Mike Huckabee

There’s so much developing news today, it’s hard to know where to begin. But one emerging story ties in with something we've mentioned, that video of the Chinese lecturer explaining that, were it not for Trump, they would be having their way via their friends at the highest levels in Washington.

That story falls into the “shocking but not surprising” category. It’s chilling, if only because it seems so plausible at this time in our history. And today, we have another report, from AXIOS, about a political intelligence operation run by China’s main civilian spy agency between 2011 and 2015, during which they established and exploited “extensive ties” with local and national politicians, including Democrat Rep. Eric Swalwell of California, who sits on the House Intelligence Committee.

AXIOS has been investigating this story for over a year. Of course, you remember Swalwell, the shill for the Democrat Party who repeatedly lied and accused President Trump of collaborating with Russia. Swalwell was about on par with Adam Schiff, in that he could always be depended on to go before the TV cameras and say ANYTHING, no matter how outrageous or demonstrably false. It got to the point where whenever his face appeared on the screen, I had to scramble for the remote and press “mute.” Life is too short.

Beijing has obviously focused for years on gaining influence in U.S. political circles, and apparently has enjoyed quite a bit. As we see from the Chinese video, the election of President Trump was seen as their one big bump in the road. Things were going oh-so-well until he got elected. But they say that now, once again, they have someone in office that they can control---I mean, work with.

I imagine the ChiComms were really depressed the night of November 3, when they saw Trump was easily ahead. But then, the next morning, after the vote had been suspended in several states and the count suddenly favored Biden, they were popping the champagne corks for a lovely celebratory brunch.

(In related, breaking news, Rep. Ken Buck of Colorado, a member of the House Judiciary Committee, is calling for a special counsel to investigate Hunter Biden’s ties with China and the access this might have given China to the Obama-Biden administration.)

As for this specific operative (SPY), a Chinese national whose name is either Fang Fang or Christine Fang, it appears her operation ended during the Obama administration, though China’s influence-expanding activities continue and are “a core focus for U.S. counterintelligence” (as they had better be). Fang reportedly targeted “up-and-coming” local politicians in the Bay Area and around the country, men who had “the potential to make it big on the national stage.” It’s easy to see why she might have targeted Swalwell, who doesn’t exactly come off as a rocket scientist but would relish the lights and cameras as a career launchpad.

According to AXIOS, Fang gained proximity to power through “campaign fundraising, extensive networking, personal charisma, and romantic or sexual relationships,” including with two Midwestern mayors.

A current U.S. intelligence official said that “there were some really, really sensitive people” caught up in this. I would presume this was a reference at least in part to Swalwell, as, again, he became a member of the House Intelligence Committee.

Fang took part in fundraising activities for Swalwell’s 2014 re-election campaign, although, as a foreign national, she did not –-- could not –- contribute herself. After that, she reportedly helped place at least one intern in Swalwell’s office. She also interacted with him at various events over several years.

Swalwell wouldn’t participate in the AXIOS story; his office said he hadn’t seen Fang in “nearly six years” but had provided information about her to the FBI.

This must be because around 2015, the FBI became alarmed at Fang’s activities and gave Swalwell a defensive briefing. He immediately cut all ties to her. She abruptly left the country in mid-2015, leaving acquaintances puzzled.

We don’t know how involved Swalwell was with this woman.

But what we do see from this story is how China –- like all governments that spy –- spends years cultivating relationships that might pay off even decades later. That appears to be the case here, as Fang first got to know Swalwell when he was a council member for Dublin, California. As AXIOS says, “The Chinese Communist Party knows that today’s mayors and city council members are tomorrow’s governors and members of Congress.” They play the long game.

Even FBI Director Chris Wray, in July 2020, said Beijing “is engaged in a highly sophisticated malign foreign influence campaign.” These efforts involve “subversive, undeclared, criminal, or coercive attempts to sway our government’s policies, distort our country’s public discourse and undermine our confidence in our democratic processes and values.”

As if that could get any worse. It would appear they’ve done their job, or at least are happy with what they see. But they're just getting started.

U.S. officials believe Fang was in the U.S. to gather intelligence and also “to influence rising U.S. officials on China-related issues.” China wants to be able “to sway the opinion of key decision-makers.” Fang apparently was being directed by China’s Ministry of State Security (MSS), the country’s primary civilian spy agency. Her main handlers are thought to have been in China. She was put under surveillance by the FBI’s San Francisco Division after being seen traveling around the country getting close to U.S. politicians.

Around 2015, the FBI started giving “multiple defensive briefings” to warn local and national politicians who had been targeted by Fang. That’s when Swalwell cut off ties.

“She was just one of lots of agents,” said a current senior U.S. intelligence official.

AXIOS goes through numerous reasons why the Bay Area is such a good place for the Chinese to spy. One is that it’s the home of one of our nation’s oldest and largest Chinese American communities. They want to indoctrinate Chinese Americans just as they do the Chinese.

Another reason that might not be so obvious is that Democrats run it. Those seeking power generally have to be from those circles. “Notice all the D’s next to their names,” says Jeff Dunetz for Lidblog.

One Bay Area political operative noted that Fang positioned herself “to be the connector between the Asian American community and members of Congress.” Some described her as “charismatic” and “well liked,” while others thought her “secretive” and “suspicious.”

Predictably, few professed to know her well, saying she didn’t talk about her family or hometown. But her Facebook friends list “is a virtual ‘who’s who’ of local Bay Area politicos, and includes city council members, current and former mayors, [California Rep. Ro] Khanna, and Swalwell’s father and brothers.” Again, all Democrats.

Fang is gone, but there’s no telling how many Chinese nationals are in this country for the same purposes of spying and intelligence gathering, every one as singleminded as she was.

But news is getting around now about Swalwell’s association with a Chinese "honeypot." Considering his repeated lies about Trump and Russia long after those allegations were known to be false, any bad press Swalwell gets now, deserved or not, I chalk up to karma. What goes around comes around.

Mike Huckabee

In a surprise move late Monday night, the state of Texas filed a direct lawsuit with the Supreme Court, arguing that the election procedures in Michigan, Georgia, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin violated the Constitution and the Court must order those states to let their legislatures appoint their electors. The full text of the lawsuit is here.

Why would Texas have standing to intervene? Think of it this way: unconstitutional voting procedures can allow an illegal vote to disenfranchise a legal voter within a state. But if those procedures determine the winner of a Presidential election, then wouldn’t they also be disenfranchising the voters of other states who voted for the candidate they believe legally won the race?

Meanwhile, judges in Georgia and Michigan dismissed Sidney Powell’s cases seeking to overturn the certifications of those elections due to vote fraud. The reasons were mostly unrelated to the evidence, such as lack of standing to file the suit, filing too late or that it should have been filed in state rather than federal court. The Michigan judge did claim that Powell presented theories and conjecture of what could have happened, but not evidence that it did. Powell claims that today’s “safe harbor” deadline doesn’t apply in fraud cases and that she has until at least December 14th and will appeal.

Mike Huckabee

What's Next, A Rain of Frogs?: I have immense sympathy for the suffering of the people of Los Angeles under the thumbs of their autocratic and incompetent leaders. So I hate to inform them that it’s about to get exponentially worse.

Like too many cities around the US, they foolishly elected a George Soros-backed district attorney, George Gascon, whose idea of “criminal justice reform” is to make crime legal. Gascon was sworn in Monday, and he announced what he immediately plans to do, as recounted at the link above: “his office won’t seek the death penalty ever, no more juveniles being charged as adults, no more use of gang or gun enhancements to put violent criminals away for a longer time, no more bail, resentencing of up to 20,000 convicted offenders (with hundreds possibly being released as soon as tomorrow), and more…”

A former Deputy DA from another county commented to RedState.com, “This is going to increase violent crime in a way people in Los Angeles can’t even imagine. Full stop.”

The big question is, will the Democrat-imposed unemployment, depression, poverty and crime wave be enough to make the people finally stop voting for the idiots who are creating it? Or will they just move away to red states and vote for the same idiocy there?

Mike Huckabee

“Social Justice Warriors Ruin Everything” Dept: If you ever wondered what would befall Ralphie from “A Christmas Story” if he asked Santa for a Red Ryder BB gun these days, then wonder no more.

A video went viral of a little boy asking a mall Santa for a Nerf Gun for Christmas. The woke St. Nick refused, telling him, “No, no guns.” His mom clarifies, “A NERF Gun,” but the real life Bad Santa is adamant: “Nope, not even a Nerf Gun…If your dad wants to get it for you, that’s fine, but I can’t bring it to you.” He then suggests some other toys, but the disappointed boy has already rushed back to his mother in tears after being woke-shamed by Santa.

Fortunately, this Christmas story has (spoiler alert!) the same happy ending as Ralphie’s: the boy got his Nerf Gun when the mall sent another Santa to his home to deliver a free one. As for the Santa who imposes his political views on kids, he’s been fired (no, not out of a Nerf Gun.) He can go back to the North Pole and try to organize the elves into a union.

Bonus Happy Ending: The boy got to be a guest on Stephen Crowder’s YouTube show. I like the comment by one viewer that this should inspire people to donate lots of Nerf Guns to Toys For Tots.

Mike Huckabee

Should the President concede the election to Joe Biden?

My newsletter readers, Facebook and Parler followers have voted.  The results are:

57,826 votes for NO

779 votes for UNDECIDED

1,064 votes for YES

Mike Huckabee

The two Georgia Senate runoffs have been dubbed “national elections” because the winners will determine whether the Republicans keep the Senate or there’s nobody to hit the brakes if the Democrats take over the steering wheel and veer hard left toward a steep cliff. So every American – and certainly every Georgian - should be interested in this past weekend’s debates. Tyler O’Neil of PJ Media did a good job of recapping the most important points.

Sen. Kelly Loeffler did a great job of highlighting the radicalism of her opponent, Raphael Warnock, while Sen. David Perdue refused to show up to debate Democratic rival Jon Ossoff. Ossoff called Perdue a “coward,” but Perdue’s campaign said there was no point in a debate since the runoff is an extension of a general election where 52% of Georgians already voted against Ossoff. Perdue had 85,000 more votes, and under most other states' laws, he would’ve already won.

Still, it’s usually not a good idea to decline to debate, although in this case, it did give Ossoff the floor to promote his agenda, such as blanket amnesty and a national virus lockdown, which might have hurt him more with viewers than Perdue could have. Perdue’s campaign manager told The Hill newspaper, “Tonight we witnessed something we didn’t know was possible: a candidate lost a debate against himself. An epic failure.”

Mike Huckabee

If Biden becomes President, this may be the last bit of sanity you hear out of Washington for quite a while, so savor it: the Department of Transportation announced that airlines are not required to treat “emotional support animals” as service animals and may treat them as pets and require them to travel in carriers in the cargo section.

This follows a rash of stories about people bringing wildly inappropriate animals onto airlines, claiming they needed them to stay calm, while the passengers around them were expected to stay calm while seated next to a frightened or agitated horse, pig, kangaroo or, famously, an emotional support peacock.

While I’m happy to hear that I’ll no longer have to worry about someone’s emotional support ostrich snatching my airline meal, there are a couple of issues that do need to be ironed out. Trained service dogs for the disabled will still be allowed, but with no national licensing or registration system to identify them, that loophole may still be open to abuse.

And mark your calendars for a momentous day because I’m actually about to agree with PETA on something. In opposing the new restrictions, PETA protested that it’s cruel to put animals into airline cargo holds, where they have died due to shifting loads falling on them, unpressurized cabins, long delays and freezing temperatures. That’s definitely something that needs to be addressed.

But it should be solved by the airlines creating safe conditions for traveling pets, not by letting live sheep travel in Business Class.

Mike Huckabee

Remember back in March when we shut everything in the world down to “flatten the curve” so we’d be able to open everything back up by Easter? I get it that we’re told to “listen to the scientists!” but it gets hard to do when the scientists themselves don’t agree and when sometimes they tell us something that they totally reverse a short time later. Early on, we were implored to NOT wear a mask. I remember Dr. Anthony Fauci, who was considered the expert on all things Covid and the Surgeon General speaking at a press conference urging that only medical professionals wear a mask. Remember we were told that it was very dangerous for us to wear a mask if we weren’t medical professionals because we’d be more likely to touch our faces and if we wore a mask, we would DIE!

We were told to disinfectant everything we touched because the virus lingered for days on surfaces of the things we touch.

Somehow, we were told it would be safe to go to Walmart or the supermarket, but if we went to a small boutique where only a couple of people were in the store, we would surely DIE!

Churches closed, but casinos didn’t. You were not permitted to get a mammogram or have a tooth pulled, but you were allowed to have an abortion because in someone’s twisted mind, an abortion was essential, but church or having a cancer screening wasn’t. We were told to stay away from large groups, but if we rioted or looted a store or tossed bricks at a police officer, we’d be safe. It was about that time that much of the general public realized that Covid was serious, but some of the political figures ordering us about as if we were 3 year olds in potty training were not trying to control a deadly disease as much as they were trying to control us.

We were ordered to wear the very masks that we had just weeks before been told would kill us. We were told no need to spray the groceries or boxes delivered with disinfectant as it wouldn’t be helpful after all.

Let me be clear-Covid is real and it kills people. I’ve lost several friends who have died from this hideous disease including a dear friend who is a pastor’s wife in Arkansas and who once worked for me as an executive assistant in the Governor’s office. Aaron Wilbourn, a wonderful Christian gentleman who was a great songwriter, performer, and comedian, and who was a regular in our theater to entertain our studio audience died a week ago from Covid. One of my own sons came down with it, and while having some symptoms of fever, sore throat, and cough, was able to get treated early and effectively and avoided a hospital stay or severe consequences and he was very careful to always mask, sanitize and social distance. He had to isolate away from his 3 children and pregnant wife to avoid exposing them.

When it comes to the seriousness of Covid, I don’t believe many of the politicians who order the rest of us to avoid travel or socialization but who go out and eat, get haircuts, travel for vacation and even show up for big events. I don’t need their hypocritical demands. I will wear a mask, avoid personal contact, wash my hands and keep distances because I believe what’s happened to my friends even if I DON’T believe what hypocritical officials say since they themselves don’t believe anything they say. The cases and deaths this week are higher than they have ever been. Don’t be foolish or careless. But next time you get to vote, don’t vote for mayors and governors who tell you to do what they are unwilling to do. They think we’re peasants and they are princes and princesses. They aren’t. But even the peasants have the power to rise up and demand that leaders live by the same rules they impose on the rest of us.

Mike Huckabee

During the hearings into alleged vote fraud, President Trump’s team keeps presenting sworn affidavits and first-hand witness testimony describing major irregularities, only to be asked repeatedly, “But where is your EVIDENCE?” They must feel like the interviewer in “Spinal Tap” futilely trying to explain to the dense rock star why putting “11” on his amp’s volume knob doesn’t make it louder. (“These go to 11!”)

But Thursday at a hearing in Georgia, Rudy Giuliani showed previously unseen security camera footage of ballot counters in Fulton County, Georgia. It was taken late on Election night, after poll workers were told to leave (we were originally told that it was due to a water main bursting in the room with the ballots, but it turned out to be just a small leak in an adjacent area that didn’t even require a plumber’s visit to fix.) The video shows that during that time, four people stayed behind and continued counting votes with no supervision. The video shows them apparently reaching under tables, pulling out four suitcases full of ballots that were separate from the others, and feeding them through machines that can count up to 3,000 ballots an hour.

The person in charge of Fulton County elections didn’t show up to the hearing to explain what we were seeing. The footage convinced Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp to call for a signature audit of the ballots.

There are also reports that the Trump team brought 20 binders full of evidence for a hearing today in Nevada.

As for the “no evidence” mantra, to quote another popular media cliché, “that claim is disputed.” Here’s what columnist and attorney Kurt Schlichter writes about sworn affidavits. They “constitute evidence. Relevant evidence is anything that ‘has any tendency to make a fact more or less probable than it would be without the evidence.’ Federal Rules of Evidence, Rule 401. Now, you may not like the evidence. You may think it is insufficient or unpersuasive or just wrong. So? Evidence is challenged on these grounds in every single trial there is – that’s why you have trials. But it is evidence nonetheless.”

Mike Huckabee

Less than five hours after Rudy Giuliani appeared with Maria Bartiromo on SUNDAY MORNING FUTURES, President Trump announced via Tweet that Rudy had tested positive for COVID-19. FOX NEWS reported it Sunday afternoon.

Later that day, it was reported that he'd been admitted to Georgetown University Hospital for treatment.

Rudy has been doing a heroic job managing the legal strategy for Trump in states where election tactics and results have been highly suspect. Like all who test positive, he’ll be under quarantine for 14 days after being symptom-free, so must continue his role either from the hospital or his home, as the case may be. I hope you'll keep him in your prayers.

He appeared fine in his interview with Bartiromo, who asked for his response to dismissals from the media such as THE WALL STREET JOURNAL's Sunday morning headline “Trump Uses Rally for Georgia’s Senate Candidates to Push Unsupported Claims of Voting Fraud.” (I join in her scorn of the WSJ’s unsupported use of the word “unsupported.”) Rudy could only shake his head in bewilderment at that headline as Maria played footage from the State Farm Arena in Fulton County, where a skeleton crew of unsupervised ballot-counters appeared to be stuffing the Dominion machines.

"Why is it that the media continues to report that there’s unsupported evidence here," she asked, "when every day, you’re out talking about these situations?”

"Maria, I wish I knew the answer to that,” he replied. “Part of it is bias, part of it is corruption, part of it’s laziness, part of it is just inexplicable. How you can say it’s unsupported, when there are now tape after tape after tape...”

(It should be noted that the chief investigator for the Georgia Secretary of State told the factchecking site LeadStories.com that the video shows nothing unusual: that the workers who left were just “cutters” whose job is open the envelopes and they were finished, and that those weren’t suitcases but standard containers for ballots. She also claims nobody was told to leave and the people on the tape were just scanners doing their job. Duly noted.)

However, Guiliani went on to say there are ONE THOUSAND affidavits from people who personally observed fraudulent acts. “This is a massive fraud, all throughout the country,” he said.

He’s looking to state legislatures to act; Bartiromo asked about the possible role of the Supreme Court. (Justice Sam Alito’s involvement in Pennsylvania has seemed to us to be a positive sign that SCOTUS might hear a case.) Giuliani said the Pennsylvania case “probably is a week away” from being ready to argue, and he believes it is “a very good case.”

He told Maria that state legislatures have authority to change state electors if this action is based on “substantial reasons of corruption, irregularities --- in each case, each one of these legislatures has more than enough of that to sustain a Supreme Court challenge.”

"We're getting heard in the state legislatures,” he said, “and once they make a decision, we’ll get heard in the Supreme Court.”

"We’re not getting heard in the public,” he added, “except for occasional shows like yours and a few others, a few interviews that we do, and social media.” (I would add that social media has actually made the sharing of information quite challenging, and also that we proudly place ourselves within the small circle of outlets trying to inform people.)

Giuliani said the FBI had not questioned the people who were shown working unsupervised at State Farm Arena. “Not that I know of,” he said. And it wasn’t just the counting, he alleged. “They were involved in two or three other acts of voter fraud.”

“And the FBI is nowhere to be found.”

John Ratcliffe, Director of National Intelligence, has expressed similar concerns and calls for more transparency from the FBI.

Alan Dershowitz, appearing later in the show, agreed that there is “probable cause” for further investigation. He said Giuliani has made “very serious allegations." The big question is WHICH institution is designed, constitutionally, to look into these allegations: state legislatures? the courts? Dershowitz proposes the creation of a “vote integrity panel” or “VIP,” consisting of former justices and judges, “neutral and nonpartisan,” that would look at all election-related complaints before, during and after the vote.

Not to shoot down an idea, but I do see potential problems, starting with the name “VIP, Voter Integrity Panel.” There already exists a group called “VIP,” the Voter Integrity Project, sponsored by the Thomas More Society; we've quoted from it here. Still, that's a relatively small problem compared with the most challenging one: keeping such a panel truly nonpartisan. But at least someone's thinking about possible solutions going forward.

Dershowitz agreed that Giuliani has been presenting evidence --- repeat, for THE WALL STREET JOURNAL, EVIDENCE --- that now should be subject to cross-examination and other testimony.

He said Justice Alito’s actions suggest that the Supreme Court would likely rule Pennsylvania acted unconstitutionally in expanding the “window” so that ballots arriving after Election Day were counted.

(Since I’m not a legal expert, here is a different take on the possible reasons for Alito’s timing of his deadline.)

Dershowitz predicted that if the SCOTUS decided to take the case, it would rule that Pennsylvania acted illegally in changing voting laws without legislative action. This would cancel out all votes in Pennsylvania that were received after the close of Election Day.

He also said the constitutional question of whether state legislatures can choose electors after Election Day –- the Constitution gives them that responsibility before –- has not been answered. The way he explained it, if a state legislature decides fraud and/or error has occurred to a level that they must choose new electors, then it becomes “the key constitutional question” for the Supreme Court as to whether the legislature can do this. So that adds another level of complication.

One thing we know: we’ve got to abolish or severely limit mail-in voting. There were 100 million mail-in ballots in this election! Ken Starr reminds us that in the year 2000, Jimmy Carter and James Baker's bipartisan commission warned of the huge potential for fraud posed by mail-in voting. In 2008, even Barack Obama agreed that mail-in ballots shouldn't be counted unless they had verified signatures.

But in Starr’s words, “we’re running out of time” with this election because December 14 is the date set for the Electoral College to meet. “It’s going to take extraordinary action by legislatures and so forth.”

On the other hand, there may be more time than that, as the Constitution itself sets just one date, and that is Inauguration Day, January 20. Some legal analysts say the rest of the timetable isn't necessarily firm.

Starr points to the allegations of especially egregious potential fraud in Georgia, and in Wisconsin with the use of unmanned dropboxes in violation of state law. We recently reported these were funded by the Center for Tech and Civic Life, meaning Mark Zuckerberg.

Again, we’ll be praying for Rudy Giuliani to stay healthy and active. At the same time, we know the election challenges are in excellent hands with lead GOP attorney Jenna Ellis. On a related note, we also share Michael Flynn’s hopes for the independent legal efforts of Sidney Powell, whom he calls “America’s guardian angel of justice.”

……………

Addendum: Speaking of Sidney Powell, we’re eager to see the case she makes against Dominion Voting Systems and how it plays out. In the meantime, we don’t quite know what to make of this announcement Friday that involves Smartmatic, the firm that makes software used in Dominion machines, but we think you might be very interested. No accusations yet, just eyebrows raised at more evidence of the George Soros connection.

Mike Huckabee

Our pop culture guru Pat Reeder says he can quote a line from “Gone With The Wind” to fit any situation in life, and his pick for this story is Rhett Butler’s, “You’re like the thief who isn't the least bit sorry he stole, but is terribly, terribly sorry he's going to jail.”

The story is that attorneys for former FBI lawyer Kevin Clinesmith are pleading with a judge not to give him jail time for lying to secure surveillance warrants against Trump 2016 campaign adviser Carter Page. He didn’t mean to do anything wrong; why, he just “cut a corner” because he was “overworked” and “exhausted.” I'm surprised he didn't use the classic DC excuse: “Mistakes were made!” In Washington, mistakes make themselves, and there’s nothing you can do to stop them.

If he was so tired and overworked, then why did he go to the additional effort of editing an email to falsify evidence so that he could obtain an unjustified warrant to spy on an innocent American? Take a look at how the inner circle of anti-Trump agents set up Mike Flynn and tried to railroad him into prison, and tell me with a straight face that if they had been able to find anything on Page with those falsely-obtained warrants that they wouldn’t have tried to slap him behind bars, too.

Clinesmith is facing a potential five years in prison because this is not a minor “oopsy” offense. This is falsifying evidence to deceive the FISA court into violating the rights of a US citizen. And it’s done by someone in a position of trust and authority in the top law enforcement agency of the federal government. He’s hardly the only one who should face serious consequences; he’s just the lowest fall guy on the list.

So I hope that after his lawyers hand the judge all those feeble excuses for why he shouldn’t face serious punishment, that the judge will also quote Rhett Butler and say, “Frankly…I don’t give a d**n.”

Pat Reeder, Staff writer

We are sad to report the passing of two performers who will be very familiar to baby boomers.

Actor Warren Berlinger passed away this past week at 83. He was one of those comic character actors whose name you might not know, but you’d recognize his face anywhere. His stage, TV and movie career stretched across eight decades, starting with his Broadway debut at age 9 in the original cast of “Annie Get Your Gun” in 1947. His friendly, chubby face, regular guy personality and knack for comedy made him a mainstay of sketch and anthology shows such as “Love American Style” and “The Love Boat,” and sitcoms stretching from “The Goldbergs” in 1956 through “That Girl,” “Happy Days,” “Laverne & Shirley,” “Too Close For Comfort,” “Friends” and right up to his last role in Netflix’s “Grace and Frankie.”

It’s also been reported that Abby Dalton died on November 23rd in Los Angeles at 88, following a long illness. While she appeared in many roles, Dalton was best known for playing Julia Cumson on “Falcon Crest” in the 1980s, for her four-year stint as the lower center square on “Hollywood Squares,” and for her 1961 Emmy nomination for Jackie Cooper’s military series, “Hennesey.” She actually starred on that show at the same time she was on the sitcom “The Joey Bishop Show” as Bishop’s wife.

She was in such high demand because of her unusual combination of talents, being both a first-rate comic actress and a gorgeous sex symbol who started out as a model. Men who were young and impressionable in 1957 will surely remember her from Roger Corman’s weirdly-titled B-movie, “The Saga of the Viking Women and Their Voyage to the Waters of the Great Sea Serpent,” while younger readers might remember that from “Mystery Science Theater 3000.”

Both Warren Berlinger and Abby Dalton contributed so much to the entertainment world over the past half century that will be enjoyed for many years to come.

* * *

I would also like to point your attention to a couple of things that I think “Huckabee” newsletter readers will appreciate, if you are as alarmed as I am by the left’s recent push to censor, label and edit movies, TV shows and recordings from bygone eras that don’t adhere to the latest PC standards. I’m a pop culture historian, and like you, I am intelligent enough to watch a movie from many decades ago and see a joke, character or story point that wouldn’t pass muster today without it affecting my personal beliefs.

We can all recognize that these artistic works are a product of their times, just as our ancestors were products of their times but still deserve respect. I assume people will someday look back on the dismal “woke” desecrations of “Star Wars” and “Ghostbusters” and say, “What were they thinking?” But I don’t even want those to be buried; I want them preserved as a warning to future generations never to do that again.

The first thing I want to share is from a YouTuber I enjoy known as “The Critical Drinker” (he does all his videos in the persona of a drunken Scotsman, so a warning about the language). He has many videos that hilariously rip the woke virtue-signaling that’s ruining today’s movies and TV shows, but this is a serious commentary that came out during the BLM boom, when “Gone With The Wind” was taken off of TV. It’s an intelligent and impassioned argument against the “cancel culture” burying, editing and altering older movies to make them “safe” for today’s audiences. It’s called “Why The Past Matters.”

Second, there’s a movie out now called “Mank,” about the great screenwriter Herman Mankiewicz’s work on the script for “Citizen Kane.”

I’m a “Kane” nut, so I enjoyed it, but it’s probably too depressing and inside for most casual moviegoers. Still, there’s a line that resonates widely today and needs to be heard by everyone. MGM head Louis B. Mayer tells this to a new writer:

“This is a business where the buyer gets nothing for his money but a memory. What he bought still belongs to the man who sold it. That’s the real magic of the movies.”

That’s also what’s so dangerous about “cancel culture” as it pertains to altering or censoring older creative works. In an era when so many people rely on streaming for content, and the content owners are so politicized and easily frightened by the Twitter mobs, our cultural past is not safe.

People ask me why my house is filled with books, LPs, CDs, DVDs, film reels, tapes, 45s and hard drives full of files. Because if you don’t own it in a hard copy format, you don’t own it at all. It can be taken away or altered at any time whenever the rights owner decides you shouldn’t see it in its original form. Personally, if I don’t own it, I don’t trust anyone else to preserve it. I don't want my personal memories of these works to be the only thing about them that survives.

And if one of my DVD’s of Disney’s “Song of the South” breaks, no problem. I have two.

Mike Huckabee

From James:

The sentiments of Patti are shared by me as well. The advertising funds for the Senate seats in Georgia have been estimated at $300 million! Most of [this] comes from foreign and out-of-state sources. Why is this allowed?

I too have turned off MSM sources and avoid network programming because of the nauseating political propaganda. There are a few sources on FOX I follow. Outside of the information you provide, there seems to be no honesty, transparency or truth in news outlets. All of this disinformation is designed to create chaos and confusion, which in turn will lead to people no longer having confidence in our democracy.

The challenges by DJT must be heard. People who have sought to corrupt our voting system should be vigorously prosecuted. We are still trying to hold people accountable for their actions in the 2016 election. No action taken to date. Why? If the bad actors are not found and prosecuted for the apparent fraud in the 2020 election, what will happen? What will people do to right the ship?

From the Gov:

You ask a great question about how hundreds of millions of out-of-state dollars can be allowed in a statewide election. The Ted Cruz v. “Beto” O’Rourke contest in Texas was the most expensive in history, and now this one in Georgia looks to eclipse that. It’s really just not right, as the principle of self-determination is being violated when outsiders come into a state like this. (The line going around is that Georgia hasn’t been invaded on this scale since Gen. Sherman marched to the sea.)

Big-time organizers on the left are leading this trend, as when they tried to make “Beto” a senator. (Note to lefties in Hollywood: looking a little like Bobby Kennedy and being on the cover of VANITY FAIR is not enough in Texas to win you a Senate seat.) It's reassuring to know all those millions didn’t work that time, but big money still has to be raised and spent on the right simply as a defensive move.

It’s gotten so out of hand that one has to wonder what might be done about it. But it would take the greatest constitutional scholars we have to come up with any limitation that wouldn’t violate the First Amendment, if that is even possible. So voters will just have to be like those Texans who were wise to outsiders who tried to come in and buy their vote.

From Woodrow (w/slight editing):

What good is a wake-up call if you've got nowhere to go? I am sorry, sir, but Republicans seem more worried about their party than they are about their country.

It makes absolutely no sense, for example, to have a runoff election using the same machines that just defrauded the American public. It makes no sense to refuse to do a forensic audit when so much doubt has been cast on this election.

We have only one shot at this and Republicans are telling us to do this that and the other for the good of the party...Only thing that any one of us should ever be concerned about is the good of our country. As I said on Parler last night, I had thought I was watching the death of the Democrat Party [but] am beginning to wonder if both parties are not in their death throes.

No way in hell am I going to vote for a Republican who sat on his [bleeping] hands while this fight was going on. Enough ranting on my part. I will end by saying it is my sincere belief the Republican Party cutting its own throat by trying to save itself.

From the Gov:

You had me till the last paragraph, Woodrow. No matter how frustrated you are, it makes no sense to help Democrats accomplish their ultimate power-grab. Talk about “releasing the Kraken”! And anybody living in Georgia and getting ready to vote for Senate in January needs to understand one thing: The damage to America --- the very concept of "America" --- if Democrats have both the House and Senate, especially if Biden and Harris win the White House, is incalculable. You know that. Go ahead and rant, but giving up on the Republican Party and helping Democrats set their own power in concrete is exactly what the party of AOC and Kamala Harris wants you to do.

Mike Huckabee

In their latest expose, James O’Keefe’s Project Veritas revealed that they’ve been recording CNN’s conference calls for the past two months, including directives to reporters by CNN president Jeff Zucker. I’m not sure if this actually qualifies as news, though, because I can’t imagine anyone would be surprised to learn that it sounded more like a bunch of unhinged leftists having a dorm room Trump-hate bull session than a phone meeting of professional journalists discussing the news.

We did learn that CNN didn't want to cover the Hunter Biden laptop story (Jake Tapper called it “too disgusting” - at least he didn't call it "icky"), that Zucker thought CNN’s anti-Trump banner headlines were actually too polite, that he compared Trump not conceding to the situation preceding 9/11, and that he urged his staff to “go after Lindsay Graham.” There was also some smearing of Fox News’ Tucker Carlson for “naked racism” and promoting white supremacy by CNN’s general counsel. CNN tried to accuse Carlson of racism for misidentifying the speaker as a black executive, but Carlson pointed out that CNN, perhaps desperate to change the subject, once again got the story wrong. Project Veritas misidentified the speaker, but Carlson didn’t identify him at all. Well, research and accuracy are not CNN’s strong points.

Rather than claim the tapes were fake or doctored or deny what they revealed, CNN expressed outrage at O'Keefe for recording them and threatened legal action for releasing them. I’m strangely reminded of the DNC’s response to the release of all those emails in 2016.

Zucker and CNN should just take a chill pill. I hardly consider it a major revelation to find out that CNN is not a news network but a biased propaganda mouthpiece for the Democratic Party. I would’ve been far more shocked if those tapes had revealed them engaging in actual, objective journalism.

Mike Huckabee

"Who are you gonna believe, me or your own eyes?”

This line from the Marx Brothers movie DUCK SOUP seems appropriate right now, as the mind reels after a day of statements and sworn testimony Tuesday in multiple states, a parade of poll watchers and postal drivers detailing outrageous allegations of ballot manipulation: alteration, duplication, invalidation, segregation and even illegal transportation.

And the media's denial of what we can all see --- that's an abomination.

The reports involve hundreds of thousands of ballots in key states. These witnesses weren’t all Republicans and Trump supporters, either. Some were just people who smelled something fishy and thought they should speak up. Many of the claims came to light through the Thomas More Society’s Amistad Project, an independent investigation of voting and voter registration in several key battleground states.

In one report that seemed like something out of a movie (MISSION IMPOSSIBLE: Help Biden Win!), a U.S. Postal Service subcontractor said he’d been tasked with driving a trailer loaded with somewhere between 144,000 and 288,000 completed mail-in ballots (!) from Bethpage, New York, to Lancaster, Pennsylvania, and that when he finished the run at the USPS depot in Lancaster, the truck “disappeared.” Yep, that’s what the man said.

Perhaps this trailer wasn’t taken by people trying to ditch a truckload of ballots. No, it might’ve been beamed up by space aliens who are studying our supposedly democratic system of voting.

Another subcontractor said he was told the USPS in Wisconsin was gathering over 100,000 late-arriving ballots on the morning of November 4 to backdate them so they’d still count. Yes, that’s hearsay, but he was told this separately by two different postal workers, who might want to consider testifying.

Multiple speakers said there was “widespread malfeasance” by Post Office employees. Besides backdating late ballots, they also ordered that Trump mail be sorted out and placed in the “Undeliverable Bulk Business Mail” bin while emphasizing that mail supporting Biden be delivered on time.

Others described violations of protocol involving Dominion voting machines. (Dominion vendors strike me as having been much too involved in our voting process.) A computer expert said that what they did rendered audits impossible “without direct forensic access to the machines.”

The Amistad group said “whistleblowers found that election officials in mostly Democratic areas manipulated ballots and campaign mail, potentially influencing the outcome. [They] detail the failure of election officials in blue jurisdictions to maintain ballot chain of custody, allowing for the potential infusion of fraudulent ballots.”

Tuesday seemed surreal, as stories such as these were pouring out at the same time the vote in key states was being certified for Biden.

And then Tuesday afternoon, the AP reported that Attorney General Barr had said that “to date, we have not seen fraud on a scale that could have effected a different outcome in the election.”

Rudy Giuliani, speaking for the Trump team, released a statement claiming there was “ample evidence of illegal voting in at least six states, which they have not examined. We have many witnesses swearing under oath they saw crimes being committed in connection with voter fraud. As far as we know, not a single one has been interviewed by the DOJ. The Justice Department also hasn’t audited any voting machines or used their subpoena powers to determine the truth.

But the dependable Catherine Herridge tweeted this: “From a DOJ spokesperson: ‘Some media outlets have incorrectly reported that the Department has concluded its investigation of election fraud and announced an affirmative finding of no fraud in the election. This is not what the Associated Press nor what the Attorney General stated. The Department will continue to receive and vigorously pursue all specific and credible allegations of fraud as expeditiously as possible.’”

By the way, in related news, AG Barr also said that as of October 19, U.S. Attorney John Durham has been appointed SPECIAL COUNSEL in the investigation surrounding the origins of the “Russia” probe. Durham’s work had been slowed by the pandemic and by (yes) additional information he uncovered. This appointment was made specifically to safeguard the probe in case Joe Biden became President. Unlike a U.S. attorney, who can be fired by the President at will and who in that case surely would be, a special counsel can be fired only by the attorney general and for specific reasons that include “misconduct, dereliction of duty, conflict of interest and other violations of Justice Department policy,” which must be documented in writing. Thank you, Mr. Attorney General.

If you’d like more details, RedState.com has plenty about the rules that apply to a special counsel. Very informative if you have the time.

Anyway, with Barr’s seemingly dismissive remark and the constant “gaslighting” from mainstream media and social media, it’s easy to start doubting your own eyes and intuition about what went on. You might feel just like the wife in this scene.

Her husband must work for CNN.

The Trump legal team presses on, filing suit on Tuesday in Wisconsin, claiming that officials there included 221,323 illegal votes in the recount and asking the Wisconsin Supreme Court to order Democrat Gov. Tony Evers to rescind certification until any illegal votes can be removed from the count. “...We know with absolute certainty illegal ballots have unduly influenced the state’s election results,” they said. Details here.

A poll observer told the Michigan state senate that in Detroit, the military ballots she saw looked like “Xerox copies” of the same ballot, all for Biden. That was just one of many concerns there. By now it’s clear that this election was an unholy mess.

And the beat goes on. If you’re into statistical analysis, this piece by Michael Horowitz has more about the outrageous numbers Biden would have had to get to win in Pennsylvania by the margin he did with mail-in ballots.

Here’s more detail on Pennsylvania, with some magnificent commentary by Paul Kengor at the SPECTATOR. Just one particularly suspicious batch of ballots could have flipped the state to Biden.

As for Horowitz, he hasn't made an accusation of fraud at this point. “These are not conclusions or closing arguments,” he says, “but these observations definitely warrant further investigation for one simple reason: The entire premise of having an election with one-third of the ballots cast through mail was built upon an illegal political decision by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, which unilaterally overrode state laws, violating the federal Constitution, which vests state legislatures with the power over election procedures. It also violated the state constitution.”

Horowitz’ next words are so appropriate, I’ll let him sum up: “The suggestion that we should somehow move on from this is a greater threat to democracy than anything in our history. Republicans who think they can just walk away from this without controversy will learn the hard way in the years to come about their inability to win against this novel way of electioneering.”

In other words, believe your own eyes.

Mike Huckabee

Joe Biden named his (potential) White House communications team, and the media are falling all over themselves to praise him for having the first all-female senior White House team. One problem, as White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany (who replaced my daughter, Sarah) points out: President Trump already has an all-female senior White House press team. So does the First Lady. And so does the Second Lady. The press has been barking at them for four years; you’d think they’d have noticed by now that they’re women.

But this is par for the course for our media, who have gone from madly attacking Trump to polishing Biden’s shoes with their tongues in record time. They’re so desperate to come up with positive things to praise him for that they might have set a hilarious new record for fawning. The liberal site The Daily Beast actually ran a story with this headline:

“Joe Biden’s Dogs Have Told This Pet Psychic a Lot About Their Beloved Master, and His Future.”

To triple the hilarity, Instapundit caught a screen grab of that puffiest of puffballs with a pop-up ad over it for subscriptions, urging people to “Support our fearless journalism.” My dogs told me psychically that even they think that’s idiotic.

In a related story, Biden slipped and twisted his ankle Saturday while playing with his dog, Major. My hopes and prayers for a swift recovery. But as Instapundit noted, why didn’t the dog psychic warn him?

Mike Huckabee

Remember when Hollywood liberals and feminists were all riled up about “Me Too” and started the “Time’s Up” movement to fight sexual abuse of women in the workplace? That all went out the window when Joe Biden was nominated, but until that point, they were so worked up that some top name Hollywood celebrities started a charity composed of two groups, the Time’s Up Foundation and Time’s Up Now Inc. They had such luminaries as Reese Witherspoon, Amy Schumer and Brie Larson on their boards, and they quickly went to work raising money to fight sexual predators.

The New York Post reports that in their founding year of 2018, the nonprofit organization raised over $3.6 million. It spent $157,155 on conferences on “gender equity,” which included “a retreat at the Ojai Valley Inn, a luxury resort and spa north of Los Angeles. The retreat was dominated by agents from the Creative Artists Agency, who apparently had difficulty deciding on what the core mission should be.” They also spent $288,000 on advertising, $112,000 on a public relations firm, over $58,000 on travel, and $1.4 million on salaries. That included $342,308 to former WNBA head Lisa Borders, who ran the group for four months before resigning after her adult son was accused of sexual misconduct.

I’ll let you click the link to find out how much they spent on supporting women who made legal claims of sexual harassment. They say their legal defense fund has spent over $1.7 million to help women, but the share of it that the two groups kicked in themselves is less than what Borders was paid for four months’ work.

Apparently, “non-profit” is a very subjective term.

Mike Huckabee

President Trump’s team is continuing to challenge the vote, and I believe in giving him time to make his case, but it does appear that the odds are getting longer, with officials certifying votes and courts throwing out cases. Still, I believe in not reporting news until it’s actually news, so I have held off on commenting on all the speculation over who Joe Biden will name to his Cabinet. But now that Biden is actually giving us some names, it’s worth pointing out that, aside from the media, the reaction is not universal adoration.

So far, what we’ve seen is exactly what many expected: a lot of warmed-over Obama-era failures and entrenched Deep Staters with egos far in excess of their abilities, the very people Trump was referring to when he said that if the Obama Administration hadn’t been so bad, he never wouldn’t gotten near the White House. I already mentioned John “Iran Deal/Logan Act” Kerry being picked as "climate czar" (I think "Secretary of Hot Air" would be more accurate), but here are a few more blasts from the past that could be returning to prominence if Biden becomes President.

Biden is rumored to be considering Michigan Rep. Elissa Slotkin as CIA Director. At least it’s not John Brennan, but here’s what Michigan GOP chair Laura Cox had to say about that pick.

“From her support of the failed Iran Nuclear Deal to her inability to articulate any plans to fight America’s adversaries, Congresswoman Slotkin has proven time and again how grossly unqualified she is to handle foreign policy matters. It comes as no surprise that Joe Biden would consider someone this incompetent for his CIA Director, but I hope for the sake of the American people he has the wherewithal to pass on what would be a disastrous appointment.”

Okay, safe to say that might not be a universally acclaimed choice. But how about his reported pick for head of the Office of Management and Budget, Neera Tanden?

Turns out she has a long history of spreading discredited Russia collusion hoaxes (ironically, she suggested that Russia switched votes to Trump in the 2016 election), and more to the point, a string of Twitter tweets rudely and viciously smearing the very Republican Senators who would have to vote for her to confirm her to the job. A spokesman for Sen. John Cornyn put Tanden’s chances of confirmation at “zero,” while other former top GOP staffers described her nomination as “a funeral” and “a sacrifice to the confirmation gods.”

Biden’s reported choices to lead his national security team, including the Secretaries of State and Defense, went straight from the Obama Administration into a DC consulting firm that doesn’t disclose its clients. The lack of transparency and ethics even drew criticism from leftwing blogs and the New York Times.

Even one of the people he chose to lead his transition team is under fire for being in charge of Los Angeles Metro while it’s under two federal criminal investigations.

I could go on, but you get the picture. He's being slammed for considering failures, liars and crooks, but what else does he have to choose from? Biden isn’t even officially the President-elect, and already the long knives are coming out from both directions. Even if he does become President, it might not be long before he starts feeling the wisdom of the old proverb: “Be careful what you wish for. You might get it.”

Mike Huckabee

The “cancel culture” is coming for guitar hero Eric Clapton, for daring to record a song written by Van Morrison that protests the endless lockdowns that are killing live music and destroying musicians’ livelihoods. He couldn’t be allowed to go around expressing a non-approved opinion, so the Twitter keyboard warriors dug up an old racist comment he made in the 1970s and are using it as a pretext to try to “disappear” him.

The comment was indeed shocking, but he’s apologized for it repeatedly for years, explaining that when he said it, he was out of his head and suicidally addicted to booze and drugs. The left seemed to forgive him, until it suddenly became useful to take it back.

I’d also point out that the song the self-righteous social justice warriors are so outraged over is to raise money to help struggling musicians whose livelihood is being destroyed by their policies. Just by recording it, he’s already done more to help others than they ever will. And I seriously doubt that anyone who already knows Eric Clapton is going to stop listening to his music because some twits on Twitter said to.

Mike Huckabee

Considering that Trump's election challenges have “no evidence” (right), there sure is an explosion of such activity going on around the country. It’s so much, in fact, that we can’t possibly condense and comment on it all. Believe me, you wouldn't want that, and my little staff and I would be in the loony bin if we tried. (They risk ending up there anyway; it's a risk that comes with the job.) Fortunately, THE EPOCH TIMES' homepage has links to most of the updated information, state by state.

https://www.theepochtimes.com

Their news site has done an amazing job of staying on top of all this. The story out of Nevada is one we find of particular interest at the moment.

Nevada Gov. Steve Sisolak is pushing forward with certifying the election for Biden just as District Judge James Russell in Carson City has set an evidentiary hearing for this Thursday, December 3, in a contest-of-election case filed by Trump’s campaign attorneys. Trump attorney Jesse Binnall says he intends to prove that so many fraudulent votes were cast across the state of Nevada that Trump actually won there, not Biden.

Kayleigh McEnany, appearing on Sean Hannity’s TV show Monday evening, talked briefly about this. Part of this lawsuit, she says, is that Trump’s side has been granted discovery, which means they get to depose witnesses. “Democrats have been fighting tooth and nail,” she said, for us not to be able to depose witnesses, not to be able to investigate and ask questions.” One question: if Democrats didn't steal the election in Nevada, what possible objection could they have to this?

It’s not in the EPOCH TIMES story, but what we find especially interesting about this is that the moment Trump's team was granted discovery, ten attorneys from the law firm Perkins Coie magically appeared. These are the same Hillary cronies who hired Fusion GPS and paid for the phony anti-Trump “dossier.”

Most interesting of all, the lead attorney for the group is Hillary's guy Marc Elias, the very lawyer who spent this year going around the country filing lawsuits in key states to make them loosen their election laws! I am not kidding. Democrats are bringing out the big guns in Nevada, and one has to wonder what they're hiding there. Stay tuned.

Mike Huckabee

The federal judge in one of Sidney Powell’s election lawsuits, this one concerning Dominion Voting Systems in Georgia, issued an order Sunday requiring the state to cease and desist wiping or resetting machines.

Shortly afterwards, U.S. District Judge Timothy Batten, Sr., reversed himself.

Oh, but he had a good reason. “The state” was not in possession of the machines. “Plaintiffs’ request fails because the voting equipment that they seek to impound is in the possession of county election officials.”

Got that? The STATE doesn’t have the machines. The COUNTIES have them, and “...plaintiffs have not demonstrated that county election officials are within Defendants’ [the state’s] control.”

Good grief.

Lin Wood, an attorney associated with the Trump campaign, couldn’t believe it. “What???” was his response. He noted that the machines are owned by THE STATE and that Georgia elections are overseen by the Georgia secretary of STATE. This judge used a ridiculous technicality to reverse a completely reasonable order to prevent officials in the state of Georgia from wiping forensic evidence.

The plaintiffs had filed their emergency motion after an election official told a poll worker that ballot-counting machines would be “reset to zero” on Sunday, November 30, prior to the recount. This information was put into an affidavit by the poll worker, a Republican, who had expressed concerns to the official about wiping the machines.

When the poll worker asked the official if the reset would wipe forensic evidence off the machines, he was told, “Atlanta already did it.”

I'll pause while that sinks in.

Georgia Republican Party Chairman David Shafer is fed up. He tweeted, “Our Republican recount monitors at the World Congress Center waited today for four hours while Fulton County election officials ‘updated the software.’”

“Updated the software"?? At the risk of sounding like Lin Wood, WHAT??

In an update late Sunday night, the judge –- I assume because the story got out –- finally did grant a temporary restraining order on election officials in Cobb, Gwinnett and Cherokee counties to prohibit them from “any alteration, destruction or erasure of any software or data on any Dominion voting machines” used in the 2020 elections. He graciously allowed Wood to amend the previous complaint to include COUNTIES in possession of voting machines. But what about Fulton County? Is it true that "Atlanta already did it?"

Here’s the full story at THE EPOCH TIMES.

The NOQ REPORT has this story, too, with an interesting add-on about a Department of Justice plane logging two trips to Toronto, where Dominion Voting Systems is headquartered. After spending three days there, the same plane flew to Atlanta, where it remained on the tarmac for just over an hour. The speculation: the DOJ was picking up hard drives or other equipment to take back to DC for analysis. Hard to believe they’re on the case, but maybe they are, very quietly.

Here’s the original story on those Justice Department flights, which was reported by NOQ on Saturday.

This Georgia story is just one of many unacceptable facts --- repeat, FACTS --- coming to light in the aftermath of Election Day. If you still hesitate to tell friends and acquaintances that you question the results of the election, fearing they’ll think you’re a crank or conspiracy theorist, just have them read the best article we’ve seen that lays out the many reasons for doubt. It’s from the SPECTATOR, by Patrick Basham, “Reasons Why the 2020 Presidential Election is Deeply Troubling.”

Basham is a director of The Democracy Institute and a pollster himself who, after looking at the many anomalies, believes that Trump campaign “is well within its rights to contest the tabulations.” He knows that with the given media narrative and the current political climate, “to say out-loud that you find the results of the presidential 2020 election odd is to invite derision. You must be a crank or conspiracy theorist.”

“Mark me down as a crank, then,” he says.

Perhaps his largest concern is the staggering amount of vote-flation there was. Trump got more votes than any incumbent President ever seeking re-election. He got 11 million more votes than he got in 2016, and somehow still lost. According to exit polls, he grew his support among black voters by 50 percent. He increased his share among Hispanic voters to 35 percent, making it “arithmetically impossible for a Democrat presidential candidate to win Florida, Arizona, Nevada or New Mexico.”

Basham is wondering exactly the same thing we have: where did those thousands of Biden votes that put him over the top COME FROM?? I would stress that if these were fraudulent, every one of them canceled out someone’s legitimate vote for Trump.

Even more to the point, Biden got them in exactly the places he needed to, to win the Rust Belt states that usually go the way of Ohio, which went red big-time this year. Biden got them in the cities of Philadelphia, Detroit, Milwaukee and Atlanta. “He did not receive comparable levels of support among comparable demographic groups in comparable states,” Basham said, “which is highly unusual for the presidential victor.”

Basham goes on to list in bullet points many of the problems we’ve discussed here, such as the suspicious halt to the counting just in those cities (he doesn’t even mention the phony “burst water main” story in Georgia), the statistically abnormal results that coincidentally started when counting resumed, the ejection of Republican poll watchers, destruction of mail-in ballot evidence (which contain signatures that should have been matched), missing USB cards containing thousands of votes, non-resident voters (he mentions the discovery by Matt Braynard that thousands of of Georgia “voters” no longer met residency requirements or were using commercial addresses or boxes as “residence” addresses), and much more.

And when you take a look at the amazing down-ballot sweep for Republicans all across the country, it just doesn’t make sense.

Basham brings up a particularly incredible coincidence: “For...53 batches of votes counted, Biden led Trump by the same exact 50.05 to 49.95 percent margin in every single batch.” What are the odds?

"Whether the cause was simple human error or nefarious activity,” he says, “or a combination, clearly something peculiar happened. If you think that only weirdos have legitimate concerns about these findings and claims, maybe the weirdness lies in you.”

In interviews over the past couple of weeks, Basham has asked the question that if there's really no evidence of fraud and it's crazy to think Biden didn’t really win, what's the harm of taking a closer look and letting the lawsuits play out? Wouldn’t this simply end up confirming that Biden is the real President? Our side would then have to say that we lost fair and square. Isn’t that what Democrats would want? Then the only people still questioning Biden’s win would BE the cranks and conspiracy theorists.

The very fact that courts are trying to squelch efforts to examine what happened on Election Night tells us something that no judge or election official can cover up, no matter how hard he tries.

Mike Huckabee

President Trump, on SUNDAY MORNING FUTURES with Maria Bartiromo, had no problem whatsoever calling Biden’s still-unofficial “win” a big fat case of voter fraud. “Biden didn’t get 80 million votes,” Trump said.

Afterwards, in online “news” stories that sounded like they came straight from the opinion page (the only appropriate place for them), the mainstream media slammed the President for “whining” about “unsubstantiated claims.” Actually, Trump brought up statistical anomalies for which we have no satisfactory explanation. To say that Biden really got the most ACTUAL VOTES in this election –- when he had to outperform Barack Obama to do it and when Republicans swept the down-ballot races –- is, itself, quite unsubstantiated, bordering on impossible.

Bartiromo asked very specific questions that Trump tended to answer much more generally --- to her frustration --- but he’s not in a position to say, for example, when his cases might reach the Supreme Court. In fact, he has no guarantee that any of his cases will even be heard by SCOTUS, though he thinks it will happen. “We should be heard by the Supreme Court,” Trump said. “Something has to be able to get up there; otherwise, what is the Supreme Court?”

"It will take a brave judge or a brave legislature,” he said. He spoke very highly of Rudy Giuliani: “Let me tell you, that guy has guts, ‘cause we had lawyers that were afraid to go forward ‘cause they were threatened, viciously threatened…both psychologically and otherwise.”

"What’s going on --- nobody’s ever seen anything like this.”

And later: “If Republicans allow it [nationwide mail-in voting] to happen, you ‘ll never have another Republican elected in the history of this country, at a Senate level or at a presidential level.”

Ken Starr, who followed President Trump on the show, said the challenge was "translating those allegations and intuitions and the reports into actual admissible evidence in court." He does think the President has a couple of "platforms, so to speak" that he can get heard. But "we're in the fourth quarter," he said.

Mike Huckabee

Providing the FDA approves, 6.4 million doses of Pfizer’s COVID-19 (Chinese) coronavirus vaccine will be shipped to the states by mid-December. Forty million doses are expected to be ready by the end of the year. Moderna is also expected to file for an emergency use authorization for its own vaccine within a few weeks.

And just to clarify for the media: this record-smashing accomplishment was completed under Donald Trump, the President they accused of botching the virus response. It was not developed under Joe Biden. He’s the one who wanted to let people keep flying into the US from Wuhan in the middle of a pandemic to prove we aren’t racist. Science!

Mike Huckabee

In breaking news Wednesday, Pennsylvania Commonwealth Judge Patricia McCullough has ordered state officials not to certify the results of the 2020 election, pending an evidentiary hearing on Friday.

She's not only ordered them to not certify, but also not to take any further steps toward that end. In other words, STOP NOW.

According to the story in THE EPOCH TIMES, this ruling regards a lawsuit brought by “Republican lawmakers and candidates” –- Pennsylvania Rep. Mike Kelly, Republican congressional candidate Sean Parnell, and Pennsylvania House of Representatives candidate Wanda Logan –- against the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, Democrat Gov. Tom Wolf, Secretary of State Kathy Boockvar, and the Pennsylvania General Assembly. The lawsuit concerns “Act 77,” a bipartisan bill that in October of 2019 became law and expanded mail-in voting but that plaintiffs say would have required an amendment to Pennsylvania’s state constitution.

Pennsylvania has its votes counted (perhaps I should use quotation marks around “votes” and “counted”), but a number of steps still need to be carried out before the formal certification can be completed. The plaintiffs maintain there's no need to rush through these to certify the results, as Pennsylvania didn’t certify until December 12 in 2016.

Marc Elias, the Perkins Coie attorney who went from state to state in the months before this election, filing lawsuits and persuading officials to (unconstitutionally) loosen up the rules, called this lawsuit “frivolous” and “absolutely shameful.” I’d say that means it’s on the right track.

"It appears that respondents’ actions may have been accelerated in response to the application for emergency relief...in an effort to preclude any remedial action by this court faster than this court was able to evaluate this application for emergency relief and the answers to it,” the plaintiffs wrote.

In other words, it looked as though state officials were pushing ahead even faster so the judge wouldn’t have enough time to figure out what was going on and do anything about it.

Come on, man! That would NEVER happen…

Mike Huckabee

Tuesday, the Dow closed over 30,000 for the first time in history. Again, to clarify for the media: Joe Biden had nothing to do with it, and the stock market isn’t booming because investors think Biden is going to become President. That’s the kind of data you get from liberal economists like Paul Krugman, who announced on the night Trump was elected that markets would “never” recover, and who assured us just last March that we were headed into a “permanent recession.”

FYI: One of my writers told me he opened a little day-trading account shortly after Krugman's warning last spring, and bought only stocks that had taken a big dive in industries that Democrats claimed would never recover. As of Wednesday, he says his stocks are up anywhere from 32% to 70.5% in six months or so. It proves you’ll never go wrong betting that leftists don’t know what they’re talking about. Even ones with a Nobel Prize.

Mike Huckabee

Say, remember the name “Hunter Biden”? Those who get their news from mainstream sources or social media probably never heard of him. But he’s Joe Biden’s son whose alleged shady international business dealings, particularly with China, were dismissed by the Democrats and their media stenographers as “Russian disinformation” (to use their favorite phrase) “without evidence.”

Well, while hardly anyone was paying attention, the Senate Finance Committee and the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs looked into some of the latest claims about Hunter from whistleblower Tony Bobulinski. They’ve just issued a supplemental report, and it shows that what Bobulinski gave them was consistent with other evidence they’d gathered showing millions of dollars being transferred from a company linked to China’s communist party to a company associated with Hunter Biden. There are more details here:

If Joe Biden gets into the White House and controls the Department of Justice, there’s no way this will be investigated other than by the Senate, which is reason #10,312 why it’s vitally important for the Republicans to win the two Georgia runoffs and maintain control of the Senate. If not, we might be conducting an experiment to find out whether manure still stinks if you sweep it under the rug.

Mike Huckabee

At this writing, attorney Sidney Powell reportedly intends to file a lawsuit in Georgia on Wednesday. We’re not sure what it’ll cover, but some reports out of Georgia strongly suggest that we still just don’t know the real vote count there. And if this isn’t cleared up, not only is the presidential vote in doubt, but there’s no telling how it will affect the upcoming senatorial run-offs.

As Peter Svab reports in THE EPOCH TIMES, and Dan Bongino discussed in his Tuesday podcast, something very suspicious is going on with thousands of ballots in Georgia.

Bongino knows something about such allegations because in his early days as a Secret Service agent, he had to investigate cases of fraud that led him to discover Post Office boxes being used as residences. Criminals were using them as drop boxes; the Secret Service would stake them out and catch the bad guys.

This same type of falsification appears to have been done on thousands of ballot applications in Georgia, which require a RESIDENTIAL address. Keep in mind that the margin between Biden and Trump, with their “official” count, is less than 13,000 votes.

Matt Braynard, former data and strategy director for Trump’s 2016 campaign, noticed that many addresses on the voter rolls included information that didn’t make sense for the actual locations. So he and his team analyzed just a partial sample of the voter data and saw that thousands of registered voters in Georgia --- who are shown to have actually voted --- might have used addresses of commercial businesses or postal facilities and disguised this by making them look like residential addresses.

Some of these immediately look suspicious: An address that says “Apt. 4928” doesn’t really make sense, as an apartment complex typically doesn’t contain nearly that many units. Others with lower numbers would, of course, blend right in.

On November 22, Braynard tweeted: “Georgia: We have identified over a thousand early/abs votes cast by individuals whose registered addresses are in fact at post offices, UPS, and FedEx locations, willfully disguising the box numbers as ‘Apt,’ ‘Unit,’ etc.”

Whoever did this has broken the law. Georgia election law states that “the residence of any person shall be held to be in that place in which such person’s habitation is fixed, without any intention of removing therefrom.”

WITHOUT ANY INTENTION OF REMOVING THEREFROM. That’s the part that people in other parts of the country intending to “move” to Georgia just to vote Democrat in the run-offs need to consider. Unless they plan to continue living in Georgia for the foreseeable future, they are committing a felony by doing this. And the state of Georgia had better get tough on this or enforce that law, or their election in January will be steamrolled.

According to Georgia state law, anyone who “knowingly gives false information when registering as an elector” can be charged with a felony and imprisoned for up to 10 years or fined up to $100,000.

Braynard found anomalies in Pennsylvania as well. His team was able to contact by phone 1,137 Republican voters in Pennsylvania who requested a ballot but were not shown in state records to have had their ballots received or counted. Nearly 42 percent of those said they had returned their ballots, or thought they had. So, what happened to those ballots?

In Pennsylvania, over 160,000 uncounted mail-in ballots were requested by or in the name of registered Republicans. If we extrapolate from the sample Braynard was able to contact, with nearly 42 precent saying they returned them, that’s many thousands of votes not to have counted. Dr. Steven Miller, mathematics professor at Williams College, has filed a sworn affidavit of his findings, which says:

"I estimate that within a reasonable degree of mathematical certainty (based on the data I received being accurate and a representative sample of the population), the number of the 165,412 mail-in ballots requested by someone other than the registered Republican is at least 37,000, and the number of the 165,412 mail-in ballots requested by registered Republicans and returned but NOT COUNTED [emphasis mine] is at least 38, 910.”

Here are Dr. Miller’s findings from Pennsylvania with his detailed analysis, as presented in the affidavit.

But back to Georgia. Braynard’s survey concluded that in Georgia, a similar percentage of Republicans they contacted who'd requested mail-in ballots said they returned them: 44 percent.

As we reported, Georgia attorney Lin Wood got a major smack-down from Judge Steven Grimberg when he attempted to stop the certification of the state vote count. He was suing as an individual voter and campaign donor (not sure why), not acting as an attorney for the Trump campaign, and Judge Grimberg ruled that he lacked standing. So Wood has filed an appeal with the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals seeking an emergency review of that decision.

In a lawsuit against the Georgia secretary of state and other state officials, Wood is making an argument that Alan Dershowitz says has merit: the fact that state officials do not have the authority to change the rules for counting absentee ballots, because under the U.S. Constitution, state legislatures must do that.

State officials did this regarding the process for verifying signatures, without authorization from the Georgia Legislature. I believe Wood still has the same judge on this one, though, so don’t hold your breath.

Wood also had State Farm Arena, where votes were being counted, served with a subpoena seeking video footage of the counting process during and after the election. Recall that officials claimed the vote count there had to be halted for several hours because of a burst water pipe, which turned out to be a mere dribble. So, what were they doing in there for all that time the count was stopped?

Here’s more of an overview of what’s going on in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and, especially, Georgia.

Trump’s campaign has requested a machine recount in Georgia, which he’s entitled to do in such a close race. They’re also looking at a Petition to Challenge the election based, we surmise, on the suspicious registration applications detailed above, the ones that appear to be from non-residential addresses. There were approximately 1 million new voter registrations between November 2018 and 2020. Absentee votes cast totaled 1,322,529.

Even though the Georgia secretary of state has certified the results, Trump still has five days from that point to file such a petition.

According to RedState.com, there is anecdotal evidence --- not yet verified but certainly being checked out --- that numerous commercial mail-drop businesses had exhausted their supply of mailboxes as of this September and October. So the campaign is likely cross-referencing the street addresses of these commercial businesses with the addresses on voter registration applications to see if this was part of a scheme to inflate the Democrat vote.

Of course, just because leftists are openly encouraging people to “move” to Georgia to vote in the senatorial run-offs doesn’t mean Democrats would EVER have falsified their addresses there to vote against Trump. Certainly not! Win or lose, if Trump’s election challenge uncovers this kind of rot, it should be considered a public service to America.

Mike Huckabee

A new Harvard CAPS-Harris poll of registered voters found that a sizable majority of Americans want divided government. Fifty-six percent said they want Republicans to maintain control of the Senate, while only 44 percent want Democrats to control the White House and both Houses of Congress.

That’s hardly surprising, given the radical agenda that the Dems have promised to ram down our throats with the tiniest of margins if they win the two upcoming Georgia Senate runoff elections. That would tie the Senate 50-50 and allow a Vice President Kamala Harris (who fell to the left of socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders in one ranking) to cast tie-breaking votes.

Incidentally, I keep hearing that the polls in Georgia are about neck-and-neck, yet overall, Americans want the Republicans to win those seats by a margin of 12 points. Are Georgians really that out of step with the rest of America, or are the polls wrong again, or is this just another one of those 2020 election statistical mysteries for which there is simply no explanation?

Mike Huckabee

It didn’t require a multinational voting machine conspiracy to swing votes away from Trump and towards Biden and the Democrats, though it might turn out there was one. There are other ways in which we KNOW some strings were pulled. Some of these were legal; some were not.

Monday on Tucker Carlson’s FOX NEWS show, research psychologist and author Dr. Robert Epstein showed that, after gathering voluminous data on the 2020 election, he can conclude “Google’s search results were strongly biased in favor of liberals and Democrats.” (They did not find this to be the case for Yahoo or Bing.) The bias was shown with almost every demographic group; interestingly, conservatives saw more liberal bias in response to their searches than liberals did.

They also found what Dr. Epstein called a “smoking gun”: over a period of days, the vote reminder on Google’s home page was sent ONLY to liberals. “Not one of our conservative field agents received a vote reminder during those days,” he said.

On the fourth day, they went public with these findings, and Google “backed off,” he said. “They literally shut off that manipulation that night, and so for four days before the election they were showing vote reminders to everyone, finally.”

Apparently it pays to notice such things and bring them to light. Otherwise, social media will go right on doing whatever they want --- and getting away with it.

Dr. Epstein said the manipulations they’ve quantified from this election had the potential to shift at least 6 million votes, easily, “in just one direction,” and you know which direction he means. “That’s the bare minimum of at this point,” he said. It’s also greater than the margin between Biden and Trump. Dr. Epstein said that because they have so much data, they haven’t even begun to estimate the possible maximum effect. Thanks, Google!

Oh, and I should mention that Dr. Epstein is NOT a Trump supporter; he deserves points for objectivity. He’s heard from whistleblowers for over a year that this has gone on at Google for some time, and he's seen leaked videos and documents attesting to it as well. “There’s no question that they set about after the 2016 election to make sure that President Trump...is not re-elected." The data they’ve collected, he said, is consistent with what the whistleblowers and leaks have said for a long time.

How is this done? Dr. Epstein alleged that “Google literally buys candidates and politicians, and my colleagues, my fellow academics, are often bought by Google with large grants...The fact is, if you’re a Democrat or you’re a liberal, you LIKE what Google and, to some extent, these other tech companies are doing. It’s to your advantage.”

The problem, he said, is that we don’t know who Google is going to be supporting tomorrow. On this one point, I beg to differ; the fact that they currently support someone like Biden and the leftist machine behind him and Harris is very much the problem NOW. I hope one day soon he sees that.

He also pointed out that Google works with the Chinese government “to help surveil and control the Chinese population.” When Google first came into existence, its motto was “Don’t be evil.” What happened, Google?

Dr. Epstein is currently seeking funding to continue this research as his group moves to Georgia and monitors the senatorial run-offs. There could hardly be anything more important than that.

Guest Sharyl Attkisson also spoke about Big Tech, how it “moved into the internet in a way we haven’t seen before, in a very overt way in those weeks before the election,” to try to control the “information landscape,” as she described it.

As one example, she said Google announced after the coronavirus hit that they would direct searches to the World Health Organization, which in reality was giving out false information. She also related how, as we got closer to the election, they started “overtly censoring and taking down accounts,” de-platforming people and even media organizations, as they did with the NEW YORK POST Hunter Biden story. And they knew there would be no repercussions.

She didn’t see how to stop this before the Georgia runoffs in January, but said we have “a lot of strong, technical minds" looking for ways in which "information can be disseminated without being curated by these self-appointed parties who have their own conflicts of interest.”

So she's optimistic. “I do think something new will be born of all this,” she said. We shall see; I think we’ve got a big fight ahead, one we MUST fight if we want to take back the control being exerted over us.

And now to Facebook. Ken Blackwell for CNS NEWS has a commentary on how the election was hijacked in what he calls “a masterpiece of electoral larceny involving Big Tech oligarchs, activists, and government officials who prioritize partisanship over patriotism.”

Blackwell says they planned this well in advance and executed it ruthlessly, by exploiting the pandemic and also by going state-by-state and getting laws changed (unconstitutionally) to make it easier to weaken the integrity of the vote.

His piece details the activities of former Obama campaign manager and senior adviser David Plouffe, starting in 2017 when he went to work leading the policy and advocacy initiative of the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, an organization established by Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan.

Plouffe published a book called –- I am not kidding –- A CITIZEN’S GUIDE FOR DEFEATING DONALD TRUMP. This offered a “roadmap” for a Biden win, turning out voters “block by block” in key Democrat strongholds in swing states.

Guess where these are. The examples Blackwell gives are Minneapolis, Philadelphia, Detroit and Milwaukee.

Investigators and attorneys for the nonpartisan Thomas More Society have been “following the money” for 18 months. “Under the pretext of assisting election officials conduct ‘safe and secure’ elections in the age of COVID-19, Blackwell wrote, “Zuckerberg donated $400 million...to non-profit organizations founded and run by left-wing activists.” The Center for Tech and Civic Life (CTCL), whose prior yearly budgets averaged less than $1 million per year, got most of it, $350 million. The CTCL distributed these funds to left-leaning counties in battleground states, in large part to those areas identified by Plouffe. Blackwell estimates this level of spending could have translated into hundreds of thousands of votes in Philadelphia alone.

Take a look at the CTCL website. I can't wait to read "Cybersecurity for Election Officials."

Here’s the kicker: Zuckerberg and the CTCL wrote detailed conditions into their grants, including rules for exactly how elections were to be conducted, “down to the number of ballot drop boxes and polling places.”

The lawyers who tried to stop this before Election Day had their lawsuits dismissed because they’d not yet been able to show harm. Of course they hadn't --- the election hadn’t happened yet!

Blackwell’s piece is a must-read, but one caution: You are going to get very, very angry, particularly with Zuckerberg and the other Big Tech billionaires pulling the strings in this world of 2020. And it’s going to make you doubt the election results even more than you already do.

Mike Huckabee

The elections were almost 3 weeks ago and votes are still being counted and ballots are turning up that are just being “found.” American Idol can tabulate 100 million ballots in an hour on a live show, but we can’t get the votes straight in all 50 states in 3 weeks? You know what no one is talking about? Florida. Remember back in 2000 when the national joke was the hanging chads? Let’s give some credit where credit is due. Florida’s governor at the time was Jeb Bush, and to his credit, he realized what a national embarrassment that election was for Florida and he worked with the legislature and county election officials across Florida and created one of the most efficient, safe, and trusted election systems in the nation. On election night this year, Florida quickly and efficiently counted millions of votes across 2 time zones without a bit of controversy and was able to announce undisputed results early in the evening. So the reforms that Florida enacted in the wake of the disastrous 2000 election are a model. If the next President, whether Donald Trump retains the office or Joe Biden is sworn in ought to appoint Jeb Bush to lead a national ballot integrity initiative that will propose ways to regain the trust of the American public that their votes are being counted properly and only the votes of legal and properly registered voters are counted.

If we can’t do that, then we have 2 choices: Either contract the producers of American Idol to do it, or just officially announce that we are no longer a free nation where we elect our leaders, but a dictatorship with make-believe elections to humor the masses, but to ignore their will.

In the meantime, we will observe Thanksgiving this week and there are plenty of turkeys this year! I’m not even talking about the bird, but the elected officials around the country who are telling us not to have Thanksgiving with our families for fear of Covid. I’m very careful about the virus—probably more than you would believe. I wear my mask, wash, sanitize, socially distance, and don’t shake hands, but elbow bump instead. But fear will not be my driving force when it comes to my family at Thanksgiving. It’s especially offensive when the politicians impose on us rules they don’t follow themselves. CA Governor Gavin Newsom issued orders for CA citizens not to eat out, but he did because he thinks he’s better than the little people he orders around. It’s not unlike Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot who prohibited the people of her city from getting haircuts, but she got one because she said she had to make public appearances. Nancy Pelosi also visited a salon without a mask—a salon that was closed to the public was opened up just for her. And just this week, Senator Diane Feinstein was seen going into a hearing room not wearing the magic mask that everyone else in the Capitol is required to wear.

Bottom line—the elections are frustrating enough, but we need to worry about the kind of people who are getting elected and who think it’s their job to tell us how to live, but who ignore the rules imposed on the rest of us.

Maybe the reason some of the elections are so messed up is because the officials running them also think that it’s their job to force us to live in a way they have no intention of living. So, sure, be careful this Thanksgiving, but the purpose of Thanksgiving is to thank God for our freedom. And there’s a reason it’s not celebrated in North Korea or China. And I don’t want to be like them.

Mike Huckabee

Sunday marked the 57th anniversary of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963. For those of us who are old enough to have lived through seeing the assassination of a President unfolding on live television, it will forever be seared into our memories. Not until 9/11 was there such a traumatic moment that affected the entire nation.

That’s one of many reasons why some of us find it so shocking and appalling that loose talk of assassinating a President you don’t like has become commonplace. It’s just one of many examples of how woeful the younger generations’ history education has become.

There have been many distorted conspiracy theories about JFK’s death that have supplanted the real history, and in recent years, they’ve taken a new twist as political partisans have tried to rewrite the truth about that dark day to throw shade on their contemporary political rivals. For instance, on the 50th anniversary, liberal media outlets like the Washington Post tried to link the Tea Party with the “right-wing extremism” of the ‘60s to imply they would have killed JFK if they’d been around back then. I wouldn’t be surprised to find similar attacks on Trump supporters, if I felt like digging through the muck to look for them. So let me just give you a quick history lesson:

For years, Dallas was unfairly painted by the left as a “city of hate” because JFK was killed there. Yes, there were some nasty anti-JFK ads in the local media (imagine that during a campaign year!) But in fact, the streets of Dallas were jammed with hundreds of cheering well-wishers who turned out just to see the President drive past. That’s why the FBI had so many photos to analyze: because there were so many people who came out to get a picture.

Lee Harvey Oswald was not a Dallasite, or even a Texan, and certainly not a right-winger. He was born in New Orleans and had only recently moved to Dallas. He was also a genuine, card-carrying communist who admired Castro and Cuba and had actually defected and lived in the Soviet Union for three years. He hated JFK for his anti-communist policies.

He was also known to be a rude, arrogant, communist loser who couldn’t hold a job and was always arguing with people and getting into fights. I could make an argument that he sounds more like an Antifa member than a Tea Partier or Trump supporter. But I won’t.

The anniversary of the JFK assassination should be a time for reflection on a tragic event that affected the world and all Americans. It should also be a time for reflection on what horrors can take place when people let their political passions overrun their sense of basic human decency.

Mike Huckabee

Attorney Sidney Powell made a statement to the Wall Street Journal about the report that she was not part of Trump’s campaign legal team, but it still doesn’t clarify exactly what happened. It reads, "I agree with the statement today. I will represent #WeThePeople and seek the Truth. I intend to expose all the fraud and let the chips fall where they may. We will not allow the foundations of this great Republic to be destroyed by abject fraud."

After Georgia certified its vote results, the Trump campaign announced Saturday that it wants a recount that includes signature matching, to insure that the ballots that were counted and recounted are legitimate. Since Biden’s current lead is only 12,670 votes out of more than 5 million cast, or less than 0.5%, Trump has a legal right to request a recount after certification.

Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski has become one of the few prominent GOP political figures to call on President Trump to begin the transition to a Biden Administration.

Fact To Bear In Mind: I’m starting to see op-eds pop up in liberal outlets, praising Al Gore for selflessly putting the good of America first by conceding to George W. Bush in 2000. What they’re not mentioning is that he only did that after exhausting all possible legal options, and the date that he conceded was December 13th. If Trump hasn’t either prevailed or conceded by December 13th (nearly three weeks from now), then you can compare him to Al Gore.

Mike Huckabee

Happy Thanksgiving week, and I hope you don’t live in a state where the government wants to arrest you for buying a turkey that feeds more than six people.

With all the other things in the news, a very important anniversary is not getting the attention it deserves. This year marks the 400th anniversary of the arrival of the Pilgrims in the New World aboard the Mayflower in 1620. A lot of people are poisoning our children’s minds with lies about their nation’s history and trying to convince them that America was founded on nothing but racism, slavery and genocide. They are an even better argument for home-schooling than COVID-19.

Arkansas Tom Cotton has a terrific article at the link about the importance of this date and the Pilgrims, and the truly great and real American traditions that first appeared in that small colony of people seeking the freedom to express their religious beliefs without fear of government oppression.

John Adams called the Pilgrims’ arrival and their organizing document, the Mayflower Compact, the “birth-day of your nation.” Sen. Cotton writes, “In this covenant, the ship’s passengers agreed to form a ‘civil body politic’ of ‘just and equal laws’ based on the consent of the governed and dedicated to the ‘Glory of God’ and the ‘general good of the colony.’ Immediately after signing the compact, the signatories conducted a democratic election to choose their first governor.”

No wonder schools don't want kids to be taught that anymore! Read the whole thing. It will remind you of a whole lot of things that all Americans have to be thankful for, and that a lot of people would like us to forget about.

Speaking of 1620, National Review has a great article about an important new book, “1620: A Critical Response to the 1619 Project.” It’s a well-deserved deconstruction of the New York Times’ awful “1619 Project” that falsely recasts America’s founding as being about nothing but enforcing and preserving slavery and that some schools are now teaching as part of their curriculum (see my recommendation of home-schooling, above.)

Mike Huckabee

While the presidential race is spinning into surreal territory, the down ballot races are getting less attention, but they carry serious national implications as well. For instance, there was the “blue wave” that didn’t appear (Republicans were supposed to lose House seats, not retain and flip so many that they came close to retaking the majority, which AOC apparently thought they did.)

Another monumental story that’s been largely overlooked was the election results for state legislatures, where redistricting lines will be drawn that will shape the House for the next decade. Democrats were salivating over grabbing that power, but Nate Silver at FiveThirtyEight.com points out that not only did Democrats not flip a single state legislative chamber, Republicans shocked them by flipping both the House and Senate in New Hampshire. Now Republicans have a huge advantage over redistricting. He wrote:

“Republicans are set to control the redistricting of 188 congressional seats — or 43 percent of the entire House of Representatives. By contrast, Democrats will control the redistricting of, at most, 73 seats, or 17 percent.”

Of course, legislators aren’t supposed to draw districts to their parties’ advantage, but it happens. That’s how we get Congressional districts that look like a chalk outline drawn around a dead centipede. When Republicans do it, it’s called “gerrymandering,” and when Democrats do it, it’s called “fairness.”

Mike Huckabee

Another big election story that didn’t pan out was “Texas turning blue.” At the link, “Beto” O’Rourke writes about what Democrats learned from this race and why Texans didn’t fall for what they were selling (my terminology.

As usual with liberals, he misses the point again and again. Whenever the left loses, it’s always because their “messaging” wasn’t effective enough. Having billions of dollars in both paid advertising and free friendly media to promote their economic and social policies just wasn’t enough to overcome the lies of the Republicans playing upon the fears of the poor, uneducated voters (quite a ringing endorsement for public schools, by the way.)

He cites as examples “lies” like “Biden will kill your oil and gas jobs” and “Biden will close down the economy” (two things Biden specifically said he would do, before looking at the polls and backtracking furiously.) He forgot, “Hell, yes,” the Democrats will take away your guns, which is what he famously said. I’m sure that played well in Texas.

He almost came close to getting it right when he said the national party had ignored Texas border districts and were shocked when Trump got such a high percentage of the vote there. But he misreads the reason. It’s not because the Democrats didn’t put in enough ads or outreach or canvassing. It’s because, as always, they assumed racial groups think monolithically, not as individuals. Latinos living along the border are on the front lines of suffering the negative effects of illegal immigration, including drugs and gang violence. Why would they vote for the “open borders/defund the police” party?

You’ve heard the saying, “When you ‘assume,’ you make an ‘ass’ of ‘u’ and ‘me’”? That was part of the Democrats’ problem in Texas. They assumed that all Latinos think alike and their votes belong to the Democrats by divine right. But in Texas, most Latinos are hard-working, God-fearing, law-abiding, church-going, patriotic, pro-family and pro-life. It’s not that they didn’t hear the Democrats’ message, they heard it loud and clear, found it terrifyingly radical, and rejected it. No amount of slick ads could put enough lipstick on the pig the Dems were trying to sell them.

And if you insist on putting people into categories, at least get the category right. Texas Latinos have their own proud heritage dating back to before Texas was a republic. It’s called Tejano, not Latino, and certainly not the annoying PC invention, “Latinx.” The Democrats’ leftist policies went over with them about as well as they did with Cubans in Florida.

One of my writers who lives in suburban Dallas provided a perfect example. He said the person he knows who is most adamantly opposed to illegal immigration is a lady who moved here with her husband from Mexico City. It infuriates her when illegal aliens come to them for jobs in their construction company, assuming she’ll hire them because she’s Mexican. She said she and her husband followed the laws, waited their turn, studied, took tests, paid fees and swore an oath to become Americans. She considers it an affront to her beloved adopted homeland for people to break its laws and demand the same rights they worked so hard to earn. What would the “one-size-fits-all” identity politics left make of her?

While it’s sadly true that the Democrats are making inroads in Texas, many Texans are seeing what allowing them to take over the big cities has led to and are recoiling in horror. Leftists have taken over Austin, and between the homelessness, trash, defunding the police and huge spike in violent crime, they’re turning the city’s motto from “Keep Austin Weird” to “Make Austin Unlivable.” The biggest problem Democrats have in selling their policies is not that their messaging isn’t effective enough; it’s that their policies are disastrous and anything they gain full control over, they destroy. Their biggest opponent isn't Republicans, it's reality.

“Beto” is right about one thing. He said: “People are smart. They smell a focus group-tested message, talking points derived from polls, a campaign driven by consultants, from a mile away.”

But their real problem is that there are also a lot of things about leftwing governance that people can smell from a mile away.

Mike Huckabee

There’s seldom been a sharper divide in America over the views of an election. Trump’s people claim he really won in a landslide and was cheated by massive vote fraud. The Democrats and the media brush that off as crazy, unfounded conspiracy talk and irresponsible, un-American rhetoric that undermines faith in a free and fair election.

I’m deliberately not taking a side on issues that I don’t know the truth about. I made my view clear early on, and caught flak for it, in calling on Joe Biden and the Democrats to simply agree to work in a bipartisan fashion to audit the vote to reassure voters that they could trust the results. If there was nothing amiss, then they should be eager to prove it, dispel the suspicions and move on.

Instead, the accusations have devolved lower every day (“You’re crazy!”/”You’re a thief!”), and a new poll shows how corrosive this has already been. A recent Rasmussen survey found that 59% of Americans think mail-in ballots will lead to more voter fraud (that’s 86% of Republicans and even 36% of Democrats.) Now, a new Rasmussen survey of likely voters finds that 61% think Trump should concede to Biden. That includes 84% of Democrats, 59% of Independents and 37% of Republicans.

But here’s the weird part: even though 61% think Trump should concede, 47% think it’s likely Democrats stole votes or destroyed Trump ballots to win, while 50% disagree. That means that not only do nearly half of voters not trust the election results, but as many as 14% apparently believe or suspect the election was stolen, but Trump should concede anyway.

Democrats are rushing to blame this apparent loss of faith in elections on Trump refusing to concede and making wild accusations of fraud and conspiracy. But they’re conveniently overlooking their own part in preparing the ground by spending four years making wild, unsubstantiated claims that the 2016 election was rigged by Russia and that Trump is an “illegitimate” President. They even made a party leader and celebrity out of Stacy Abrams, who has yet to concede her loss in Georgia in 2018. She’s currently leading their drive to win Georgia’s two Senate seats, even as prominent Democrats openly call for liberals to move temporarily to Georgia and commit voter fraud by voting in the runoff.

It’s not healthy for this nation to have so many people start to believe – whether that belief is accurate or not – that they can’t trust our election process. It’s like ignoring a crack in your home’s foundation. Restoring their trust is going to take both parties working to pass bipartisan reform to make our elections more secure. One top priority should be an end to the push to simply mail ballots to every name on unvetted, out-of-date voter lists, which even 39% of Democrats see as an open door to vote fraud. That’s how we treat junk mail, and ballots are not junk.

Unfortunately, as Arizona Rep. Debbie Lesko points out, the House is already poised to do the exact opposite if the Democrats win the Senate. They will ram through HR 1, a bill that federalizes election laws to remove most safeguards, including banning voter ID laws and legalizing ballot harvesting. This is why it’s so vital that the Republicans win those Georgia seats so the Senate can put the brakes on incredibly irresponsible bills like these.

Now is the time to tighten election security and reassure Americans that the system works, not undermine their trust even more. Anyone who would fight even the most basic, common sense laws to insure that every vote is secure and legal is signaling a lack of concern for the disenfranchisement of legal voters and prioritizing the pursuit of their own power over the good of the nation.