By Mike Huckabee
January 16, 2024
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Blessings on you and your family from all the Huckabee team! Today, if you have a moment, leave me a comment about something you read. Comments help me fine tune what I am writing, and they show that we have an active community of readers.
Sincerely,
Mike Huckabee
P.S. Just a reminder: The Morning Edition, delivers Monday-Saturday
Daily Bible Verse
5 My soul, wait thou only upon God; for my expectation is from him.
6 He only is my rock and my salvation: he is my defence; I shall not be moved.
Psalm 62:5-6 KJV
Newsletter Notes
12 stories
4,348 words
Reading time: About 20 minutes
Trump wins Iowa
As expected last night, Donald Trump won a record victory in the Iowa Caucuses. He took 51% of the vote, smashing George Bush’s previous record of 41%. And his 29.8% margin of victory over second placer Ron DeSantis obliterated Bob Dole’s record winning margin of 12.8%. Nikki Haley came in third at 19.1% (she declared that this is now a “two-person race,” but it’s unclear who that second person is that she's referring to.) Vivek Ramaswamy was fourth with 7.7%, and as I predicted, he started the post-Iowa field-thinning by dropping out and endorsing Trump.
Interestingly, Texas pastor and little-known candidate Ryan Binkley won 774 votes for 0.7%. That's four times more support than the 191 votes and 0.2% taken by Asa Hutchinson.
There was some controversy early on that drew complaints from the DeSantis campaign after the AP called the race for Trump with less than 1% of the vote in and people still caucusing. They’re right to complain about that, but it didn’t seem to make much difference in the long run.
DeSantis and Haley say they’re moving on to New Hampshire and South Carolina, although Haley announced that she won’t participate in any more GOP debates.
But Newt Gingrich says it’s already time to stick a fork in it. He told Fox News that despite all the lawfare, slander and censorship thrown at Trump, "He's the nominee. Get over it – He is the nominee. He's going to win the nomination. The news media doesn't want to say that because they need to somehow hype ‘please watch us while we go through this charade’."
He said there is no viable path for a second-place candidate to come from behind and win: "[Y]ou get to be the leading ‘irrelevant’ or the second ‘irrelevant’ or the third ‘irrelevant’, but nobody is going to be number two because he is going to dominate totally if you look at the country at-large."
Despite claims that Trump will alienate women voters, an AP poll found that he actually got more support from GOP women in Iowa (54%) than from men (53%.) One red flag that the campaign will need to address is that his support was much higher among rural women than suburban women (59% to 40%), who are an important factor in the November vote. He’ll need to work hard to dispel the phony Boogey-man image that the Democrats and the media (but I repeat myself) have created, and convince suburban women that it’s not in their best interests to keep voting for high crime, open borders, endless wars, eroded Constitutional rights and a terrible economy.
The Media reacts
The media reacted to Trump’s crushing victory exactly the way you’d expect: by having a full-scale tantrum worthy of a two-year-old in the Walmart candy aisle.
Trump’s victory speech was actually rather moderate and mature. He called for unity, praised his rivals for their efforts, and talked about how he planned to begin making America great again by ending the rising threats abroad, fixing the economy and rebuilding our crumbling infrastructure. He even said he wasn’t going to go too hard on Joe Biden, although he then referred to him as the worst President in history. But by Trump’s standards (and considering the evidence), I’d say that IS going easy on him.
But if you were trying to watch the speech on CNN or MSNBC (and why would anyone do that?), you couldn’t, because they cut away from it. Instead, they filled the time with their far-left talking heads ranting against Trump and his supporters. Like Joy Reid complaining that there are too many white Christians in Iowa. Or CNN’s Jake Tapper, who claimed that Iowans “believed the lie” (what, that CNN is a news channel?) and that Trump was spouting “anti-immigrant rhetoric” when he said he would start deporting the millions of illegal aliens Biden has allowed to cross our open border.
This is a good example of how liberals only win arguments by changing the definitions of words. An illegal alien is not an “immigrant.” Immigrants respect America’s laws and follow the system to become US citizens, and are among our best and most patriotic citizens. Literally anybody can cross an open border illegally, which is the problem. By the way, polls show that a majority of Americans agree with those Trump policies they’re demonizing, including securing the border and deporting illegal aliens.
Even more hilariously, MSNBC’s tiny viewing pool was treated to Rachel Maddow piously intoning about how they made the painful decision not to show Trump’s speech because they’re so devoted to airing the truth. She then went into a weird diatribe about how Trump is a dangerous fascist but his supporters are even worse. You might recall that fascism is a political doctrine in which the government dictates which views are allowed to be expressed. You might also recall Ms. Maddow as the professional fabulist who misled her viewers for years, feeding them ever-wilder “Russian collusion” conspiracy theories that all turned out to be horse manure.
So why is this lying hypocrite still employed by MSNBC? I like my writers, but if they’d tainted my reputation by pushing a lot of patent rubbish for two years, I would have fired them. Whenever I see Maddow now, it’s like seeing a flashing neon sign reminding me not to believe a word I hear on MSNBC.
As laughable as these histrionics are, they do offer a serious lesson in how this campaign is going to play out, and it shows that Trump and the GOP will have to be clever and diligent in cutting through the attempts to silence and censor their message. These people are terrified, but not that Trump will be a fascist dictator (he was already President for four years, and I notice none of them ended up in a gulag.)
They’re terrified that if Americans see Trump unfiltered by them, it will undo three years’ worth of their efforts at creating a straw man and standing between him and the public to keep people from seeing who he really is: a man who was once the most popular celebrity on NBC before he announced for President as a Republican, and overnight, magically transformed into a racist, Nazi monster. They’ll also use the “We can’t let Hitler speak!” dodge as an excuse for Biden not to “lower himself” to debate Trump, as if he possibly could.
To quote Newt Gingrich: “Get over it!”
To save you (and me) the annoyance of having to watch this bilge, Nick Arama at Redstate.com did it for us and recapped it, and he has my eternal gratitude. He also makes the correct observation that despite all the claims that the Republicans are “extremists,” there are only a handful of extremists on the fringe of the rightwing, while they are the animating force of the modern Democratic Party.
A postscript on Martin Luther King Jr. Day:
The FBI put out a tweet honoring MLK, and was immediately eviscerated by Twitter (X) users and Community Notes, which reminded us that “The FBI engaged in surveillance of King, attempted to discredit him, and used manipulation tactics to influence him to stop organizing. King’s family believe the FBI was responsible for his death.”
Kudos to Mark Hemingway for reminding us that “the man in LBJ's (White House) responsible for monitoring King and disseminating the illegal recordings to humiliate him was none other than beloved progressive PBS icon Bill Moyers.”
https://instapundit.com/626873/
Related: I find that most leftist attacks on Trump tell you far more about the attacker than about Trump. For instance, on Monday, Trump’s campaign put out a simple cartoon on social media, showing Iowans how to vote in the Caucuses.
https://www.westernjournal.com/weirdos-mediaite-lose-minds-harmless-video-trump-posted-caucus/
The leftist website Mediaite managed to twist this into both an accusation of ignorance and disrespect about Martin Luther King Jr. Day (apparently, you’re not supposed to tweet about anything else on that day, and/or it’s horrific not to include the “Jr.,” which prompts me to ask, if that’s so necessary, why is it frequently abbreviated as “MLK Day” rather than “MLKJ Day”?) and a weird sexual controversy because the cartoon character didn’t have genitalia.
What kind of sick cartoons did these people’s parents let them watch as kids, and is that why they turned out the sad way they did?
100 days
Guy Benson at Townhall.com has a round-up of the disgusting pro-Hamas, anti-Israel rallies around the US, marking 100 days since the horrifying October 7th attack on Jews in Israel.
As these protesters have become more emboldened by authorities’ refusal to make them obey the law, their disruptions hit a new low on Saturday night when a mob of them gathered outside the White House. They waved Palestinian flags while chanting, “Ceasefire Now," "Free, Free Palestine," and "Yemen, Yemen make us proud / Turn another ship around," showing their support for attacks on ships by Iran-backed Houthi militants.
The situation escalated when the protesters damaged the fence around the White House, and staffers and journalists inside were relocated to ensure their safety. As many pundits noted, if they’d been wearing red MAGA caps, they would have been arrested, branded as “insurrectionists” and imprisoned for years, but chances are they will face zero consequences for their open support of terrorists, threats and vandalism of the White House, and interfering with government business.
Maybe they were extra mad because on Friday, Biden admitted that the Houthis are terrorists. The Trump Administration had designated them as terrorists, but Biden revoked that designation. Apparently, he mindlessly revoked everything Trump did without any regard for why it was done, under the theory that “Trump BAD!,” which explains a lot of the disasters we’re dealing with today.
Related: Hamas released footage of three hostages that confirms they were alive, but it’s not clear when they were filmed. The terrorists added ominously, “Tomorrow we will inform you of their Fate.”
These are just three of over 130 hostages who are still being held by Hamas. As Bob Hoge rightly says at the link, if these pro-Hamas protesters really cared about ending the war, they’d be demanding that Hamas release its hostages, not that Israel surrender.
Also related: These pro-terrorist leftists might think they can get away with being public menaces with no consequences, but they’re learning quickly that they’d better not mess with Texas.
Kerry steps down
It was announced that John Kerry is stepping down as President Biden’s “climate czar” and will instead work on Biden’s reelection campaign. Ironically, his no longer taking private jets to climate conferences all over the world may represent the biggest reduction in CO2 emissions that this Administration has yet achieved.
https://www.westernjournal.com/ap-john-kerry-us-climate-envoy-leave-biden-administration/
I wish Kerry just as much success with Biden’s presidential campaign as he brought to his own.
Willis responds
Fulton County DA Fani Willis has finally responded – sort of – to allegations that she enriched herself with tax money by paying big bucks to her unqualified, married boyfriend Nathan Wade to act as Trump special prosecutor, and he, in turn, spent some of the money on lavish trips with her.
She didn’t respond in legal fashion, nor did she deny the allegations. But she did go in front of a friendly crowd at a black church and play the race card like crazy.
https://redstate.com/nick-arama/2024/01/14/fani-willis-comments-on-scandal-n2168718
Willis insinuated that the accusations are racially motivated because the other two special prosecutors are white and only she and Wade, who are black, are accused of wrongdoing. Yes, but maybe that’s because the other two prosecutors had nothing to do with all that corruption mentioned in the first paragraph.
Defying any bolts of lightning from above, Willis declared in church, "You cannot expect black women to be perfect and save the world. The Lord is completing us, we are not perfect. We need your prayers, we need to be allowed to stumble. We need grace. We are all flawed, sinners, unworthy, imperfect, damaged."
Much of that is true. However, these allegations aren’t just about personal sins and shortcomings, they’re also about public corruption and illegality. What is flawed, unworthy, imperfect and damaged is her case. As for personal sins, you can’t expect forgiveness for them while refusing to admit you committed them.
Chris Queen at PJ Media also has some good comments on this transparently self-serving speech and how disgusting it was that it came in a church during what was supposed to be a day honoring the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., who stood up to real racism.
A “grave injustice” in Florida
A 19-year-old illegal alien in St. Johns County, Florida, is accused of causing the death of a sheriff’s officer who was trying to detain him and is facing charges of resisting an officer with violence and manslaughter. But while he hasn’t been in the US for long, either he’s already learned a lot about our system (possibly from listening to Fani Willis), or his lawyer certainly has.
His attorney is threatening a lawsuit over this “grave injustice” against his client, whom he claims “was a victim of police brutality. He was a victim of racial profiling. He was a victim of violation of his fourth, fifth, and sixth amendment constitutional rights. Those who are responsible for this abuse will be held accountable.”
The officer remains dead, but at least we can be comforted in knowing that the illegal alien accused of causing his death enjoys all those Constitutional rights guaranteed to US citizens. And since we’re holding people other than him accountable for this, how about Joe Biden and Alejandro Mayorkas?
Hmm
As part of its “diversity and inclusion” initiative, the Federal Aviation Commission is actively seeking to hire people with “targeted disabilities,” including “hearing, vision, missing extremities, partial paralysis, complete paralysis, epilepsy, severe intellectual disability, psychiatric disability and dwarfism."
I’m sure nervous flyers will be comforted to know that the agency in charge of airline safety will be staffed by people with psychiatric problems and severe intellectual disabilities. If it’s good enough for the White House, it’s good enough for the FAA.
Reporting the news
Back in November, we reported on the shooting and wounding of three Palestinian students in Burlington, Vermont. I said then that if they were targeted for being Muslim, that was a deplorable hate crime and should be condemned and prosecuted, but we didn’t know. That didn’t stop a number of media talking heads and politicians, including President Biden, from charging ahead and framing it as an Islamophobic hate crime and the shooter as a deranged MAGA type.
Well, we finally know the real story, and surprise! It doesn’t fit the preferred media narrative. The accused shooter is reportedly a mentally-unstable leftist and Hamas sympathizer who likely had an episode, ran outside in a rage and shot the young men as they were passing his house without even knowing who they were.
Again, this is why we don’t report news until we know what happened. Other people ought to try that sometime.
Rand: Proof Fauci needs to go to prison
After last week’s House testimony in which Dr. Anthony Fauci admitted that pandemic-era social distancing regulations were based on zero science, and that the lab leak hypothesis was not a “conspiracy theory,” in between claiming not to recall salient facts over a hundred times, Sen. Rand Paul is citing the testimony as vindication for his long-standing argument that Fauci should go to prison.
https://www.westernjournal.com/rand-paul-fires-off-really-thinks-fauci-deserves-frankly-go-prison/
Sen. Paul said that for making one of the worst public health decisions “in the entire history of the world,” Fauci “should just be pilloried.” But trying to silence discussion of the lab leak theory and denying knowing anything about it to Congress while privately admitting his concerns is a different story. He said, “For his dishonesty, frankly, he should go to prison. If you lie to Congress, and you’re dishonest, and you won’t accept responsibility.”
He’s right, but unfortunately, we’ve seen in recent years that if you are among a certain favored political circle, you can lie all you want to Congress and face no consequences. That’s our new pandemic.
RIP JOYCE “TRIXIE NORTON” RANDOLPH
By Pat Reeder
We've just lost another familiar TV face that generations of us have grown up watching. Joyce Randolph, who played Trixie, the wife of Ed Norton (Art Carney) on the original classic sitcom “The Honeymooners,” died Saturday in her New York apartment at 99.
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/tv/tv-news/joyce-randolph-dead-honeymooners-trixie-1235787487/
You are forgiven if you were surprised to hear she was still alive, since her co-stars Jackie Gleason, Art Carney and Audrey Meadows all passed away quite a while ago, the most recent being Carney in 2003. Although she had worked before in summer stock with Meadows, Gleason hired her after seeing her on a Clorets commercial. Of the four main characters, she had the least to do, once joking that her favorite episodes were any “in which I had more than six or seven lines.”
Although she never played Trixie with Gleason again after the original “Golden 39” episodes, she did revive the role along with Meadows as Alice Kramden for a cameo on the 1991 sitcom, “Hi, Honey, I’m Home.”
Her TV resume may not be extensive, but if you’re going to be known for one role in a show that lasted only one season, you couldn’t do better than being part of the main cast on what many consider the greatest sitcom of all time. RIP.
The J6 case against the GOVERNMENT grows as official narrative falls apart
“This may be the most significant instance of the United States government turning against its own citizens that we’ve encountered in our lifetime.”
That’s the conclusion of a must-read new piece in REVOLVER NEWS that brings together an array of details showing what the administration, some members of Congress, and the law enforcement bureaucracy have done (and continue to do) to American citizens in furtherance of their own political agenda. “What’s emerging,” they say, “is a chilling image of a rogue and desperate regime willing to go to any lengths, including imprisoning innocent Americans, to keep its grip on power and punish its political enemies.”
Anyone who thinks that’s hyperbole needs to take a look at what they’ve put together over long months through the magnificent reporting of Julie Kelly and Darren Beattie. For when you have time, here’s “The Essential REVOLVER NEWS January 6 Reading List” that they assembled two years ago. Most of this background information should be familiar to longtime newsletter readers, as we’ve covered it in detail. But what a great compendium to share with family, friends and acquaintances who might not be as well-versed in what really happened. (Also highly recommended: Kelly’s eye-opening book, titled “JANUARY 6: How Democrats Used the Capitol Protest to Launch a War on Terror Against the Political Right.”)
https://revolver.news/2022/01/the-essential-revolver-news-january-6-reading-list/
This administration’s mad power-lust, fueled as it was by TDS, was even turned on a former President of the United States, especially during the past two years, when they decided it was permissible to commit a shocking armed raid on Mar-A-Lago a few months before the 2022 election. We would add that the blatant targeting of Trump is one big reason why so many Republicans so strongly back him today, as seen in last night’s Iowa caucuses. He’s seen as THE leader who can and will get in there and fix this unholy and most decidedly un-American mess.
On Monday, Kelly and Beattie appeared on Sebastian Gorka’s podcast, stunning Gorka with some of their latest details. Kelly delves into the matter of DC U.S. Attorney Matthew Graves and his leftist political agenda. Recall that Graves is also one of two Biden-appointed prosecutors who refused to allow Delaware U.S. Attorney David Weiss to prosecute Hunter Biden in their districts. Graves is supervising ALL the J6 cases.
It should be noted that before and after her book came out, Kelly personally attended the trials of the various J6 defendants and read all the court filings and legal judgments, so she has a good idea of the mindset of the actors involved, particularly Judge Tanya Chutkan. Reading her orders, one can see the twisted “logic” behind punishing people innocent of any violent or even provocative act. In her mind, she had already convicted anyone who was there as being part of the “insurrection,” just for being at the rally at all. It was essentially a blanket condemnation.
Gorka started his interview by observing the government is “upping the ante” as the January 6 narrative is crumbling, with Graves announcing in a big presentation just days ago that “you’re committing a felony even if you didn’t go into Congress.” As we’ve discussed, in his zeal to double the number of his J6 indictments and keep the stack of cases growing, this prosecutor is fine with putting someone in prison just for standing in the wrong spot outside the building. But Kelly said this legal strategy is really not new (note the aforementioned Judge Chutkan), citing the conviction of Enrique Tarrio, who was charged with obstruction of an official proceeding and trespassing (!) even though he wasn’t anywhere near the Capitol building on January 6. The man was in a Baltimore hotel. He got 22 years in prison.
“But what Matthew Graves did last week was really egregious,” Kelly said. “...This is the centerpiece of Joe Biden’s presidential re-election campaign, and Matthew Graves, another partisan disguised as a prosecutor, did his part with that egregious hour-long presentation.”
Now view that in light of something else that happened this week, the sentencing of Ray Epps, who is clearly seen on video yelling at the top of his lungs multiple times the day before the rally for the crowd to “go INTO the Capitol!!!” (The crowd didn’t go for it; sensing a trap, they started chanting, “Fed! Fed! Fed!”) Unbelievably, Epps got a suspended sentence of less than a year --- no jail time at all --- when others have received astonishing sentences of 20-plus years in prison.
Gorka also brought up something new this week that we haven’t addressed yet: the insistence by a Pentagon source that Gen. Mark Milley was the “architect” of the events of that day, as he’s the one who obstructed the deployment of National Guard troops that had been green-lighted by President Trump. Col. Earl G. Matthews, a former Guardsman now serving in the Army Reserve, called Milley “the Don Barzini of the Deep State.”
As senior military advisor to the President, Gen. Milley had no legal role in the chain of command, according to Matthews. But he managed to exploit relationships and run it as “his own feudal possession.” Read what Matthews said about the role played by Army leadership on J6 --- not wanting to appear as if they were cooperating with President Trump in any way --- and you’ll see another chunk of the government’s narrative fall to the ground.
Even with all this, Beattie --- who deserves credit for coining the term “fed-surrection” --- informed Gorka that “the cracks in the official narrative are far more severe even than what you’ve described,” though he didn’t have time in that brief podcast to get into it in detail. He said that with Ray Epps’ slap on the wrist, “they’re trying to put the toothpaste back in the tube, tie up loose ends” and that Epps “would have been Central Casting for their fake insurrection narrative,” a hulking 6’3” former Marine in camo and a Trump hat. On the day of the rally, Epps skipped Trump’s speech in favor of directing people to the Capitol building. And at just the right moment, Epps found himself “magically pre-positioned right at that initial breach point, whereupon he whispers in a man’s ear and two seconds later, the initial breach occurs [with the barriers being moved].”
After this was accomplished, Epps texted his nephew to say he’d “orchestrated” it. Epps had been the head of the Arizona chapter of the Oath Keepers and on the FBI’s Most Wanted list, but he was dropped from that and ended up doing softball interviews with THE NEW YORK TIMES and 60 MINUTES while other J6-ers were held without bail. Beattie, wording it as nicely as possible, concluded that Epps is “not an authentic actor.”
The REVOLVER NEWS piece brings up yet another example of the crumbling J6 narrative. Remember former Capitol Police Lt. Tarik Johnson, the official that Pelosi’s committee made sure it did NOT talk to? And Special Agent David Lazarus, whose testimony helped put Oath Keepers in prison but who appears to have perjured himself after newly-released J6 video shows he couldn’t have been in the right place to witness what he testified about?
Johnson (a hero in our book) posted an “EMERGENCY UPDATE!!!” on X with the news that Capitol Hill Police Chief Thomas Manger --- whom he called “arguably the most corrupt politician in the country,” which is saying something --- has decided to do no internal investigation of Lazarus’ allegedly false testimony. The rug is getting pretty lumpy with all that stuff swept under it.
https://twitter.com/elleonceotk/status/1746638838112420258?s=51&t=J4D-_h2kFjBAjWxykloF4w
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