By Mike Huckabee
May 19, 2023
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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.
With gratitude,
Mike
DAILY BIBLE VERSE
11 For I know the plans I have for you,” declares the Lord, “plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future.
Jeremiah 29:11
SUPREME COURT NEWS
Not liable
Thursday, a unanimous Supreme Court gave a big win to YouTube (Google), Twitter, Facebook and other social media companies, ruling that they are not liable for ISIS attacks that were planned or promoted using their platforms.
The case was brought by families of the victims of such attacks. The SCOTUS didn’t get into Section 230, the clause of the Communications Decency Act that protects the platforms from liability for things people post on them as long as they’re acting as a neutral platform and not a publisher that chooses and edits content (that’s another BIG issue, as we’ve all recently learned.) In this case, the SCOTUS found that the role played by the tech companies did not rise to the level of “aiding and abetting” the crimes, as the plaintiffs claimed.
It's a win for tech companies, and it will prevent a flood of similar lawsuits that threatened to restrict online speech and bring down the Internet. But it does show that if any measures are going to be taken to keep terrorist propaganda off the Internet, or to ensure that tech companies do act as neutral platforms and don’t censor users’ free speech, they will have to come from the legislature, not the courts.
Supreme Court dismisses Arizona lawsuit
Also on Thursday, the Supreme Court dismissed a lawsuit by Arizona seeking to force President Biden to retain the Title 42 pandemic emergency measures at the border to prevent a flood of illegal immigrants. The dismissal was no surprise, seeing as the health emergency has been officially declared over and Title 42 has already expired.
Still, it’s well worth reading this article at Redstate.com that includes the comments of Justice Neil Gorsuch. In fact, I wish that everyone in Washington, and a lot of politicians and activists all over America would read it until they’ve memorized it.
Gorsuch goes into some detail about the dangers of allowing medical emergency powers to be used for other ends (notice how everything from racism to guns is now “a public health emergency.”) He recounts how politicians used COVID as an excuse to assume powers they didn’t normally have and use them for things unrelated to COVID, in the process trampling on Americans’ rights. There’s so much wisdom there that needs to be heard far and wide that I urge you to read it in its entirety. But just to pique your interest, here is an excerpt:
“One lesson might be this: Fear and the desire for safety are powerful forces. They can lead to a clamor for action—almost any action—as long as someone does something to address a perceived threat. A leader or an expert who claims he can fix everything, if only we do exactly as he says, can prove an irresistible force. We do not need to confront a bayonet, we need only a nudge, before we willingly abandon the nicety of requiring laws to be adopted by our legislative representatives and accept rule by decree. Along the way, we will accede to the loss of many cherished civil liberties—the right to worship freely, to debate public policy without censorship, to gather with friends and family, or simply to leave our homes.
We may even cheer on those who ask us to disregard our normal lawmaking processes and forfeit our personal freedoms. Of course, this is no new story. Even the ancients warned that democracies can degenerate toward autocracy in the face of fear.
But maybe we have learned another lesson too. The concentration of power in the hands of so few may be efficient and sometimes popular. But it does not tend toward sound government. However wise one person or his advisors may be, that is no substitute for the wisdom of the whole of the American people that can be tapped in the legislative process.
Decisions produced by those who indulge no criticism are rarely as good as those produced after robust and uncensored debate…”
Seldom has a moot, dismissed case yielded such an important ruling. And by the way, might I also add that raising the debt ceiling is not a public health emergency that justifies the President ignoring Congress and assuming the power to torture the 14th Amendment.
Good News, Bad News
The good news: The Supreme Court affirmed high school football coach Joe Kennedy’s right to pray on school grounds, effectively overturning the 1971 Lemon v. Kurtzman ruling that restricted religious freedom in schools. And now, the Biden Department of Education is issuing new guidance to schools on protecting students’ and staffers’ religious rights that reflects the Kennedy ruling.
The Bad News: The First Liberty Institute is raising concerns that the DOE guidance still includes references to cases that cited Lemon v. Kurtzman as precedent. It also includes some of those notoriously vague weasel phrases that allow activist school officials to “interpret” people’s religious freedom away.
Read the details at the link, and let’s pray that the next time the SCOTUS reaffirms that the First Amendment means what it says, that it does so in a way that’s so crystal clear, there can be no room for any leftist “interpretation.”
IN OTHER NEWS
Clueless Headline of the Day
“Markey: Biden Using 14th Amendment Necessary If GOP Not Reasonable.”
That’s Massachusetts Democrat Sen. Ed Markey declaring that if Republicans continue to demand that the government restrain its spending to ONLY a 1% increase instead of raising the debt limit yet again and letting the Democrats continue to spend money the way a fire hydrant dispenses water, they’ll be forced to twist the Constitution to subvert the House’s clearly-delineated power to write budgets. Because that’s the…”reasonable” position.
By that definition, I’d say that Ed Markey is “reasonably” qualified for his job.
Corrections Page, and This Is A Big One
The Biden Administration is walking back claims that it killed a top-level al-Qaeda official in Syria with a missile strike after his family claimed the man had no ties to terrorists but was a poor, kind, hard-working, former bricklayer and father of 10 who was killed by the missile while tending to his sheep.
Interesting story
This is an interesting story, but frankly, I don’t know if she’d be interested in the demotion.
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Do you remember?
Do you remember Sam Brinson? If not, I’m sorry to have to remind you, but “they” was the former Biden Department of Energy official who “identifies” as “a non-binary, gender fluid person” and is known for being bald, having a mustache and wearing bright red lipstick, diamond necklaces and ball gowns. Brinson left the DOE after being arrested for stealing women’s luggage from airports and being photographed in one-of-a-kind stolen designer dresses. Brinson faced up to 15 years for grand larceny, but since you could tell with one look that “they” was a well-connected Democrat, the judges ruled that no jail time was necessary.
Well, prepare to be shocked: Brinson has been arrested again. Maryland police arrested him (sorry, I’m tired of this “they/them” nonsense, even as a joke) at his apartment as a “fugitive from justice.” Not many details were revealed, but it reportedly relates to more stolen luggage, this time from Reagan National Airport.
It’s ironic that Brinson became a celebrity by promoting the idea that “you can’t judge a book by its cover,” but if you looked at him and thought he seemed mentally unstable, well…
By the way, this write-up also includes a statement from his family, who say that his claims that his parents abused him and forced him into conversion therapy “never happened,” and that he’s been lying and slandering his parents for the past decade.
https://www.westernjournal.
When the Biden Administration hired him, I’m sure they were thrilled at how many identity boxes he checked. Too bad “mentally stable” wasn’t one of them. I assume from all available evidence that that one’s not a job requirement for anyone in this Administration.
Memo to New Yorkers
You might want to know about this before the sweltering summer heat arrives, or next winter’s blizzards. All those Democrats you keep electing have decided to try to appease the climate gods by shutting down all the state’s fossil fuel power plants in seven years, despite currently having nothing to replace them with.
Back during the ‘70s oil crisis, Texans used to joke about “letting the Yankees freeze in the dark.” Whoever imagined that New Yorkers would someday vote to do that to themselves?
Interesting article
Jeff Charles at Redstate.com has an interesting article that’s behind a paywall, but if you’re a subscriber, it’s well worth reading.
It’s based on a wide-ranging YouGov poll, but focused on one particular issue, and that’s the public’s perception of the likelihood of a mass shooting in their community.
https://docs.cdn.yougov.com/
Overall, 24% of Americans think it’s “very likely” and 35% think it’s “somewhat likely.” 20% think it’s not very likely, 7% think it’s not likely at all, and 13% aren’t sure. That’s how likely people believe it is. But what does the data say?
It’s tough to say for sure because there’s no accepted definition of a “mass shooting.” But Charles reports that under the most common definition (at least four victims, whether or not there are fatalities), out of 20,958 gun murder victims in 2021, only 706 (about 3%) were in mass shootings. If you’re calculating the odds of it happening where you are, that’s 706 victims out of a US population of about 333 million.
So why do so many people think mass shootings are happening everywhere all the time? Charles lists several factors: the emotional impact of such horrific events, the way so many people immediately try to politicize them, and of course, the ubiquity of the media and social media.
This really isn’t a new phenomenon. I remember reading an article decades ago, explaining why people had so much anxiety about crime when the crime rate was actually pretty low. It’s been so long, I don’t remember where I read it; possibly in Reason magazine. But it noted that as recently as 100 years in the past, a murder could occur in a town a hundred miles away, and you might never hear about it. But at that time, a murder could happen on the other side of the country, and you’d hear about it within hours because of TV newscasts. Now, thanks to 24-hour cable channels, the Internet and social media, every murder in the entire world is thrown in our faces in real time, and mass shootings get 24/7 coverage.
If you’re one of those people who’s afraid a mass shooting will happen whenever you step outside, maybe this will help calm your fears. Gun researcher John R. Lott Jr. found that in the vast majority of counties in America, murder is practically nonexistent. Out of more than 3,000 counties in the US, 52% had zero murders in 2020, while the worst 2% (62 counties) accounted for 56% of all murders, almost all of them being deep blue urban areas like St. Louis, Baltimore, New Orleans and Detroit.
Yes, mass shootings are horrific, and we all agree that even one is too many. It’s also true that they can happen in red districts like Allen, Texas (although they are more likely to be stopped quickly by a good guy with a gun.) No matter where you live, it’s smart to be alert and be prepared. But if you let fear of something that's so unlikely dominate your life, then you’ll never really be able to fully live your life.
Megyn Kelly interviews Roseanne Barr
On her recent Fox Nation comedy special, Roseanne Barr makes some pretty sharp jokes about her kids, but in an interview with Megyn Kelly, Roseanne opened up on her motherhood experience and why she's happy she had all five of her kids. That includes a daughter she gave up for adoption when she was a pregnant teen and was later reunited with her.
Roseanne said she never even considered abortion and doesn’t understand why the “right to choose” has come to mean choosing something so barbaric. She says that in her life, she’s always trusted God, and that includes the unusual way she was able to identify the daughter she gave up.
I’m proud to say that my TBN show welcomed her when the Hollywood crowd that she had enriched for years cowered before the cancel culture mob and backstabbed her. I hope she’ll consider coming on again soon.
ICYMI: A clear-eyed look at drug legalization
For a while there, it seemed as if the drug legalization boom was unstoppable. That’s understandable when you consider that every time a new proposal to legalize drugs came up, there were even more people on drugs to vote for it. It started with legalizing pot, then grew to the point where Oregon even decriminalized possessing “personal amounts” of drugs like heroin, meth and fentanyl. But now, it appears that at long last, even people in blue states are finally coming out of their purple haze and realizing what a bad idea that was.
DHM Research in Portland surveyed Oregonians and found that 63% favor reinstating criminal punishments for drug possession. Majorities of every demographic want drugs banned again. To the surprise of nobody who isn’t on drugs, decriminalizing hard drugs didn’t make life better, it increased drug addiction, homelessness and crime.
One Portland-based attorney told Fox News, "I think we didn't realize that what we were signing up for was the deterioration of civilized norms and the public spaces being ceded to people in late-stage drug addiction and engaged in all sorts of criminal activity to keep that addiction going." She added, "Oregon has turned into an international spectacle and I think we looked at each other and realized that we made an enormous mistake."
Let’s hope that this new clear-headedness trend keeps going until they realize they get the exact same results with their addiction to voting for Democrats.
Well, This Is Embarrassing
Michelle Obama just released a new line of health drinks called Plezi that purportedly help combat childhood obesity. Bloomberg News spoke to 12 independent health professionals and organizations and found that none of the drinks meet the requirements for being served in elementary schools under the Obama-era guidelines that Michelle was in charge of.
https://www.foxnews.com/media/
For instance, they contain “non-nutritive sweeteners” like Stevia, which the WHO advises against using to control body weight. Under the Obama school lunch guidelines, the only drinks permitted are water, milk, or 100% fruit or vegetable juice with no added sweeteners.
If it’s any consolation to Michelle Obama, much of the food served under those guidelines was also rejected, only by the students. Anyone remember this from 2014?...
Problems ahead for woke businesses
As if Bud Light didn’t have enough problems, Sens. Ted Cruz and Marsha Blackburn are calling on the Beer Institute’s Code Compliance Board to look into whether their partnership with controversial “trans” influencer Dylan Mulvaney was a violation of the rules against marketing to people below the legal drinking age. Mulvaney doesn’t just claim to be female, he acts like a particularly ditzy tween girl on social media, and he was given his own Bud Light can for celebrating one year of “girlhood,” not “womanhood,” as in “biological female who’s old enough to drink.”
Compounding Bud Light’s “Get woke, go broke” woes, the New York Post reports that a photo went viral allegedly showing an unnamed beer vendor offering $20 rebates to customers to buy one of a stack of unsold cartons of Bud Light. They sell for $19.98, so if this is real, they’re effectively paying people two cents a carton to take them away.
https://nypost.com/2023/05/17/
Apparently, Adidas is really jealous of Bud Light’s sales trajectory. Why else would they try to sell women swimsuits by having them modeled by a man who can barely contain his male equipment in them? (Warning: if you click on this, you’ll never be able to unsee it.)
Ford also seems determined to convince 97% of men to buy Chevy pickup trucks.
Finally, here are more companies who’d rather promote leftwing and “trans” virtual signaling than stay in business.
“This government will crush you”: whistleblowers testify about retaliation
WOW, the Democrats in Congress made themselves look bad on Thursday.
They were trying to make government whistleblowers look bad, ripping into them during televised congressional hearings. But their overblown dramatics backfired spectacularly.
The hearings started early enough that I was able to cover the start of them in yesterday’s newsletter. But the show went on, and now that the event is over, one can only marvel anew at how tone-deaf the Democrats can be.
There are already rules in place that are supposed to protect whistleblowers from retaliation (minus one significant “exception,” which I’ll get to). Obviously, rules don’t mean anything to this administration --- that’s why legislative “reform” won’t bring significant change until the bad people are gone --- and for now, whistleblowers are unfortunately paying the price.
So, the big losers of the day were arguably congressional Democrats. But also losing big: the FBI itself, with yet another jaw-dropping revelation about them. It seems that when they want the phone records of Americans --- at least anyone who was on Capitol Hill on January 6, 2021 --- their attitude is, “Warrants? We don’t need no stinkin’ warrants!” According to an interim staff report from the House Judiciary Committee and the Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government, the FBI obtained Americans’ phone records from Bank Of America “without any legal process.”
The committees’ report, which was released just ahead of the hearings, said that retired FBI Supervisory Intelligence Analyst George Hill --- now we know his name --- had “provided the Committee with detailed allegations of FBI civil liberties abuses.” Hill testified that after January 6, Bank Of America supplied the DC Field Office with a list of people who had made transactions in the DC-Maryland-Virginia area with a Bank Of America credit or debit card over January 5-7. Hill also testified that those who used a Bank Of America card to purchase a firearm “were elevated to the top of the list.”
Another whistleblower, FBI Intelligence Analyst Marcus Allen, a Marine who a few years ago was named Employee of the Year at the Charlotte, NC, field office, has had his security clearance revoked and his pay suspended --- it’s been a year --- after he found open-source reporting that contradicted Director Chris Wray’s testimony about the January 6 probe and complained to the DOJ inspector general.
Allen is represented by Tristan Leavitt, who recently joined forces with attorney Mark Lytle to defend him as well as the IRS whistleblower whose entire team was taken off the Hunter Biden investigation. Leavitt told JUST THE NEWS that with the departure of the entire Hunter investigative team, a lot of “significant institutional knowledge” has been lost from the case. Well, it probably doesn’t matter; doesn’t seem as though they’re serious at all about doing a real investigation.
Here’s Leavitt at Thursday’s hearing…
https://www.c-span.org/video/?
Leavitt also appeared on Thursday’s HANNITY show to talk about the “one-party mind” at the FBI and IRS. He says the FBI was given a “special exemption” when the whistleblower protection law was passed, and they are taking away security clearances because “it’s a tool available to them.” I would say legislators have their work cut out for them.
https://www.foxnews.com/video/
Allen was one of the whistleblowers who testified Thursday. He was suspended after daring to share an article from REVOLVER NEWS that examined the likelihood of federal agents’ involvement in January 6. (As you know, their presence on that day has since been confirmed.) As REVOLVER NEWS described it on Thursday, “A patriotic and decorated Marine veteran and current FBI employee tasked with investigating January 6 crimes had his security clearance revoked and his loyalty to the United States questioned for sharing (not even endorsing) a REVOLVER NEWS article on January 6.”
Former State Department diplomat Mike Benz was shocked at what the FBI had done to Allen. “This is incredible,” he tweeted. “The Biden administration is revoking clearances on the basis of independent news sources that agents read. There must be accountability. [House Appropriations Committee] --- it is time to make the FBI budget fall with its fall in public trust.”
He mentioned in another tweet something we didn’t know: “In Jan 2021, Democrats tried to achieve this power legislatively with Steph Murphy’s (D-FL) ‘Security Clearance Improvement Act.’ That bill sought to ban anyone who believed in ‘conspiracy theories’ from holding a security clearance.”
“Conspiracy theories”? Let’s see...would that include the one about Trump being a Russian agent and his campaign working with Russian spies? No?
Florida Congressman Matt Gaetz stood up for Allen during the testimony, citing his service to his country and the fact that he’d been factually correct about government agents on January 6, but Democrats on the committee treated him beyond disrespectfully.
Rep. Linda Sanchez, a Democrat congresswoman with an IQ lower than that of tree fungus, confronted him with a tweet about Nancy Pelosi and January 6 from someone named “Marcus Allen,” asking him first if this was his Twitter account. He said it was “absolutely not,” but she insisted on reading the tweet --- someone else’s tweet ---ANYWAY. Then she asked him if he agreed with it. I have never seen anything like this in my life, even in Pelosi’s kangaroo court.
https://twitter.com/
Let’s just say that Fetterman, Feinstein and Biden are not the only Democrats suffering from cognitive impairment.
Following Allen’s testimony, FBI Special Agent Garret O’Boyle, another whistleblower whose career has been destroyed, took the stand. Please just take five minutes now to watch him give his opening statement…
https://twitter.com/
He also had a warning: “This government will crush you” if you come forward.
https://dailycaller.com/2023/
Here’s the write-up from REVOLVER NEWS…
So, what needs to happen to fix this? Alan Dershowitz, never a fan of “partisan bickering,” wants a nonpartisan commission, like the 9/11 Commission, to look at how to reform the FBI. Sigh, another commission?
Author Ryan McMaken makes a case for ending the FBI entirely. “It is well past time,” he says, “for a more realistic assessment of the FBI for what it is: an unnecessary, unconstitutional and incompetent agency.” He says FBI agents “have long displayed a contempt for basic human rights, and instead function as a partisan federal ‘secret police’ designed to protect the powerful at the expense of ordinary Americans.” McMaken believes the FBI should be “decentralized, defunded, stripped of its powers, and ultimately abolished,” with its functions taken over by military intelligence and state and local police. Honorable rank-and-file FBI employees will be sad to read this about their agency.
https://discernreport.com/end-
Rep. Gaetz has called for indicting FBI agents named in the Durham Report. As for the agency itself, “deauthorize, defang and defund,” he says. Unlike Dershowitz, he holds little hope for bipartisanship. “In a proper world, Republicans and Democrats would be able to work together on this,” he said. “It wasn’t that long ago that the FBI was a right-wing organization, weaponized against civil rights leaders and others. And it was wrong then, and it’s wrong now.”
https://twitter.com/
Ohio Rep. Jim Jordan, who chairs the House Judiciary Committee, agreed that the FBI needs to be defunded. “The only way we can hold them accountable,” he said, “is to go after one thing that everybody cares about --- money.”
And Margot Cleveland makes the case --- using quotes from Durham’s report --- that without people of integrity in positions of authority, no amount of policy change is going to fix the FBI. Dishonest attorneys will just figure out how to go around the laws and guidelines. The dishonesty came from the top down. What has to happen now is a bottom-up movement, she says, in which “honorable and faithful men and women of the FBI join the ranks of whistleblowers and revolt against those leaders corrupted in heart and mind.”
https://thefederalist.com/
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