Good morning!

Blessings on you and your family, and from all the Huckabee staff! 

Today's newsletter includes:

• Bible Verse Of The Day
• INTOLERABLE: political rhetoric has reached new lows
• Florida Excludes CRT
• The Fight Against Cancel Culture
• Pro-Union?!?
• David vs Goliath
• Joe Biden's America
• CORRECTION: Big Court Win Against NYT
• A Reader Writes Back...
• America The Beautiful

Sincerely,

Mike Huckabee

BIBLE VERSE OF THE DAY 

INTOLERABLE: political rhetoric has reached new lows

By Mike Huckabee

"We’re in a bad place,” New Jersey Rep. Jeff Van Drew said to FOX NEWS’ Maria Bartiromo on Sunday. “We’re on the precipice. On tone –- everyone. The future of democracy and our republic is in all our hands. And we must come together; we must reverse course; we can’t go this way, or we’re gonna lose the greatest nation, the shining light of the whole world. I worry about it every single day.”

China is laughing at us, he said, calling us “stupid and weak.” But our nation DOES look stupid and weak, because of the way we talk to each other.

Van Drew knows firsthand what’s happened to political discourse in America. When he just couldn’t vote to impeach President Trump just over a year ago, after unrelenting pressure from Democrats, he left the Democrat Party and became a Republican, the first Democrat in ten years to do so. Van Drew stands by his decision though the bullying from the left has never let up.

Van Drew has released audio of a death threat recorded on his home phone, in the aftermath of his rejection of the certification of two states’ 2020 election results. And, no, it wasn’t from an enraged constituent.

It was from a journalist. (Correction: “journalist.”) Name: John McCall.

Here’s a sample: “As a member of the New Jersey Press Association [!}, I will do everything in my power to ensure that you are deposed –- if not dead. Anything that I can do to basically get you out of office, I will do. You are a traitor, Jeff Van Drew, and you deserve the fate of all traitors.”

It gets worse. Van Drew wasn’t the one who heard it first, as he was in Washington DC. It was his wife who heard it.

He says he’s not worried for his own safety and is “standing firmer” for what he believes. Normally he wouldn’t bring in the police or make a deal out of it. But he brings up two issues that make this threatening behavior “particularly vile.”

First, McCall also threatened the congressman’s wife, and even used sexually-charged words. The man is a freelance reporter and writes for the OCEAN CITY SENTINEL. Worse, after he left that message, he wrote an op-ed for the OCS that continued to threaten Van Drew and his wife.

Second, this swill had to get by editors and publishers to get into the paper. Wouldn’t SOMEBODY have thought that threats like these were beyond the pale? To his credit, David Nahan, editor and publisher of the OCS, published an apology, in which he even helped make our point by saying, “The partisan vitriol has become so extreme, it is easy to get desensitized to what is being said...We all need to tone down the political anger that is dividing our country.” No kidding.

Van Drew said Sunday that threats against his wife and children are “where the line is drawn in the South Jersey sand.” He’s still considering pressing charges and also suing. “This cannot be the new normal for America, for American journalism,” he said. "It is just intolerable. It’s gonna hurt our society, It’s gonna make us worse and more violent to actually think that these are things that can be printed in the newspaper or in any media.”

A defamation case in the DC Circuit Court of Appeals might seem unrelated, but the dissenting opinion of Judge Laurence Silberman could’ve just as easily been written about what the media did to Van Drew: “The increased power of the press is so dangerous today because we are very close to one-party control of these institutions. Our court was once concerned about the institutional consolidation of the press, leading to a ‘bland and homogenous’ marketplace of ideas. It turns out that ideological consolidation of the press (helped along by economic consolidation) is the far greater threat.”

Judge Silberman went on, as reported in this must-read piece, calling THE NEW YORK TIMES and WASHINGTON POST “virtually Democratic Party broadsheets.” I suppose we should add the OCEAN CITY SENTINEL in New Jersey to that list, if that editorial is at all typical of what they print.

Another snippet of Silberman’s brilliance: “...Ideological homogeneity in the media –- or in the channels of information distribution [elsewhere he makes it clear he’s referring to Silicon Valley] –- risks repressing certain ideas from the public consciousness just as surely as if access were restricted by the government.” As an example, he cited the suppression by social media of the story about Joe Biden’s involvement with his son Hunter’s foreign business dealings.

Judge Silberman, a Reagan appointee (and thank you, President Reagan), cited a book, “LEFT TURN: How Liberal Media Bias Distorts the American Mind,” by UCLA political science and economics Prof. Tim Groseclose.

"The First Amendment guarantees a free press to foster a vibrant trade in ideas,” Silberman wrote. “But a biased press can distort the marketplace. And when the media has proven its willingness –- if not eagerness –- to so distort, it is a profound mistake to stand by unjustified legal rules that serve only to enhance the press’s power.” He was arguing that, with the press as biased as it is and prone to distortion, the bar to prove defamation is too high.

Finally, in another example of the level of discourse hitting bottom, Democrat Sen. Bob Menendez of New Jersey –- there’s New Jersey again –- actually called Wisconsin Sen. Ron Johnson a racist on the floor of the Senate for comments comparing the Capitol Hill rioters to Black Lives Matter rioters. There is no pooper scooper big enough to accommodate the steaming load Menendez left on the Senate floor.

He read a letter from a member of his staff who’d taken Sen. Johnson’s comments as racist, accusing him of “hate speech” and “stoking fear against black Americans” and also grossly misrepresenting what happened that day. The letter was based on a distortion of what Johnson said; he wasn’t talking about race. Rather, Johnson's words were based on the enormous violence that Black Lives Matter has perpetrated in our cities. The BLM movement is NOT, as the letter asserted, “overwhelmingly peaceful.”

Unfortunately, Johnson had also defended those who breached the Capitol as “people that love this country, that truly respect law enforcement, would never do anything to break the law...” Now, as much as they might love their country, some DID break the law and did NOT respect law enforcement, and what they did was stupid and wrong, as I've repeatedly said.

Even so, the Senator most certainly was not commenting on race. People conveniently forget that many BLM rioters have been radical white leftists.

But it doesn’t matter. In 2021, Democrat Senators can and do call out Republican colleagues by name as racist, falsely, right on the Senate floor. They deserve censure for this new low but will receive no consequences, so brace yourself for more.

By throwing around that word, they continue taking the country down. Just as they mean to do.

Florida Excludes CRT

By Mike Huckabee

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis announced that Florida will expressly exclude Critical Race Theory from its school curriculum.

DeSantis said, “Florida’s civics curriculum will incorporate foundational concepts with the best materials, and it will expressly exclude unsanctioned narratives like Critical Race Theory and other unsubstantiated theories. Let me be clear, there’s no room in our classrooms for things like Critical Race Theory. Teaching kids to hate their country and to hate each other is not worth one red cent of taxpayer money.”

This is yet another reason why DeSantis is already starting to look more presidential than the current Oval Office occupant.

The Fight Against Cancel Culture

By Mike Huckabee

I’m so happy to see a rising number of Americans standing up and fighting back against the loud but tiny “cancel culture” goons. Everyone should take a look at Ohio for an example of how it’s done:

In October, David Johnsen, dean of the University of Iowa’s college of dentistry, sent a mass email criticizing then-President Donald Trump’s ban on “diversity training” that promotes “anti-American race and sex stereotyping.” Conservative student Michael Brase did a “reply-all” saying that it shouldn’t be that hard just to do diversity training “without intentionally race/sex scapegoating people.”

For that eminently reasonable comment, administrators ordered him to a disciplinary hearing and threatened him with dismissal for “unprofessional behavior.” (I would say that getting these administrators to behave professionally is like pulling teeth, but I digress.)

But for once, the victim refused to grovel and apologize. He contacted his state legislators. And for once, they didn’t dodge and pass the buck. They ordered Dean Johnson into a hearing and grilled him on his school’s assault on free speech. Johnson backed off fast, canceling Brase’s disciplinary hearing, apologizing to him and promising never to use his official capacity to push his political beliefs again.

All well and good, but we’ve seen these leftist executives back off in hearings before, only to go right back to doing it again (see Twitter and Facebook.) For once, the Republicans didn’t fall for it. They told Johnson that this was an ongoing, repeated double standard that had affected thousands of students, and they demanded that he and the entire university write systemic reforms to ensure it never happens again, if they want to keep getting state funding.

Three cheers for everyone involved. Along with all the UT alums who threatened to yank their big donations if the school caved to young ignoramuses who wanted to ban the school song “The Eyes of Texas” as racist, let’s hope this is a growing trend that represents normal Americans finally reaching their Howard Beale “I’m mad as h*ll and I’m not going to take it anymore” moment with leftist campus tinpot dictators.

Pro-Union?!?

By Mike Huckabee

Remember when we had a President who intervened to keep companies from moving American jobs to other countries? But the United Auto Workers union endorsed his opponent, Joe Biden, praising him as “pro-union.”

In a related story, Ford just announced that a major project that would have meant a $900 million expansion in Ohio is being moved to its plant in Mexico instead.

David vs Goliath

By Mike Huckabee

This is a great article about a small town bookstore in Lawrence, Kansas, that’s taking on Amazon. The owner is leading a movement and has written a book explaining to Americans why it’s bad to order everything from Amazon, and the ways that they can afford to undercut prices and drive local businesses out of business, then use their monopoly power to control what you’re allowed to buy, see, say and read. It’s already happening, with Amazon Web Services shutting down Parler and Amazon.com blocking sales of conservative books.

I know money is tight and every penny counts. But it will be a lot tighter if you give all your money to Big Tech companies that drive local employers out of business. Think of that extra buck you have to pay for a book at your local bookstore as an insurance payment to make certain that the kind of books you want to read will still be available for sale.

Joe Biden's America

By Mike Huckabee

Joe Biden doesn’t want to call the crisis at the southern border a crisis. At best, his people call it a challenge. But here’s an inconvenient truth—it’s such a mess that the Biden team had to dispatch FEMA to help. That’s the Federal EMERGENCY Management Agency—called out when there is a disaster. But Jen Psaki, the WH mouthpiece says they have it all under control! That’s like saying the landing of the Hindenburg was pretty smooth; or that the Titanic maiden was overall a great cruise except for that ONE little bump. Or that Katrina was like a great big water park. Why is it so hard for them to admit that what they have on the southern border is an all hands on deck, Cat 5 disaster and it was created because in their arrogance, they decided to immediately reverse the successful policies of the previous administration. They took Minnie Pearl’s motto of “y’all come” as their message and by the thousands, they have come. And many of them are unaccompanied children. There are so many of them, that little storage units are being used to house the children—and there are 1800 of them in a facility that has a capacity of 250. Kids are only getting one shower a week, living in conditions that certainly don’t allow for social distancing and they aren’t getting Covid tests much. When they do, and they test positive, they are still allowed in the country without a mask, although 4 year old Carter Kimball, an autistic boy from Benton, AR was removed from a Spirit Airlines flight because he didn’t have a mask, even though he had a medical note indicating that he couldn’t wear a mask because of his autism as it caused him to have a meltdown. John Kerry was on a plane without a mask last week and illegal immigrants can cross the border without a mask. So if you’re told to wear a mask just tell them you’re an illegal immigrant and your name is John Kerry—you’ll be fine.

Reporters and even Congressmen are not being allowed to see first hand the conditions for these kids on the border, and there is a gag order placed on government officials there. When pushed about the lack of the promised “transparency,” Jen Psaki said that the White House had some information and reporters could come by and some government officials would be glad to describe it to them. What??? The only thing more amazing than a North Korean style press propaganda operation is that almost all of the press corps seemed to think that was okay for an answer!

Joe Biden will finally hold his first press conference next week, but reporters have to apply and be picked to ask a question. I suppose that’s so President Biden can have his answer scripted out and placed in his trusty teleprompter. Let’s hope at least one reporter can sneak in some real questions—the kind the press ought to be asking of an administration that can’t see the crisis that everyone else can see.

Joe Biden is turning America into a place where churches are locked down, but borders are wide open; where we kill thousands of high-paying jobs on a pipeline in order to get those people on a government rescue plan that their grandkids will have to pay for; where we have people in Hollywood wanting to cancel Pepe Le Pew and Dr. Seuss, but give awards for pornographic performances of rap artists like Cardi B and Megan Stallion on the Grammys that are so adult that the lyrics had to be totally changed and the costumed should have been changed or at least covered up. In the meantime, the Biden bunch is covering stuff up—mostly just the truth about what’s happening on the border!

CORRECTION: Big Court Win Against NYT

(We mistakenly posted the wrong story underneath this headline in Sunday's newsletter.  The correct version is below)

By Mike Huckabee

Congratulations to Project Veritas on a big win in court against the New York Times. The conservative undercover video organization sued the Times for defamation for claiming that its video investigation of illegal ballot harvesting in Minnesota in the 2020 election was “deceptive.” The Times tried to argue that that was simply the reporter’s opinion. But Project Veritas argued, and a New York Supreme Court judge agreed, that the Times allowed opinion to be interjected into a news article without alerting readers that it wasn't really news.

The judge denied the Times’ motion to dismiss the case, finding that Project Veritas had demonstrated "a substantial basis in law and fact that the Defendants [The New York Times] acted with actual malice, that is, with knowledge that the statements in the Articles were false or made with reckless disregard of whether they were false or not" and Project Veritas should be permitted to "conduct discovery."

I’ll keep you posted on further developments. This could be very bad for the Times. Injecting opinion into news articles without alerting readers is pretty much their entire business model.

A Reader Writes Back...

Why is it that I stutter and stumble like I'm reading a foreign language whenever I read any newspaper these days? However, when I read your newsletter, the words fall into place naturally, comfortably and make the read effortless.

America The Beautiful

God's creation is all around us. To learn more about Great Basin National Park and Preserve, visit its website here.