By Mike Huckabee
October 10, 2021
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Blessings on you and your family, and from all the Huckabee staff! These are the top stories that ran this week on our website.
Today's newsletter includes:
- We are holding the wrong people to account for Afghanistan failure
- “Shut up and obey” is not a strategy for anything
- A furious backlash to Biden, Garland plan
- In MORE Facebook news...John Stossel sues Facebook
- "Imminent threat"
Sincerely,
Mike Huckabee
We are holding the wrong people to account for Afghanistan failure
By Mike Huckabee
Thirty House Republicans signed a letter to top military leaders, demanding the release of Marine Lt. Col. Stuart Scheller, who was thrown in the brig for publicly calling on the top brass to accept accountability for the tragic botching of the Afghanistan withdrawal. I just want to know why it’s only 30.
Also, Rep. Louie Gohmert visited with Scheller and had some encouraging news to relate afterwards.
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/jailed-marine-looking-good-louie-gohmert
As if to hammer home that the only people the DC liberal establishment think deserve jail are those who disagree with their politics, an investigation has been launched into Lance Cpl. Hunter Clark. He’s the Marine who was seen in a viral video saving a baby by pulling it over a barbed wire-topped wall at the Kabul Airport during the botched Afghanistan evacuation. His alleged crime: he accepted an invitation to speak at a rally from former President Trump.
Note that he was not in uniform and made no political statements. He was invited up by Trump as part of a public show of support for US troops, and he thanked the crowd for their support and said it means a lot and he’s glad to be home. For that, he’s now under a command investigation to see if he violated any Department of Defense policies.
So to recap so far: Ask for accountability from failed leaders, go to jail. Get thanked in public by a former President for saving a baby, go under investigation. Preside over the worst strategic disaster in modern military history, keep your job and get praised by CNN.
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“Shut up and obey” is not a strategy for anything
By Mike Huckabee
The Bible tells us in Luke 8:17 (NAS version), “For nothing is concealed that will not become evident, nor anything hidden that will not be known and come to light.” Or as Shakespeare put it in “The Merchant of Venice,” “Truth will come to light; murder cannot be hid long; a man's son may, but at the length, truth will out.” (By the way, “a man’s son” was not a reference to Hunter Biden and his laptops.)
Despite all the power and influence of the government, media and social media, you can only fool the people for so long and hold the lid down on discussion of your chicanery before the under-the-radar chatter finally explodes into the public sphere. We’re seeing that happening all around us these days, with erupting backlash against attempts to censor everything from discussion of vaccine side effects to the origins of COVID-19 to the efficacy of natural immunity to questions about the 2020 election.
Attacking those who speak up only works for so long, particularly when influential people start speaking up, whether it be Eric Clapton, Nikki Minaj or French tennis pro Jeremy Chardy, who says he’s suffering intense pain after getting vaccinated and it's derailed his tennis career.
As noted in the story, that’s not meant to discourage vaccination, since the potential side effects are still less of a risk than COVID. But if you’re asking everyone to take a shot that might have even a tiny chance of serious side effects, then you can’t just order them to shut up and take it without question or else lose their job and all their rights, which is the autocratic method this Administration has chosen. Right now, Americans are scared enough of COVID to go along with that, but “Shut up and obey” is not a strategy that will work longterm in this country.
Likewise, after being silenced and shamed for months into not questioning any aspects of the 2020 election, the findings of various audits and investigations, coupled with the indictment of a top Democrat lawyer on charges related to lying to the FBI to frame Trump and his people for Russian collusion, has many people finally speaking up. Some are even prominent Trump-hating liberals who suddenly seem to have taken the red pill and awakened to what we’ve been telling you here for years now.
Here are two stunning examples: liberal British comedian Russell Brand admitted he was “in awe, gobsmacked, flabbergasted and startled” by the indictment of Michael Sussman and the realization that Trump was right about a conspiracy to frame him. Like too many people, Brand was getting his news from outlets that went on 24/7 about “Russian collusion” as “absolute fact,” so he assumed it must be true (a rookie mistake when watching CNN.)
https://www.westernjournal.com/massive-liberal-celeb-sees-light-trump-right-clinton-russia/
Brand said he wanted to believe that the Democratic Party is the party of “inclusivity, and diversity and truth and social justice and all great, positive ideas” (yep, that's the image they push, like putting a bouquet of flowers on a pack of cigarettes.) But, he said, “To discover that this was propaganda, a construct, a confection by the Democratic Party — who, of course, are now in government — is kind of beyond disappointing, because you begin to question and query what other things may not be true.”
Yes, and you should! Good for you, Russell. Embrace the truth, and it shall set you free. For a start, you’re welcome to subscribe to my newsletter, which is also free.
Another example, again from Britain, but let’s hope this reflects what’s happening here, too: writer Rob Liddle in the Sunday Times of London is still a Trump hater (as you can tell from his article), but his blinders have started to slip. He admits, “So Trump was right” about the election being rigged against him, and “The American public is slowly waking up to the fact that they are being led by an ineffectually devious, senile halfwit.”
Maybe someday, he'll wake up to the fact that Trump wasn't just a victim of the cabal, he was the only person standing between it and the rest of us and fighting it. But that might take a handful of red pills for some people to see.
Note that he makes the same point that I have made repeatedly: you don’t even have to go into conspiracy theories about hijacked voting machines or stuffed ballot boxes. Just the collusion between Deep State operatives, leftist billionaires, the media, political figures, lawyers, Big Tech and social media to make sure voters heard only one side of the story was enough to unfairly tilt the election – and they’ve openly bragged about how successful that was. They even hail themselves as heroes for making sure the “right” person won by suppressing “unwanted elements of US political conversation” – as determined by them, of course.
Liddle points out that Time magazine said this cabal wasn’t subverting democracy by rigging the election, they were “fortifying” the election. We all need to start speaking up to make sure they don’t “fortify” any more elections. They do it the way cereal makers used to claim their sugary cereals were “fortified” with vitamins. They claim it’s good for you, but it’s just a thin coating over a bowl of junk.
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A furious backlash to Biden, Garland plan
By Mike Huckabee
I’m very glad to see that Attorney General Merrick Garland’s plan to engage federal, state and local law enforcement to intimidate parents who protest the actions of leftist schools boards is being met with the overwhelming furious backlash it deserves. One commentator said this might be the straw that broke the camel’s back (sorry for triggering any animal lovers) for the Democrats’ dwindling hopes in the midterm elections. This is such an outrageous assault on the most basic rights of all citizens to engage in free speech and protest, and of all parents to have a say in how their children are educated, that the outrage cuts across all political and racial lines.
To be clear: I'm not defending anyone who makes actual physical threats against school board members. But Garland cited no examples of actual threats to justify this. Instead, his statement included vague and overly broad terms such as “harassment” and “intimidation,” which signals that this is really an abuse of power designed to chill free speech. He also offered no justification for literally making a federal case out of these hypothetical threats, which are already covered by laws and police on the local level. The only reasons to federalize this are to assert more control in picking targets and to ramp up the intimidation factor (ironically, Garland is the one who seems to be guilty of attempting to harass and intimidate people.)
Here’s a round-up of just some of the reactions to this Orwellian abuse of power:
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis blasted Garland for “weaponizing the DOJ by using the FBI to pursue concerned parents and silence them through intimidation,” adding, “Florida will defend the free speech rights of its citizens and will not allow federal agents to squelch dissent.” His spokeswoman also called it “despicable and un-American,” saying, “Florida law enforcement is perfectly capable of responding to crimes in Florida, and we have never heard the FBI suggest otherwise. However, disagreement is not harassment. Protest is not terrorism, unless it involves rioting, looting, and assault, like some of the left-wing protests of summer 2020.”
Speaking of that, while the DOJ and FBI busy themselves with surveilling Trump voters and intimidating concerned parents, murders took the biggest spike in history in 2020, nearly 30 percent (thanks, all you police-defunding blue state Governors, mayors and city councils!)…
And while the FBI is ignoring that, they’re also doing virtually nothing about actual violent terrorists and anarchists like Antifa, as long as they’re on the left.
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In MORE Facebook news...John Stossel sues Facebook
By Mike Huckabee
This week, all the 24/7 news channels could have a theme: “All Facebook, all the time!”
But in a week with so much dramatic Facebook news –- including a whistleblower on 60 MINUTES accusing them of exploiting hate and misinformation for profit and a crashing halt to their platform for six hours on Monday –- it might be just as important to focus on what some would see as a smaller story: the $2 million defamation lawsuit filed against the Big Tech behemoth by veteran investigative reporter John Stossel. You’ll know immediately whose side we’re on, as we’ve also had it up to HERE with so-called independent “fact”-checkers –- both the “official” ones who get paid to distort the truth and the pajama-clad partisans with nothing else to do but sit and snark. We applaud Stossel for refusing to take it.
Stossel has 19 Emmys to his name. He’s the former host of ABC’s 20/20, STOSSEL ON REASON, and his own show on FOX BUSINESS NEWS. He’s currently the creator and host of STOSSEL TV. He’s also the author of several bestselling books. And yet to put his reports on Facebook, even he has to gain the approval of partisan, agenda-driven gatekeepers.
He appeared Monday evening on FOX NEWS PRIMETIME with this week’s host Ben Domenech. Stossel’s problem with Facebook started when he posted a couple of videos about climate change and the California wildfires. Stossel says some “fact”-checkers from the team Climate Feedback, a spin-off of parent group Science Feedback, twisted his words so they could flag his posts as “misleading.” It’s incredibly easy to distort what somebody said so you can argue against THAT, rather than what they actually said. We’ve had to deal with that ourselves; in fact, it happened to us last week, with our story on the Maricopa County forensic audit report. So we were very interested in what Stossel had to say.
On his website, Stossel notes that Science/Climate Feedback uses Facebook to censor “lots of responsible people, such as science writers John Tierney, Michael Shellenberger and Bjorn Lomborg."
He explained to Domenech that the reason he’d left FOX NEWS was to do independent reports like the ones that had been posted to Facebook. “And I’m very careful about what I say,” he said. These “fact”-checkers, hired by the Poynter Institute, described by him as “a lefty group,” are so alarmed about climate change that they won’t allow anyone to even postulate, “Well, maybe we can adjust to this.” Stossel accuses them of actually manufacturing a misleading quote --- even putting quotation marks around it.
We thought it might be fun to look up the Poynter Institute and their International Fact-Checking Network (IFCN), so we did and found their “Code Of Principles,” which include “A Commitment to Non-Partisanship and Fairness” and “A Commitment to Open and Honest Corrections.” Gosh, we love unintentional humor. Why, it looks as though John Stossel is accusing the “fact”-checkers of violating their own principles as stated right there on their own website. I wonder how well their “Code of Principles” would stand up to a fact-check.
https://www.poynter.org/ifcn-fact-checkers-code-of-principles/
Anyway, Stossel said the fakery was pointed out to the “fact”-checkers and also to Facebook but that it wasn’t taken down. “And that’s just lying about me,” he said. It didn’t matter –- reviewers labeled Stossel’s piece “FALSE.”
Stossel was able to get interviews with a couple of the reviewers and showed them the original video posts. (That’s rare, by the way; usually there’s no way to appeal these actions, and they don’t even tell you what they find objectionable.) The reviewers told him, “Oh, we never watched that.” So Stossel got “black marks” for something he never said and the reviewers hadn’t looked at.
What’s the significance of this? As Stossel explained, when you get two “black marks,” Facebook cuts off your views. In the case of Stossel’s climate videos, that’s 24 million. “Now, I don’t get anything like I used to,” he said. And, of course, that was exactly the idea, as the powers that be have no room for dissenting opinion. “...I’m being punished by these idiot ‘fact’-checkers,” he said.
In his lawsuit, Stossel claims the “fact”-checkers never actually challenged any facts in his videos, adding that their process “is nothing more than a pretext...to defame users with impunity, particularly when Defendants disagree with the scientific opinions expressed in user content.” He's saying what we’ve said for a long time: they’re not checking facts; they’re checking opinions. (In case you wondered, that's why we keep putting quotation marks around the word "fact.")
Stossel believes Facebook should, first off, fire Climate Feedback “because they are silencing a lot of good science reporters.” That activity does seem to be spreading these days, infecting social media like some kind of...well, virus.
Matt Agorist wrote about Stossel’s lawsuit for THE FREE THOUGHT PROJECT.
https://thefreethoughtproject.com/fact-check-facebook-defamation-john-stossel/
Apparently TFTP has had a lot of trouble with this, too. As Agorist writes, “THE FREE THOUGHT PROJECT knows this process all too well as we have a target on our backs and we have successfully refuted and overturned nearly every fact check from the outlets who respond to our appeals. But even after the fact check is reversed, the damage is done.” He explains that even when there is vindication, users are never notified of that.
This can happen to you, he says, even when your content is “100 percent factual.”
Agorist’s piece has more details about what Stossel said vs. what he was purported to say. The “fact"-checkers flagged Stossel’s content as “misleading” and --- our favorite --- “missing context.” Stossel alleges that what they did has ruined his business model after his “viewership plummeted,” and he also cites “reputational harm.”
According to Agorist, THE FREE THOUGHT PROJECT had a similar experience with some perfectly accurate information they posted about COVID when their commentary was falsely linked to a conspiracy theory having to do with 5G wireless signals. TFTP had said nothing about 5G, but by creating that link out of thin air, "fact"-checkers were able to label the commentary “false.”
Facebook is reportedly standing by its “fact”-checkers regardless of their bias. They told VARIETY that they believe Stossel’s case is “without merit,” proclaiming, “We will defend ourselves vigorously against the allegations.”
Agorist mentions the Hunter Biden laptop scandal as just one example of social media “fact”-checking leading to censorship of accurate and potentially game-changing information. (I would add that according to one recent poll, 16 percent of Biden voters said they wouldn’t have voted for him if they’d known of his family’s dicey foreign business dealings.) You’d think that after they’d been proven so utterly wrong, "fact"-checkers wouldn’t be taken seriously any more, but they work in service to an agenda so the truth hardly matters.
We wish John Stossel well with his litigation. In fact, we’ll give him the last word, by linking to his website, where he gives his side and shows the videos that were flagged.
https://www.johnstossel.com/smeared/
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"Imminent threat"
By Mike Huckabee
When the president of the National School Board Association sent a letter to President Biden, urging him to use federal law enforcement to deal with the “imminent threat” of parents showing up at school board meetings to protest their kids being forced into draconian COVID restrictions and indoctrinated with pornographic sexual content and racist “Critical Race Theory,” many Americans rightly reacted with fury and dismay. Public school bureaucrats have no divine right to decide how they will treat other people’s children or what they’ll teach them, especially if it’s controversial leftist propaganda that parents don’t want polluting their children’s minds.
In fact, in Virginia, Democrat gubernatorial candidate Terry McAuliffe’s campaign took a big stumble when he sided with these educrats in a debate, declaring, “I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach.” Problem: that right is actually codified into state law, which he should know, having been Governor before (State code section 1-240.1: “A parent has a fundamental right to make decisions concerning the upbringing, education, and care of the parent’s child.”) Even Democrat ex-Gov. Doug Wilder slapped him down, saying, “If parents don’t have a say-so in terms of their kids’ education, then who does?”
We all know the left’s answer to that question: they believe the government owns your kids, the same way it owns every penny you earn but is generous enough to let you keep a few of them.
Anyway, do you know who didn’t give that outrageous letter the quick trip to the circular file that it deserved? Attorney General Merrick Garland, who announced that the FBI and the Biden “Justice” Department will begin holding meetings with federal, state and local law enforcement to discuss ways to combat this “disturbing trend” of parents refusing to let their children be brainwashed with leftist garbage. He didn’t exactly put it that way, of course, but I cut to the chase.
Garland said in a statement, "Threats against public servants are not only illegal, they run counter to our nation’s core values. Those who dedicate their time and energy to ensuring that our children receive a proper education in a safe environment deserve to be able to do their work without fear for their safety."
That’s funny, I thought the term “public servant” meant they serve the public, not the other way around. Also, America’s greatest core value is freedom of speech.
To be clear: it’s important to remain civil even when you’re justifiably angry. Nobody should express their anger at school boards with threats and intimidation. FYI to AG Garland: that also applies to BLM and Antifa protesters. But it’s reasonable to assume that with this massive effort to start “policing” and monitoring parental speech, the goal is not to prevent real threats and violence but to intimidate parents into being afraid to speak up at public meetings. It’s the same method that’s been used to intimidate Trump supporters into being afraid of expressing their honest opinions on social media. They know “Big Brother is watching you.”
So keep showing up at public meetings to express your opposition, but do it civilly. And most importantly, show up to all local elections and VOTE THESE BUMS OUT. The left has figured out that the way to destroy America is from the bottom up. So they show up for local elections, where voters have gotten complacent and assume it doesn't matter whether they vote or not. This is how you get city councils that defund the police and Soros-funded district attorneys who release criminals the prosecute people who defend themselves from criminals, and yes, school boards that push anti-Americanism, critical race theory and radical sexual politics. If you want to get rid of them, show up at the meetings, but better yet, show up at your local election polls.
Meanwhile, with every new action taken by Merrick Garland, we see what a debt of gratitude America owes to Sen. Mitch McConnell for blocking Obama from putting him onto the Supreme Court. Far from the moderate, centrist jurist he was touted as being, he’s proving daily that he has no qualms about treating the Bill of Rights like toilet paper and abusing his powers to impose the will of the authoritarian left. I am counting the minutes until 2024, when a new Republican President has him escorted from the DOJ, hopefully never to hold any position of public trust again.
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