Mike Huckabee

It looks as if the Democrats’ hopes have been dashed for shoving HR1, their Legalize Vote Fraud Act (they call it the “For The People” Act, but my name for it is far more accurate), through Congress with one tie-breaking Senate vote. It’s thanks to West Virginia Democrat Sen. Joe Manchin.

https://www.westernjournal.com/democrats-prized-h-r-1-jeopardy-one-partys-senators-announces-will-vote/

It was already iffy whether they’d be able to hide it inside a bill that could pass through reconciliation and not be subject to the 60 votes needed to end a filibuster. Both Manchin and Arizona Democrat Sen. Kyrsten Sinema are under heavy fire from the left for opposing their dream of doing away with the filibuster - an incredibly short-sighted power grab that would surely come back to bite them, just as ending the filibuster for judicial nominees did, but long-term planning is not the strong suit of liberals.

But Manchin made it clear that even if they could pass HR1 with 50 Senate votes, they won’t have 50 because he won’t vote for it. Manchin said, “The right to vote is fundamental to our American democracy and protecting that right should not be about party or politics. Least of all, protecting this right, which is a value I share, should never be done in a partisan manner.” He said the current debate on how to hold elections “is not about finding common ground, but seeking partisan advantage,” and “partisan policymaking won’t instill confidence in our democracy — it will destroy it.”

He added that any bill about voting rights should be the result of Democrats and Republicans working together, or “we risk further dividing and destroying the republic we swore to protect and defend as elected officials.” HR1 is a purely Democrat invention opposed by 100% of Republicans.

As for passing it by doing away with the filibuster, that’s also a no-go. Manchin said, “It has been said by much wiser people than me that absolute power corrupts absolutely. Well, what I’ve seen during my time in Washington is that every party in power will always want to exercise absolute power, absolutely. Our founders were wise to see the temptation of absolute power and built in specific checks and balances to force compromise that serves to preserve our fragile democracy.”

It's rare to see someone in Washington these days say something that wise or take a stand on principle in the face of an onslaught of angry personal attacks and threats from his own party. In fact, that’s so wise that I’m sure it will result in an even bigger onslaught of angry personal attacks and threats. He should take that as verification that he is absolutely doing the right thing.

And just to prove how 180 degrees out of phase with reality the pushers of HR1 are, here’s former Obama aide Ben Rhodes actually using the anniversary of D-Day to compare proponents of HR1 to the Normandy Invasion troops and Republicans who oppose it to the Nazis.

https://redstate.com/bonchie/2021/06/06/the-absolute-dumbest-most-offensive-d-day-anniversary-take-goes-forth-n392322

Mike Huckabee

Almost every day, there's news about election fraud. It’s just not being widely reported.

In perhaps the biggest story, West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin has announced he won’t vote for the so-called “For The People Act,” which we call the “Legalize Vote Fraud Act.” He rightly says that forcing it through by way of the partisan reconciliation process will further divide the country. And he's right --- if anything could, this is it. The bill runs over 800 pages and, for good reason, has zero GOP support.

Manchin also said he won’t vote to weaken or eliminate the filibuster. His reasoning is consistent: it would have given total power to one party that has only a tiny edge in votes.

Thank you, Sen. Manchin, for standing up for bipartisanship and elections that reflect the will of the people. You've said you don’t want either party --- even your own --- to have absolute power, and we applaud you for that.

Here’s what Sen. Manchin said in his home state newspaper, THE CHARLESTON GAZETTE-MAIL.

https://www.wvgazettemail.com/opinion/op_ed_commentaries/joe-manchin-why-im-voting-against-the-for-the-people-act/article_c7eb2551-a500-5f77-aa37-2e42d0af870f.html

“Do we really want to live in an America where one party can dictate and demand anything it wants, whenever it wants?” Manchin wrote. (Note: most Democrat politicians would answer YES!) “I have always said, ‘If I can’t go home and explain it, I can’t vote for it.’ And I cannot explain strictly partisan election reform or blowing up the Senate rules to expedite one party’s agenda.”

“For as long as I have the privilege of being your U.S. senator,” he continued, “I will fight to represent the people of West Virginia, to seek bipartisan compromise no matter how difficult and to develop the political bonds that end divisions and help unite the country we love.”

Amen. And thanks, West Virginians, for making your feelings known about this. I would also add that this bill, by federalizing elections when the Constitution leaves elections to the states, is blatantly unconstitutional.

Mollie Hemingway, whose book about the 2020 election is due out in September, appeared on SUNDAY MORNING FUTURES with Maria Bartiromo to talk about what we know so far.

https://video.foxnews.com/v/6257645445001#sp=show-clips

She noted something former President Obama said last week: that in our focus on election reform, Republicans are trying to “rig” the elections going forward. (Once again, accuse us of what YOU are doing.) I would characterize what he said as not just wrong but downright offensive.

Obama was speaking at The Economic Club of Chicago when he spoke in sharp condemnation of the voting reform laws passed in Georgia and Florida and under consideration in Texas and other states. Here’s a strong opinion piece in the WESTERN JOURNAL about Obama’s presentation, including the video. Read on in the article to see what Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton said about the risk posed to Texas by the push to send out mail-in ballots to every registered voter currently on the rolls.

https://www.westernjournal.com/trump-banned-questioning-election-obama-claims-gop-rigging-game/

By the way, Republicans in the Georgia House have gone further than passing election reform. They’ve also approved a resolution censuring Secretary of State Brad Raffensperget, saying that he failed to perform his duties “in accordance with the laws of the Constitution of the State of Georgia.” The document itself makes good reading.

https://twitter.com/bluestein/status/1401278635751919622/photo/1

According to this document, Raffensperger’s failure stems from the settlement agreement he entered into with the Democratic Party of Georgia, the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. Republicans accused him of “undermining the security of our elections by allowing mass mailings of absentee applications by his office and third parties [!] which created opportunities for fraud and overwhelmed election offices; rendering accurate signature matching nearly impossible; allowing ballot drop boxes without proper chain of custody; and ignoring sworn affidavits and disregarding evidence of voter fraud.”

Details are in this EPOCH TIMES premium story.

https://twitter.com/bluestein/status/1401278635751919622/photo/1

If you’re really into the 2020 statistical anomalies suggestive of election fraud, we recommend this piece from REVOLVER about what appears to have happened in Montgomery County, Pennsylvania. (And no, it doesn’t make us “conspiracy theorists” to want to examine this.) Former President Trump is calling for a Maricopa-style election audit in Pennsylvania, saying the vote was rigged. There should be one.

https://www.revolver.news/2021/06/trump-demands-pa-audit-revolver-why-pennsylvania-was-rigged/

As Mollie Hemingway said, tens of millions of Americans saw the election as rigged “when laws were changed about how to control and protect our elections, or, sometimes...the courts just intervened or rogue election officials changed the processes by which we make sure that ballots are correct and should be counted.” Indeed, attorney Marc Elias of the law firm Perkins Coie (the firm that paid Fusion GPS for the Steele “dossier”) might very well be the one individual most responsible for the outcome of the 2020 election, just by traveling around the country and getting states to ignore their own laws, the Constitution be damned. It all made cheating easier, regardless of whether or not the machines got hacked.

Hemingway also noted the practice by Big Tech companies of shoveling outside money to county election officials, essentially “privatizing our election process.” The biggest example of this that we know of is the Center for Tech and Civic Life (CTCL), which received hundreds of millions of dollars from Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. This money had strings attached; for example, money that went to counties in Wisconsin paid for unsupervised dropboxes in locations determined by...CTCL.

Bartiromo recalled the various locations on Election Night where counts were abruptly stopped and picked up again in the morning. Of course, the most infamous of these, at which a skeleton crew of election tabulators continued counting into the night, unobserved, after the building had been evacuated because of a nonexistent burst pipe, was in Fulton County, Georgia, at the State Farm Arena in Atlanta.

“The whole problem with absentee voting and mail-in balloting is that we don’t even know how many ballots are out there,” Hemingway said. “This is a big concern for people who care about election fraud, ‘cause you need to be able to trust elections to have a republic.” And we can't.

Moving on...the Maricopa audit is working at good pace, with 60 percent of the ballots counted so far. But as the Arizona GOP tweeted Friday, “Democrats aren’t just trying to stop the audit, they are using it to raise millions of dollars from Big Tech and Corporate Cronies, grab power, finance campaigns, and further their anti-American agenda.” Well, of course they are.

https://www.oann.com/ariz-audit-completes-recount-of-more-than-60-percent-of-ballots/

Finally, Mike Lindell hasn’t backed down one iota –- that means "infinitesimal amount" –- on his claims of fraud. We had to go looking for his most recent video and finally found, on his own website, a choice edit that deals with his latest findings. I’ll tell you, it’s much easier to find the so-called “debunkings” (which aren't) than it is to find the videos themselves. And once you see this, you’l be wary of how simple it might be for China to hack into voting machines. The huge take-away is that to have secure elections, we have to go back to old-school paper-and-pen ballots. Stop electronic voting NOW.

https://lindelltv.com/china-puts-biden-in-the-white-house/

Mike Huckabee

Democrats breathed a sigh of relief last week and started boasting that they’re in great shape after they pulled out all the stops and won a special election in a New Mexico Congressional district that they won in 2020 by 23 points. Well, not so fast…

https://redstate.com/nick-arama/2021/06/06/republican-win-in-mcallen-tx-is-great-news-for-gop-harbinger-of-massive-trouble-for-dems-n392193

Saturday, there was a mayoral election in McAllen, Texas, a border city with an 85% Hispanic population. In a surprise, the mayor’s seat flipped from Democrat to Republican GOP county chairman Javier Villalobos.

Analysts say it may be a sign that Hispanics who supported Trump aren’t just Trump voters and have shifted away from the Democrats. Or it may be a sign that they’ve seen up close and personal the disaster wrought by Biden’s open border policies. Either way, it’s good news for the people of McAllen, but bad news for the Democrats.

Mike Huckabee

While we were taking our day of rest on Sunday, the world commemorated the 77th anniversary of D-Day, the biggest seaborne invasion in history and likely the most complex military operation of all time. Somehow, a massive invasion involving over 300,000 troops was kept secret until the moment it began on the beaches of Normandy.

Of the Allied troops who stormed the beaches or parachuted behind enemy lines, thousands were killed or injured by relentless gunfire from the entrenched German snipers’ positions. But they fought on and eventually prevailed, gaining a foothold in France and marking the turning of the tide of World War II in Europe.

Here are two articles from Fox News about both D-Day then and the 77th anniversary events.

https://www.foxnews.com/media/remembering-d-day-fox-nation

https://www.foxnews.com/us/d-day-anniversary-reminder-american-greatness

Here is the website of the National D-Day Memorial with more information.

https://www.dday.org/

Here are two fine blog articles about D-Day, the second giving some information about the less-well-known Juno Beach Landings.

https://americandigest.org/june-6-a-walk-across-a-beach-in-normandy/

https://spinstrangenesscharm.wordpress.com/2021/06/06/77th-anniversary-of-d-day-the-somewhat-under-appreciated-juno-beach-landings/

And this is a must-read article by Rick Moran at PJ Media about Sunday’s anniversary commemorations in France.

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/rick-moran/2021/06/06/the-day-the-the-word-courage-came-alive-n1452448

Because of the pandemic, live events were still very limited, with only one D-Day veteran attending the ceremony at the Normandy American Cemetery at Colleville-sur-Mer. That was 96-year-old American Charles Shay, who lives in Normandy.

Shay said, “In France, people who remember these men, they kept them close to their heart. And they remember what they did for them. And I don’t think the French people will ever forget.”

Sadly, many young Americans are in danger of forgetting because they’re not being taught accurate American history. It’s hard to push a narrative about America being evil when you have to tell students how many Americans willingly risked their lives and limbs to stop the Nazis and save innocent people they’d never met on the other side of the world. As Moran rightly points out, the word “courage” has been devalued in our modern age, as it’s applied to everyone from celebrities admitting their drug problems to comedians insulting the President.

But the anniversary of D-Day is a reminder of what true courage really is. It’s doing the right thing, even when it requires charging head-on into the face of death. D-Day veterans often shun the title of “hero,” but nobody is more deserving of it. And nobody is more deserving of being remembered and honored long after their lives are over, and long after all of our lives are over.

Mike Huckabee

A graduating senior at Lake Highlands High School in Dallas is getting showered with praise from liberal celebrities and politicians, including Hillary Clinton, for using her valedictorian speech to promote abortion rights and denounce Texas’ “heartbeat” abortion limit law.

https://www.christianpost.com/us/valedictorian-slams-texas-abortion-restrictions-at-graduation.html

I could only imagine what their reaction would be if someone used a valedictorian speech to promote pro-life beliefs and denounce the atrocity of abortion. In fact, we don’t have to imagine. Officials at a Michigan high school tried to censor a girl’s valedictorian speech just because she referred to her Christian faith in it. She planned to say that her "future hope is found in my relationship with Christ. By trusting him and choosing to live a life dedicated to bringing His kingdom glory, I can be confident that I am living a life filled with purpose and meaning. My identity is found by what God says and who I want to become is laid out in Scripture.”

The principal reportedly told her, "These are your strong beliefs, but they are not appropriate for a speech in a school public setting." (Unlike promoting abortion, I suppose.) Fortunately, the principal backed down after receiving a letter from lawyers at the First Liberty Institute, demanding that the student be allowed to exercise her First Amendment rights. They said graduation speeches are private speech, not government speech subject to separation of church and state.

So, I wonder when this student will get her congratulatory tweets from Hillary and the rest, lauding her for standing up for her rights, not backing down and speaking truth to power? I won’t be holding my breath. One thing I’ve noticed about liberals is that they’re always ready to defend free speech, as long as you’re saying something they agree with.

For the record, I don’t think the first girl should have given a pro-abortion speech, but I also don’t think she should have given an anti-abortion speech either (the other girl’s speech wasn’t about public policy, it was about her personal religious beliefs that affect her plans for the future, which is an appropriate topic for a graduation speech.) The audience wasn’t there to have someone’s politics inflicted on them, they were there to see a graduation ceremony. Anyone who’s the valedictorian should be smart enough to know that.

Mike Huckabee

Rep. Alexandria “Don’t Call Me AOC” Ocasio-Cortez offered forth some more of her renowned wisdom this week, declaring that there’s no evidence that insane Democrat policies like doing away with bail or defunding the police have caused the skyrocketing crime waves in blue cities. No, she insists that if we want less crime, we need to build fewer jails.

This inspired a brilliant idea for me, too: if we don’t want any more pandemics, we need to build fewer hospitals. Think about it: what’s the #1 sign of a pandemic? Hospitals full of patients. No hospitals, no patients; and no patients, ipso facto, no pandemic!

Sorry, having to listen to nonsense like this got me thinking like a liberal for a minute.

AOC claims there’s no evidence that the rise in crime was caused by leftist policies, but that’s like saying you see no evidence that a flood was caused by a rainstorm, just because you slept through the rainstorm. At the risk of suggesting something that might be beyond her abilities, I’d suggest she try connecting the dots. Read this article from the Wall Street Journal about the horrific conditions being suffered by minorities in cities that defunded the police and allowed rioters and looters to run riot.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-year-after-george-floyds-murder-its-open-season-in-minneapolis-11621893383?mod=hp_opin_pos_2

It points out that in Minneapolis, between January 1st and last week, homicides were up 108% from the same period last year, shootings were up 153%, and carjackings up 222%. Similar crime spikes have been seen in other blue cities with similar policies, including New York, L.A. and Chicago. Perhaps most horrifying of all, shootings of children in Minneapolis are up 171%. The grandmother of a 10-year-old boy who’s fighting for his life asked why nobody is mad and protesting that; is it only because a cop didn’t shoot him?

In a darkly ironic twist, the area known as “George Floyd Square” is now described as a burned-out, desolate, isolated, police-free zone where residents live in fear and senior citizens sleep in their bathtubs to try to avoid being shot through their windows. The WSJ article notes that Democrats blame this crime wave on the pandemic, but it actually started after the George Floyd riots, which began two months after the pandemic shutdowns began.

To be fair, AOC does have a bit of a point buried under her usual illogical verbiage. If someone is genuinely mentally ill, they should be in a hospital or care facility rather than jail (of course, it was leftists who insisted that it was a violation of civil rights to involuntarily institutionalize people and gave us the epidemic of mentally ill homeless people.) It probably would help reduce some crimes if we focused more on root causes such as preventing drug abuse or street gangs. But without the threat of possible jail time, some would sincerely seek help while others would just play the system to see what they could get away with.

Ironically, the only reforms that would truly make a difference are things that AOC and her comrades would virulently oppose.

First, improve inner city schools. We all know how bad many urban public schools are, and Democrats have recently given us a perfect example of how they prioritize teachers’ unions over the students. With the endless lockdowns, poor minority students have suffered the most, since many can’t afford the Internet or tutors. Want to help them avoid falling into drugs and crime? Help them get better educations. And I mean real educations, not teaching them that they can never get ahead because America is racist.

Next, a reform I know AOC would hate: bring back traditional, Judeo-Christian values.

Leftists lament that in crime-ridden urban neighborhoods, many young people have no respect for life, but they want to put an abortion clinic on every corner. They want new government programs to deal with gangs of young males who grew up without fathers, while demonizing marriage, dismissing the importance of fathers and incentivizing having kids out of wedlock (the founders of Black Lives Matter have openly stated that one of their goals is the destruction of the nuclear family, which is the #1 culprit in the destruction of black lives over the past half-century.) AOC wants a slew of new government programs to provide every need even as leftists wage war on churches that used to provide such charitable assistance, along with the spiritual guidance to help people overcome their demons, understand that God loves them, and get on their own feet so they no longer need charity.

If AOC really wants to rebuild families, instill respect for life and help people overcome sin and temptation, I’m actually with her. I just seriously doubt that she’d approve of the only things that would actually accomplish those goals.

Speaking of AOC, she actually blamed the still-unrepaired damage to her grandmother’s home in Puerto Rico from Hurricane Maria on “systemic injustices” and Donald Trump. That led conservative commentator Matt Walsh to launch a GoFundMe account to raise money to pay for AOC’s grandmother’s home repairs, since AOC can afford a Tesla but can’t seem to cover her grandmother’s handyman bills. He suggested giving $499, the monthly cost of a Tesla lease.

https://www.gofundme.com/f/save-aocs-abuelas-ancestral-home?utm_source=customer&utm_medium=copy_link&utm_campaign=p_cf+share-flow-1

It was picked up by other conservatives eager to rub AOC’s nose in it (Ben Shapiro, for instance, pledged $499), and the fund rose to $104,153.

But someone in AOC’s family said her grandmother would not take the money, so it’s being refunded. Apparently, AOC won’t accept voluntary help from conservatives. She’ll only accept help in the form of taxes taken from them by force.

Mike Huckabee

Democrats are celebrating a landslide win Tuesday in a special election for an open seat in New Mexico’s 1st Congressional District. State. Rep. Melanie Stansbury defeated Republican State Sen. Mark Moores by nearly 25 points, 60-36%. The Democrats were sweating over this race because losing it would mean (A.) an even narrower House majority and (B.) bad prospects for the 2022 elections. But now they’re crowing that the Democrats are “stronger than ever” and people are rejecting Republicans’ “fear-mongering” about their policies.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/new-mexico-special-election-results-democrats-big-win-in-blue-district-may-not-say-much-about-2022-races/ar-AAKDOMQ

Yeah, that’s the official line. Here’s the real takeaway from this:

This is the safest of safe Democrat seats. It’s in solid blue Albuquerque, and Biden won it just seven months ago by 23 points. A Libertarian and an Independent siphoned off 4% of the vote, which means that Stansbury’s actual margin of victory over all challengers was 20 points, a 3-point drop in the bluest of safe blue seats in a low-turnout election.

To get to that margin, the Democrats did everything they possibly could, including an endorsement from President Biden, visits from state and national big names like First Lady Jill Biden, and outspending Moores on advertising by 2-1. Analysts are now saying that a victory of more than 15 points should make Democrats “very happy.” But winning by 15 points, or even 20 points, after going all-out in a safe district they’d just won in November by 23 points? That don’t impress me much. In a close district where Republicans really fight for it, losing three points could mean losing the seat; and the races like that in 2022 will far outnumber the Dems’ microscopic majority margin.

Oh, and one other thing: when Republicans slam Democrats for opening up the borders to let in drug gangsters and other criminals they refuse to arrest and deport; and for defunding the police while releasing criminals from jails, going away with bail and refusing to prosecute rioters, resulting in record leaps in violent crime; pointing all that out isn’t “fear-mongering.” It’s just alerting the voters to the fact that their opponents are nuts.

Mike Huckabee

Anyone who argues that President Biden isn’t embarking on a more radical third term of Obama should take it up with someone who obviously believes that: Barack Obama.

https://www.westernjournal.com/barack-obama-joe-biden-finishing-job-using-people-administration/

Obama pointed out that Biden is appointing people from his Administration, reinstating his policies and essentially, “finishing the job.” Considering that Obama vowed to “fundamentally transform” America, and that many people were horrified at what he was transforming it into, the phrase "finishing the job" carries ominous echoes of "The Godfather." Anyone who bought the line that Biden was going to be a moderate centrist working across the aisle was conned worse than Bernie Madoff’s clients.

Latest examples: say goodbye to small hometown banks and Alaskan oil…

https://www.foxbusiness.com/energy/biden-climate-policy-will-be-kiss-of-death-for-small-banks-ceo-says

https://www.foxbusiness.com/politics/biden-suspends-alaska-oil-gas-leases-arctic-national-wildlife-refuge

Mike Huckabee

As we reported in February, Dominion Voting Systems is suing Mike Lindell and MyPillow for $1.3 billion for defamation. Now, in a new filing, Dominion is focused on going after the company itself –- deeper pockets, of course –- by arguing that MyPillow is liable for Mike Lindell’s allegations about them.

I’m not a lawyer, but it seems to me that Lindell was speaking very much as an individual when he made allegations about the lack of security surrounding the Dominion voting machines. He’s definitely a man on a mission, and I’m not talking about the mission of selling pillows, sheets and mattress toppers. Yet Dominion is arguing that this is really just about selling lots of bedding –- that Lindell has been waging a “defamatory marketing campaign” in his capacity as “the MyPillow guy.” They say he’s “integrating bogus election fraud claims with an extensive marketing campaign for the pillow company.” They couldn't be more wrong.

They point to his online store, in which he uses promo codes such as “FightForTrump.” My thought is that if Lindell is appealing to his right-wing clientele, it’s because he’s had to say goodbye to just about all of his other clientele over the election issue. I would assume that conservative Trump-supporters are pretty much all he’s got left.

“The law is clear that corporations can be held liable for the defamatory statements their employees make within the scope of their employment and furtherance of the company’s business,” their attorneys wrote. They argued that a jury could infer that Lindell was acting as the company’s agent and “exploited lies about Dominion to market MyPillow products.”

Lindell, however, had already claimed to have lost tens of millions of dollars in retail partnerships. Recall that major retailers such as Bed, Bath & Beyond and Kohl’s discontinued his products. MyPillow has also said in its own defense that Lindell sincerely believed his claims.

Lindell had asked the judge in the case, U.S. District Judge Carl John Richards, to dismiss Dominion’s lawsuit against him. But with this latest filing, Dominion is now asking him to move their suit forward.

What has bothered me about Dominion, and still does, is that they insist they have “publicly available facts and evidence” disproving the claims against them, and that the statements against Dominion have been “rebutted by the evidence,” while refusing to turn such evidence over to auditors. For example, they continue to withhold the administrative passwords for the machines used in Maricopa County, Arizona, to those who are currently conducting the audit there. My understanding is that these passwords would enable auditors to thoroughly investigate whether or not the machines are hackable and might have contributed to a rigged election. Dominion is trying to have it both ways: deny the charges but withhold their evidence.

It’s challenging to find stories in the news about Lindell and his claims that don’t dismiss them out of hand and call them false and “debunked.” To date, no one has debunked them. If you read this story in BUSINESS INSIDER, keep in mind that there’s some editorializing, such as the statement that “Lindell has continued to levy falsehoods against Dominion in interviews and rallies.” The accuracy of Lindell’s claims is yet to be determined. So, who’s defaming whom?

https://www.businessinsider.com/dominion-says-mypillow-liable-mike-lindell-election-falsehoods-defamation-lawsuit-2021-6

In other election fraud news, RealClearInvestigations has a detailed expose about how Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan paid $350 million to a progressive group called the Center for Tech and Civic Life (CTCL), which, in turn, distributed those millions to cities and towns across America and worked with election officials to conduct their elections just so. We’ve previously reported on the use of this money to pay for unsupervised ballot dropboxes in locations chosen by CTCL, but this article reveals other ways in which they were involved. It’s long, but worth your time.

https://www.realclearinvestigations.com/articles/2021/05/26/how_zuckerberg_millions_paid_for_progressives_to_work_with_2020_vote_officials_nationwide_778300.html

According to the story by Stephen Miller, “In exchange for the money, elections divisions agreed to conduct their elections according to conditions set out by the CTCL, which is led by members of the New Organizing Institute, a training center for progressive groups and Democratic campaigns.”

A partner with CTCL, the Center for Civic Design, actually helped design absentee ballot forms and instructions, crafted voter registration letters for felons, and tested automatic voter registration systems. In Michigan, they worked alongside “progressive activist groups.” In Georgia (yes, Georgia) and Utah, they worked directly with elections offices.

This type of funding has apparently never been done before. Does anyone see a problem here?

It gets worse. Even Facebook got into the act, producing a webinar and guide to help election officials engage voters, specifically targeting low-income people and minorities, “helping Democratic candidates win key spots all over the U.S.”

According to court documents filed by the conservative law firm the Thomas More Society, the CTCL allowed election officials in Green Bay, Wisconsin, to use the grant money to buy vehicles to transport “voter navigators,” who were used to “assist” voters at their front doors, answering questions and witnessing ballot signatures. They also “cured” absentee ballots that lacked signatures, addresses, etc.

In Georgia, agents from CTCL trained poll workers. I can’t help wondering if they trained the small team of ballot tabulators who stayed behind in the State Farm Arena in Fulton County late on Election Night after other workers, including the poll watchers, had been dismissed over a bogus water leak. Hadn’t their “training” included the fact that they weren’t supposed to count votes without supervision?

The infuriating examples go on and on. Erick Kaardal, a lawyer with the Thomas More Society, says, “It was a pay-to-play scheme, where in exchange for taking this money, the CTCL gets to tell them how to run the election. And it’ll happen again in 2022.”

This use of private funds to control how elections are run has got to be stopped –- now. State legislatures will have to pass laws to stop it, because in the absence of such laws, some judges are enabling it to continue. For example, in Texas of all places, U.S. District Judge Amos Mazzant III, an Obama appointee, ruled in favor of this kind of funding, and apparently his stance is typical. He said, “Ultimately, plaintiffs complain that people with different political views will lawfully exercise their right to vote. That is not a harm. That is democracy.”

Wrong. The practice he ruled in favor of is HARMING DEMOCRACY.

Mike Huckabee

In case you missed it, and no, there’s nothing funny about this story: Iran will soon be getting a new President. The nation President Biden thinks is reasonable enough that we can deal with them and send them piles of our money that won’t be spent on funding terrorism and advancing their nuclear weapons ambitions has decided that its next President will be Ebrahim Raisi, a hardline Muslim cleric who took part in the mass murder of more than 30,000 dissidents in 1988 and who opposes conciliation with the West. He’s currently the Chief Justice who recently sentenced Iranian wrestling champion Navid Afkari to be executed, like many others, for peaceful protest of the clerics’ regime.

https://www.westernjournal.com/op-ed-irans-selection-mass-murderer-president-final-straw-time-stop-appeasement/

Before you ask how the Iranian people could elect such a person as their leader, note that they had no say over it. Raisi is the choice of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and the unelected members of the Guardian Council. As the linked story notes, they fear the rising opposition of the people to their brutal reign and want to make sure they keep the suppression turned up to 11.

I wish America were doing more to help the good people of Iran overthrow these murderous monsters, but that would require having an American President who recognizes Iran’s illegitimate leaders for what they are and who puts sanctions and pressure on them instead of trying to bribe and appease them into acting like civilized human beings with billions of dollars that they will undoubtedly use for more suppression of their own people and terrorism against Israel and throughout the world.

https://foreignpolicy.com/2021/04/28/iran-deal-biden-bailout/

https://gellerreport.com/2021/05/biden-admin-considering-one-billion-in-humanitarian-aid-to-terror-regime-in-iran-as-a-show-of-goodwill-cnn.html/

Or as the Democrats call that, “smart diplomacy.”

Heck of a job, experts!

Mike Huckabee

In his two-word (“Told you”) response to the email revelations about Dr. Fauci, Sen. Rand Paul added the hashtag #FireFauci, and he might get his wish. Even the Biden White House must sense that Fauci has suddenly become a liability. One anonymous White House official told Human Events Senior Editor Jack Posobiec that they are actively discussing an “exit strategy” for him. Stephen Green of PJ Media called that a headline that should have been from April, 2020.

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/matt-margolis/2021/06/02/report-white-house-actively-discussing-an-exit-strategy-for-dr-fauci-n1451556

And in a turn of events that reminds me of Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s self-congratulatory book about how well he handled the pandemic, a pre-sale web page for an upcoming book by Dr. Fauci suddenly disappeared from Amazon and Barnes & Noble. The publisher, National Geographic Books (which was also planning a documentary about Fauci) claims that the announcement was simply “premature.” No kidding!

https://townhall.com/tipsheet/leahbarkoukis/2021/06/03/faucis-book-listing-n2590402

The book is (was?) to be titled “Expect the Unexpected.” Well, at least you can’t accuse him of lying about that.

RELATED:  Do you think Dr. Fauci should be removed from his position advising President Biden due to his past statements about mask wearing and the coronavirus' origin? VOTE HERE.

Mike Huckabee

Last night, I was on Sean Hannity’s show on Fox News, to comment on a cartoon lesson shown to first graders as young as four at an elite prep school in New York City.

https://video.foxnews.com/v/6257003848001

I should warn you before you click that if you watch that clip, you will see the cartoon, which is about sexual subjects you might find quite inappropriate. It's a real conundrum: I hate linking to it because it’s too adult, but I have to report what's being shown to FOUR-YEAR-OLDS! At a school that charges parents $55,000 a year.

Why was I not surprised to learn that back in the 1970s, notorious pedophile Jeffrey Epstein was a teacher at that very school?

https://nationalfile.com/pedophile-jeffrey-epstein-was-a-teacher-at-ny-prep-school-that-educates-6-year-olds-about-masturbation/

Sadly, this is only the tip of the iceberg. Schools are replacing education with indoctrination. It’s no wonder kids are doing so badly at math, science and reading. When you’re spending most of your day being taught to hate America, sexually pleasure yourself, celebrate the LBBTQ+ agenda and judge people by their skin color, who has time to learn anything else?

Parents have to become proactive and start speaking up against this, even if they’re afraid it will cause them to be ostracized by other, liberal parents. They might be surprised to discover how many other parents agree and would welcome someone taking the lead in speaking up. Even if they don’t, it’s better to take your kids out of these schools than to stay quiet and leave them there. Find a better school (that shouldn’t be hard), home-school them, or for $55,000 a year, I bet you could find a pretty decent tutor. Leaving them in these schools is tantamount to child abuse.

And as if children aren’t getting enough of this inappropriate indoctrination in schools, when they come home and turn on the TV, they get even more of it. To celebrate Pride Month, Nickelodeon is airing an episode of the young children’s cartoon show “Blue’s Clues and You” that includes a “Pride Parade” hosted by an animated version of drag performer Nina West of “RuPaul’s Drag Race.” It features cute, colorful animals representing every sexual identity group, including “queer,” “bi,” “pan,” “ace” and “trans” (a cartoon beaver with scars on its chest, apparently from having its breasts surgically removed.) This is aimed at kindergarten children. I’ll bet some of you who are adults have never even heard of some of those particular sexual designations.

https://www.christianpost.com/news/blues-clues-lgbt-pride-video-features-drag-queen.html

I’m linking to the Christian Post write-up of this because it was one of the few media outlets that has the video posted but that points out the shocking inappropriateness of it. Virtually every mainstream media write-up of it is overwhelmingly positive, with no concerns at all about how damaging it can be to push sexually explicit ideas at children who are too young and innocent to comprehend them.

Mike Huckabee

The latest study suggests that if you had even a mild case of COVID-19, your antibody levels may fall over time, but memory B cells will patrol your bloodstream for reinfection and plasma cells in your bone marrow will keep making antibodies for decades.

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-01442-9

This would make sense, since most vaccines work by making your body think you had a particular disease, to try to mimic the immunity you get from really having it. But it brings up an important point: with so many people trying to divide Americans into two groups (vaccinated and unvaccinated), and prevent the unvaccinated from going without masks or getting on planes or even being able to afford to attend a concert, what about people who had COVID and are now naturally immune, maybe even more so than the vaccinated? Some doctors are advising them not to get the vaccine, out of concerns that it could cause complications. Should there be a third category: “Unvaccinated but immune because I had it already”?

Or maybe we should just stop putting people in categories and denying them rights, keep allowing those who haven’t had COVID to get vaccinated if they want to until we reach herd immunity (if we haven’t already), and quit trying to force people to get the shot if they don’t want to. Because forcing them to take a shot is a practice that’s about to enter the court system, and there’s a good chance it won’t survive.

https://www.westernjournal.com/100-health-care-professionals-staff-sue-hospital-vaccine-mandate-warns-employees-not-human-guinea-pigs/?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=huckabee

Mike Huckabee

A study of the effects of lockdowns in 10 nations found that “mandatory stay-at-home and business closures” resulted in “no clear, significant beneficial effect…on case growth in any country.” In some cases, lockdowns even made the contagion worse.

https://thefederalist.com/2021/05/12/lockdown-mongers-can-point-fingers-but-the-science-is-in-theyre-to-blame/

That’s largely because most workplaces took immediate steps to reduce contagion risks (masks, social distancing, constant disinfecting, improved ventilation, etc.) that most people didn’t take in their homes. On average, workers were 4 to 5 times less safe outside their workplaces than in their workplaces. But the “experts” imposed lockdowns that shut workplaces and forced people into places where they were more likely to catch the virus.

So putting aside all the ruined businesses, crushed dreams, depression, alcohol and drug abuse, lost class time and dangerously postponed medical treatments, the lockdowns were at best useless and at worst, spread the virus even more.

Heck of a job, experts!

Mike Huckabee

The bloom may be off the rose for the Black Lives Matter group. Once, they had Americans so intimidated that money was flowing to them in rivers and people were shamed and canceled just for not putting their logo on their social media accounts or daring to question their anti-cop, anti-American dogma.

But lately, the bad news has been coming thick and fast. Polls show Americans’ opinions of the group have taken a steep dive. Their co-founder, Patrisse Cullors, was criticized for buying expensive houses in mostly white neighborhoods and resigned last week. The mothers of several black people who were shot by police blasted BLM, and Cullors in particular, accusing her of taking the money and running, and BLM of using their children’s names and stories to promote their organization and make money, while doing nothing for their families or communities.

https://www.theepochtimes.com/mkt_morningbrief/mothers-of-tamir-rice-breonna-taylor-criticize-black-lives-matter-benefitting-off-the-blood-of-our-loved-ones_3838434.html

The founder of Black Lives Matter in St. Paul is also speaking out against the group, saying he discovered the “ugly truth,” that they couldn’t care less about rebuilding black families or improving education for black children.

https://www.foxnews.com/us/former-blm-leader-rashad-turner-ugly-truth

There’s also this story out of Denver that could tarnish the group’s image further.

https://clashdaily.com/2021/06/denver-school-board-member-and-blm-activist-steps-down-amid-allegations-he-sexually-abused-up-to-62-children/

Leave it to the Babylon Bee to perfectly illustrate how BLM’s hold on the left may be slipping, as people finally start thinking clearly and daring to speak up for common sense again.

https://babylonbee.com/news/neighbors-with-black-lives-matter-asian-lives-matter-and-latino-lives-matter-yard-signs-getting-awfully-close-to-all-lives-matter

Mike Huckabee

This is mostly a story about Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ most likely Democrat challenger, Commissioner of Agriculture and Consumer Services Nikki Fried, tweeting “Florida is not a red state,” only to have it pointed out that her own Twitter bio describes her as the only Democrat in statewide elected office.

https://www.westernjournal.com/likely-desantis-challenger-declares-fl-isnt-red-state-unknowingly-fact-checks/?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=huckabee

But as amusing as that is, read the full story for DeSantis’ comments from last week’s townhall with Sean Hannity, in which he claims that the overwhelming majority of people fleeing blue states for Florida are registering Republican. Let’s hope so because Colorado and Austin, Texas, provide chilling examples of what happens when leftists flee their fouled nests and then vote for the same policies and people they fled from.

Let’s hope DeSantis is right, and that the pandemic was the final straw that red-pilled (or red-stated) many longtime Democrats, who saw their businesses shut down, their rights taken away and their children’s schooling prioritized below the wishes of teachers’ unions.

If he’s correct, then the good news is that red states will be less likely to turn purple or even blue (as I’ve pointed out before, “turning blue” is often what someone does before dying.) The bad news is that it will leave the blue states in the hands of the most die-hard leftists, the ones who absolutely refuse to learn from experience. It will mean even deeper polarization between the states, and I feel true sympathy for anyone stuck in a blue state who can’t move out for some reason. I fear the crime, unemployment, filth, taxes, corruption, high cost of living and assaults on Constitutional rights are only going to get worse.

Mike Huckabee

Freddie Sayers, executive editor of Unherd.com, has a good article on Facebook’s censorship of any questioning of the origins of COVID-19, and how, despite their recent reversal, they have failed to learn any lessons from that and are continuing to censor other legitimate comments and questions that run counter to “official” narratives that remain unproven.

https://unherd.com/2021/05/how-facebook-censored-the-lab-leak-theory/

Meanwhile, Instapundit has a good round-up of some of the other recent news about the media’s red-faced crawl-back of its “fact-checkers’” flat denial that COVID-19 might have possibly escaped from the Wuhan virology lab.

https://pjmedia.com/instapundit/453205/

This collection of stories and tweets shows you just how badly the media’s combination of Trump Derangement Syndrome and financial dependence on China warped their perceptions and their “reporting.”

It also features a new twist: they didn’t just automatically deny the lab theory because Trump raised it. A New York Times reporter has admitted that reporters (and other leftists in general) first went into kneejerk denial mode because Republican Sen. Tom Cotton raised the possibility, and they also had to automatically dismiss everything he said. So Tom Cotton was in good company with the President. Here’s a separate link to that story from the Daily Wire.

https://www.dailywire.com/news/nyt-writer-admits-media-dismissed-claim-of-wuhan-virus-origin-because-cotton-said-it

That includes Cotton’s original comments, and it’s interesting to compare what he actually said to the distorted version most media consumers received. If you listened to the liberal media (which I keep warning you not to do), you’d have thought Cotton was spouting racist, anti-Chinese conspiracy theories as if they were fact. Actually, he merely pointed out things China had said that were proven to be false, facts we had learned that undermined the official “wet market” story, and the way China was being so resistant to allowing access to doctors or investigators. He never said it came from the lab; he just said it was a possibility that deserved consideration and that shouldn’t be discounted simply because Chinese officials adamantly denied it while blocking any efforts to investigate it.

In other words, the exact same situation that prevails today. And come to think of it, the same situation that prevails in all the states where they’re trying to audit the 2020 ballots.

Mike Huckabee

After admitting there are no guarantees that some of the $150 million of our money they’re sending to Gaza won’t end up funding Hamas terrorism, the Biden Administration is taking action: they’re adding an extra $38.5 million.

https://www.westernjournal.com/alarm-bells-ring-biden-restarts-aid-packages-palestinians-trump-suspended-program-tacks-38-5-million-midst-hamas-onslaught/?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=huckabee

And speaking of absolutely bonkers policies, having already reduced ICE deportations of illegal aliens to the lowest levels ever, the Biden DHS may consider a plan to bring ones who’ve already been deported back to the United States.

https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2021/05/31/report-joe-bidens-dhs-bring-deported-illegal-aliens-back/#

If they’re going to do that, could they at least be honest enough to stop calling it the Department of Homeland Security?

Mike Huckabee

With the lockdowns winding down in most states, many Americans are chomping at the bit to get out of the house and go to beaches or parks to celebrate Memorial Day weekend as the unofficial start of summer. But let’s not forget that Memorial Day means far more than that. It’s a day set aside to remember those who made the ultimate sacrifice to provide for us the unprecedented freedom that we so often take for granted as Americans.

In a premium story in the Epoch Times, veterans talked about the meaning of Memorial Day, and all of them made it clear that it isn’t about them, but about their comrades who never made it back home. As one put it, “Veterans Day is for those who survived and retired. Armed Forces Day is for those who are still serving. Memorial Day is reserved for those who never got to take off their uniform.”

https://www.theepochtimes.com/mkt_breakingnews/veterans-speak-about-memorial-day-its-not-about-us_3836117.html

Despite the distortions of America’s history that so many people want to force into our schools, the fact is that no people in the history of the world have experienced the liberties, opportunities or prosperity that we have enjoyed as citizens of the greatest country on God’s green earth — the United States of America. I don’t say that as a biased American, but as one who has traveled the world and who can scour the pages of human history and say definitively that no nation has ever given its inhabitants the degree of freedom, security, and pursuit of happiness as has this extraordinary experiment in government called the United States.

Our Constitution is a simple, yet profound, blueprint for a government in which the ultimate power rests with the people and not with a king, a tyrant dictator, a military general, or even an elected official. The genius of our nation is that the people have been vested with the highest power, and while we temporarily grant it to those we elect, we don’t give it away (even during a pandemic.)

This great system of self-government with its separation and balance of powers and its accountability to its people has been and continues to be protected against both foreign and domestic threats by those who trade their clothes of choice for a uniform and who trade their personal liberties to accept orders from someone who outranks them.

In the process of providing that protection, in wars and other police actions over more than two centuries, more than one million of those in our military have given their lives for those of us who will enjoy this long weekend. No American should take this for granted nor ignore it. It shouldn’t be left to the Gold Star families alone to take a pause for a somber reminder of the price of our benefits of citizenship. We all owe it to them to show respect in some way for those whose deaths gave us our lives.

This year, May 8 was the 76th anniversary of World War II’s VE Day (Victory in Europe) and August 15 will be the 76th anniversary of VJ Day (Victory over Japan.) While most of the commemorative events last year and this were canceled due to the pandemic, parents should use the Internet to teach kids at home about VE Day and VJ Day.

For kids who’ve heard derogatory comments about the military, these anniversaries are a golden opportunity to teach them that the rights, freedoms and comforts they enjoy were paid for with the blood of patriots: over a million soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines. To cite just one war alone, many people today unconscionably water down the meaning of the term “Nazi” by hurling it thoughtlessly at political opponents.

This Memorial Day, especially in light of the shocking rise of anti-Semitic attacks by those who are ignorant of what World War II was about, please teach your children about the real evils of Nazism and the tens of millions who died because of it. And fly your flag and give thanks and prayers for the 16 million Allied military members – over 405,000 of them Americans – who heroically gave their lives to stop it.

Mike Huckabee

Once a year, on the last Monday in May, we set aside a day to honor our fellow Americans who made the greatest of all sacrifices so that the rest of us could continue to enjoy the blessings of liberty and security.

Memorial Day was born after the Civil War, when families would take a day to tend and decorate the graves of Confederate soldiers. It soon spread to the North, and became known as Decoration Day. Eventually, it became a national holiday to honor all American military veterans who gave up their homes, their families, their very lives -- everything they had, or ever dreamed of having – all in sacrifice for their country. And just how many have made that ultimate sacrifice? Brace yourself:

From the Revolutionary War to the War of 1812, the Civil War and Spanish American war, World Wars I and II, Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, and all the other wars, police actions and rescue missions around the world since 1776, over one million, three hundred and eight thousand Americans have died in uniform.

Imagine if all those soldiers, sailors, Marines and airmen could come back to life for a Memorial Day parade. Picture them marching past in rows of ten, each row taking just 10 seconds to pass. That parade would stretch on and on, row after row, 360 rows per hour, for hour after hour, 24 hours a day, for over 15 straight days. That is the enormity of the military casualties America has experienced since 1776. That doesn’t even include the millions more who sacrificed their limbs, their sight, their peace of mind, and the best years of their lives, all for us.

Make you realize just how ignorant and slanderous it is to claim America's history is built on slavery, racism and selfishness instead of freedom, compassion and sacrifice.

Today's military members, like those before them, risk their lives to protect the cherished American principles of liberty, equality, democracy, fighting tyranny and defending the weak. Previous generations guarded these bedrock principles so that they could be passed down to us. It is now our sacred duty to preserve them for future generations.

Every year, the American Legion sells poppy pins to support veterans and their families. May 22nd was National Poppy Day this year (https://www.legion.org/poppyday). I hope you bought one and are wearing it proudly. The poppy became the symbol of Memorial Day, thanks to the famous poem, “In Flanders’ Fields,” by Canadian Lt. Col. John McCrae. He wrote it in memory of his friend Alexis Helmer, whom he watched die in battle in World War I.

The poem starts, “In Flanders’ fields, the poppies blow,

Between the crosses, row on row…”

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/47380/in-flanders-fields

Read the poem. It's very short, but it still conveys a powerful message of the depth of those soldiers' sacrifice and the debt we owe them all.

The pandemic is waning, but there are still fewer group activities than usual available where we can gather to show our support for veterans and our gratitude to those who gave their lives to protect our freedom. But we can all proudly fly our American flags. And we can offer support to some of the many great veterans’ support organizations, such as the VFW and the American Legion.

Another great new organization with an especially timely mission is Code Of Vets, founded by Air Force Veteran, Gretchen Smith. She and a staunch supporter, the late Charlie Daniels, once appeared on “Huckabee” on TBN to talk about the group’s efforts to provide support to veterans struggling through the pandemic. You can learn more and donate at http://www.codeofvets.com. It’s tax-deductible, and with their 1% operating costs, you can rest easy knowing that 99 cents of every dollar given goes directly to help veterans in need.

And of course, one more thing we can all do from wherever we are is to stop for a moment and think of all the rows and rows of crosses in veterans’ cemeteries…say a prayer of thanks to them…and remember that each and every cross represents a genuine American hero who made the ultimate sacrifice for all of us.

McCrae’s poem ends, “To you, from failing hands, we throw the torch. Be yours, to hold it high. If ye break faith with us who die, we shall not sleep, though poppies grow in Flanders’ fields.” If you really want to memorialize these greatest of American heroes, then take up the torch they passed to us. Hold it high. And NEVER let it drop.

Mike Huckabee

The makeup chain Sephora caved to the woke mob and canceled its partnership with popular social media influencer Amanda Ensing, because she was a Christian conservative who supported Trump. The accusation of her being opposed to “inclusivity” got her banned from Twitter, where she’d had over a million followers.

Now, in a blow back against the cancel mobs and corporate bullying, free speech attorney John Pierce is representing Ensing in a defamation lawsuit against Sephora. Pierce said they “picked on the wrong target,” and issued this statement:

“Ms. Ensing is intent on exposing cancel culture for what it is — a poisonous cancer that is destroying the norms of free speech and the fabric of America. Sephora and its leadership will be held accountable for globally defaming her. No matter how long and hard the fight, Ms. Ensing will make an example out of Sephora that will serve to deter other massive corporations from thinking they can simply steamroll individuals and destroying their lives for the sake of pandering to a leftist, woke and un-American mob.”

https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2021/05/exclusive-beauty-influencer-dropped-sephora-conservative-files-defamation-lawsuit/

This should be fun to watch. It’s too bad people who are wrongfully censored just for expressing their political views can’t also sue Twitter. Come to think of it, why CAN’T they sue Twitter?...

Mike Huckabee

Brandon Morse at Redstate.com has a good lesson on why parents need to be watching their children’s school officials like hawks. At a school board meeting for Desert Valley Elementary in Arizona, parents got up and made it clear that they did not want racist “Critical Race Theory” being taught to their kids (the crux being that America is a racist nation and all white people are evil oppressors.) After the meeting, someone leaked a private email in which school principal Tonya Neve complained about the school “giving those wackos a platform to spread propaganda” and talked about ways to silence “those pushy voices.”

https://redstate.com/brandon_morse/2021/05/27/exposed-emails-show-school-principle-scheming-to-silence-wacko-parents-after-they-reject-crt-curriculum-n387342

After it hit the news, the Peoria Unified School District claimed it was unaware of Neve’s contemptuous name-calling of parents. They later said, Neve has “taken a position outside of our district for next school year and will no longer be serving our district.” Strange use of the word "serving," but I'll let it pass.

So three lessons to take away:

1. Speak up and fight back against this racist, Marxist indoctrination of our children.

2. Watch your school officials like a hawk to make sure they got the message and hold them accountable if they don’t.

3. Both 1 and 2 go double for anyone who lives in whatever district that principal moved on to.

Mike Huckabee

Black Lives Matter co-founder Patrisse Cullors, who has been under fire for spending millions of dollars on houses in upscale, mostly white neighborhoods, is stepping down as BLM’s executive director. The self-proclaimed "trained Marxist" blamed “right-wing attacks” for trying to “discredit my character,” and said the time is right to leave to focus on other projects, including the release of her second book and a television deal with Warner Brothers.

https://www.foxnews.com/politics/black-lives-matter-co-founder-patrisse-cullors-step-down

Funny, I would’ve guessed she’d go into real estate.

In a related story, the National Pulse unearthed a 2015 clip of Cullors lamenting the demise of the US Communist Party. On the contrary, I’d say that some communists are doing incredibly well these days.

Mike Huckabee

If the 2020 election taught us anything, it’s that we have to be able to trust the system, with complete transparency and a fully auditable outcome. But officials in Georgia, as in Arizona, are acting as if they hadn’t learned that lesson –- or else as if they knew something they were desperate to hide.

In breaking news Thursday, a meeting scheduled for Friday at a ballot storage warehouse as part of a ballot integrity case in Fulton County, Georgia, was canceled after officials filed what was described as a “flurry” of motions. The Fulton County Board of Registration and Elections and the county clerk of Superior and Magistrate Courts filed these motions, and Henry County Superior Court Judge Brian Amero said they must be heard before plaintiffs may gain access to the ballots, and he has proposed the new date of June 21, though it still hasn’t been scheduled. So the county is able to delay a few more weeks. Delay, delay, delay.

At least the lead petitioner in the case, Garland Favorito, sees a silver lining. “It seems like a desperation move,” he told THE EPOCH TIMES, adding that they now have time to perfect the changes they were having to make in their inspection plan, though he didn’t say what those are. Also, Judge Amero said during the hearing that since there had been no motion to dismiss, petitioners could obtain some discovery. Some finer points of their legal wrangling are contained in ET’s premium story.

https://www.theepochtimes.com/mkt_breakingnews/georgia-judge-postpones-election-ballot-examination-after-county-files-motion-to-dismiss_3833447.html

Lawyers for the county –- and almost certainly there are other outside attorneys involved in this fight –- were urging the judge to refuse the plaintiffs access to the ballots. Fulton County Commission Chairman Robb Pitts, a Democrat, said in a statement, “It is outrageous that Fulton County continues to be a target of those who cannot accept the results from last year’s election.” Gosh, he sounds just like the Democrat on the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors who ranted about people upset that “their guy” didn’t win.

These people just don’t understand: IT’S NOT THAT. They are misrepresenting what this fight is about. You don’t protect democracy by slamming the door shut on the process that selects the winner. If Republicans had presided over the kinds of wild irregularities we saw last November, Democrats would never stop screaming about it. Nor should they.

Meanwhile, in Wisconsin the election isn’t escaping scrutiny, either. State Assembly Speaker Robin Vos, a Republican, says he’s hiring a team of three retired police officers, highly skilled investigators, to probe some aspects of the election that received “thousands” of complaints. In an interview with the WISCONSIN STATE JOURNAL, he said he believes Biden won but that there were “irregularities” in how the vote was conducted that need to be checked out. The officers will review all allegations and focus on the most credible ones.

Recall that Wisconsin was one of the states that got millions of dollars from a group called the Center for Tech and Civic Life, which is funded by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. The five largest cities in Wisconsin got a total of $6.3 million in grants, and it apparently came with some strings attached. Much of the money funded unmanned dropboxes that were reportedly placed where CTCL specified they should go. About 200 municipalities across the state got CTCL money.

According to the story at the link, a judge found that there was nothing in the law to prohibit the use of that money. But I think this is something that really warrants a closer look. Much as they might want millions of dollars in outside grant money, state legislatures need to think seriously about passing laws against it. States don’t need these outside groups coming in and giving them money with strings attached, telling them how to conduct their elections, especially when the changes they demand make it easier to cheat. Simply put, there's just something wrong about this.

https://madison.com/wsj/news/local/assembly-speaker-robin-vos-hires-retired-police-officers-to-investigate-presidential-election/article_f610cf8a-3c4f-52aa-ac88-34682aaa4955.html

Mike Huckabee

I told you about the audit in Windham, New Hampshire, that found that voting machines were misreading folds in ballots as votes, causing them to be rejected for “overvoting” or having too many spaces filled in. It proved that a Republican who won by only 24 votes on election night actually won by 420 votes (that many Republican ballots had been falsely disqualified.)

https://theconservativetreehouse.com/2021/05/25/action-alert-windham-new-hampshire-ballot-issues-identified-in-adjacent-counties-exact-same-ballot-issues-state-audit-needed/

Officials claim this was isolated to only that county, but other researchers claim they’ve identified neighboring counties with the exact same issue.

I wonder if someday, we’ll look back on the people who declared questioning the 2020 election results to be a “Big Lie” the same way we’re already starting to look at the smug “fact-checkers” who said the same thing about questioning whether COVID-19 really came from eating bats out of a wet market?

Mike Huckabee

Miranda Devine of the NEW YORK POST is working on a new book about the Hunter Biden story called (get ready)...LAPTOP FROM HELL. It’s scheduled to be out in September.

In the meantime, she’s breaking big news about Hunter’s business dealings that very much implicates his father Joe Biden when Joe was Vice President. Of course, most everyone in the media will get a bad case of whiplash from quickly looking the other way. But as we go through this, I hope you’ll stop periodically to think, “What would the reaction to this be if it involved Donald Trump and any of his kids?”

The laptop is a MacBook that Hunter Biden apparently has forgotten taking to a Delaware repair shop in April of 2019. But evidence exists that he did, and we’re safe in saying that it’s his, all right, and that claims of this story being “Russian disinformation” are very obviously not true. Records on the abandoned laptop show clearly that Hunter arranged a dinner between his father, then-Vice President Joe Biden, and business associates of Hunter’s from Kazakhstan, Ukraine and Russia at a tony restaurant in Washington, DC.

https://nypost.com/2021/05/26/hunter-biden-arranged-secret-dinner-with-business-partners-and-vp-joe/

On April 16, 2015, the group met in the private “Garden Room” at Cafe Milano, a restaurant that goes by the catchphrase, “Where the world’s most powerful people go.”

https://www.cafemilano.com/about/

The guest list was prepared by Hunter three weeks before the event. One of the guests was Vadim Pozharskiy, an executive at the Ukrainian energy company Burisma, which was paying Hunter over $83,000 a month to be on its board. Recall that this company was being investigated in its home country for corruption; it was the prosecutor investigating Burisma whom VP Biden got fired by threatening to withhold $1 billion in aid to Ukraine. We KNOW this happened; Biden is on video publicly bragging about getting the prosecutor fired and telling the story of exactly how he did it. His live audience seemed to think this was very cool.

There seems to have been an underlying purpose to the meeting that the emails don’t disclose, but we all know the meaning of the word “ostensibly.” As in: “Ok --- the reason for the dinner is ostensibly to discuss food security.” That’s what Hunter wrote to one of the guests, Michael Karloutsos, son of the then-head of the Greek Orthodox Church. “Dad will be there but keep that between us for now. Thanks.”

Since Hunter was also on the board of World Food Program USA, the American fundraising arm of a U.N.-affiliated nonprofit, he could easily use “food security” as cover. They were gathering at this fine restaurant where all the power brokers go to talk about food security for the poor. Ostensibly.

Obviously, the Vice President was there. The day after the dinner, Pozharskiy emailed Hunter to say, “Dear Hunter, thank you for inviting me to DC and giving an opportunity to meet your father and spent [sic] some time together. It’s realty [sic] an honor and pleasure.”

Also included on the guest list were Russian billionaire Yelena Baturina and her husband, the former mayor of Moscow Yury Luzhkov, who by all accounts we have seen was known to be corrupt. He has since passed away, but Baturina is the woman from Moscow who on February 14, 2014 (a little over a year before this dinner) wired $3.5 million to Rosemont Seneca Thornton LLC, a Delaware-based investment firm co-founded by Hunter and Devon Archer, a former adviser to then-Secretary of State John Kerry.

Last year, during an inquiry into Hunter’s business dealings by the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, that wire transfer was flagged in a report sent to them by the Treasury Department.

Other guests on the list included a Mexican ambassador and three officials from Kazakhstan, including the then-chairman of the former Soviet republic’s largest bank. Three seats were reserved for representatives of World Food Program USA, and the founder of that group emailed an enthusiastic note of thanks for their “fantastic and productive evening” to Hunter later that night. So they must have had at least some conversation about food security.

A total of 14 were invited, though it’s not clear if everyone attended. Archer emailed Hunter before the dinner to say that Baturina didn’t want to come but that her husband would be there. “Yelena doesn’t want to steal Yuri’s thunder,” Archer wrote. “...That was just her thoughts. We could insist.” Why would anyone need thunder about food security?

The NY POST report has more details about related communications and get-togethers. It’s all very chummy and involves at least one other wire transfer noted in the Senate report, this one from an associate of the prime minister of Kazakhstan to Rosemont Seneca Bohai LLC. The money, $142,300, was sent on April 22, 2014, and was “for a car.” Nice car; the price must have included the undercoating.

President Biden has said more than once that he knew nothing about his son’s foreign business dealings and that they never talked about them at all.

Again, imagine if this had been, say, Don Jr., glad-handing with Russians, Ukrainians and Kazakhstanians, scoring millions of foreign (and likely dirty) dollars and bringing in his father for a private dinner with them, “ostensibly” about food security. And imagine President Trump lying and saying he knew nothing about his son’s foreign business affairs and had never even talked to him about them. Can you say “special counsel”? Can you say “Impeachment #3”?

And that time, he would have actually deserved it.

Oh, and there’s one more item of interest. That $83,333 a month that Hunter Biden was getting paid to sit on Burisma’s board? Just two months after Joe Biden left the Vice Presidency, Hunter’s salary was cut by half, to $41,500 a month. As Devine reported, “No reason is given for the change in salary. The only change in circumstance appears to be that Hunter’s father was no longer in office.”

“We are very much interested in working closely together,” said the email from Pozharskyi, “and the remuneration is still the highest in the company and higher than the standard director’s monthly fees. I am sure you will find it both fair and reasonable.”

https://nypost.com/2021/05/26/hunter-bidens-ukraine-salary-was-cut-after-joe-biden-left-office/amp/?__twitter_impression=true

Mike Huckabee

The Huffington Post’s White House correspondent normally isn’t worth quoting for any reason other than laughs, but when you claim the January 6th violence at the Capitol was “1,000 percent worse” than 9/11, that’s a level of stupidity that deserves recognition, possibly by the Guinness World Record people.

https://townhall.com/tipsheet/spencerbrown/2021/05/25/huffpos-white-house-correspondent-says-january-6-1000-percent-worse-than-911-n2589965

Kudos to Spencer Brown at Townhall.com for writing that this person also authored a book titled “The Useful Idiot,” “which this writer was surprised to learn was not in fact an autobiography.”

In a related story: No, AOC, the fact that you were evacuated from an office near the Capitol during the January 6th violence does not mean that you know what it feels like to be traumatized by “serving in war.”

https://townhall.com/tipsheet/katiepavlich/2021/05/25/aoc-gets-wrecked-for-comparing-january-6-to-going-to-war-n2589964

That’s an insult to anyone who actually has served in war, including your colleagues. Maybe you should try listening when Rep. Dan Crenshaw speaks. This would be one of many areas in which you could benefit.

Mike Huckabee

(Warning: huge sarcasm alert)

We interrupt this commentary on censorship as discussed by legal expert Alan Dershowitz to offer the following words of gratitude and praise to Almighty Facebook:

Thank you, THANK YOU, O benevolent, magnificent and powerful Facebook, the arbiter of truth and blocker of misinformation for every American –- and, indeed, the entire planet –- for finally allowing us to express an opinion at odds with the one viewpoint you have permitted about the origin of the virus. We understand why, in your deep concern for our well-being, you spent the past year boldly and tenaciously censoring our slightest question about the “wet market” theory of origin for covid-19. It must have been quite important to make us believe that it entered the first human being quite innocently from a bowl of fresh and tasty bat soup or pangolin pie.

Why, you even dictated, in the interest of accuracy and anti-racism, that we CALL it covid-19, and not something outrageous like “China virus” or “Wuhan virus,” even though it came from Wuhan, China. Thank you so much for your wisdom and your guidance, as we realize that sometimes we need to be told what to think and otherwise kept in line.

Dear FB –- may we call you FB? –- we thank you for graciously informing us these many months that stories about the virus possibly emerging from the Wuhan lab were “misinformation,” nothing more than right-wing conspiracy theory and propaganda, and not worthy of your great and magnificent social media platform. Your diligent and tireless fact-checkers worked around the clock to make sure we expressed only the truth as you saw it, because you cared so much that only the right information would be shared with our “friends.” How thoughtful you were to protect us all from the woefully ignorant view that the Chinese bioweapons program might pose a risk.

Suddenly, now, the tide has turned –- even at the White House, where President Biden has called for an investigation after his State Department disbanded the one Trump had initiated –- and you, Dear Facebook, in your infinite, all-seeing and all-knowing authority and mysterious wokeness and wonderfulness have decided the narrative should change, so you've tweaked your algorithms and now permit us to speculate that the virus came from the Wuhan lab after all.

We are even allowed to say that some Wuhan lab staffers came down with symptoms consistent with covid-19 in the fall of 2019. Praise to you, glorious Facebook! We trust your inerrant judgment in finally offering us this freedom, as you know best, and, again, thank you, THANK YOU, for keeping such a close and protective eye on the information we read and share.

https://www.theblaze.com/news/facebook-reverses-course-allows-users-to-claim-covid-was-man-made-as-lab-leak-theory-gains-ground

……………………………..

Now, on to Dershowitz and the First Amendment.

Harvard Law professor emeritus Alan Dershowitz did an interview for the EPOCH TV show “Crossroads” to express concern about the removal of Lt. Col. Matthew Lohmeier from the U.S. Space Force over his stated opposition to Marxism and Critical Race Theory, and also about President Trump’s removal from Facebook, Twitter and other platforms after the Capitol Hill security breach on January 6 of this year.

Before Trump was removed from Twitter, he had about 90 million followers. Twitter says his ban will stay in place indefinitely. Facebook has upheld his ban but has been told by its advisory board to put a time limit on it.

“What Donald Trump tweets --- I may disagree with every word he says, but he has the right to say it,” Dershowitz said. “And more importantly, people forget the First Amendment has two aspects: one, the right of the speaker --- Donald Trump to speak --- that’s one part of it. And the second part, which is largely ignored, is the right of you and me the public to hear and read and see what he has to say to accept or reject it in the marketplace of ideas.

“When you ban a speaker,” Dershowitz continued, “you also ban his viewers and listeners from having access to that speech, and that’s an equally dangerous aspect of violating free speech rights.”

Of course, most of the “moderation of content” (censorship) is being done to conservative and pro-Trump speech.

Lohmeier’s comments about Marxism spreading through the military were deemed “politically partisan,” and he also spoke less-than-glowingly of Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin’s pro-CRT agenda. He was removed from the 11th Space Warning Squadron just a few days ago, on May 19.

Censorship is at the top of Dershowitz’ mind right now; he has a new book out called “THE CASE AGAINST THE NEW CENSORSHIP: Protecting Free Speech from Big Tech, Progressives and Universities.” Here’s the interview, highly recommended, in which he describes this censorship as something new, “a sign of the times.”

“I’m critical of Marxism,” Dershowitz said in the interview, “I’m critical of ‘race theory,’ I’m critical of Black Lives Matter --- not the concept, the organization. I’m critical of many of the things that today you can’t criticize.” He mentioned a course he co-taught at Harvard about ten years ago called “Taboo,” about subjects you couldn’t talk about, and back then it ran 14 weeks. “Today, it could be a thousand-week course,” he quipped.

We have to use our power as consumers, he said, to STOP THIS CENSORSHIP.

The government isn’t supposed to be in the business of censorship, but Dershowitz says it's using Big Tech to sidestep the First Amendment. Be sure and see his full interview, which features multiple examples of the “new” censorship. He also briefly examines the history of government censorship, starting with the Alien & Sedition Acts very early in our nation’s life. Believe it or not, just a few years after the Bill Of Rights was passed, this law that made it a serious, prison-worthy crime to criticize the government, yet it was signed into law by President John Adams and supported by Alexander Hamilton and even George Washington.

“We’ve always had a struggle in our country,” Dershowitz says, “between those who believe in free speech and those who believe that they know better.” I would say that right now, we have a huge oversupply of people on the left who think they know better and have no problem at all with shutting down any speech they deem “problematic.”

Dershowitz brought up the current struggle in the Mideast, noting that former President Trump would very much like to go on social media and express support for Israel. “But they say ‘No, Trump lies! You can’t be on Twitter, you can’t be on Facebook, you can’t be on YouTube.’” Yet they leave up horribly anti-semitic and even pro-Hitler speech, wrongly implying that this is truthful.

“That’s the problem,” he says, “because when you have censorship of some things, then other things seem to have the imprimatur of truth.”

In applying this to Facebook and the virus, we could say the “bat soup” theory was given the imprimatur of truth. Until it wasn’t. “The Truth” is whatever Facebook decides it will be, on any given day. Have mercy on us, O Great And Powerful Facebook.

Mike Huckabee

I’ve pointed out many times over the years that the strongest proponents of gun control laws seem to know the least about guns. They’ve found their ultimate representative in David Chipman, President Biden’s nominee to head the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. His Senate confirmation hearing on Wednesday at times looked more like a shoot to create video for future NRA commercials.

For instance, he wants to ban “assault weapons,” but couldn’t define what one was (to be fair, nobody can: that’s a nebulous term created by gun control advocates, and many of the characteristics they list for an “assault weapon” are actually cosmetic or safety features.)

https://www.westernjournal.com/watch-bidens-atf-nominee-says-law-abiding-gun-owners-often-commit-violent-crimes/?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=huckabee

Chipman also admitted he wants to ban the AR-15, the most popular rifle in America, even though a letter from 21 state Attorneys General urging Biden to withdraw Chipman’s nomination points out that the AR-15 is used in fewer murders than “sharp objects.”

https://www.westernjournal.com/biden-atf-nominee-admits-wants-ban-popular-rifle-america/?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=huckabee

Then there was this bizarre moment, about the alleged threat of violent crime by law-abiding gun owners.

https://www.westernjournal.com/watch-bidens-atf-nominee-says-law-abiding-gun-owners-often-commit-violent-crimes/?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=huckabee

Chipman conceded that most gun owners are law-abiding but said someone may buy a gun legally, then go on to do something illegal with it. But if that’s the criteria, then we should probably ban cars, too. Most career criminals, such as drug gang members, prefer to get black market guns that aren’t traceable and don’t require a background check.

And when they use those guns, you should hope and pray that there’s a law-abiding gun owner close at hand.

Mike Huckabee

Remember that time when Joe Biden went off the rails and told a black audience that Republicans “want to put y’all back in chains”? (Fun fact: The Republican Party was founded to end slavery, and it was Democrats who fought a war to preserve it.) Well, Joe is back to slandering Republicans again, only this time, the lie is even easier to debunk. You don’t have to look up what happened in the 1860s, you just have to be able to remember back as far as last year, which maybe Biden can’t.

https://www.westernjournal.com/insanity-biden-cooks-false-claim-trump-campaigned-idea-black-folks-taking-job/?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=empowerconservatives

Among many unmoored-from-reality statements Biden made in an interview with the Atlantic magazine was the stunning claim that Trump ran for reelection by telling voters, “The reason you lost your job is because of an immigrant; the reason you lost that job is because those black folks are taking your job.”

Wow, where to begin untangling that ball of fantasy? First of all, Trump ran on the fact that his policies created jobs, sparking the lowest unemployment numbers ever in nearly all demographics (at least until a virus from China and endless lockdowns in blue states cratered the economy.) Trump actively campaigned to minority voters on how he had created jobs and rising wages for them for the first time in decades, and boasted of achieving the lowest poverty rate ever for African-Americans. They rewarded him with larger shares of the black and Hispanic vote than he or other recent Republican candidates had received before.

Biden also commits the common Democrat fallacy of using the term “immigrant” when what he’s really talking about is illegal immigrants. Illegal immigration does depress wages for low-skill American workers. That’s something that even union icon Cesar Chavez understood. Trump’s border security measures were part of the reason why those US workers’ wages were finally rising until Biden came in and opened up the cheap labor floodgates again.

Is it really any wonder why, under Biden, the black unemployment rate is rising even as the pandemic is ending? Telling lies about Trump isn’t going to create jobs for anyone, but reversing all of Trump’s policies is proving very effective at destroying jobs. Once again, he’s proving that today’s Democrats have only one arrow in their quiver: When their policies inevitably fail, accuse the Party with the successful policies of being racists. It's a shopworn lie that minorities are starting to see through. The Atlantic magazine interviewer didn’t challenge him on any of his wild claims, but I pray that the voters will be smarter than that.

Mike Huckabee

A big salute to Texas for standing up once again for common sense and laws that protect public safety. The state just passed a law increasing penalties for protesters who block traffic and making it a felony to obstruct emergency vehicles.

https://www.westernjournal.com/red-state-moves-put-brakes-protesters-block-traffic/?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=huckabee

This was a bipartisan measure, passing the House 90-55 and the Senate 25-5. Gov. Greg Abbott said he will sign it into law, tweeting, “Peaceful protest doesn’t include blocking roadways & preventing emergency vehicle access. That chaos won’t be tolerated in Texas.”

Naturally, leftist media decried the bill, claiming Abbott would have arrested the Rev. Martin Luther King for marching in the streets. Not mentioned: King engaged in peaceful, planned, pre-announced marches, and to my knowledge, none of his supporters surrounded cars and threatened the drivers, shot at them, or deliberately blocked entrances to hospital ERs, all behaviors we’ve seen from leftist “protesters” in the past year.

It's sad that we live in a time when it’s necessary to pass strict laws to prevent things that anybody with two brain cells to rub together used to know better than to pull. But then leftists started claiming a right to sleep on sidewalks and in other people’s doorways, or to “protest” by walking out in front of traffic or blocking ambulances and police cars. I agree that we shouldn’t have to pass laws ordering people not to walk out in front of oncoming traffic. But we wouldn’t have to, if leftists had more sense than God gave an armadillo.

Mike Huckabee

About a month ago, a concerned father named Andrew Gutmann was dismayed at the indoctrination his daughter, a student at the prestigious Brearley School in New York City for the past seven years, was receiving in “antiracism,” which is, of course, racism. (Just as Orwell said that Ignorance Is Strength and War Is Peace, so Racism Is Antiracism.) Gutmann wrote a remarkable letter to the administrators, which, if you didn’t see it then, is available on Substack and linked to here, in a column by Bari Weiss.

https://bariweiss.substack.com/p/you-have-to-read-this-letter

A lot has happened since Gutmann sent the letter. It went viral. We wrote about it. Fortunately, it has played a huge role in bringing attention to the problem of toxic “Critical Race Theory” as it is being taught in schools --- not just in New York, either, but across the country.

Parents pay $54,000 a year to send one child to Brearley. And before their child may be considered for enrollment, parents must take an “anti-racism pledge.” Now, one might think there’s nothing wrong with this; who's for racism, right? But “anti-racism” means something else entirely, which is to say it is the most racist doctrine that’s been seen in America since the Jim Crow days. The difference is that the racism is turned on white people --- even white children, who are taught that they are “privileged” and that they should be ashamed of their “whiteness.” As for children "of color," they're taught that white people are racist and, deep down, hate them. There is hardly anything more damaging one can say to any child. It is straight-up child abuse, to both black and white kids.

Mr. Gutmann let the administrators have it: “If Brearley’s administration was truly concerned about so-called “equity” [equality of outcomes, as opposed to equality of opportunity], it would be discussing the cessation of admissions preferences for legacies, siblings, and those families with especially deep pockets. If the administration was truly concerned about “diversity,” it would not insist on the indoctrination of its students and their families to a single mindset, most reminiscent of the Chinese Cultural Revolution.”

Of himself and his wife, he said that “we no longer have confidence that our daughter will receive the quality of education necessary to further her development into a critically thinking, responsible, enlightened and civic minded adult.” Needless to say, he was pulling his daughter out of the school. Father of the year!

“...Brearley’s obsession with race must stop,” he wrote. “It should be abundantly clear to any thinking parent that Brearley has completely lost its way.” He went on to craft what might be the most spot-on indictment of Critical Race Theory that has ever been written. Again, if you haven’t seen this, it’s an absolute must-read.

And now, a month later, Gutmann has followed up his explosion into the media spotlight with another letter, intended to “dispel several common misperceptions pertaining to this movement [CRT].”

https://thehill.com/opinion/civil-rights/555194-one-fathers-stand-against-critical-race-theory-were-indoctrinating-our?rl=1

He says the perception that opposition to CRT comes just from the political right is incorrect. (This should be welcome news to us on the right.) “...I have received several thousand supportive emails and messages from people throughout the country,” he says, “including many from self-described Democrats and liberals. The tone of most of the messages is not at all political in nature; instead, the tenor is one of desperation and powerlessness.”

Parents and grandparents can’t stand to see their kids being taught “to feel guilty solely because of the color of their skin” and “being brainwashed to turn against their own families.” Even teachers, he says, have written to him to say they have tears in their eyes “because they are required, day after day, to teach fundamentally divisive, racist doctrines and being forced to demonize their own students.”

He relates letters --- the ones he considers the most frightening of all --- from people who came here from the former Soviet Union or from formerly Communist countries in Eastern Europe. (He doesn’t specifically mention Communist China, but that would apply as well.) These first-generation immigrants tell him they have “seen this movie before.” The chill we get when we see our children being indoctrinated in school, or when we’re censored by social media for daring to deviate from approved “facts,” or when we hear about people’s careers being “canceled” over something as innocuous as a tweet from a decade or two ago, is uncomfortably similar to what these immigrants experienced in the land of the not-free.

“Simply put,” Gutmann writes, “they cannot believe this is happening here.”

He goes on to warn that this indoctrination isn’t happening just in schools, but in major corporations and organizations across America. We’ve talked about some of the examples he cites: the anti-racist training forced on employees by Coca-Cola and the Walt Disney Company, the hiring quotas for pilots at United Airlines, the American Medical Association’s roadmap to “social justice” (displaying an obsession with anti-racist jargon that would likely drive the most dedicated members of the medical profession to madness), and even the push within our own Defense Department.

One reason this concerned dad decided to write again, he says, was to clarify that his original letter wasn’t primarily about race. His first concern was that the school wasn’t even willing to talk to parents or engage in any debate about their “anti-racism” initiatives. That “touches the heart of democracy itself,” he writes. Democracy won’t work unless we can debate freely the most difficult issues of our time. “We have allowed a very small but vocal minority, amplified by the power of social media, to shut down nearly all debate on the topic of race and critical race theory,” he writes. “The simple cry of ‘racist’ or the threat of that cry will nearly always do so. This cannot be allowed to continue.”

I would add that race isn’t the only topic being mishandled in this way, to deliberately shut down debate. And though Mr. Gutmann stresses that the issue of Critical Race Theory transcends politics, the people shutting down debate on this and other issues are doing it for political reasons. Any question of global warming gospel or the safety of new vaccines makes one a “science denier.” Any question of the election results or the origin story of COVID-19 makes one a “conspiracy theorist.” Never mind that right now, even the “fact”-checkers who tried to censor any mention of the Wuhan virology lab are scrambling to deal with what is very likely the truth about that.

Gutmann writes, “We must begin to have a national conversation about the story we want to tell our children and about the future we want for our country.” That is true, but for much too long, the conversation has been one way, and we can’t permit that any longer. While some are working overtime to extinguish America’s founding principles and make skin color our defining feature, we have to push back against this evil, at the ballot box (from President down to school board) and in every area of life, to reaffirm our principles of individual freedom and make sure they apply to all Americans.

Mike Huckabee

Jame O’Keefe’s Project Veritas has released a new expose, this time aimed at Facebook.

https://www.foxnews.com/media/okeefe-project-veritas-hannity-facebook-vaccine-hesitancy

Two alleged Facebook whistleblowers provided him with interviews and documents about what they claim is a disturbingly Orwellian program that’s secretly monitoring Facebook users and tracking their comments about the COVID vaccines. They say Facebook is using an algorithm that tracks any comments about vaccinations. Any posts that run counter to the company’s “everyone must get vaccinated” narrative, even if they’re factually accurate, go toward the user’s “VH score” (for “vaccine hesitancy.”)

The whistleblowers claim that based on your secret VH score, “we will demote or leave the comment alone depending on the content within the comment." The idea is to drastically reduce exposure of comments that express reluctance to vaccinate, keeping other users from seeing, liking or reposting them.

Facebook replied that they proactively announced this policy on their company blog, but O’Keefe said the extent of it has largely been kept quiet. The whistleblowers fear this is only the beginning, and that instead of creating an open forum where people can freely discuss personal issues, Facebook wants a community where everyone complies with the approved narrative or you’ll be singled out as an enemy of society.

If that isn’t enough to make you rethink your use of Facebook, try this article from the Federalist. It’s about how Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg, with his astonishing $350 million gift to a left-leaning get-out-the-vote organization, is probably the person most responsible for Joe Biden being in the White House right now. You’ll have to read it here because Democrats stopped whining about “billionaires buying elections” the minute they realized that billionaires were buying elections for them.

https://thefederalist.com/2021/05/24/mark-zuckerberg-should-never-be-allowed-to-touch-u-s-elections-again/

Mike Huckabee

We do indeed live in an age of miracles. First case in point: Politifact has actually retracted one of its partisan “fact-checks!”

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/politifact-retracts-wuhan-lab-theory-fact-check

Back in the early days of the pandemic, they branded a claim that the COVID-19 coronavirus might have come out of a Chinese lab as a “Pants On Fire” (sorry, the juvenile term is theirs, not mine) lie and conspiracy theory. Now, in light of more evidence and questions coming to light, they’ve retracted that and say, “Currently, we consider the claim to be unsupported by evidence and in dispute.”

Of course, they could have said the same when it first came up. At the time, there was no evidence to support or debunk the claim because China’s government was blocking anyone from investigating it. For me, that should have caused suspicions to fall more on the “probably has merit” side. But as is often the case with today’s “fact-checkers,” Politifact committed the logical fallacy of an “appeal to authority,” or treating their preferred “experts” as if their views were unimpeachable objective truth.

Until these sources are able to differentiate a proven fact from a preferred opinion, I’ll continue to put quotation marks around “fact-checkers.”

Mike Huckabee

Will the miracles never cease today? The New York Times has actually noticed the humanitarian disaster wrought by President Biden’s undoing of Trump’s border security policies. And all that it took was a report that up to 10,000 unaccompanied migrant children, half of them 12 and under, were going to be warehoused at Fort Bliss, which an attorney for the National Center for Youth Law called “a setting that fails to meet rudimentary child welfare standards.”

https://www.westernjournal.com/biden-admin-reverses-course-plan-tender-age-immigrant-children-backlash/?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=huckabee

The backlash forced Biden to cancel the Fort Bliss plan for children of “tender age” (although thousands of teenagers are still there), but it’s not clear what he’s going to do with all the kids that are pouring in. Previous plans included busing them around the country in the middle of the night and cramming them into facilities that liberals called “cages” when Trump was in office, except under much more crowded, unsanitary and dangerous conditions. Reason magazine obtained secret recordings of federal employees at the facilities complaining about the appalling situation there, both for the kids and the workers.

https://reason.com/2021/05/24/secret-recordings-reveal-officials-discussing-filthy-conditions-of-4632-immigrant-kids-held-in-texas-tent-camp/

And the problem isn’t likely to end anytime soon: Maria Bartiromo of Fox News reported that between February and April, 453,000 migrants illegally entered the US. Sen. Ron Johnson said more than 6,000 a day are being apprehended, which is three times the number that Obama called a “humanitarian crisis.”

I guess if Biden really got desperate, he could restore the Trump security measures that he kicked down like a drunken mule on day one. But no, that would require admitting that Trump was right about something. Democrat leaders would rather see America go down in flames than ever admit that. Obviously.

Mike Huckabee

I’ve often written about how miraculous it is that so many politicians who’ve never done anything except politics know how to do so many things better than the people who actually know about them. For instance, Bernie Sanders has never so much as run a lemonade stand, but he knows how to run every business in America better than the people who started them. Likewise, many politicians think they know everything they need to know to regulate guns, even if they don’t know which end of one the bullet comes out of.

Latest example: our thanks for the laugh to California Assemblyman David Chiu, who tweeted his horrified and indignant response to finding the packaging from a Glock pistol as he was walking through a San Francisco park. He didn’t notice, but other Twitter users did, that what he posted a photo of was the packaging from a Glock brand toy air gun.

https://redstate.com/nick-arama/2021/05/24/ca-assemblyman-makes-people-laugh-their-heads-off-with-ridiculous-remark-about-guns-n385407

While it’s also interesting to see how many things he got wrong while just trying to back out of that boner gracefully, my question is why he was so upset at finding that, but San Francisco parks full of discarded heroin needles and human feces don’t seem to bother him in the least.

Mike Huckabee

The Maricopa County election auditors, put in place by the GOP-led Arizona Senate, took a week away because of the high school graduation ceremonies scheduled to take place at the Veterans Memorial Coliseum in Phoenix, but those events are over, and, as reported on NEWSMAX (story credited to Associated Press), auditors went back to work on Monday. The 2.1 million ballots had to be carted back over from a nearby building on the fairgrounds, where they’d been guarded 24/7.

I wouldn’t imagine that there’s been any problem with security. Imagine how many pairs of eyes were locked on those boxes of ballots every inch of the way.

https://www.newsmax.com/politics/election-2020-arizona-audit/2021/05/24/id/1022581/

The audit team, which consists of four different firms with different responsibilities, are ramping up their operations, with more tables and counters added this week. Even with that, the operation still hasn’t reached full capacity. So they might speed up even more, though there is no deadline, just the goal of getting it right.

There are a few other differences as well. For example, journalists observing the audit have been advised that Senate liaison Ken Bennett, a former Republican secretary of state, will no longer be answering questions about the audit process. Instead, reporters will be directed to Arizona Republican Party Chairman Randy Pullen. We’re not sure why this change was made; it likely means nothing but we’ll check into it.

Anyway, even though auditors had some time off, the lawyers and politicians were working overtime, and it’s been, well, tense. We brought you the “special” meeting of the County Board of Supervisors, who unanimously supported a letter by the county recorder condemning the audit and vowing not to cooperate further. “We’re DONE,” they said. (The stunning YouTube video of that meeting is now under restricted access.) Then there was the next-day meeting of auditors and board members Senate President Karen Fann had called, which the auditors attended but the board members boycotted. The idea behind that meeting had been to try to work together without more subpoenas, but that hope apparently has been dashed.

Heck, with the members of this board, even subpoenas and judicial orders don’t work. The lawyers advising them have apparently given them grand delusions of their own power.

The auditors’ claim that the main database had been removed from one of the machines was met with denial and outrage by the board, and CNN and AP reported that auditors walked back that claim. This was inaccurate, and technical forensic expert Ben Cotton of Cyfir, one of the companies performing the audit, wrote a letter to THE EPOCH TIMES to that effect. Cotton says that not only was the database deleted, but he has been able to recover it and is working on retrieving the information on it.

The claim that there are no legal grounds to conduct this audit is inaccurate as well. Senate Republicans had issued a subpoena for all the ballots, plus the voting machines and election data, and a judge upheld this, saying that Maricopa County needed to comply. So the board begrudgingly did, and now they won’t stop carping about it.

They’ve criticized the audit for being conducted by people who don’t normally audit elections, and “journalists” covering this story have stressed the point, calling them “unqualified.” But we think there’s a reason these companies ended up with the job, and it’s a political one. Reportedly, some companies that specialize in election audits have been intimidated from participating in what they’ve been told is conspiracy-theory nonsense. My understanding is that this issue is so politicized, there were companies that chose not to get involved, as it could damage or even destroy their professional relationships with clients. But as you’ll see, the auditors who did accept this mission seem to be doing a highly professional job.

In another update, we now have a portion of the transcript from last Tuesday’s meeting with auditors and state senators (the meeting snubbed by the County Board), and Ben Cotton appears in video testimony. Shocking: he doesn't appear to be a wild-eyed right-wing crazy, but a professional forensic analyst who knows what he's talking about.

The media have been insisting that the fact the auditors were ABLE to recover the information meant it hadn’t really been deleted –- that they’d just been looking in the wrong place before it turned up. But it's amazing what forensics investigators can retrieve that has been "deleted." (That's no doubt why Hillary's aides were instructed to hit her devices with hammers.) Cotton said specifically that the “D” drive of the EMS Primary Server had been deleted. He said it was his extensive experience in data forensics that enabled him to recover the deleted files.

Cotton explains the procedure he followed during this segment of the transcript, as reported by THE CONSERVATIVE TREEHOUSE.

https://theconservativetreehouse.com/2021/05/24/maricopa-county-forensic-auditor-notes-media-and-county-officials-intentionally-misleading-public-about-deleted-vote-result-databases/

(Editorial note: the headline for THE CONSERVATIVE TREEHOUSE says Cotton accuses the media and board of “intentionally misleading” the public. We didn’t see anything in the story or in their video news report that talked specifically about intentionally misleading; i.e., lying. But reason tells us that they either were deliberately lying or are just such lazy, partisan excuses for journalists that they repeated the false story they wanted to tell. It’s one or the other.).

Cotton’s testimony about the data recovery is technical stuff, but it boils down to the fact that he was able to recover all the deleted files and has gained access to that data. (If I understand correctly, having “access” to the data doesn’t necessarily mean that all of it is readable; we’ll have to cross our fingers that the “data continuity checks” show that it is.) In the course of retrieving this material, Cotton said, he found clear indications –- in the form of an MFT, or master file table –- that the database directory had been deleted from that server.

Finally, members of the Board of Supervisors are now bringing their accusations to the media, in a full-court press to affect public perception of the audit. Specifically, county recorder Stephen Richer, who read a scathing prepared statement at last Monday’s meeting board meeting and who wasn’t even in office during the November election, has taken his show on the road, going on ABC News Monday in an interview with Terry Moran to say there’s no “legitimate reason that would have prompted this audit.” He complained again that the companies doing the audit are not professional or legitimate. I beg to differ; we’ve been watching this drama play out, and the auditors seem to be the ones who are behaving professionally.

I’m not going to link to the article on Yahoo News about Richer's interview, because it contains verbiage that I know not to be correct. For example, this is not a “so-called audit.” It’s a real audit, it's being handled well, and if these board members want to be taken seriously, they need to stop fighting tooth-and-nail against transparency.