Good morning!

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

Today's newsletter includes:

• Bible Verse Of The Day
• Not an April Fool's joke
• 2021 Liberal Newspeak
• G. Gordon Liddy passes
• THE FOUR "R's": reading, writing, 'rithmetic and RACE
• A Reader Writes Back...
• America The Beautiful

Sincerely,

Mike Huckabee

BIBLE VERSE OF THE DAY 

Not an April Fool's joke

By Mike Huckabee

I wish I could say this was an April Fool’s Day joke, but no. Facing opposition to his $3 trillion “infrastructure bill,” President Biden yesterday unveiled a “scaled-down” $2.5 trillion version (half a trillion here, half a trillion there, and sooner or later, it adds up to real money.)

Breitbart.com did a good job of listing the “top 45” (!) spending items in the “infrastructure” bill, and when you see some of them, you’ll understand why “infrastructure” is in quotation marks. If you think that word refers to things like roads, bridges and airports, guess again. I’m amazed Biden didn’t toss in $20 billion to winterize the windmills of your mind.

For instance, the bill would spend $174 billion to “win the electric vehicle market.” I’m not even sure what that means (and Toyota recently warned that if we all had electric cars, there would be nowhere near enough power generation capacity to charge them.) But I can tell you that it’s $59 billion more than the bill allocates to modernize roads, bridges and main streets that are most in need of repair. You know…“infrastructure.”

The Wall Street Journal noted that aside from the $115 billion for actual infrastructure repairs and some money for airports, the rest of the $620 billion earmarked for “transportation” is all “subsidies for green energy and payouts to unions for the jobs his climate regulation will kill.” They said this isn’t a bill to rebuild America, but to rebuild government back to bigger than it’s ever been.

There’s also $20 billion for a program that will “reconnect neighborhoods cut off by historic investments and ensure new projects increase opportunity, advance racial equity and environmental justice, and promote affordable access.” Sounds like something that will really keep the bridges from collapsing.

To save your eyes from crossing from reading the word “billion” over and over, here’s a shorter list of just some of the most outrageous items in the bill.

Biden claims this is all necessary because our infrastructure is “crumbling.” I wouldn’t deny that we need to shore up and modernize some of our infrastructure, and some items in the bill are reasonable, like replacing lead water pipes. But with this overstuffed bill, it would be cheaper to fill all our potholes with hundred dollar bills. A bill targeted at fixing what really needs it wouldn’t cost anywhere near $2.5 trillion. Fox News pointed out that a 2019 study by the National Bureau of Economic Research found that “most US transportation infrastructure is not deteriorating” and that “massive new expenditures” are not warranted by the evidence.

Biden and the Democrats want to pay for this orgy of spending by (stop me if you’ve heard this) raising taxes on businesses. Biden would raise the corporate tax rate from 21 to 28% and the global minimum tax on corporations from 13 to 21%. That would make US businesses less competitive, raise consumer prices and confiscate money they used during the Trump years to expand and hire, but don’t worry: you’ll be able to get a cushy union job with help from the government. If this sounds “dangerously misguided” to you, then you’re in agreement with the US Chamber of Commerce.

Biden is also attempting to justify the bill on grounds that it will create so many jobs. Stacey Lennox at PJ Media notes that Biden talks as if we’re in a Great Depression and need a massive government jobs program. In fact, the current unemployment rate is 6.2%. That’s 1.5 points lower than the 7.7% jobless rate we had in 2012 when Obama/Biden were reelected.

Meanwhile, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (who thinks that “surges” and “insurgencies” are the same thing) is disappointed in Biden’s $2.5 trillion bill because she wants to spend $10 trillion, since money now falls from the Heavens like rain in the spring or something.

In a related story, Victor Davis Hanson lists 10 radical new rules that are changing America, although since it’s impossible to change reality, they're actually just heading us over a cliff. Note that #1 is “Money is a construct. It can be created from thin air. Annual deficits and aggregate national debt no longer matter much.”

The fact that our national debt is approaching $30 trillion and 110% of our entire GDP will never lead to the type of fiscal disaster that's occurred in every other country that’s spent itself into unpayable debt. The Ivy League leftists pushing this idea may have paid no attention to any economics courses, but they’ve completely embraced the one lesson they’ve been told since the cradle: “You’re special.”

2021 Liberal Newspeak

By Mike Huckabee

I’ve often written about why the left is constantly declaring various words to be offensive, racist, etc., often with no logical reason other than that those words make it harder for them to bend the truth so they want them banned. In the book “1984,” George Orwell called it “Newspeak,” the way the totalitarian government systematically removed words from the language that were used to describe the government’s crimes and abuses, so that eventually, the people wouldn’t even be capable of expressing opposition because there would literally be “no words” to express it with.

Well, that’s now happening so fast that I have to report on two inconvenient words that the left is trying to shove down the memory hole just today.

First, Biden’s new U.S. Citizen and Immigration Services director Tracy Renaud ordered the agency to remove the word “aliens” from its policy manual and replace it with "noncitizen" or "undocumented individual."

This deliberate fuzzification of the language is part of an ongoing effort to erase the meanings of words, so there is no way to differentiate a legal immigrant from a foreign resident from an illegal alien. Note how a member of any of those groups could be a “noncitizen,” and there’s no way to tell whether they’re here legally or not.

Meanwhile, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has declared it verboten to use the word “surge” to describe the surge of illegal immigrants…oops, sorry, “noncitizens”…across our southern border. She said, “Anyone who's using the term 'surge' around you consciously is trying to invoke a militaristic frame. And that's a problem because this is not a surge, these are children and they are not insurgents and we are not being invaded, which by the way is a White supremacist idea-philosophy, the idea that if another is coming in the population that this is an invasion of who we are.”

("White supremacist” is another term that has lost all meaning thanks to leftists, who now sprinkle it into every sentence the way some people drop in “you know’s” and “literally’s.”)

What utter claptrap. “Surge” is a perfectly fine word with a very specific and appropriate meaning: “A sudden or great increase,” which is exactly what we’ve seen in the number of illegal border crossers. It doesn’t mean they’re “insurgents,” although Democrats have recently proven that they have a poor grasp on the meaning of that word. “Invasion” also has a very specific meaning: to enter by force or to enter as if by invading, to overrun or crowd. Immigrants don’t “invade” a country, but you could argue that illegal immigrants currently are. And if concern about having your country invaded by outsiders is based in white supremacy or racism, then why was France so concerned about the Germans invading, or Ukraine about Russian invaders?

The thesaurus lists 49 synonyms for “stupid,” and none of them are strong enough to describe that comment. Maybe we need to invent some new words, or at least stop throwing away the perfectly good old ones. As the attorney said in “Inherit the Wind” in explaining why he swore, “Language is a poor enough means of communication. We've got to use all the words we've got. Besides, there are d**n few words anybody understands.”

If we allow the left to keep censoring our language, soon, there will be no words left than anybody understands.

G. Gordon Liddy passes

By Mike Huckabee

Former FBI agent, Watergate figure, author, actor and radio talk show host G. Gordon Liddy died Tuesday at 90. No cause of death was given, but his son said it was not COVID-related. Liddy was one of the most colorful, outspoken and provocative political figures of the past half century, as you can see from the details of his life at the link. Our condolences to his family.

Featured Post:  THE FOUR "R's": reading, writing, 'rithmetic and RACE

By Mike Huckabee

The California Board of Education has just voted --- unanimously --- to approve their new 894-page Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum, and it looks as though many of the state’s largest school districts will be making it a requirement for graduation.

Now there are “Four R’s”: reading, writing, ‘rithmetic and RACE, and it could well be argued that in this educational environment, RACE is going to the most important of the four.

A couple of weeks ago, while it was still under consideration by the board, NATIONAL REVIEW ran an editorial explaining what was in the program and why they were against it.

At that time, the California legislature had already signaled its intention to make this curriculum mandatory throughout the state if the Board of Education approved it. As reported in NATIONAL REVIEW, if such a bill were to be signed into law, ethnic studies would be the only subject in California with the same “pedagogical priority” in K-12 classrooms as reading, writing, and arithmetic.

Did you know that to graduate from high school in California, students aren’t required to take chemistry, physics or biology? And if you think knowledge of these subjects might not be necessary for many adults, please note that these kids don’t have to take history, geography, civics, or foreign language, either. They can come out of school pretty much pig-ignorant.

At least this explains a lot. Kids honestly do not know whether the Civil War was fought in the 1860s or the 1920s. They don’t know whether the Revolutionary War was fought for independence from England or France. The think the colonists came to America in 1619 so they’d have freedom to own slaves. They know absolutely nothing about the branches of government, the balance of powers, the Bill of Rights, or the rationale behind any of that, except that it should be ignored because it was all created by some racist old white men.

In other words, THEY DON’T HAVE A CLUE. They just think they do.

Before it was approved, NATIONAL REVIEW described this new Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum as “probably the most radical, polemical, and ideologically loaded educational document ever offered up for consideration in the free world...a political catechism, clearly formulated for the purpose of indoctrinating children into the intersectional priorities of the far Left.”

Apparently, the first draft of this was even worse, as it was actually rejected by the Board of Education, the governor and the editorial board of the LA TIMES, which called it “an impenetrable melange of academic jargon and politically correct pronouncements.” Some changes were made, particularly to tone down the anti-Semitism, but “the radicalism of the document hasn’t been blunted in any significant way.”

For example, would you like to know what it says about Christians? Again, I quote NATIONAL REVIEW: “White Christians are accused of having committed ‘theocide’ by against indigenous peoples, murdering their gods and replacing them with the God of the Bible. This, students are told, led directly to ‘coloniality, dehumanization and genocide,’ and to the ‘explicit erasure and replacement of holistic Indigeneity and humanity.’ In response, students are encouraged to establish for their generation a new social order characterized by ‘countergenocide’ and ‘counterhegemony,’ which will eventually allow for the ‘regeneration of indigenous epistemic and cultural futurity.’”

This still sounds like impenetrable academic jargon to me.

And, by the way, do you know what “countergenocide” is? It’s GENOCIDE, but in this case, of white people. In retaliation.

Oh, and there’s “religious” content as well. For example, teachers are encouraged to lead their students in “indigenous chants, songs and prayers to the Aztec gods.” One lesson plan calls for students to clap and chant to the god Tezkatlipoka (whom the Aztecs worshiped with human sacrifice and cannibalism), asking him to grant them the power to make them “warriors” for “social justice.”

This is the left's idea of multiculturalism.

And never mind any problems with the First Amendment over this. The people in charge probably went to California schools as well and don’t know or care anything about the First Amendment, either.

If this curriculum is adopted by the state of California, it will be forced upon 6 million children from the age of 5 or 6 all the way up to high school graduation. Untold numbers of kids will be indoctrinated in this rot. Oh, and California taxpayers will be footing the bill.

The NATIONAL REVIEW editorial was written in the hope that board members would ask themselves an important question: “How would this curriculum look different if it had been written by America’s worst enemies, by all of the bad actors in the world who would relish the sight of American society collapsing in upon itself?” Obviously, they didn’t ask that question, or didn’t care about the obvious answer to it, since they approved it unanimously. It wouldn’t surprise me if it HAD been written by America’s worst enemies, people who are playing the long game and want to see America “fundamentally transformed” as waves of newly-brainwashed generations take positions of authority.

As of this writing late Wednesday night, Gov. Newsom hadn’t yet signed this, but it seems likely he will, as he appointed the current head of the school board and several other members. On March 23, The Lawfare Project urged the governor to prevent its implementation “over concern that it could violate federal and state civil rights laws.”

Still, they only want “problematic” portions specifically relating to Jews removed. That would leave the rest of the miserable thing intact.

In 2020, Newsom signed a bill requiring all state university students to take an ethnic studies class to graduate --- the “Ethnic and Social Justice” requirement --- so it’s easy to imagine him approving similar requirements for high schoolers.

If Newsom moves forward with this high school curriculum, it will, according to the editors of NATIONAL REVIEW, “fall to the courts to spare the children of California the fate of an early life lived as lab rats for the state’s most insane and depraved would-be social engineers.”

And if that's still their fate, what then? Well, after good little social justice warriors graduate from California high schools, they might well attend Brown University, where students are so “woke” that they just approved “reparations” for descendants of slaves connected to the school. Student body president Jason Carroll said it’s “time to put money in black folks’ pocket.”

Let this be a warning: if you have children or grandchildren in California public schools, get them out of there as soon as you can. In fact, just get out of California if you can. (Side note: my writer/researchers, who live in Texas, say to please not to come to Texas if you think you might conceivably ever vote Democrat.) Until then, be intimately familiar with your kids’ reading materials and ask them every day what they talked about in class. Give them other books, and talk about them. And whatever you do, don’t send them to Brown University.

A Reader Writes Back...

I am a Vietnam veteran an army ranger, special forces qualified, 18 months in combat, then decided to become a police officer and a paramedic. I’m also a pilot and I flew EMS for years. Your newsletter is the highlight of my day and evening I can’t wait to wade through all of the garbage that you’re getting emails these days to read your newsletters! I followed you since you became the governor of Arkansas and your daughter was the press secretary for my President Trump! I live in Texas and I wish I could vote for in Arkansas. We won’t go into that kind of voter fraud. Thank you and your staff for all you do every day for all of us! You guys are awesome! Very respectfully. Mike.

America The Beautiful

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