By Mike Huckabee
September 26, 2022
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THE EVENING EDITION
BY MIKE HUCKABEE
Good evening! Blessings on you and your family and from all the Huckabee staff! Thank you for subscribing and I hope you enjoy today’s newsletter.
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DAILY BIBLE VERSE
“I have told you these things, so that in me you may have peace. In this world you will have trouble. But take heart! I have overcome the world.”
John 16:33
If you have a favorite Bible Verse you want to see in one of our newsletters, please email [email protected].
Mark Houck
I had this story a couple of days ago but decided to wait until it was clear what really happened, as each side is telling a different story. Well, it’s Monday, the story is all over the media, and both sides are still telling completely different stories.
What we know for certain is that the FBI showed up at the rural Pennsylvania home of Mark Houck, a Catholic pro-life activist and founder of The King’s Men ministry. They arrested him for allegedly physically assaulting a 72-year-old Planned Parenthood escort last year.
Here’s where it gets confusing:
Houck’s wife says that about 25 FBI agents in about 15 vehicles showed up. They pounded on the door, threatening to break it down if the Houcks didn’t open it. And “they had about five guns pointed at my husband, myself and basically at my kids.”
The Philadelphia FBI office responded that no SWAT teams were present. The agents “knocked on Mr. Houck's front door, identified themselves as FBI agents and asked him to exit the residence. He did so and was taken into custody without incident pursuant to an indictment."
As for the charge, the indictment claims that Houck twice confronted the man outside a Planned Parenthood clinic and forcefully shoved him to the ground, the second time resulting in him requiring medical attention. Houck’s wife claims he shoved the man after he got into the personal space of their 12-year-old son and started saying obscene things about Houck. She says the man tried to sue her husband and the case was thrown out of court, but Merrick Garland’s DOJ picked it up again.
Under normal circumstances, we’d all like to believe the FBI, but there have been so many cases recently of showy, forceful arrests of conservatives, apparently intended to intimidate critics of this Administration into silence, that I'm all out of benefits of the doubt. I’ve also seen too much outrageous over-charging of Biden critics (the persecution of Brandon Straka leaps to mind immediately) to accept the FBI’s word about Houck's alleged heinous crime without seeing the evidence first.
The question of which side is telling the truth is not academic: If convicted, Houck faces a maximum of 11 years in prison, three years of supervised release and fines of up to $350,000. That’s because the FBI claims it wasn’t just a couple of shoves, it was a violation of the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances (FACE) Act, which makes it a federal crime to use force with the intent to injure, intimidate and interfere with anyone because that person provides reproductive health care.
Fair enough. But if they’re going after Houck hammer and tongs, where are the similar raids and arrests of the people responsible for fire-bombing, vandalizing and threatening pro-life pregnancy centers and their staffs? How are those investigations going? I invite Merrick Garland to look at the previous paragraph, read the definition of the FACE Act, and then tell me why those outrageous crimes aren’t far worse than even the government’s version of what Houck is accused of.
Michigan abortion violence
In a sadly related story, in Lake Odessa, Michigan, an 84-year-old volunteer for a pro-life group was shot going door-to-door, handling out pamphlets opposing a proposition to change the state constitution to legalize abortion.
https://www.theblaze.com/news/prolife-woman-shot-michigan-abortion
Police say the woman got into a “heated conversation” at one house, and as she was leaving, someone shot her in the back and shoulder. She’s recovering and a criminal investigation is underway. Our prayers for her swift and complete recovery.
I can’t think of a better way for pro-abortionists to convince me that they’re not deranged, heartless enemies of life than to shoot an 84-year-old woman for trying to protect babies.
Add this to the ever-growing pile of violent incidents by leftwing extremists, from the shooting of Rep. Steve Scalise to the firebombing of pro-life pregnancy centers to the murder of teenager Cayler Ellingson. It was bad enough already, but ever since President Biden’s repulsive speech demonizing “MAGA Republicans” as violent, semi-fascist enemies of democracy, the incidents not only seem to be ramping up, but the overheated and violent “fascist” rhetoric is being parroted all over the Internet. It’s even being repeated by people who ought to know better, but who can offer no reasons to vote for their party aside from “those other guys are Nazis!”
And I’m not the only one calling them out on this.
Sorry, January 6th Kangaroo Kommittee members, but I am not interested in any more evidence-free political theater designed to convince me that Donald Trump should be imprisoned for inciting a riot by telling people to “peacefully and patriotically protest” while your party continues to defend and even echo Biden’s dangerous, divisive rhetoric. Every time someone points out a biological fact about sex differences, leftists scream that it’s going to “get trans kids killed!” Well, Biden’s words are obviously influencing deranged people, and now, they’re getting people killed for real.
I will continue to call on him to hold another prime time address to forcefully retract and apologize for his previous address, the most shocking and reprehensible speech made by a President in at least the last century, and to urge the extremists on all sides to stop trying to impose their political wills by violence or they will face grave consequences. Until he does, he should be considered unworthy of holding the office of President of all Americans.
Let’s hope this is a preview of November
In Italy, a coalition of rightwing groups has won control of the government, and the media is having a hair-on-fire meltdown over it.
Giorgia Meloni is poised to become Italy’s first female prime minister, but instead of celebrating that achievement, the left-cheering media are branding her as (say it with me) “a fascist!” You’d think the Italians would know what a fascist is and recognize that nothing she’s said remotely resembles that. But then, they also seem to conveniently forget that Hitler and Mussolini were socialists. Mussolini once declared, “I am and shall remain a socialist and my convictions will never change! They are bred into my very bones.”
https://troymedia.com/viewpoint/mussolini-fascism-more-left-than-right/
They call her a fascist because, just like in America, it’s the only defense they have of their destructive, divisive, failed policies. Meloni is promising to restore traditional standards that have been ripped to shreds by the leftwing extremists, such as secure borders, law enforcement, patriotism and protecting children from LGBTQ+++ indoctrination. She once told a crowd, “They want to call us parent 1, parent 2, gender LGBT, citizen X, with code numbers. But we are not code numbers…and we’ll defend our identity. I am Giorgia. I am a woman. I am a mother. I am Italian, I am Christian. You will not take that away from me!”
Obviously a fascist, right? They’re known for being Christian moms. Here’s another quote:
“Yes to natural families, no to the LGBT lobby, yes to sexual identity, no to gender ideology, yes to the culture of life, no to the abyss of death, no to the violence of Islam, yes to safer borders, no to mass immigration, yes to work for our people.”
There’s a lot of interesting background info in this pre-election article by Nicholas Farrell in the Spectator:
He predicts that a win for Meloni would be a triumph for Italian democracy. Wait, I thought that everyone who opposes leftists is an enemy of democracy, even when they come to power by winning elections in a landslide?
Rod Dreher at the American Conservative described Meloni as a standard populist social conservative who’s suspicious of big government and globalists. He writes, “If CBS News is right and Giorgia Meloni is a ‘fascist,’ then I'm telling you, half of America is fascist. Then again, they probably do believe that in the CBS Newsroom in New York.”
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/meloni-our-lying-media/
Thoughts on Bill Maher’s latest commentary
Bill Maher has had some great commentaries lately that suggest that even as a longtime liberal, he’s alarmed by how crazy the left has gone. But on his commentary Friday, I think he had some good points but is misreading the feelings of those on the right.
It’s a commentary about how both sides of the political divide claim to be fighting for the soul of America, but they don’t seem to like the things that have always made America what it is. I think he got it right about all the guilt mongering and America-hating from the left, but that’s hard to mistake. They’re completely open about it.
But when he chastises the right for “attacking” democracy, the FBI or the military, that is, as the “fact-checkers” like to say, “lacking nuance.” I’ve argued for years for election integrity laws, not because I want to suppress any voters but because I want to suppress vote fraud. It’s fine with me if every legal voter casts a ballot. But every illegal ballot negates a legal vote and denies an American citizen a voice in his or her government. Ensuring clean and trustworthy elections is not an attack on democracy, it’s a defense of democracy.
Also, the quote about America not being a democracy is technically correct; the phrase “separation of church and state” is not in the Constitution (the First Amendment bans the creation of a state religion and government encroachment on the free exercise of religious beliefs, and that’s it); and some of the Trump quotes he cites are fake news (the one about calling our World War I soldiers “losers” was refuted by everyone around him.)
Likewise, I don’t know any Republicans who hate rank-and-file FBI agents, Capitol Hill police officers or military members. We just think that the leadership of those organizations has been politicized and corrupted. It’s because we hold them in such high regard that we are outraged to see how their leaders are abusing these organizations and the people who have devoted their lives to them. Just look at how many FBI agents are turning whistleblower and how many career military members are resigning in protest of the current leadership. And I’ve said from the beginning that actual January 6th rioters should be prosecuted to the full extent of the law. But that doesn’t mean condoning the over-charging of people who did nothing but walk through an open door and take a selfie, or the leadership’s push to gin up false charges that FBI agents are now exposing.
I agree that some of the rhetoric is overheated, but it’s because those on the right do revere those organizations so much that they are outraged to see them corrupted. I predict that if Republicans gain control of Congress, there won’t be any “defunding” of the FBI’s core mission, but there will be accountability for its corrupt officials. Can you really say the same of the left; that they would never actually be thick-headed enough to defund their police departments?
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