By Mike Huckabee
November 16, 2021
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THE MORNING EDITION By Mike Huckabee
Good morning! Here are some stories from me that I think you will want to read. Topics include:
- Rittenhouse Trial
- Media Trust
- Beto For Governor
- COVID-19 Origin Story Changing
- And Much More
DAILY BIBLE VERSE
14 if my people, who are called by my name, will humble themselves and pray and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven, and I will forgive their sin and will heal their land.
Today's verse was recommended by Francine B. and Jim D.
If you have a Bible verse you want to see in our newsletter, please email [email protected].
THE LATEST NEWS
1. RITTENHOUSE TRIAL UPDATE:
Monday, both sides gave their closing arguments to the jury in the Kyle Rittenhouse trial. And if the prosecutors weren’t deliberately trying to force a mistrial so they could get a do-over, then there hasn’t been such pure incompetence on display since the Three Stooges tried being plumbers.
Where to begin? Victoria Taft at PJ Media summarized the state’s summation, noting that D.A. Thomas Binger told the jury that “I’m scared” is not a legal justification for self-defense. Actually, it is the exact legal justification for self-defense. He also suggested that Rittenhouse should have fired warning shots. Which, despite Joe Biden’s advice, is clearly illegal.
The very first slide shown to the jurors claimed that Rittenhouse shot three people with a gun he knew he couldn’t legally have. That’s false; it was perfectly legal for him to carry that gun under Wisconsin law, which you’d assume the prosecutors would be vaguely familiar with. Unfortunately for them, the judge knew the law and dismissed the underage weapons charge.
Binger told the jury that the BLM rioters that night were “heroes” who stopped an “active shooter.” They were actually starting fires, assaulting police, and they even attacked the very courthouse where the trial was taking place.
In the most eye-popping display of incompetence, at one point, the prosecutor picked up the rifle and pointed it directly at the jurors with his finger on the trigger. That should be grounds for charging the prosecutor with criminal stupidity. That violates the first rule of gun safety. It doesn’t matter if you “know for certain” that it’s unloaded. You never point a gun at another person (unless, of course, that person is trying to kill you.) Has he never heard the name “Alec Baldwin?”
Believe it or not, it got even crazier during the rebuttal to the defense’s summation.
But the utter disregard for facts and accuracy wasn’t restricted to the prosecutors. From the start of this story, the mainstream media have pushed a phony racial narrative that’s made many people believe this was a racist triple murder by a white supremacist. One black Democrat in the Oregon state house even called for giving all black workers the day off to process their trauma if Rittenhouse is acquitted, even though he's not a white supremacist and he claims he fired in self-defense at three attackers, all of them white males. By fanning the racial flames, the media are complicit in setting the stage for more riots if Rittenhouse is acquitted (or knowing leftists, even if he’s not.)
This is why Harvard law professor emeritus Alan Dershowitz says that Rittenhouse should not only be acquitted, he should sue CNN, the New York Times and other liberal media outlets for encouraging vigilantism by continually pushing the false narrative that he’s guilty.
He’s not the only one they've put in danger, of course: the judge has received many threats against himself and his family, and Kenosha is bracing for possible riots and street violence.
But wait: don’t we now have a battalion of self-appointed “fact-checkers” to expose such “misinformation”? Well, sort of. As Kylee Zempel at the Federalist reports, sites such as Politifact were bending over backwards to find ways to declare false narratives about the case true and true claims false. The major reason we know this is that the conservative media they usually target risked life and limb to shoot video of the riots.
Zempel says this phony “fact-checking” might mislead and inflame the public, but it serves the greater goal of promoting the leftwing narrative that “guns are bad, and law-abiding citizens are wrong to have firearms to protect themselves from lawless rogues,” which is the prosecution’s entire case.
Tucker Carlson argued that by claiming that “you lose the right to self-defense when you’re the one who brought the gun,” the prosecutors are trying to nullify the right to bear arms. They’re saying that if you carry a legal weapon, you give up the right to use it to protect yourself.
Carlson told viewers, “That’s the whole point of this whole proceeding: so the next time BLM sweeps into your town, your neighborhood, your house, to burn and loot and brandish weapons, you had better not try to protect yourself or your family…We will charge you with murder, and while we’re at it, we’ll have the national media call you racist.”
For those who think he’s being hyperbolic and this is a totally unique case, guess who showed up at the courthouse to support Rittenhouse? Kyle and Patricia McCloskey.
2. TWO REASONS TO SEND YOUR KID TO TRADE SCHOOL:
1. Meet the “non-binary” assistant professor at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia, who wants to help normalize “non-offending” pedophiles by rebranding them with the less-stigmatizing term, “MAP” or “Minor-Attracted Persons.”
2. Or you could send your daughter to the UK’s Durham University, where the Durham Students’ Union wants to create an online course to teach undergrads how to be safe as they work their way through college in the sex industry as paid escorts or online nude models.
Say, do you know what America really needs a lot more of? Truck drivers.
3. BIDEN'S VIRTUAL SUMMIT:
Monday, President Biden had a “virtual summit meeting” with Chinese President Xi Jinping. There were no major breakthroughs but a few awkward moments. For instance, both Biden and his spokesperson Jen Psaki have denied that Biden and Xi are “old friends.” Biden even got angry when Fox News’ Peter Doocy asked him last April if he would call Xi, “old friend to old friend,” to cooperate in investigating the origins of COVID-19. Biden snapped, "Let’s get something straight: we know each other well, we’re not old friends. It’s just pure business."
So how did Xi begin the virtual summit? "It’s the first time for us to meet virtually. Although it’s not as good as a face-to-face meeting, I’m very happy to see my old friend.”
https://www.foxnews.com/politics/xi-calls-biden-old-friend-us-china-virtual-summit
If it’s any consolation to Biden, I wasn’t any more comforted by his claim that his relationship with China was “pure business.”
4. TRUST IN THE MEDIA REACHES A NEW LOW:
You know the mainstream media have completely squandered the public’s trust when even Andrew Sullivan is alarmed by the way they’ve not only gotten major stories completely wrong over and over again, but their false narratives always favor the Democrats and the left.
https://andrewsullivan.substack.com/p/when-all-the-media-narratives-collapse-650
When called on their politically-motivated lies, they ignore the truth, quietly issue “corrections” that nobody sees, or worst of all, edit stories in their archives to erase their own "mistakes," as the Washington Post just did with Russiagate. And nobody pays a price. As Sullivan notes, Rachel Maddow pushed wild Russia collusion conspiracy theories for years, and instead of being fired and never allowed near any position of journalistic responsibility again, she just got promoted. “And the man who first published (the Russian 'dossier'), Ben Smith, was made the media columnist for the (New York Times.)”
Being at heart still a liberal, Sullivan has to bash Trump a little even in slamming the anti-Trump media (“We need facts and objectivity more than ever. Trump showed that.”) No, I’d argue that the media showed that, with their blatant bias and reflexive need to refute everything Trump said, including, “Good morning.” Yet Sullivan is forced to admit, “But Trump was right, in the end, about the dodgy dossier; he was right about the duped FBI’s original overreach; and the mass media — Rachel Maddow chief among them — were wrong.”
I would posit that he was also right about a whole lot of other things that the media branded as lies or insanity. Just one example: remember when turncoat aide Omarosa Manigault gave NBC secret recordings in 2018 of a meeting where Trump talked about Hillary’s campaign concocting the Russia smear and illegally funding it through a law firm? That story was spun as Trump being paranoid and unhinged. Now we know he was spot-on correct.
And from gas prices to border security to the Middle East to the growing threat of China, we’re now living the dire consequences of reversing his policies that we were assured were all based on falsehoods.
Again, as a good liberal, Sullivan is going through the same withdrawal pains as many Americans who are finally waking up to how badly they’ve been duped: “I still rely on the MSM for so much. I still read the NYT first thing in the morning. I don’t want to feel as if everything I read is basically tilted through wish-fulfillment, narrative-proving, and ideology. But with this kind of record, how can I not?”
Welcome to my world, Andrew. My staff and I also are forced to read that stuff every day, but we consider it our duty to sift through it and separate any tiny nuggets of truth from the giant pile of horse manure. It’s a lousy job, but somebody’s got to do it. If you’d like to join us here in the light, we’re happy to have you.
Related: It’s rumored that in a desperate attempt to drag CNN’s ratings out of the sub basement, after the merger with Warner Media is complete, many of the current on-air “talents” will be fired and – brace yourself, this is really radical – CNN will try being an actual 24-hour news channel!
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/cnn-reportedly-fire-good-number-air-talent-staff-major-shakeup
I know: it’s a crazy idea, but it just might work!
5. BETO IS BACK:
Robert “Beto” O’Rourke announced that he will run for Governor of Texas next year, perhaps so he can complete the trifecta of losing the Lone Star State in races for Senate, President and Governor.
The writer Bonchie at Redstate.com has some harsh but amusing comments on this story, as well as the headline of the day. He thinks it's delusional to believe that a table-leaping, gun-grabbing far-leftist could win in Texas next year, but enough rich liberals in New York and California are probably delusional enough to send him millions of dollars to burn. That’s good for Republicans, since it’s money that won’t go to races where Democrats might have more of a chance than an ice cube in Haiti. But I agree with Bonchie that it’s a shame when you think of the good that money might do.
Imagine if all the millions of dollars in donations wasted on “Beto” over the past few years had instead gone to homeless veterans or food banks or orphanages. On the other hand, since conservatives give directly to charity while liberals tend to give to candidates who promise to fund charities with other people’s money, if it hadn’t gone to “Beto,” I doubt it would have left their bank accounts at all.
6. THE CHANGING STORY OF COVID-19:
Ever since COVID-19 helped us ring in the New Year of 2020, the approved narrative was that it had come from a wet market in Wuhan, China, though social media didn’t allow mention of Wuhan or China.
But in recent months we’ve learned plenty about Chinese gain-of-function research into dangerous bat viruses, commissioned and funded by none other than the National Institutes of Health, and we know it’s very likely the source of the pandemic. Steve Hilton, on his FOX NEWS show “The Next Revolution,” reported Sunday night that even the LOS ANGELES TIMES had to report that “...there is no clear sign of an intermediate host. Of the 80,000 animal samples tested in China, none have contained the virus’ genetic material or antibodies to it.”
As recently as August of this year, the LA TIMES was still pushing the “wet market” idea. Business columnist (not doctor) Michael Hiltzik actually said the “lab leak” explanation was driven by politics, not science.
https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2021-08-26/lab-leak-theory-origin-covid-19
As a side note, “fact”-checkers also tried to discredit the story about beagles being used in cruel experiments funded under Dr. Fauci’s leadership at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, but we found this was happening.
Now, Hilton points to a new story offering more specifics about surreptitious bat studies at the Wuhan lab. In September, 900 pages of documentation from this research was released in response to a FOIA request a year ago by THE INTERCEPT, leading Rutgers University professor Dr. Richard Ebright to say,“The documents make it clear that assertions by the NIH Director, Francis Collins, and the NIAID Director, Anthony Fauci, that the NIH did not support gain-of-function research or potential pandemic pathogen enhancement at WIV are untruthful.”
https://theintercept.com/2021/09/06/new-details-emerge-about-coronavirus-research-at-chinese-lab/
“POTENTIAL PANDEMIC PATHOGEN ENHANCEMENT”? Think about what that is, and one can only conclude that it is evil.
Gary Ruskin, executive director of U.S. Right to Know, said, “This is a road map to the high-risk research that could have led to the current pandemic."
If the NIH commissioned gain-of-function research, it did so, Hilton said, “in direct contravention of the rules that were in place in both the Obama and Trump administrations. Hilton has been calling for months for a real investigation of this funding, as the one way to perhaps show Fauci accountable.
In the Senate, a bipartisan group consisting of Republicans Roger Marshall of Kansas and Joni Ernst of Iowa, and Democrats Dianne Feinstein of California and Kirsten Gillibrand of New York, introduced legislation establishing a “9/11-style” Covid Origins Commission to determine how the pandemic really started. Sen. Marshall told Hilton that it was important to make this investigation bipartisan, without politics involved.
He’s hoping this can be an amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act before it comes up for a vote “in three or four weeks.” This is the act that funds the military; in its 60-year history, it’s always been passed.
Marshall told Hilton that he thought it was “a matter of months if not weeks” to get the commission in place. They would have to come up with ten names –- five from Republicans, five from Democrats, all “experts in their specific areas,” he said, but not driven by politics.
There’s a great deal of information that would need to be declassified, Marshall said, and these commissioners would also have the power to subpoena people such as Peter Daszak and others from EcoHealth Alliance and get them in front a grand jury. He thinks that if we start looking at all the DNA sequences having to do with this virus, “we’ll find the grandfather of COVID-19 somewhere buried in Eco Health lab system.”
……………………..
Something else that needs to be looked at critically in the age of COVID: the push for draconian lockdowns that force us all to comply with our political leaders regarding the most personal decisions we make. Those who for decades have been saying we have the right to do what we want with our own body (even if it happens to be our own body and another very small person's, too) are quick to say we must follow orders to have new, practically untested substances injected into our bodies.
To question this is not to be an “anti-vaxxer,” no matter who decides to rewrite the dictionary. It’s to be anti-mandate, which is altogether different.
Now that well over a hundred million people have been exposed to COVID-19 and have presumably obtained some immunity to it --- most likely even stronger than that possessed by a vaccinated person who hasn't been exposed --- one has to wonder why we’re still talking about all the restrictions. Is the idea really to get us used to taking orders “for the public good”? Christopher Bedford at THE FEDERALIST has an interview with FOX NEWS climate expert Mike Bastach. You may ask, what do COVID restrictions have to do with climate? Turns out, quite a bit.
As we reported in our commentary on the National Audubon Society and their apparent dismissal of the effect wind turbines have on birds, China has said it will work with the U.S. on cutting carbon emissions. (We said we’d believe it when we see it.) This was the Glasgow Climate Conference, in which (Bedford’s words) “a few thousand clueless, feckless old men flying from all over the planet to babble on about saving the world and maybe even catch a quick nap during the most boring of the mostly boring speeches.”
Now that we’re back to boring meetings that don’t really accomplish much, it might seem as if we’re returning to normal, but we’re not. The way Bedford explains it, our society is at a crossroads: we can continue to pursue individualism, or we can turn to “a more involved government that tries to actively reorder society toward the ‘higher good.’”
And here’s where COVID comes in. British writer/editor Mary Harrington said, “The pandemic state of emergency [shattered] the consensus about individual freedom. Across the developed world, the liberal privileging of individual freedom has been replaced by a de facto acceptance that state power absolutely must be ordered to the common good, up to and including coercive measures when necessary.”
Bedford goes to describe even how this way of thinking is transforming the language, and not in a good way.
He says, “In all societies, there are people who feel entitled to build their own moral universes and compel us to obey their manmade constructs. It’s for the collective good, they say, although suspiciously often 'the collective good' seems to align with giving them the most money and power, status and freedom...”
“COVID was the best thing ever to happen to these people,” he says, and he’s right.
And with COVID fading away, they’ll turn on a dime and make “climate” the new emergency. Consider that if they can essentially trap you in your home and limit your travel to purportedly contain the spread of COVID, they can do the same thing to purportedly keep the temperature from rising. Same for spreading so-called “misinformation” (which very often turns out to be the truth).
We know China won’t keep their promise on fossil fuels. But don’t assume we'll hold China accountable for their toxic emissions. That won’t happen, any more than we’ll hold them accountable for their toxic virus.
AMERICA THE BEAUTIFUL
This feature returns with images of America's cities, landscapes and people.
HYMNAL: O GOD, OUR HELP IN AGES PAST
Listen: https://youtu.be/yKP_XxCBDZY
Today's hymn was recommended by Jan R.
1 O God, our help in ages past,
our hope for years to come,
our shelter from the stormy blast,
and our eternal home;
2 under the shadow of your throne
your saints have dwelt secure.
Sufficient is your arm alone,
and our defense is sure.
3 Before the hills in order stood,
or earth received its frame,
from everlasting you are God,
to endless years the same.
4 A thousand ages in your sight
are like an evening gone,
short as the watch that ends the night
before the rising sun.
5 Time, like an ever-rolling stream,
soon bears us all away.
We fly forgotten, as a dream
dies at the op’ning day.
6 O God, our help in ages past,
our hope for years to come,
still be our guard while troubles last,
and our eternal home.
Author: Isaac Watts
If you have a favorite hymn you want to see in our newsletter, please email [email protected].
For past editions of my morning newsletter, please visit my website here.
For more of my news coverage, visit my website here.
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