Mike Huckabee

And the great turning continues, as liberal institutions that went all-in on supporting lawlessness and anarchy realize it’s going over with voters like a punch bowl full of manure. First, the mayor of Portland – PORTLAND! – admitted that people who throw incendiary devices into occupied buildings with the intention of murdering the people inside are not “peaceful protesters” (I’m sure that was a difficult concession for him to make.)

And now, the New York Times (!) has actually printed an in-depth article about the living hell inflicted on the people whose businesses were inside CHOP, the area of Seattle that the mayor turned over to violent leftist, Antifa anarchists, some armed, and tried to pass off as the new “summer of love.” Those businesses are suing the city for the massive costs inflicted upon them when officials failed to do their most basic duty of protecting public safety and private property. None of this is news to you, of course, but for the Times to suddenly wake up to reality is massive.

(The Times is behind a paywall, so I’m linking to a lengthy excerpt at Instapundit. There’s a link there to the full story if you are a Times subscriber. I also wanted you to see the comment by Instapundit founder, Prof. Glenn Reynolds, that all this abrupt backpedaling away from supporting rioters by leftwing politicians and media suggests that the Democrats’ internal polling on this issue must be truly awful.)

Between this lawsuit and others like it in similar blue cities, Nick Sandmann’s lawsuits against the media outlets that slandered him, all the lawsuits against leftist college administrators who denied students due process and First Amendment rights, and the countersuit the NRA just filed against New York’s Attorney General…

…it appears that conservatives have learned from the lawfare that liberals have been waging and are turning the left’s favorite weapon against them. It might even be more effective than expected, thanks to all the Trump judicial appointees who actually respect the Constitution -- one of the top reasons why it's so important not to believe any johnny-come-lately "law and order" rhetoric from the left and instead to reelect Trump.

Mike Huckabee

You would think that the idea of a city doing away with its police force would be idiotic enough just on the face of it that no sane person would actually suggest it. But if you think beyond the surface inanity, there are also further negative consequences that advocates haven’t even considered. Here’s one of them.

City dwellers don’t like to think about this, but they are heavily dependent on us rubes outside the city to create all the products they consume, like food, and to deliver them into their barren concrete jungles. Trucking companies aren’t too thrilled about the idea of sending expensive trucks loaded with valuable merchandise into cities where the police have allowed armed gangs to take over the streets. Just because the people were foolish enough to elect politicians who left them at the mercy of criminals, that doesn’t mean trucking companies outside the cities have to risk their drivers' lives, trucks and merchandise to keep them afloat.

As the trucking company owner at the link says, any states that defund the police, truckers will avoid for safety reasons. He estimates that the food chain will collapse, the people will run out of food, and there will be complete chaos within 72 hours. Then again, in places with no police, there may already be so much chaos that they won’t even notice more.

Mike Huckabee

Gallup and the Knight Foundation just released a massive poll on Americans’ views of the media. No wonder people weren’t as outraged as the media thought they should be when President Trump called them “the enemy of the people!”

The survey of more than 20,000 adults found pessimism about the news media delivering factual, nonpartisan information deepening. A staggering 86% of Americans see at least a “significant” amount of bias in the media (49% see “a great deal” of it), and 73% say there’s “too much bias in the reporting of news stories that are supposed to be objective.” They don’t buy that it’s unintentional or just their subjective perceptions: 54% believe the media knowingly misrepresent facts, and 28% think they make up facts entirely (believe me, I could do a “Fake News” feature every day.)

As for all the divisiveness that the media blame on Donald Trump: 48% of Americans say the reporters deserve “a great deal” of blame for our deep political divisions, while another 36% let them off easy with only “a moderate amount” of the blame.

Of course, you probably won’t be surprised to learn that Republicans express more negative sentiments about every aspect of the media’s performance than Democrats. Maybe that’s because you’re less likely to be negative about people who are biased toward your side. But then, to approve of their bias is to admit they’re biased. And since 86% of Americans agree they are (and 86% aren’t Republicans), that means a lot of Democrats must know the news they’re watching isn’t objective or trustworthy, but they approve of it anyway. These Americans are known as “MSNBC viewers.”

Here’s Stephen Kruiser of PJ Media, with some bluntly-expressed examples of the most egregious recent media bias and why it’s so dangerous to America.

Mike Huckabee

There was a massive explosion in Beirut this week that killed at least 135 people, injured 5,000 more and caused devastating damage that’s left up to 300,000 people homeless. Investigators have been trying to ascertain if it was an attack, a hidden weapons cache or what? Now, it appears that it might have been due to Russian fertilizer.

A Russian ship called the MV Rhosus that was carrying agricultural fertilizer with 2,750 metric tons of ammonium nitrate came into port in Beirut in 2013. It had technical and financial problems, was abandoned by its owners, and the crew sent back to Russia. It’s been there for years, despite multiple warnings from the customs director to the judiciary that it was a “floating bomb,” warnings that were apparently ignored. So the explosion wasn’t due to a deadly action by a foreign government, but deadly inaction by Lebanon’s own government. And yet some people still insist that we need to entrust every important aspect of our lives to the care and efficiency of government bureaucrats.