Mike Huckabee

As exasperating as the news is that Judge Emmet “Captain Ahab” Sullivan refused to comply with an order by the DC Circuit Court of Appeals and drop the case against Michael Flynn, it’s hardly unexpected. After all, the original Captain Ahab just kept pursuing his great white whale until (spoiler alert!) it finally dragged him down to his watery grave.

The investigation of the attempted coup against the Trump Administration has uncovered widespread misconduct in the FBI and DOJ, including evidence that Flynn was set up, he did nothing wrong and the FBI knew it, and exculpatory evidence that should have been turned over to his attorneys was hidden. The DOJ rightly requested that the case be dropped, which is the prosecutors’ prerogative. But Sullivan, attempting to act as both judge and prosecutor, still refuses, even after being ordered by his superiors to hang it up. He’s clinging to a novel legal theory that if a defendant changes his plea, he can be charged with perjury for making the plea he withdrew (and never mind that we now know Flynn’s initial guilty plea was coerced: after having lost his job, reputation, home and life savings, he was being threatened with having the same done to his son if he didn’t plead guilty.)

It's obvious that there is no real case against Flynn, but Sullivan apparently hopes either to force Trump to pardon Flynn so it can be made into a political issue, or else drag the case out beyond the election in hopes that anti-Flynn conspirator Joe Biden is elected. Then the coup cabal can return to power, kill the investigation into their own misconduct, cover up their crimes and go right back to their unconstitutional abuses of government power against political opponents, just as if Hillary had been elected in 2016.

So now, the case will have to be heard again by the entire DC Circuit Court. If there is any justice remaining in Washington at all, let us pray that the judges quickly dispense with this unfunny farce, release Flynn so that he can get on with the serious legal business of suing the pants off of the people who targeted him, and order that Sullivan be removed from the bench and have to run 15 laps around the courthouse. I know that last part isn’t technically within their constitutional powers, but that hasn’t been much of a factor in this case so far.

Mike Huckabee

Joe Biden unveiled his economic plan in Pennsylvania Thursday. If I had to sum it up in a few words, they would be: “Exactly like Trump, only with a lot more government. And he doesn't really mean it.”

It’s almost funny to see how much “America first” rhetoric Biden has cribbed from Trump, after spending the past three years accusing Trump of being a xenophobic fascist for putting America first. I guess it’s not xenophobic if you don’t really mean it. I have to assume Biden’s talk about bringing back manufacturing jobs from overseas and standing up to China and being “laser-focused on working families” is all banana oil. That’s because he’s done nothing about any of those issues during 42 years in government, the last eight as veep to a President who scoffed that Trump would need a magic wand to bring back manufacturing jobs. Also, Biden mocked Trump for suggesting that China was our adversary. And frankly, I don’t think he can laser-focus on anything these days.

What he’s mostly done is take popular buzzwords from Trump, like “bring back American manufacturing jobs,” and parrot them while proposing a lot of big government plans that would actually retard growth. Before the pandemic (from CHINA) knocked down the economy, Trump was standing up to China, renegotiating bad trade deals, bringing manufacturing back to the US and creating real private sector growth, with record low unemployment in all demographics and wages rising for the first time in years.

One of the biggest keys to that was that Trump cut taxes and slashed the onerous regulations that were acting like a boot on the neck of business. Biden now claims he will “stimulate” the economy by having the government spend hundreds of billions of dollars on American goods (with money raised from new high taxes on Americans, who might have spent their money on American goods themselves if they hadn’t had to send it to Washington) and tons more new regulations to pick winners and losers in the markets and punish industries that don’t do what he wants them to do.

Sorry, but I’ve seen those policies, and their lousy results, before. I believe it was during the Obama-Biden Administration. Trump calls his plan, “Keep America Great.” If Joe is looking for a name for his, I’d suggest “The ‘Fool Me Twice, Shame On Me’ Plan.”

Mike Huckabee

In commentaries over the past couple of days, I’ve illustrated how quickly freedom can be lost --- Hong Kong is the current real-life example --- and shown the true nature of the threat our country faces, as we need to know what that is before we can combat it. Turns out, it really is very much like the Chinese Communist Party that clamped down on Hong Kong, with the same Marxist underpinnings as the CCP.

For example, let’s take a look at Black Lives Matter, which has shown itself NOT to be as much about black lives as many thought. Thanks to Tucker Carlson for bringing attention to a CNN interview segment with “America’s Got Talent” host Terry Crews criticizing BLM’s indifference towards black-on-black shootings. Host Don Lemon said this: “The Black Lives Matter movement was started because there was talking about police brutality. If you want an ‘All-Black-Lives-Matter’ movement that talks about gun violence in communities including, you know, black communities, then start that movement with that name, but that’s not what Black Lives Matter is about.”

Never mind that BLM’s campaign to “Defund the Police” has direct bearing on the safety and security of black people in violent neighborhoods. Some black residents of Minneapolis are definitely disenchanted with the attack on police, as they know they NEED COPS. “It’s time to tell the city council that utopia is a bunch of B.S.,” said one violence prevention advocate. “We are not in Mayberry RFD; we are in the wild wild west.”

(By the way, Carlson also aired a very different clip of Lemon from 1991, in which he lamented that “more than 72 percent of children in the African-American community are born out of wedlock --- that means absent fathers. And the studies show that lack of a male role model is an express train right to prison.” He goes on to blame “the hip-hop and rap culture that many of you embrace.” How “un-woke” is that?? This was one of the few times I’ve ever heard Don Lemon make sense, but CNN will have to fire him immediately for his past failure to blame white people for problems in the black community. But I digress.)

Anyway, we’re finding out just what BLM really is about. Since it’s billed as a “grassroots group” and not legally organized, it doesn’t report where its money comes from and how it is spent. But it’s the project of a 501(c)3 promoting “alternative economies” and “climate justice” called Thousand Currents, and, as Carlson pointed out Wednesday, the vice chair for fundraising of Thousand Currents is Susan Rosenberg, a convicted terrorist who spent 16 years in federal prison until she was pardoned by...wait for it...Bill Clinton on his last day in office. (She’d been sentenced to 58 years.) As former NYPD commissioner Bernard Kerik said, Black Lives Matter is “a revolutionary Marxist group...a group that wants to overthrow this country.”

Kerik said the DOJ should be looking into BLM as a terrorist organization, and he’s right. The founders of this group were inspired by a woman who is now in exile in Cuba after assassinating a New Jersey state trooper and being involved in a number of bombings and executions of NYC, New Jersey and San Francisco police. That should tell you all you need to know about BLM.

Such activity has been going on since the 1960s and ‘70s. BLM isn’t the kind of organization that U.S. corporations should be supporting or even paying lip service to. Yet they’ve been so intimidated by “cancel culture” and cries of “institutional racism” that they’ve gone along. But, as Kerik says, “If ‘Black Lives Matter was truly, you know, working for black lives, they’d be marching tonight in Chicago, or Baltimore, or Cleveland, and I can give you 20 other cities.”

Most media will ignore this, of course. In the four months leading up to the next election, we’ll have to work overtime beating back lies from the media, which can be counted on to spout nothing but DNC talking points. The people who suffer from Trump Derangement Syndrome are not going to be cured in the next few months, but we can help inoculate others against the lies.

As for “Republican” officials suffering from TDS and vowing to “burn down” the Republican Party by supporting Democrats, Kurt Schlichter at TOWNHALL has some choice words for them.

"GOP dummies,” he asks them, “what is your excuse? I want to know the thought process by which you slack-jawed nimrods who make up a startling proportion of the Republican Party’s political cadre got the idea that we sent you to Washington to rename army bases and switch-up holidays...You want to be ‘reasonable’ --- stop that!...You simps are staggering into the world’s most obvious ambush.”

It goes on, with a long list of things our elected “Republicans” need to do. We’re going to have to get angry at those do-nothings and communicate our immense displeasure directly to their offices. The Republican rank-and-file have to make their voices heard, now.

Schlichter has a brand new book called THE 21 BIGGEST LIES ABOUT DONALD TRUMP (AND YOU!), and it is fabulous, full of inspiration for the fight ahead.

Schlichter is really funny, especially when you’re in that mood I increasingly find myself in, the one that says “I have had enough!!” So read it, enjoy it, get out your yellow highlighter and study it, and use it to make the case whenever you can for Trump 2020. It’s not enough just to savage the Democrats, although, heaven knows, there’s plenty to be said there, too, and organizations such as Black Lives Matter must be exposed for what they are. But voters need reasons to vote FOR someone. They’ve been lied to nonstop, and it’s up to us to be the antidote for the poison. Some will tune us out, but others won’t. This book looks to be the greatest defense of Donald Trump, warts and all, that anyone will see.

To quote Schlichter from his Introduction: “Lies have always been a part of politics, but today defamation has replaced actual debate. It’s almost quaint to see someone offer a coherent, thoughtful argument instead of spewing a spray of cheesy slander. When was the last time you heard someone provide a detailed, pointed critique of Donald Trump’s policies? Not of his character or his alleged personal failings, but his POLICIES?”

He goes on to point out that this is not what you hear. Instead, you hear lies about what a racist he is. There’s plenty in this book to counter that fake argument, and numerous others.

So we’ve got to get busy these next few months. Take advantage of every opportunity to get involved. With people you know, don’t be intimidated; speak up confidently with facts and reasoned argument. To some, your approach will seem refreshing and, yes, “almost quaint.” Others may call you names, but be like our President and simply decide, with so much at stake, not to CARE. We can’t change most minds, but we can change some, and some is all we need.

......................

Postscript: Georgia Sen. Kelly Loeffler, co-owner of the Atlanta Dream, has refused to bow down to BLM. She's the only owner in any major pro sports league with the courage to call out BLM for what it is, Marxist and divisive. The WNBA players' union is calling for her to be "canceled" (removed). She will not be silenced. Good for her!

Mike Huckabee

This morning, the Supreme Court upheld President Trump’s order protecting the Little Sisters of the Poor from having to provide abortion-causing drugs to workers under their health insurance plan. (For the record: this is an order of Catholic nuns who take a vow of poverty and provide care to terminally ill indigents, so just imagine how shriveled a soul you’d have to have to threaten them with ruinous fines and legal costs just because you love abortion so much.)

The ruling was 7-2, with Chief Justice John Roberts remembering he’s supposed to be a conservative and protect people’s First Amendment rights. Only abortion-rights-above-all Justices Ruth Bader Ginsberg and Sonia Sotomayor dissented from what should have been the most obvious slam-dunk decision possible (“No, the government shouldn’t be able to force the Little Sisters of the Poor to pay for abortion drugs! Are you insane?!”) It will now be up to historians to argue how anyone could have ever thought that was (A.) remotely Constitutional or (B.) not a repulsive and reprehensible idea.

The nuns have already had to fight for years against the government forcing them to violate their most sacred beliefs, and having won that exception, to fight for it again. Just as with the same-sex marriage lawsuits against Christian bakers and florists, losing in court doesn’t stop those bent on destroying religious liberty, they just find some other legal loophole to attack from. Let’s all pray this will settle it for good.

Let’s also pray it will serve as a long-overdue lesson to the SCOTUS to stop throwing bombs into settled moral and Constitutional issues, and then expecting people to go bankrupt fighting endless lawsuits in order to clear up the legal murk that they created.

Mike Huckabee

And in a second ruling that also strikes a blow for religious liberty, the Supreme Court again ruled 7-2 (Ginsberg and Sotomayor dissenting) that religious schools should be free from discrimination lawsuits if they don’t hire people for ministerial positions whose lifestyles conflict with their religious beliefs.

Read the details of both cases at the link. Religious schools were already supposed to be protected from these lawsuits, but again, litigants are searching for ways around those protections and liberal judges in places like California are only too willing to help them do that. This ruling expands that protection to cover less ministerial positions and more types of discrimination lawsuits to help head off all the various ways in which people were trying to use the law to force religious schools to hire people who contradict their beliefs and teachings.

As this article points out, the decision will raise controversy because opponents claim it allows religious organizations to discriminate against employees who are not in fully ministerial positions, such as math teachers. But the alternative is to allow the government to decide which positions in a religious institution qualify as “ministerial,” and that doesn't sound like a job that the government should be doing at all. It sounds instead like a perfect example of what the Founders were banning when they wrote that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.”

YOU MIGHT ALSO LIKE:  Supreme Court rules on abortion-health care fight

Mike Huckabee

Yesterday, I brought you the story of what has happened to the rights of the people of Hong Kong in an attempt to show how quickly it can happen here. Truly, the Democrat Party cares no more about your rights than the Communist Chinese Party cares about Hong Kong’s. As a follow-up today, I’d like to explain a bit about the philosophy we’re up against and the grip it currently has on our media and culture. We have to know about our enemy – and, yes, it is our ENEMY – in order to figure out how to defeat it.

To help me in this, I’ve linked to an excellent piece in THE FEDERALIST by John Andrews, former president of the Colorado Senate (where I’m sure they could use him now) and former vice president of Colorado Christian University.

Andrews is right in seeing “Marxist fingerprints” all over the current mess in our country. The infiltration has been going on for decades. I’m sure it once seemed farfetched to many when the more outspoken conservative commentators, such as Mark Levin, frequently warned of Marxism in America. Today, no one would call that over-the-top. He has always been right about this; it's just more obvious now.

RELATED READING: What do Americans have to lose? Look at Hong Kong...

As Andrews notes, the assumptions underlying Marx have pervaded schools and universities, mass media and popular entertainment, corporate philosophy, medicine, the arts and sciences, even many churches and seminaries. They define today’s Democrat Party as well, “Joe Biden and Nancy Pelosi no less than Bernie Sanders and Barack Obama.” That’s why I said yesterday that it doesn’t matter whose names are on the ticket this fall.

So what are these Marxist assumptions? Well, they certainly don’t spring from the Judeo-Christian values we hold dear, the spiritual connections that enrich our lives. Both Marx and Hegel were materialists, considering all things spiritual to be inconsistent with their way of looking at the world. The idea gives new meaning to Madonna’s song about “living in a material world.” Living in THIS “material world” is a grim, empty way to exist, with no real objective concepts of right and wrong, only what your leaders tell you. But in places such as North Korea, it’s how the people exist. They know nothing else. They are ALLOWED to know nothing else.

Atheists tend to see the world as a random collision of atoms affected by physical forces, so they’re much more likely to “gravitate” (ha) to this way of seeing life. And it’s true that more Americans are atheists today than in previous generations. But it should be stressed that many people who doubt the existence of God have still been exposed in our culture to religious beliefs about right and wrong and understand the value of these concepts in our lives. They love America and dread the thought of our freedoms being taken away just as much as any churchgoer. Some of them may even be induced to start praying for our country, as in the old saying, “There are no atheists in foxholes.”

Still, as Andrews says, “Cultural Marxism is increasingly defining the worldview within which all debates and decision-making take place, even for most of those who rightly fear and despise Marx.” The goal: “deconstructing the American way of life from top to bottom, leaving no sphere of our lives untouched.”

I would add that race is just a pretext for all of this. Create chaos, add heat, mix well, cook until done.

Andrews warns of the three main ways Marxism accomplishes this deconstruction. (If you’ve read George Orwell, especially ANIMAL FARM, you’re ahead of the game. Ironically, Orwell himself was a democratic socialist but an unsparing critic of how Marxist societies worked in practice, particularly under Stalin. Brilliant as he was, it seems he was too much of an idealist to realize in those days that his socialist dream of a classless society and nationalizing everything was not also going to be free.)

Anyway, the first step: dehumanizing of the individual. We’re seeing the Democrat Party doing this with identity politics, which reduces every person to his or her group victimhood or guilt.

Second, demoralizing relationships. In a world with no objective right and wrong, everything boils down to the material; forget such things as personal dignity, family ties and duties, promises, tradition and heritage, even love and life itself. Really, all the things that make us human have no value in such a world.

I would add that if you’ve read Orwell’s “1984,” you know that in such a society, truth itself is meaningless, as the truth is whatever your leaders say it is. (It’s not enough for you to say that 2+2=5; you must truly believe that 2+2=5.) To give a current example, if it’s politically correct for you to believe that, as a white person, you are a racist, but you know you’re not, you will have to undergo sensitivity training and read WHITE FRAGILITY as many times as it takes for you to sincerely believe you are one. If you can’t believe this about yourself and do what is required of you to atone, you will have to be a nonperson.

Third, institutions must fall. The idea of civics and the citizen, with a shared history, is seen as absurd. Look at how it’s being destroyed now, with statues crumbling and history being twisted. Even language has to be controlled, as it’s a shared part of the culture used to communicate and seek truth. We can see that happening today as well.

Importantly, ANIMAL FARM shows that the noble idea that “all animals are equal” inevitably is tweaked into “...but some are more equal than others.” We see this now in the “Black Lives Matter” movement. Try saying that “all lives matter” and see where it gets you. And don’t think that those at the top of the socialist pyramid will ever give up their wealth and control. Rather, they will cast it in stone and make sure no one else gets it.

Why would “educated” young people and “the masses” living in leftist cities ever want this kind of nation? They’ve been brainwashed into thinking capitalism must be overthrown. In their artfully poisoned minds, America must atone with “social justice” for generations of racism and exploitation. America is evil, with an evil history and corrupt values that must be erased for all time. Even seeing an American flag "triggers" them. Trying to reason with a person indoctrinated in this view is like trying to communicate with a cult member. He’s not interested in what you think, only in getting you “woke” or getting you out of the way.

We’ve got people like this expressing themselves quite openly in the House of Representatives. Here’s just one.

I realize that today’s commentary hasn’t exactly been a treat to read, but knowing what we’re dealing with is the first step in developing a plan of action. Many of you have written in frustration to ask, “What can we DO??” Tomorrow morning, we’re going to talk about what we can do. A long-term plan is important, but we’ll focus on the short-term for now, as we have four months to keep leftists from taking over America.

Mike Huckabee

Warning to anyone playing poker with President Trump: Never assume he’s bluffing. Tuesday, Trump officially served notice to the UN and Congress that the United States will withdraw from the World Health Organization, effective one year from today. Of course, that means he’ll need to be reelected because if Biden gets in, the WHO will be only one of many international organizations in thrall to China that will have more sway in the White House than American citizens do.

Trump’s announcement drew the expected condemnations from Democrats, the media and even some Republicans. The general thrust was “It’s outrageous to withdraw from the World Health Organization during a worldwide pandemic!” Going unspoken is the fact that if the WHO hadn’t covered up for China and repeated its lies, there might not even be a worldwide pandemic. As Trump pointed out, we give the WHO $450 million a year while China gives it $40 million and seemingly has total control over it.

I mention the money because opponents will try to claim that withdrawing from the WHO means Trump is turning his back on world health initiatives. No, it means the money that was going to the WHO can instead go to more effective, efficient and honest health organizations. This is the same false argument presented whenever we talk about cutting funding to Planned Parenthood and liberals scream that we’re slashing “women’s health care.” No, the money would instead go to real local medical clinics that actually provide women’s health care, not to those that spend all their money on abortion facilities rather than purchasing a single mammogram machine.

Personally, I second Charlie Kirk’s tweet in that linked article: now that we’ve notified the UN that we’re withdrawing from the WHO, let’s next notify them that we’re withdrawing from the UN.

Mike Huckabee

I hope you had a safe and enjoyable Fourth of July weekend, which means I hope you didn’t turn on the news for the past four days, except to watch President Trump’s speech at Mount Rushmore. Here it is if you missed it, and if so, it’s today’s Must-See. It may be the most important speech of his Administration, and one of the most important of any President.

After weeks of riots, looting, arson, vandalism of national monuments and historic statues, slander of America’s founders, bullying and intimidation of law-abiding citizens and “canceling” of anyone who dares voice an opinion unapproved by the radical left mobs, Trump took to national television to stand up and fight back against leftist fascism and on behalf of America’s great heritage of liberty, justice and government of, by and for the people. In the most memorable line of a stunning speech, he declared that Americans “only bend the knee for God.”

Naturally, the anti-Trump media had a hair-on-fire hissy fit. The New York Times repeated the mischaracterization of his Inaugural speech by claiming that Trump gave a “dark and divisive” speech. The most hilarious bit was their claim that he created a liberal “straw man” by trying to convince us that the left is engaging in violence, rioting and anti-American radicalism. I have to assume that the Times’ reporters haven’t glanced at their own news pages in the past month.

Of course, for the Times, denying reality is par for the course.

Mike Huckabee

Last week, it was reported that a record 4.8 million jobs were added to the economy in June, dropping the unemployment rate back down to 11.1% and bringing the two-month total to nearly 8 million jobs restored since the coronavirus lockdowns began. Even with some states reimposing lockdowns and closures because of a rise in cases, this is more proof that the underlying economy remains strong and is being artificially held down by the virus and the official reactions to it.

Meanwhile, Joe Biden had to dump a big shovel full of gloom and doom on the good news. I won’t bother recounting it all here, but you can read it at the link if you’re not easily inclined to losing your lunch.

A couple of reminders:

(1.) Joe Biden was part of the Administration that turned what should have been a quick economic recovery into an 8-year struggle in economic quicksand; the slowest recovery in history, where people working three part-time jobs were told to get used to it because anemic job creation and below-2% GDP growth were the “new normal.”

(2.) Biden blames Trump’s “bungled” response to the coronavirus for both the job losses and the deaths from the disease. Yet Biden was part of the Democratic crowd that accused Trump of racism and xenophobia when he shut down travel from China (a nation that owns Biden so thoroughly, I wouldn’t be surprised if they have a receipt). They also predicted 2.2 million US deaths and now blame Trump that there are 126,000 deaths, even though most of them were in the Democrat-run states of New York and New Jersey and due to idiotic policies like forcing nursing homes to take in COVID-19 patients. Biden also points to the recent rise in cases, implying that it's due to the economy reopening, conveniently ignoring the massive superspreader events that Democrats not only endorsed but participated in. Finally, how many of those victims might be alive today if Democrats and the media weren’t more interested in badmouthing the now-proven drug hydroxychloroquine to make Trump look bad than in saving patients’ lives?

Mike Huckabee

I hope you’re having a great 4th of July week, but between the celebratory fireworks on one hand and the anti-American political fireworks on the other, let’s take just a moment to reflect on what Independence Day really means and how it led to the freedoms and blessings that far too many Americans fail to appreciate these days.

Most historians (not New York Times writers, but real historians) mark the beginning of America as the signing of the Declaration of Independence on July 4th, 1776. But in truth, there was still a long road to travel before America as we know it came to be. First, of course, there was the matter of fighting a bloody revolution against Great Britain, one where victory was an overwhelming longshot, and win or lose, the leaders risked their lives and fortunes. Victory was followed by more heated battles over what kind of government we would have.

Our Forefathers finally agreed to a blueprint, the Constitution, that wasn’t even introduced until 1789 – over 13 years later. Today, many Americans take those hard-won freedoms very lightly and seem eager to trade them away for false promises of security. Some can’t even name the freedoms guaranteed by the Bill of Rights. Maybe they’d cherish them more if they knew how close they came to not having them at all.

Did you know that the Constitution very nearly got passed without the Bill of Rights? Even some of the wisest of our forefathers thought a Bill of Rights was a dangerous idea. Alexander Hamilton argued that it was risky to list the rights the government couldn’t take away because then, politicians might try to grab any and every power that wasn’t specifically prohibited to them (apparently, the ability to rap wasn’t the only way Hamilton predicted the 21st century). He and many others also felt that a Bill of Rights was unnecessary: since nobody was surrendering their God-given rights by agreeing to the Constitution, there was no need to list them, right? Hamilton wrote, “Why declare that things shall not be done which there is no power to do?”

It’s ironic that Hamilton made that argument. Later on, as the first Treasury Secretary, he cited powers that the Constitution merely implied that the government had in order to take on debt, create a federal bank and impose unpopular taxes. Over a century later, when the federal income tax was passed, some lawmakers wanted to include a 10% limit, but they were voted down. Opponents scoffed that it was absurd to think the government would ever steal as much as 10% of an American’s hard-earned wages. Flash forward just 30 years, and they were happily taxing away 94%. So just imagine how few freedoms we’d have today if they’d listened to Hamilton and decided it wasn’t necessary to put specific limits on government power.

Luckily for us all, Thomas Jefferson won the argument, and the Bill of Rights was added. They even included the 9th amendment, which I’ll bet most people can’t even describe. Here’s what it says:

“The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.”

It means that just because some God-given rights aren’t specifically listed, that doesn’t mean the people cede them to the government. Maybe because so many of the framers were also farmers, they understood that like weeds, government tends to grow and grow, choking out the productive crops -- and like a bull, it will trample you if you don’t corral it.

So if we want to preserve our freedoms, and keep government limited, maybe we should send more farmers to Washington -- and fewer lawyers.

Mike Huckabee

The Democrats tweeted, then deleted, this message. But too late; it was archived.

So this is what we’ve come to in 2020. If you vote for Democrats, you’re voting to put people in charge of a nation whose own history and culture they hate so much that when they hear the patriotic phrase “President to attend 4th of July celebration with fireworks at Mount Rushmore,” what they hear is “President to attend white supremacist rally at sacred land stolen from indigenous peoples.”

I implore you: please have some sympathy for the poor Democrats and don’t curse them by forcing them to hold public office in a nation for which they are seething with hatred and obviously despise most of its people, whom they believe are irredeemable racist deplorables. Encourage them instead to retire to someplace where they would feel much more comfortable, like Cuba or Venezuela.

Mike Huckabee

The number of coronavirus cases is spiking again (let’s see, what might have happened a few weeks ago to spread it that Democratic officials refused to lock down?...) Across America, officials are panicking and reinstating lockdowns and other draconian measures that did more harm than good.

The good news that’s being overlooked is that while testing is finding many more cases than we expected, the number of serious illnesses has dropped sharply. The vast majority of people found to be carrying the virus have mild or no symptoms, and those who are hospitalized are not getting as sick as before and are recovering in greater numbers. We’ve learned more about the disease and found better ways to treat it (and no, having a billion ventilators was NOT the key).

In fact, an Oxford study found that we’ve progressed so far so quickly that a hospitalized COVID-19 patient’s chances of dying are now one-fourth of what they were as recently as April. Of course, that one-in-four deaths is still all the fault of President Trump, while the three-in-four who now live owe nothing whatsoever to the massive public-private team effort he put together to study and battle the disease.

While early computer models were telling us the death rate could be as high as 2% of all who were infected, we’ve since learned that it’s much more widespread and asymptomatic than we first thought. Studies worldwide are finding between 10 and 100 times more infections that we knew, the average being 20 to 25 times more. While media reports are still using outdated, inflated figures, the actual death rate might be as low as 0.26% of those infected.

It’s still a bad disease, and certainly one that we should take all reasonable precautions to avoid. But it may be time to start putting the emphasis on “reasonable” instead of “all.”

Mike Huckabee

Great news: the First Amendment is still in effect, at least in some courtrooms. Friday, a federal judge issued an injunction blocking New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo and New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio from enforcing restrictions on outdoor and indoor gatherings of religious groups that are stricter than those on businesses and other types of gatherings. They'd even put tighter restrictions on religious groups than on businesses and gatherings that were classified as “non-essential,” which ranked religious expression as lower than “non-essential.”

It’s a great victory for religious liberty but what makes it extra sweet is that the judge based his ruling partly on the blatantly biased way that those two Democrats treated the recent street protests over George Floyd and the police.

Judge Gary Sharpe pointed out that Cuomo and DeBlasio not only allowed but endorsed and participated in protests that violated their own restrictions on large gatherings while harshly enforcing those restrictions on religious groups (DeBlasio even spoke at one – with no mask! – at the same time that he was threatening to arrest Jews who gathered in groups of more than ten to worship.) That denied churches, synagogues and other religious groups equal protection under the law.

Some legal experts noted that what they were also doing was establishing an unconstitutional state religion: the religion of secular leftism, which is allowed to flout the rules because the government deems its mission and message to be so much more important than those of traditional religions.

So now that we have an official ruling that secular leftism is a religion, I’m sure the leftists will agree with me that it has to be kicked out of public schools immediately.

Mike Huckabee

Robert Johnson, the founder of Black Entertainment Television (BET) and America’s first black billionaire, has a message for all the virtue-signaling white liberals who are making a big show of their racial wokeness by vandalizing statues of historical figures and getting “The Dukes of Hazzard” taken off TV. And that message is:

Black people are laughing at you!

Johnson calls these overheated white racial warriors (have you seen the video of the entitled young white woman screaming in the faces of two black police officers about how they’re undermining her struggle against racism?) “borderline anarchists” and says their attempts to “cancel” people for thought crimes such as saying that “all lives matter” are "tantamount to rearranging the deck chairs on a racial Titanic. It absolutely means nothing…White Americans seem to think that if they just do sort of emotionally or drastic things that black people are going to say, ‘Oh my God, white people love us because they took down a statue of Stonewall Jackson.’ Frankly, black people don’t give a d**n."

And he thinks the “silliest expression of white privilege” is white celebrities releasing videos of themselves apologizing for being white, and saying, “'Oh, my God, I am so sorry that I am white.’ I don't find any black people getting on Twitter and saying, 'Oh, I'm so sorry I'm black.' And we got the worst problems...My thing is: embrace being white and do the right thing."

Johnson said none of this self-righteous political theater is going to “give a kid whose parents can't afford college money to go to college. It's not going to close the labor gap between what white workers are paid and what black workers are paid. And it's not going to take people off welfare or food stamps.”

Incidentally, I should point out that that’s what he means by “Do the right thing,” not that you should watch the Spike Lee movie instead of “Gone With The Wind” and tweet at length about how woke to your privilege it made you.

Mike Huckabee

Michael Flynn knows firsthand what it’s like when a small group of highly motivated people gets together behind the scenes to “affect change.” He was “changed” right out of the White House.

Lately, he’s applied that wisdom to the country at large and doesn’t like what he sees. Now that he can glimpse the light at the end of his own personal tunnel, he’s raising alarm bells to all Americans who want to continue their way of life. This is no time to be complacent, he says in an op-ed for the WESTERN JOURNAL. If we stand by, it’s not too much to say that America as we know it will be destroyed.

Reading this piece, one can’t help but think that its author would have made such a fine national security adviser. (Who did we end up with after the FBI interfered? John Bolton.) It’s clear that he would be encouraging President Trump right now to set up a tough line of defense. This is a man who loves America while recognizing its flaws --- having almost been done in by them himself --- and who knows how vulnerable our democracy is.

"I believe the attacks being presented to us today are part of a well-orchestrated and well-funded effort that uses racism as its sword to aggravate our battlefield dispositions,” Flynn says. “The weapon is used to leverage and legitimize violence and crime, not to seek or serve the truth.”

Its end goal: the creation of a socialist society. “The very heart and soul of America is at stake,” he warns.

This is a wake-up call for us to face the reality of 2020. Obviously, Flynn sees America right now as a battlefield, and battlefields are something he knows quite a bit about. He understands that a small, highly motivated, and organized group can quickly gain control over a much larger group that isn’t fighting back hard enough. As he puts it, “If we’re not careful, 2 percent of the passionate will control 98 percent of the indifferent 100 percent of the time.”

"Treason and treachery are rampant,” he says, no doubt drawing on personal experience with our own government, “and our rule of law and those law enforcement professionals who uphold our laws are under the gun more than at any time in our nation’s history. This passionate 2 % appears to be winning.” He’s concerned that Americans don’t realize how severe the consequences will be if the “passionate” do win.

Voting is one very important part of this (it’s become a cliché, but in this case, it’s true that no election in our lifetimes has mattered more than this upcoming one.) But Flynn says we have to do more. We have to exhibit the “audacity and resolve” that the small, well-organized, fired-up groups do.

Speaking like a battlefield commander, he makes an intriguing point: that our enemies have vulnerabilities we don’t know about. “I also sense that only a slight push on our part is all that is required to defeat these forces.” Mostly he looks to our law enforcement professionals to hold the line against “the corrupt and the criminal.” They need our support most of all, the support of “our entire being.”

They are NOT the enemy, he says. “They bring light to the darkness of night through their bravery and determination to do their jobs without fanfare and with tremendous sacrifice.” (One might say this is the ultimate example of the enemy of our enemy being our friend.)

He also warns not to be taken in by fake news. Trust your instincts and your common sense to help you see the difference between right and wrong. “Those with courage will always choose the harder right over the easier wrong,” he says. He applies this not only to dealings with our enemies but with our own government, our own “so-called leaders,” the people WE put in charge and can remove as well. Politicians who have been in office too long have “discarded us like old trash,” he says.

Flynn communicates the same strong faith, commitment, and optimism that surely kept the soldiers under his command at their peak in the field. Our goal, he says, “is to remain an unwavering constitutional republic based on a set of Judeo-Christian values and principles.”

"In war, as in life, most failure comes from inaction.”

Reading this, I am angered anew that Michael Flynn was kept from being Trump’s national security adviser, and not just because of the criminal way he was treated. We were shortchanged; we deserved someone of this caliber working for us. Personally, I would love to see him put right back into that job. In the meantime, he has made his position clear, and the President knows, at least in general, the advice he would be giving.

Incidentally, Flynn lawyer Sidney Powell made some news in an interview on “The Vickie McKenna Show” on Madison, Wisconsin, radio by saying one reason Flynn was taken down was that he was prepared to “audit” the U.S. intelligence community. The big fish there: former CIA Director John Brennan.

Now, if you’ve been reading the HUCKABEE newsletter, you already knew that Flynn was planning to do that audit. As Lee Smith reported in his book, THE PLOT AGAINST THE PRESIDENT, Flynn wanted to streamline the Pentagon and the intel community, and that would have involved financial audits and much-needed downsizing. They didn’t like it at all. One area of particular interest was the Office of Net Assessment (ONA), which appeared to be hiring contract people to produce reports of dubious value. Interestingly, one of those contractors was...(yes) Stefan Halper, the very person who would go on to ambush Trump campaign associates as a confidential human source on foreign soil and record their conversations. On the books, he was being paid to “write reports.”

Anyway, there were lots of reasons why Obama’s intel community --- and Obama himself --- did not want Michael Flynn around. Ironically, he thought the CIA was “too political,” and it was the truth of this that ended up taking him down. The idea of his being national security adviser and almost certainly discovering what they'd been up to in the summer of 2016 had to be just too much. That’s why McCabe, Strzok, and the rest HAD to make sure the case against him stayed open and why they had to see him gone baby gone. Look around today and you can see that it was our country’s loss.

Mike Huckabee

I didn’t address this story when it came out on Friday because I have a standard rule: any shocking “blockbuster” anti-Trump story that comes from hostile media outlets such as the New York Times should be allowed to sit and air out for at least 48-72 hours to give the truth a chance to bubble up. Since this story came out on Friday, and it’s now Monday, I guess it’s safe to mention it.

The New York Times, citing its favorite source, “unnamed officials,” “reported” that Russia offered bounties to Taliban-linked militants to kill US troops in Afghanistan to drive the US out of the region, and that the President was briefed on it. Joe Biden, picking up the softball handed to him by the Times, declared:

“The truly shocking revelation that if the Times report is true, and I emphasize that again, is that President Trump, the commander in chief of American troops serving in a dangerous theater of war, has known about this for months, according to the Times, and done worse than nothing.”

Democrats and the media (but I repeat myself) screamed that Trump was guilty of Russian collusion (do they ever get tired of doing that?), and even some top Republicans are demanding an investigation. They really need to learn to count to 100 before taking anything seriously that comes from the New York Times.

So here’s what we know after waiting a couple of days: Russia called the story “fake,” and the Taliban denied there was any truth to it. Neither of those things may cut any ice with you, but Trump also tweeted that the Intelligence agencies reported to him that they did not brief him or the Vice President on this because they didn’t find the info credible (and that was even before they saw it in the New York Times.)

White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany said, “This does not speak to the merit of the alleged intelligence, but to the inaccuracy of the New York Times story erroneously suggesting that President Trump was briefed on this matter.” So she's saying that maybe Russia did offer such a bounty (even a blind squirrel finds a nut occasionally), but the big anti-Trump “bombshell” part of the story was fake news. Unless you believe our intelligence agencies are willing to lie to make it appear that President Trump is NOT colluding with Russia. And if you believe that, you haven’t been paying much attention for the past three years.

In a somewhat related story, there’s a new movie coming out about the time in the 1930s when the New York Times won a Pulitzer Prize for fake stories covering up atrocities committed by Russian tyrant Joseph Stalin, an award they never returned. Now, THAT'S Russian collusion!

Mike Huckabee

Well, it’s taken long enough, but I’m starting to sense a shift in the wind as the “silent majority” are getting sick of staying silent while America-hating jerks smash national monuments.

Immediately after President Trump signed an executive order requiring the enforcement of the federal law against vandalizing public statues and monuments, the Justice Department announced indictments of four men in connection with the attempts to topple the statue of Andrew Jackson in Lafayette Square in Washington.

The DOJ rightly drew a line between lawful protest and vandalism, stating, “This Office remains steadfast in its commitment to protect the sacred First Amendment right of individuals to peacefully protest, but these charges should serve as a warning to those who choose to desecrate the statues and monuments that adorn our nation’s capital: your violent behavior and criminal conduct will not be tolerated.”

I feel fairly certain that the idea of facing consequences for their actions will be a completely new experience for these folks, and one that their parents should have introduced them to long ago. They were among 15 people whose photos were tweeted by Trump and whom the DOJ is searching for. Naturally, some liberal media outlets accused Trump of “inciting violence” by tweeting their wanted posters. Here’s a hint: if you don’t want to be the subject of a federal manhunt, then don’t do things that put your face on wanted posters, like trying to smash national monuments. This seems like one of those “you knew the job was dangerous when you took it” situations.

Trump isn’t the only one who’s fed up with allowing rampant crime and destruction in the streets under the guise of protesting racism. In Oklahoma City, DA David Prater announced charges of terrorism, rioting and assault against protesters who turned violent in May. He said, “This is not Seattle. We’re not putting up with this lawlessness here.”

In Manassas, Virginia, a different kind of protest occurred when hundreds of people turned out for a “back the blue” march to support the police. Participants called it “disgusting” to tar every police officer because of what some bad cops elsewhere did, and said police might need better training or background checks for hiring, but as for “defunding the police, "Who in their right mind would even think that's a good idea…” In fairness, I don’t think being in your right mind has anything to do with that particular movement.

At this point, I guess I should stop and make it clear to those who like to take things out of context and leap to dumb conclusions that none of this is meant in any way to diminish the justifiable anger over the death of George Floyd. Indeed, that was something that people of all races across the political spectrum agreed on. The growing backlash is not against legitimate protesters who have genuine concerns about police behavior toward blacks. It’s against the radical left extremists from groups like Antifa, many of them young white adults from privileged backgrounds who were indoctrinated into socialism and hating America in college, who are exploiting the anger over Floyd’s death as a convenient excuse to attack the foundations of the country and try to eliminate the police.

They not only aren’t helping the black community, they’re actively harming it, and they don’t care. And not just by tarnishing the image of legitimate peaceful protesters. Their riots, arson and looting are destroying black-owned businesses and black people’s jobs, eliminating needed goods and services, and making black neighborhoods less safe by driving police out.

Even Bill Maher sees through this latest form of twisted “white savior” behavior as you can see at this link.

Also, check out the must-see video at that link by Ami Horowitz. He asked white leftists on the street who hate the police and want to abolish them if they think black people in East Harlem would agree with them. Well, of course, they would! So he went to East Harlem and asked black people about that. Their response: they think the white leftists who want to abolish the police are “ignorant” and “full of c**p.” They don’t want to live in the lawless chaos that would exist if there were no police.

And check out this blow-by-blow account of the scene at the attempt to take down the Emancipation memorial (the statue of Lincoln freeing a slave) in Washington. Black history reenactors attempted to tell the screaming activists (most of them white) the history of the statue and why it’s important. But what one young white woman called “disgusting” was the fact that they were expected to respect their elders.

And since there are so many white celebrities speaking for black people (without being asked) and calling for abolishing the police, here’s a celebrity rebuttal: Muhammad Ali Jr. says that his father would have called the people who are smashing shops and police stations, beating up innocent people and terrorizing communities “devils.”

And because I don’t believe in smashing heads to make political points, but I’m not averse to making leftists’ heads explode, I’ll also pass along this quote from The Greatest’s son, which has to represent the ultimate backlash against the past few weeks of anarchy:

“I think Trump’s a good president. My father would have supported him. Trump’s not a racist; he’s for all the people. Democrats are the ones who are racist and not for everybody.”

Mike Huckabee

With the investigation of “Crossfire Hurricane” by U.S. Attorney John Durham looking more serious by the day, it’s obvious what the political cover is now. The memo has gone out to everyone in the Democrat Party and the media (but I repeat myself) to paint Attorney General Bill Barr, who had the gall to appoint Durham in the first place, as a purely political AG. Why, he’s not there to consistently enforce the law of the land; he’s just there to be President Trump’s protector, his lackey, his “wingman,” so to speak. (Wait, no, that was Eric Holder’s self-described role as attorney general for President Obama.)

Rep. Jerrold Nadler, with visions of impeachment still dancing in his head, assisted in this effort last week by bringing in federal prosecutor Aaron Zelinsky to speak to his House Judiciary Committee about Barr’s “interference” last February in the sentencing of Trump campaign associate Roger Stone.

Keep in mind that Zelinksy was a member of Mueller’s get-Trump special counsel team and also used to work under Rod Rosenstein. He was one of four prosecutors who dramatically resigned from the Stone case; in fact, he even chose to leave his position but (big surprise) continues to work with the Justice Department. In an interview for NPR on Thursday, Barr dismissed his testimony as “simply false” and “double hearsay.”

"I was the decision-maker in that case,” he said, “because there was a dispute. And usually what happens is, disputes, especially in high-profile cases, come up to the attorney general.” He said he had not discussed the sentencing with Trump and had already decided to change his recommendation before Trump’s angry tweet. Barr said that Stone “doesn’t deserve a break, but he doesn’t deserve to be...singled out, and treated more harshly than everyone else.”

I’ll point out what few Barr critics have: this was simply a sentencing RECOMMENDATION. Judge Amy Berman Jackson may follow the suggested guidelines or not. So what is the all-fired big deal?

Trump’s political enemies want looooong sentences for his associates because that puts pressure on him to pardon them, and that would unleash a media hysteria to last until Election Day. If this means putting a 67-year-old man behind bars potentially for life (especially if he gets coronavirus in there), so be it.

The narrative from now on will be that Barr is motivated only by the desire to help President Trump. Therefore, everything he does will be examined strictly from that perspective. It doesn’t matter that Stone’s sentence WAS harsh, that invading his home with a SWAT team while CNN cameras rolled WAS an abuse of power, and that the Russia “collusion” story in which he was ensnared WAS a hoax.

But Kimberly Strassel, writing about the Michael Flynn case in the WALL STREET JOURNAL, departs from the chosen media narrative. She points out that the three-judge panel of the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals that ruled on Judge Emmet Sullivan’s rejection of Barr’s decision to drop the case has done something beyond simply rule on the legal merits.

Importantly, the ruling is also a rebuke of the FBI and Robert Mueller’s special counsel team. This isn’t being widely reported, of course, but Strassel says it marks the first time a federal court has acknowledged the misconduct that Barr is trying to bring to light.

Judge Sullivan had bought into the same (debunked) Democratic conspiracy theories the FBI had been using; recall that he flew into a fit and even called Gen. Flynn a “traitor,” right there in the courtroom. So, naturally, he couldn’t let this case go just because the attorney general told him to, choosing instead to call on retired Judge John Gleeson to take on the role of shadow prosecutor.

Strassel makes an important point: that if the circuit court judges had any thought that Sullivan was right about Barr playing political favorites, they could have allowed him to continue fighting that. Instead, they said quite bluntly that there was “no legitimate basis” to question the Justice Department's behavior.

They even went after Judge Gleeson for relying in his amicus brief on “news stories, tweets, and other facts outside the record,” contrasting that with the DOJ’s motion that “includes an extensive discussion of newly discovered evidence casting Flynn’s guilt into doubt.”

They said this “includes evidence of misconduct by the Federal Bureau of Investigation.”

According to Strassel, the DOJ had provided voluminous evidence --- I would add that this is thanks to the determination of Flynn attorney Sidney Powell --- that the FBI had improperly pursued Flynn, kept the investigation open even when it had produced no evidence of wrongdoing, gone after him on the never-used Logan Act when he had acted appropriately, and schemed to trap Flynn into perjury with an interview that had no “legitimate investigative basis.”

Recall that in February of this year, Barr appointed U.S. Attorney Jeff Jensen to review the Flynn case, and four months later, Jensen concluded that dismissal was “the just and proper course.” The appeals court decision was consistent with this.

Former U.S. Attorney Brett Tolman was on FOX & FRIENDS on Friday to offer a similar viewpoint, saying that Flynn was so wronged that he should consider a “Bivens Action” against the Department of Justice and former Obama administration officials. A Bivens Action is the legal remedy to use when one’s rights have been violated by a federal investigator.

"I hope he is looking at it strongly,” Tolman said. I would imagine that at this point, Powell's team is already putting together that lawsuit. Let’s hope they are, and also hope he becomes an extremely wealthy man after losing his career and financial security over this bogus case.

Tolman agreed with Powell’s brief that the newly obtained notes penned by Peter Strzok, which describes the underlying action of Flynn’s phone calls as legitimate, show that stunning exculpatory evidence was withheld from Flynn’s defense.

He described what happened as “an absolute effort --- call it collusion, conspiracy, whatever you want to say --- that now we know goes as high as the Vice President and the President. To not only withhold information about the investigation to the incoming President, but to go after the incoming President through the incoming national security advisor on an investigation that did not have a foundation to it.” The fact that they should still have managed to bring a case should concern everyone, he said.

Tolman dared to voice what we’ve known for a long time: that they were trying to keep Donald Trump out of the Oval Office.

So remember when Barr continues to be accused of politicizing the DOJ, it’s just another example of Democrats accusing others of what they themselves are doing. The attack on Barr is political, and it’s coordinated. It sure seems to me that Barr’s the one trying to get the politics OUT. If his decisions at times help President Trump, perhaps it’s because the President actually has the truth and the law on his side.

Mike Huckabee

If you’re getting demoralized by all the polls showing Joe Biden winning in a landslide, don’t be. That’s the whole point of them. I’ll remind you that at this point in 2016, Hillary was supposedly ahead by 13 points, and I got plenty of eye rolls when I predicted that Trump would win. But if you wonder whether the majority of your fellow Americans have really gone crazy, then this might cheer you up a little.

Reporter Brian Cates reminds us of a number of important factors that the poll takers fail to take into account, such as state organization, ground game and campaign war chests. But the most important one of all is this:

“The Democratic party has openly turned into a party of stark raving lunatics.”

To be fair, I don’t know if the Party leaders are lunatics, or if they’re just pandering to lunatics, but neither one is a very convincing argument for giving them power over your life, your job, your business, your home and your family.

Mike Huckabee

A lot of people are talking about (and I don’t know why) a Yahoo music editor’s article calling for replacing “The Star-Spangled Banner” as America’s National Anthem, possibly with “Imagine” by John Lennon. The excuse is that Francis Scott Key was a slaveholder (he also represented slaves trying to win their freedom in court, pro bono), and that the third verse that is never sung is “blatantly racist” (although his use of the term "slave" has been hotly debated and might mean people pressed into service by the British Navy, oh and by the way, did I mention that it’s NEVER SUNG?

This is hardly the first time anyone’s wanted to replace “The Star-Spangled Banner,” although until now, it’s usually been because it’s so hard to sing (the tune was taken from a drinking song with a high note you practically have to be drunk to attempt to hit.) The choice to replace it was usually Irving Berlin’s “God Bless America,” but we can’t have that now! Referring to God is almost as un-PC as honoring a slaveholder.

But what about “Imagine”? Look, I love the Beatles, but that has to be the most over-praised song of the past century. Even Lennon admitted that it’s basically the Communist Manifesto set to music. Radical leftists love it because it paints a picture of a utopian world without national borders, private property or religion, and Lennon often found himself having to correct their interpretations and reminding them that he wasn’t advocating for those things, he was just suggesting “imagining” that we didn’t have all those differences so we could work together globally.

But people DO have differences, and as experience has taught us, leftist prescriptions, like taking away religious freedom and property rights, do nothing but make them angrier and more likely for those differences to flare into war. Besides, imposing that "utopia" requires an ironfisted oppressive government, which isn’t likely in a world without borders. If the song has a dreamlike quality, that’s because it is a dream. A pipe dream.

Besides, if we had to do away with every song because the writer wasn’t a saint, we wouldn’t have much music left, and that includes John Lennon music. Wonder what the cancel culture would do if they realized John wrote a song intended as a feminist anthem that was called “Woman is the (N-word) of the World”?

As with all art, we have to learn to separate the creation from the creator. Francis Scott Key was a flawed human being, as are all human beings, but he gave us a great song that represents a great nation, and it stands for all our people. Some of the most inspiring renditions of it were performed by black entertainers, from Mahalia Jackson to Jimi Hendrix to Whitney Houston.

If the statue-smashing radicals really want to learn from the wisdom of John Lennon, I’d recommend instead a far better song: “Revolution.”

“You say you want a revolution, well, you know, we all want to change the world...

But when you talk about destruction, don’t you know that you can count me out…

You say you got a real solution, well, you know, we'd all love to see the plan.

You ask me for a contribution, well, you know, we're all doing what we can.

But if you want money for people with minds that hate, all I can tell is brother you have to wait…

You say you'll change the Constitution, well, you know, we all want to change your head.

You tell me it's the institution, well, you know, you better free your mind instead.

But if you go carrying pictures of Chairman Mao, you ain't gonna make it with anyone anyhow…”

Mike Huckabee

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Laura Ainsworth, Staff Writer

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Chief of Staff --- And?

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

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

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

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

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

Prez: Yeah.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mike Huckabee

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

“Nip it! Nip it in the bud!”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mike Huckabee

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

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

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

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

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

Mike Huckabee

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before, but…Thursday, Chief Justice John Roberts sided with the liberals on the Supreme Court in a 5-4 decision, ruling that President Trump’s attempt to rescind Obama's DACA program is unlawful – even though Obama repeatedly stated that he had no constitutional authority to create it before going ahead and doing so.

The Court ruled that Trump didn’t give a good enough reason for why he rescinded it. Roberts wrote, "We do not decide whether DACA or its rescission are sound policies. The wisdom of those decisions is none of our concern. We address only whether the agency complied with the procedural requirement that it provide a reasoned explanation for its action."

Just off the top of my head, how about: “It's illegal because the President has no constitutional power to invent new immigration laws”?

The story at the link states, “No one disputes that the President has the power to end DACA. Instead, the focus of Thursday's case is whether administration officials followed procedural rules when terminating the program.” Actually, a lot of people disputed that Trump has that power, mostly based upon their delusional belief that Trump isn’t really President. The “reasoned explanation” argument was just the excuse that they thought might pass muster in courts, if they could find enough liberal judges. I can almost picture their attorneys leaving the SCOTUS, high-fiving each other and saying, "I can't BELIEVE they bought that!"

Personally, I have supported something similar to DACA in the past. I think it’s wasteful and cruel to send kids who were brought to the US by their parents when they were small and have only known America back to nations where they have no place and might not even speak the language, particularly after the state has already paid to educate them to the point when they’re about to become employed taxpayers. But this was NOT the way to deal with it. Letting a President simply ignore the Constitutional separation of powers as if his office conveys magical abilities is not the way to handle it, nor is restricting the powers of future Presidents from undoing the unconstitutional actions of previous Presidents unless they say “Mother, may I?” convincingly enough to a judge.

In the dissent, Justice Thomas, one of a dwindling number of SCOTUS members who remembers what the Constitution is and cares what words mean, warned that the Court’s decision means future presidents will be stuck with illegal policies inherited from their predecessors:

"Under the auspices of today’s decision, administrations can bind their successors by unlawfully adopting significant legal changes through executive branch agency memoranda. Even if the agency lacked authority to effectuate the changes, the changes cannot be undone by the same agency in a successor administration unless the successor provides sufficient policy justifications to the satisfaction of this Court."

I refer you again to Sen. Josh Hawley’s speech warning that we have become a nation in which laws are no longer made by the elected Representatives of the people but by unelected bureaucrats and judges who think that wearing a robe makes them wizards. I guess now we can add rogue Presidents to that list. Everyone can make laws except our lawmakers.

The good news: if Trump wants to bypass the Democratic House and create laws and programs by executive order, he can now feel free to go ahead, knowing that his successors can only do away with them if they can come up with a reason better than “But this is plainly UNCONSTITUTIONAL!!” As Roberts first signaled when he twisted the law into a pretzel to uphold Obamacare, that’s no longer a convincing enough reason for the SCOTUS to overturn something.

As for what to do about the SCOTUS, it's obvious that having Justices appointed by Republicans, even by Trump, is no guarantee that they'll protect the Constitution. But letting the Democrats have the Presidency and Senate would be exponentially worse. As law professor/blogger David Bernstein (who called the DACA decision "a very dangerous ruling" and "a very bad day for the separation of powers") said, the best insurance against 5-4 liberal decisions thanks to a rogue conservative Justice is to have a 7-2 or higher conservative bench.

Mike Huckabee

Monday, the Supreme Court not only rewrote the 1964 Civil Rights Act to redefine the ban on job discrimination by sex to include “gender identity” (setting the stage for endless nuisance lawsuits targeted at religious institutions), but they also rejected a number of cases in which citizens were appealing government interference with their Second Amendment rights.

For instance, the SCOTUS rejected an appeal by a New Jersey man who services ATMs and carries a lot of cash who understandably wants to carry a gun, but the local government requires that he name a specific threat to justify his need for one (as if he knows the name of the person who will eventually pop up and try to rob and likely kill him.) If you read the Second Amendment, you’ll notice that nothing in it says that citizens must justify their specific need for a gun to the government before they’re allowed to keep and bear one.

As the (sadly only) three Justices who dissented from the gay rights ruling noted, this Court is only too ready to pull new rights out of the ether when they involve abortion or LGBTQ issues, but they refuse to defend the clearly-enumerated Constitutional right that the Founders listed second in the Bill of Rights. It’s especially disappointing that alleged “conservative” Justices such as John Roberts and even Trump nominee Neil Gorsuch went along with the liberals in these activist rulings.

Why is it that so many so-called “conservative” Justices morph into liberals after just a short time on the SCOTUS (or as the media call it when a judge goes from respecting the text of the Constitution to rewriting laws from the bench, they "evolve”)? Some of it might be peer pressure, or just living inside the upper-crust liberal DC bubble. Some of it might also stem from the fact that ALL of our Supreme Court Justices attended the same handful of Northeastern Ivy League colleges (every one of them spent time at either Harvard or Yale) and were taught by the same liberal professors. While a few were able to resist the indoctrination, there is no real “diversity” on the Court. For instance, there’s not a single Justice who was schooled in the South or West, and can understand the needs of farmers or ranchers who bring cases to the Court.

Law Prof. Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit sums up the problem in a recent book called “The Judiciary’s Class War.”

Reynolds argues that the problem with the judiciary isn’t political but a class divide. Since the judiciary is the only branch of government that requires members to attain elite schooling, it’s dominated by people from upper middle class, elite backgrounds. Once they’re on the bench, they tend to favor things that people of their class embrace (abortion, gay rights, birth control, open borders, etc.) and even invent new “rights” to promote them, while marginalizing the real rights that working class Americans care about, such as freedom of religion, property rights, gun rights and honest apportionment of legislators to represent legal citizens.

Victor Davis Hanson also has some related thoughts about how “class, not race, divides America”…

SCOTUS decisions like Monday’s will make many conservatives despair of ever being able to get America back on the right track of respecting the Constitution and laws as written by elected Representatives of the people. But if you give up and stop voting, then you’ll guarantee the election of people like Joe Biden and Nancy Pelosi, who will put their lead feet on the accelerator to take America over the cliff.

A Republican majority in both Houses and the reelection of President Trump would at least set the stage for passing legislation to replace the legislation concocted by the courts, and to keep allowing Trump to nominate conservative judges to lower courts who might someday be on the Supreme Court. And of course, to nominate SCOTUS judges who will actually defend the Constitution. So far, he’s batting .500 on that, which is .500 more than we’d ever get under Joe Biden.

Mike Huckabee

In one week, the Supreme Court has managed to douse the Constitution with gasoline and light it on fire with two separate outrageous decisions. In the first, by declaring that “sex discrimination” in the 1964 Civil Rights Act also means “gender identity,” they affirmed that the plain words of laws don’t mean what Congress intended but whatever judges want them to mean, rendering the concept of laws written by elected representatives of the people to be meaningless. In the second, they ruled that President Trump cannot use an executive order to undo a previous President’s illegal and unconstitutional executive order unless the Court approves his reasons for doing so, which eviscerates the separation of powers, usurping for the Court a power reserved exclusively to the Chief Executive. And in both of these dangerous and destructive rulings, the key vote was that of Chief Justice John Roberts, who sided with the liberals.

Yesterday in the Senate, Constitutional scholar Sen. Ted Cruz took to the podium and spent about 10 minutes dismantling Roberts’ “legal reasoning,” in which he concedes that something is, of course, obviously what we all know it is, then yanks some rationale out of the ether for ruling the other way. It’s a must-see or must-read for anyone who cares about preserving – or more accurately now, reviving - the Constitution and the rule of law:

None of this is surprising since Roberts has made it clear from his writings and interviews that he doesn’t see his job as ruling on whether an issue before him is Constitutional or not – which is actually his ONLY job. He erroneously sees his job as being to look at something before him that he assumes the people want, like Obamacare, same-sex marriage, gender identity protections, DACA or keeping a citizenship question out of the Census and then work backward to try to find some legal mumbo-jumbo to justify it. He’s now done this so many times that he’s left the Constitution as full of holes as Swiss cheese.

(Incidentally, for Justice Roberts’ enlightenment, here are 10 instances where Obama himself admitted that he had no Constitutional authority to create DACA):

Since there are no elections for Supreme Court Justices, and impeachment is a longshot, there’s only one way to counter this. That is to ensure that President Trump is reelected and the GOP holds the Senate, so that Trump can continue appointing conservative, constructionist judges who can rise to the level of SCOTUS appointments, and we can all pray that he appoints enough of them so that if one or two decide, like Roberts, to go, rogue, they won’t be “swing” votes.

Of course, there is one other solution, but it’s not very likely. As Arkansas Sen. Tom Cotton suggested, if John Roberts “believes his political judgment is so exquisite,” “I invite him to resign, travel to Iowa, and get elected. I suspect voters will find his strange views no more compelling than do the principled justices on the Court.”

Mike Huckabee

Happy Juneteenth, and if you don’t know what that means, you probably will soon. Juneteenth (for “June 19th”) has been a popular holiday throughout the South for well over a century, but the current racial tensions have politicians and corporations around the nation suddenly jumping on the bandwagon to declare it a national or state holiday or paid leave day, only about 150 years late. Here’s what it’s about:

On June 19, 1865, Union Army Gen. Gordon Granger read General Order No. 3  to the slaves in Galveston, Texas, which informed them that they were free and now had “an absolute equality of personal rights and rights of property, between former masters and slaves.” This was 2-1/2 years after Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation.

Juneteenth was a Texas celebration for many years, starting in 1866, but ramping up in 1872, when former slaves bought 10 acres of land in Houston to create Emancipation Park, the city's only park and swimming pool open to African-Americans, and the site of a big annual Juneteeth celebration. It gradually spread throughout the South, but most people outside the South knew very little about it until very recently.

Ironically, Juneteenth has finally entered the national consciousness during a summer when the coronavirus has killed mass public gatherings, so the usual barbecues and concerts will mostly be restricted to virtual events, backyards and close family this year.

I know some people will be cynical and call the sudden push for Juneteenth pandering or politics, but as someone who grew up in the South, I can assure you you’re lucky to finally discover Juneteenth. It’s a great holiday that celebrates freedom just as much as the Fourth of July does, and while it’s considered an African-American holiday, it’s something that every American should celebrate. Anything that can get us all back into public parks, celebrating together with music, fireworks, and barbecues, and remind us that people of all races are free and equal in America, is more than welcome now. It's necessary.