By Mike Huckabee
May 20, 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
28 And we know that all things work together for good to them that love God, to them who are the called according to his purpose.
Romans 8:28
TODAY'S NEWS
"Huckabee" Preview
Settle in tonight for a great new episode of “Huckabee” on TBN! I’ll talk politics with columnist/author Cal Thomas and co-host of TBN’s “Centerpoint,” Lindsay Keith. I’ll discuss the pressures on today’s police officers with author and former officer Adam Davis. But we’ll also have plenty of entertainment, including comedy from the hilarious Eric O’Shea, and the music of contemporary Christian superstar Katy Nichole.
It all gets started tonight at 8 and 11 EST, 7 and 10 CST, and Sunday at 9 EST/8 CST on TBN. To find out how to watch TBN, from local cable and broadcast channels to streaming, visit https://www.huckabee.tv and click on “Channel Finder” on the top menu. You can stream previous episodes, highlights and online-only “Digital Exclusives,” including extended interviews, “In Case You Missed It” and “Facts of the Matter” segments, plus extra performances by our great musical and comedy guests and links to all their sites, at https://www.huckabee.tv. You can also find past shows, highlights and digital exclusives on YouTube and my Facebook page.
Tim Keller RIP
I was deeply saddened to learn of the death of Tim Keller, the founding pastor of the Redeemer Presbyterian Church in Manhattan and a noted scholar and author.
His church attracted massive crowds of younger New Yorkers to the point it required additional services, campuses, and days for church to accommodate those drawn to his Biblical teaching. While he related to the very diverse culture of New York City, he stuck to Biblical concepts of sin, grace, forgiveness, and service without apology.
He was a guest on my television shows both on Fox in New York and in Nashville on TBN. (Here is his appearance to talk about his book on Jonah, "The Prodigal Prophet.")
When I was working in New York each week and had to stay over on a Sunday, I occasionally visited Redeemer Church, but found that it was necessary to go very early to get a seat.
His impact has been substantial. He will be missed for clarity and articulation of the Gospel.
Ginning up outrage
Here's the latest example of the woke mob ginning up outrage over a viral Internet video depicting an incident for which they got the facts all wrong. They branded an innocent woman as a racist monster, causing her to suffer trauma, smears of her name, doxing and being put on leave from her job while she was placed under investigation.
But guess what? Turns out she has the evidence to prove the accusation against her was a lie. I hope she also has the phone number of Nick Sandmann’s attorneys because there are a lot of deep-pocket leftists who rushed to slander her online before knowing the real story, and who really need to be sued to teach them to stop doing that.
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A “progressive” who agrees with conservatives
Chalk up at least one “progressive” who agrees with conservatives that the FBI is engaging in politicized intimidation tactics.
Elise Ketch is part of Progressive Anti-Abortion Uprising, a group that espouses feminist values but also opposes elective abortions (yes, believe it or not, there are still some people who can discern the difference between women’s rights and killing babies in the womb.) In April, her doorbell camera recorded a surprise visit by two FBI agents who claimed they needed to speak with her regarding "some information that was sent in."
Ketch told them to talk to her attorney. While nothing more has come of it, she believes it was an attempt to intimidate and silence her. But she says it backfired because she’s even more determined to keep doing what she was doing.
Ketch told Fox News, "They're going after everybody. So I think it's really important we step up and say, The FBI is being weaponized against all of us.’…Even as a progressive, I actually agree with the right on this, that the FBI is corrupted and there's always going to be bias against the people who are trying to get human rights, who are trying to do the right thing."
A progressive fighting for free speech, human rights and the sanctity of life? That’s a novelty! She sounds like an actual progressive and not what I call most of them these days: “regressives.”
Sicker than we were told
Just as many people suspected, Sen. Diane Feinstein was sicker than we were led to believe, and was suffering from neurological complications even after she returned to the Senate. Here are the details:
Least Surprising Headline Of The Day!
“George Soros Funds Organization That Says Criticizing Soros is Anti-Semitic.”
https://headlineusa.com/
Encouraging signs
There’s a saying that’s quoted often at the Instapundit blog: “Things that can’t go on forever won’t.” And there are encouraging signs that people may have finally had enough of the freedom-crushing, anti-science jihads of the woke elites and are finally speaking up, fighting back and saying, “Enough!”
For a long time, Europe has been under the sway of radical greens demanding that civilization be dismantled to appease the climate gods. It’s gotten so insane that unelected EU bureaucrats are forcing farm families of generations standing off their land without regard for what people would eat, and shutting down power plants with no viable alternatives available. The self-destructive virtue signaling was papered over by buying food from Ukraine and oil from Russia, but suddenly, that protection from their own insanity was cut off by the war.
Now, reality is suddenly making a surprise comeback. Dutch farmers are fighting back, and some nations are fed up with unreliable, high-priced “renewable” energy sources. Finland recently opened a nuclear power plant that was delayed by 14 years, and power bills dropped by 75%. The Greens are blasting France as “crazy” for building nuclear plants, but as the linked article notes, they’ll be begging to buy electricity from France soon enough. Even in Germany, a hotbed of radical environmental lunacy, unreliable and inadequate wind turbines are being dismantled to make room for a coal mine expansion.
(As a reminder of how loony German greens are, they rushed to ban nuclear energy after an earthquake caused a tsunami to flood the Fukishima nuclear plant in Japan in 2011, despite the fact that Germany is not prone to earthquakes or tsunamis.)
Speaking of Germany and unscientific ideas that liberals refuse to give up, five German researchers have stood up against the rigid pro-mask narrative with a new study warning of hidden health dangers from longterm mask-wearing and arguing that mask mandates should be reconsidered.
https://www.city-journal.org/
Even with the pandemic far in the rearview mirror, you still see people wearing facemasks everywhere. But this study isn’t about the effectiveness of masks at blocking viruses, or even the unhygienic practice of putting a dirty mask over your face. It’s about carbon dioxide (CO2.) The human body is built to breathe in fresh air and exhale CO2. Fresh air is about 0.04% CO2. Chronic exposure to CO2 levels of 0.3% is considered toxic. From the article:
“At levels between 0.05% and 0.5% CO2,” one might experience an “increased heart rate, increased blood pressure and overall increased circulation with the symptoms of headache, fatigue, difficulty concentrating, dizziness, rhinitis, and dry cough.” Rates above 0.5% CO2 can lead to “reduced cognitive performance, impaired decision-making and reduced speed of cognitive solutions.” Beyond 1% CO2, “the harmful effects include respiratory acidosis, metabolic stress, increased blood flow and decreased exercise tolerance.” And the US Navy limits CO2 levels on submarines to 0.8% to reduce the risk of stillbirths and birth defects for pregnant female personnel.
So how much C02 are mask wearers breathing in? According to this study, people who wear masks for five minutes or longer are inhaling CO2 levels of 1.41% to 3.2%, or 35-80 times the normal level.
But if you try telling some people this, they call you a science-denier and refuse to remove their masks. Maybe they’ve living proof that longterm masking really does cause “reduced cognitive performance” and “impaired decision-making.”
Disney cancels plans to expand in Florida
Disney announced that it was canceling plans to build a new campus in Orlando that would have cost $1 billion and created 2,000 jobs. Liberal media outlets gleefully blamed Gov. Ron DeSantis and claimed that Disney was teaching him a lesson for messing with them (today’s liberals apparently now love big corporations dictating to the people’s elected representatives.)
California Gov. Gavin Newsom crowed about the project staying in California rather than moving to Florida (hey, we finally found one!) And DeSantis himself apparently felt the pressure enough to comment on it and say that it would not cause him or the state to back down from their fight with Disney. As if there’s a shortage of companies moving from California to Florida!
https://www.foxbusiness.com/
Okay, that’s the politically spun version. But here’s a novel idea: how about considering the possibility that politics had nothing to do with Disney’s decision?
Chris Queen at PJ Media reports that the project would have moved Disney’s “imagineers” from L.A. to Orlando (incidentally, how much “imagineering” does it take to turn old classic cartoons into boring, woke, live remakes?) It was the brainchild of former CEO Bob Chapek, who’s gone. Current CEO Bob Iger always opposed the move because he prefers having those people closer to the movie production facilities. Many workers didn’t want to move (woke Disney workers are the only ones who don’t want to get out of California and move to Florida.) And it would have cost Disney a billion dollars at a time when they’re cutting 7,000 workers and slashing production budgets to try to save $5 billion.
Putting politics aside, the project makes no sense. But of course, nobody today is capable of putting politics aside.
ICYMI: 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.
ANOTHER document shames FBI for “conduct unbecoming”
The civil rights abuses carried out by the FBI since 2016 --- 2015, really --- have been shown to be motivated primarily by a seething hatred of Donald Trump. So why should even those conservatives and middle-of-the-roaders who don’t wear MAGA hats and attend Trump rallies be all that concerned about this? Maybe their relentless trashing of the Constitution was just an aberration that will blow over if and when President Trump walks away from politics. Maybe things will finally go back to normal with Trump no longer in the mix.
Don’t fool yourself. As long as we “extremist MAGA Republicans” (translation: Republicans) exist, the entrenched bureaucracy will be pulling out all the stops to keep us from putting on our white hoods and doing whatever it is white supremacists supposedly do in 2023. (These days, Jim Crow-style segregation is promoted only by the left. I digress.) Mostly, of course, they want to stop us from voting Republican. They might no longer be targeting Trump, but they’ll still be out to get whoever takes his place, with half the country as collateral damage. Nothing will change.
Here’s one indication of what can and will continue to go wrong if changes aren’t made: A document from the FISA Court unsealed Friday shows that the FBI misused Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) more than 278,000 times (!) in the year ending November 2021, “including against crime victims, January 6 riot suspects, and people arrested at protests in the wake of the killing of George Floyd in 2020.”
They also misused it to spy on 19,000 donors to a congressional candidate. It’s not clear who that former candidate is, but FOX NEWS says this person wasn’t a member of Congress and did not win the election. (Who’s to say if the outcome would have been the same without their involvement?) Just think: whenever you give to a candidate, you can’t be sure that the FBI isn’t scooping up your electronic communications.
Section 702 is what gives the government permission to conduct targeted surveillance of (“SPY ON”) foreign persons located outside the United States to acquire foreign intelligence. The FBI can compel electronic communication service providers such as ATT to assist them in this task. As reported by AMERICAN GREATNESS, “The law, created in the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks, allows National Security Agency [NSA] and FBI employees to search a vast database of electronic communications and other information.”
Agents are not supposed to be searching the 702 database unless they have reason to think that doing so will provide needed foreign intelligence or evidence of crimes.
The FISA Court now says the FBI has shown “a pattern of conducting broad, suspicionless queries” that go beyond these limits. Can you say “fishing expedition”?
A senior FBI official told FOX NEWS that these abuses are “completely unacceptable” blah blah blah. They claim to have changed their “querying procedure” so this will never ever happen again, adding, “We are committing to continuing this work and providing greater transparency into the process to earn the trust of the American people and advance our mission of safeguarding both the nation’s security, and privacy and civil liberties, at the same time.”
Well, that’s good enough for me! Actually, they’re wasting their breath. “Civil liberties” is supposed to mean the same standard of ‘justice’ for all, and after seeing the Durham Report’s comparison of the Trump and Hillary investigations, they are not to be trusted. Sad to say, the pinky-swear of the FBI means nothing to me at this point, and I’ll bet it means nothing to you, either.
(The Durham Report revealed that the FBI dropped FOUR active criminal investigations of alleged attempts to influence the Clintons via donations to Hillary’s campaign and/or the Clinton Foundation in the run-up to the 2016 election. Have they ever dropped an investigation of Trump, even when they knew it was based on fake evidence they manufactured themselves?)
Greater transparency is the last thing they want. We JUST SAW the testimony from whistleblowers who, for trying to provide transparency, were suspended without pay and deprived of their security clearances.
The big question right now is, “What’s it going to take to rein in the FBI? Do we need to just tear it down and start over?” That certainly should be on the table, but in the meantime, Ohio Rep. Jim Jordan, chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, says the FISA law, which “sunsets” on December 31 of this year, should be allowed to expire.
RELATED: As they say, what’s good for the goose is good for the gander. According to investigative reporter Peter Schweizer, the House Oversight and Accountability Committee has subpoenaed the phone records of a phone belonging to President Biden that Hunter Biden’s business paid for while his dad was VP. (Unlike the FBI, at least Congress got a subpoena.) The contents of that phone are “going to yield a lot of interesting information as to who Joe Biden was talking to on this phone that was being paid for by his son,” he said.
Also, Schweizer is quite disturbed by the firing of the IRS team looking into Hunter’s financial improprieties. He thinks what happened to the investigators is potentially illegal as well.
AND THIS: More from the Durham Report --- Here’s a blast from the past: Remember Bruce and Nellie Ohr? Bruce Ohr was a very high-up ‘Justice’ Department official --- third in command if memory serves --- married to Nellie Ohr, who just happened to work at Fusion GPS (!) as an open-source researcher with a specialty in all things Russia. It turns out the foundation for many fictions in the Steele “dossier” came from material she put together.
In the course of his investigation, Durham obtained the reports she had done for Fusion GPS. In a series of at least 12 reports, she had zeroed in on an individual named Sergei Millian and stories about his connections to Russia and Trump, which turned out to be absolutely false (Millian sued) but so what?
Instead of re-telling the story of Nellie and Bruce Ohr and the Steele “dossier,” I’ll ask you to read this excellent summary at REALCLEAR INVESTIGATIONS. Apparently, the role played by Nellie Ohr in creating the “dossier’s” central claims is much more significant than we knew until now. The material wasn’t the high-quality “Crown material” of a British ex-spy, as the FBI had insisted it was. The “dossier” was nothing of the kind and they were well aware; it carried the name of a British ex-spy, Christopher Steele, but actually was the brainchild of Fusion GPS, a political oppo research company paid by Hillary Clinton’s campaign through her attorneys at Democrat powerhouse legal firm Perkins Coie.
In other words, it was a sham.
There’s also quite a bit here about Fusion GPS promoting the phony Alfa Bank story in the media. For this, they sought the assistance of Clinton attorney Michael Sussmann. So even though Durham didn’t get a conviction in the Sussmann case, the discovery phase of that trial was invaluable in getting information about everything the various Hillary cronies were doing to help her frame Trump. All roads lead back to Hillary.
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