By Mike Huckabee
May 10, 2023
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BY MIKE HUCKABEE
Blessings on you and your family from all the Huckabee staff!
Thank you for subscribing and I hope you enjoy today’s newsletter.
With gratitude,
Mike
DAILY BIBLE VERSE
So in Christ Jesus you are all children of God through faith, 27 for all of you who were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ.
Galatians 3:26-27
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Mike Huckabee: This is a seminal moment in history
I joined Eric Bolling's Newsmax show to discuss media landscape fallout from an announced Tucker Carlson return on Twitter.
WATCH MY NEWSMAX APPEARANCE HERE>>>
Programming note
I'll be appearing tonight on Laura Ingraham's show on Fox News. I hope you'll tune in.
Comer releases the results of his investigation
We’ll have much more on this tomorrow since it’s a breaking story, but as I’m finishing up the newsletter, Rep. James Comer is in the process of releasing the results of the House Oversight Committee’s investigation into the Biden family’s “influence peddling and business schemes.”
Comer says that the Biden family and its associates created a web of more than 20 companies, mostly limited liability corporations, and took in over $10 million from foreign nationals, including those "with significant ties to Chinese intelligence and the Chinese Communist Party,” while Joe Biden was Vice President. He said some of these payments could indicate attempts by the Biden family to peddle influence (I understand the cautious wording, but really, why else would anyone pay the Bidens $10 million, especially Hunter?) and that the family appeared to take steps to "conceal the source and total amount received from the foreign companies."
There’s a lot more of this coming out in real time. We’ll sift through it all and have an in-depth recap tomorrow, while resting easy in the knowledge that we’ll probably still tell you about it long before CNN or MSNBC will.
John Kerry is operating in the dark again
You might recall that during Trump’s term, John Kerry allegedly acted as a shadow representative of the US to undermine official White House policies with foreign governments. That’s the kind of behavior that the Logan Act was created to criminalize. Well, now that the Dems are back in power and Kerry is actually dealing with China with some legitimacy as Biden’s “climate czar,” he’s still finding ways to seem illegitimate about it.
https://www.bostonherald.com/
The Boston Herald reports that as Kerry is negotiating on “climate change” policies with China, he has a “proposed staff” in the State Department of 45 (the same number assigned to combat ISIS.) They operate in secrecy, with all of them reporting directly to Kerry, who reports directly to Biden, with no oversight by the Secretary of State.
The watchdog group Protect the People’s Trust is suing Kerry’s office to open up its super-secret workings. Their director Michael Chamberlain said, “For an individual with the level of authority that John Kerry possesses to operate not only outside the Senate confirmation process but also not report to the head of the agency he ostensibly works for seems, at the very least, tremendously unusual, at worst, in violation of the Senate’s advice and consent authority…It’s little wonder that staff in the office are so secretive and even their responses to Congressional oversight are cryptic and dismissive. The more that Protect the Public’s Trust, Congressional representatives, and media discover about this secretive office, the more questions and concerns become apparent.”
In other words, the title “czar” isn’t meant to be taken literally. We don’t need an unelected, unvetted, unsupervised environmental radical with an unearned sense of his own self-importance secretly making binding policies with the Chinese Communist Party that adversely affect America’s economy. Personally, I have a lot of questions for John Kerry, and they only start with “If CO2 is destroying the climate, why can’t you hold all these climate conferences via Zoom instead of taking private jets to Switzerland?”
New York Republican Rep. George Santos taken into custody this morning
New York Republican Rep. George Santos was taken into custody this morning and will be arraigned this afternoon after a New York grand jury indicted him on 13 counts. And these aren’t “New York grand jury Trump indictments,” but actual crimes. They include seven counts of wire fraud, three counts of money laundering, one count of theft of public funds, and two counts of making materially false statements to the House of Representatives.
It’s easy to joke about the allegations against Santos not being any more shocking that what a lot of Congress members do and nobody bats an eye, but the US Attorney said it’s very bad indeed:
"This indictment seeks to hold Santos accountable for various alleged fraudulent schemes and brazen misrepresentations. Taken together, the allegations in the indictment charge Santos with relying on repeated dishonesty and deception to ascend to the halls of Congress and enrich himself. He used political contributions to line his pockets, unlawfully applied for unemployment benefits that should have gone to New Yorkers who had lost their jobs due to the pandemic, and lied to the House of Representatives.”
He's right, this is serious. I can’t think of any other Congress member who unlawfully applied for unemployment benefits.
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Inflation is up this month, but you likely won't hear that part of this story
The Labor Department reported this morning that consumer prices in April were up 4.9% from one year before.
https://www.foxbusiness.com/
If you watch liberal news outlets, this will be painted as a ringing success for Biden’s economic policies because it’s the first time annual inflation has dropped below 5% in nearly two years. If you get your news from more objective sources, you’ll hear that despite all the crippling interest rate hikes, inflation actually rose 0.4% from the previous month, far more than the 0.1% increase predicted. And as the article I linked to notes, “it remains about more than double the pre-pandemic average and well above the Fed's 2% target rate.”
But it’s below 5%, so…yay!
Set Your DVRs
Set Your DVRs: In a move that even he admits may prove a disaster, former President Trump will appear tonight in a townhall on CNN. Gee, do you think they’ll fill the hall with rabid Trump haters? Do you think they know anyone who isn’t?
https://www.westernjournal.
New York's Democrat Governor declares a state of emergency
With the influx of illegal immigrants and the expiration of Title 42 expected to lead to another massive surge across our border, New York Gov. Kathy Hochul declared a state disaster emergency that includes the power to call up another 500 members of the state National Guard to deal with illegal immigrants.
While it is nice to see a Democrat politician recognize that Biden’s policies officially qualify as a “disaster," I do feel bad for New York liberals who must be horrified to learn that their Governor is a racist fascist who thinks the National Guard should be deployed to deal with “immigrants.” The New York Times staff must be hardest hit.
Tucker makes an announcement
While we still don’t know the details of why Tucker Carlson is no longer at Fox or whether his contract allows him to go elsewhere, his attorneys are taking the position that it does. And so on Tuesday, Carlson announced that, despite staggering offers from other broadcast outlets, he plans to go independent and start doing his show on Twitter. That led leftists to claim that Elon Musk must’ve made a deal with him and Twitter is now a “rightwing platform.”
https://www.westernjournal.
Musk issued a statement denying any deals with Carlson, and saying that anyone, left or right, is free to use Twitter and that everyone may “interact, critique and refute whatever is said.”
So…a rightwing platform, then?
I was on Eric Bolling’s show on Newsmax yesterday, and we talked a lot more about this. I called it a “seminal moment in media history.” You can see that video here:
https://www.mikehuckabee.com/
Speaker McCarthy cancels Tlaib event
I reported yesterday that “Squad” member and raving anti-Semite Rep. Rashida Tlaib was set to speak tonight at a dinner in the Capitol by Palestinian groups decrying as a “catastrophe” the upcoming 75th anniversary of Israel as an independent Jewish state. Well, if they’re going to hold that disgusting event, they’ll have to find another venue. Speaker Kevin McCarthy said, “It’s wrong for members of Congress to traffic in anti-Semitic tropes about Israel. As long as I’m Speaker, we are going to support Israel’s right to self-determination and self-defense, unequivocally and in a bipartisan fashion.”
And so tonight, he’ll be leading a bipartisan briefing celebrating 75 years of the US-Israel relationship…in the Capitol Visitor Center space where Tlaib was planning to hold her anti-Israel hate fest. He canceled their reservation. Cheer up, Rep. Tlaib. Maybe you can find a nice deli nearby that will let you do it there.
I reported yesterday that “Squad” member and raving anti-Semite Rep. Rashida Tlaib was set to speak tonight at a dinner in the Capitol by Palestinian groups decrying as a “catastrophe” the upcoming 75th anniversary of Israel as an independent Jewish state. Well, if they’re going to hold that disgusting event, they’ll have to find another venue. Speaker Kevin McCarthy said, “It’s wrong for members of Congress to traffic in anti-Semitic tropes about Israel. As long as I’m Speaker, we are going to support Israel’s right to self-determination and self-defense, unequivocally and in a bipartisan fashion.”
And so tonight, he’ll be leading a bipartisan briefing celebrating 75 years of the US-Israel relationship…in the Capitol Visitor Center space where Tlaib was planning to hold her anti-Israel hate fest. He canceled their reservation. Cheer up, Rep. Tlaib. Maybe you can find a nice deli nearby that will let you do it there.
Allen, TX shooter update
Here’s the latest on what is now known about the mass shooter at the Allen Premium Outlet Mall. It isn’t much more than we already knew, but there’s a little bit of new info, and some of the early stories have been debunked. As for motive, it’s still unclear. He appears to have staged his attack based on the location, and not to have targeted any person or group but just killed randomly.
https://redstate.com/smoosieq/
Gov. Newsom says no to reparations
I’m happy to see that California Gov. Gavin Newsom is capable of grasping fiscal reality, at least when it’s about to hit him over the head with a 2x4. California is facing a $22.5 billion budget deficit, and after much debating and fantasizing, the state’s slavery reparations task force recommended paying every black resident of California up to $1.2 million. The total package weighs in at around $800 billion. That’s about 2.6 times the current record-high budget for the entire state. As critics like to point out, all that reparations money would have to be taxed from people who never owned slaves to be given to people who never were slaves in a state that never had slavery.
Faced with fiscal lunacy on such a Godzilla-like scale, even Gavin Newsom realized that he couldn’t afford that high a cost to ease his white guilt. So he thanked the task force, “applauded their efforts” in this “important process” to “reconcile our original sin of slavery and understand how that history has shaped our country”…but made it clear that dealing with the legacy of slavery "is about much more than cash payments." Instead, he offered something even better: a pledge to continue to "advance systemic changes that ensure an inclusive and equitable future for all Californians."
Translation: the check is definitely not in the mail, but here are some empty words and more discriminatory and expensive leftwing government policies. Good luck using them to buy a Ferrari.
This must come as a real blow to the reparations boosters, some of whom are insisting that every black American should receive $200 million because money apparently grows on magical trees now. The good news is that those people are already well-entrenched in the racial grievance industry, and it’s extremely lucrative, so they may yet become millionaires. They should look for inspiration to Nicole Hannah-Jones. She was an $80,000-a-year newspaper writer until she hacked out “The 1619 Project,” a wildly inaccurate history of the US, painting the freest nation on Earth as a racist dystopia where oppressed black people can’t possibly get ahead due to all the systemic racism.
She’s now worth millions, has a series deal with Hulu, and charges up to $55,000 a speech to fill her followers’ heads with this anti-American racist poison. Recently at Indiana University, she gave a one-hour speech, signed some books, led four classroom discussions (I’ll bet they were really lectures with precious little “discussion”) and attended a dinner party. That grossed her $101,700 in 24 hours, or over $4200 an hour.
https://www.wsws.org/en/
See, despite all the claims of racism and oppression, it’s still possible for anyone to become rich in America, if you just have enough imagination.
New IRS data shows exodus of highest-earners from blue states
One reason Gavin Newsom can’t be passing out million dollar checks to strangers like “The Millionaire” on that old TV show is that blue states such as California are seeing their most productive residents (i.e., their biggest taxpayers) flee like rats from a sinking ship.
https://fee.org/articles/
John Milimore at the Foundation for Economic Education reports that according to recent IRS data, the exodus of the highest-earning taxpayers from blue states like New York and Illinois to red states is increasing. California alone has seen its adjusted gross income drop by $29 billion since 2019 due to a tripling in the number of top-earning taxpayers leaving. Hence the attempt to try to pass a law requiring people to keep paying state taxes even after they move out (At the Hotel California, you can check out anytime you like, but you can never leave.)
This also means a financial boom for red states. In Florida, the average new arrival makes $150,000 a year, more than double the income of the average person who moves out of Florida. Taxpayers leaving Illinois and New York make an average of $35,000 more per year than people moving in. But why would anyone making a good income want to move to a state that will take most of it away to pay for government that does nothing to prevent criminals from stealing the rest of it?
For a long time, the big worry among conservatives was that these new arrivals would bring their leftist voting habits with them and foul their new nest like their old one. But with the exception of cities that are magnets for leftist looney-tunes (looking at you, Austin), most of the new arrivals seem grateful and appreciative to have escaped to America. That’s leaving red states gaining population and House seats while getting even redder (Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis won reelection in 2022 by the biggest landslide in 40 years.)
The downside is that the combination of decades of one-party Democrat rule, the far-left lurch of the Party, and the exodus of productive wealth-creators is reducing America’s once-great cities to crime-infested nightmares, run, as Milimore notes, by public sector workers unions and welfare activists. And how will it ever get better if there’s nobody left to vote but people who are dependent on the broken system?
I fear it’s going to get worse before it gets better, and I’m not even sure how it could get worse or how it will get better (Chicago voters reacted to the wave of crime unleashed by far-left Democrats by electing a new mayor who’s even further left and softer on crime. It’s possible the criminal vote is now the swing vote in Chicago.) But there’s a saying that “things that can’t go on forever won’t.” We just have to hope that eventually, the remaining residents of these cities get over being suicidal.
Bravo Tom Hanks
In a welcome trend, another Hollywood celebrity has spoken up against the woke mob. Tom Hanks declared his opposition to the movement to rewrite classic books to remove anything that might offend modern delicate PC sensibilities, such as is being done to the novels of Roald Dahl, Agatha Christie and Ian Fleming.
Hanks told NBC News:
“I’m of the opinion that we’re all grown-ups here. Let’s have faith in our own sensibilities as opposed to having somebody decide what we may or may not be offended by. Let me decide what I am offended by and what I’m not offended by. I would be against reading any book from any era that says ‘abridged due to modern sensitivities.’”
Bravo! I agree with every word he said, except the phrase, “We’re all adults here.” We wouldn’t have this issue at all if we didn’t have so many two-year-olds running around in 30-year-old bodies.
Disney hasn't figured it out yet
Just in case you might think Disney has started to understand why so many Americans, especially parents, are turning away from their products, be assured that they have not. Otherwise, they probably wouldn’t have undermined the family box office for their “must-make-money” “woke” remake of “The Little Mermaid” by inviting a prominent drag queen to the world premiere of the movie in Hollywood.
I’m starting to think it wasn’t an innocent artistic decision that Donald Duck never wore pants.
Trump civil trial and finding of liability is steeped in politics
As you know, President Trump was found liable in a Manhattan court for one count each of battery and defamation in the civil case brought by E. Jean Carroll. They found that he should pay around $5 million --- $3 million for defamation and $2 million for the civil battery charge.
Here are the facts from the NEW YORK POST. I apologize for the sordidness of some of the allegations.
https://nypost.com/2023/05/09/
Trump, who didn’t attend the trial (I’ll get to that), wrote on Truth Social: “I HAVE ABSOLUTELY NO IDEA WHO THIS WOMAN IS. THIS VERDICT IS A DISGRACE – A CONTINUATION OF THE GREATEST WITCH HUNT OF ALL TIME.”
In 2019, Carroll accused him in her new book of raping her in a dressing room of Bergdorf Goodman. In 1996. Well, she THINKS it was 1996. She’s not sure, and she made no police report. It might have been possible for Trump to clear himself with an alibi if she’d just remembered the date! She couldn’t even remember the year. And her confidantes apparently didn’t know, either.
As Alan Dershowitz said, “Those cases should never have been allowed to be brought. The historical purpose of a statute of limitations is to make sure you don’t have to stand trial for something that occurred 25 years ago --- in this case, even more than that. How do you remember things? How do you know where you were? Maybe he was in Europe at the time. She hasn’t even given the dates and the times of the year. It’s a case that normally would be thrown out --- but again, it’s Donald Trump.”
He’s afraid this will hurt Trump with independents, who’ll think “where there’s smoke, there’s fire.” Sometimes, he said, where there’s smoke, there’s arson. “And I think a lot of these fires have been set politically,” he said.
If you’re not convinced it’s all political, here’s the NEW YORK POST: “Watchers in the court gallery cried tears of joy when the verdict finding Trump liable for sexual abuse was read.”
It’s part of the death-by-a-thousand-cuts strategy being used by Trump’s adversaries. Polls now --- for what polls now are worth --- show Trump easily out front for the GOP nomination and even easily ahead of President Biden in a head-to-head contest. (Not that Biden will necessarily be the nominee, but still.) So this relentless lawfare against Trump will continue until we’re all just sick of it, which is the idea. Trump’s enemies hope we grow weary of the constant fight and decide he should stay in Mar-A-Lago --- if he’s not in pre-trial detention.
They might be misreading his supporters, though. After the Mar-A-Lago raid and the indictment of Trump in Manhattan, this appears to be one more banana republic-style maneuver to interfere with the 2024 election, just as there have been attempts in 2016, 2020 and 2022. If Trump can stand up to it, so can we. Who else is better equipped and more motivated to finally drain the swamp good and dry?
Trump attorney Joe Tacopina said after the verdict that they would appeal. “He’s firm in his belief, as many people are, that he can’t get a fair trial in New York City based on the jury pool. I think one could argue that’s an accurate assessment based on what happened today.” In answer to a reporter’s question, he said this would not derail Trump’s run for the nomination.
I understand why Trump might not have wanted to participate in this, but his no-show likely sent the wrong message. It seems he was found liable largely by default. Carroll’s attorney trumpeted the fact that Trump “didn’t even bother” to show up. Trump’s attorneys didn’t call any witnesses, either, or show any evidence, though it’s hard to know what evidence they could’ve presented to prove he DIDN’T do something that happened who-knows-when.
A better idea would have been to show up with full motorcade and make NYC pay millions for all the security and traffic re-routing. He didn’t have to testify, but just to BE THERE would have said plenty.
Trump was not found liable of rape, though Carroll had claimed he raped her. So they must’ve doubted her testimony about it. It doesn’t make sense --- if she was lying about that, how could they believe the rest of it? As Tacopina said after the trial, “Strange verdict. It was a rape case all along, and the jury rejected that.”
Of course, being a civil trial, the plaintiff doesn’t have to prove liability “beyond a reasonable doubt.” Just “preponderance of the evidence” will do. The original 2019 suit was just for defamation, when Trump quipped “she’s not my type” after she publicly claimed he raped her. (Really? That’s defamation? Defending yourself against an accusation of rape that the jury apparently didn’t even believe?)
So, why did this case even get to court? As explained in THE EPOCH TIMES: “In 2022, the New York state legislature passed the Adult Survivor Act, which amended state law to give victims of certain sexual offenses a one-year window, beginning on Nov. 24, 2023, to file a civil lawsuit against alleged offenders. Carroll filed a second lawsuit on Nov. 24, 2022, under this Act, which went to trial and resulted in Tuesday’s verdict.”
Kyle Becker tweeted a concise list of ways that the ‘justice’ system has been twisted and weaponized just to go after Donald Trump. It was nice of LIBERTY DAILY to format his series of tweets for easy access, because this is a must-read…
We don’t know if jurors got to see Carroll’s social media posts, but Tacopina (we think it was Tacopina) did unearth some doozies. Carroll is a writer who had a sex advice column in ELLE magazine. Please read these comments of hers and tell us if you’d believe anything she says about sex --- or anything she says about anything.
https://headlineusa.com/trump-
And these, from 2019. (Again, apologies for the language.)
Carroll included the Trump rape story in her 2019 book WHAT DO WE NEED MEN FOR? A MODEST PROPOSAL. Seems as though HE might have had a defamation case.
And in answer to her question about what we need men for, in her case I guess about $5 million.
Finally, and perhaps most importantly, we found quite a story from Byron York at the WASHINGTON EXAMINER, written right before jury selection, about the origin of Carroll’s defamation lawsuit. He says it arose in conversation at a party at the home of writer Molly Jong-Fast, held in honor of Trump-hater Kathy Griffin. Another Trump-hater, George Conway (Kellyanne’s ex) came up with the idea. Tech billionaire and Trump-hater Reid Hoffman bankrolled her case. York says this case was “pushed forward by a group of politically motivated Resistance figures who have for years been trying to defeat Trump in any way they can.”
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