January 15, 2024
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Blessings on you and your family from all the Huckabee team! Today, if you have a moment, leave me a comment about something you read. Comments help me fine tune what I am writing, and they show that we have an active community of readers.
Sincerely,
Mike Huckabee
Daily Bible Verse
11 Shall thy lovingkindness be declared in the grave? or thy faithfulness in destruction?
Psalms 11:88 KJV
Newsletter Notes
14 stories
4,589 words
Reading time: About 21 minutes
Monologue: The Iowa Caucuses
We are just hours away from the Iowa Caucuses which will be the first real test of the 2024 Presidential Election. Having won the caucuses in 2008, I do understand some things about them and their importance. You will hear some of the know-it-all news commentators talk about how irrelevant the caucuses are and how that the winner of the caucuses don’t often end up being the nominee. That may be, but the Iowa caucuses do a couple of things that the know-it-alls forget: First, it’s not that the caucuses always pick the winner. It’s that the caucuses eliminate some of the candidates that the media had picked to be the winners. It’s not as much about winning them as it is about not LOSING. In 2008, my victory there was the undoing of Mitt Romney, Rudy Guiliani, and Fred Thompson. In 2012, when Rick Santorum had a surprise victory, it was the beginning of the end for Rick Perry, Newt Gingrich, and Michelle Bachman. In 2016, it was the night that put Ted Cruz and Donald Trump in virtually a 2 man race and forecast the demise of Jeb Bush, Ben Carson, Rand Paul, and me.
So yes, it will be important to see who comes out of Iowa with momentum, but the real story will be who crashes against the rocks and will never seriously sail again. Perhaps some will limp forward to New Hampshire or South Carolina, but the race will become populated with fewer candidates soon after Iowa.
And the caucuses are not like any election process. There is no early voting. No machine tabulations. No late night boxes suddenly discovered. On what is often one of the coldest nights of the winter, people have to leave their homes and assemble in public places like a school, church, city hall, community center, or gymnasium. Once there, candidates or their representatives make final pitches for the votes. People are asked to physically indicate who they support by going to a section of the facility. They will vote on a ballot, but the numbers are known and reported immediately. There is none of the drama of waiting 2 weeks after the election to determine who won.
And because the first in the nation primary in New Hampshire is just a week and a day later, most of the candidates who believe they still have a shot will get on airplanes that very night and arrive in New Hampshire in the early morning hours of the next day. In 2008, when I won the caucuses, we enjoyed a wild celebration of our supporters by shocking the world with the victory and then around midnight boarded a chartered plane filled with our campaign workers, press (many of whom hadn’t bothered to pay attention to me before) and supporters like Chuck Norris and his wife who campaigned with me for several months in the race. People asked me where Chuck sat on the plane and I told them, “Wherever he wanted to.” We arrived in New Hampshire around 4am, went to a hotel to freshen up, and then I started nonstop back to back press interviews with media from all over the world that lasted for almost 4 straight uninterrupted hours. There is no “day off” or resting. If you are still in the hunt, you continue the grueling pace of a campaign. Our team went months without eating a meal at a table with silverware or ordering from menus. We ate every meal from a paper sack in a car or bus while traveling to the next event. The best way to describe a campaign is to live off cold pizza and hot Cokes. If there is glamour in it, most of us never experienced it.
But this insane process is how we start the process to pick the leader of the free world. It’s messy, at times disgusting, and beyond exhausting for most of us who engage in it. But it’s better than having a gunfight or a military coup d’état to pick a President.
Hey, if you’re a political junkie, or even if you’re not, pay attention to the events of the next 10 days. You might not yet know who will be President, but you will probably know some folks who most certainly will NOT be President. And that’s the part of this that the know-it-alls in the media mob never really understand.
Martin Luther King Day
Today is Martin Luther King Day, the federal holiday honoring his birth on January 15, 1929. While some of the activities planned for today may be postponed due to inclement weather, we shouldn’t let that stop us from honoring his memory and accomplishments today.
As a boy growing up in the South in the 1960s, I saw the pernicious effects of racism firsthand, and was inspired by the Rev. King’s faith, courage and eloquence, his message of brotherhood and his dream of a colorblind society where Americans weren’t separated by race and where people were judged by the content of their character, not the color of their skin.
He was not a “social justice activist” in the current sense, nor just an eloquent speaker. He was a preacher, one of the greatest ever. He didn't give political speeches, he gave sermons. And like all great sermons, they relied on the teachings of the Gospel to inspire his listeners to renounce the grievous sin of racism and follow, as Lincoln put it, “the better angels of our nature.” He taught us that as God created us all in His image, hating someone for the way they look is a sin against God.
Today, when we celebrate the man who did so much to achieve the goal of recognizing and repudiating that sin, it’s more important than ever to remember what he said, because in recent years, his legacy has been under intense assault. A movement has arisen that’s tearing America apart by yanking from the ash heap of history such terrible ideas as judging people solely by skin color, bringing back segregated spaces and blaming children for the sins of their fathers. This racial separatist poison is the opposite of the Rev. King’s message, and any attempts to co-opt his name to promote it are detestable.
I’m sure that today will bring many speeches that will try to use the Rev. King’s name to cynically promote divisive political and racial agendas. Instead of listening to them, go to the source. Listen to his original “I Have A Dream” speech, and see if it sounds anything like the anti-American nightmare these charlatans are promoting.
https://youtu.be/vP4iY1TtS3s?si=u5p6FJ5EIJUBmG5l
I have no doubt, as well, that if Dr. King were alive today, many on the left would be seething over his support of Israel. Rep. John Lewis quoted King as saying, "When people criticize Zionists they mean Jews, you are talking anti-Semitism." Lewis said King also said in 1968 that "peace for Israel means security, and we must stand with all our might to protect its right to exist, its territorial integrity. I see Israel as one of the great outposts of democracy in the world, and a marvelous example of what can be done, how desert land can be transformed into an oasis of brotherhood and democracy. Peace for Israel means security and that security must be a reality."
Here's more on that subject from John Solomon at Just The News. I wonder if anyone at the liberal media outlets will quote those prophetic words today?
And here are some comments from a woman I’m honored to call my friend, the Rev. King’s niece, Alveda King. This was written last year, but it’s just as timely today.
Last bit of Caucus news
There was little in the news over the weekend other than coverage of the Iowa Caucuses and who’s going to win, what it will mean and will Democrats try to skew the results by crashing the GOP caucuses, since they apparently have no choice for President in their Party.
That presents a dilemma for us, since, unlike major media outlets, we have an archaic policy that we don’t comment on news that hasn’t happened yet, and the Caucuses start later today. They might even be delayed by dangerous frigid weather (wags are calling the caucuses “The North Poll”), although I’ve never known that to keep Iowans from showing up.
Frankly, I see no point in obsessing over polls that might or might be accurate when the vote is going to be taken within 24 hours. So I’ll just pass along this story, which actually already happened. The winter weather forced Donald Trump to cancel two planned rallies in Iowa Saturday, so he held a virtual rally. You can watch that here if you like:
https://www.breitbart.com/2024-election/2024/01/13/watch-live-donald-trump-holds-virtual-rally/
If you don’t have time to watch it, here’s a post that Trump put on Truth Social about all the wars that Biden is getting us involved in.
This weekend on “Huckabee” on TBN, my monologue was about what the media know-it-alls always get wrong about the Iowa Caucuses. Here it is, and this is from someone who’s been through two of them as a candidate, and won one of them.
https://www.huckabee.tv/this-week
By the way, that link is to the entire show, so if you missed it, or want to see it again (it was a great one!), just keep watching.
Another Hunter theory
After pulling some baffling grandstanding in Congress, Hunter Biden must’ve gotten the riot act read to him by his dad’s reelection campaign. That’s the only explanation I can think of for how quickly he did a 180 and agreed to comply with a House subpoena and testify after arrogantly defying it. Although Bonchie at Redstate.com has another theory: Hunter really is so stupid and arrogant that he thought he could get away with bullying Congress and face no consequences.
His attorney Abbe Lowell tried to finesse the turnabout by blaming Congress and claiming that the original subpoena was invalid on a technicality, but if they give Hunter his umpteenth mulligan by forgetting all this unpleasantness and issuing a new subpoena, he’ll comply with that one. Law professor Jonathan Turley calls this the “Say it nicer” dodge.
This is why Lowell is such a top Democrat attorney: he finds loopholes the way mice find holes in your house’s siding. Unfortunately for Hunter, unlike his dad, House Republicans aren’t in the business of handing out endless mulligans. They’re pressing forward with contempt charges.
Taking heat
Nikki Haley is taking heat (pun intended, as always) over comments she made that seemed to give credence to the idea that the overwhelming illegal immigration to the US is due to people fleeing the effects of “climate change.” As noted at the link, there is scant evidence of that, with the Center for Immigration Studies reporting in 2019 that crop yields in El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala actually increased in recent years, even tripling and quadrupling in some places. In areas where they declined, it had nothing to do with the climate.
To be fair, Haley’s comments weren’t new but came in 2017 when she was being confirmed by the Senate as Trump’s UN ambassador and was asked about that subject. She replied, “If confirmed, the role that climate change plays in refugee flows is an issue I look forward to assessing, and assisting refugees is a U.S. policy in which I look forward to engaging.” In short, she didn’t say she bought it, she just said she’d look into it.
As to whether she believes it now, that’s unclear, although she did recently confirm that she thinks “climate change” is not a hoax. So I’d say that to find out whether she really believes that all those hordes of people flowing over our border from all over the world are here because it’s too hot where they came from, someone should just try asking her now.
NeverNikki from Rand
Speaking of Nikki Haley, Sen. Rand Paul hasn’t endorsed any presidential candidate, but he made headlines by posting a looong thread on Twitter (X) this week about the one Republican he would absolutely NEVER support and why. If you guessed Trump, guess again.
https://www.westernjournal.com/rand-paul-reveals-anti-endorsement-says-still-undecided-2024/
Here’s a link to the full original Twitter thread:
https://twitter.com/RandPaul/status/1745793256779092327
He even launched a website called NeverNikki.net, which gives you an idea of how committed he is to this position.
3 terms
China has been doing a lot of threatening and saber-rattling at Taiwan recently, but I’m happy to report that Taiwanese voters told them where to put it. William Lai was just elected President of Taiwan, winning an unprecedented third term for the pro-Taiwan Democratic Progressive Party and defeating the candidate of the pro-China party by over 7 points.
While this likely signals more threats from China, China expert Gordon Chang told Fox News Digital, "The results are in, and Taiwan’s voters stood up to China and all its war talk of recent weeks. Free people, living just a hundred miles from the menacing Chinese state, refused to be intimidated." Good for them, and I was very glad to see that they didn’t fall for this attempt to undermine Taiwan from within by electing a candidate who was more concerned with China’s best interests than his own nation’s.
Let’s hope American voters go back to doing that in our next election.
Disturbing new poll
A new ABC News poll claims that a slight majority of Americans wants the Supreme Court to ban Donald Trump from being on the ballot or to let the state bans stand. This is disturbing, considering that Trump has not only not been convicted of any disqualifying crime, he hasn’t even been indicted for one. And if today’s leftist prosecutors could possibly make that case, they would have by now. So we’re being told that a majority of Americans believe people should be barred from running for office just because their political opponents’ level groundless charges at them. Yikes!
Then again, this is an ABC News poll of “adults” with a sample of 25% each of Democrats and Republicans and 41% Independents, so I wouldn’t give it much credence. Still, the fact that any American would go along with something so un-American is disturbing. The Founders knew that in a pure, majority-rule democracy, it’s easy for demagogues to inflame the passions of the majority into trampling the rights of the minority. So ironically, this story is a good example of why the Founders deliberately did NOT give us a “democracy.”
Judge dismisses Trump lawsuit
A federal judge dismissed Donald Trump’s lawsuit against the New York Times and three of its reporters and ordered him to pay their nearly $400,000 in legal fees. This is over a story that exposed his confidential tax records, bank statements and other private information provided to the Times by his Trump-hating, MSNBC-appearing niece, Mary Trump. The suit alleges that reporters gave Mary a burner phone and convinced her to smuggle Trump’s private and confidential financial records out of an attorney’s office and hand them over to them.
https://www.foxnews.com/us/trump-ordered-pay-new-york-times-400k-failed-lawsuit
The case shows how hard it is for a public figure to sue a media organization, and how hard it is for Trump to win any court case in New York. But it’s not entirely over yet. Trump’s case against his niece Mary was not dismissed. He’s pressing on with that. His attorney Alina Habba said they’re pleased that the court has affirmed "the strength of our claims against Mary and is denying her attempt to avoid accountability."
A big pinata full of corruption
Fulton County, Georgia, DA Fani Willis’ absurd RICO case against Trump and his associates is starting to resemble a big pinata full of corruption that just keeps spilling more sleaze onto the floor every time someone taps it.
I’ve already reported on how she allegedly hired her unqualified, married paramour Nathan Wade as special prosecutor for the Trump case and signed off on paying him an exorbitant amount of taxpayer money that he turned around and spent on luxury trips and cruises with her. And that his estranged wife has subpoenaed Willis to testify in their divorce trial. And that they appear to have colluded with the Biden White House and the January 6th Kangaroo Kommittee in crafting their charges. Now, here are the latest droppings from the sleaze pinata:
House Judiciary Committee Chair Jim Jordan has launched an investigation into Willis and Wade for politically-motivated probes and potential misuse of federal funds (the Fulton County DA’s office gets millions in federal grants and he wants to know if that money benefitted Willis via Wade.)
And documents from Wade’s divorce case show that his wife Jocelyn claims she’s unemployed and in dire financial need after 26 years as a stay-at-home mom. She also says Wade didn’t tell her he pocketed over $650,000 from this case that he was spending on Willis, even as he kept withdrawing funds for himself from their joint account, leaving it overdrawn and his wife with no money or financial support. Sounds like a great guy.
Again, I’ll say it: I hope he didn’t spend all that money on trips for him and Fani because I have a feeling he’s going to owe his ex-wife an awful lot of it.
Prediction: Biden’s basement strategy to return
I’m not going to try recapping everything that happened when President Biden was sent out amongst the people in an attempt to shore up his reelection campaign. I’ll just send you to this summary by Nick Arama at Redstate.com and predict that we will very soon see a return to the 2020 campaign strategy of hiding him in the basement.
https://redstate.com/nick-arama/2024/01/12/biden-comments-on-iran-houthis-n2168642
Irony of Ironies:
Meet the flour company that’s so woke, it hates whiteness.
About those “pro-Palestinian” protesters here in the US…
We keep being told that they’re not anti-Semites, Jew-haters, anti-American or terrorist supporters. No, perish the thought! They’re just humanitarians who CARE about the suffering of the Palestinian people.
So how did a mob of them in New York react to the strikes on Houthi militants who have been launching unprovoked missile and drone attacks on ships in the Red Sea? Surprise! They sided with the attackers and chanted, “US and UK, go to Hell!”
https://twitchy.com/amy-curtis/2024/01/12/nuc-anti-israel-protestors-mad-about-yemen-n2391678
Please remember this the next time someone gives you a song and dance about their true motives. And remember that when someone tells you exactly what they are and what they stand for, believe them.
The left thought they could put one over on us. WRONG.
With every week leading up to the 2024 election, we find out more about how the left --- with the help, of course, of some so-called “moderates” --- are trying to pull the strings leading up to it. Those full-of-themselves Ivy League grads ensconced in the halls of power really do assume Trump supporters are dimwitted, undereducated, unsophisticated rubes who can barely use a knife and fork in public and have no clue that the super-genius Ruling Elite are using lawfare against Trump to rig the election right in front of us and save us all from the imaginary Hitler they’ve created. They hardly try to hide what they’re doing. (Those of us who dare to write about this and let them see we have a clue --- many, many clues ---are dismissed as “conspiracy theorists.”)
And yet, as they tell it, we’re the “threat to democracy.”
It’s increasingly clear that Trump would not be facing the variety of courtroom hit-jobs he is now if he weren’t running for President and also polling spectacularly against Biden. And the most chilling part of all is the emerging hard evidence that both the Biden White House and Pelosi’s House “Select” J6 Committee have been involved in the coordination of these attacks, including Fulton County, Georgia, District Attorney Fani Willis’ sprawling RICO case. This cannot be allowed to stand; if it does, our so-called “Republic” is over, killed by the power-mad left.
In the words of Victor Davis Hanson, writing for AMERICAN GREATNESS, “We should dispense with the tired narrative that four conscientious state and federal prosecutors—independently and without contact with the Biden White House or the radical Democrats in Congress—all came to the same disinterested conclusions that Donald Trump should be indicted for various crimes and put on trial during the campaign season of 2024.”
On the bright side, VDH says the left are in a “doom loop,” in that the more unwarranted grief they give Trump, the more he rises in the polls. Trump’s benefiting from it because WE’RE ON TO THEM, and we also know that Trump, of all the candidates, will be in the best position to do something about it once he’s in the White House. We see his actions not in the context of vengeance or retribution, as Democrats like to say, but of justice and reform.
VDH goes into the stunning revelations of Fani Willis’ corruption and machinations in the Fulton County case --- you’re probably up to speed on all that, but his column is a good refresher --- and predicts it will end with Willis’ resignation and indictment of both her and her boyfriend. “Both have made a mockery of their indictment of an ex-president,” he said, “and if the allegations are true, will be disbarred and prosecuted.” Let it be so.
The other three indictments are even weaker, he says. We’ve seen in Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg’s prosecution of Trump and the Trump Organization --- eagerly attended daily by New York Attorney General Letitia James, who campaigned on “getting Trump” and who must not have any other crime to deal with in her state --- that Trump did exactly what virtually every other big-city real estate developer does in obtaining financing. Nothing unusual about it at all. And no financial institution dealing with him had made any complaint about this, ever.
As for Special Counsel Jack Smith’s raid and prosecution of Trump over so-called “classified” documents being retained at Mar-A-Lago, VHS points out that “Trump was the first ex-president in history to be indicted for a dispute with archivists over the status and security of removed classified files.” Bill Clinton did it (classified tapes in a sock drawer); Obama did it (with no one challenging him, naturally); Biden did it (a whole lot, in a variety of non-secure places, and he didn’t even have presidential declassification power.) “Such disagreements,” VDH says, “were historically adjudicated bureaucratically rather than criminally, and certainly not with performance-art FBI swat raids into an ex-presidential residence.”
As for the other Jack Smith prosecution, the January 6 case, VDH sums it up thusly: “...True insurrectionists do not instruct protestors to assemble peacefully and patriotically. Insurrectionists themselves do not try to overthrow governments while unarmed and accompanied by bare-chested buffoons with cow horns and slow-moving septuagenarians draped in American flags.” He points out that there were perhaps 150-200 FBI plants getting in on the action, and that in some cases, security guards were acting as doormen, waving nonviolent rally attendees right in. You’ve followed these cases well enough to know that most of them are travesties.
Ultimately, it’s those on the left, not Trump, who are destroying the precedents and traditions of our system of government. It’s their “endless miscarriages of justice,” VDH says, that are “the real threat to constitutional government.” And the less effective they are at taking him down, the more desperate they become. We would add that this is true even though the Trump they despise is mostly a creation of their own fevered minds that bears little resemblance to the actual person.
The column is a must-read.
https://amgreatness.com/2024/01/14/lawfare-against-trump-is-running-out-of-gas/
Speaking of Democrats, as opposed to President Trump, being the real threat, NBC News has a report on how some leftist groups are planning a “quasi-military” coup if Trump is elected. The plan is 1) to hamstring him legally (nothing new there) to keep him from fulfilling his agenda, and 2) to convince military officials not to comply with Trumps’ orders. One of the people involved in this plan is reportedly Mary McCord, whose name you’ll recall from the Obama administration but who is now executive director of the Institution for Constitutional Advocacy and Protection at Georgetown Law.
“We are preparing for litigation and preparing to use every tool in the toolbox that our democracy provides to provide the American people an ability to fight back,” said Skye Perryman, president of a participating organization called Democracy Forward. Since he’s presumably talking about doing this after Trump has been duly elected President, what exactly are “the American people” needing to fight back for? After all, they ELECTED HIM.
Tell us again, who is the real threat to our system of government? Hint: It’s not Trump.
Here’s more about the Deep State showing their hand from Nick Arama at Redstate.com…
Trump’s primary opponents will likely glom on to this story and use it to warn voters away from such a “divisive” and “chaotic” figure. But choosing a different nominee will not stop this. Guaranteed, the left will use these same tactics against any conservative running on the GOP ticket. That person will be painted as “Trump’s proxy” or even “worse than Trump.”
RELATED READING:
Speaking of the J6 committee, Newt Gingrich has a great commentary about Liz Cheney’s involvement with the testimony of star witness Cassidy Hutchinson --- remember our recent report on her highly unusual “errata” sheet changing her testimony? Newt spares no words.
Things may get rocky for members of that committee. For when you have time to digest it, this is a must-read article about coordination among the Trump prosecutors and J6 committee members as well as the White House. From the timeline, it appears Biden has had his hands in all four prosecutions. Oh, and Mary McCord’s name turns up again.
Here’s a piece offering rebuttals on major Trump hoaxes. If you know people who still believe garbage like the “fine people” hoax, the “Russia collusion” hoax, the “Muslim ban” hoax, and the “mocking-a-reporter’s-disability” hoax, this would be good for them to see.
https://www.politicstruth2020.com/trump-hoaxes
Finally, here’s some historical perspective on Jack Smith’s prosecution team and their political slant. One of his prosecutors, Ray Hulser, is the same staffer who in 2014 “declined prosecution” of the Clinton Foundation even though a well-placed confidential source said two foreign governments had attempted to buy influence with Hillary ahead of her 2016 run for President. He shut down investigations that were already going on in three FBI field offices. Nothing to see, folks!
RELATED WATCHING:
Be sure and watch Mark Levin’s remarkable opening monologues from both Saturday and Sunday if you missed them. They both concern all the lawfare and relentless election interference we’re seeing. At the time of this writing, Sunday’s hadn’t been posted yet on the FOX NEWS site, but here’s the link to Saturday’s. Very powerful stuff; no additional comment necessary.
https://www.foxnews.com/video/6344861874112
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