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Political correctness

Protests show the failure of the US education system

June 26, 2020

Mike Huckabee

The mayor of Seattle allowed a bunch of far-left radicals to create their own six-block Utopia. She called it a festival and a second “summer of love.” But after just a couple of weeks, what have we learned about what kind of America they would really create?

Well, we immediately learned that they would build walls and barricades around the border to keep out people they didn’t want inside. Those seeking entry would be greeted by armed guards demanding to see their papers. Instead of trained police accountable to the public, arbitrary “laws” would be enforced by a self-proclaimed “warlord” carrying around a semi-automatic rifle in a densely populated area, and passing out similar weapons to other people without any background checks whatsoever (All this is not what I've been told liberals wanted.) Nobody would have any protection from killings, assaults or robbery, including sexual assault; so much for women’s right to say “no” to unwanted sexual aggression. There will also be no food, except for what the capitalists they hate give to them.

And it’s not like they’re being coy about what their real end game is.

Now, the latest piece of sub-mental regression: to protect black people from the racism of white people, white people create special segregated areas where only black people can go.

But as Stephen Kruiser at PJ Media points out, this is not, as many people claim, a failure of the US education system to teach these young people about history, economics or anything remotely useful. It’s actually a triumph of the leftist project to infiltrate schools and indoctrinate a generation of young Americans with hatred of their own nation and its history and culture so they could be used as an easily-controlled mob.

Unfortunately for their would-be masters, their big mistake was in thinking that a group of angry, miseducated and overly-entitled brats could be “easily-controlled.” Note the growing calls for renaming liberal schools like Harvard and Yale that were started by people aligned with slavery, redistributing their precious vast endowments, and “canceling” any professors who argue against it.

Instead of concentrating so heavily on the writings of Karl Marx, maybe some of these leftist professors should have read Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein.”

Ainsworth: Did "Logan Act" idea really come from THE WEST WING?

June 26, 2020

Laura Ainsworth, Staff Writer

When last we left the Michael Flynn case, presiding Judge Emmet Sullivan had been advised by a three-judge panel of the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals to follow Attorney General Bill Barr’s orders and let it go. Give it up. Shake it off. And then maybe take a loooooong vacation. (Personally, I’d suggest a permanent one.)

But the stalemate continues, though it’s almost overshadowed by another revelation, made possible through the DOJ’s partial declassification of a note in Peter Strzok’s chicken-scratch handwriting, that Obama and Biden participated actively in a January 5, 2017, Oval Office meeting about the incoming national security adviser. The notes even suggest Biden specifically brought up the Logan Act.

RELATED READING: Crazy: Judge Sullivan can't let Flynn case go

On Thursday, numerous pundits weighed in on the significance of this, and I was particularly intrigued by one comment from a source we’ve quoted with confidence, Undercover Huber, who tweeted: “Don’t laugh, but at this point, my working theory about Gen. Flynn and the Logan Act is that the people in the Obama administration got the idea from the freaking WEST WING cable TV show. An episode at the end of the series (“Transition”) shows the outgoing lame-duck admin in a foreign policy dispute between China and Russia. They carry out electronic surveillance of all calls with Russia and wiretap the incoming team and confront them about...the Logan Act!”

Dan Bongino brought this up in his Thursday podcast. Could it be?? We’ve seen real-life intersect with fiction before in this scandal; Christopher Steele apparently borrowed from the creative mind of wannabe screenwriter Glenn Simpson of Fusion GPS. What if Biden got the idea to go after an incoming national security adviser for violating the Logan Act after seeing something similar on THE WEST WING?

We know he’s not above plagiarizing others’ words and ideas; in fact, he even dropped out of a presidential race after it was discovered he had plagiarized.

It’s likely he also stole a different idea from THE WEST WING, as Bongino illustrated by juxtaposing two clips: 1) Biden at a podium, likening the race to cure cancer to JFK’s call to put a man on the moon in 10 years, and 2) Martin Sheen playing the President in his office, giving essentially the same spiel, with similar delivery.

Hilariously, Obama borrowed the same idea, for his January 2016 State of the Union Address.

My guess is that then-Sen. Biden was a fan of that show, which depicts those in the corridors of government power the way they must love to be portrayed, with constant snappy reparte –- do they EVER tire of hearing themselves talk? –- and nonstop hectic lives, all in the interest of “governing.” Martin Sheen played a President Democrats could only dream of, and goodness knows they needed someone they could idolize in the early 2000s with George W. Bush in office. I’ve imagined this show as therapy for them.

I’d seen clips from THE WEST WING but never an entire episode. So I thought the best way to come to any conclusion would be to watch the episode in question: Season 7 (the final season), Episode 19, “Transition,” which originally ran April 24, 2006, and has been in reruns since. Obviously, this episode is set during the transition period, with President Bartlet (Martin Sheen) transitioning out and President-elect Santos (Jimmy Smits) transitioning in. Concerns are established early in the script about the new administration overstepping the old on foreign policy issues before Inauguration Day.

To set the stage, the episode opens with President-elect Santos returning congratulatory calls from foreign leaders, specifically from the G8 countries. He’s told by an aide that the rest can be dealt with by his chief foreign policy adviser. “Well, then we’d better hire one,” Santos quips.

When he gets to the call from the Russian president, he hesitates. The aide nods him forward, telling him Russia is “one of the G8's.” Santos replies, “He’s also leader of a nation we may find ourselves exchanging hostile fire with any moment.” They exchange uncomfortable looks, and Santos finally says, “Call him.”

A scene in the President Bartlet’s office establishes that the incoming President is going to be briefed in-depth on the “intervention” in Kazakhstan. Santos is taken to a secure deep-basement briefing room --- I’m guessing kind of like the one Adam Schiff’s committee used for their secret impeachment confabs --- where he’s told we’re “reaching full deployment” of ground and support personnel positioned between Chinese and Russian forces. (Say what??) When he asks what happens next, he’s has a big problem with their cavalier answer and the “entire adventure, as I’ve already expressed to the President.” He abruptly leaves the room.

Here’s where it gets interesting. As soon as he’s gone, there’s this exchange:

Official #1 --- The NSA picked up the President-elect’s congratulatory phone call with the Russian president.

Bartlet’s chief of staff (I think) --- They’re tapping his phone?

Official #2 --- In the current crisis, the NSA’s monitoring all contact with the Russian and Chinese governments as a matter of course.

Chief of Staff --- And?

Official #1 --- The Santos call contained nothing improper.

Hm, so why was this even brought up? Later in his office, Santos complains of the Kazakhstan “mess” that “they’re depositing on our doorstep.” He tells his aide to get the president of China on the phone. “China’s not one of the G8 countries,” the aide warns. The message to Santos is definitely "don't go there." But the call is placed as the scene cuts away.

Now, it gets even more interesting. We go to President Bartlet’s office.

Chief of Staff –- Sir, we have a problem.

Official #1 –- NSA monitors picked up a phone conversation between President-elect Santos and Chinese President Lian.

Prez: Yeah.

Chief of Staff: Sir, you’re not going to like what he said...

Then, everything hits the fan. There’s a twist later that reveals the incoming and outgoing Presidents --- who, significantly, are from the same political party --- had secretly coordinated this call to China, using it to play “a little geopolitical good-cop, bad-cop.” VERY different from the adversarial Obama-Trump transition. Still, the episode contains several clear messages.

1. That the incoming administration is supposed to wait till Inauguration Day to insert itself into foreign policy.

2. That the NSA wiretaps calls between incoming officials and foreign leaders. (Apparently when this episode came out in 2006, that practice was kept closer to the vest. Today, both President-elect Trump and incoming national security adviser Flynn would have been aware.)

3. That current security officials will listen to the calls and “tell” on the interlopers, even on the incoming President or his national security adviser.

So, could Biden have gotten the idea of using Flynn’s recorded calls with a foreign leader to prosecute him after watching this show? The words “Logan Act” are never spoken, but if Biden watched the show, it might have come up later in conversation among colleagues exploring possible ways of taking Flynn out. And everyone seemed to be exploring those.

Doesn’t sound too farfetched to me. These days, hardly anything does.

Woke mobs are targeting smaller towns

June 26, 2020

Mike Huckabee

Must-Read Article: I recently linked to an article about how very different life is in rural and small-town America than it is in the deep blue cities filled with riots and “occupied zones” and cancel culture and attacks on police. The writer seemed unconcerned about all those things because they were in those horribly-run cities and wouldn’t touch the rest of the country. I argued that while he was certainly right about life being better and people getting along a lot better outside of leftist-run cities, he was wrong to think that “it can’t happen here.”

In fact, it already is happening. The woke mobs are starting to target smaller towns with the same smear tactics and organizational techniques they’ve perfected in cities to get sympathetic leftists elected to office where they release criminals and make cops stand down and kneel before rioters and monument smashers. Here are some examples of small towns where conservative mayors, school board members and other officials have been intimidated into resigning amid nonsense accusations of being “white supremacists.”

How does this happen? It happens when you’re not paying attention (that’s how AOC got into Congress via a low-turnout primary, the same method radical leftists are using to get local DA’s elected who “reform criminal justice” by refusing to prosecute or jail criminals.) It happens when officials knuckle under, apologize and resign instead of standing up for themselves. And it happens when citizens are too scared to fight back and say “No” to the mob’s demands. Yes, there is a silent majority, but we are quickly reaching the time when the majority can’t stay silent any longer, or it will find itself being oppressed by a very vocal, very leftist and very, very stupid minority.

Facebook censorship

June 25, 2020

Mike Huckabee

Project Veritas has released another undercover video, this one allegedly exposing the free speech-crushing leftist bias inside Facebook.

Facebook insider/whistleblower Zach McElroy said, “We are essentially in charge of what gets said and what gets stifled,” and he’s willing to testify to Congress about Facebook’s bias and its algorithm that results in 75-80% of posts selected for review being ones that support Trump or conservative causes.

The video captures Facebook moderators bragging about how they target and sideline conservative posts. One is asked if she deletes every Republican post that comes up, and she replies, “Yes! I don’t give no (bleep)s, I’ll delete it.” As for anti-Trump posts that do violate policy, she said, “You gotta take it down, but I leave it up. If you see something that’s not supposed to be up, it’s probably me.” Another said, “If someone is wearing a MAGA hat, I am going to delete them for terrorism…I think we are all doing that.”

Check out the link to see the Project Veritas video, as well as video of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg testifying under oath to Congress that Facebook doesn’t have any bias, why, “to the contrary, our goal is to be a platform for all ideas.”

He must define “all ideas” the way the New York Times defines “all the news” in its motto, “All the news that’s fit to print.” That is, all the news that fits the leftwing political agenda. If Congress doesn’t change the law to yank Facebook’s protection from lawsuits as a “neutral platform” (HA!), then can we at least see perjury charges brought?

Crazy: Judge Sullivan can't let Flynn case go

June 25, 2020

Mike Huckabee

Come on, Judge Sullivan; at this point, you’re just embarrassing yourself.

I say this because at the time of this writing, late Wednesday night, Emmet Sullivan, the presiding judge in the Michael Flynn case, still has not complied with the federal appeals court that ordered him to drop the case. What he did was issue a “stay of the current settings” for a hearing already on the calendar and for any further briefings.

The vote was 2-1 from a 3-judge panel of the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals. I’m not a lawyer, but it seemed to me that even the judge who dissented was doing it based on the timing of their intervention, not the merits of the case itself. But that’s not enough for Judge Sullivan, who, in defying Attorney General Barr’s decision to drop the case, has shown himself to be the very incarnation of Captain Ahab, determined to harpoon the Great White Trump if it sinks him.

(Aside: to show how apt this imagery is for describing TDS, I’ve included this quote from Melville’s MOBY DICK: “...all evil, to crazy Ahab, were visibly personified, and made practically assailable, in Moby Dick. He piled upon the whale’s white hump the sum of all the general rage and hate felt by his whole race from Adam down; and then, as if his chest had been a mortar, he he burst his hot heart’s shell upon it.”)

Anyway, Barr –- who is, after all, the prosecutor –- wants to dismiss the case. The D.C. panel wants to dismiss it. Lord knows Flynn and attorney Sidney Powell want to dismiss it. One would think even the original prosecutors would want the case dismissed, as Powell has amassed a mountain of evidence of their misconduct big enough to send THEM to the hoosgow. It seems the only one still involved who doesn’t want to drop it is Judge Sullivan, and the appeals judges have essentially kicked the ball back to his court. He doesn’t get to exercise his own discretion on whether or not to drop it, but he may choose to continue to stretch this out and have the matter re-heard by the full appeals court.

Former deputy Assistant AG John Yoo, speaking Wednesday with Shannon Bream, pointed out that issuing this writ of mandamus to Judge Sullivan’s court was “an extraordinary step on the part of the D.C. Circuit Court." They’re rare, and apply when a judge has abused power. He said Sullivan could indeed appeal to the full panel of 13 or even to the Supreme Court, but “that would just be prolonging his own mistake.”

We’ve been following the case against Flynn from the start, and it has recently been blown wide open with revelations from FBI interview notes, texts and other declassified documents that it was a trap set for him early on. As the incoming national security adviser, Flynn did nothing wrong in speaking with the Russian ambassador, and he never tried to be less than forthcoming in his interview with agents Strzok and Pientka. It’s clear now that Flynn was railroaded, but the judge is on a mission to take him down just for pleading guilty --- never mind that his plea was coerced and that Powell has the goods on what they were trying to do.

Just this Tuesday, the Justice Department informed Sullivan that it had just found another page of Strzok’s notes that are exculpatory for Flynn. Strzok was the lead investigator on “Crossfire Hurricane,” which encompassed Trump and Russia and also “Crossfire Razor,” the case against Flynn.

At the time of that report, the notes were subject to a protective order, but they've now been released with some redactions. Here is Solomon's updated story, which makes additional points about the case.

A former senior FBI official told Solomon that Strzok’s notes about the Oval Office meeting are a “red flag” that the Bureau, under Comey, “may have been involving itself illegitimately in a political dispute between the outgoing Obama administration and the incoming Trump administration.” Ya think?

The notes were said in Powell’s brief to have been taken January 4, 2017, the day Strzok relayed a request from “the 7th floor” to the lead investigator in the case telling him to keep it open, but that appears to be wrong, as they refer to events that happened on the 5th. The DOJ has said they were taken between January 3-5, which would have included the Oval Office meeting. But Strzok wasn’t at that meeting, so he was probably writing down someone else’s account of it.

Still, with stunning evidence like this on Flynn’s side, it’s quite a spectacle to watch Judge Sullivan trying so hard to keep the case going. Curiously, Sullivan seems as desperate to keep it open now, against all odds, as Strzok was in early January 2017. And we know that there were others back then who were just as keen on it, including both Obama and Biden. We know this because they attended a now-infamous Oval Office meeting January 5 to talk about this. And, yes, there are notes.

In her court filing, Powell referred to these: “...Former President Obama, James Comey, Sally Yates, Joe Biden, and apparently Susan Rice [James Clapper also attended] discussed the transcripts of Flynn’s calls and how to proceed against him. Mr. Obama himself directed that “the right people” investigate Gen. Flynn. This caused former FBI Director Comey to acknowledge the obvious: General Flynn’s phone calls with Ambassador Kislyak ‘appear legit.’”

Of course, we already knew from Sally Yates’ testimony that she was surprised to learn Obama already knew in detail about Flynn's recorded conversations. And we’ve long known from a Lisa Page text that Obama “wants to know everything we’re doing.”

Funny that in Strzok’s notes there is nothing about Obama saying to do everything “by the book.” Susan Rice wrote that to herself –- repeating the phrase three times –- a couple of weeks later in her very last act as a White House official, on January 20 just as Trump was taking the oath of office.

Biden is playing dumb about the Flynn investigation –- one of the few instances where it appears to be just an act. Either that, or he only mentioned the Logan Act in that meeting because he was the one person in the room old enough to remember the day it passed, in 1799.

Speaking of people playing dumb, on Wednesday ABC, CBS and NBC slammed the decision by Barr to drop the Flynn case as purely political and pretended to know nothing about the release of the notes implicating Obama and Biden.

Powell, looking understandably weary at the end of the evening on Sean Hannity’s TV show, said she wasn’t sure what’s going on right now. When Sean asked if she was confident justice would be done, she only said, “I feel very strongly that we will make a lot of progress in that direction...and I don’t know that it will be what everybody wants to see as full justice, but we’re heading in the right direction. Today was a big step forward.”

Flynn, though, seemed newly energized on Wednesday and made it clear he intends to fight for justice and the rule of law.

People are next

June 25, 2020

Mike Huckabee

Some people like to look back to the old “Andy Griffith Show” for valuable life lessons. If I had to cite the best advice from that for big city mayors dealing with streets full of radical leftist vandals burning, looting and destroying monuments and historic statues, I’d point to the sage wisdom of Barney Fife:

“Nip it! Nip it in the bud!”

Unfortunately, with Democratic officials having ordered the police to stand back for weeks and let the mob “vent” and “express its feelings,” it’s too late for that. Instead of getting it out of their systems, they’ve just been emboldened to believe that their strategy for destroying America and its history is working, and they’re only ramping it up.

It’s obvious that the call to remove Confederate monuments was only a pretext, and that President Trump was right: they’ve quickly moved on to attacking statues of Washington and Jefferson, and to show their genuine historical illiteracy, Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, Ulysses S. Grant, World War II soldiers, and several prominent abolitionists. In Texas, a statue of guitarist Stevie Ray Vaughn was defaced, and there was even a threat against the Alamo (if they dare to damage that Texas shrine, Davy Crockett and company won’t be the only people who made their last stand at the Alamo.) There’s even talk about whether we need extra security to protect up Mount Rushmore. So this is not really about feeling “triggered” by Confederate monuments, it’s an all-out assault on all American history and culture, and everything and everyone who did something to contribute to it.

Christopher Bedford in The Federalist wrote one of the most talked-about editorials of the day, recounting the history of revolutionary mob violence and what happens when nobody stands up to them.

Bedford writes, “A society that believes in itself builds monuments, a sick society does not, and a dying society watches as they are torn down.” He further warns that “everywhere statues are torn down by the mob, history teaches that people are next.”

And we’re already seeing that come to pass, with physical assaults and even killings of police, protesters, and others unfortunate enough to attract the mob’s attention. Just last night, Democratic Wisconsin state Senator Tim Carpenter was beaten by “peaceful protesters” at the State Capitol. They claim he “provoked” them. He says he was just taking a photo. They were toppling two statues, one of them a statue of a Union officer who fought to free the slaves. So either they didn’t want their faces seen by police, or they were too ashamed of how pig-ignorant they are about history to show their faces.

President Trump has now ordered that if local Democratic officials refuse to do their jobs and protect public monuments, he will enforce the federal law protecting them. But what is these officials’ reaction to the expanding anarchy in their own jurisdictions? I’m not certain which would be the most accurate adjective: shameful, oblivious or insane? Take a look at this outrageous statement by New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, and you be the judge:

When asked about Trump saying Democratic officials should do more to protect monuments, Cuomo replied, “People are making a statement about equality, about community, to be against racism, against slavery, I think those are good statements…It’s a healthy expression of people saying let’s get some priorities here and let’s remember the sin and mistake that this nation made and let’s not celebrate it.”

Far be it from me to tell Gov. Cuomo how to do his job (although I did do that job for 10 years, and somehow managed to avoid killing thousands of nursing home residents, driving businesses to other states, or allowing communist radicals to run riot in the streets, destroying public monuments), but that is not “healthy expression.” It’s felony vandalism. You know, the kind of criminal act and threat to public safety that Governors are supposed to prevent.

It’s too bad Barney Fife isn’t with us anymore. He’d make a much better Governor than Andrew Cuomo.

Some good further reading on this subject: Conrad Black at National Review on why the assault on statues is really a fight against civilization:

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