By Mike Huckabee
October 23, 2023
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BY MIKE HUCKABEE
Blessings on you and your family from all the Huckabee team!
Mike Huckabee
DAILY BIBLE VERSE
Blessed are the poor in spirit: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
Matthew 5:3
Blocked for my views on President Trump, the COVID-19 response, Joe Biden, etc.
Let me be clear: Government and Big Tech are working together to censor conservative views, and because they are I moved my newsletter to Substack.
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To become a paid subscriber of my politics newsletter it is $5 monthly or $36 annually. I email daily and my politics newsletters usually take 10-15 minutes to read. I cover the news of the day and the liberal media. I write about the upcoming elections and dive deep on the Biden scandals. I will also share my opinion of the Trump indictment. I don’t think you will regret reading my newsletter regularly as a paid subscriber, so please consider subscribing today.
With gratitude,
Mike Huckabee
Tragic death in Detroit
Samantha Woll, the president of a Detroit synagogue, was found stabbed to death outside her home Saturday morning. Police say that so far, they’ve found no evidence that it was motivated by anti-Semitism. There are more details at this link, but this is a developing story. We extend our prayers and condolences to her family.
News on the War in Israel/Gaza
Here is today’s page of continually-updated news on the war in Israel from Fox News:
https://www.foxnews.com/live-news/october-23-israel-hamas-war
Among the latest developments: Israel is continuing airstrikes and hit over 320 Hamas military targets in Gaza over the past 24 hours. But the expected ground invasion has yet to begin. Meanwhile, Prime Minister Netanyahu responded to threats from the Iran-based terrorist group Hezbollah that an attack on Israel from Lebanon would be “the mistake of its life. We will cripple it with a force it cannot even imagine, and the consequences for it and the Lebanese state will be devastating."
Here in the US, with Americans being held hostage by Hamas terrorists and our embassies having to be evacuated under attack, President Biden boldly took action and went on another weekend beach vacation in Delaware.
The shocking attack on Israel and the equally shocking support for Hamas’ obscenely brutal terrorism against innocents by so-called liberals could have a major effect on politics here and around the world. Jewish Americans tend to support Democrats over Republicans by about 64-26%, but political analysts are predicting a historic shift next year, thanks to the exposure of the open anti-Semitism on the left, including from elected Democrat officials like Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar.
Going hand-in-hand with that trend, a number of Jewish-Americans are also suddenly developing a new respect for the Second Amendment.
https://bearingarms.com/tomknighton/2023/10/21/jewish-arming-up-n76342
Switzerland is the latest of several nations that have turned to the right, rejecting open borders leftists who preached diversity while letting in many migrants from the Middle East who are now making it clear that they do not share their host nations’ values. One of the few that held the line was Poland, and like the US, they got too complacent and just elected a leftwing government. Let’s hope that even their leftists are now able to realize the dangers of welcoming in large foreign populations that refuse to assimilate.
The pro-Hamas rallies by students at “elite” universities like Harvard are causing some of their biggest donors to slam their checkbooks shut and demand reform of what have devolved from universities into radical indoctrination camps.
https://instapundit.com/612821/
And that’s just the tip of the problems these institutions have created for themselves.
https://www.campusreform.org/article?id=24220
These universities have even lost Bill Maher, who declared that “if ignorance is a disease, Harvard yard is the Wuhan wet market.”
Although Wellesley has decided to give Harvard a run for its money in the anti-Semitism department.
A revolution on campuses can’t come a moment too soon, if we are to believe a shocking new Harvard-Harris Poll. It found that among 18-24-year-old Americans, a majority (51-49%) think Hamas’ slaughter of 1200 innocent Israeli civilians was justified. Overall, Americans disagree by 76-24%, with those over 65 (the ones furthest away from exposure to a modern university) disagreeing by 91-9%.
A Cygnal Poll also found that 75% of Americans believe Hamas was not justified in attacking Israel (that should be 100%), but a majority of Muslim-Americans back Hamas’ attack, by 58-42%.
Related: Courtesy of Instapundit, some wise comments from Richard Fernandez on how the “best and brightest” who run our political and “educational” institutions were somehow taken completely by surprise by the hatred and brutality of Hamas and Iran, despite some of us warning about it for years.
https://instapundit.com/612811/
Back underway: The House Speaker’s race
The House Speaker’s race will get back underway today, and here’s some info on the NINE candidates who are now vying for the position after all of the party’s top leaders were rejected. I think some of them are pretty good, but sadly, they may be hamstrung by the fact that none of them are perfect.
Washington Math
There’s only one form of accounting shadier than Hollywood math, and that’s Washington math. The deficit is one of the most fertile fields for financial finagling, for instance, when Biden claimed he cut the deficit by a trillion dollars when all that actually happened was that we didn’t spend an extra trillion on pandemic relief that year because the pandemic was over the year before.
For those of you who enjoy shady math, here’s an example of how the government is hiding our ballooning federal deficit that Biden claims his policies are reducing. Like claiming that this year’s deficit is $400 million lower by subtracting the $400 million that the Supreme Court wouldn’t let Biden spend on paying off his constituents’ student loans.
https://www.westernjournal.com/fact-check-federal-budget-deficit-double-just-one-year-biden/
Only in Washington can money you wanted to spend but were never going to be allowed to spend be counted as a “budget cut.” I think I’ll tell my wife that I’ve decided to cut our expenses by $50,000 by not buying a fancy new fishing boat this year and see how that goes over.
Aside from DC’s mathemagician act, that article also contains some actual math that should scare anyone who cares about America’s fiscal health. Not only are deficits out of sight, each one adds to our national debt, which recently topped $33 trillion. In a vicious circle of fiscal incompetence, high inflation is forcing higher spending (like last year’s 8.7% COLA for Social Security recipients) while higher interest rates to curb inflation are raising the interest payments on the national debt. Interest payments on the debt will soon be more than we spend on national defense.
The government has run up a debt on our national credit card that averages out to about $100,000 for each and every American. And nobody asked me if I wanted any of that spending. Personally, I’d rather have two new $50,000 fishing boats.
Apple users: Something to think about
Jon Stewart’s show on Apple+ is reportedly ending because he was planning to do an episode critical of China and China is a big market for Apple. Something to think about when you’re standing in line at the Apple store.
https://www.cnn.com/2023/10/20/media/jon-stewart-apple/index.html
From our “You Can’t Fool All of the People All of the Time” file:
It seems that black voters are starting to realize that false accusations of racism against Republicans aren’t a good enough reason to keep voting for Democrats who have made their lives miserable for generations.
Spiritual darkness of Hamas and its defenders: a follow-up
Note: In case you missed my weekend TBN monologue and the transcript in Sunday’s newsletter, please watch it here. The following piece builds on what I said, once again asking the question of why the White House --- under Obama and Biden, NOT Trump --- has been so protective of Iran.
https://youtu.be/jti4RX14zWU?si=QZGdSySYgdCnBDOY
First, some history. Did you know the October 7 attack wasn’t really about Israel? Such barbarism against Jews and other non-Muslims has been going on for many centuries, with the same kind of depraved inhumanity-to-man we saw from Hamas just two weeks ago. As Milt Harris writes for PJ MEDIA, Israel and the politics surrounding Gaza are “excuses for a bloodletting that, in the eyes of extremists, is not only justified but obligatory.”
Harris explains that the Ottoman Empire based its authority on religion. It follows that they would use religion to expand that authority, and they surely did, furiously conquering other lands with a seething blood lust.
The 1529 siege of Vienna was just one such example, and Hamas’ butchery of two weeks ago is reminiscent of those tactics. (Yes, Harris describes some of the worst atrocities.) Harris has questions for today’s “anti-colonialist” defenders of Hamas: Was that (horrible atrocity) an expression against colonialism or capitalism? Was this (other horrible atrocity) a response to globalism or Zionism? “Perhaps this was simply Islam,” he ventured, qualifying that later to read “Islam in this form.”
Other grisly attacks continued into the 20th and 21st centuries. Harris describes two that took place in 1929, one in the Jewish city of Safed and the other in Hebron, the “Hebron Massacre” --- noting that some Jews survived the latter attack after being hidden by Arab families. These two attacks shocked the Jewish community and led to the development of Israel Defense Forces.
Harris describes another attack near an archeological site in Egypt in 1997, during which machete-wielding attackers systematically killed and mutilated the bodies of 58 tourists, mostly from neutral Switzerland (they don’t care), and 4 Egyptians.
In the 21st century, of course, there have been numerous other vicious attacks, and Harris goes into detail. He makes the point that every time they commit some gruesome attack, there is some “paper thin” excuse for it. Two weeks ago, it was that the border wall suppresses them and makes them feel as if they’re in an “open-air prison.”
All this attack demonstrated to thinking people is that this wall wasn’t nearly secure enough! Israel doesn’t keep Hamas behind a fence because they’re oppressors; they do it for the same reason that zoos keep crocodiles behind a fence.
In Harris’ words, “The truth is that each attack manifests itself out of Islam. No one wants to admit that fact, lest they are called Islamophobic. Instead, we allow the weak excuses that are offered to justify their barbarism. When Muslims gang raped and sawed in half a Hindu schoolteacher in Kashmir, it was about India’s treatment of Muslims. When they rampaged through the Bataclan theater in Paris, killing everyone within reach, they were protesting France’s treatment of ISIS. When they rape a woman at a music concert in Israel next to the bodies of her murdered friends, they’re protesting for Gaza.”
As if ANY excuse could’ve justified such barbaric onslaughts against innocents.
And if the more recent attacks were actually motivated by such excuses, they wouldn’t bear such uncanny resemblance to the slaughters that took place many centuries before.
Harris writes, “Islam in this form cannot be reasoned or co-existed with. Its violence is a religious duty written into its scripture and its laws. Its atrocities, murder, torture, mutilation and rape are all acts of sacred religious devotion. The Islamic kingdom of heaven can only be achieved when the entire world submits to Islam.”
As Harris explains it, “This is not about politics, Israel, the United States or anything else. It’s a thousand plus year crusade to subjugate all of mankind.”
We’d like to introduce you to someone who just doesn’t get this at all. He’s Sven Kuhn von Burgsdorff of Germany, until recently the foreign European Union envoy to Gaza. Get a load of what he did in July, several months before Hamas carried out their paraglider attack. He actually got into his own paraglider and demonstrated to people in Gaza what they could do when they “are free.”
Oh, and Mr. Sven Kuhn von Clueless has since blamed Israel completely for any retaliation against Hamas. “It doesn’t matter what Hamas did,” he said. Israel’s foreign ministry says this man is being used as a propaganda tool by Hamas. They’re right --- he’s the ultimate useful idiot.
Now let’s go from the most clueless to the most clued-in. Investigative reporter Lee Smith, whom you know from such books as THE PLOT AGAINST THE PRESIDENT, also has a great deal of experience covering the Middle East, and Jan Jekielek interviewed him this weekend for AMERICAN THOUGHT LEADERS on EPOCH TV.
Smith spoke first about willing American media being tools for spreading terrorist propaganda. Example: THE NEW YORK TIMES printed a picture of supposed Israeli “war crimes” that turned out to have been completely posed. (Surprised they didn’t get a Pulitzer for it, ha.) Israeli activists have a name for fake video, he said: “Pally-wood,” with “pal” meaning “Palestine.” He praised Elon Musk for coming out against it on his platform, “X” (formerly Twitter).
“There’s a very large part of Gazan society, unfortunately, that’s devoted to sustaining Hamas operations,” Smith explained. In other words, many more people are involved than, say, a fighting force of a few thousand. Some dig tunnels, some are responsible for creating and spreading propaganda.
In speaking of the terrorists’ use of human shields, Smith began to sound very much like Milt Harris in the article we linked to above. “What does this tell you about...the nature of regimes like Hezbollah, like Hamas?” he asked. “It’s not just that they’re non-Western, right? We’re not just talking about a clash of civilizations or a clash of cultures. We’re talking about a particular type of regime. It’s a ‘pathocratic’ regime...rule of the pathological. We’re not talking about an oligarchy, we’re not talking about a democracy, a tyranny, a monarchy. We’re talking about rule of the pathologically evil.”
Of course, his words immediately remind us of Nazi Germany and THEIR twisted plan to exterminate all Jews. Smith brought up Saddam Hussein and the current Iranian regime as other examples.
We have to understand the nature of these regimes. These are people “who would put their own neighbors, their own families” in front of themselves as they waged war. They’d “risk the lives of their own families in order to kill others.” They are SICK.
Concepts like “proportionality” don’t work, because we’re talking about powers that “don’t operate in the same way.”
He noted that many Arab countries --- Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan, to name three --- hope Israel will destroy Hamas. “But this is something that you’re not gonna hear in public.”
About ten minutes in, Smith brought the discussion home to America, saying the Biden administration is lying when they say they’ve found no evidence that the Iranians weren’t involved in the attack on October 7. We have records of meetings between high-ranking Iranian officials and the top leaders of Hamas and Hezbollah, “training operatives specifically for this assault,” he said.
Biden lies about this, he said, because his administration is still trying to restore Obama’s Iran nuclear deal. Hand to his forehead, he asked, “Why does American and European leadership want to legalize the nuclear weapons program of a pathocratic state?” Why are they normalizing twisted regimes like Hamas and Iran? And that IS the big question, isn’t it?
It was Obama’s “communications infrastructure” that allowed him to misrepresent the Iran deal as one that would work against Iran getting nuclear weapons. That deal is actually just the opposite.
Trump withdrew from the deal in May 2018. Also under Trump, the head of Iran’s “terror master” was assassinated. Critics said these actions would bring more chaos, even war, to the region, but it didn’t. In fact, while Trump was President, there was a period of relative stability there. They knew he meant business.
Trump also deserves credit for the very important Abraham Accords, Smith said. These were “the Trump administration’s recognition that the Obama administration, through the nuclear deal, and through other initiatives, wanted to rearrange the Middle East to prioritize relationships with Iran.”
To do this, Obama had downgraded relationships with traditional U.S. allies, such as Israel and Saudi Arabia. Trump reversed this as well, going around Iran while firming up relationships with those allies and building a structure “counter to the Iran deal.”
So, there’s one more thing Trump was right about. If anyone has the strength and resolve to deal with “pathocracies” like Iran, he has shown that he does.
If you have a subscription to EPOCH TV, Smith offers more detail in this interview.
But his recent article in TABLET covers the same topic, in much greater detail. Highly recommended...
Laura Ainsworth update
Our writer/researcher Laura Ainsworth, who moonlights as an award-winning retro jazz singer, attended the Josie Music Awards last night at the Grand Ole Opry Theater in Nashville, where she was nominated for both Artist and Vocalist of the Year (Jazz/Blues) for her fantastic new album of requested standards, “You Asked For It.” Unfortunately, she didn’t win, but she says she never expected to. Her form of classic old school jazz a la Julie London and Peggy Lee is a niche-within-a-niche these days.
Still, it was a huge honor to be nominated. The JMAs are an international indie music organization and this year, they received over 59,000 submissions. So you can imagine how talented she is to be chosen as one of the nominees in two major categories. We’re not surprised, since she’s already won awards from three other organizations. Keep your fingers crossed for a Grammy nod.
In the meantime, if you’d like to see her gown on the red carpet, here’s a photo:
https://twitter.com/LauraAinsworth1/status/1716232679954243691
And to buy her music and follow her on social media, visit
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