By Mike Huckabee
March 3, 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
17 You will not have to fight this battle. Take up your positions; stand firm and see the deliverance the Lord will give you, Judah and Jerusalem. Do not be afraid; do not be discouraged. Go out to face them tomorrow, and the Lord will be with you.’”
2 Chronicles 20:17
VETO UPDATE
President Biden decided at the last minute not to make his veto pen do double-duty, and he signed a resolution passed by both Houses of Congress to block the DC City Council’s new “justice reform” bill that would have reduced punishments for a range of serious crimes, including robbery and carjacking.
Congressional Democrats who had fought the resolution assuming Biden would veto it are railing against him, with criticism ranging from “disappointed” to “betrayal” to “BLEEP-ing amateur hour” and “He f---ed this up royally.” I can’t imagine that they speak for the Democratic Representative who was recently attacked in a DC elevator and had to fight off her assailant with a cup of hot coffee.
Meanwhile, everyone with two brain cells to rub together is breathing a sigh of relief that Biden read the writing on the wall and decided it would not be politically advantageous to perform a big national, public endorsement of the Party’s habit of siding with criminals over law-abiding citizens.
DC is already in the grip of a crime wave, and this was such an insane move that even the far-left Mayor, Muriel Bowser, vetoed it, but the Council overrode her. They backed this unanimously, which tells you all you need to know about the DC City Council and why they must NEVER be allowed to become a self-governing state with votes in Congress.
Fact-checks
I’ve finally found a legitimate use for Twitter’s imposition of “fact-checks” on posts. In one of his recent speeches, President Biden went off prompter to talk about the nurse who cared for him after “a couple of craniotomies” (yes, he had those, which might explain a lot.) His comments were so bizarre and off the rails that Twitter felt it necessary to put a disclaimer on all posts of them, confirming that they were actually real and not deep fake technology.
https://www.westernjournal.com/twitter-add-fact-check-video-biden-tell-viewers-not-fake/
They should put that on all his speeches, including the State of the Union Address.
Related: Minnesota Democratic Rep. Dean Phillips dared to speak the truth out loud by saying that he wishes Biden weren’t the Party’s only option in 2024, and admitting there are “literally hundreds of fellow Democrats in Congress “who would say the same thing, but they simply won’t (BLEEP)ing say a word.”
https://www.westernjournal.com/dem-blurts-painful-truth-biden-interview-hundreds-congress-say-thing/
Clinging to power
Democrats at the top party levels these days have adopted the attitude that they don’t care how old, infirm or mentally shaky a candidate is, as long as they can warm a chair and have a (D) next to their names. They will move Heaven and Earth to elect or reelect them so the Party can cling to power.
But that strategy might be coming back to bite them in the rump. They have a razor-thin majority in the Senate, with Joe Manchin (having been betrayed on promises for selling his vote for the laughably mislabeled “Inflation Reduction Act”) having no incentives to tow the Party line. And that majority now hinges on two Senators who are too sick or old to show up and vote.
Sen. Dianne Feinstein is already the subject of rumors that she’s in mental decline. Now, she’s been hospitalized with shingles. She’s expected to make a full recovery, and I honestly hope and pray that she does. Shingles is a serious and very uncomfortable viral infection and rash that can take up to six weeks to clear, even for a younger, healthier person. Remember when David Letterman had it in 2003? It was the first time he’d ever missed a show, and he was out for a month. But what the compliant liberal media aren’t telling us is that older people can suffer very severe post-shingles pain that can go on for months. And Sen. Feinstein is 89.
Meanwhile, Pennsylvania Sen. John Fetterman is suffering the entirely predictable (I predicted it here), dangerously debilitating effects of running for office rather than taking necessary recuperation time off after a severe stroke. He’s barely been sworn into office and has already been hospitalized twice. He’s currently in the hospital for severe clinical depression. Pennsylvania Republicans are now demanding that he show himself to prove he’s capable of doing the job, which he clearly wasn’t even before he was elected (he’s since admitted that voices sound to him like the “wah-wah” sounds of the teachers in Charlie Brown specials.)
https://townhall.com/tipsheet/mattvespa/2023/03/02/john-fetterma-health-update-n2620142
Fetterman’s staff put out a press release claiming he’s partnering with other Democrats to introduce legislation to prevent train derailments. But when Republicans asked how that’s possible when he’s still hospitalized – and which unelected staffer is actually doing his job – his chief of staff had his own train wreck by attacking the “ugliness on the right” for focusing on his health problems.
I’m sorry, but I refuse to accept that load of guilt. It was the Democrats who were more concerned with grabbing a Senate seat than with the life and health of their own candidate; and any questions about his health now, when he’s spending more time in the hospital than in the Senate, are entirely legitimate.
All this has given rise to a new question: with both Feinstein and Fetterman out of service for an indefinite period of time, do the Democrats even have a working majority? They may control the agenda, but how likely are they to pass anything? The only thing that mattered to Party leaders was that they secure a Senate majority. They showed no concerns for the health of their own Senators and whether they were able to represent their constituents. It would be a cruel irony if their obsession with obtaining power at all costs, even at the cost of the health of their own members, effectively cost them their majority power because of the poor health of their own members.
New “Twitter File” drop, and more on our information overlords
Regular readers of this newsletter are familiar with a State Department-funded think tank called the Global Engagement Center because we’ve covered it in detail. One reason for this: they provided funding to a group that created a “disinformation blacklist” to provide to advertisers and then proceeded to put us on it.
There’s news on two fronts about the GEC, though it was generally ignored late Thursday because all anyone in the news wanted to talk about was the guilty verdict in the Alex Murdaugh trial. But let’s talk about something else, something very important: the (yes) conspiracy to spoon-feed “information” to us.
Before getting into the finer points of how the federal dollars flowed from one group to another and another, I want to say that the U.S. government has no business being involved in policing “disinformation” aimed at Americans AT ALL. They’ve already shown themselves to be the biggest spreaders of it. The Russia Hoax, Hunter Biden’s laptop, the origins of COVID...we don’t need to go back over all the examples now; you know what they are. Who needs Russia to spread disinformation when you’ve got the U.S. intel community? They’ve lost all credibility. If there’s any “policing” to be done, it should be our policing of THEM, and that’s what we have the Oversight Committees for.
With that said, let me outline for you what the House Oversight Committee is investigating and what they have found. On February 23, chairman James Comer of Kentucky sent a letter to the State Department, raising concerns that “federal funds administered by the Department of State were used to suppress lawful speech and defund disfavored news outlets under the guise of combatting disinformation. The Committee is disturbed by recent reporting that taxpayer money ended up in the hands of a foreign organization running an advertiser blacklist of organizations accused of hosting disinformation on their websites, including some conservative-leaning news organizations.”
The GEC, described as “an inter-agency organization housed within the State Department,” had passed $100,000 to an investment group called Park Advisors, who in turn passed it to the Global Disinformation Index in Britain, for a government-sponsored program called the U.S.-Paris Tech Challenge. The goal of this was “to advance the development of promising and innovative technologies against disinformation and propaganda,” according to their records.
Well, that sounds potentially evil. When I read the stated description of their goal, why am I reminded of gain-of-function research? That’s supposed to protect us, too. What could go wrong?
The news outlets they identified as the Top 10 “riskiest” all skew to the right and include THE FEDERALIST, THE AMERICAN CONSERVATIVE, OANN (One America News Network), THE BLAZE, DAILY WIRE, REAL CLEAR POLITICS, REASON, the NEW YORK POST, and THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR. Some of our very favorites! Though we were on their “blacklist,” I have to say we were disappointed not to make it into their Top 10 and are determined to try harder.
Anyway, according to the WASHINGTON EXAMINER (which sadly didn’t make the Top 10, either), Republican and Democrat staffers for the House Oversight Committee and the House Foreign Affairs Committee received a classified briefing Thursday in connection with the GEC and its bankrolling of the group that created this blacklist. (The Foreign Affairs Committee was involved because the Global Disinformation Index is British and the purported use of this $100,000 was to root out “foreign” disinformation.) According to sources, “roughly seven” State Department officials were there.
The $100,000 was given in 2021, and the GEC is silent on whether it will commit to stopping future funding. They defend it as legitimate because THAT MONEY is not used for U.S. matters. (Never mind that the news outlets that ended up on the blacklist were American.) That reasoning seems on par with saying the Biden Penn Center isn’t funded by the Chinese because THAT MONEY goes to the University of Delaware.
Rep. Comer told the WASHINGTON EXAMINER, “It’s alarming that the State Department passed U.S. taxpayer dollars to a foreign organization that attempted to censor conservative American news outlets. The State Department’s classified briefing provided to committee staff indicates that there may need to be stronger mechanisms in place to prevent domestic censorship.” MAY need to be?
Comer anticipates receiving more records from the State Department documenting their activities in this realm. We shall see.
Jim Jordan, House Judiciary chair, and Mike Turner, House Intel chair, are also working on getting information from 29 CIA officials concerning their efforts to discredit the Hunter Biden laptop. They’ve sent letters, but what do you bet they’re gonna need subpoenas?
https://dailycaller.com/2023/03/01/jim-jordan-house-intel-officials-letters-hunter-biden-discredit
Two weeks ago, the House Oversight and Foreign Affairs Committees were briefed by the National Endowment for Democracy on their funding to GDI, which totaled over $545,000 between 2020-21. Important details are here…
The Global Disinformation Index also is funded by George Soros’ laughably-misnamed Open Society Foundations.
Here’s something we found from 2016, showing that even then, the National Endowment for Democracy was on India’s “watch list” --- they keep their eye on Soros --- but that doesn’t keep American leftists in our State Department from working to funnel money to organizations associated with him. It seems the world is just infested with groups like this.
On the other front, a new “Twitter File” from Matt Taibbi has dropped, this one about internal communications at Twitter regarding...the Global Engagement Center!
Our own GEC also funds the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab (DFRLab), which says it doesn’t track Americans. That doesn’t fly with Americans who are on its “list.”
Taibbi describes how the GEC was created during Obama’s last year as an interagency group “within” the State Department, with initial partners including the FBI, DHS, NSA, CIA, DARPA, Special Operations Command (SOCOM) and others. As Taibbi reports, “GEC funded a secret list of subcontractors and helped pioneer a new form of blacklisting that created an alarmist report and sent it to the slower animals in journalism’s herd, creating flawed or flat-out wrong news stories.”
“GEC’s funding is up for a vote this year,” he writes, “and the TwitterFiles expose the need to stop paying to blacklist Americans.”
https://covidreason.substack.com/p/twitter-files-another-acronym-government
And here’s a perfectly-timed new column about censorship from Margot Cleveland at THE FEDERALIST. In it, she talks about what she has dubbed the Censorship Complex: “a cabal of government agencies, politicians, academia, nonprofits, the corrupt press, and Big Tech.”
Remember when Chuck Schumer said the intel community has “six ways from Sunday” to get you? Well, Cleveland says this cabal really does have six ways to censor your speech. Big Tech (as in Twitter, but they all did it) censored speech it didn’t like. It coordinated with intel agencies. It followed requests from “disinfo” groups such as nonprofits (like the GDI, as described above). It caved to pressure by concerted --- and false --- PR campaigns. It heeded censorship requests by past and present government officials.
And...last but not least...it used blacklisting to “starve” its targets of advertising dollars. That’s just what the Global Disinformation Index was doing --- what it was trying to do to us.
Given all this, Cleveland says Americans are “no better off than citizens of authoritarian countries with state-controlled media.”
The war continues
The allegedly “nonexistent” war on Christianity continues. In its latest front, an atheist group is “OUTRAGED!”(™) that NFL legend and now head coach of the University of Colorado-Boulder Buffaloes, Deion Sanders, is exposing the players to (brace yourselves) prayer!
These groups had an attorney write a letter to the school accusing Sanders of “infusing his program with Christianity and engaging in religious exercises with players and staff members,” the only specific examples being that he reportedly twice began a team meeting with a prayer. You know, like Congress does. The letter goes on to list the groups’ “demands,” which include that Sanders be “be educated as to his constitutional duties under the Establishment Clause.”
I would respond that these atheists and their attorney should get educated on the Establishment Clause, which does not in any way say that exercises of religious faith are banned from public places; it actually bans the government from restricting the free expression of religious faith. And nowhere in the Constitution do the words “separation of church and state” appear. The phrase “Establishment clause” refers to the ban on the government establishing an official state religion. Sanders expressing his personal Christian faith is hardly the equivalent of Congress declaring Christianity to be the official state religion.
Stephen Kruiser at PJ Media has some interesting commentary on how atheists like this have actually become America’s most strident religious fanatics (and yes, atheism is a religion; it takes a big leap of faith to declare with absolute certainty that there is no God when you can’t prove a negative.) Kruiser says these atheists “do a lot of preaching for people who supposedly don’t believe in anything,” and their “complaints really do come off like the ravings of a severely unbalanced person who didn’t get hugged enough as a kid.”
I also strongly recommend visiting that link so you can scroll down to see the video of a small farm boy and his lamb. It’s the perfect antidote to a bunch of bitter, angry cranks screaming that God doesn’t exist.
ICYMI: AINSWORTH: Time for a Scott Adams update
by Laura Ainsworth, staff writer/researcher
All right, ladies and gentlemen (yes, we still use those terms around here). Get your coffee vessels ready ‘cause it’s time for the moment of the day that makes everything better: the “simultaneous sip.” (Gentle slurp.) Aaaahhhhh.
As I was watching Tuesday’s "Coffee With Scott Adams" podcast, listening to him explain to his waiting audience about what has happened to kill off DILBERT after that so-called "rant" (it wasn't one), what black conservatives are saying (they generally don’t have a problem, he says), what the white liberal media are saying (racist!!!), what Scott originally said, what he didn’t say, what he’s said since, and on and on, I was reminded of something Ronald Reagan used to say: "If you're explaining, you're losing."
As I found out later in the day, someone else was thinking the same thing, Stephen Green, because he said so in his column for PJ MEDIA. Here it is; for that content, scroll down to "Is Scott Adams racist?" (Spoiler alert: he's not.)
https://pjmedia.com/vodkapundit/2023/02/28/insanity-wrap-the-correct-take-on-scott-adams-n1674305
It's a very good commentary, and that's fortunate because Green’s headline is "The Correct Take on Scott Adams." Like me, he actually watched the podcast --- I, as a subscriber, happened to see it in real time before there was even any public reaction --- and he looked for takes from both sides. He also paid attention to what Scott has had to say since.
The good news: Scott Adams is not a racist.
The bad news: His monologue really was not that good. Green found what he said “not funny.” It was hard to figure out exactly what Scott’s target was, Green said, when his humor is usually so pointed. I, on the other hand, did find the deadpan humor funny. (Social media influencer Hotep Jesus, who is black and a very independent thinker, got it, too, and was rolling on the floor laughing as he played clips during his own podcast.) At the same time, as I wrote a few days ago, I was concerned that the satire was too subtle and over-the-heads of most people, especially those who don’t already know him well or who were hearing about his “rant” second-hand. As you can see from this early-on ABC NEWS report, the so-called mainstream media and Scott’s critics decided to treat this piece of hyperbolic performance art as serious and took his words at face value.
https://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/media-drop-dilbert-after-creators-black-hate-group-97467210
I agree with Green that Scott's target was unclear. At whom or what was his hyperbole directed? Was it the Rasmussen poll, which it turns out really did have poor methodology and didn't tell us much of anything? Was it the media, who are happy to exploit a bad, potentially highly misleading poll to exacerbate interracial strife? Was it CRT-style indoctrination and the state of our education system and corporate business? Was it cancel culture? Was it “all of the above”? That’s really what I’m thinking, but I can’t be sure.
I recall that some months ago, Scott was talking in his podcast about the inevitable end of DILBERT. He said it would have to be the permanent demise of the strip, the kind of end you can’t come back from. I wish I could remember exactly what he said. Maybe some other Locals subscriber --- someone with either more time on his hands than I’ve got or more expertise in how to search video databases --- will remember watching this, too, and will go hunting for that clip. Perhaps Scott had been planning for a long time to do something like this. I believe he must have deliberately caused this seeming career self-destruction.
The DILBERT strip, along with a particularly biting one he does occasionally called ROBOTS READ NEWS, will still be available for Locals subscribers, at least for as long as he chooses to draw it, along with other Scott Adams content including a large number of helpful “microlessons.” (Maybe he should do one of these on how to avoid cancel culture, ha.) I wonder if, freed as he is from “woke” business constraints, he will take DILBERT in some bold new direction, as he had already introduced the concept of wokeness to Dilbert’s office with brilliant results.
But Adams’ contracts with both his syndicator (for the comic strip) and his publisher (for the books) have been terminated. In his podcast Tuesday, he didn’t seem to know yet how this was going to affect the availability of his books. I found that odd; you’d think he would’ve been extremely clear on that before doing something he knew was absolutely, positively going to get him canceled.
Adams did a long-form interview --- two leisurely hours --- with Hotep Jesus, and if you have time for this, it will give you a good background on his real attitudes about race. For years, Scott has taken the sort of playful approach to this subject that I as a humorist can appreciate. For instance, just as he (until the last few days) identified as black, I identify as 22. Sadly, though, many people lack the humor gene. That’s especially true of those on the left, who take this and other social issues VERY SERIOUSLY and demand that the rest of us treat those issues exactly as they would. They are definitely a bunch of humor-phobes.
The complete interview is included in this commentary by Jeff Charles at REDSTATE. It’s the video of Scott on the left in a split screen with Hotep. You should also read the article; Charles has a lot of insight and has “been black for 42 years.” He quips that the exception has been the years after he didn’t vote for Joe Biden.
https://redstate.com/jeffc/2023/02/27/who-says-its-not-okay-to-be-white-n709411
Farther down in the article is another video, a conversation on racism and white guilt between Charles, a self-described “conserva-tarian,” and Brandon Morse, Charles’ colleague at REDSTATE. It’s nice to see two friends, a black guy and a white guy, having a fun, freewheeling conversation about race that doesn’t rely on words like “diversity” and “intersectionality.”
Charles blames virtue-signaling white progressives, not black people, for the hate directed at white conservatives. “It’s the Robin DiAngelos of the world that are responsible for the bulk of the anti-white rhetoric coming from the far left,” he says.
“This poll,” Charles concludes, “was nothing more than a distraction that fomented useless outrage on the right.” So conservatives need to keep their eyes on the real enemy --- not blacks, but white leftist activists.
As for Scott, I still don’t know exactly what he’s up to but do have a general sense of it and am willing to wait to find out. As he summed up his Tuesday podcast: “So, ladies and gentlemen, what do you think? Have I put myself at the fulcrum of power on one of the most important questions in the United States and the only person who can explain it in a useful way? Or have I thrown away my career and my reputation for nothing? [long pause] To be determined. Well, this movie is not over. There are some more twists and turns coming. I know some of them; you don’t. But, uh, stay tuned for that! But we probably do need to figure out some smarter way to be.”
Here’s that podcast; he starts talking about this about 16 minutes in.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pTYkEjSTif4
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