By Mike Huckabee
December 21, 2022
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BY MIKE HUCKABEE
Blessings on you and your family from all the Huckabee staff! Thank you for subscribing and I hope you enjoy today’s newsletter.
You can read the top story on my website: EXCLUSIVE: Vice President Mike Pence Tells HIS Story | So Help Me God - Latest Stories - Mike Huckabee
Mike
DAILY BIBLE VERSE
6 For unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given: and the government shall be upon his shoulder: and his name shall be called Wonderful, Counsellor, The mighty God, The everlasting Father, The Prince of Peace.
Isaiah 9:6 KJV
1. The Joe Who Stole Christmas
By Mike Huckabee
A survey by the National Retail Federation found that the average American family intends to spend $832 on “core Christmas items” (presents, decorations and food) this year. That’s a 5% decrease from 2021.
That jibes with a November survey by RetailMeNot that found that about half of shoppers will be buying less this year, and a CNBC poll that found 25% of consumers will be opting for cheaper gifts or practical gifts like gas gift cards.
However, the NRF also predicts a 6-to-8% increase in household expenses through December, suggesting that because of inflation, people are having to spend more on everyday expenses and less on the holidays.
But wait! How is that possible? According to the Biden White House, inflation is falling, gas prices are lower, and the economy is booming with a record one million-plus jobs created in the second quarter of 2022, according to his Bureau of Labor Statistics. That stat was touted by the Administration and its media sycophants during the election to argue that there is no risk of a recession.
Yeah, about that…
According to the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia, that “million jobs created” claim that helped save the Democrats in the November election was slightly overestimated. By about 99%. The Philly Fed’s new assessment of the March-to-June period found that job creation was “essentially flat,” with only about 10,500 net new jobs created. To cite one of the most glaring examples, in Biden’s home state of Delaware, the BLS claimed there was 4.5% job growth, while the Fed found that payroll jobs fell by 4.1%.
https://m.washingtontimes.com/
Some Congressional Republicans are calling the Biden BLS job figures an outrageous lie and demanding an investigation. I have a feeling the Democrats’ response to that will be the same as Harry Reid’s when he was asked if he regretted lying about GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney not paying his taxes. Reid scoffed, “He didn’t win, did he?”
Related: While young voters are being credited (or blamed) for stopping the red wave in November by voting 53-41% for Democrat House candidates over Republicans, that was actually down from their 61% support for Biden in 2020 and their 64% vote for Democrats in 2018.
It appears that young voters are losing some enthusiasm for Democrats, and I can’t imagine it will go back up after they got hosed on that “Biden will pay off my student loans!” promise. But as Stephen Green at PJ Media warns at the link, Republicans can’t depend on voter enthusiasm to put them back into power. The Dems have changed the election laws to allow mail-out ballots and ballot harvesting. Their voters don’t need enthusiasm, they just need a ballot arriving in the mail and someone dropping by to take it and go stuff it in a drop box.
It’s a lousy way to run elections, it’s ripe for fraud and cheating, but as long as it exists, Republicans had better learn how to exploit it as well as the Dems do, or they may face a future of showing up on Election Day to vote in person, only to be told that the election has already been decided by mail-in votes – or soon will be, because all the ballot printers and tabulators have mysteriously gone down.
2. Programming Note
By Mike Huckabee
While my staff and I are on a Christmas break and sending material we’ve prepared in advance, we will also be watching the news for anything that calls for a bulletin, like if the judge in Kari Lake’s lawsuit issues a ruling before next week. In the meantime, please have a safe and wonderful Christmas, take care if you’re in the path of the winter storm, and keep checking your mailbox every day for the Huckabee Newsletter.
And to quote my staffer Laura Ainsworth (who is also an award-winning retro jazz singer), have yourself a merry little Christmas!
3. Addendum
By Mike Huckabee
Addendum to yesterday's story about how Stacey Abrams blew over $100 million on her latest failed campaign: here are some of the things she blew it on. The people of Georgia really dodged a bullet by not putting her in charge of their tax money.
4. THIS, is a big win for the GOP?!?
By Mike Huckabee
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and a handful of fellow Republicans are painting their support of the Democrats’ $1.7 trillion omnibus spending bill as a big win for the GOP. Why, I don’t know, other than it includes money for the Pentagon, which hasn’t exactly earned any respect lately, as it spends more time targeting our own troops for lack of wokeness and vaccinations than it does winning wars.
This bloated whale of a bill was dropped on Congress in the middle of the night, and members are being told they have to hurry up and vote on it, and there’s no time to read its 4,000+ (!) pages. But just flipping through, critics have unearthed a number of outrageous outlays, including tens of billions for Ukraine (which might be okay except it gives Biden a blank check with zero oversight of where the money goes); a couple of hundred million for the border patrol, but only for “processing” illegal entrants (i.e., letting more of them in more quickly), and specifically forbidding any of the money to be used for securing the border; millions of dollars for LGBT “Pride Centers” (have I mentioned that we already have a $31.4 trillion national debt?); and an extra $212.1 million for US attorneys "to further support prosecutions related to the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol and domestic terrorism cases." I assume that means more prosecutions of selfie-takers, elderly pro-life activists and people who admit to voting for Trump on Facebook.
North Carolina Rep. Dan Bishop uncovered another hidden landmine in the bill: $575 million for “family planning” in areas where population growth “threatens biodiversity.” Translation: using environmentalism as an excuse for taxpayer-funded abortion.
On top of that, it takes away the power of the incoming GOP Congress to control budget decisions through September 2023 when all that’s really needed is a temporary stopgap bill to keep the government funded until the new Congress takes office in January.
Kudos to Sen. Rand Paul for standing up in the Senate and calling this bill what it is: an “abomination” and a “no-good, rotten way to run government.” He pointed out that Congress had nine months to write a spending bill, missed the deadline and put it off another three months, missed that deadline and put it off another week, but now they’re claiming it’s an emergency and must be passed right away without taking time to read it. I thought the voters took the House away from the Dems because they were sick of giant, transformative bills being passed first, and then we find out what’s in them?
The constituents of McConnell and all the other predictable GOP votes to cave to the Dems need to let them know what they think of this craven capitulation to profligate liberal spending and runaway government power.
5. "Twitter File" #8 --- Twitter deceptively working with MILITARY
By Mike Huckabee
But, wait, there’s more! Installment #8 from the “Twitter Files” dropped on Tuesday, and these just keep getting worse. This one specifically deals with the relationship between Twitter and...(drum roll, please)...the Pentagon. This installment, called “TWITTER AIDED THE PENTAGON IN ITS COVERT PROPAGANDA CAMPAIGN,” comes to us courtesy of investigative journalist Lee Fang. He could have truthfully added to that headline “AND LIED ABOUT IT FOR YEARS.”
This is what Fang was able to put together after having access to Twitter’s internal communications for just a few days last week, and since a Twitter attorney conducted the document search, he knows he might not have seen absolutely everything, even given Elon Musk’s pro-transparency stance. “I signed/agreed to nothing,” Fang tweeted. “Twitter had no input into anything I did or wrote.”
We now know, through executives’ own communications, that Twitter directly assisted the Pentagon’s 'influence operations' specifically in “an online psychological program aimed at shaping opinion in the Middle East and beyond.” The Pentagon had reportedly promised to shut down covert state-run propaganda programs such as this. And representatives of Twitter had maintained –- even under oath before Congress –- that they’re not involved in this. They pledged, under oath, “to rapidly identify and shut down all state-backed covert information operations and deceptive propaganda.”
“But behind the scenes,” Fang tweeted, “Twitter gave approval & special protection to the U.S. military’s online psychological influence ops. Despite knowledge that Pentagon propaganda accounts used covert identities, Twitter did not suspend many for around 2 years or more. Some remain active.”
The Pentagon seems to have, at some point, wanted to cover its tracks. As Twitter attorney Stacia Cardille said in a communication sent to Jim Baker and one other official, the Pentagon wanted a SCIF [“Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility,” or secure reading room] and might have wanted to retroactively classify its social media activities “to obfuscate their activity in this space, and that this may represent an overclassification to avoid embarrassment.”
If the DoD was concerned about embarrassment, their faces ought to be really red right now.
According to Fang, executives at both Twitter and Facebook were invited to meetings that were so sensitive, they were held in a SCIF.
Fang tweeted, “Twitter actively assisted CENTCOM’s [U.S. Central Command’s] network going back to 2017 and as late as 2020 knew these accounts were covert/designed to deceive and manipulate the discourse, a violation of Twitter’s policies and promises. They waited years to suspend.”
And there’s this: “Twitter’s comms team was closely in touch with reporters, working to minimize Twitter’s role. When the WashPost reported on the scandal, Twitter officials congratulated each other because the story didn’t mention any Twitter employees & focused largely on the Pentagon.” Communications specialist at Twitter Katie Rosborough wrote to assure their lobbyists and lawyers that the WAPO piece was almost entirely about Facebook, not Twitter, and it didn’t tie in Twitter whistleblower Peiter Zatko.
Lee Fang was a great choice to report on this particular Twitter File, as he had recently investigated a “close collaboration between DHS and the private sector,” including monthly meetings with Twitter’s Vidaya Gadde (“exited” by Musk) “to discuss censorship plans.” A Microsoft exec (who was also a former DHS official, surprise) texted Department of Homeland Security director Jen Easterly this chilling observation: “Platforms have got to get comfortable with government. It’s really interesting how hesitant they remain.” This came in late October; we had the story. Anyway, that was Lee Fang, and here is another write-up on it from TOWNHALL.
Fang wrote: “How disinformation is defined by the government has not been clearly articulated, and the inherently subject nature of what constitutes disinformation provides a broad opening for DHS officials to make politically motivated determinations about what constitutes dangerous speech.”
And this, in his conclusion: DHS “is attempting to make an end run around the First Amendment by exerting continual pressure on private sector social media firms.”
TOWNHALL provided a good summary, but here’s Fang’s full report on the DHS and social media, in THE INTERCEPT.
https://theintercept.com/2022/
That was almost two months ago, and he had already uncovered a lot about government teaming with social media. Now here’s his full report on the PENTAGON and social media AFTER being granted access to Twitter’s internal communications. For when you have time, these both really are must-reads if you want to see how U.S. government censorship works, not just here, but globally.
https://theintercept.com/2022/
Still, Installment #7, from Michael Shellenberger, deserves more discussion, because 1) it deals specifically with monitoring American citizens –- the FBI’s specialty –- and 2) there are some big updates...
Now that we know the FBI paid Twitter and other social media platforms millions of dollars to censor a legitimate news story, the Biden laptop story, Elon Musk is demanding answers from California Rep. Adam Schiff, who currently heads –- only for a few more days, thank heavens –- the House Intel Committee, tweeting: “As (outgoing) Chair of House Intelligence, did you approve hidden state censorship in direct violation of the Constitution of the United States @RepAdamSchiff?”
Dave Rubin posted a hilarious tweet about this, saying that since the government was PAYING Twitter to censor people, Elon might actually have a way to make Twitter profitable!
At this writing, there’s been no response from Schiff.
Oh, and guess who else has been implicated in the censorship of the laptop story? George Soros. “First Draft News, a now-defunct nonprofit that left-wing billionaire George Soros’ Open Society Foundation funded, played a key role in Twitter’s preparation to shut down the Hunter Biden laptop story in 2020...” And never fear, First Draft News is coming back, no doubt funded again by Soros, as the more ominously-named Information Futures Lab.
That nugget is part of a report from the DAILY CALLER NEWS FOUNDATION that goes on to talk about that infamous “tabletop exercise” called “The Burisma Leak,” which was “to shape how the media covered the eventual leak of the Hunter Biden laptop story and the way social media platforms covered it.” That was hosted by the Aspen Institute in September 2020. They knew what was coming in October and were gearing up.
In case you wonder about the political slant of this invited group, it included Vivian Schiller (who organized the event), the former CEO of NPR; the former head of news at Twitter; the former general manager at THE NEW YORK TIMES; the former chief digital officer at NBC NEWS, the head of security policy for Facebook/Meta; plus the top national security reporters for the NYT and WASHINGTON POST.
The Aspen Institute is described here as “a left-leaning think tank funded by massive philanthropic organizations including the Rockefeller Foundation and Ford Foundation” that “runs the Commission on Information Disorder, an anti-disinformation project that’s drawn ire for its alleged far-left partisanship.” (“Alleged”? I love unintentional humor. But the term “information disorder” is too scary to be funny.) “The commission has urged social media platforms to censor accounts it considers misinformation ‘superspreaders’ through demonetization, the removal of what it considers inaccurate posts, and penalties for offending users.”
The NEW YORK POST is doing some outstanding reporting on this, which is no surprise considering they broke the original, scrupulously accurate story censored by Twitter. Here are a couple of good pieces…
https://nypost.com/2022/12/19/
6. The book you want if you are a guitar fan
If you haven’t already finished shopping for Christmas, I have a great last minute gift idea—the just released book “ Basses and Guitars ” written by Willie G. Moseley, veteran writer and editor of Vintage Guitar Magazine and all about the guitars in my personal collection and the stories behind them. Even if you’re not a guitar owner or player, you’ll enjoy the stories of these musical instruments and how many of them shaped my life. The folks in our studio audience will receive one as a Christmas gift for being here tonight, but you can order one for yourself or gifts for family and friends at mikehuckabee.com . It’s filled with full-color photos that help tell the stories behind the instruments. There are quite a few stories about Tre Corley and the Music City Connection and how the show has factored into my musical life. If you order before Christmas, shipping is included. Get it now at: The Huckabee Guitar Collection - Mike Huckabee
**The retail price is $24.95 but for those who order before January 1st, the special early bird price for our newsletter subscribers is $21 per book and that includes shipping. **
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