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BY MIKE HUCKABEE
Good morning! Below is an abbreviated version of my newsletter. I will resume my regular, lengthy political commentary on Tuesday.
Sincerely,
Mike Huckabee
DAILY BIBLE VERSE
I have set the Lord always before me; Because He is at my right hand I shall not be moved.
Psalm 16:8 NKJV
Memorial Day and a "Huckabee" Preview
I hope you’re having a fun and safe Memorial Day weekend. For many, it’s the kickoff of summer, and it means barbecues, picnics or hitting the beach. But please don’t forget the real reason that Memorial Day exists: to honor the men and women of the US military who made the ultimate sacrifice so that you could have the freedom to enjoy this weekend however you want.
I hope you will not only fly your flag on Monday, but also take part in some commemorative events to show your respect to our fallen service people. Maybe your community has a Memorial Day parade or other event. If so, turn out and let the service members and Gold Star Families involved know how much you appreciate their sacrifice. If you’re not certain what might be taking place, check the online event calendars for your town or church, or contact your local military support organizations, like the VFW, the American Legion or your state’s veterans’ organizations. Community service groups like the Elks Club may also be holding Memorial Day events.
If all else fails, call your friends, family and neighbors together in your yard to salute the flag, say a prayer of thanks and hold a moment of silence for the over one million military members who have given their lives defending America since this nation was born.
I hope you’ll also join me tonight for a special Memorial Day edition of “Huckabee” on TBN. I’ll be talking about current events with Sen. Marsha Blackburn, former acting US Attorney General Matt Whitaker and MAGA Inc. spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt. Plus, barbecue master Robbie Shoults of the famous Bear Creek Smokehouse is back to show us how to make the perfect Memorial Day picnic food. And we’ll top it off with a musical salute to veterans with the return of the great WWII-era vocal tribute group, The Swing Dolls.
We roll out tonight at 8 and 11 EST, 7 and 10 CST, and Sunday at 9 EST/8 CST on TBN. To find out how to watch TBN, from local cable and broadcast channels to streaming, visit https://www.huckabee.tv and click on “Channel Finder” on the top menu. You can stream previous episodes, highlights and online-only “Digital Exclusives,” including extended interviews, “In Case You Missed It” and “Facts of the Matter” segments, plus extra performances by our great musical and comedy guests and links to all their sites, at https://www.huckabee.tv. You can also find past shows, highlights and digital exclusives on YouTube and my Facebook page.
ESSAY
How to prevent young people from falling prey to socialism
I got a comment from a reader arguing that one reason young people fall prey to socialism (aside from being brainwashed by their teachers) is that they feel the capitalist system is failing them. They were told they had to get college degrees if they wanted good jobs, and encouraged to take out huge student loans. Now, they’re saddled with crippling debt, and those degrees aren’t opening the doors to jobs that pay enough to ever get out of the hole.
I admit that’s a serious problem, but it won't be solved by electing people who will expand the very policies that raise taxes, kill jobs and wages, and encourage making college even more ridiculously expensive and pursuing useless degrees. And promising to “forgive” student loan debt is just a bait-and-switch. Your student loan debt might disappear, but your tax bill will double or triple, while colleges will raise tuition to take advantage of the new government subsidy. Will that solve your problem? And talk about redistributing wealth from the poor to the rich! Working people who never attended college will pay higher taxes to pay off the college loan debts of lawyers, doctors, lobbyists and Ivy League grads.
We need action on a number of fronts for young people to be able to access the American dream. I’ll lay out a few proposals, knowing there’s no chance of them being put into effect until after the next two elections.
First, we do need to restructure student loans, so that rates are lowered and terms easier to handle. It would also help if states that control the colleges’ purse strings would make them pull back on the leftist indoctrination, speech policing, racial discrimination and propaganda about things like logic and productivity being “white surpremacy,” and instead go back to teaching things that can help students get decent jobs.
Government policies need to be aimed at helping grow the economy and encourage private sector expansion and business creation instead of punishing it, so that jobs are plentiful and wages keep rising. We need to stop using our tax code and unemployment system to disincentivize work and success. Future generations need to be taught to be more judicious in choosing majors, or that maybe college isn’t the only alternative. Just as the pandemic sped up evolution of the work-from-home movement, it also introduced many people to learning from home. Did you know that you can now watch all of MIT’s classes on YouTube for free?
https://www.youtube.com/user/MIT
There are also many good-paying jobs in skilled trades that employers desperately need to fill (just ask Mike Rowe.) Trade school is faster and cheaper than college, and doesn’t come with a heaping side order of communism. There’s dignity in all work, and it’s a heck of a lot better to be a busy, well-paid plumber or mechanic than an angry, underemployed gender studies major (they obviously have way too much free time on their hands these days.)
Besides, as our current political leaders have proven beyond a doubt, having an Ivy League degree is no guarantee of superior intelligence, ability or even basic competence. It might just mean that your parents bought the school a gym. Academic credentials are fine, but they don’t mean as much to me as native intelligence, a strong work ethic and an eagerness to learn.
Before I entered politics, I worked with a fellow named Gary Underwood to build a community TV station on a shoestring budget. Gary had no formal education in television production, but he figured out things, like how to make work lights from Sam’s Club do as studio lights, and how to run lights and a camera off a car battery so we could do remotes. If he’d had formal training, he might’ve told me it was impossible on our budget and given up. But since he wasn’t a "trained expert," he found ways to do the impossible. Later on, he ran media operations for the Arkansas Governor’s Office for me.
There are people with more education than others, and who certainly think they’re smarter than the rest of us. But you’d be hard pressed to find people with more “smarts” than someone like Gary. Have you ever heard it said that someone was “educated beyond their intelligence”? We’ve got plenty of people like that these days. Washington is crawling with so many Harvard and Yale alums that if they could all get a tuition refund, they could probably pay off the national debt. And frankly, based on their competence and intelligence, many of them should demand a tuition refund.
As both a Governor and a business owner, I’ve hired a lot of employees over the years. Some would figure out how to get something done, while others would spend more time explaining why it couldn’t be done than it would’ve taken to do it! Give me a smart person with a can-do attitude any day over one with an expensive “education” who lacks the resourcefulness to solve problems with whatever is available.
Remember the story of the eminent scientist who proved through incontrovertible laws of physics, gravity and aerodynamics that it was impossible for a bumblebee to fly? The bumblebee ignored all his arguments about how flying was impossible and flew anyway. The moral: If you want to succeed, be like a bumblebee and don’t let anyone tell you that you can’t fly.
America the Beautiful
God's creation is all around us. We are blessed with his bounty. Take a moment to enjoy it.
RIP Tina Turner And Jim Brown
By “Huckabee” pop culture guru Pat Reeder (http://www.hollywoodhifi.com)
It is my sad duty to report that music legend Tina Turner passed away peacefully at her home in Switzerland Wednesday at 83. Here are two very extensive obituaries from Variety and Rolling Stone.
https://variety.com/2023/music/news/tina-turner-dead-singer-pop-rock-queen-1235624415/
https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/tina-turner-dead-obit-192002/
Variety also helpfully compiled some of her best songs…
https://variety.com/2023/music/news/tina-turner-best-tracks-12-essential-songs-1235624796/
…And best performances on TV.
I always try to include some piece of info you might not know, but that’s difficult with Tina Turner. She was such a huge star for so long, and her life was such an open book (literally: her autobiography “I, Tina” was made into the hit movie, “What’s Love Got To Do With It?”), and the obituaries on her so comprehensive, that there isn’t much I can say that might surprise you. Well, other than that there were long stretches of her career when she was struggling to make money, performing in small clubs and considered washed up by the morons who run the music industry.
Also, while most consider the Ike & Tina recording of “River Deep, Mountain High” to be an all-time classic, when it came out in 1966, it was branded an expensive flop. Producer Phil Spector wanted it to be the ultimate example of his “Wall of Sound” and he threw everything but the kitchen sink into the mix, yet it only reached #88 on the US charts. Over three decades later, it was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
I would also be remiss not to mention the passing last Friday of sports icon and movie star, Jim Brown.
https://theathletic.com/4535558/2023/05/19/jim-brown-dead/
That link has a very thorough recounting of his life, both the extraordinary highs and the lows. As for things you might not know, he was not only possibly the greatest NFL player of all time, but in college, he also competed in basketball, track and lacrosse, and might be the best lacrosse player ever as well. He’s the only person who’s in the Pro Football Hall of Fame, the College Football Hall of Fame, and the Lacrosse Hall of Fame.
And since my specialty is celebrity records, I’ll mention that while he never sang on record that I know of, a collection of his speeches was released on LP in 1967. It was called “Jim Brown Tells It Like It Is,” and you can listen to the whole thing on YouTube now. Rest in peace to them both.
Video Link
From my desk on the “Huckabee” set, I answer questions from readers/viewers about everything from abolishing the FBI to the NAACP travel advisory to Memorial Day .
https://www.mikehuckabee.com/
Biden's latest scheme
As we honor the service members who gave their lives to defend our Constitutional rights, here’s the latest scheme by the Biden Administration to take away the First Amendment.
It shows a fundamental lack of understanding of the huge difference between “things you shouldn’t say” and “things the government decided you’re not allowed to say.”
Related: The Department of Homeland Security gave a $352,000 grant of our tax money to a leftist University of Dayton project to “develop and implement modules on the risks of and protective factors for radicalization to violence related to media literacy and online critical thinking for students.”
https://nypost.com/2023/05/25/
If you think that means they identified groups like BLM and Antifa that spread anti-American lies to indoctrinate leftist students into becoming violent protesters, boy are you barking up the wrong pyramid. No, what they came up with is a “pyramid of far-right radicalization.” It has four levels of allegedly dangerous, violent, far-right organizations.
At the top are some actual bad groups, like the neo-Nazi paramilitary group The Base and the white supremacist website The Daily Stormer. But by the time they get down to level three, we’re seeing perfectly mainstream conservative organizations like Breitbart News, the Make America Great Again movement and Prager University (I can see why they hate that; logic, facts and reason are like Kryptonite to the left)
And on the fourth level, we find such dangerous hate groups as Fox News, the NRA, the Heritage Foundation, the Christian Broadcasting Network and the Republican Party. Could this be a more transparent six-figure payoff to a useless, biased organization to do nothing but slander their political opponents, criminalize free speech, and create chum to toss to their trained seals in the leftist media?
All things considered, I suppose I should be offended that this newsletter didn’t make it to their $352,000 Pyramid. If nothing else, the effort we put into checking facts and getting accurate quotes should have qualified us as an existential threat to the left.
The debt ceiling negotiations
Here's an update on the latest negotiations over raising the debt ceiling, which I won’t detail because it’s like trying to describe the plot of a soap opera that never really ends and is 95% pointless melodrama.
https://www.foxnews.com/
The good news: A top White House official said Friday that President Biden will not try to circumvent Congress by twisting the 14th Amendment to raise the debt ceiling.
https://www.westernjournal.
He said, “The 14th Amendment can’t solve our challenges now. Ultimately, the only thing that can do that is Congress…raising the debt limit.”
So there’s the bad news: they’re still trying to paint the stalemate as being all the fault of House Republicans for refusing to give them a no-strings hike in their credit card limit. It’s not Biden’s fault for claiming it’s a dire emergency then refusing to negotiate with Congress for months.
The fact is that House Republicans are the only ones who actually wrote and passed a plan to raise the debt ceiling, but with limits on future spending increases. Democrats have been treating that as draconian cuts that will starve orphans and cause the Earth to spiral into the Sun if they can’t keep spending unlimited amounts of money we don’t have.
It's no wonder they keep pushing for more fiscal irresponsibility, since it appears to be working, at least with their young leftist base. While a CNN poll found that 60% of Americans want spending cuts to be part of any debt ceiling increase, an NPR poll found that only 50% want spending cuts while 46% want taxes and fees raised.
The percentage wanting higher taxes and fees has jumped by 10 points in the past decade, largely because of younger Americans. So the economic miseducation in liberal schools is working. I hope they haven’t applied what they were told about government spending to their own credit card bills. Or maybe these are the same young people who took out six-figure loans to get gender studies degrees and now think the rest of us should pay them off for them.
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