THE GATEWAY PUNDIT, had a headline we made clear was theirs, not ours, as it out-and-out said that “Election steal is now confirmed.” We advised readers to look at the story and come to their own conclusions, which I assume they did.

One thing we credited these canvassers with was transparency. It’s possible to go back and see their methodology. It was made clear that, unlike the enormous official audit, this was another one of those attempts to extrapolate from a limited sample. For example, from the 330 registered voters –- 34 percent of their total sample –- who claimed they had voted but whose votes couldn't be unaccounted for, they came up with an estimate, county-wide, of 173,104 votes that were cast but not counted.

Opinion writer Laurie Roberts at the ARIZONA REPUBLIC predictably made fun of the canvass for its process of statistical sampling and the “conspiracy crowd” that was “abuzz with excitement” about it.

https://www.azcentral.com/story/opinion/op-ed/laurieroberts/2021/09/09/canvass-report-arizonas-election-out-and-is-indeed-shocking/8258447002/

As for “ghost” voting --- mail-in ballots cast by people that residents said they didn’t know or had moved away --- the same extrapolating was done. Canvassers looking at a sample of voters ended up talking with 164 people who told them this had happened. They extrapolated from that number to get their rough estimate of 96,389 “ghost” votes counted county-wide.

Even so, Arizona state Rep. Mark Finchem is premature in saying the statewide election should be decertified. He’s running for secretary of state and wants to show how proactive he is, but we’re not there yet. Quite possibly we will be after the full audit is complete, but not now. They can’t decertify with only rough estimates based on statistical samples. Still, this does give us a pretty good idea of what probably happened.

“Our questions were really simple,” Harris said. What method did you use to vote? Did you receive extra ballots? What did you do with those extra ballots? How many registered voters are supposed to be here, and how many actually voted? Not once do we ask who the person voted for.”

See her interviewed by Steve Bannon here.

https://www.worldtribune.com/decertify-maricopa-county-canvas-found-173000-lost-votes-96000-ghost-votes/

The canvassers did run into trouble identifying a couple of properties as vacant lots. One of these appears to be a mistake; there’s actually a house with a pool at that address. The other, which was unfortunately used in a cover photo for the report –- inviting ridicule –- is something we’re checking into. There’s data from 2019 showing that it was a mobile home park and from 2021 showing it to be vacant lot, under construction. So, was anyone at that address actually registered to vote at the time of the 2020 election? We’re not sure; it’s possible. But the issue with that one property is just a small part of the big picture this canvass paints, the one that “debunkers” desperately want to turn your attention from.

As Bannon says of Liz during the interview, “She never states here that this is definitive or final. But this is why you need a full canvass to be part of a full forensic audit.”

Exactly. But that doesn’t matter to agenda-driven “fact”-checkers determined to discredit any challenge to the 2020 election. They’re jumping all over this as if it WERE intended to be a definitive accounting. That’s what Lead Stories does --- they criticize Harris for using only “rough reckoning,” when, of course, that’s all it’s intended to be and, given realistic budget restraints, all it really CAN be.

https://leadstories.com/hoax-alert/2021/09/fact-check-arizona-republicans-estimates-do-not-document-173104-lost-votes.html

“Has an Arizona Republican’s door-knocking campaign and back-of-the-envelope estimate proved there were “173,104 lost votes and 96,389 ‘ghost’ votes in Maricopa County’s 2020 election,” asks Dean Miller. “No, that’s not true.” The problem with his critique is that Harris doesn’t claim her canvass IS proof of those exact counts.

Lead Stories also points out that there are problems when people are just asked for their responses, because they don’t always answer accurately. And that is right; people might not want to tell the truth, or they might not remember correctly. This is the same problem pollsters have. But, again, Harris’ report is not intended to provide a perfect, definitive vote count, just an idea of how bad the problems were with all those mail-in ballots in 2020. In a state with a tiny margin of “victory” of just over 10,000 votes, these problems essentially render the real election outcome unknown. For this reason, the report proposes banning mail-in voting.

Harris did tweet that those who “knew the election was stolen” and had been ridiculed as conspiracy theorists should feel vindicated, and it would have been better for her to hold off on that until the official audit is done. Similarly, GATEWAY PUNDIT should not have oversold this as they did. As bad as the results look, it’s not time to decertify the Arizona election at this point, which is not to say that we won’t get there.

But to the “fact”-checkers: You dissected Harris’ study so you could say she didn’t “prove” those numbers when she wasn’t even claiming to –- and, of course, so you could get in some digs at the right. We think, though, that your main goal here was to pull focus from the real take-away, which is that there are massive problems with mail-in ballots and even more reasons to suspect the Biden win in razor-close Arizona.

RELATED READING:

Important follow-up: Maricopa County "discrepancies"

Maricopa County canvassing uncovers huge discrepancies

Mike Huckabee

Mike Huckabee

Mike Huckabee

Thursday morning, the Labor Department reported that 310,000 Americans filed for first-time unemployment benefits last week, the lowest number since the pandemic began.

https://www.foxbusiness.com/economy/initial-jobless-claims-pandemic-era-low-september-4

Meanwhile, there is much wailing coming from the left over the fact that federal expanded unemployment benefits that were paying people more to stay home than to work have now expired. There are anguished cries of “What will people do to survive?!,” usually not followed by the suggestion that they take one of the 10 million job openings that are going unfilled.

To be clear: I don’t begrudge help to anyone who can’t work and really needs it. But it’s not the government’s job to keep paying able-bodied people to sit on their couches, which is driving small business owners out of business and saddling our grandchildren with unsustainable debt.

And while this won’t come as any surprise to anyone who’s been paying attention to economic numbers over the past few months, a new study confirms that states that ended the expanded unemployment benefits early enjoyed twice as much job growth as states that kept paying them.

https://fee.org/articles/new-study-vindicates-states-that-canceled-expanded-unemployment-welfare-early/

The Mercatus Center researchers said these results are consistent with a long and extensive economic literature finding that higher unemployment benefits that essentially subsidize joblessness tend to discourage employment, whereas ending them “appears to motivate more workers to become employed.”

That conclusion would also be consistent with having at least two brain cells to rub together.

Mike Huckabee

Showing the deep-seated love of “DEMOCRACY” for which the left has become famous lately, leftist agitators disrupted California gubernatorial candidate Larry Elder’s public appearances Wednesday, shooting pellet guns at his security detail. And one “activist” (that’s the current leftst term for “thug”) in a gorilla mask rode by on a bicycle and tried to throw eggs at Elder, but missed.

https://www.foxnews.com/politics/larry-elder-says-his-security-details-was-hit-by-pellet-gun-while-campaigning

Ed Driscoll at Instapundit noted that this is now the Los Angeles Times headlined that story: “Larry Elder cuts short Venice homeless encampment tour after hostile reception.” Notice how it’s obviously meant to imply that Elder is unpopular, not that he was targeted by a handful of violent radicals.

https://pjmedia.com/instapundit/472670/

Now, try to imagine the L.A. Times headline if a conservative activist in a GORILLA (!!) mask had thrown eggs at a Democrat who was seeking to become the first black Governor of California. Think maybe the word “racist” would’ve been in that headline somewhere?

Conservative media seems to have noticed the glaring double standard and the deafening silence from “progressives”…

https://redstate.com/jenvanlaar/2021/09/09/whether-its-racism-mental-illness-or-intentional-progressives-silence-on-the-larry-elder-attack-is-deafening-n440203

Mike Huckabee

Elsewhere today, we linked to a Fox News article about precisely what’s in the new Texas election integrity law that Democrats are howling about. But for those who have subscriptions to the Wall Street Journal, this is also worth a read.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/whats-really-in-the-texas-voting-law-elections-republicans-11630533819

The Journal editorial board talks about what’s in the law, but also explains why the hysterical attacks on it as “voter suppression” are ludicrous. For instance, while 24-hour voting is banned, since letting people drop off ballots at 3 a.m. makes fraud easier, in some cases, voting hours are actually expanded. 24-hour voting and drive-in voting are banned (except the latter is okay for disabled people), but they were only allowed for the first time last year due to the pandemic.

The editors also point out that in a previous case in Georgia, when the ACLU argued that expecting people to buy a stamp to mail in their ballots was an “unconstitutional poll tax,” the judges said that “bordered on the frivolous.” I’d say that like most leftists these days, it showed no respect for borders at all.

Just bear in mind that when everything Biden has touched, from the border to the economy, has turned into a blazing dumpster fire, and he’s just surrendered Afghanistan and $85 billion worth of weaponry to the Taliban on the eve of the 20th anniversary of 9/11, while leaving unknown numbers of Americans and allies behind in the process, it’s not surprising that the Democrats are desperate to distract the public with anything else.

I guess, “Look, Texas is securing elections and protecting babies’ lives! GET ‘EM!!” is the best they can come up with.

Mike Huckabee

A reader of our newsletter, to be identified for our purpose here merely as Carl, left us a phone message after reading Thursday’s story, “Maricopa County canvassing uncovers huge discrepancies.” This reader had called with firsthand knowledge of the same type of ballot “discrepancies” in Maricopa County that canvassers had found.

To set the scene for what he told us, we’d first like to call attention to an interview on Stephen Colbert’s late-night “comedy” show –- not so much what Colbert had to say (no surprises there) as what guest Chris Wallace contributed to the discussion. The interview was part of the promotion for Chris’ new book on 9/11, which I’m sure is a great read. To be clear, I bring attention to this not to single out Chris Wallace specifically, but rather to highlight the dismissal with which legitimate concerns about the election are typically received.

Let's start with how Colbert phrases his question: “I’m wondering whether you and your fellow Sunday morning guys out there who are doin’ the Sunday shows, talkin’ about the week, if you ever feel like you shouldn’t have on people who have the irrational belief that the last election...” (Pause for predictable applause from Colbert’s audience.) “...the people who are cynically –- and I know you’ve held these guys’ feet to the fire; I don’t want to suggest that you haven’t pushed back; you have, quite famously –- but have you ever seen anything so cynical in Washington, DC, than...people saying things they know aren’t true, uh, that they KNOW has to have lasting damage on our democracy, coming on TV and saying these things with a straight face?”

This is where Perry Mason would rise and say “Objection, leading the witness.” But leading questions ARE asked in court, at least whenever opposing counsel is asleep and they can be gotten away with, because they work. The same holds true in TV studios, and this one worked here, setting the tone for the whole exchange. If you have a strong stomach, hear it all at the link.

https://www.toddstarnes.com/media/chris-wallace-d-fox-i-dont-frankly-wanna-hear-their-election-was-stolen-crap/

I debated whether or not to provide a full transcript of the conversation, since the video is available, but I think it’s instructive to see at least a part of it in print. So here’s a condensed version, starting where Chris answers the above question from Colbert:

“I have never seen this...I’ve been in Washington 40 years, so I’ve seen a lot of bad stuff [chuckle], but nothing like this, where --- and, you know, someone would say to me, ‘Well, are they delusional?’ No --- well, maybe some of them are --- but what’s worse, I think some of them have cynically decided, because of the Trump base, because they don’t want to get crosswise with the former President, they’re gonna say something they know is not true. Now, I don’t believe you’re just gonna sit there and say, ‘I’m not gonna have them on. But if I’m gonna have them on, I’m gonna hold them to account, over and over, about, you know, ‘what about, you know, this election, what about --- I’ve said this to many of them, ‘Is Joe Biden the duly-elected President of the United States, and they’ll say ‘Well, he’s the President,’ and I’ll say ‘No, no, was he elected fair and square?’ So, we go back on this, and I don’t let it pass...”

More: “There are plenty of people who were the leaders in the Congress who were challenging [the election] that I just have not had on the show ever since then, and have purposefully not had on the show, because I frankly don’t wanna hear their crap. But having said that, there are some leaders that you have to ask them questions. There are people in leadership and the Senate and I won’t let them come on without putting them through the wringer.”

Colbert interjects at this point, referring to such concerns as ‘garbage.” Wallace segues into January 6, “one of the worst days,” as he watched “this mob coming to the cathedral of our democracy.” “I was sickened,” he says, to applause. Colbert goes on to say that anyone who isn’t “wiling to stand up for that truth” –- I guess he means the “truth” that Biden was duly elected –- should be “DISQUALIFIED to be in the public sphere.” (!!!) He says that appearing on those Sunday shows is of value to such people because it helps them “promulgate that lie.”

“Does it worry you,” he asks Chris, “that you have given legitimacy to people who have abdicated all public responsibility?” (Again, where's Perry Mason when you need him?)

Chris responds that there are members of Congress who have been the leaders on that argument whom he just has deliberately not had on the show, “ever since then.” He says it was because he “frankly, didn’t want to hear their crap.” (This is followed by predictable audience cheers and applause.)

He goes on to say there are certain ones you have to have on, “but I won’t let ‘em come on without putting ‘em through the wringer.” That was pretty much the end of the interview, except for a book plug, and then on to the commercial break, which should have been for Pepto-Bismol.

So, Chris Wallace said he essentially gives his guests a litmus test, and it’s not enough for them to say, “Biden is the President.” It SHOULD be enough, but no –- the guest has to say that, yes, Biden was elected “fair and square,” even though it’s not known for sure that he was. We do not have definitive proof that the election was “stolen,” either, but after known problems with mass mail-in balloting in 2020, we have good reason to call for audits, and this does not make us “cynical,” "irrational" or “delusional.” It certainly does not mean that we "lie." Likewise, fact-based observations that there were problems with the last election that need to be fixed or that elections need to be more transparent are not “garbage” or “crap,” and to suggest this is offensive and insulting to millions of intelligent and informed people.

Such observations are not made to stay in good with “Trump’s base.” They are made because there are valid reasons for concern. Concerned Americans want to make sure we can TRUST the system, and maintaining that trust is PRO-democracy --- much more pro-democracy than pulling the curtain over the election and saying, “You have to talk about this in a certain way or you can’t participate in public life.”

Indeed, though I strongly and repeatedly condemned the breach of the Capitol Building, it's easy to understand why it happened. People were fed up because no one, not even the courts, would take their concerns seriously, saying that whatever the truth, the issue was "moot."

So, back to Carl. (Remember Carl?) Our commentary on Maricopa County sparked him to call and tell us about his niece, who moved from Maricopa County to Florida ten years ago. She found out something very interesting this year when a jury summons from Maricopa County was forwarded to her. She received this because they still had her on the Maricopa County voter rolls.

And the records showed her as having “voted” in the 2020 election.

Mike Huckabee

Did you ever see the classic episode of “Friends” where Ross bought a couch that he roped his friends into helping carry up a stairwell? Even after it was hopelessly stuck in place, he kept frantically yelling, “Pivot! Pivot!! PIV-OT!!!”

Well, that’s pretty much the Biden White House strategy for pivoting away from his Afghanistan catastrophe and getting us all to forget about the Americans and Afghan allies he left behind at the mercy of the Taliban.

https://redstate.com/mike_miller/2021/09/07/biden-hoping-to-turn-the-page-on-afghanistan-stranded-americans-unavailable-for-comment-n439248

As Mike Miller of Redstate.com reports at the link, Biden’s staffers are hoping to “turn the page” on this “unrelenting summer” (Yeah, all these disasters must be the summer’s fault! No wonder Biden thinks the weather is America’s #1 threat.) They want the media to direct Americans' attention away from Afghanistan, the border, and all of Biden’s other self-inflicted disasters and get us to focus on the shiny object of his “domestic agenda.” That is, the $1.2 trillion “infrastructure” bill (only about 23% of which will go to actual infrastructure) and the Democrats’ $3.5 trillion “expansion of the social safety net,” or as we critics more accurately call it, their government-bloating, socialist spending orgy. (And Sen. Joe Manchin may have just scuttled that, or at least $2.5 trillion worth of it.)

https://redstate.com/nick-arama/2021/09/08/manchin-destroys-dems-dreams-delivers-his-ultimatum-on-3-5-trillion-spending-bill-n439628

Biden will also use try to distract us with an all-out battle against the new Texas abortion law protecting babies with a fetal heartbeat. He wouldn’t stand up and fight the Taliban when they were slaughtering post-born humans, but he will bravely go to battle to ensure the slaughter of pre-born humans.

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/ari-j-kaufman/2021/09/06/biden-seems-more-determined-to-fight-texas-than-the-taliban-n1476297

In this, he’ll have the help of big tech companies like GoDaddy and others that are trying to punish Texas for protecting life.

https://freebeacon.com/policy/big-tech-companies-mobilize-to-disrupt-texas-abortion-law/

Will this Penn & Teller-level feat of misdirection work? So far, it’s not going too well, even in deep blue New Jersey.

https://www.westernjournal.com/watch-bidens-trip-new-jersey-blows-face-protesters-special-greeting/?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=huckabee

Nor is Biden reacting well to criticism. Or even coherently.

https://redstate.com/nick-arama/2021/09/08/biden-lies-his-head-off-and-attacks-americans-who-yelled-at-him-about-afghanistan-n439601

But as powerful and politically biased as the mass media are, it will undoubtedly work with some people, particularly those whose political prejudices make them predisposed toward wanting to be gaslighted. But I believe in Abe Lincoln's principle that you can’t fool all of the people all of the time.

I especially don’t believe that Americans can be distracted into forgetting the horrific scenes in Afghanistan, not when I fear more horror stories will continue to come pouring out; or that they will ever forget the shame of an American President leaving Americans behind enemy lines and running away while he took orders from a group of terrorists who gave a safe haven to the people who plotted 9/11.

I’m not a doctor, so I won’t make any guesses about the state of Joe Biden’s memory, but I can assure you that’s something that most Americans will never be able to forget, no matter how much they wish they could.

Mike Huckabee

The Democrat Protection Industry (i.e., the media) has another explosive document to ignore aside from those obtained by the Intercept suggesting that Dr. Fauci lied to the Senate about funding gain-of-function virus research in China. Now, they also have to try to bury the original Trump plan for pulling out of Afghanistan. It lays out the conditions the Taliban was required to meet, and the sequence of events that were to take place. Needless to say, closing Bagram Air Base and removing our troops before we evacuated our people was NOT Trump’s plan. That was entirely Biden’s.

https://www.westernjournal.com/document-nobodys-heard-confirms-afghanistan-disaster-bidens-alone/?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=huckabee

Speaking of the media as the Democrat Protection Industry, the Media Research Center notes that none of the big three network newscasts mentioned the bombshell documents revealing that Dr. Anthony Fauci apparently lied to the Senate about the NIH under his leadership funding gain-of-function research on viruses in China, and the possibility that experiments he funded resulted in COVID-19.

https://www.newsbusters.org/blogs/nb/nicholas-fondacaro/2021/09/07/nets-censor-evidence-fauci-lied-about-funding-wuhan-covid

ABC and CBS had a more important story: attacking Texas for passing an election integrity law. ABC covered Fauci, but only to repeat his COVID scaremongering against attending Labor Day events and his touting of a third COVID booster shot (or is a fourth by now? It is in Israel.)

Meanwhile, CNN actually interviewed Fauci and didn’t even bring up the new revelations, instead using the segment to attack Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis for refusing to impose draconian COVID measures.

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/stacey-lennox/2021/09/07/this-is-cnn-dr-fauci-gets-a-complete-pass-following-bombshell-report-on-wuhan-research-n1476618

Moral: When you rely on these sources for your news, you get all the news that fits the left’s agenda.

In a related story, the news networks might not be serious about holding Dr. Fauci accountable for lying to the Senate, but Sen. Rand Paul is.

https://townhall.com/tipsheet/leahbarkoukis/2021/09/08/rand-paul--fauci-n2595510

Mike Huckabee

We interrupt this newsletter, of necessity focused recently on the international threat created by Biden’s tragically inept pull-out from Afghanistan, to bring you some long-awaited 2020 election news.

It’s been ages since we’ve heard anything about the audit that’s been taking place in Maricopa County, Arizona. That’s the Phoenix area, one of the largest counties in the United States. (Keep in mind that Biden “won” the ENTIRE STATE of Arizona with only a 10,457-vote margin.) We’re still waiting for results of the official audit –- as we’ve reported, the auditors have run into snags in getting material they say they need to complete their work –- but canvassing efforts by a separate group have apparently been completed and what they reveal is stunning.

Of course, few news outlets will report this at all; we’ve gone to Joe Hoft at THE GATEWAY PUNDIT for his story. The headline from Wednesday says ‘ELECTION STEAL IS NOW CONFIRMED.” Let me make it clear, that’s their headline, not ours, but we are eager to take a look at what the results of this canvass tell us, and then we can all make up our own minds.

Again, this is not the official Maricopa County audit report, which is still going on and has no hard-and-fast deadline. It’s an independent effort conducted by Liz Harris and a group of volunteers, a “separate exercise” sponsored by the Arizona State Senate Republicans. That alone will give the Democrats the excuse they desperately need to dismiss this canvassing as partisan. But the methodology is transparent; volunteers went door to door, verifying the registration and voting information of thousands of voters, who make up a large statistical sample. And Democrats who scream “Partisanship!” need to understand something: this, I’m sure, is documented right down the line and can be verified for you, every bit of it. (You, on the other hand, still work tirelessly to avoid election transparency.) So read it and weep

Liz Harris tweeted this morning, “For all of those who knew the election was stolen, those who were ridiculed or labeled conspiracy theorists, you have been vindicated.”

https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2021/09/breaking-huge-results-canvassing-arizona-released-election-steal-now-confirmed/

First, let’s look at “lost votes.” These are votes that were discarded and never counted even though people actually cast them. They were cast, primarily by mail, by American citizens living in Maricopa County, and yet there is no record of them at all. This canvass brought to light 173,104 lost votes.

Then, there are “ghost votes.” These are votes cast by someone other than the voter who was assigned that ballot. The example everyone knows is a vote cast for someone who is dead and should have been dropped off the voter rolls. Someone else had to cast that vote, but who? The number of ghost votes uncovered in this canvas was 96,389.

There were other irregularities as well, though not as many, including votes cast from addresses that turned out to be vacant lots and votes recorded from people who it turned out hadn’t actually voted. And when they went door to door to gather data on 2,897 mail-in voters, 98 of those people said they’d actually voted in person.

According to their Election Summary, “Two primary categories of ineligible ballots and election mishandling, encompassing hundreds of thousands of votes, render the 2020 General Election in Maricopa County UNCERTIFIABLE.”

The report talked as well about smaller, local elections that would have been impacted by this sort of inaccuracy. Ironically, those include the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors (which oversees elections, haha), which, in District 1, was decided by a mere 403 votes. Their election for U.S. Senate was decided by 78,886 votes, still well within the margin here.

The Election Summary proposes a solution with which we wholeheartedly agree: BAN VOTE-BY-MAIL. “The U.S. Mail is not meant to be a secure transactional system,” they say. This is why we don’t send cash through the mail. How much is your vote worth to you? With that in mind, do you really want to send it through the mail, knowing all the things that can happen to it? They mention that “most first-world democracies, such as Germany, either ban Vote-by-Mail outright or place very heavy restrictions on its use.”

They also provide some historical perspective: “Until the late 1800s, all votes in all states were public information.” Our country went to secret ballot to stop a tremendous problem with voter fraud. (Before then, many people had been paid to vote a certain way, and it could be checked.) History is repeating itself now with mail-in balloting, “and again we have ridiculous and frivolous arguments being put forth against common-sense legislation to secure the rights of honest American citizens to vote and have their vote count.”

For more details on why and how this canvass was conducted, be sure and go to the link provided above and read “Canvass Overview.” All the issues they uncovered impacted an estimated 5.18 percent of mail-in votes, or about 88,215.

In a presidential election where statewide, the margin of “victory” was only a little over 10,000, it’s clear that reforms are necessary if we’re ever going to trust our system again. (In such a close race, with these discrepancies, I don’t think I need to tell you what the real outcome in Arizona likely was.) But, when Texas addresses the same issues with solid legislation, the bill is condemned by the left as racist and “anti-democracy.” It is nothing of the sort. (I would say that “anti-democracy” should apply to any policy that makes cheating easier or less detectable, because cheating causes real disenfranchisement.) Here's what is really in the new Texas law, just signed into law by Gov. Greg Abbott…

https://www.foxnews.com/politics/texas-election-law-what-is-in-it

This is all totally common sense, to make the voting process easier to monitor.

Of course, the new law will face legal challenges, but it should be looking pretty good when it gets to the Supreme Court. Let’s hope more states follow Texas’ lead and adopt election integrity legislation, not be bullied out of it.

Mike Huckabee

Yesterday, we brought you the story of Oklahoma Rep. Markwayne Mullin, who went on FOX NEWS’ SPECIAL REPORT in an interview with Bret Baier to talk about the effort he was involved in to help Americans still trapped in Afghanistan. Trapped, stranded, held hostage, use whatever words you prefer.

If you missed the original interview, here it is. Check out some of the recent comments, too, some of which will renew your faith in the American spirit.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RKbWUxXTxlA

If you don’t know the story, people had started calling the congressman wanting help getting out, he said, or getting out their loved ones or people who had helped them in Afghanistan as interpreters, etc. There were 20 who needed evacuation, but after he made some phone calls, he found out they needed some government entity, such as the State Department, to sponsor their flight. That’s the only way a plane could get in. But no such entity, he said, would sponsor them.

But then he was told a member of Congress can sponsor a flight. For example, if the State Department wanted to stay out of it, knowing not to touch it, this would give them cover. (Remember that useful old phrase, “plausible deniability”?)

Rep. Mullin explained that he was asked to go along when the “Tier One” operators –- Special Forces people experienced in this sort of thing –- were repeatedly denied a flight in. They felt he, as a congressman, could be an asset. He had no military background himself, he said, and “wasn’t trying to be a cowboy.”

When they got to the airport, all they could do was circle, for an hour, and he thinks this was the doing of the State Department, “100 percent.” Five requests to land were denied. And during this time, they lost contact with one American citizen, her father and her two-year-old son, who had been slated for rescue along with her father and two-year-old son.

But now that you’re caught up, here’s something that’s been escaping attention in the American press but that looks to us to be potentially quite significant. During this interview, Rep. Mullin happened to mention, seemingly in passing, that he’d been told of a “very sensitive” upcoming visit on September 5 by both “Putin and the Chinese government.” Wait a minute --- China, Russia and the Taliban all getting together? What was that about?

We found no news reports specifically about a meeting on September 5, but several reports in the foreign press do describe an upcoming “celebration” for the Taliban’s new government. We found little in the American press on this, but according to a story in THE GATEWAY PUNDIT --- taking information that first appeared in AL-JAZEERA and Russia’s TASS NEWS –- the Taliban have just announced that they invited Turkey, China, Pakistan, Iran, Russia and Qatar to participate in a ceremony announcing their new government in Afghanistan.

https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2021/09/taliban-invites-russia-china-pakistan-iran-turkey-qatar-ceremony-announcing-new-government-afghanistan/

Apparently a representative for the Taliban gave the story to AL-JAZEERA on Monday, bragging that the Taliban would create “a regime that will be accepted by the global community and the Afghan people.” I suppose if the alternative is to be beheaded, you'll accept it, all right.

According to plan, the big international party to ring in the new official interim Taliban government will reportedly take place on...(drum roll, please)...September 11. (When else?) And if that weren’t in-your-face enough, four new ministers in this new government happen to be former Gitmo detainees who were traded for captured U.S. service member Bowe Bergdahl. The whole list of terrorists --- I mean government ministers and other officials --- is listed here.

https://theconservativetreehouse.com/blog/2021/09/07/four-gitmo-detainees-released-in-berghdahl-swap-are-now-taliban-ministers-for-afghan-government-interim-government-will-be-officially-introduced-on-sept-11th/

Their statement reads, “The Islamic Emirate [NOTE: I think that’s what we’re supposed to call Afghanistan now if we want our Americans back] will take serious and effective steps towards protecting human rights, the rights of minorities as well as the rights of underprivileged groups within the framework of the demands of the sacred religion of Islam.” Never mind that the “framework” nullifies the entire first part of that sentence.

Here’s a write-up of the new government “inauguration” in ONE INDIA.

https://www.oneindia.com/international/taliban-finalises-new-govt-formation-in-afghanistan-invites-china-pakistan-russia-3307758.html?story=1

(Incidentally, we learned something while perusing ONE INDIA. We’ve all been hearing a lot from the administration lately about how the Taliban is not the same as the “real” terrorist groups such as al-Qaeda and the Haqqani Network, but don’t believe it. They’re all the same.)

https://www.oneindia.com/india/ties-of-blood-why-there-is-no-separating-the-taliban-al-qaeda-and-haqqani-network-3308576.html?ref_medium=Desktop&ref_source=OI-EN&ref_campaign=Auto-Deep-Links&story=2

But back to our main story. This big celebratory “do” isn’t the only international meeting going on concerning Afghanistan. Here’s the write-up from Japanese news service ANI on the upcoming G7 foreign ministers’ meeting to discuss the crisis in Afghanistan, particularly as pertaining to human rights, although we can see from the above statement that the Taliban have that covered. Over 20 nations are expected to take part, including Russia and China, though they are not members of the G7. The extent of America’s participation in this meeting isn’t clear, although Secretary of State Tony Blinken said he would be traveling to Germany to co-host with the German foreign minister. Other foreign ministers will be joining online.

https://www.aninews.in/news/world/asia/g7-foreign-ministers-meeting-on-afghanistan-expected-next-week20210905112540/

For what it’s worth, Russia is denying participation in the G7 meeting, according this report in REUTERS.

https://www.reuters.com/world/russia-denies-it-has-discussed-participation-g7-meeting-ifax-2021-09-05/

As there’s so little media coverage, my research staff and I are just feeling our way here. Putting the puzzle pieces together to get an idea of what’s really going on as alliances are forged in that part of the world, it's easy to feel like the blind men trying to describe an elephant. What we get in the media is just one tiny part. And the American press is strangely quiet about all this –- they want to move on and talk about vaccines and climate change, just as Biden does –- and we certainly can’t trust the administration to tell us, as we know they’ve been lying.

In fact, in an update to the Rep. Mullin rescue story, we’ve now learned that the White House actually blocked private rescue flights out of Afghanistan that would have landed in third countries. According to FOX NEWS, “the State Department explicitly stated that charter flights, even those containing American citizens, would not be allowed to land at Defense Department (DOD) airbases.” And as for who will be allowed to depart, including Americans, the Taliban are calling the shots.

Mullin isn’t the only one who’s been finding out about this.

https://www.foxnews.com/politics/state-department-afghanistan-private-rescue-flights-leaked-email

Rep. Mullin returned for a must-see follow-up interview Tuesday evening on FOX NEWS PRIMETIME. He told host Rachel Campos-Duffy that embassies in that part of the world had been instructed by Washington DC not to assist his rescue party “in any way.” He said that the State Department’s assertion that the Taliban had been working with them to get people out is a lie.

https://video.foxnews.com/v/6271373883001#sp=show-clips

He lays this all at the feet of President Biden, saying he never would have considered going over there if Biden hadn’t failed so spectacularly.

Right now, of course, there’s still one immediate concern, and it’s getting Americans evacuated. Six planes chartered by Glenn Beck’s charity, are still sitting on the tarmac in Mazar-i-Sharif. There are other planes as well, also grounded.

https://www.newsweek.com/taliban-holds-glenn-beck-groups-planes-least-100-americans-among-passengers-1626294

https://www.theblaze.com/news/glenn-beck-taliban-hostage-planes

Mike Huckabee

It’s been challenging, to say the least, to find out what’s really going on in Afghanistan concerning the evacuation of Americans and our friends.

Unlike President Trump, who used to enjoy hanging out on the White House lawn and speaking off the cuff to answer reporters’ questions --- not that he got the credit he deserved for that --- President Biden’s White House prefers to “put a lid” on their commentary. If Biden doesn’t have it on a teleprompter to read, he simply shuffles off, stage left, if he can remember which way is left.

When that happens, it’s up to the Pentagon and the State Department to speak for him. But they’ve abdicated their responsibility as well. As Kyle Becker reported on Sunday, the White House has implemented a virtual news blackout. Good luck finding out anything from them.

https://beckernews.com/zero-chatter-from-the-white-house-on-u-s-hostage-crisis-as-bidens-media-blackout-continues-41340/

“There is zero chatter in the White House about getting American citizens out of Afghanistan,” tweeted Jack Posobiec, senior editor at HUMAN EVENTS. A White House official told him that “they’re acting like they’re not even there.”

Why would that be? Multiple Pentagon sources independently confirm that “the White House counsel (through the National Security Council’s legal department) told multiple federal agencies and departments NOT to respond to Afghanistan correspondence, with more guidance to follow.” In other words, “ghost” any media outlet seeking information.

Of course, the mainstream media are showing no curiosity. When White House Chief of Staff Ron Klain appeared Sunday on CNN, he was never asked one question about the planes on the ground, not even if Americans were among those being held on airplanes at Mazar-i-Sharif International Airport. He did say that “about 100” Americans remain in Afghanistan and the administration is working on getting them out.

On FOX NEWS SUNDAY, Texas Rep. Michael McCaul surprised host Chris Wallace by revealing that six planes, loaded with Americans and Afghan interpreters and other helpers, had been sitting for at least a couple of days on the tarmac at that airport, prevented by the Taliban from taking off. He said the Taliban wanted “something in exchange.”

Here’s the story from THE DAILY CALLER.

https://dailycaller.com/2021/09/05/michael-mccaul-taliban-hostage-mazar-i-sharif/

And here's the full interview with Rep. McCaul.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kqiXgaZnuKg

“The airplanes are there,” Texas Rep. Ronny Jackson had said Friday on NEWSMAX. “Everything is ready to go, They can’t get out...because the Taliban won’t release the flight until September 9 because they want to be recognized as an official government.” McCaul said it was guaranteed these hostages would be held until the U.S. recognized the Taliban as a government.

As for Ron Klain’s assertion that “about 100” Americans are being held, California Rep. Darrell Issa says it’s a vast understatement. He told the AP it’s likely that “about 500 Americans” remain stranded (yes, Jen Psaki, STRANDED) in Afghanistan. That’s not including their family members, which would bring the number up to as high as 1,000. By not including the families, Nebraska Rep. Don Bacon said, “they’re lowballing the numbers.”

Jack Phillips of THE EPOCH TIMES reports that according to Mike Jason, who runs a rescue operation called Allied Airlift 21, the figure quoted could be far higher.

Alex Plitsas, an Iraq War veteran and former intel officer who is part of a rescue mission called Digital Dunkirk, said that in just one day, he’d received six calls from Americans who weren’t registered with the U.S.Embassy (which is abandoned now, I might add). “Those names are starting to trickle out now,” he said. “I expect that number to rise significantly.”

https://www.theepochtimes.com/mkt_breakingnews/congressman-at-least-500-americans-stranded-in-afghanistan-contradicting-white-house-estimates_3984209.html?utm_source=newsnoe&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=breaking-2021-09-06-3&mktids=6437ae131d64f5f45607d429407c959b&est=8Z%2BL4DN5rtUC3Hu7ZGygoVv1vQ4jeawJOdkGCTkFoyrCl0M07t1kFIMQ%2Bde%2BrakkdToAGw%3D%3D

Be sure and read Rebecca Downs’ account in TOWNHALL of Oklahoma Rep. Markwayne Mullin’s attempt to help Americans who were still trapped there, as told to FOX NEWS’ Bret Baier on Friday.

https://townhall.com/tipsheet/rebeccadowns/2021/09/06/congressman-helping-americans-in-afghanistan-biden-administrations-claims-are-100-n2595369

“A congressman can sponsor a flight going in,” Mullin explained, “and it gives one of these other departments cover because it’s kind of, no one wants to touch it because I personally believe it was because they knew it was a hot mess.”

Even though they had obtained a humanitarian flight plan from the FAA, he said, they had to keep circling the Kabul airport because requests to land were repeatedly denied. Mullin believes this was “100 percent directed from the State Department.”

As he would be coming in with a large amount of money, Mullin had sought help from the U.S. ambassador, who told him he’d have to go through 16 Afghan checkpoints and at each one “would be charged to get through.” (Good thinking to bring cash!) Tellingly, the ambassador also told him that he’d been instructed not to help.

Mullin said that when President Biden, the State Department and others said they’d get everyone out of there who wanted out, it was “a boldfaced, 100 percent lie.”

“...We’re not handling our mess,” he said. “...It’s our mess. The United States created this vacuum to allow the Taliban to come in. President Biden and his horrific withdrawal has caused this to happen.” He said that even if we got more Americans out, others would die “because of the failure of President Biden.” He said Biden would have blood on his hands.

Indeed, this so bad that some are speculating it was done on purpose to divert attention from something even worse. “What could be worse than this?” one might wonder. Tucker Carlson, on his show TUCKER CARLSON TONIGHT, and guest Glenn Greenwald speculated about that on Friday.

https://royalpatriot.com/tucker-carlson-says-afghanistan-screwup-may-have-been-planned/

Carlson said he didn’t want to enter “the realm of conspiracy” but thought it was “at least worth wondering.” Could it be that someone wants to maintain future engagement in Afghanistan, or might someone have some other reason? I have to say, that idea DOES sound a little out-there, but it tells us HOW BAD the situation in Afghanistan really is: bad enough to take our minds to some crazy possible explanations.

Even though Greenwald has seen no evidence of such a conspiracy, he said, it is “fully within the character of the deep state operatives” to deliberately engineer something like this. Sadly, he is correct. Certainly I’m not saying they did this, but who can trust them not to?

Another question: did the Taliban necessarily have to overrun Afghanistan at all? According to retired U.S. Army Brigadier Gen. Anthony Tata, the answer is NO. Details here.

https://conservativebrief.com/just-shameful-50608/

“We have utterly abandoned this country,” he said. “We have abandoned Americans within this country. It is just shameful what has happened...They chose to let it happen, they facilitated it happening, and now what you’ve got is a terror superstore there in Afghanistan.”

Finally, Piers Morgan wrote searingly about the “bitter shame and humiliation” America is experiencing as we near the 20th anniversary of 9/11 “thanks to Biden’s appalling mishandling of the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan and abject surrender to the very people who helped commit the attacks by harbouring the terrorists who carried them out.”

“America’s defeat to just 75,000 murderous medieval thugs is thus complete,” he wrote. He went on to talk about what is most certainly a hostage situation. Read it all, and get angry. Angry enough to reject whatever this government tells you. The turn we've taken is so bad --- and so unnecessary --- that it’s easy to speculate along with Glenn Greenwald that something even larger is afoot.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9962605/PIERS-MORGAN-9-11-approaches-Bidens-Afghanistan-disaster-cost-presidency.html

Mike Huckabee

For six decades, Labor Day meant an American tradition: the Jerry Lewis Labor Day Telethon for the Muscular Dystrophy Association. MDA ended its association with Lewis in 2010, and the telethon kept getting shorter until its final broadcast in 2014. But the association of Labor Day with the MDA continues. Some local areas still host telethons, and firefighters across America are out this weekend at intersections, collecting cash for their “Fill the Boot” drive. If you see them, I hope you’ll dig into your pocket and give generously.

MDA leaders say that a 21-hour telethon no longer fits into today’s short attention span world. But they’re adapting to changing times by turning to Internet fundraising, with online gaming competitions and entertainment by comedian Kevin Hart (stepping into Jerry’s old hosting role) and other celebrities, all streaming on major social media platforms. You can learn more about that or keep up your Labor Day tradition of donating at https://www.mda.org/telethon.

Although Jerry Lewis passed away a few years ago at 91, active right up until the end, I’m sure that he would want you to continue giving generously and remember that it’s about helping the kids. In fact, while Jerry made the telethon the success that it became, he wasn’t the one who started it all rolling. He gave credit for sparking his six-decade mission to wipe out muscular dystrophy to another man -- a man you’ve probably never heard of. Jerry kept the story secret for many years, until the publication of his memoir, “Jerry Lewis in Person.”

Jerry recalled that it was in 1948. He was 22, and he and Dean Martin were the hottest comedy team in show business. His good friend and press agent, Jack Keller, had helped make them stars, but never requested a single thing for himself -- until one day, he came to Jerry and begged a favor. He had a friend who was in trouble and asked if Jerry would talk to him. His name was Paul Cohen. He’d had MD since childhood, and he’d started a group called the Muscular Dystrophy Association to fight it. They had a few patients, their parents and nothing much else.

By chance, Jerry knew someone whose nephew had had MD. He said he’d watched helplessly as that child had withered like a leaf in the winter, and the effect of seeing that would never leave his mind until a cure was found. So he agreed to meet with the handful of doctors who knew anything about MD at the time. They weren’t encouraging. They warned him that research was in the Dark Ages. Nobody even knew what caused MD, and no known medicines helped. It was like fighting an invisible killer. But that just made Jerry more determined to take it on.

He and Dean began hosting live fundraisers…until one night at the end of their TV show, Jerry jokingly ad-libbed that viewers should each send in two dollars. He was stunned when over $2,000 arrived in the mail. And that’s when it hit him: the power of television to raise money for charity. So in 1951, Jack Keller put together a special hosted by Dean and Jerry. It aired on just one station and raised $68,000 (over $714,000 in today’s dollars), and the MDA telethon was off and running.

Over the next six decades, Jerry Lewis’ tireless work on his Labor Day telethons helped raised well over a billion dollars to fight neuromuscular diseases and help the victims and their families. He also inspired millions of Americans to join in the effort. That’s why so many Americans will always associate him and the MDA with Labor Day.

But let’s also salute an unsung hero. If you think one person can’t make a difference, remember that the Labor Day tradition that raised over a billion dollars to help children with MD started because a man you’d never heard of, Jack Keller…for the first time in his life…asked someone for a favor. And as Jerry observed, it was no surprise to him that the favor was a request to help somebody else.

So when you see a firefighter out collecting for MDA, doing his or her bit to help the kids, please do your bit and toss something into the boot. You'd be amazed how all those little individual efforts add up.

Mike Huckabee

There are some teachers who think their job is not to educate but to indoctrinate children into the leftist hivemind. Fortunately, though, the public is catching on, partly because of the pandemic exposing parents to what’s happening in classrooms. But also because, as with Harvey Weinstein, years of doing it in secret and getting away with it made them arrogantly think they were untouchable, so they got sloppy about exposing themselves. That was a bad idea. Today’s cases in point:

The Natomas, California, school district has fired an Inderkum High School social studies teacher after Project Veritas released an undercover video of him allegedly revealing how he works to radicalize his students “farther and farther left.” He said, “I have 180 days to turn them into revolutionaries.”

https://www.foxnews.com/us/pro-antifa-california-teacher-to-be-fired

The school found Antifa and Mao Zedong posters in his classroom, and stickers of communist dictators such as Stalin and Castro that he used to mark papers. He gave students extra credit for attending protests and described Mao’s “Cultural Revolution” in China that killed up to 20 million people as “fixing a problem.” When a student said that the teacher's Antifa flag made him uncomfortable, he replied, "Well, this is meant to make fascists feel uncomfortable, so if you feel uncomfortable, I don’t really know what to tell you.”

Ooh! Ooh! I know, teacher! What I’d tell the student is this:

“Antifa follows in a long tradition of duplicitous radical left groups that use misleading terms to trick you into supporting terrible ideas. Antifa claims it’s fighting fascism by using violence and intimidation to silence political opponents, which is a hallmark of fascism. So if their flag makes you uncomfortable, it means you can spot dangerous, lying fascists when you see them. You’re smarter than your teacher, so you get an A.”

Meanwhile, an Orange County, California, teacher who bragged on TikTok that she removed the American flag from her classroom because it made her “uncomfortable,” and suggested kids say the Pledge of Allegiance to her LGBTQ Pride flag instead, has been removed and placed on administrative leave pending an investigation.

https://www.foxnews.com/us/california-teacher-pledge-allegiance-pride-flag-removed-from-classroom

A group of parents rallied in protest outside her school, and a school district spokesperson said, “While we do not discuss employee related matters, we can tell you that showing respect and honor for our nation’s flag is a value that we instill in our students and an expectation of our employees. We take matters like this seriously and will be taking action to address it."

I’m very relieved to hear that. I’d be more relieved if it didn’t require exposure on social media and public parental protests just to get teachers to teach instead of indoctrinate.

Mike Huckabee

Stephen Kruiser at PJ Media has an entertaining and informative write-up about two good stories out of Texas (the passage of the voter integrity bill and the Supreme Court allowing enforcement of the post-five-week abortion ban – FYI,, Chief Justice Roberts sided with the liberals in wanting to block that, but they were outvoted 5-4.)

https://pjmedia.com/columns/stephen-kruiser/2021/09/02/the-morning-briefing-democrats-angry-that-babies-and-votes-are-now-safer-in-texas-n1475010

Kruiser also talks about some of the apocalyptic hair-on-fire rhetoric dispensed by the Democrats in their anguish over the idea that Texans disapprove of election cheating and killing babies.

I fervently hope that this overheated verbiage is starting to lose its potency, like the boy who cried, “Wolf!” (or “Racist!”) It seems to me as if the left has a bag full of random red-hot words and phrases that they just throw wildly at anything that displeases them, in hopes it will stick even if it makes no sense. Like insulting black people by calling an ID requirement “voter suppression” or “Jim Crow on steroids” (most black Americans are perfectly capable of obtaining an ID and support having to show it to vote.)

But leave it to radical left Rep. Cori Bush to take this to new levels of incomprehensibility by tweeting, “I’m thinking about the Black, brown, low-income, queer, and young folks in Texas. The folks this abortion health care ban will disproportionately harm.”

https://redstate.com/bonchie/2021/09/01/the-freak-out-begins-after-texas-abortion-law-goes-into-effect-n436450

Wow, applying logic to that is like trying to untangle the world’s biggest hairball. First of all, abortion isn’t “health care.” It’s the opposite: it’s killing a child in the womb. There is almost no circumstance in which abortion is considered a necessary procedure to protect a woman’s health.

Secondly, the way that black and brown people would be disproportionately affected by an abortion ban is that a lot more of them would be alive today. Since Roe v. Wade, more than 20 million black babies have been aborted. That’s more than the entire black US population in 1960. Also, 79% of Planned Parenthood abortion clinics are located within walking distance of black or Latino neighborhoods. It should come as no surprise that Planned Parenthood was founded by a racist eugenicist.

Third, young folks probably are disproportionately affected by any abortion law, since old people don’t get pregnant that often.

Finally, “queer” people are certainly disproportionately affected by abortion laws, as in “not affected AT ALL!” Is unplanned pregnancy really a big concern for male-male or female-female couples? Maybe some hire surrogates or get artificially inseminated to have kids, but if so, I doubt they’ll be running to abortion clinics afterward.

This just goes to show that the left has no intelligent arguments in favor of killing children in the womb, so they just reach into their bag of buzzwords (“Black!” “Young!” “Queer!” “Disproportionate!”) and throw out whatever they can grab in hopes it will fly by so fast that you won’t have time to think about it.

Mike Huckabee

Update: 

Our original story "Were U.S. working dogs left behind? Depends on who you ask,"  included a link to the Defense Department's denial of claims that any military service dogs were left behind, but Lead Stories now has more details to confirm that.

https://leadstories.com/hoax-alert/2021/09/fact-check-the-united-states-did-not-leave-behind-military-working-dogs-in-cages-in-afghanistan.html

You may read the story, along with the update above here. 

Mike Huckabee

President Biden’s professional apologists in the media are getting fewer in number as it becomes more difficult to defend the indefensible…not that some of them aren’t still giving it the ol’ college journalism degree try.

https://www.foxnews.com/media/msnbc-chris-hayes-biden-ghani-phone-call-afghan-withdrawal

But this story is going to make it harder for even the most diehard Biden bootlickers at CNN and MSNBC to spin his Afghanistan catastrophe into an “extraordinary success.” We now know that Biden’s own White House staffers are horrified that he left Americans behind to the mercy of the Taliban.

https://www.westernjournal.com/biden-officials-turn-reveal-really-feel-afghanistan-withdrawal/?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=empowerconservatives

Anonymous White House officials told Politico that the removal of all Americans was a hostage rescue under the guise of an evacuation, and they failed at that no-fail mission. One said, "I am absolutely appalled and literally horrified we left Americans there.”

There are also plenty of people in the military who feel the same way.

https://www.westernjournal.com/unsettling-report-leak-reveals-livid-82nd-airborne-colonel-tried-save-us-citizens-forced-abandon/?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=empowerconservatives

With a stunning new Rasmussen survey showing that a majority of Americans (52%) think Biden should resign (only 39% think he shouldn’t, with the rest unsure), it’s clear that our top “leader” is not only out of touch with most Americans but also with his own staff. And of course, with reality.

PS – That Rasmussen poll also found that even among Democrats, 32% say Biden should resign now, 40% say he should be impeached and 33% say Kamala Harris isn’t qualified to be President.

Mike Huckabee

In a shocking report, Politico claims that a “majority” of special immigrant visa applicants – Afghans who worked with us for years as translators and in other positions, which would put them and their families into extreme danger from the Taliban – were left behind in Afghanistan. This was allegedly due to security threats at the airport, the Taliban checkpoints around the airport and the airport design.

https://townhall.com/tipsheet/leahbarkoukis/2021/09/02/report-state-department-official-believes-majority-of-sivs-were-left-in-afghanistan-n2595191

An unnamed senior State Department official also said that any electronic credentials they tried to give out were immediately disseminated far and wide, making them unreliable for ID purposes.

As sad and infuriating as this is, it’s not surprising. It’s also horse apples to blame the airport design, or the attacks on the airport, or the Taliban surrounding the airport or the problems with last-minute electronic credentials for these allies being left behind in grave danger. That’s because all of those issues occurred at the last minute, after the Taliban moved in and took over. In fact, these people are stranded in Afghanistan and fearing for their lives because the White House failed to speed up the molasses-in-January paperwork processing to approve their SIVs.

I reported way back on May 19th, a good six weeks before Biden assured us that it was highly unlikely that the Taliban would take over, that Congress members sent the White House a bipartisan letter, complaining about their delay in processing these visas because leaving our allies behind would be a death sentence. That was from a report that was also in Politico:

https://www.politico.com/news/2021/05/18/lawmakers-visas-afghans-us-troops-489290

In short: the White House knew about this issue months ago, but didn’t take it seriously enough. They should’ve moved heaven and earth to cut through the bureaucracy and get our allies out faster (you know Trump would have), or at least to some safe spot outside Afghanistan until the paperwork was completed, but that’s yet another thing they failed at. If it results in the deaths of those who helped us for years and their families, it will be even more blood on the incompetent hands of this Administration.

Mike Huckabee

Update:

Our original story included a link to the Defense Department's denial of claims that any military service dogs were left behind, but Lead Stories now has more details to confirm that.

https://leadstories.com/hoax-alert/2021/09/fact-check-the-united-states-did-not-leave-behind-military-working-dogs-in-cages-in-afghanistan.html

On Tuesday, we commented on a story from an organization called American Humane, which works to rescue military working dogs and place veterans with service dogs, about U.S. military dogs being left behind in Afghanistan. We didn’t know if it was true and said we’d try to find other sources confirming this. Tuesday evening on Tucker Carlson’s show, he said the SPCA had confirmed that the Biden administration has chosen to leave the dogs behind.

“In the end,” the SPCA said, “the dogs and their caretakers were explicitly NOT allowed to board military aircraft, and numerous private charter aircraft were not granted access to the airport, either.”

If this is true, about 200 of these very special dogs are presumably doomed by the decision to leave them behind. But the U.S. military is saying this claim is “erroneous.”

A spokesperson for U.S. Central Command, U.S. Army Lt. Col. Karen Roxberry, said in an email that the “priority mission was the evacuation of U.S. citizens, SIV [Special Immigrant Visas] and vulnerable Afghans,” but she also stated that reports about leaving dogs behind were in error. She said the photos circulating online (perhaps including those Tucker had on his show, showing dogs in carriers) were not of dogs under the care of the U.S. military but rather the Kabul Small Animal Rescue.

https://nypost.com/2021/08/31/american-humane-society-say-us-left-military-dogs-behind-in-afghanistan/

So what’s the story? And what dogs were in the custody of Kabul Small Animal Rescue, and what happens to them? Honestly, we can't say for sure. Those are probably shelter dogs and former pets of evacuees, and they likely face cruelty and extermination by the Taliban, who think of dogs as unclean and typically kill them. But the government insists all the military dogs were evacuated, that none were left behind.

https://www.defenseone.com/threats/2021/08/no-us-military-dogs-were-left-behind-afghanistan-dod-says/184984/

Let's hope that’s true. I wish we could take our government at their word, but these are also the people who said no American would be left behind.

Mike Huckabee

All right, this is JUST IT. The breaking point.

Whoever at the White House, State Department and/or Pentagon comes forward to try to put a good spin on "8/31" by saying we met “the deadline” and are “out of Afghanistan after 20 years” can just, pardon the expression, pound sand. We're NOT all out. Don’t even bother trotting somebody out to try to clean up for the mentally AWOL Commander-in-Chief in one of your increasingly ridiculous press briefings. You still have some partisan loyals in the media trying to cover for you, but in defending this President you are a pathetic joke. You know perfectly well that we ALL wanted to be out of Afghanistan, Trump included, and we were going to be, and he would've gotten us out in a way that at least made strategic sense. But this latest development is, pardon the expression again, the straw that broke the camel’s back.

What finally did it –- what irreparably broke the hearts of me and my staff –- is this image from yesterday, in which the Taliban are flying over Kandahar in one of the Black Hawk helicopters we used to own, which President Biden left for the terrorists along with $90 billion worth of other military prizes as if it were Christmas in August. Yes, we’d already seen them joyriding in a Black Hawk, but this is the first case we’ve seen of them taking one up and dangling what appears to be the body of a man hanged by the neck. Is the man dead? We don't know.

https://www.westernjournal.com/videos-show-taliban-hanging-body-neck-bidens-left-behind-us-black-hawk-helicopter-report/

The WESTERN JOURNAL reports that it is indeed a dead body and describes this as “a giant middle finger to the Western world that has battled terrorism for the past two decades.”

The video was shared by the TALIB TIMES; it’s from a Twitter account claiming to share “official news” from “the Islamic Emirate Afghanistan.” (I assume that’s what we’re supposed to call it now.) The caption reads, “OUR AIR FORCE!”

And who was this man? WAS he dead, or being tortured, or what? Maybe he was one of our interpreters or guides. Maybe a young student at American University, after our State Department refused to admit them to the airport. Maybe just some poor schlub whose beard was too short or who was standing in the wrong place at the wrong time. Or maybe he was a happy Taliban fighter, very much alive, getting his kicks and celebrating the 8/31 defeat of the Americans.

Some have interpreted this video as appearing to show a member of the Taliban “on patrol” over Kandahar. We don’t know, but it would be the strangest patrol ever.

https://www.independent.co.uk/tv/news/taliban-hanging-us-helicopter-afghanistan-v41072cd5

Here are more details on the massive array of equipment the Taliban now have, thanks to President Biden. Indiana Rep. Jim Banks, who assembled the list, said the Taliban now has “more Black Hawk helicopters than 85 percent of the countries in the world.” Each helicopter cost the taxpayers $6 million, and there is so much more we bought them. We've armed our own enemy to the teeth!

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9941207/Taliban-Air-Terrorists-fly-captured-6million-Black-Hawk-helicopter-Kandahar.html

The administration has been trying to fool us into thinking the Taliban are “negotiating,” working with us, fulfilling our interests by going after ISIS-K, the “real” terrorists who blew up 13 of our service members at the Kabul airport checkpoint. That, as I've said, is a distinction without a difference. They are all terrorists and all want Americans dead. If the Taliban and ISIS really were enemies, the Taliban wouldn’t have released the approximately 2,000 ISIS fighters we’d detained at Bagram Air Base.

Note to Biden administration: Just stop insulting our intelligence. Calling ISIS-K the “real” terrorists to take the heat off the Taliban reminds me of O.J. Simpson’s lawyers saying he would dedicate himself to finding the “real” killer of Nicole.

And who flew this helicopter? It’s not as if some 7th-century Taliban soldier climbed aboard this ultra-sophisticated piece of equipment and somehow knew how to take it up and circle it over Kabul, dead-or-alive person in tow. Are we sure EVERY American helicopter pilot got out? Or maybe the pilot is an Afghan trained by us and now held captive. We don’t know, and, even worse, we can’t trust the White House to tell us.

Western media have been mostly banned from Afghanistan.  

Well, they did allow some media people because they wanted the world to see them take over and declare victory over America.

https://www.foxnews.com/world/taliban-fighters-kabul-airport-hangar-examine-helicopters-us-troops-depart-afghanistan

There's no telling the horrors that will go on. Those particularly in danger include Americans left behind, Afghan women and girls, interpreters and others who helped American soldiers, and Christian missionaries. We don’t know how many thousands of people this might be.

President Biden, when asked about any of this, says he’s “not supposed to take any questions” on Afghanistan. (What??) Then he walks away. Can you IMAGINE what the reaction would be if Trump were in office and he did that? They’d use it to push their fake “Russia” narrative and say Vladimir Putin had instructed him not to answer.

Here’s something else we can’t forgive Biden for, if the allegations are true: leaving our service dogs behind in Afghanistan. I’m not comparing this to the loss of 13 service members, but these dogs mean so much to the soldiers who depended on them. Some owe their lives to these dogs. Here’s the press release from American Humane, an organization that brings home retired military working dogs and pairs service dogs with veterans.

https://www.americanhumane.org/press-release/american-humane-condemns-death-sentence-delivered-to-contract-working-dogs-left-behind-in-kabul-afghanistan/

American working dogs left there by our military face a grim future: certainly death and perhaps torture. We’re looking for additional verification that these dogs have indeed been left behind in the crush to evacuate. Our leaders like to talk about “who we are”; this certainly is not it.

Something else: the airlift out of Kabul was supposed to rescue those who helped us, but it turned into such a free-for-all that Afghans weren’t vetted before boarding the planes. Here’s just one unfortunate example.

https://amp.washingtontimes.com/news/2021/aug/30/convicted-rapist-reached-us-afghan-evacuation-flig/

Of the 2,000 rescued Afghans being held at Wisconsin’s Fort McCoy, not a single one had an SIV, or Special Immigrant Visa. And according to the WASHINGTON TIMES, only “a tiny fraction” of those evacuated have been Americans.

But here's a ray of hope: An organization of retired U.S. generals and admirals called “FLAG OFFICERS 4 AMERICA” has HAD IT every bit as much as we have and is demanding accountability in the form of the resignation of the two top generals, the highest military advisers to President Biden (who should have resigned in the first place rather than carry out his disastrous orders), Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Mark Milley. Know what I call those resignations? A good start.

They’ve also written a spectacular letter expressing what they think of the modern “woke” military and weighing in on a number of national security issues, including Biden’s fitness to serve. If anything will make your day, it’s this letter and the long, long list of signatories. Here it is, in pdf form to share far and wide.

https://img1.wsimg.com/blobby/go/fb7c7bd8-097d-4e2f-8f12-3442d151b57d/downloads/2021%20Open%20Letter%20from%20Retired%20Generals%20and%20Adm.pdf?ver=1630334080425

Mike Huckabee

With Americans stranded in Afghanistan, the credibility of the United States is shredded by our inept exit there. And now we’ve suffered the worst loss of American military personnel in 11 years and the first casualty in Afghanistan since Feb of 2020. It is so bungled that the British Parliament did something it had never in its history done—it voted to censure the President of the United States. Think about that. Joe Biden has continued to pretend world leaders are standing with him, but not one world leader has said a public positive word. In fact, it’s been the opposite. The Germans have said that Biden has virtually destroyed NATO, the French—yes the FRENCH—have lectured us about “moral responsibility” to the people being held hostage there by the Taliban terrorists. Even the Belgians have condemned the way this mess has been handled.

And how has President Biden responded? By stepping to a microphone, screaming into the teleprompter words someone else wrote and he has trouble reading, boasting about Democrats going on a wild shopping spree with your tax dollars to spend 3.5 TRILLION dollars on give-a-ways to try and buy some more voters. It’s clear Joe Biden wants to talk about his domestic agenda so we won’t pay attention to the collapse in Afghanistan. We’re not about to forget about those Americans stranded in Kabul, but I’ll oblige him and talk about his equally disastrous domestic plan.

He insists that we keep paying people to not work and indefinitely extending unemployment benefits to people who refuse to take one of the jobs being offered by desperate employers who are having to close restaurants, lumber mills, and construction sites. As long as Uncle Joe will pay people more money to get up at the crack of noon and watch Netflix than to work, people will take the government hand-out. I think instead of giving non-workers an extra $300 to sit on their ample backsides and stay away from work, we ought to give that $300 as a bonus to the people who actually showed up for work! We tax the wages of the workers, but not the welfare of the lazy. I don’t begrudge people who can’t work, but I have no sympathy for those who simply won’t work and are willing to let others lift THEIR loads while the only thing they lift is their federally subsidized forks. Take the taxes off those who are sweating through hot summer days on the job, and if a person is capable of working and won’t take a job, cut the benefits to zero.

And Biden’s energy plan has resulted in your gas to get to work costing $1-2 dollars a gallon more than it did just a year ago. He killed an American pipeline and the thousands of jobs that died with it, but he turned around and approved the Russians’ pipeline which gave them great riches at our expense. He has turned our Southern Border into a free-flowing firehose of human beings rushing into America without us having a clue who they are, whether or not they are drug runners, human traffickers or criminals, and not seeming to care whether they have been vaccinated, wear a mask, or socially distance. While Democrats are shutting down churches for fear of Covid, they turn a blind eye to illegal immigration. Tell your pastor if you have an idiot for a governor or mayor who is forcing your church to close, have him announce that the church will “identify” as the Southern border, and tell the masses to come on in!

I’m not sure we’ll hold out until the 2022 elections, but if we miraculously do, please think about who you vote for in the next election. Because if you keep sending socialists and socio-paths to serve in Congress and on your school board, then you’ll deserve the mess. But frankly, I’ll never vote for people who hate this great country because I believe we ALL deserve better!

Mike Huckabee

Mike Huckabee

Of all the disturbing and heartbreaking stories coming out of Afghanistan this weekend, this might be the most infuriating of all.

Two highly trusted sources, investigative reporter Lara Logan and Texas Rep. Dan Crenshaw, a former Navy SEAL who lost an eye in an IED explosion in Afghanistan, are independently reporting that over the past few days, Americans have been turned away from entering the Kabul airport. Logan tweeted this on Saturday: “Most Americans don’t understand what’s happening in Kabul – been on this all night with no end. US citizens are fighting through enemy lines to get to the airport. When they show their blue passport to 82nd [Airborne] soldiers at the gate, many are turned away and sent back to the Taliban.”

Later, she tweeted, “All that stands between these Americans and safety/home is the US govt and military.”

President Biden had supposedly sent the 82nd Airborne to Kabul to facilitate the mass evacuation. What in blazes is going on there?

Dan Crenshaw tweeted, “America, all you need to know is this: Biden is not letting US citizens through the airport gates. It has been impossible to get anyone through for the past 24 hours. This administration has been lying about their intent to save Americans. Unforgivable.”

Also unexplainable, in a sane world with a sane Commander-in-Chief. But that’s not what we have.

Weirdly, the Biden White House is also trying to say that ISIS-K is the enemy, not so much the Taliban. One Green Beret and others in a position to know report that they’re really one and the same. I was on the same track a few days ago when I called this “a distinction without a difference.”

Bryan Preston at PJ MEDIA wrote at greater length about this.

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/bryan-preston/2021/08/29/dan-crenshaw-lara-logan-bring-the-most-disturbing-reports-out-of-the-kabul-airport-yet-n1473930

We don’t know how many Americans are stranded in Afghanistan. Some reports have said 350, but it could be thousands more. The Biden administration says it’s evacuated “thousands,” but it never says how many of these are Americans.

The State Department, officially in charge of the evacuation effort, apparently is not helping. If soldiers are turning away Americans, it is on their order, not the Pentagon’s. Texas Rep. Ronny Johnson tweeted this on Saturday: “I am furious!! My team has been on the phone all day trying to get AMERICAN CITIZENS out. They have been just outside the airport numerous times, but the State Department WILL NOT help them.”

Congress won’t be looking into this anytime soon. Speaker Pelosi has adjourned them.

American citizens aren’t the only ones being turned away at the airport gates. As reported in THE NEW YORK TIMES, students and alumni from the American University of Afghanistan were, too. This came after about 600 of them had gathered at a safe house and boarded buses to take them, they thought, to freedom. After waiting for several hours, they were told that evacuations had been called off. An email told them to return home. (“Home”?) Because the U.S. troop deadline for evacuation is August 31, it said, the U.S. military was turning from evacuating civilians to getting its own personnel out.

Think that’s bad? Oh, it’s much worse. They're terrified for their lives now, as they also also learned the U.S. military, “following protocol,” had shared a list of their names and passport information with the Taliban who were guarding the airport checkpoints. Their identities are now known, and there's no way to evacuate.

The Taliban have already taken over the American University campus. The staff got out in time and are now safely in Doha. The president of the school says they’re committed to “ensuring all students would finish their degrees remotely.”

Well, isn’t that nice. And how are these students going to be receiving their degrees? Posthumously?

https://www.nytimes.com/live/2021/08/29/world/afghanistan-live-news-updates#american-university-of-kabul-students-and-alumni-trying-to-flee-were-sent-home

Brad Slager at RedState.com has an excellent commentary on the total incompetence surrounding the withdrawal.

https://redstate.com/bradslager/2021/08/29/no-aspect-of-bidens-afghanistan-fiasco-was-handled-with-competence-n434910

Reading this, though, I have to wonder: Is this level of incompetence due to Biden’s lack of cognitive faculties, leading him to be fatally singleminded and stubborn about his arbitrary pull-out date, or is he actually an all-out traitor to his country? If he were the latter, what would he be doing differently? The one other possibility is that he is so monumentally stupid that...well, I have to wonder if even Joe Biden is THAT monumentally stupid.

It gets even crazier: As Nick Arama at RedState reports, at a time when military aircraft are at such a premium that commercial jets are being called into service, President Biden approved the use of a military plane by Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm to fly last Monday to a nonessential diplomatic summit in Ukraine. Why the frivolous waste of a military craft when it was so badly needed for the evacuation? This makes about as much sense as anything else going on right now.

https://redstate.com/nick-arama/2021/08/29/biden-diverted-military-jet-away-for-outrageous-reason-in-middle-of-kabul-evacuation-n434949

Also, recall the Marine officer who was relived of duty within hours of criticizing military leaders for the deaths of 13 service members last week? Lt. Col. Stuart Scheller had tweeted: “I have been fighting for 17 years. I am willing to throw it all way to say to my senior leaders, I demand accountability.” In case you missed that story, here’s a review.

https://redstate.com/mike_miller/2021/08/29/marine-officer-relieved-of-duty-for-slamming-leaders-over-afghanistan-debacle-issues-blistering-warning-n434835

Scheller has given an interview with the NEW YORK POST. They also spoke to his dad, who proudly called him “a Marine’s Marine.” Here’s the link; highly recommended reading.

https://nypost.com/2021/08/28/marines-praise-lt-colonel-fired-for-slamming-afghan-exit/

Although we praise Scheller to the skies for having the courage to do what even Biden’s generals couldn’t do but should have, we do have one small quibble with something he said, relating to the age of his superiors. “The baby boomer’s turn is over,” he told the POST. “I demand accountability, at all levels. If we don’t get it, I’m bringing it.”

Speaking as a baby boomer, I would say that most Americans my age are appalled at what is transpiring and want to “bring it,” too. Much of my readership, including many veterans, would be considered part of the “baby boomer” generation, and we are just as horrified as he is and also demand accountability. I would not be surprised if some of those officials, say, from the State Department, giving orders behind the scenes are closer to his age.

That said, Scheller, who received a Combat V for Valor and a Bronze Star, has exhibited perhaps an even rarer form of bravery by standing up to his superiors when such action was badly needed. He’s a hero for daring to say that the U.S. should never have abandoned the strategic Bagram Air Base. Some of his fellow officers, even though they were supportive, have urged him to take his video down. But over 30,000, some of whom served under him, have liked and commented on it.

Saturday, Michael Goodwin in THE NEW YORK POST asked the question, “What if Biden and his administration really are every bit as bad as they look?

https://nypost.com/2021/08/28/in-the-midst-of-a-white-house-breakdown-goodwin/

Finally, in her grief, the mother of one of the Marines killed at the airport checkpoint has spoken out. We’ll just let her tell you in her own words what she thinks of the current Commander-in-Chief.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9936483/Biden-flies-Dover-Air-Force-Base-receive-remains-13-American-troops-killed-Kabul-attack.html

Mike Huckabee